Book Discussion

Quasi-Rationalistic Moralizing

Criticisms of Life, by Horace Bridges. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

Some time ago, at a meeting of the Book and Play Club, Mr. Bridges complained against The Little Review wherein a certain book was criticised and labeled “naive and dull as the sermon of an Ethical Society preacher.” “Ladies and gentlemen, I am naive and dull!” protested Mr. Bridges. The reviewer of that unfortunate book, who happened to be present, expressed his surprise at the complainer’s unmodest assumption that those epithets were meant for him, as if he had monopolized the characteristic features of all ethical preachers. Now that Mr. Bridges’ book is out, the reviewer wishes to make amends and apologize; verily, the distinguished preacher was justified in claiming the honorary titles.

The author analyzes his problems through the prism of empirico-pragmatic rationalism, if such a combination is thinkable. Whether it be Chesterton’s theological views, or Ellen Key’s marriage theory, or Maeterlinck’s mysticism, or Sir Lodge’s ideas on immortality—the author applies to them the same apparatus for testing their validity and truth: Are they provable? Are they workable? Are they in harmony with Mr. Bridges’s ethical standard? A few citations will illustrate the critic’s method and sense of humor.

He takes Gilbert Chesterton very seriously, and indignantly reproves him for such typically Chestertonian offences as misquoting his opponents, as paradoxical buffooneries, “unpardonable tricks” and “inexcusable mistakes”; he offers him a few lessons in theology, explains to him in an earnest tone the meaning of miracles, the Fall of Man, and finally comes to the astounding discovery that the readers “will see in Mr. Chesterton’s amateur apologetics nothing but a psychological curiosity, to be read, like his novels, for amusement, in some slight degree perhaps for edification, but not at all for instruction.” Horribile dictu!

Mr. Bridges’s heaviest cannon are directed against Ellen Key. He totally destroys her and Shaw’s opposition to marriage with one humorous stroke, arguing that if that institution were really bad it would either have destroyed humanity, or the revolted conscience of mankind would have “risen and annihilated the abominable thing.” This optimistic argument needs as little comment as the author’s logical conclusion that “free love” is equivalent to prostitution and that free divorce is synonymous with adultery, or as these pearls:

I am decidedly of opinion that in a more enlightened age divorce will be as completely obsolete as duelling is to-day in England.

I am opposed to divorce on this ground (incompatibility of temper) for two reasons: first, because if people’s tempers are really so incompatible as to make their lifelong companionship intolerable, they can, and therefore ought to, know this in time to prevent their union. And, secondly, because such incompatibility as can remain entirely concealed before marriage cannot possibly be so great but that it may be overcome and harmonized after marriage by means of proper self-discipline and true grasp of the idea of duty.

No soldier would be pardoned for deserting from the army on the ground that he found his temper hopelessly incompatible with that of his comrades and his officers. No party to a business contract would be absolved from observing its terms upon any such consideration.

The right to renounce marriage because of unhappiness would logically involve the right to commit suicide for the same reason.... Who are we that we should repudiate the universe because it will not devote itself to securing our petty pleasures and happinesses?... Marriage, like every other great social ordinance, is instituted not primarily to secure our happiness, but to enable us to discharge our duty, in the matter of the perpetuation and spiritual development of the human species.

I am confident that the reader will appreciate the reviewer’s gallantry in not taking issue with the quoted statements: it would be too easy a task to exercise one’s humor over such threadbare niceties. My only apology for devoting so much space to Mr. Bridges’s book is the fact that Mr. Bridges is one of the moulders of public opinion in Chicago, hence ... I shall owe one more apology for my unrestrainable desire to quote the closing lines of the author’s sermon on the War:

May she (this country) preserve her unity, and that nobly disinterested foreign policy manifested, to the admiration of all Europe (indeed!!) in Cuba and Mexico: so that, when the vials of apocalyptic wrath beyond the seas are spent, she may enter to motion peace—the welcome arbitress of Europe’s dissensions, the trusted daughter, first of England, but in lesser degree of all the nations now at strife, called in to cover their shame and to mediate the purgation of their sins.

Hm—but I promised to refrain from comments.

K.

Sophomoric Maeterlinck

Poems, by Maurice Maeterlinck. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.]

The publisher of Maeterlinck’s Poems states apologetically that there has been a demand for a complete edition of the Belgian’s works, hence his justification in publishing a translation of the poems that originally appeared twenty years ago. The service rendered thereby to the author is of doubtful value: great writers are inclined to forget their youthful follies; as far as the English reading public is concerned the little book may be of some interest as a pale suggestion of an early stage in the development of Maeterlinck’s talent. I say a pale suggestion, for with all the conscientious labor of the translator the poems Anglicised have lost their chief, if not sole value—their Verlainean musicalness. If as a verslibrist Maeterlinck was obviously influenced by Whitman, his rhymed verses bear the unmistakable stamp of the poet who preached: “De la musique avant toute chose.... De la musique encore et toujours!” Back in the eighties Maeterlinck belonged to the Belgian group of Symbolists, who, like Elskamp, Rodenbach, van Lerberghe, Verhaeren, reflected the French school which began with Baudelaire and culminated through Rimbaud and Verlaine in Mallarmé. Yet, unlike his great friend, Verhaeren, the Mystic of Silence directed his genius into a different channel and abandoned verse as a medium of expression. In the collected poems, the Serres Chaudes and the Chansons, despite the mentioned influences, we discover the Maeterlinckian key-note—the languor of the oppressed soul, helplessly inactive in “a hot-house whose doors are closed forever.” We are dazzled frequently with such beautiful lines as “O blue monotony of my heart!”; “Green as the sea temptations creep”; “the purple snakes of dream”; “O nights within my humid soul”; “My hands, the lilies of my soul, Mine eyes, the heavens of my heart.” A friend confessed to me that these similes reminded him of Bodenheim; to be sure, this compliment should be laid at the door of the translator.

K.

“The Great American Novel.”

The Harbor, by Ernest Poole. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

In America today, other things being equal, that novelist first achieves success who writes—let us say—of the social fabric, rather than of the eternal verities. Thus, in the case of two undoubtedly great artists, John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad, the former had to wait but half the latter’s time before he came to enjoy real popularity.

And so it is not difficult to understand the noteworthy and deserved success of The Harbor—a book so good that one would be inclined to wonder if it could become popular. Mr. Poole writes with charm and a passionate earnestness of the growth through young manhood of his hero. He knows the New York water-front well and it furnishes an original and interesting background. The boy goes through college, to Europe for a happy year or two and returns to become a successful magazine writer—a worshipper at the shrine of “big” men. Gradually his social conscience is awakened and his entire life is transformed—his allegiance is transferred from the presidents of the corporations who own the steamers to the striking stokers and their fellows. On the whole the picture is impressively convincing and Mr. Poole has caught in his pages much of the most glowing thought of idealistic youth.

His work is so very good that criticism may appear ungracious—still, if one may be allowed: some of the young men at college speak Mr. Poole’s thoughts and not their own. College men do not think as Mr. Poole would have you believe they do—at least not until a year or two after they have graduated. And isn’t Eleanore, the hero’s wife, just a little too perfect—even for the role she has to play? How well an amiable weakness would become her! Finally, The Harbor has the commonest fault of almost all first novels that have for their subject the social fabric: there is too much thought (or too little action)—the author wants to give his opinion on all the things he has ever seriously thought about.

When Mr. Poole has tempered his fine seriousness with just a little more of the creative artist’s austerity he will produce a greater novel than The Harbor, and one that will fulfill the splendid promise of this first book.

Alfred A. Knopf.

The $10,000 Play

Children of Earth: A Play of New England, by Alice Brown. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Frankly, I do not like the spectacle of a collection of New Englanders, well past middle age, splashing about in a puddle of sex. And that is what Children of Earth is. Of course sex is interesting—most of the time; New Englanders are interesting sometimes (especially when as skilfully drawn as Miss Brown draws them); but the combination is rather too much.

In the first place what happens to these people of Miss Brown’s play never seems of any real importance—it isn’t simply that they are unsympathetic. Nor need one believe for a moment in the old idea that in true tragedy the great must suffer. But at least either the great or the typical must, and I cannot feel that these children of earth are either. The play is well enough done; it may be compounded of fact; but I doubt if it exhibits that finer thing by far—truth. How much better work might Winthrop Ames’ money have purchased.

Alfred A. Knopf.

American Thought, by Woodbridge Riley. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

A historical analysis of American philosophical theories, from Puritanism to New Realism, through the stages of Idealism, Deism, Materialism, Realism, Transcendentalism, Evolutionism, and Pragmatism. The work lacks the strict impartiality of a text-book, which it evidently intends to be. The author reveals a tendency to prove that American thought has developed independently of European influences; this appears to be true to a certain extent in regard to Pragmatism, as the philosophy of practicality.

The Poetry of A. E.

Collected Poems, by A. E. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

A friend of mine once expressed pained surprise on hearing that A. E. was among the poets I delighted to read. Having just heard me dissent from occultism, he could not understand how one who did not believe in theosophy, esoteric Buddhism, or any of the many modern forms of Mumbo-jumboism could possibly take delight in a poet who, according to him, was a theosophist, or revere poems which had first appeared in a theosophical journal.

Poetry, however, is not a record of one’s beliefs; it is a record of one’s experiences; and while the existence of God may be asserted and just as easily disproved, in the medium of rhyming language, there is no question of poetry involved. But it is equally true that when a poet describes a spiritual experience, though he may draw his images from Neo-Platonic philosophy, Christian tradition or even the animatism of the primitive poets, there is no question of theological belief implied.

When, therefore, we open Mr. Russell’s book at random, as I actually did when this volume reached me, and come across the following lines, we must be blind to a wide-spread experience of mankind if we cannot see that it expresses poetic truth as well as poetic beauty:

Unconscious

But Mr. Russell’s mysticism—and mysticism, being an attitude rather than an intellectual belief, is something that is legitimately expressible in poetry, and is moreover something that Mr. Russell constantly and beautifully expresses—is no mere world-flight. Even the Beatific Vision he would only accept on terms becoming a man whose life is implicated in humanity. Hence, under the title of Love we find him singing:

One of Mr. Russell’s poems suggests in its very first line a lyric from Shelley’s Hellas, and the two poems form an interesting contrast between the temperaments of the poet of sentimental Platonism and this later singer who adds to Shelley’s lyric vision a firmer stationing on the substance of earth. While Shelley began on a high note of joy that

but ends on the note of disenchantment:

—while Shelley thus descends, Mr. Russell in The Twilight of Earth begins more or less where Shelley left off with:

But while

there is no need to cease from life or from aspiration on that account:

While in few or none of these poems is mystic thought absent it is never present at the expense of poetry, and many of the poems find in nature both their occasion and their material. A. E.’s vision is preeminently for the evanescent aspect of things, especially for the colors of the changes that come over earth and firmament. The poem beginning

is typical of his response to the vision of the outer world.

The same sturdy sense of actual values that leads Mr. Russell to write prose works on co-operation and nationality, seeing in these matters no less than in religious ecstasy the ground for the free life of man, is evident in the poem On Behalf of Some Irishmen not Followers of Tradition. But lest sturdy commonsense be thought a grotesque piece of praise for a poem, let me add that it is a commonsense illuminated by the purest idealism. How close to earth this idealism moves is shown in the little sketch In Connemara describing the peasant girl:

and enmeshing her in the nature mysticism of her race and country.

William Morris somewhere speaks of the cultured man as one who is in sympathy with past and present and future—a contrast indeed to much latter-day doctrine—and one is reminded of the phrase by this poet who with such lyrical skill not only embodies all three for us, but knits them together in that unity which alone can bestow on man the values of life which are timeless.

Llewellyn Jones.