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Title: Some Impressions of My Elders

Author: St. John G. Ervine

Release date: November 10, 2020 [eBook #63704]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)


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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS

by

ST. JOHN G. ERVINE





New York
The Macmillan Company
1922

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Copyright, 1920 and 1921,
by North American Review Corporation

Copyright, 1922,
by St. John G. Ervine

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1922

Vail-Ballou Company
Binghamton and New York


TO

ELIZABETH CUTTING

who would not give me any peace until I had overcome my idle habits
and written all these impressions of my elders for the North American
Review.




CONTENTS


THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS            3

A. E. (GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL)      25

ARNOLD BENNETT                      61

G. K. CHESTERTON                    90

JOHN GALSWORTHY                    113

GEORGE MOORE                       161

BERNARD SHAW                       189

H. G. WELLS                        240

W. B. YEATS                        264




SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS




THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS


The matter which appears in the following pages was originally
contributed, in the shape of a series of articles under the general
title of "Some Impressions of My Elders," to the _North American
Review_ at intervals during the years 1920 and 1921. The order in which
the articles appear in this book is different from the order in which
they appeared in the _Review_: _this_ order is alphabetical whereas
_that_ was capricious. Some excisions and some additions have been made
to them and I hope that I have evaded the danger which besets all those
who reprint their journalism in book form, the danger of repetitions.
Why I reprint them at all is a point on which I am not able to offer
conclusive explanations. I have reached that period of my life when
my wish is rather _not_ to write a book than to write one, and I have
lost all the cheery conceit which caused me in my youth to feel that
anything I wrote ought to be published in a handsome volume. Indeed,
when I think of the great quantity of books there already are in this
world, it seems to me a sign of hopeless irresponsibility to add to
their number. There are so many books that ought to be read, but never
can be read because there is not enough time for any of us to do so,
that no author can plead justification for printing a book which does
not come within the catalogue of those that ought to be read unless he
needs the money which, presumably, he will get for it. I cannot urge
even that plea, for I have few needs and they are easily satisfied. I
have never been afflicted with the mania for owning things, as Walt
Whitman calls it, and therefore have no wish to accumulate either goods
or money. Were it not for the insistence of some of my friends, I do
not suppose I should issue this book to the public at all. We are too
prone, we scribblers, to put our casual writings between the covers
of a book, when regard for our craft would compel us to reserve that
dignity for our greatest efforts; and I have feared for several years
now to be one of these offenders. And yet, one likes to have an array
of books on a shelf and be able to say, "I wrote those." The profession
of writing gives degree and reputation to a man which is often greater
than his due, and people of ability will listen respectfully to the
opinions of a lesser person than themselves merely because he (or even
she) has printed a book. Many clever men and women actually paid good
American money to hear me talk on odds and ends of subjects, although
they probably had views on them that were at least as sound as mine
and no doubt a great deal sounder. I am afraid of this tribute to the
author. It may make us, a much assorted crowd, esteem ourselves more
highly than we are naturally prone to do. The mere fact that a man
has contracted a profitable habit of putting words together does not
entitle him to more of the world's respect that is due to one who has
contracted the habit of putting bits of metal together and calling the
result a motor-car. I do not know why a man who writes books should
regard himself as a better man than one who makes butter. Far less do
I know why the man who makes butter should consent to believe that he
is less worthy than the man who makes books. But undoubtedly some such
superstition fills the minds of most of us. When a man or woman of
ordinary appearance and uninteresting speech comes into our presence,
we say "How do you do!" and turn away; but when we are informed that
this same person has written a novel, immediately we become interested
and turn again to him or her in the expectation that something
profoundly illuminating will be said to us. Experience does not cure us
of that delusive hope. We do not prick up our ears when a man who owns
the largest motor-car factory in the world comes into our presence,
and we yawn in the face of a railway director. Yet either of these may
be far more entertaining company than any author. It is true that the
author is presumably more imaginative than the owner of the factory or
the president of the railroad, and perhaps the instinctive tribute paid
by mankind to the author, even when mankind omits to buy his books,
is a recognition of the value of imagination to human life. As such I
gladly accept it. Nevertheless, I could wish for more discrimination
in these tributes. On the whole, I would prefer to see our authors
neglected than over-estimated. No one on earth and probably no one in
heaven can prevent an author from making books while he has breath in
his body and energy in his brain and fingers. Therefore, neglect will
not greatly harm him. But too much praise, too much consideration of
his views, above all, too much profit from his work, will make a sad
mess of an excellent writer. I tell myself sometimes that no author
should be praised until he is dead, though he might occasionally be
dispraised during his lifetime. We should thus save our authors, though
there is no certainty in this, from excess of vanity. Let Shakespeare's
reputation grow to legendary proportions when he is safely within his
grave, but do not, if you desire the best that is in him, let him be
often or much praised while he is alive. We have come to a period of
time when authors feel that they must write so many books each year.
But I would have an author publish a book only when the compulsion
to publish it becomes greater than he can resist. Books would not
necessarily be better, but they would certainly be fewer, and they
might be better.


II

I have written thus far, partly to resolve my own doubts (which,
however, are not resolved) but chiefly to excuse myself to those who
may buy this book. I beg of them to believe that I have not reprinted
these fugitive pieces without deliberation on their value. My friends
tell me that any impressions of men of quality and genius have value,
and undoubtedly Boswell's biography of Dr. Johnson confirms many
mediocrities in their intention to accept a man's hospitality for the
purpose of earning money by describing his personal habits in a public
journal. We would be very grateful for an account of Shakespeare no
better than any one of the chapters in this book. If an Elizabethan
had had a mind like Boswell's and had noted down all that he ever
heard Shakespeare say, had pressed him with questions on his work,
had noted his personal appearance, his habits of dress, his ways of
eating, his effect on women, his likes and dislikes, the thousand and
one small things which, when summed up, make a man out of a myth,
how happy we should all be, how many thousand commentators and
emendators and wrathful Baconians and cypher maniacs would be put out
of employment! One could cry with vexation at the thought that there
was no one with sufficient intelligence to keep a diary during those
last few mysterious years in Stratford-on-Avon when Shakespeare, though
still a young man as ages go, ceased to work at his trade and went in
silence to his grave. Such are the considerations which have affected
me in my decision to reprint these chapters, though they may add very
little to any one's knowledge of the men who are described in them.
It is, perhaps, an additional factor in the decision that they record
impressions made on the mind of a young man by his elders and betters
and expressed at a time when he was ceasing to be young. The generation
to which I belong was much impressed by the men whose work and beliefs
are sketched in this book. All young men, whatever their class or
culture, have heroes. The world, indeed, will end when young men cease
to have heroes. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc,
Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy and, rather
more remotely, "A. E." were heroes worthy of emulation by me and the
likes of me. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy were too far up the slopes
of Olympus for us to hope ever to touch the hem of their garments, but
we were alive in the same world with them and sometimes spoke with
people who knew them. Once, even, on a hot Sunday morning I walked for
miles in Surrey, stiff with determination to see Meredith and to speak
with him, even if I should have to skulk about his house the entire day
and run the risk of being arrested for suspicious loitering; but my
heart failed me when, tired and thirsty, I came into his neighbourhood.
Who was I, I demanded of myself, that I should thrust my unimportant
person on the notice of a genius? And when I had made that demand of
myself, I realised that I could do no other than go away and leave the
old man in peace. And so I went, though now I regret that I did, for a
little while after I made my expedition to Box Hill, Meredith died and
I had lost for ever my hope of seeing him. Time has been kinder to me
over Mr. Hardy whose friendship I have the happiness to enjoy.

I have described these men as our heroes, but of course the degree of
respect we gave to them varied. The feeling we had for Mr. Galsworthy,
for example, was diminished by the fact that we were afraid he would
turn aside and shed a few unaccountable tears. His work, particularly
"The Man of Property," "The Country House" and "The Silver Box," had
the great appeal which all passionately sincere work has, but it
left some of us in a state of chilled speculation. We were afraid of
the effect Mr. Galsworthy had on our emotions and we resisted him
more, perhaps, than we ought to have done because we suspected him of
sentimentality and were afraid he might let our minds down by pressing
too hardly on our hearts. His work excited a remote pity in us, but it
did not rouse us to wrath or warm our affections. His characters were
the creatures of an aloof, impassive and immovable Destiny; and it is
difficult to feel much interest in automatons. If a man is wronged by
another man, I may be stirred to his defence, but if he is thwarted
or crushed by some passionless Force which cannot be controlled or
persuaded or defeated, I am unlikely to do more than murmur "Poor
fellow!" and pass on my way. Spineless men, impotently submitting to
Circumstances, do not stir the blood, and Mr. Galsworthy's characters,
though they might excite our pity, killed our hope. Mr. Galsworthy
seemed to us to say, "Vain youths, it is idle to make any effort!
Things happen and they cannot be helped. You are doomed from the moment
of your birth to die frustrated!..." He is easily made indignant by
suffering, but we could not imagine him sounding a call to fight.
We could think of him only in the act of surrender. We asked for a
challenge; he counselled submission. He was a Tolstoyan, not of his
Free Will, for he had no Free Will, but because he could not help
himself. He turned the other cheek because he would not clench his
fist. Mr. Hardy did not fill our mouths with dust as Mr. Galsworthy
did, for his people, though they, too, were creatures of Destiny, were
gallant creatures and went to their end with a noble gesture. He left
us with the sensation that although we were obliged to submit to a doom
determined for us by a Power that understood neither Itself nor us, yet
we could put ribbons in our hats. We could die like men and not like
rats. When Mr. Hardy celebrated his eighty-first birthday, his younger
comrades in the craft of letters presented an address to him from which
I quote the following passages:


     "In your novels and poems you have given us a tragic vision of
     life which is informed by your knowledge of character and relieved
     by the charity of your humour and sweetened by your sympathy with
     human suffering and endurance. We have learned from you that the
     proud heart can subdue the hardest fate, even in submitting to it.
     When Mr. Justice Shallow sought to instruct Sir John Falstaff in
     the choice of soldiers, the knight said: 'Care I for the limbs,
     the thewes, the stature, bulk and big assemblance of a man? Give
     me the spirit, Master Shallow.' So would you have answered him,
     for in all that you have written you have shown the spirit of
     man, nourished by tradition and sustained by pride, persisting
     through defeat. You have inspired us both by your work and by the
     manner in which it was done. The craftsman in you calls for our
     admiration as surely as the artist, and few writers have observed
     so closely as you have the Host's instruction in the Canterbury
     Tales:


         Your termes, your colours and your figures,
         Keep them in store, till so be ye indite
         High style, as when that men to kinges write.


     From your first book to your last, you have written in the 'high
     style, as when that men to kinges write,' and you have crowned a
     great prose with a noble poetry."


Those extracts express, I think, some of the quiet quality of courage
discoverable in the determinism of Mr. Hardy, but absent from the
determinism of Mr. Galsworthy.


III

Our attitude towards Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc
was very different from our attitude towards Mr. Galsworthy. These
challenging, fighting, protesting men were concerned less with pity
for the victims of life than with anger against or opposition to the
oppressors of life. They did not wring their hands; they put up their
fists. The Early Twentieth Century Youth listened respectfully to Mr.
Galsworthy, but he went out to fight with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells and
Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc. These four men did not move him in equal
measure. Mr. Wells stimulated him with the quick succession of his
ideas, but disconcerted him also with the rapidity with which he shed
one idea for another. While we were willing to challenge everything and
make it justify its existence, we were eager also to find firm ground
for our feet. We felt that Mr. Wells ought to make up his mind a little
more carefully before he took the public into his confidence. Mr.
Shaw's awful consistency, even when he took to religion, drew us to
him more than Mr. Wells's willingness to modify or enlarge his views.
Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton stimulated us in a different way from
that in which Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells stimulated us. Mr. Wells sent us
out into the world in search of new and more adequate formulæ; Mr.
Belloc and Mr. Chesterton checked us in headlong flights with words of
warning and remonstrance. They reminded us that man is of the earth,
earthy; that man does not live by Good Will alone; that society is
composed of a great variety of beings, generous and mean, exalted and
debased, hearty and miserable, noble and ignoble, self-sacrificing and
self-seeking, kind and cruel; and they reminded us also that unless
we took care to remember this vital fact of the variety of man, we
should lose our way in the deserts ahead of us. They told us that Mr.
Wells's "Good Will" was merely Godwin's "Universal Benevolence" all
over again, and that Godwin's doctrine had made the way easy for the
Utilitarians and the growth of a devitalizing political theory which
expressed itself in the brutal industrial system of the first half of
the nineteenth century. Mr. Wells sought to convict man of a sense
of stupidity and disorganization, but they sought to convict him of
a sense of sin. Mr. Wells reminded man of his power to aspire; they
reminded him of his lapse from grace. Mr. Wells said, "You can climb!"
They said, "You have fallen!" He said, "Think!" They said, "Repent!"
The world, in Mr. Wells's opinion, needed Love and Fine Thinking. In
the opinion of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton it needed the love of God
and faith in the Catholic Church. There probably was less difference
in essentials between Mr. Wells and the Chesterbelloc, as Mr. Shaw
nicknamed them, than appeared on the surface of things. The Catholic
Church in its organized state may move Mr. Wells to admiration, though,
in its religious aspect, it probably moves him only to derision. It is
a shabby sort of faith, with a tendency to tawdriness which makes it
ultimately unsuitable to the spiritual needs of a gentleman, although
adequate to the needs of servant-girls and actors. No one who has
visited a Catholic church or witnessed the ceremonials in Rome can
help, if he or she be possessed of any culture at all, feeling that the
whole business is second-rate: the effort of an overblown actor-manager
to interpret Shakespeare in pretentious terms. The fundamental sanity
of Mr. Chesterton has, no doubt, saved him from the folly of secession
to Rome, but his partiality for it and Mr. Belloc's rigid attainment
to it, made the young men of my time suspicious of the Chesterbelloc.
Mr. Belloc said, on a public occasion, that he would support the Church
in an act of repression if the Church came into serious conflict with
an antagonist; and he proved that he meant what he said by applauding
the execution of Ferrer, the anti-clerical, in Spain. It was natural,
perhaps, that my Orange blood should boil when I heard Mr. Belloc
palliating the offences of his obsolete church, but my more tolerant
friends were as dashed by his behaviour as I was, and what respect
we had for him was considerably diminished by the knowledge that he
would always come to heel when some priest snapped fingers at him.
Neither he nor Mr. Chesterton, although their criticism interested and
on occasions checked us, ever established dominion over us because of
their preoccupation with Catholicism. They might spell the word with a
capital C, but we knew very well that Mr. Belloc in his heart spelt it
with a small one, and we were not going to deliver ourselves into the
hands of men who were priest-ridden, however "jolly" they might be or
however well they might write.

We were not interested in their beer-swilling habits which we regarded
as queer nastinesses in otherwise reputable persons. Their efforts
to make a tenet of religion out of beer-swilling seemed to us to be
as ridiculous as would be an effort by a Chinaman to make a tenet of
religion out of opium-smoking.

Mr. Shaw was incontestably the supreme figure among these men of mind
who stimulated and influenced the young men and women of the Early
Twentieth Century. I doubt whether any one has ever captured or held
the fancy of young men as Mr. Shaw captured and held our fancy. Dr.
Johnson had an influence as powerful in his time as Mr. Shaw had in
ours; but Dr. Johnson's influence was mainly exercised over men of
older years than we were, of more established habits than we had; and
I doubt very much whether he affected their thoughts and outlook on
life so profoundly as Mr. Shaw affected us. He could not persuade the
faithful Boswell to accept his view of the American colonists, and his
pamphlet, "Taxation No Tyranny" displeased his friends as much as it
appeared to gratify George III and his supporters. Dr. Johnson was a
critic and a scholar with very little creative ability; he was too
conservative a man to be a man of genius; and he looked back too often
for the liking of young men who are always looking forward. His love
of tradition and settled order, while it was pleasing to men of an age
when comfort and security and familiar things began to attract the mind
more than effort and adventure and change, made him unattractive to
the stirring minds of young men. Shelley derived from Godwin, not from
Johnson.

There is a passage in Boswell's "Life of Dr. Johnson" in which Dr.
Johnson's peculiar views on the respect due to men of rank are set out
very clearly.


     " ... a discussion took place, whether ... Lord Cardross did right
     to refuse to go Secretary of the Embassy to Spain, when Sir James
     Gray, a man of inferior rank, went Ambassador. Dr. Johnson said,
     that perhaps in point of interest he did wrong; but in point of
     dignity he did well.... Sir, had he gone Secretary, while his
     inferior was Ambassador, he would have been a traitor to his rank
     and family."


The question, to Dr. Johnson's mind, was not one of merit: Lord
Cardross was entitled to "go Ambassador," not because he was a more
skilful diplomatist than Sir James Gray, but because he was a lord
while Sir James was only a knight! This extraordinary doctrine, which
may be held accountable for much in British history, might appeal to
elderly men who love rules and regulations and like to have everything
neatly set out in books, but it certainly does not appeal to young men
who believe in conflicts won by superior qualities; for young men, as
Dr. Johnson himself said on one occasion, "have more virtue than old
men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect."

Mr. Shaw is incapable of uttering such a remark as Dr. Johnson uttered
in support of Lord Cardross's inept behaviour. He has, indeed, said
and written foolish things and he is capable of making what are called
"debating" points and cheap scores and of saying things for the sake
of saying them or of annoying the complacent and the smug; but he is
incapable of saying anything which supports a belief that one man shall
have precedence over another, not because of his merit, but because
of his birth. Dr. Johnson's statement was not a casual, fantastic,
perverse statement; it was a natural result of his general theory of
society. It is recorded of him that he declined to leave a room until
a Bishop had done so on the ground that the Bishop's office gave him
a title to precedence over a man of greater mentality! It was not
humility that caused Dr. Johnson to behave thus, for he was an arrogant
man, nor was it indifference to such matters, for he was a stickler for
respect to himself even when he did not deserve respect: it was his
belief in the providential arrangement of society in settled grades
that caused him to behave in this way. The man was entitled to quit the
room first, not because he was a good man or a great man, but because
he was a bishop! There is probably some convenience in this belief, a
simple method of preventing incivility, but it is a small convenience
which does not greatly matter to youth.

I can imagine Mr. Shaw refusing to go out of the room before the Bishop
has done so, in sheer humility or indifference, but I cannot imagine
him refusing to do so because of his regard for the man's office as
distinct from the man himself. And it is, I suppose, his irreverence
for office, more than anything else, which draws young men to him.
He is no respecter of persons or authorities: he criticizes them all,
high or low. His courage, his vitality, his arrogance, his humility,
his championship of persecuted persons, his impulse to help an
unpopular cause not, as stupid people imagine, because it is unpopular,
but because it seems to him to be a just cause, and his absolute
indifference to vested interests and the power of the majority--these
qualities of his draw young men to him as a magnet draws a needle. It
is significant, I think, that Dr. Johnson had a very strong dislike of
Dean Swift to whom, in many respects, Bernard Shaw bears a close mental
resemblance. It is very certain that had Bernard Shaw lived in the
eighteenth century, to which, in spirit, he really belongs, he would
have supported the Americans as fiercely as Johnson denounced them; and
I do not doubt that his would have been the most scathing and powerful
of the pamphlets written in reply to "Taxation No Tyranny."


IV

These, then, were the men who guided in greater or less degree the
opinions of the young men and women of the Early Twentieth Century in
the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. "A. E." greatly influenced
young Irishmen who remained curiously unimpressed either by Mr. Moore
or Mr. Yeats. Rumours of his doctrine came to the ears of young
Englishman, but they had no personal contact with him as they had
with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells and Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton. It is
not possible to calculate the extent to which these men moulded the
minds of my generation, but indisputably it was large. No one who grew
from youth to manhood between 1900 and 1914 could escape from their
influence, even if he were unconscious of it. The greater part of that
generation died in the War. The young men who drew their ideas chiefly
from Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw, directly or indirectly, did not live to
make their world, and so we can never tell what good or ill would have
resulted to mankind had they succeeded to authority. Their bones are
buried in France and Italy, in Palestine and Turkey, in Russia and
East Africa, on the shores of Gallipoli and in the marshes of Salonica,
in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and the North Sea; and there
is nothing to remember them by but broken lands in France and the
broken vows of politicians the world over. These young men went out to
die in a mood of selflessness that has never, perhaps, been equalled or
excelled in the history of mankind; and when their backs were turned,
they were betrayed. We cannot look on them again, but we may find
comfort in our loss by remembering and considering the men who formed
the faith they held.




"A. E."

(GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL)


I

In all the books on Ireland, considered nationally, socially and
economically, that have been written in the past twenty years, two
men inevitably are mentioned: Sir Horace Plunkett and "A. E.," whose
lawful name is George William Russell. Men of affairs in most parts
of the world have heard of them, and I imagine that very few of the
people who go to Ireland with any serious purpose fail to visit them.
I saw Sir Horace Plunkett receive an ovation from a large audience in
New York which could only have been given to him by people who had
some knowledge and appreciation of his work for his country; and I
was impressed by the fact that many Americans asked me to tell them
something of "A. E." And yet, though the wide world is not ignorant
of their worth, it is very likely that they are less generally known
in Ireland than some paltry politician with a gift for street corner
rhetoric. Once, in Dublin, I praised Sir Horace Plunkett to a man from
the county of Cavan, who interrupted me to say that no one in his
village had ever heard of Sir Horace. He seemed to imagine that the
ignorance of his neighbours proved a demerit in the founder of the
co-operative movement in Ireland. Your villagers, said I, may never
have heard of Sir Horace Plunkett and are probably very familiar with
the names of Mr. Charles Chaplin and Miss Mary Pickford, but does
that prove that Mr. Chaplin is a greater man than Sir Horace? I am
not indifferent to the merits of Mr. Chaplin--I would go a long way
to see him in the movies--but I hope I shall never succumb to this
modern shoddy democracy which will not believe that a man possesses
quality unless his name is printed frequently in the newspapers and is
familiarly known to the rabble. It may be that Paudeen, unfit to do
more than "fumble in a greasy till," as Mr. Yeats wrote in his bitter
poem, "September, 1913," knows little or nothing of Sir Horace Plunkett
whose life labours have brought so much of comfort and prosperity to
him--but who cares what Paudeen knows? Let him grub in the soil, as
God made him to grub, while men of mind and quality look after his
affairs. It is sufficient for the knowledgeable minority that _they_
know of Sir Horace and realize the value of the great work he has
done for his country. A false optimism bids us to believe that "we
needs must love the highest when we see it," but a sense of reality
convinces us that the highest has to fight harder for recognition than
the lowest, and that the way to the throne of heaven passes through
Golgotha, the place of a skull.


II

If it be true that Sir Horace Plunkett is less known to his countrymen
than some fellow with flashy wits, it is more certain to be true that
his great colleague in co-operation, "A. E.," is still less known
to them. It would be difficult for any intelligent person to come
into the presence of "A. E." and remain unaware that he is a man of
merit. He fills a room immediately and unmistakably with the power
of his personality. A tall, bearded, untidy man, with full lips and
bulkily-built body, he draws attention by his deep, grey eyes. When
he speaks, other people listen. If you were to meet him in the street,
unaware of his identity, and he were to ask you for a match with which
to light his pipe, you would do more than civilly comply with his
request. You would certainly say to yourself, "That's a remarkable
man!" It is said, with what verity I cannot say, that Mr. Bernard Shaw
and "A. E." met for the first time in a picture-gallery in Dublin,
each ignorant of the other's identity, and that they began to talk
of Art. They impressed each other so greatly that they continued in
argument for a long time, and only, when they parted, did they become
known to each other. The mountains nod to each other over the heads
of the little hills; and men of merit, even when they are not easily
recognized by the multitude, are known to each other. One man of merit
may, indeed, belittle another man of merit, as Dr. Johnson belittled
Fielding, as George Meredith belittled Dickens, as Henry James
belittled Ibsen and Thomas Hardy; but at least they are aware of each
other.


III

Very often have writers told the story of how Sir Horace Plunkett,
a tongue-tied, hesitant man with very delicate health, returned to
Ireland after a long stay in America, to begin the Co-operative
Movement, and found, in a Dublin shop, keeping accounts for a
tea-merchant, a poet and a painter, a mystic who was also an economist
with the capacity, as it afterwards proved, to become the ablest
journalist in Ireland. This man of multiple energies was George William
Russell, who was born in Lurgan, in the County of Armagh, on April 10,
1867. He is two years younger than Mr. Yeats, eleven years younger
than Mr. Shaw, and fifteen years younger than Mr. George Moore. The
order of these births is significant. Observe how an aloof artist has
been succeeded by a furious economist! Mr. Moore, who began life as a
realist after the manner, but not after the style, of Zola, and then
turned his back on Zola and sought the company of Turgeniev so that he
might pursue apt and beautiful words and delicate and elusive thoughts,
was followed by Mr. Shaw, who began life by filling his mind with the
ideas of Henry George and Karl Marx, and then turned his back on both
of them in order that he might consort with Mr. Sidney Webb. Mr. Yeats,
with his vague poetry and vague mysticism--none the less vague because
of the curious care for exactness which causes him to count the nine
and fifty swans at Coole and the nine bean rows on Innisfree--followed
Mr. Shaw, and in his turn was followed by "A. E." so closely connected
with economics that a wag, when asked what was the meaning of "A. E's."
pen-name, replied "agricultural economist."[1]

One cannot, however, leave the matter as simply as that. Mr. Shaw likes
to think of himself as an economist, but he is more than an economist;
he is John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx. "A. E." likes to
think of himself as an expert on the price of butter and milk and cows
and sheep, but he is more than an expert on these things: he is Blake
pretending to be Sir Horace Plunkett. Or Walt Whitman pretending to be
President Wilson. It has always seemed to me that Sir Horace Plunkett
and "A. E.," colleagues in a great enterprise, are the embodiment of
the peculiarly interwoven strands of Irish character, of that queer
mingling of the material and the spiritual in the Irish people which
at once allures and astounds the Englishman, accustomed to keeping
his materialism and his spirituality in separate compartments. Sir
Horace has a neat and unexpected wit, but he does not appear to me
to have much feeling for poetry or for any other literature or art.
He has respect for these things and will talk on them sometimes with
singular incisiveness, but his interest in them is an outside interest.
If he had to choose between a co-operative creamery and the Heroic
Legends of Ireland, I do not doubt for a moment that he would choose
the co-operative creamery. "A. E.," on the contrary, would choose the
Heroic Legends and would give the good reason for so doing that without
the Heroic Legends, the co-operative creamery is useless. When "A. E."
pleads for the co-operative societies, he does so because he believes
that these are part of the means whereby the Irish people will be
restored to their ancient stature.

Organize your industry, he said to the farmers, so that you may become
what your fathers were, fit company for the Shining Ones, for Lugh
and Balor and Manannan, the great and brave and beautiful Pagan gods.
Each by himself, Sir Horace or "A. E.," might have failed to make
much out of the co-operative movement in Ireland, but both together,
each possessed of a different, yet complementary, crusading spirit,
could not fail to make a happy issue of it. When Garibaldi appealed
for recruits for his Thousand, he offered them wounds and death. When
Sir Horace Plunkett appealed for helpers in the Irish Agricultural
Organization Society, he offered them hard and discouraging labour and
poor wages. Mankind, which responds to a noble appeal as readily as it
responds to a base appeal, offered its best to both of them. Garibaldi
got his Thousand, and Sir Horace Plunkett got his colleagues.

They were diverse in character, and included Nationalists and
Unionists, Catholics and Protestants, peers and peasants. For the
first time in Irish history, Irishmen of all classes were united on a
matter which had no relationship with passions! There were no angry
emotions astir when the I. A. O. S. brought the diverse elements of
the Irish entity into accord as there had been when the union of the
North and the South was made many years earlier; and consequently
the movement could not be split, as that Union was, by the collision
of one angry emotion with another. In face of every conceivable
discouragement and even of active enmity and in spite of the grave
unhealth of Sir Horace himself, the movement grew in strength until now
it is indestructible.[2] Chief among the colleagues whom Sir Horace
gathered about him was "A. E." Mr. Russell could, without doubt, earn
a large income as a journalist if he were to offer his pen to a rich
newspaper proprietor--his weekly review, the _Irish Homestead_, is
the most ably-edited and skillfully-written organ in Ireland--and he
could probably earn as much as, if not more than, he receives from
his Co-operative work if he were to devote himself exclusively to
his mystical and poetical writings; but just as Mazzini felt himself
compelled to sacrifice his heart's desire, the life of a man of
letters, in order to devote himself to a political career which was
distasteful to him, so "A. E." felt compelled to hitch his star to Sir
Horace Plunkett's wagon, and for many years now he has preached, week
after week, the gospel of co-operation to Irish farmers when he would,
perhaps, have preferred exclusively to tell stories of the ancient gods
and heroes.


IV

But the Co-operative Movement did not absorb the whole of his energies.
He is as many-sided as William Morris was, almost as many-sided as
Leonardo da Vinci. His work on the _Irish Homestead_ would seem to
be sufficient to employ all the vitality of a healthy, active man,
but "A. E." cannot be contained within the pages of a weekly review,
and so, while writing four or five pages every week of the finest
journalism to be found in Great Britain or Ireland, he has also
produced seven remarkable books and painted many pictures, engaged in
political and economic controversy, and sat as a member of the Irish
Convention which endeavoured, in 1917, to discover a solution of the
Irish Problem. In a strange and, to me, incomprehensible book, called
"The Candle of Vision," he has wrought his mysticism to such a pitch
of practicality that he is able to offer his readers an alphabet with
which to interpret the language of the Gods! It manifests itself in
some of his pictures, where strange, luminous and brightly-coloured
creatures are seen shining in some ordinary landscape, creatures that
seemed to me, when I first saw them, akin to Red Indians. In everything
that he writes and does, there is a consciousness of some spiritual
presence, not the spiritual presence of the Christian theology, but
of the Pagan Legends. One night, in his house in Dublin, I drew the
attention of a lady to one of his pictures, a dark landscape, in the
centre of which a very brilliant and beautiful creature was dancing.
"A. E." turned to us and said, "That's the one I saw!" and I remembered
the story I had been told earlier in the evening, that he saw fairies,
that he actually took penny tram-rides from Dublin to go up into the
mountains to see the fairies! I do not remember what the lady said,
but I remember that she looked exceedingly astonished, and, indeed,
I myself felt some astonishment. If Mr. Yeats had said that he had
seen a fairy, I should have smiled indulgently and should neither
have believed that he had seen one nor that he himself believed that
he had seen one. But while I do not believe that "A. E." saw a fairy,
otherwise than in his imagination, I am certain that he believes he saw
one, not as a creature of the mind, but as one having flesh and blood.
He claims no peculiar merit for himself in seeing visions. "There is
no personal virtue in me," he writes in "The Candle of Vision," "other
than this that I followed a path all may travel but on which few do
journey." He tells his readers how they, too, if they have the wish,
may see the things which he has seen, and he gives descriptions of some
of his visions. People as incredulous as I am can very easily dispose
of "A. E.'s" visions as the fantasies of a man suffering perhaps from
inadequate nourishment--for "A. E." was careless about his meals in
those days--just as the visions of St. Theresa and St. Catherine of
Sienna may be explained by the feverishness of mind that comes to
people who are starving themselves or are suffering from neurosis. Here
is an account of one of his visions. You are to understand that it is
not a dream such as you and I have when we are asleep, but something
seen by a man who is awake at broad of day, something actual, something
that you who read this might also see if you were to follow the path on
which he has travelled:


     So did I feel one warm summer day lying idly on the hillside,
     not then thinking of anything but the sunlight, and how sweet it
     was to drowse there, when, suddenly, I felt a fiery heart throb,
     and knew it was personal and intimate, and started with every
     sense dilated and intent, and turned inwards, and I heard first a
     music as of bells going away, away into that wonderous underland
     whither, as legend relates, the Danaan gods withdraw; and then
     the heart of the hills was opened to me, and I knew there was no
     hill for those who were there, and they were unconscious of the
     ponderous mountain piled above the palaces of light, and the winds
     were sparkling and diamond clear, yet full of color as an opal, as
     they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was
     all about me, and it was we who had been blind to it but that it
     had never passed away from the world.


The Golden Age is here, at this moment, and all the noble creatures who
filled it with chivalry and beauty are crowding about us. We have only
to open our eyes and we shall see!...


     Once, suddenly, I found myself on some remote plain or steppe,
     and heard unearthly chimes pealing passionately from I know not
     what far steeples. The earth-breath streamed from the furrows
     to the glowing heavens. Overhead the birds flew round and round
     crying their incomprehensible cries, as if they were maddened, and
     knew not where to nestle, and had dreams of some more enraptured
     rest in a diviner home. I could see a ploughman lift himself from
     his obscure toil and stand with lit eyes as if he too had been
     fire-smitten and was caught into heaven as I was, and knew for
     that moment he was a god.


It is very vague, the disbeliever feels, and there is nothing in it to
make one accept it as a vision of a thing actually seen, rather than
fancied; but there can be no doubt of the intensity with which "A. E."
believes in the actuality of it. These visions form the foundation of
his political and economic faith. He advocates co-operative enterprise
because he believes in his visions as actual happenings. In a poem,
called "Earth Breath," he says:


     From the cool and dark-lipped furrows breathes a dim delight
     Through the woodland's purple plumage to the diamond night.
     Aureoles of joy encircle every blade of grass
     Where the dew-fed creatures silent and enraptured pass.
     And the restless ploughman pauses, turns, and, wondering,
     Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a king.


This verse is obviously a poetical account of the experience he
underwent "on some remote plain or steppe," and the final couplet of it
gives the explanation of his belief in democracy. If he had no faith in
the god in man, if he were not certain that "the restless ploughman ...
deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a king," he would probably
offer his allegiance to autocracy and believe in government by a caste;
but since he has seen visions and is convinced that there is a god in
man, he cannot be other than a democrat. All his political strivings
have been directed towards making this "a society where people will
be at harmony in their economic life," as he writes in "The National
Being," and "will readily listen to different opinions from their own,
will not turn sour faces on those who do not think as they do, but
will, by reason and sympathy, comprehend each other, and come at last,
through sympathy and affection, to a balancing of their diversities,
as in that multitudinous diversity which is the universe, powers and
dominions and elements are balanced, and are guided harmoniously by the
Shepherd of the Ages." Whether such a world, balanced in that way, can
be rightly described as a democracy is not a matter on which I offer
any opinion here, though it seems to me to be a very long way from what
the common man considers a democracy to be.


V

It is when we come to connect his visions and the beliefs he derives
from them with the actual circumstances in which we find ourselves
that we begin to be most dubious. "National ideals," he says in "The
National Being," "are the possession of a few people only." That is an
argument for aristocracy.


     Yet we must spread them in wide commonalty over Ireland if we
     are to create a civilisation worthy of our hopes and our ages
     of struggle and sacrifice to attain the power to build. We
     must spread them in wide commonalty because it is certain that
     democracy will prevail in Ireland. The aristocratic classes with
     traditions of government, the manufacturing classes with economic
     experience, will alike be secondary in Ireland to the small
     farmers and the wage-earners in the towns. We must rely on the
     ideas common among our people, and on their power to discern among
     their countrymen the aristocracy of character and intellect.


With the deletion of the word "Ireland" and the substitution of the
word "America," that quotation might stand just as effective for the
United States as for Ireland. Why is it certain that democracy will
prevail in Ireland? Because the small farmers and the wage-earners
in the towns will take precedence over the aristocracy and the
manufacturing classes! I do not follow that argument. I have seen
nothing in England or America or Ireland or France to convince me
that if the small farmers and the wage-earners in the towns were
authoritative they would be any more democratic than the aristocratic
or the manufacturing classes. I have seen much to make me feel certain
that they will use their authority as implacably in their own interests
as any aristocrat or manufacturer ever used or ever will use his. Mr.
G. K. Chesterton, in his book, "Irish Impressions," produces this
argument in favour of peasant proprietorship:


     It may be that international Israel will launch against us out
     of the East an insane simplification of the unity of Man, as
     Islam once launched out of the East an insane simplification
     of the unity of God. If it be so, it is where property is well
     distributed that it will be well defended. The post of honor will
     be with those who fight in very truth for their own land.


It is indisputable that a peasant will fight for his own land, the tiny
portion which he owns and cultivates, but will he fight for another
man's land when that man is unjustly to be bereft of it? There is
nothing meritable in a man who fights for his own goods and lands, nor
does it seem to me that a peasant will fight for his potato-patch with
any greater determination than a share holder in a railroad will fight
for the interest on his capital. There certainly is not anything more
noble or chivalrous in the peasant's desire to keep possession of his
means of livelihood than there is in that of the Liberty Bondholder.
The test of honour is, not what will you do for yourself, but what will
you do for other men? The French peasant proprietors, the Pennsylvania
Dutch, the Irish peasant proprietors may offer a guarantee of stability
to society, but the offer may carry with it obstinate reaction and
a gross disregard of the rights of those who are not possessors of
land. It will not guarantee the landless man against exploitation in
the price of food in times of war and necessity. It offers singularly
little hope that "national ideals" will be spread in wide commonalty,
if the peasants can help it. "A. E." will urge, perhaps, that while
"national ideals are the possession of a few people only," they may
be spread in wide commonalty if the "few people" will make the effort
to spread them. The soil lies ready for the seed. But what is there
in human affairs to justify any man in assuming that the mass of men
are likely to be long-suffering in idealism? Is it not a fact of human
nature that even when the multitude has been stirred to some act of
exaltation, the staying power of the multitude has not been sufficient
to maintain the exalted mood long enough to render the reactionaries
hopeless? Where are the generous ideals of 1914 now? Has not the war
that was to end war made war seem more probable? Is not the world at
this moment suffering to the point of distraction because the multitude
cannot live up to its own ideals long enough to make them practical?
"The gods departed," says "A. E.", "the half-gods also, hero and
saint after that, and we [i. e. the Irish people] have dwindled down
to a petty peasant nationality, rural and urban life alike mean in
their externals." But he does not despair. "Yet the cavalcade, for
all its tattered habiliments, has not lost spiritual dignity." And he
hopes "the incorruptible atom" in us will make us great again. Divine
optimism, but what is there in peasant society to justify it?


VI

And here I make a wide digression to discourse on nationalism and
peasant states. The world conspires to believe that the spirit of
nationality is a desirable one, filling men with the purest ideals;
but we begin to realize now that the spirit of nationality, while
it has animated many noble men and brought them to a condition of
extraordinary selflessness, more often reduces a race to a state
of mean brutality and insufferable smugness. The self-satisfaction
of a Sinn Feiner is as sickening as the ruffianly behaviour of a
Black-and-Tan, and the outrages committed by the former are more
despicable than the outrages of the latter, because the Black-and-Tan
makes no pretences about himself, whereas the Sinn Feiner covers his
blackguardly behaviour with a cloak of virtuous nationalism and high
ideals. What is there to choose between the Sinn Feiners who seized
an old man of seventy and dragged him from a tram-car in Dublin and
murdered him in the presence of terrorized Irishmen (not one of whom
had the common pluck to risk his life in an effort to save him) and
the Black-and-Tans who dragged the Mayor of Limerick from his bed and
brutally murdered him? What is there to choose between the noble-minded
Sinn Feiners who took old Mrs. Lindsay, a woman of more than seventy
years, and shot her and her aged servant dead because she had done
what any spirited woman would do, warned soldiers who were on her
side, that they were walking into an ambush--what is there to choose
between them and the Orangemen who threw bombs into the midst of little
Catholic children playing games in Belfast? What is there to choose
between the Sinn Feiners who murdered four sick men (one of them dying
of pleurisy) in their beds in a Galway hospital and the Orangemen who
murdered the McMahon family in Belfast? Very little. If one side is
more condemnable than the other, it is those who, professing noble
motives, practice foul deeds. One may, perhaps, find excuses for the
evil acts of men whose minds are inflamed with patriotic emotions which
cannot be found for a civilized government committing similar deeds of
atrocity. Murder by the former may be less reprehensible than murder
by the latter, but the difference between them is too slight to be
worthy of consideration. Murder remains murder, whether it be done for
imperial or national purposes, and I confess to feeling more respect
for the plain Black-and-Tan, making no bones about his brutality and
his murders, than I do for the Sinn Feiner who commits crimes and
calls them acts of virtue. "A. E.'s" restless ploughman may pause and
turn and wonder, but is more likely to find himself, "deep beneath his
rustic habit" a Sinn Fein gunman than "a king." I do not know how "the
incorruptible atom" is to be developed in men who have made a virtue
of crime and covered up their infamies with hypocrisy; and "A. E."
amazingly omits to tell us how it is to be done.

We Irish people--and I am as Irish in my origins and emotions as any
man--suffer from the sin which afflicts all subject peoples: the sin
of self-pity; and I desire self-government for Ireland, not because
I believe that the Irish people can govern themselves better than
the English have governed them--I take leave to doubt that when I
remember the achievements of the Irish in America--but because I can
see no hope of the Irish people acquiring a sense of reality until
they have freed themselves from the complacency, the smugness, the
self-satisfaction, the self-pity which are inevitable in subject
peoples. When they have discovered the truth about themselves, they may
be able to govern themselves. And the truth about the Irish people,
whether they be Protestant or Catholic, from the North or the South,
is that they are a brutal, cruel, greedy, mean and treacherous people
who have humbugged the rest of the world into the belief that they are
a faithful, generous, high-minded, kindly, noble and tolerant race. We
have our virtues, but by our insufferable contentment with ourselves
we have made vices of them. Our literature, particularly our modern
literature, plainly reveals the truth about us. Synge, Padraic Colum,
Lennox Robinson, Daniel Corkery, James Joyce--all these have shown us
an Irish people completely false to the world's common belief about
them. I remember, when Mr. Robinson's bitter comedy, "The White-Headed
Boy," was first performed in London, being asked by an English dramatic
critic whether I recognized my countrymen in Mr. Robinson's characters.
I said "Yes," and he replied in accents of disgust, "But they're
_horrible_ people! There isn't one of them for whom any decent person
can feel sympathy!..." "Exactly," I said. And what our literature is
now revealing, our acts and history have long made clear. We are at
the culmination of centuries of oppression and cruel treatment. To
the natural treachery and brutality of the Celt must be added the
treachery and brutality which are provoked by misgovernment. The broad
fact about us is that we have been so accustomed, by nature and by
circumstances, to occasions of harsh and violent conduct that we find
nothing startling in them, provided we can give them a patriotic gloss.
Our satisfaction with ourselves is so intense that we imagine our
little efforts in literature to be greater than those of the rest of
the world. We prate incessantly about the ancient Gælic literature, but
are reluctant to produce the evidence for our boasting. We forget that
the Irishmen of distinction in literature, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde,
Shaw, Yeats, Moore and Synge, are not Celtic at all, but Anglo-Saxon
in origin.[3] All of them, with the exception of Mr. Moore, are
Protestant, and even Mr. Moore became a Protestant. "A. E." himself is
an Ulster Protestant with a Scotch name. The O's and the Macs, who are
reputed to be compounded of poetry and noble thoughts have furnished
the world with little but soldiers, cattle-drivers, Sinn Fein gunmen
and Tammany bosses. We have sponged upon the world, and the world is
utterly sick of us.

Our absorption in ourselves is so complete that we demand consideration
for our academic grievances which rightly belongs to the ruined races
of Europe. Ireland is the only country in the world which made a profit
out of the War, yet her behaviour during it was that of an hysterical
woman who should rush into the presence of a man bleeding to death and
exclaim, "My God, I've got toothache!" Millions of Russians are dying
of disease and hunger with less complaint than a Sinn Feiner makes
about his obsolete language which he cannot speak, will not write
and does not wish to learn. Millions of Austrians are without the
elementary decencies of life, but they do not whine over their ills as
Sinn Feiners whine over ills which they have not got. Snivelling and
whining, indeed, are the most obvious characteristics of the modern
Irishman, Catholic or Protestant, added to an impudent demand that his
affairs shall be treated as of greater consequence than those of the
rest of mankind.

To crown all, we are allowing ourselves to be dominated by peasant
ideals: the little narrow demands of men who care only for their own
interests and not at all for their neighbours'. We have seen how the
curse of nationality together with the curse of peasant principles
have helped to ruin Europe. When we are asked to believe in "the
incorruptible atom" of the peasant, we look to the Balkan States and
see a foulness which spread a plague across a continent. When we are
told of "the spiritual dignity" of the peasant community, we look to
France and see a nation so corrupted with peasant greed and peasant
fright that the Peace Treaty threatens to be a more potent force
for war and bloodshed than all the Kaisers that have ever lived put
together. And when we are told that the patriotic peasant "deep beneath
his rustic habit finds himself a king" we look to Ireland and see young
men, masked and armed, seizing old, unarmed men and old, unarmed women
and sick and dying men and little children, and brutally murdering
them. These be your Gods, O Israel. These be your high-minded patriots,
your selfless peasants, your noble army of idealists!

If we are to govern ourselves, we can only hope to do so manfully
if we begin by humiliating ourselves before God and man. We have
made claims on the world's regard which we are not entitled to make
and cannot maintain. If "the incorruptible atom" is in our national
being at all--if we are not a foul and cantankerous race destined by
Almighty God to perish utterly from the earth because we are unfit to
survive--then for each of us the principal purpose of life must be a
prolonged process of purification. We have sinned, we have sinned, we
have sinned, but we have not repented. We have pretended that our sin
was a virtue and have demanded admission to the society of our betters
on the plea that we are their equals, if not their superiors, when in
fact we are not fit to be in their company at all; and our task now
and for a long time must be the bitter one of acknowledging the truth
to ourselves and striving to justify our boasting to other men. We
have to rid ourselves of vain-glory and self-pity, of cant and humbug,
of cruelty and hatred, of backbiting and slander, of false pride, of
whining and snivelling, of corrupt living and a mean religion. There
are evil things in our nature and more evil things in our circumstances
which we must somehow subdue if we are to come to equality with the
civilized races of the world, but they will not be subdued until we
have learned to acknowledge facts and have discovered that hatred is
a device of the devil whereby men are destroyed and the world is made
a wilderness. We can neither live nor let live until we have filled
our hearts with love and charity. Nor will there be any hope in our
lives until we have abandoned the mean divisions which keep the North
Irishman in bitter enmity with the South Irishman. These two are
necessary to each other, the first for his stability and judgment and
governing ability, the second for his vision and faith and docility.
There are millions of Irishmen or men of Irish origin in the United
States, yet no Irish Catholic or man of Irish Catholic origin has
risen to Presidency of his country. Three men of Ulster Protestant
origin have done this. The Irish Catholic has given corrupt politics
to America. He has not given anything else. The Ulster people, the
only compact people in Ireland, whose blood has hardly been mingled
with other blood in three centuries and more--there is not a drop of
English blood in my veins, a claim which cannot easily be maintained
by Irishmen south of the Boyne--contemplate the scene in Ireland now
with misgiving and astonishment. They, whatever their faults, chose
an Irishman for their leader, but the Sinn Feiners could not throw
up from among themselves a man to lead them. They chose, first, an
Englishman, called Padraic Pearse. They chose second, an American Jew,
called De Valera, whose principal adviser is an Englishman, called
Erskine Childers, whose domestic urge is his American wife, infatuated
with the thought that she is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc. And the
Ulstermen, free from dialectical intricacies, listen to the tortured,
worn-out sentiments uttered by Mr. De Valera, not in fear, but in
contempt. That long, lean Jew, trained by Jesuits, possessed in double
measure of the narrow, uninspired idealism of his race and furnished
with the casuistical devotion of his teachers, is an honest man, with
cold, humourless, fanatical eyes, whose unreceptive mind guards itself
against knowledge by barriers of bigotry, hatred, obstinacy, disbelief
and self-deception. He has the dishonesty that is sometimes found in
a very honest man, the dishonesty one might expect to find in a man
trained in a Jesuit school: for there are few acts of unscrupulousness
that he will not commit to achieve the end he devoutly desires. When
he was asked on one occasion what his attitude would be to the Ulster
people if they refused to give allegiance to an Irish Republic, he
replied that he would blast Ulster from his path, unaware seemingly
that blasting is a bad business in which more than one party can
participate. I put the question to him myself in the Commodore Hotel
in New York at a meeting of the League of Free Nations; and his reply
was that he would present the Ulster people with these alternatives:
they might remain in Ireland under the Republic or they might go out
of Ireland altogether with compensation for their property. It did
not occur to Mr. De Valera that of these alternatives, Ulstermen would
choose neither. How far he had considered the question of finance
involved in schemes of compensation, I do not know, although I suspect
his mind to be innocent of much financial knowledge; but I wonder how
he would raise the money with which to compensate a single firm in
Belfast, that of Harland and Wolff, the shipbuilders, if they elected
to build their ships in Southampton; and I wonder still more how he
would raise the men and the money to carry on those works after Harland
and Wolff had taken themselves away! But such suppositions are idle,
for Ulstermen will not let themselves be disturbed in their homes by
one who is not their countryman. The story of my family in Ulster is
typical of the story of hundreds and thousands of families there.
All my forefathers, on my mother's side and my father's side, for
three hundred years of which we have record and for a longer period
of which we have incomplete records, were born and bred and buried in
the County of Down, with the exception of my maternal grandfather who,
although born and bred in Down, died and was buried in America. And
we, so indigenous to the soil as that, are bidden to acknowledge Mr.
De Valera for our President or clear out of our homes, although Mr.
De Valera is an American citizen, born in New York, whose first act,
if he were President of the Irish Republic, would have to be one of
naturalization! We will see Mr. De Valera damned first. This strange
intruder into Irish politics has brought in his trail a terrible
procession of young men trained to take life lightly, to listen to no
argument but that of the revolver; and the end of that procession is
out of sight. It is more easy to train men to take life than it is to
train them to preserve it. We cannot say to a man, "Thus far shalt thou
kill, but no further!" and those whom we have taught to commit crime
in the name of patriotism, may continue to commit crime for personal
profit. "And so, to the end of history," as Cæsar says in Mr. Shaw's
play "murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honour
and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can
understand."


VII

Sometimes I say to myself that "A. E." has lived too long and
too exclusively in Ireland. He is not free from the mush of
sentimentality with which Irishmen regard themselves, this everlasting
self-congratulation that Irishmen are not as Englishmen, this smug
preoccupation with their own virtues and bland disregard of their
vices, this eternal denial that they have any demerits. If the Irish
people are to recover the dignity and the stature of the gods, they
must display god-like qualities or prove that they possess them. It
is not sufficient to assert that they possess these qualities, at the
same time denying them by nagging continually at their neighbours. I
have wished at times that "A. E." could be removed from the atmosphere
of adulation which envelopes him in Dublin, and sent, without letters
of introduction, on a tour round the world. He has probably travelled
less than any other educated man in Ireland. He passes from his
home in Rathmines, a suburb of Dublin, to the office of the _Irish
Homestead_ in Merrion Square, from one centre of adulation to another,
with occasional visits to the home of James Stephens, where he meets
the same people that visit him on Sunday nights, or to the Hermetic
Society, where he meets them again. He is too fine a spirit to be
seriously affected by the paltry gabble of the third-rate minds he
encounters on most occasions in Dublin, and perhaps it hardly matters
that he seldom leaves Dublin and hardly ever leaves Ireland; but even
so rare a man as "A. E." must suffer contraction within the narrow
limits of Dublin. He has resources that few men possess: a quiet mind,
a vivid faith and the love and respect of very dissimilar people. He
can turn from the consideration of agricultural prices in the _Irish
Homestead_ to the esoteric alphabet with which he speaks to the Gods,
or he can go off to the mountains of Donegal and make pictures. When
painting no longer delights him, he can spend his nights and days in
making poems. He is extravagantly generous to young writers, giving
greater praise to them sometimes than they deserve, giving less of
criticism than is necessary. There are minor poets in Dublin, authors
of thin books of thin verse, who have persuaded themselves, because of
"A. E's." praise, that they are more meritable than they are. There
are people in Dublin who seem to believe that Ireland has produced a
greater literature than England and will denounce you as a traitor to
your country if you protest that she cannot show poets of the stature
of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning
and Tennyson, with the exception of Mr. Yeats. I am the sort of patriot
who would like to see his country raise herself to the level of other
countries, but I am not the sort of patriot who will pretend that she
is on the level of England and France and Germany when, in fact, she
is far below it. "A. E." is not entirely free from blame for this. He
could have given Ireland a sense of proportion, had he cared to do so.


VIII

I have a picture by "A. E." of an ascending road on the side of
a mountain. There is rain in the air, and the road has a lonely,
unfrequented look. Yet, though there is no living creature visible in
the picture, Life fills it. I feel sometimes when I sit back in my
chair and look at "The Mountain Road" that there are divine beings
behind the bushes, that if I could only climb up that road and turn
the corner of the mountain, I should come upon the Golden Age. Is it
not ungracious to make complaint, even if the complaint be a slight
one, of a man who can make the invisible world so powerfully felt as
that? And if he persuades me, by nature sceptical, almost to believe
in the Shining Ones, how much more strong must his influence be on
those who are eager to believe! When the evil temper which possesses
Ireland at this moment has subsided, the fine temper of "A. E." will
rise again and call Irishmen to a kindlier mood. The little town of
Lurgan, in which he was born, is notorious in Ulster for the harshness
of its religious dissensions. A base bigotry flourishes there. It is in
the nature of things that from a place of great bitterness should have
come a man of reconciliation, bidding Catholic and Protestant to meet,
not in Geneva or in Rome, but on the holy hills of Ireland, under the
protection of the ancient gods.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr. Darrell Figgis, in his book on "A. E.", explains the pen-name
thus: "Wanting at one time a new pen-name, he subscribed himself as
Aeon. His penmanship not at all times being of the legiblest, the
printer deciphered the first diphthong and set a query for the rest;
whereupon the writer, in his proof-sheets, stroked out the query and
stood by the diphthong." Since then, however, Mr. Russell has abandoned
the diphthong and prints his pen name as two separate letters.

[2] I leave that passage unmodified, despite the fact that the
Black-and-Tans in the course of their fight with the Sinn Feiners
(equally disgraceful to both of them) burnt down many of the
creameries. They will be built again. Mr. Lloyd George jeered at Sir
Horace Plunkett soon after the Black-and-Tans had performed most of
their infamous work, but any decent person would infinitely prefer to
be Sir Horace with his burnt creameries than Mr. Lloyd George with his
burnt principles.

[3] Parnell, the greatest political leader the Irish Catholics have
ever had, was a Protestant of Anglo-Saxon origin. Like Synge, he
belonged to a family which came to Ireland originally from Cheshire in
the North of England.




ARNOLD BENNETT


I

One night, some years before the outbreak of the European War, I
arrived in the town of Hanley in the County of Stafford in the midlands
of England to deliver a lecture on some subject, the name of which
I do not now remember, although I suspect it was connected with the
general improvement of mankind. I had accepted the invitation to
lecture in Hanley, not because I had anything of importance to say to
its inhabitants, but because I had lately read "The Old Wives' Tale"
by Mr. Arnold Bennett, and was eager to see the place and the people
from which that great book had sprung. My recollections of the visit
are very vague now, but I remember that my host, a man of serious mind,
a little over-weighted, perhaps, by the troubles of the universe, took
me for a walk on Sunday morning through some of "the Five Towns," in
the course of which he displayed much knowledge of the topography of
Mr. Bennett's books without displaying much knowledge of the books
themselves. He informed me that the real name of "Trafalgar Road" in
"The Old Wives' Tale" is "Waterloo Road" and that the fictitious name
of Hanley is "Hanbridge." He speculated incuriously on the oddness
which had caused Mr. Bennett to alter real names in this palpable
manner, and ended his discourse with the statement that he seldom read
novels (which he persisted in calling "Works of Fiction") being more
inclined to the study of serious books. I learned that he read chiefly
in the writings of sociologists and political economists and similar
serious persons. I suggested to him that he might more profitably read
novels than sociological books if he wished to discover something
about human character. He was a polite and kindly man, and he did not
abruptly tell me of my folly, but I could see that he considered me to
be a fool or, at best, a flippant person, and I am sure that had he
not been my host he would not have troubled to attend my lecture that
evening. He smiled in the benign way men have when they abstain from
expressing their frank opinion, as he listened to me saying that he
would find in novels a greater fund of information about human nature
than he could hope to find in all the works that all the sociologists
in the world have written. Men of affairs, I said, spend their lives
in writing ponderous volumes on society which are out-of-date as
soon as they are published, whereas the novel or the play of a man
of genius remains true for ever. Henry Fielding and Adam Smith were
contemporaries, but I imagine few will deny that there is more durable
stuff, stuff more continuously applicable to human concerns, in "Tom
Jones" than there is in "The Wealth of Nations." But my friend would
have none of this, and seemed to think that any man who spent time in
reading Fielding's novel which might be spent in reading Adam Smith
was shamefully misusing his mind. He led me, I remember, through much
of the territory which is generically known as "the Five Towns." I saw
the Square in which the Baineses lived, and was told that although Mr.
Bennett called it "St. Luke's Square" in "The Old Wives' Tale," the
local authorities preferred to call it after St. John. So great was the
influence of the novel upon me that when I peered through the window
of the shop in which, so I was told, Constance and Sophia Baines were
born, I almost expected to see the half-heroic figure of Samuel Povey
behind the counter or to meet the cold, un-human glance of that frozen
spinster, Miss Marie Insull, who once, and once only, displayed signs
of human emotion--on the occasion when Mr. Critchlow brought her into
the presence of the widowed Constance to announce his betrothal to her:


     The dog had leisurely strolled forward to inspect the edges of the
     fiancé's trousers. Miss Insull summoned the animal with a noise of
     the fingers, and then bent down and caressed it. A strange gesture
     proving the validity of Charles Critchlow's discovery that in
     Maria Insull a human being was buried.


My host led me up stony streets, in which every sort of domestic
architecture was visible--for "the Five Towns" are so independent
that even in the workmen's houses there is no uniformity of style or
harmony of design, a fact which makes, not for a pleasing diversity,
but for shapelessness and incoherence--and pointed to places in the
ground where, so he said, the earth had opened, owing to underground
operations, and swallowed whosoever should happen to be passing over
it. There was a story of a man who had set forth in the morning to go
to his work, but, before he had travelled many yards from his home,
was suddenly consumed by the opening earth and was never seen again. I
will admit that I trod those streets thereafter with trepidation and
considerable care! I had begun to tire of the ugly houses with their
insufferable architecture, and of the grime caused by innumerable
chimneys emitting thick, black smoke, when I was led up a steep street
at the top of which I was told to halt and gaze about me. I saw the
whole of "the Five Towns" and much of the surrounding country spread
out like the kingdoms of the world and realized how strangely moving
such a scene can be because of its suggestion of human presences.
It was not without beauty, in spite of the gloom of an industrial
area, but it impressed me most by its air of effort and power and
achievement. I became conscious of the activities of men and women, of
great labours, of confused strivings out of which some human need is
satisfied, and I came away, as I always come away from such sights,
immensely impressed by human organization and very satisfied with great
machines. When we had descended from that high street and had walked
elsewhere, I found myself suddenly confronting a railway station on
which I saw the romantic name of ETRURIA.


II

Etruria, the country of the Etruscans in Italy, was, I suppose, a very
different place from Etruria, the small town between Hanley and Burslem
("Hanbridge" and "Bursley") where Josiah Wedgwood founded his pottery
in the eighteenth century, but the spirit which produced the Etruscan
ceramics was not dissimilar from the spirit which produces the famous
Wedgwood ware; and I thought to myself as I looked at the romantic name
of that grimy-looking town in Staffordshire that I had stumbled on the
secret of Mr. Bennett. Underneath the plain appearance of the pottery
town, there is a spirit which has persisted in the production of
beautiful things for the best part of two centuries, a spirit so much
in love with delicate ware that it calls an unsightly town by the name
of an ancient and reputedly beautiful one; and underneath the hard and
fact-ridden style of Mr. Bennett there is an ineradicable desire for
romance. I said of him once that he fights the battles of the romantic
with the weapons of the realist, and that description seems to me to be
strictly accurate. Mr. Bennett mingles, even in his Christian names,
the gritty and the graceful in a way that is singularly characteristic
of the people of his district. "Enoch Arnold Bennett" is a combination
of names not easily imagined, but it is not more unusual than the
combination of Etruria and Staffordshire, of lovely ceramics and "the
Five Towns." Mr. Bennett has many times been charged with addiction
to dusty realism, a dull love of facts. His critics say of him, after
reading such a book as "Your United States," that he must have spent
his time on the liner in which he went to America in counting the
rivets in her plates for the sheer love of counting them, and they
conclude that he is a materialist because of his interest in numbers
and in things. They even complain of him that he is infatuated with
largeness, just as Queen Victoria was, and that he imagines a thing
to be good when it is merely big. This is undiscerning criticism.
It is as if a child were charged with being a disciple of Haeckel
because it thinks that ten things are more wonderful than one thing.
We may think that Mr. Bennett is a fact-ridden modern, incapable of
romance, because he inordinately admires electricity, but to do so is
to announce ourselves as dunderheads for not discovering that his love
of electricity is the Romantic's love of the Magic Lamp! How easily
most of us are dissuaded from our faith in romantic things! We are
in ecstasies when we hear of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the
fishes and the birds and addressing them as little brothers, but we
are horribly shocked and humiliated when Mr. Bernard Shaw makes the
mad priest in "John Bull's Other Island" speak of a pig as our little
brother! There is prettiness in the community of men and birds, even
of men and the smaller fish, but pigs--PORK!! We find romance in the
spectacle of a man rubbing a dirty lantern with his fingers in order
to summon up a serving genie, but cannot perceive the greater romance
found by Mr. Bennett in the spectacle of a man pressing a switch and
illuminating a room with power drawn by wires from a station many
miles away! We are enchanted with the thought of transport on Magic
Carpets, but unmoved by the thought that presently great ships will be
guided into New York Harbour, not by pilots, but by means of wireless
telegraphy! Some dullards have exclaimed despairingly of Mr. Bennett
because of what they called his trivial and commonplace interests as
revealed in that enthralling book, "Things That Have Interested Me,"
failing utterly to discern that it is his interest in these things
which is so infallible a sign of his zest for life. Any one can be
interested in the Rocky Mountains, but it is only a superbly romantic
man who can be absorbed in Tarrytown. There is not anything in the
round world, made by God or by man, which does not interest Mr.
Bennett. Familiarity breeds contempt in most of us, but it does not
breed contempt in him. _He never gets used to things._ Most of us are
too dull of mind, too destitute of imagination to feel interest or
astonishment unless we are abruptly confronted with the unusual or the
violent, and our capacity for romantic enjoyment is limited and soon
exhausted. We would exclaim with astonishment on beholding an eruption
of Mount Vesuvius for the first time, but we would exclaim rather less
on perceiving the ninety-ninth eruption. Mr. Bennett would experience
as much excitement on the ninety-ninth occasion as he would on the
first. Nothing less than an earthquake is necessary to stir some of
us, but Mr. Bennett can be stirred by the sight of a taxicab. The
genesis of "The Old Wives' Tale," as described in the preface to one of
the later editions, is a clear illustration of his romantic possession:


     In the autumn of 1903 [he writes], I used to dine frequently in a
     restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others,
     two waitresses that attracted my attention. One was a beautiful,
     pale young girl, to whom I never spoke, for she was employed far
     away from the table I affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged,
     managing Breton woman, had sole command over my table and me, and
     gradually she began to assume such a maternal tone towards me
     that I saw I should be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I
     was absent for a couple of nights running she would reproach me
     sharply: "What! you are unfaithful to me?" Once when I complained
     about some French beans, she informed me roundly that "French
     beans were a subject which I did not understand...."


I break the quotation here to exclaim at the obtuseness of that Breton
woman who, in the course of her management of Mr. Bennett, failed
to discover that he loves to regard himself as an authority on such
matters as French beans. There is a kind of romantic pride which makes
some men believe that they know the one place in a city where the best
brand of a particular article is to be purchased. Mr. Bennett has that
pride. The heaviness of the Breton's blow to it can be imagined after
reading the next sentence in the passage from which I am making the
quotation:


     I then decided to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I abandoned
     the restaurant. A few nights before the final parting an old
     woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless,
     ugly and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice and ridiculous
     gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in
     the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity
     which induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was burdened with
     a lot of small parcels which she kept dropping. She chose one
     seat; and then, not liking it, chose another; and then another.
     In a few moments she had the whole restaurant laughing at her.
     That my middle-aged Breton should laugh was indifferent to me,
     but I was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling on the pale
     face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I had never spoken.
     I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: This woman was
     once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these
     ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her
     singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to
     make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as
     she. Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque--far from it!--but
     there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout,
     ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth
     in her form and movements and in her mind. And the fact that the
     change from the young girl to the stout, ageing woman is made up
     of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unperceived
     by her, only intensifies the pathos. It was at that instant that
     I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately
     became "The Old Wives' Tale." ...


III

In that passage there is revealed much, I think, of Mr. Bennett's
character and spirit. He dislikes the sensation of being managed
because he likes the sensation of managing. The Breton woman could have
won him to faithful service for ever if she had deferred to him in the
matter of French beans, and who knows what tricks of duplicity she
could have played upon him had she stooped to guile? But she wounded
him in his pride when she bluntly told him that her judgment on beans
was sounder than his, and thus lost the custom of the most interesting
of her diners. The first fact, therefore, that one discovers in this
passage is that Mr. Bennett has a profound respect for his own opinion:
he feels pretty sure of himself. This may be considered to be a sign
of conceit, but that consideration is not necessarily true. It could
only be a sign of conceit if Mr. Bennett's respect for his own opinion
were misplaced, and there is nothing in his record to show that it is
misplaced. There is, on the contrary, much to show that it is placed
with the utmost propriety. He has done many of the things which he said
he would do, and has done them exceedingly well. If all of us could
have faith in ourselves with as much justification as Mr. Bennett has
faith in himself, we would do well to practice our faith with fervour.
The second fact about Mr. Bennett which is revealed by this passage is
the romantic nature of him, but before I discuss it, I wish to point
out a third and minor fact which is something of a flaw in him, not
an important flaw, but one which must be remembered by his admirers.
It is his occasional tendency to let his romanticism degenerate into
sentimentality. Observe how he seems to have romanced about the pale
and beautiful waitress to whom he never spoke, how he assumes that
because she is beautiful she must also be generous and sympathetic and
kindly, with what dismay he discovers that, just as a man can smile
and smile and be a villain, so a woman can be pale and beautiful, and
yet be as cruel or lacking in perception as the ruddiest and least
lovely of her sex. He declares, indeed, that he quitted the restaurant
in the Rue de Clichy because of the insolence of the Breton woman who
disputed his authority on beans, but may he not be deceiving himself,
may he not in fact have quitted that place because his illusion
about the beautiful, pale young waitress was shattered by her coarse
grimaces, her unkindly giggles? After all, it is easy enough to live
with those who will not accept our estimate of ourselves, but how hard
it is to live with lost beliefs. One of the most painful things about
shell-shock cases resulting in mental derangement is that the patient
seems to loathe most those whom he formerly loved most, and here in
England many of us know of pitiful women who dare not go to see their
unbalanced husbands because the mere sight of them throws the unhappy
men into paroxysms of rage and anguish!...

But it is when we come to consider Mr. Bennett's attitude towards
the foolish old woman who changed her seat and dropped her parcels so
often in the restaurant in the Rue de Clichy that we discover his chief
characteristic. If he were the fact-ridden realist that some of his
critics pronounce him to be, he could not possibly have perceived in
that old woman, "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque," the lineaments
of a girl, "young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these
ridiculous mannerisms." A fact-ridden realist might not have joined in
the laughter of the Breton woman and the giggling pale waitress, but he
would have judged the old woman with harsh contempt, more intolerable
even than mocking laughter, and he would have turned away from her in
irritation and disgust because of her inefficiency, her clumsiness,
her indecision, her displeasing exterior. At best, he would have seen
her solely as a fat, ugly and grotesque person who had always been
incompetent, fat, ugly and grotesque. But Mr. Bennett, incorrigibly
romantic, regarding her closely and with kindliness, insists that
beneath the bulk of her body there is a soul, that the too, too solid
flesh once wore "the feature of blown youth," even as Ophelia found
it in Hamlet! She may not be beautiful now, he tells himself, but how
beautiful may she not once have been. That is the spirit of romance.
It is a certain sign of the romantic in a man that he will not permit
himself to be bluffed by appearances when appearances are bad, although
he may often be bluffed by them when they are good. Mr. Bennett was
not deceived by the old woman's looks, but he was terribly deceived by
the looks of the pale, young waitress, and it is true of him, I think,
that he is very easily deceived by youth, to which he is uncommonly
generous. Observe how he shows his willingness to be deceived by youth
in the passage which I have quoted. He tells himself that the old woman
was once "young, slim, perhaps beautiful," which is likely enough,
but he goes on, not romantically, but sentimentally, to add, that she
was "certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms." Now, there is
no warrant in human experience for such an assumption. I am prepared
to believe that an old woman, "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque"
was once "slim, perhaps beautiful," but I am not prepared to believe
that an indecisive, footling old woman was, in her girlhood, any other
than indecisive and footling. We do not change our natures to that
extent as we grow older unless we lose our wits or suffer gravely in
health, and the tragedy of old age is that habits and mannerisms which
are charming and attractive in youth are merely silly and annoying in
age. We are amused by the violent opinions of a clever young man of
twenty, inclined even to applaud him for holding them because they are
significant of an active and developing mind, but they are less amusing
to us and win less applause if they are still being expressed by him
when he is thirty. We cease altogether to applaud or be amused when we
hear him still at them when he is forty. We no longer describe him as
a clever young man, but a damned fool. No one has any right to be a
clever young man all his life. The law should forbid any one to be a
clever young man after the age of twenty-seven. The world is entitled
to demand that its clever young men shall grow up and achieve some sort
of sanity and right judgment by the age of thirty, and if they refuse
to grow up, then they are not free to complain if the world revises
its judgment on them and inexorably thrusts them from its regard. Mr.
Bennett's old woman dropped her parcels and changed her seat just as
frequently in her youth as she did on that evening when he saw her
in the Rue de Clichy, but she was young and perhaps pretty then, and
people forgave her for her footling ways because of her youthfulness
and in the hope that someday she would acquire steadiness of character
and control over her packages. I think I can give a fairly accurate
description of that old woman when she was a girl. She was always late
for everything, but her demure ways and a sort of foal-like clumsiness
about her made men willing to wait and be gracious about it. She always
remembered at the last moment nineteen different things which she had
forgotten to do, which must immediately be done, which inevitably
caused greater delay. She could never find her railway ticket when the
inspector came round to examine it and frequently held up trains while
every one in her carriage hunted high and low for it. She persistently
dropped her gloves, her handkerchief and her vanity-bag or left them
behind her wherever she went. She never went out of doors without
losing something. She never had any small change, and invariably
tendered a ten-dollar bill, when buying a ten-cent newspaper, in the
fond belief that the clerk at the news stand or even the boy in the
street was certain to have plenty of change and be all too eager to
oblige her. She always got on to the wrong train or trolley-car and did
not discover her mistake until too late to dismount from it!... But
she succeeded in putting over that sort of fatuous behaviour on the
strength of her youth and prettiness; and men, who would go raving mad
if they had to live with a middle-aged or elderly woman of such habits,
readily excused her imbecilities because they were those of youth.

I wondered often, when I was in America, why I saw so many old or
middle-aged husbands with girl-wives. People told me that the cost of
living is so high in America that young men cannot afford to marry
young girls, but must either marry older and richer women or refrain
from marriage until they are middle-aged. Young women, so I was told,
must marry the elderly and the bald, the slack and the flabby because,
otherwise, they cannot hope for a good time until they are no longer
of an age to enjoy it. I do not much esteem young women who refuse
the great adventure of marriage with young, poor men in order that
they may have a good time with unenthusiastic, tamed and middle-aged
men, especially when I remember that a good time in such circumstances
means only a fatly comfortable one, being well-fed, well-housed and
well-clothed without ever having had the fun of fighting for such
comforts. But I am not entirely convinced by the arguments which were
put to me in explanation of this singular and unnatural conjunction
of the young and the middle-aged. There may be truth in the statement
that American girls marry elderly men for the comfort they receive,
but I doubt whether the elderly men marry for that reason. I am very
certain that such marriages are made because the men are romantic and
will not believe that the young girl's "charming ways" will not be
retained by her when she is no longer young. The plain and undeniable
fact is that elderly men marry girls because they cannot believe that
a girl who has foolish habits will not cease to have them when she is
older. The romantic is a man who is everlastingly hoping for the best,
everlastingly striving to obtain the best. A romantic realist is a man
who, while striving for the best, knows that he may only obtain the
worst. The sentimentalist is a man who removes himself from the region
of reality and refuses to admit that there is a worst, who insists
that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Mr.
Arnold Bennett is a romantic realist, with a slight tendency towards
sentimentalism.


IV

His romantic realism seems to plunge desperately into sentimentalism
when he contemplates very old age and death. Dr. Johnson had a strange
horror of death, "so much so, Sir," as he said to Boswell, "that the
whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it." But he achieved
quietness of mind when his end came and his last recorded words were
of a benignant character. "God bless you, my dear!" he said to Miss
Morris, forbidden by his faithful negro servant, Francis, to come
nearer to his bed than the outer room. Mr. Bennett seldom, if ever,
permits his very old people to die placidly. Their disappointments
press hardly upon them, if they are not prevented from remembering them
by senility or gross disease. Paralysis claims many of them. Age does
not beautify them nor bring peace to them, nor do they face their
end with undiminished heads. He is remarkably consistent in this view
of old age and death, and perhaps it is natural that he should regard
it so gloomily when one remembers how completely he is enthralled by
youth. But his view is an unbalanced one.

Old age is not always graceless and crabbed and unlovely. Such an
old man as Mr. Thomas Hardy has a grace and quietness and courage
discoverable only in those who have endured many things but have not
been conquered by them. Mr. Bennett, however, looks upon age as a
calamity which must, indeed, happen to all of us, if we live long
enough, but cannot possibly be mitigated.

He is able to detect the "young, slim, perhaps beautiful" girl in
the "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque" old woman, but he cannot so
easily detect the gracious old man or woman in the boy and girl. I
am oppressed sometimes by the thought that if Mr. Bennett had seen
the "young, slim, perhaps beautiful" girl, his romantic nature would
have let him down, yielding place to his cynicism, and he would have
detected the coming wrinkles on her brow, would have seen that her eyes
would grow dull, might even have pointed out her tendency to obesity.
"Of course, I should!" Mr. Bennett may retort, "for I am a realist as
well as a romantic, and in this case, I should have been right!" And
so he would, but the trouble is that, while Mr. Bennett romantically
and rightly sees the slim, perhaps beautiful girl in the fat old woman,
he always realistically and wrongly sees the fat old woman in the slim
young girl! I think that the spirit of "the Five Towns" is entirely
responsible for the fact that Mr. Bennett never sees beauty in age. It
is a harsh, acquisitive spirit, busy principally in the accumulation
of material things (despite the fact that it produces lovely pottery)
and inclined to measure a man's worth by the amount of his fortune. The
leisurely and gracious things of life are not the immediate or even the
ultimate concerns of life in "the Potteries," and old age is likely, in
such places, to be harsh and acquisitive. When men and women, who have
spent their activities entirely in money-making, reach the age at which
they possess much money but are no longer able to employ themselves in
its acquisition, they become crabbed, unlovely, mean, for they have
no resources. You cannot derive pleasure from literature or music or
painting or any other art when you bring to its consideration only the
fag-end of your life. One has seen men who were notorious among their
neighbours for their hard work--always engaged in their employment from
early morning until late night--seldom, if ever, resting or taking
holiday. One has seen these men, after they have retired from business,
so helpless without their work to occupy their minds that they steadily
declined into a condition of misery which brought about premature
death! They lived for one thing, and when that thing was no longer
available for them, they perished because they had no other resources
and it was too late to acquire any! Mr. Bennett must have seen such
men many times during his early years in "the Five Towns" and the
pitiful spectacle so impressed his mind that old age has become to him
a terrifying thing, a complete debâcle of the brain and energies. This
life, this youth, is so wonderful, so full of romantic possibilities,
that age and death seem to him merely obscene interruptions of an
enthralling spectacle.


V

Once only, so far as I can discover, did he make a poem. It was
published in _The English Review_ in the brave days when that magazine
was edited by Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, and since it is singularly
characteristic, as a poem ought to be, of its author's outlook on life,
I quote it here in full. But first I must affirm my belief that _The
English Review_, under the editorship of Mr. Hueffer, was the greatest
magazine that this world has ever known. That is a tremendous title
to claim for any magazine, but I doubt whether any one, familiar with
great magazines, will seriously dispute it. The title of Mr. Bennett's
poem is "Town and Country." Here it is:


     God made the country, and man made the town.
     And so--man made the doctor, God the clown;
     God made the mountain, and the ants their hill,
     Where grinding servitudes each day fulfil.
     God doubtless made the flowers, while in the hive
     Unnatural bees against their passions strive.
     God made the jackass and the bounding flea;
     I render thanks to God that man made me.
     Let those who recognize God's shaping power
     Here but not there, in tree but not in tower,
     In lane and field, but not in street and square,
     And in man's work see nothing that is fair--
     Bestir their feeble fancy to the old
     Conception of a "country" made by God;
     Where birds perceive the wickedness of strife
     Against the winds, and lead the simple life
     Nestless on God's own twigs; and squirrels, free
     From carking care, exist through February
     On nuts that God has stored. Let them agree
     To leave the fields to God for just a year,
     And then of God's own harvest make good cheer.


If one were a sentimentalist, one could describe that poem as a sign
of a blankly materialistic mind, with a turn for blasphemy, but if one
is what one ought to be, a romantic with a sense of reality, it will
appear to be a confession of faith in God _and_ man.


VI

Mr. Bennett, of all the men of letters with whom I am acquainted,
not even excluding Mr. Shaw, is the most generous and kindly to
young people. Mr. Wells likes young people, but his interest in them
is curiously impersonal. He likes youth in a lump, so to speak,
rather than youth in the individual, just as he seems to love mankind
more than he likes any man. But Mr. Bennett likes _you_, the youth,
personally. He is happier on the whole with young people than he is
with their elders, and he assiduously seeks their society. He is amused
by their extravagances, but not to the extent of sneering at them. He
likes youth to be dandiacal, to have an air, to be arrogant, but not
to be ill-bred or pretentious or third-rate. In spite of his notable
kindness, he can be merciless to humbugs, and stories are told of
devastating things said by him to presumptuous persons and fools. The
blunt speech of "the Five Towns" is native to his tongue, and he passes
judgment without mincing his words. He has a dry sort of wit which is
remarkably helped by a slight hesitation in his speech, and his general
conversation, without being markedly distinguished, is entertaining
and agreeable in a way that is very elusive when put upon paper. It is
natural, perhaps, that a man who loves youth so much as he does should
have a more potent sense of the present and of the future than
of the past, and this accounts for the fact that his books and
pictures are chiefly modern. I imagine that he has a greater number of
books and pictures by young authors and painters than any other man of
his calibre in England. He loves music, but is not "highbrow" about
it, and he has a passion for dancing which threatens now to keep him
jigging through ballrooms for the rest of his life. He paints quite
charming water-colour pictures, and is so fond of the sea that the
surest way in which any one can lose his friendship is to accompany him
for a trip on his yacht and be sea-sick during it! He is a keen man of
business, and he is full of contempt for the rather sloppy-minded man
of letters who allows himself to be worsted in a bargain. Most men of
quality are lonely men, oddly isolated in spirit, and Mr. Bennett is
not an exception to the rule, but more than his compeers, I think, he
is a companionable person in a small group, chiefly because of that
romantic interest he has in all things, animate and inanimate. He has a
wider knowledge of books than most men of letters. Most men of letters,
indeed, are remarkably ignorant of books. And he has the courage, the
supreme courage, to do what no other literary man I have ever met has
the courage to do: he keeps a gramophone. He likes the savor of life,
and life for him includes the pictures of Corot and the gramophone
and French poetry and the novels of George Moore and newspapers and
motor-cars and Balzac and Bernard Shaw and the right brand of French
beans. How can such a man help being romantic!




G. K. CHESTERTON


I

There is a legend, much beholden to Shakespeare, that learning and
leanness are akin to each other, while dull wits flourish in company
with obesity. The curious submission sometimes made by Shakespeare
to common prejudices and ignorance, glorified by the name of legend,
caused him too often to forget the obligation of the aristocrat to
think for himself, and remember only to think with the mob; and the
singular fact about this forgetfulness of his is that when he chose
to think with the mob, he nearly always did so when the mob was in
the wrong. He preferred the judgment of the street to the judgment of
informed minds when he wrote "Richard the Third," and allowed himself
to malign that excellent and most capable prince and monarch. Richard
was one of the ablest of the kings of England, but Shakespeare,
forgetting his obligations to his own genius, portrays him as a
pervert with a mania for blood. He yields to the common view in his
references to fat men. Falstaff is fat and flighty and a coward, a
drunkard, a braggart and a misleader of young princes, although the
prototype of Sir John was himself a man of known courage. Cassius was
deemed to think too much because he had a lean and hungry look. Julius
Cæsar desired the society of fat men who, presumably, indulged but
seldom in thought and never in any that could be called dangerous. Fat
men are endowed with but one tolerable virtue: that of good nature; and
if any fat men ever enters heaven, it will be because of his equable
temper and in spite of his corpulence.

Mr. Chesterton is a fat man. There is a rumour in England that many
Americans felt they had been defrauded of their money when they went to
hear him lecture lately because he was hardly so fat as they had been
led to believe! He certainly is not so bulky now, because of a serious
illness, as he was when I first knew him, but in those days he was
undeniably an enormous man. And in himself he is a complete refutation
of the legend that fat men are dull men. Dr. Johnson was another fat
man whose large flesh covered a large intellect. Dr. Johnson, indeed,
was so able a man that, in spite of an incorrigibly lazy character,
which kept him abed of mornings when he ought to have been improving
the shining hour, he compiled a dictionary with little assistance
which, so Frenchmen said, would have engaged the labours of forty
French scholars for a long time.

These legends about men of wit and dull men need to be revised. There
have been as many fat men of genius as there have been lean men of
genius. There have been as many epicurean geniuses as there have been
ascetic geniuses. My experience is that men of great mental energy are
fonder of their food than many men with torpid minds; and some of the
ablest men I know are excessively addicted to the pleasures of the
table. Mr. Shaw is a fastidious feeder, with odd likes and dislikes,
but no one could say that he is indifferent to what he eats. It is, I
think, an ironic commentary on the legend that fat men are lacking in
cleverness, that much the cleverest of those who oppose the opinions of
the lean Mr. Shaw is the fat Mr. Chesterton.

Mr. Chesterton, was sent into the world by an All-Just God for the
exclusive purpose of saying the opposite to Mr. Shaw. With the most
complimentary intention I say that Mr. Chesterton's job in the world
is, when Mr. Shaw speaks, to reply, "On the contrary!..." He has to
restore the balance which Mr. Shaw very vigorously disturbs. Mr.
Chesterton is considerably younger than Mr. Shaw, much younger than
most people, on seeing him, imagine him to be. He was born in London
in 1874. His book on Browning was published when he was twenty-nine,
and "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" when he was thirty. The bulk of his
work, and certainly the best of it, with the exception of the "Short
History of England," was published before he was forty. The bulk, and
certainly the best, of Mr. Shaw's work was published after he had
passed his fortieth year. A critic comparing the two writers ought to
remember that Mr. Shaw's work is mainly that of a mature man, whereas
that of Mr. Chesterton is mainly the work of a young man.


II

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is commonly known as a writer of paradox. He
is something of a paradox himself, for he is half-Scotch, half-French,
and wholly English. This paradox is not any more startling than the
fact that yellow and blue, when mixed together, become green. England
is half-way between Scotland and France! He handles paradox very
skilfully, but there are times when he imagines he is making a paradox
and is only making a pun; and there are other times when he is merely
making nonsense. He states in a book called "What's Wrong With the
World" that "the prime truth of woman, the universal mother" is "that
if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." That is singular
paradox! I can understand a prime truth which declares that a thing is
worth doing, even if it be done badly, but I cannot understand a prime
truth which seems to make a merit of bad workmanship.

Elsewhere in the same book, he says that "submission to a weak man
is discipline. Submission to a strong man is servility." The proper
commentary on that paradox can only be made by a soldier. I can
assure Mr. Chesterton that the discipline of a weak man is the nearest
approach to tyranny I know, and it flies to pieces in times of great
distress. Your strong man can hold thoroughly frightened men to
their manhood with a word and a wave of the hand, but your weak man
demoralizes them with the fretful tyranny which he calls strength. The
submission of strong men to a weak man may be called discipline, but
it would be better named self-assurance. But in the field itself, when
authority and strength are needed, that weak man is quietly pushed into
the background, and the really strong man, although he may be a private
soldier, takes command. One can, of course, pick holes in many of Mr.
Chesterton's paradoxes in that manner, but it is profitless to do so.
Our work now is to discover what is of value in his doctrine and to
describe what is unsound in it.

Roughly, one may say that Mr. Chesterton stands for the common man
against the very clever man. He believes more in the People than he
believes in Particular Persons. As he himself would say, he trusts
Man more than he trusts any man, a statement which reads better than
it sounds. He believes in tradition, even in legend, which is the
wisdom accumulated by Man, not out of his mind so much as out of
his experience. He believes in the institution of private property,
provided that the property is widely distributed. In other words, he
believes in what is called Peasant Proprietorship. He does not believe
in Progress as Mr. Wells, for example, believes in it, and he will tell
you very emphatically that the common man was happier in the Middle
Ages than he is to-day. There are times when it seems to me that Mr.
Chesterton's "common man" is as mythical as the "average man" of the
newspapers and the "economic man" of the economists; and I am very
dubious about the happiness of the poor people of the Middle Ages.
It would be foolish to carry one's doctrine too far, but if there is
anything in this theory of Man deriving wisdom from experience, surely
it is reasonable to suppose that human beings, having discovered a
means of living which ensures some comfort and security to them, will
not easily be deprived of it. Mr. Chesterton asks us to believe that
the "common" man permitted the rich lord to rob him of his rights
almost in ignorance of the fact that he was being robbed of them. It
is just as probable that he was ignorant of them because he never had
them.

Mr. Chesterton believes, too, in what he calls "the ancient and
universal things" as against what he calls "the modern and specialist
things." He has invented a theory which establishes man as the great
specialist and woman as the great amateur, and he would keep woman out
of the polling-booth, not because the vote is too good for her, but
because it is not good enough. He demands that the woman shall stay
in the home, not for the Teutonic reason that she is inferior to man
and must work in a narrow area, but for the Chestertonic reason that
she is capable of more varied work than man and can only find adequate
range for her variety in the broad dominions of the home. "Women were
not kept at home," he says, "in order to keep them narrow; on the
contrary, they were kept home in order to keep them broad." The effort
must seem to many persons to have been a singularly unsuccessful one,
but Mr. Chesterton will have none of this sophistry. "I do not even
pause to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a general
servant," he asserts; discovering in her "generalness" a virtue where
others would discover only a certainty of incompetence and muddle.


     If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman
     drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of
     Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that
     the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless
     and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I
     do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a
     definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to
     be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets,
     cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching
     morals, manners, theology and hygiene--I can understand how this
     might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow
     it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children
     about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own
     children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same
     thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No;
     a woman's function is laborous, but because it is gigantic, not
     because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of
     her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.


I have quoted that extensive passage because it is a good example of
Mr. Chesterton's style and his thought. It is a mixture of soundness
and unsoundness, in which the two things merge so imperceptibly that
there is difficulty in distinguishing the one from the other. It is not
easy to see why the stenographer, travelling to an office every morning
at the same hour by the same underground railway, and typing more or
less the same sort of letter for a specified number of hours before she
returns every evening by the same underground railway to the home from
which she set out in the morning, should be more broad-minded than the
woman who stays at home performing a variety of jobs; and perhaps Mr.
Chesterton is justified in his faith by the fact that the stenographer
is most eager to escape from the office to the home by the way of
marriage.

Nevertheless, I suspect that the home is not quite the broadening
influence Mr. Chesterton declares it to be, and Mr. Chesterton himself
provides me with the ground for my suspicion. To be Queen Elizabeth
within a certain area may be enlarging for the mind. To be Whiteley
(or Marshal Field, in America) within a certain area may be enlarging
for the mind. To be Aristotle within a certain area may he enlarging
for the mind. But to be Queen Elizabeth _and_ Whiteley _and_ Aristotle
within a certain area is paralyzing for the mind. The stenographer
who does one thing every day, has time to think of many things: the
wife and mother who does many things every day has time to think of
nothing. I do not believe that the stenographer, who accepts the
responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, regards the drudgery of
them as an unparalleled opportunity for exhibiting her versatility; and
I have observed that the people who are most keen on such "modern and
specialist things" as labour-saving devices, are just those women who,
in Mr. Chesterton's judgment, should be most reluctant to accept them.


III

His praise of the "ancient and universal things" at the expense of the
"modern and specialist things" leads him to say that


     If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at least think
     of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope; and some
     of them might be practical. He could tow a boat or lasso a horse.
     He could play cat's cradle or pick oakum. He could construct
     a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes for a
     travelling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could
     hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveller who
     should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with a
     telephone: you cannot do anything else with it.


He disparages the hot-water pipe in order to exalt the open fire. He
argues that "the ancient and universal things" can be turned to many
uses, but that the "modern and specialist things" are strictly limited
to one purpose.

There may be much in his argument, though his examples hardly support
him, but how much is not apparent. Take the case of the man in the
desert who finds a coil of rope, and compare him with the man in the
desert who finds a telephone. Mr. Chesterton begs us to observe how
happy is the former compared with the latter, but is he one-half so
happy? The absorbing passion of a man's life in a desert would be the
desire to get out of the desert as quickly as possible. How far would a
rope help him to realize his desire? He could not tow a boat or lasso a
horse because there would not be any water on which to tow the boat or
any horse to lasso. If there were a horse to lasso it would either be
wild and unrideable or private property. He could play at cat's cradle
with the rope if it were not a rope at all--if, that is to say it were
twine; and perhaps this would help him to pass away the time before
he died of starvation. He could pick oakum if he wished to un-rope
the rope and had never been to prison to discover what a loathsome
job oakum-picking is. But he could not construct a rope-ladder for
an eloping heiress or cord her boxes for his travelling maiden aunt,
because the eloping heiress would not be eloping in a desert, and his
maiden aunt would hardly be packing her trunk in the Sahara. He might
be able to tie a bow. He might even be able to hang himself, though
that is doubtful, for trees are not prolific in deserts. But I cannot
see what comfort he would derive from either of these accomplishments.

To sum up, a man in a desert with nothing but a coil of rope between
him and civilization would be in as complete a state of isolation
as it would be possible for a man to imagine. How different would
be the case of the man in a desert with the despised "modern and
specialist" telephone! For he, finding a telephone, would instantly
be able to communicate with other people and to direct them to his
rescue. If he were anxious to hang himself, he could more effectively
do so in the neighbourhood of a telephone than in the neighbourhood
of a coil of rope, for where there are telephones there are generally
telegraph-poles!

Even in the case of the open fire and hot-water pipe, as much can be
said for the "modern and specialist thing" as can be said for the
"ancient and universal thing," and in some instances, more can be said
for it. We get a cheerful glow from an open fire that certainly is not
to be got from a hot-water pipe; but Mr. Chesterton must have noticed
on many occasions that whereas one gets tolerably toasted on one side
by an open fire, the other side is usually left cold. Thus a man, on a
wintry night, sitting before the fire, may be too warm in front, and
half-frozen behind. But a hot-water pipe creates an equable temperature
in a room and leaves a man warm on all sides.


IV

He is a nationalist and therefore opposed to imperialism. His belief in
peasant proprietorship flows naturally from his belief in nationalism.
He defends peasant proprietorship in "Irish Impressions" because he
believes that a country controlled by peasants will survive long after
more majestically-governed nations have declined and fallen:--


     I do not know how far modern Europe really shows a menace of
     Bolshevism, or how far merely a panic of Capitalism. But I know
     that if any honest resistance has to be offered to mere robbery,
     the resistance of Ireland will be the most honest and probably the
     most important.... It is where property is well distributed that
     it will be well defended. The post of honour will be with those
     who fight in very truth for their own land.


Now, here we are on very debateable ground, as debateable as his
statement that "honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a
necessity for hall-porters," which is surely an obscure rendering
of the entirely commercial statement that "honesty is the best
policy." Honour is not honour when a man uses it merely because it
is profitable to him, and I cannot see much virtue in him who fights
for his land simply because he owns it. Honour is admirable when it
brings not profit but loss to the man who wears it. Virtue is in the
man who fights for his country though he does not own an inch of it.
And here I come to my objection to Mr. Chesterton's beloved peasant
proprietorship, the cause of my dismay at the thought that my own
country of Ireland may soon be controlled by small farmers.

It is true that a peasant will fight desperately for his own piece
of land, but he manifests a sturdy reluctance to fight for another
man's land; and I cannot understand why Mr. Chesterton regards his
determination to hold on to his property as more "honest," or more
"honourable" than the determination of a Victory bondholder to get
the last cent of interest out of the taxpayers. Peasants, no less
than other men, in fact more than other men, have itching palms, and
it is sheer sentimentalism to describe as "honest" or "honourable"
behaviour in them which is denounced as dishonest and dishonourable in
a stockbroker. It is true that Lenin's schemes collapsed completely
before the resistance of the Russian peasants, and that his plans for
the nationization of everything failed to include the principal thing
of all, namely, the land; but Mr. Chesterton will hardly maintain
that the Russian peasants had disinterested motives in offering this
resistance to Lenin. He may, indeed, insist that their motives were
entirely interested and base his case for the Distributive State,
as Mr. Belloc named it, on that very interest. But a nation should
be something more than a crowd of peasants digging in the earth for
their personal profit, and when Mr. Chesterton commends his peasant
proprietors to me, I ask not for the signs of their interested
behaviour, but for the signs of their disinterested behaviour. When
he tells me that the peasant will fight for his own land, I ask him
whether the peasant will fight for his neighbour's land? When he tells
me that the Irish peasant will resist the attempts of the Bolshevist to
communalize his land, I ask him whether the Irish peasant is equally
ready to defend the French peasant from Russian aggression? Mr.
Chesterton declares that France had claims on the gratitude of Ireland.
Did the Irish peasant farmer remember those claims on his gratitude?
Or did he find it more convenient and profitable to ejaculate, "Yah,
dirty atheist, go and fight your own battles!" In deriding the idea of
empire, Mr. Chesterton says in this book of "Irish Impressions" that
"the British combination" is "more lax and liable to schism" than a
combination of peasants. I do not believe there is any truth in this
statement, particularly when I remember that "the British combination"
held together for five years in circumstances that might have been
expected to shake it to pieces. Let me give you an example, out of
my experience during the War, of the way in which the Imperial idea
rallies men to its support to their own loss. While I was being trained
to be an officer, I shared a hut with twenty-five other men. Between
us, we represented every part of the British Empire. The twenty-six men
in that hut included Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and two Irishmen
(one of whom was an Orangeman, and the other, myself, a Home Ruler). In
addition to these, there were two Australians, a man from New Zealand,
two men from Canada, two from South Africa and a couple of men from
South America, one a Spaniard and the other the son of English parents.
Many of these men had travelled for thousands of miles at their own
expense in order to join the British Army. They were volunteers. I
would like to see the community of peasants that would travel ten
yards to defend anything but their own personal property, except under
compulsion.

When I cited this case to Mr. Chesterton some time ago, in controversy
with him, he replied with characteristic amiability, that Serbia was a
community of peasants, and that Serbia had fought in the War. When I
asked whether Serbia would have fought for Montenegro, he replied that
she had done more than that, she had fought for "the wholly invisible
bond of all Christendom." But Serbia did nothing of the sort. She
fought for herself because she was invaded. That was a perfectly proper
thing to do, but there is no comparison between it and the behaviour
of men responding at their own cost to the Imperial idea, although
many hundreds of miles away from the place of argument and under no
compulsion to go to it.

The truth about a peasant civilization is that it is a mean
civilization, in which mean virtues compete with mean vices, and the
small and local thing is esteemed above the big and worldwide thing.
There are many defects in empires, even in one so loosely-bound as the
British Empire, but although those who control an empire are often
guilty of cruel deeds, there is at least this to be said in their
defense, that they honestly believe themselves to be possessed of
greater wisdom than those whom they oppress, and do desire in their
stupid fashion to govern them for their good.

On the whole, freedom may be defined as the right to choose; but that
definition must obviously be subject to limitations. There is a sort
of wild and woolly democrat who believes in the right of uninstructed
persons to choose wrong. It is not a right in which I believe. Mr.
Chesterton thinks, not without justification, that the common man can
choose in a right manner. If his creed were confined to that clause we
could accept it with heartiness, but there are times when he seems to
think that the common man chooses aright because he is a common man,
and he leaves us with the impression that he can never quite forgive
Magna Charta because it was won by peers, and not by peasants. He seems
not to realize that if Magna Charta had depended upon peasants, it
would never have been won.


V

But he helps us to keep a balance. His service to us is that when we
are inclined to run frantically after the superman, he reminds us of
the existence of the common man. If he were not so well-padded with
flesh, I should describe him as the skeleton at a feast of supermen,
reminding them that even a superman can be a fool.

There are times indeed, when his faith in the common man undergoes a
sea-change, and he utters sentiments that might be spoken by Mr. H. L.
Mencken, who cannot abide the common mind. In one of his essays, Mr.
Chesterton says, "I certainly would much rather share my apartments
with a gentleman who thought he was God than with a gentleman who
thought he was a grasshopper." So would Nietzsche. But I doubt whether
the Early Christians would have approved his preference. They, who were
ready to pronounce all flesh to be grass, would not have found anything
incompatible with their faith in a gentleman who regarded himself
as a grasshopper. They would certainly have considered his rival in
misapprehension to be a blasphemer. And if Mr. Chesterton would fail
to find pleasure in the company of a man who believed himself to be
that interesting but monotonous insect, how much less pleasure would he
derive from sharing his apartments with a man who believed not only
himself, but all men, to be worms?

He is personally the most kindly and agreeable of men, in whom the
one virtue commonly ascribed to fat men, that of good nature, is
most highly developed. His anger is almost completely impersonal.
His pardon is on the heels of his condemnation. The sins of jealousy
and hatred are unknown to him, and he seems to be without the power
of resenting spiteful things done to himself. He said to me on one
occasion, "Arnold Bennett says I'm an imbecile!" in the tone of a man
who was not in the least annoyed by the statement, but puzzled by
the fact that any man should call another one an offensive name. We
are all children of the one God, in his belief, even if some of us
are Jews, and in some mystical manner he contrives, in his anger, to
discriminate between the human being and the thing which the human
being does. If ever he is moved to slay a sweater or an international
financier or a Prohibitionist, he will do so entirely without prejudice
to that person's right to be called a child of God. It is a tribute to
the charm of his character and the equability of his temper that his
stoutest admirers are those who most vigorously combat his opinions,
and that most of his friends are men who do not share any of his views,
except perhaps the only view that matters, the view that an ill deed
must be exposed and a wrong put right. He is Don Quixote in the body of
Sancho Panza.




JOHN GALSWORTHY


I

It is sometimes said that an artist never intrudes his personality
into his work and that the great writers of the world have kept
themselves so closely to themselves that their readers have never been
able to discover anything of their faith or partialities. This is not
only untrue, but is also absurd, for how can any man hope to exclude
himself from his creations, since without him the creations would not
be? There never was a book of any sort which did not in some fashion
reveal the nature of its author to discerning readers, and I will
personally undertake to give a fairly accurate account of the general
character of any author after an attentive reading of all his writings.
There are authors, such as Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, who
do not make any pretence of excluding themselves from the notice of
their readers: they deliberately force themselves into their books;
and the habit has become so much a part of their nature that they
sometimes do it unconsciously. One may say of them, perhaps, that we
learn chiefly from their writings what their opinions are, but learn
nothing of their characters. But while it is true that we do receive
much information about their opinions, it is true also, I think, that
they unmistakably reveal themselves, something of the intimate parts of
them, to those who closely consider their books. Fielding formally held
up the course of his stories in order that he might state his views to
his readers, and Dickens and Thackeray followed his example; but all
three of them revealed more than their beliefs to their readers--they
revealed themselves. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are excellent examples of
what may be described as the Direct Revealers--writers who nakedly
manifest their opinions and, more or less nakedly, their personalities
in their books. The Indirect Revealers are best exemplified in two
poets, Shakespeare and John Millington Synge, and one novelist and
dramatist, Mr. John Galsworthy. We have very little documentary
evidence of Shakespeare's existence, and it is impossible, therefore,
to write his biography with the accuracy of detail with which one is
able to record the events of, say, Roosevelt's career; but there is
a clear and unmistakable account of his hopes and fears and beliefs
and disbeliefs, a most faithful portrait of his character, contained
in his poems and plays. How can any one fail to discover behind his
work the figure of a grave, fastidious, disdainful and distrustful and
solitary man whose spiritual solitude was concealed under an appearance
of gregariousness and cheerful living that made him a good companion
on most occasions without being excessively popular. Ben Jonson,
despite his quarrelsome character, was probably more deeply loved by
his contemporaries than Shakespeare was, because Shakespeare had more
of reserve and spiritual isolation than Ben had, and was less willing
to put faith in the virtue of the crowd; and I imagine that had one
interrogated any of Shakespeare's friends, they would have said of him,
"Oh, yes, I like William Shakespeare very much! Talks well! He's a good
chap, but a little odd ... queer ... at times. It isn't easy to make
friends with him. He always keeps us at our distance--not deliberately,
of course, but in some vague way. He understands us all right, and he
takes part in our revels, but he never completely descends to our
level. Now, old Ben ... he's a good, hearty chap! He is so comradely
that we frequently forget he is Ben Jonson and think of him as just one
of ourselves. Shakespeare's friendly enough, but we never forget that
he is Shakespeare. Sometimes, quite unintentionally, he makes us feel a
little common!..."

The best biography of John Synge that I have read--and l have read
all of them--is contained in his plays and poems. It is impossible
to rise from his books without an impression of intense loneliness
and unachievable desires, of a man eager to be the hero of romantic
exploits, but totally unable to stand up to life and make himself a
hero because of some spiritual ineffectiveness, some lack of assertion
which results in fumbling and self-distrust; and one goes from the
plays and poems to the biographies and is not surprised at reading of
his lonely life. How often the word "lonesome" occurs in his writings,
and how deeply he insists on the terrors of solitude! Pegeen Mike in
the "The Playboy of the Western World" reproves her father for going
"over the sands to Kate Cassidy's wake" and leaving her alone in the
shebeen:


     If I am a queer daughter, it's a queer father'd be leaving me
     lonesome these twelve hours of dark, and I piling the turf with
     the dogs barking, and the calves mooing, and my own teeth rattling
     with the fear.


I imagine that there is some deep personal feeling of Synge's in the
speech he puts into the mouth of Christy Mahon in the second act of the
same play:


     CHRISTY: And isn't it a poor thing to be starting again, and I a
     lonesome fellow will be looking out on women and girls the way the
     needy fallen spirits do be looking for the Lord?

     PEGEEN: What call have you to be lonesome when there's poor girls
     walking Mayo in their thousands now?

     CHRISTY: It's well you know what call I have. It's well you know
     it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights
     shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange
     places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or
     drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking
     deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an
     empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart.

     PEGEEN: I'm thinking you're an odd man, Christy Mahon. The oddest
     walking fellow I ever set my eyes on to this hour to-day.

     CHRISTY: What would any be but odd men and they living lonesome in
     the world?


The scene of all his plays is laid in a lonely place: the last cottage
at the head of a long glen in Wicklow; a small and remote island off
the west coast of Ireland; a distant hamlet in a mountainous district.
His people are possessed of a perpetual fear of death and old age,
and lead uneventful lives, having minds which continually crave for
the performance of splendid and unusual deeds. Few men have put their
longings and disappointments so boldly and plainly into their work as
John Synge put his. I do not suggest that an author may be identified
with every word and action of his creatures--a manifestly absurd
suggestion--but I do suggest that it is possible for an intelligent
reader to obtain a very clear and well-defined impression of the
character and beliefs of an author from a careful study of the whole
body of his work.


II

Mr. John Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of
modern men of letters, but his sensitiveness is of a peculiar nature,
for it is almost totally impersonal. One thinks of Dostoievsky
eternally pitying himself in the belief that he was pitying humanity
and particularly that part of it which is Russian; or of Maxim Gorki,
as shown in his vivid and extraordinary study of Leo Tolstoi,[4]
preoccupied with himself to the extent of imagining that Tolstoi, the
aristocrat, related salacious stories in common speech to him, the
peasant, because he imagined that Gorki, being of vulgar origin, could
not appreciate refined conversation:


     I remember my first meeting with him and his talk about "Varienka
     Oliessova" and "Twenty-six and One." From the ordinary point of
     view, what he said was a string of indecent words. I was perplexed
     by it and even offended. I thought that he considered me incapable
     of understanding any other kind of language. I understand now: it
     was silly to have felt offended.


One thinks, too, of Mr. Shaw's lively interest in himself, and of Mr.
Wells's eagerness to remold the world nearer to his heart's desire.
And remembering these men, intensely individual and not reluctant
to speak of themselves, one is startled to discover how destitute
of egotism Mr. Galsworthy seems to be. It may even be argued that
his lack of interest in himself is a sign of inadequate artistry,
that it is impossible for a man of supreme quality to be so utterly
unconcerned about himself as Mr. Galsworthy is. He has written more
than a dozen novels and at least a dozen plays, but there is not one
line in any of them to denote that he takes any interest whatever in
John Galsworthy. The most obvious characteristic of his work is an
immense and, sometimes, indiscriminating pity, but I imagine that the
only creature on whom he has no pity is himself. Whatever of joy and
grief he has had in life has been closely retained, and the reticence
which was characteristic of the English people--I am now using the
word "English" in the strict sense--in pre-war times, but is hardly
characteristic of them now, is most clearly to be observed in Mr.
Galsworthy. And yet there are few among contemporary writers who reveal
so much of themselves as he does. Neither Mr. Shaw nor Mr. Wells, who
constantly expose their beliefs to their readers, do in the long run
tell so much about their characters as Mr. Galsworthy, who never makes
a conscious revelation of himself and is probably quite unaware that
he had made any revelations at all. How often have we observed in our
own relationships that some garrulous person, constantly engaged in
egotistical conversation, contrives to conceal knowledge of himself
from us, while some silent friend, with lips tightly closed, most
amazingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr. Galsworthy's handsome,
sensitive face and is immediately aware of tightened lips!... But the
lips are not tightened because of things done to him, but because of
things done to others.

I remember, more than ten years ago, reading a notice of the first
performance of "Justice" in an English Sunday newspaper in which the
critic, who must have been terribly drunk when he wrote it, attacked
the play, making nine misstatements of fact about it in as many lines.
Those were the days when I took the field on the slightest provocation.
An insult offered to a man of letters for whom I had respect was an
insult offered to me, and I made much trouble for myself by smacking
faces with great ferocity for offences, not against me, but against my
friends and my betters. I wrote a letter to that critic which created
some havoc in his sodden brain, and I then posted a copy of it to Mr.
Galsworthy. He thanked me very civilly for what I had done, and added
that he never replied to criticism of any sort! I was astounded by his
statement and a little dashed. My faith in those days was, crudely,
two eyes for one tooth! Those who struck at me might expect two blows
in return. Like Mrs. Ferguson, in my play, "John Ferguson," I said to
myself, "If anyone was to hurt me, I'd do my best to hurt them back
and hurt them harder nor they hurt me!" I could not bring myself into
line with the meekness of Mr. Galsworthy until I discovered in it a
form of supreme arrogance!... Now that I know him and his work better,
I realize that I was wrong in my estimation of him both as excessively
meek and excessively arrogant. His rule never to reply to criticism,
however unfair, is a sign, not of humility or pride, but of complete
indifference to himself. I can believe in him becoming furious with
one who belittles a dog, but I cannot believe in him displaying any
feeling over one who belittles John Galsworthy.

But when I look at his tightened lips, I feel certain that they are
drawn closely together, not to prevent himself from forgetting his
indifference to himself, but to prevent him from pouring out his anger
at wrong and cruelty suffered by other people. His hatred of injustice
possesses him like a fury, so that I expect to find his hands always
clenched. There are times, indeed, when he allows his feeling for
others, human and animal, to destroy his sense of proportion, and he
will sometimes imagine that people or beasts are suffering a great
deal more of pain than they really are, even that they are suffering
when in fact they are not suffering at all. This is the complaint most
commonly made of him by his critics, that he sometimes exaggerates the
extent to which people and, particularly, animals suffer. When I was
a child, I remember that I often read in sentimental Sunday-school
books of slum children who never smiled and had never seen grass. I
suppose that fundamentally I have a sceptical mind, for even then I
found myself doubting whether there were any children in the world who
had never seen grass. Grass is so persistent!... I knew that a street
had only to be free of traffic for a short while and little blades of
grass would begin to push up from between the cobbles!... It might be
that slum children never smiled--though I was dubious of that--but
all of them must have seen some grass sometime. Then I grew up and
left Ulster and went to England, and for two or three years I lived
on the confines of a slum in South London, where I discovered that my
sentimental authors were sentimental liars, that poor people do not
live lives of incessant misery, that they smile and laugh as often as,
if not more frequently than, rich people, and are fully as happy as
any one else. Happiness and unhappiness are conditions of the spirit,
and provided a man has sufficient food to eat and a decent shelter and
warm clothes, it matters very little whether he be rich or poor. Mr.
Galsworthy is not always as sensible of this as he might be. Like many
idealists he attaches more importance to material things than many
materialists do. He lets himself be too easily persuaded that a thing
is wrong because it looks wrong. If he had walked into the Valley of
Elah on that morning when the fair and ruddy youth, David, encountered
Goliath, he would certainly have run to David's side. What combat could
have seemed more unequal than that? David was young and slender and of
ordinary stature. He wore no armor and his weapons were a sling and
five pebbles casually picked from a brook. Goliath was five cubits and
a span high, and his huge body was covered with heavy armor. There was
a helmet of brass on his head, and there were greaves of brass on his
legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders. His weapons were
terrible: the staff of his spear was like a weaver's beam, and his
spear's head weighed six hundred shekels of iron. A man walked in front
of him carrying a shield!... No wonder that Goliath mocked at David
and threatened to pick the flesh from his bones and give it to the
birds. He probably felt that one breath from his mouth would blow David
clean out of the valley. Mr. Galsworthy, had he been present on that
occasion, would have said to himself, "Poor David, young and slight
and ill-armed, has no chance whatever against this great hulking,
uncircumcized Philistine!..." The combat certainly was an unequal one,
but the advantage lay, not with Goliath, but with David. The giant had
the outward show of strength, but David had the Power of God in his
right arm, and before that Power Goliath was but a boneless beast. Mr.
Galsworthy makes Stephen More in his play "The Mob," revile the crowd
in these terms:


     You are the thing that pelts the weak; kicks women; howls down
     free speech. This to-day, and that to-morrow. Brain--you have
     none! Spirit--not the ghost of it! If you're not meanness, there's
     no such thing. If you're not cowardice, there is no cowardice.


Neither Stephen More nor Mr. Galsworthy appears to know that these
characteristics of the mob are the characteristics of weak things.
Strong men do not pelt the weak or kick women, nor do they prevent
free speech. It is weak men and timid men and ignorant, frightened
men--politicians and officials and guttersnipes and sinners--who do
these things, because they have neither the courage nor the strength
nor the intelligence to do otherwise. The mob-instinct of unreasoning
chivalry, the natural impulse to take the part of "the little 'un,"
constitutes a very serious danger to Mr. Galsworthy's work: he is
becoming increasingly partisan in his opinions and sympathies, with
the result that his sentiment is in danger of degenerating into
sentimentalism, and he, so commonly considered impartial, is likely to
end in a state of hopeless and wrong-headed bias. He is beginning to
believe that a weak man is right because he is weak. He is forgetting
the truth enunciated, perhaps excessively, by Dr. Stockmann in "An
Enemy of the People" that "the strongest man in the world is the man
who stands absolutely alone." Or if he has not forgotten it, he is in
danger of believing that a minority is always in the right because it
is a minority: a belief which is as fallacious as that which Mr. G. K.
Chesterton sometimes seems to hold, that a majority is always in the
right because it is a majority. The plain and platitudinous truth is
that only those are in the right who are in the right, whether they be
in a majority or in a minority. Weakness, although it may endow a man
with cunning, does not endow him with moral authority. Mr. Galsworthy
at times lets his pity for weakness lead him into seeming to regard it
as a sign of infallible judgment.


III

Mr. Galsworthy can create people and he can write natural dialogue.
"The Silver Box" is a testimony of his power to do so. But in his later
plays he has not always allowed his creatures to behave in a creditable
fashion, nor has he always written dialogue that exactly fits their
tongues. One suspects, too, that he is losing his sense of proportion,
that he is not so capable now as he was earlier in his career of
distinguishing between things which are important and things which are
not. He has developed an interest in trivial questions of sex and has
become so absorbed in dilemmas of colliding characters that he has lost
sight of the nature of his characters. He has been called a Determinist
because he shows his people as the creature of circumstances, but
in his later work, particularly in his play "The Fugitive," his
Determinism has become wilful: he seems to have made up his mind that
his characters shall become the victims of circumstances in defiance of
facts and the natures with which he has created them. He deliberately
ties their hands behind their backs and then exclaims: "These are
the victims of adverse circumstances!" And indeed they are, but the
circumstances have been artificially created by Mr. Galsworthy and not
by any force that governs the universe. He is so eager to bring Clare
Dedmond, in "The Fugitive," to her death in a restaurant frequented by
prostitutes that he totally neglects to consider the fact that with the
nature he gives her she is the last person on earth likely to end that
way.

It is not in ideas that Mr. Galsworthy fails, so far as his later work
is concerned--it is in execution. The idea of "The Fugitive" is a
notable one. The play, which in its faults is significant of all Mr.
Galsworthy's later plays, deals with the tragic failure of a sensitive
woman to adjust her life to that of a dull, unimaginative man in whom,
although the conventions and traditions of his class have schooled
him into a certain decency of form, there is a very large measure of
coarseness. The collision is between the finely-perceptive and the
totally-imperceptive, and the theme is similar, in one respect, to
that of "The Doll's House," and in another to that of "The Shadow of
the Glen." But the treatment of it is very inferior to the treatment
of it by Ibsen and Synge. Ibsen plainly showed how impossible it was
for Nora to continue to live with her husband after she had suffered
her disillusionment. He showed with equal clarity how natural it was
that she should marry and love her husband, and yet in the end, turn
away from him. Mr. Galsworthy takes Clare Dedmond beyond the stage to
which Ibsen took Nora. Ibsen was content to end his play with Nora's
exit from her husband's home: he did not follow her from it nor show
what became of her thereafter. Mr. Galsworthy is concerned less with
the act of separation and more with the consequences of it. He is not
so interested in her flight from her husband as he is in what happens
to her after she has flown from him. He has taken a longer stretch of
Clare's life than Ibsen took of Nora's, but he has contrived to make it
smaller than Nora's. One derives an extraordinary sense of completeness
and space from "The Doll's House," but does not derive a similar sense
from "The Fugitive." Ibsen gives one a sense of familiarity with his
people, but Mr. Galsworthy hardly makes one more familiar with Clare
Dedmond and her husband than a reader of a newspaper is with the
principal parties to a divorce suit.

Clare Dedmond, like Nora Burke in Synge's "The Shadow of the Glen,"
is suffering from starved emotions, but Synge in his one-act play has
created the atmosphere of starved emotions far more successfully than
Mr. Galsworthy has done in his four acts. The antagonism between Nora
and Daniel Burke is instantly understood by the reader, who, however,
cannot immediately understand why it is that Clare and George Dedmond
do not "get on" together. The reader knows why Nora married Daniel.
"And how would I live and I an old woman if I hadn't a bit of a farm
with cows on it and sheep on the blackhills?" The sense of desolation
in this woman's life is so powerfully expressed that the reader of
the play does not ask questions. He does not stop to inquire why Nora
married her husband: he _knows_ why she married him, and this knowledge
is derived, not from the author's assertions, but from the woman's
behaviour. A sense of desolation is not created when the author says
that there is desolation, nor is it created when a character says:
"I am miserable!" It is created when the speech and behaviour of the
characters are such as one hears and sees when people are unhappy. It
would be absurd for a writer to make a character say: "I have a very
kindly disposition," and then show him in the normal habit of beating
his wife, kicking his grandmother, and ill-treating animals ... unless
he were trying to be funny or were portraying a madman. There must
be consistency between character and conduct, and the measure of a
writer's artistry is the degree to which he succeeds in reconciling the
one with the other.

It is when Mr. Galsworthy's later work is tested in this manner that
one realizes how lamentably he has failed to create the illusion of
life. One goes through the pages of "The Fugitive" making notes of
interrogation! One does not ask: "Why did Ibsen's Nora marry her
husband?" "Why did Synge's Nora marry her husband?" because one knows
the answer to these questions from the beginning of the plays, and
it is not necessary to ask them. But why did Clare Dedmond marry her
husband? Because she loved him? Because she wished to be married and no
one else had asked her? For money? To escape from her parents? It is
impossible to say. Most of the faults which I find in Mr. Galsworthy's
work are to be found in this play and so I propose to examine it here
in detail.

The story of "The Fugitive" is summarily this:--

Clare Huntington, the daughter of a poor parson, is married to George
Dedmond, a man of wealth and social position. When the play begins
these two have reached that point in their marital relationship when
their unhappiness is plain to their acquaintances. The husband,
irritated and puzzled, is eager to make a compromise which will not
involve legal separation and "talk."


     CLARE (_softly_). I don't give satisfaction. Please give me notice.

     GEORGE. Pish!

     CLARE. Five years, and four of them like this! I'm sure we've
     served our time. Don't you really think we might get on better
     together--if I went away.

     GEORGE. I've told you I won't stand a separation for no real
     reason, and have your name bandied about all over London. I have
     some primitive sense of honour.


While travelling abroad the Dedmonds make the acquaintance of a
journalist named Kenneth Malise who is employed on a weekly review.
He and Clare become very friendly with each other, but George, who
declares that Malise is a bounder, does not share the friendship.
Malise knows that Clare is unhappy in her marriage and he incites her
to "spread your wings." He does not appear to have thought of what is
to become of her when she spreads her wings, nor does he manifest any
concern about her ability to remain in flight. His attitude towards her
may roughly be said to be: "It doesn't matter what happens to you so
long as you run away from your husband!" Clare eventually leaves her
husband, and in the second act she goes to Malise's rooms to ask for
his advice. She has taken his advice to spread her wings. What is she
to do?

Mr. Malise very clearly does not know what she is to do. While he and
she are debating about her future his rooms are invaded by Dedmond's
parents, his solicitor, and, subsequently, by Dedmond himself. They
endeavour to persuade Clare to return to her husband, which she refuses
to do, and there is a scene in which George Dedmond, having offered to
take Clare back to his home, goes away threatening to divorce her and
cite Malise as co-respondent. After this scene Clare, in obedience to
her queer sense of honour, which impels her to make hateful returns
for favours received, offers herself in physical submission to Malise,
without, however, being able to conceal the fact that such submission
is loathsome to her. It is necessary, in studying this play, to take
considerable notice of Clare's attitude towards physical relationships.
Sexual submission is repulsive to her, not only in relation to her
husband, whom she dislikes, but also in relation to Malise, for whom
she has so much liking that eventually she falls in love with him. At
the moment at which the offer is first made, however, she is not in
love with Malise: she offers herself to him because she feels that,
having brought trouble upon him, she ought to make reparation for her
conduct!


     CLARE. If I must bring you harm--let me pay you back. I can't bear
     it otherwise! Make some use of me, if you don't mind!

     MALISE. My God!

         _She puts her face up to be kissed, shutting her eyes._

     MALISE. You poor----

         _He clasps and kisses her; then, drawing back, looks in her
         face. She has not moved; her eyes are still closed. But she is
         shivering; her lips are tightly pressed together, her hands
         twitching._

MALISE (_very quietly_). No, no! This is not the house of a "gentleman."

CLARE (_letting her head fall, and almost in a whisper_). I'm sorry--

MALISE. I understand.

CLARE. I don't feel. And without--I can't, can't.

MALISE (_bitterly_). Quite right. You've had enough of that.


That speech--"I don't feel. And without--I can't, can't"--is the
key-speech of Clare Dedmond's nature, and, in view of the end of the
play, must be remembered.

Malise, recognizing that Clare cannot happily be his mistress otherwise
than in name, will not accept her offer of physical submission merely
as a return for what he may have to bear in her behalf, and so she
leaves his flat. She obtains employment as a shop-assistant, and is not
seen again, by her family or by Malise, for three months. Then, after
she has encountered a relative, she bolts in a panic from the shop and
returns to Malise's flat. She proposes to do typewriting and asks him
to find employment for her. He gives her some of his own MSS. to type,
and while they are discussing her prospects of employment she reveals
the fact that she now loves him.


     MALISE. Can you typewrite where you are?

     CLARE. I have to find a new room, anyway. I'm changing--to be
     safe. (_She takes a luggage ticket from her glove_). I took
     my things to Charing Cross--only a bag and one trunk. (_Then,
     with that queer expression on her face which prefaces her
     desperations._) You don't want me now, I suppose?

     MALISE. What?

     CLARE (_hardly above a whisper_). Because--if you still wanted
     me--I do--now.

     MALISE (_staring hard into her face that is quivering and
     smiling_). You mean it? You _do_? You care?

     CLARE. I've thought of you--so much. But only--if you're sure.

         _He clasps her, and kisses her closed eyes._


That love declaration is singularly unconvincing, more so to the
reader of the play than to the witness of it. It is not unlikely that
Clare's liking for Malise increased during the three months of their
separation, particularly as she regarded him as a benefactor to whom
she had brought trouble, but it seems to me to be improbable that she
would declare her love so casually. Mr. Galsworthy's stage directions
make the puzzle more involved. If Clare were in love with Malise to
the extent of overcoming her hatred of physical contacts, she would
hardly have "that queer expression on her face which prefaces her
desperations." When a man or woman is desperate he or she is hopeless
or almost hopeless, and if Mr. Galsworthy's stage directions are to be
taken seriously then they mean that Clare was willing to become the
mistress of Malise for much the same reason that a rat will fight in
a corner. But if her words mean what they would seem to mean, surely,
given her character and remembering what she has endured, her surrender
to Malise will not be accompanied by any signs of desperation at all,
but in sheer reaction, if nothing else, by every sign of jubilation and
relief.

The attitude of Malise towards Clare does not appear to have undergone
any change at all; he is not any more in love with her in the third
act than he was in the first act, when, indeed, his love had a dubious
aspect. There is no warmth in the man, no glow. He is cold, not with
the hard, sharp, tingling cold of ice, but with the flabby chill of a
dead fish. When George Dedmond institutes divorce proceedings, citing
Malise as co-respondent, the fellow goes to pieces, and whines and
bleats to his charwoman because the proprietors of the review on which
he is employed propose to dismiss him. They have some scruples against
writers who become involved in scandals. The charwoman informs Clare
of Malise's misery, and she, knowing that her husband will abandon
the suit if she leaves Malise, goes quietly from his flat. Her next
appearance is in a restaurant, largely patronized by prostitutes. One
does not know what has happened to her in the meantime, but it is
plain that she must have suffered acutely, for this delicately bred
woman, sensitive to the point of morbidity about sexual relationships,
has decided to become a prostitute! We see her entering "The Gascony"
for the first time when the fourth act begins. A young man, ordinary,
decent, and uncommonly lustful, makes overtures to her, treating her
with kindliness when he discovers that he is her first customer. His
kindliness helps to reconcile her to her position, and she prepares to
leave the restaurant with him. While he is paying the bill two coarse
men leer at her, and one of them accosts her, making an appointment for
the following evening. As she watches his coarse face, inflamed with
lust, she realises the horror of the life she is about to lead, and
suddenly makes a decision--she takes a bottle of poison from her dress,
pours its contents into a wine-glass, and drinks it. She dies while
some sportsmen in an adjoining room play "the last notes of an old song
'This Day a Stag Must Die' on a horn." And that is the end of the play.


It seems to me to be incredible that Clare Dedmond should have gone
to that restaurant to sell herself to any casual purchaser. It seems
to me, given her nature, incredible that she should even have thought
of such a way of life or that, having thought of it, she should
not instantly poison herself rather than endure it. Mr. Galsworthy
insists throughout the play on her exceptional sensitiveness about
sex-relationships. I think that psychologically he has over-stated this
sensitiveness, but, assuming that he has not done so, is it conceivable
that a woman who shivers and twitches her hands when she is kissed by
a man whom she likes will consent to put on fine clothes and go to a
notorious restaurant and sit at a table while men inspect her?... (I
leave out of consideration such questions as: "Where did she obtain the
fine clothes?" "How did she acquire her knowledge of 'The Gascony'?")
If she were prepared to endure that last of all defilements, why did
she run away from her husband? If she were capable of selling her
embraces, why did she shiver and twitch when Malise kissed her? George
Dedmond was not a "bad" man. He did not ill-treat her nor was he
faithless to her. He insisted, indeed, on sexual submissions, but one
has difficulty in believing that her horror of these, "unless I feel,"
was very strong since she was willing to suffer the casual amours of
"The Gascony." There would have been something pitiable in her if,
after leaving Malise, she had returned to George. There would have
been something tragical in her if, reluctant to return to George, she
had killed herself when she found that she could not maintain herself
in decency. But there is nothing either pitiable or tragical in the
end devised for her by Mr. Galsworthy. It is an arranged and schemed
destiny that overwhelms Clare Dedmond, arranged and schemed not by
Circumstance but by Mr. Galsworthy, and having no relation whatever to
the nature of the woman. Mr. Galsworthy wanted to poison her in "The
Gascony," and so he thrust her into the restaurant in plain disregard
of her character and of common facts.

There is a phrase in the play which is intended to illuminate Clare's
nature. "You're too fine," Mrs. Fullarton says to her, "and you're
not fine enough to endure things." How can one be too fine to endure
a thing and yet not fine enough to endure it? And, having begun to
question in that fashion, one goes on again to wonder why she married
her husband. "Five years" (of marriage), she says to her husband, "and
four of them like this!" Here is no case of slow transformation of love
into dislike or of instant disillusionment. Clare does not suddenly
discover or slowly discover that George is not the sort of man she
had imagined him to be, for he remains throughout the play exactly
the sort of man he was when she was wooed and married by him. He did
not become prosaic, unimaginative, and coarse after marriage: he was
always like that; and Clare, so sensitive as she was, must have been
jarred by him as much before marriage as she was a year after marriage.
There is no suggestion in the play that she married for money. Had she
done so, surely she would, when we remember the depths to which she
was subsequently prepared to descend, have borne his dullness and
coarseness, not gladly, perhaps, but with fortitude?

The processes of attraction and repulsion are so complicated that it
is difficult to say where one begins and the other ends, but this
difficulty is hardly to be experienced in cases where the personalities
are so marked and divergent as were the personalities of Clare and
George Dedmond. If one were to take a man like Squire Western in "Tom
Jones" and marry him to Mélisande in "Pelléas et Mélisande," one
could prophesy with some certainty what would be the result of such a
marriage. It would be disastrous. Left to the ordinary processes of
nature, however, such a marriage would not take place at all.

But the difficulty of fathoming Clare's relationships does not end
with her husband. It is equally difficult to understand her attitude
towards Malise. What attracted her to this extraordinarily ill-bred man
who sneers openly at her relatives and friends, mocking and insulting
them to her and to their faces? The Dedmonds, parents and son, are
dense, but they are decent. They live by rule because they cannot live
by any other means. It is not their fault that they cannot understand
Clare's point of view, any more than it is the fault of a blind man
that he falls over an obstacle which he cannot see. Malise regards them
as malignant people, deliberately imprisoning an aspiring woman. His
vision of them is as narrow as is theirs of him, and, since he has not
got their breeding or kindliness, his conduct is caddish where theirs
is merely stupid. There is no magnitude or charity in this man. He
spends his days and nights in writing petulant screeds in the style of
Thomas Carlyle: windy stuff, blowing out of a noisome mind; and when
he has induced one helpless, incompetent woman to follow his creed he
fails her completely.

The last sentences of the play show that Mr. Galsworthy had set his
mind on Clare's death in disregard of the probabilities. Clare, having
swallowed the poison, is lying back in her chair, presumably dead.


     _The Young Man has covered his eyes with his hands; Arnaud is
     crossing himself fervently; the Languid Lord stands gazing with
     one of the dropped gardenias twisted in his fingers; and the woman
     bending over Clare, kisses her forehead._


That is a piece of theatricality. It has no relationship to real
things. Those people, in life, would not have stood about in
sentimental attitudes watching a woman die of poison. The young man
would have flown for a doctor; the waiter would have rushed off for an
emetic; the languid lord would have lost his languid airs in his desire
to get away from the restaurant in fear lest he might be summoned as a
witness at the inquest; and the woman would promptly have had hysterics.


IV

He seems to be most impressed, in viewing the human scene, by the sense
of property which he discovers in mankind. In his best work, the novels
of the Forsyte Saga, beginning with "The Man of Property" and ending
with "To Let" one finds him attributing this sense to human beings to a
degree which is, in my belief, entirely excessive. Soames Forsyte, "the
man of property," is portrayed to us as a man who regards all things,
human and otherwise, as things to be owned. His wife is a piece of
property just as a picture or a dog is. When he obtains a divorce from
her and marries a young French girl, Annette, he treats the latter
as a piece of valuable property useful for the purpose of producing
a still more valuable piece of property; and when Annette bears a
daughter to him, he is left exclaiming almost passionately that this
child is _his_, not hers and his, but _his_! All the members of the
Forsyte family, described with great particularity, are possessed of
this sense of property, but it is more highly developed in Soames than
in any of them. Even those members of it, like young Jolyon Forsyte,
who break with the family tradition, concentrate on this property
point. They only differ from the rest of the family in being anti-,
rather than pro-, property. None of them seems to be indifferent to
property. The dominating influence in their lives, either for happiness
or for misery, is property. Mr. Galsworthy states of them that as
they watched the funeral of Queen Victoria, they felt that they were
burying more history for their money than had ever been buried before.
One of the Forsyte women loves the statement of Christ that "In My
Father's house are many mansions" because it comforts her sense of
property. Most of the conflict in the Galsworthy novels springs from
the reactions of the characters to this sense, and it is laboured
to the point of attenuation. The temperamental differences between
Soames and Irene Forsyte in "The Man of Property" are obscurely stated,
and still more obscurely stated in the dramatized version of their
relationship called "The Fugitive," in which Soames and Irene become
George and Clare Dedmond, and Bosinney, the architect-lover, becomes
Malise, the journalist-lover. It is true that the differences which
break a marriage are sometimes the result of fundamental things which
cannot be described with the clarity of the items in an auctioneer's
catalogue; but the business of an artist is to make obscure things
plain and understandable, and the success of his work depends upon the
way in which he impresses his readers with the vagueness and obscurity
of these things and yet at the same time makes them realize how
substantial they are. Soames and Irene Forsyte may not be able to say
why they cannot live together, but Mr. Galsworthy must be able to do so
and he must empower his readers to do so, too. A novelist gives a sense
of inarticulateness in a character, not by making him so inarticulate
that the readers cannot hear or understand a word he is saying, but
by making his inarticulateness articulate. The danger into which many
writers tumble headlong is that they will spend all their energies on
getting the details right and will leave the general effect obscure.
One sees signs of this in Mr. Galsworthy's work. He is so busy endowing
his people with a sense of property that he occasionally omits to endow
them with a sense of humanity. If one compares the Forsyte novels,
say, "In Chancery," with Mrs. Edith Wharton's latest book, "The Age of
Innocence," one discovers that in each case, the theme is concerned
with the institution of the family, with the tribal instinct which
makes the majority of minds seek identity rather than dissimilarity.
But in Mrs. Wharton's book, this tribal instinct is humanly expressed,
whereas in Mr. Galsworthy's it is not. I recognize Mrs. Wharton's
people as human beings, but I am sceptical about Mr. Galsworthy's
people. Old Mrs. Mingott, in "The Age of Innocence," has affinity with
old Jolyon Forsyte in "The Man of Property" and "The Indian Summer of
a Forsyte." (He is the most human figure in the Saga.) But the rest
of the cast in the Forsyte Saga has less relevance to humanity than
the rest of the cast in "The Age of Innocence," and the reason is, I
think, that Mr. Galsworthy has allowed his theory to get the better of
his people, whereas Mrs. Wharton, whatever her theory may be, has kept
her eye very steadfastly on human beings. The Countess Olenska in "The
Age of Innocence" has verisimilitude which is absent from the figure
of Irene Forsyte in "The Man of Property" or Clare Dedmond in "The
Fugitive." We can comprehend Ellen Olenska, but Irene Forsyte utterly
eludes us.


V

One entertains oneself with noting how differently an experience
of life presents itself to Mr. Galsworthy from the way in which it
presents itself to Mr. Bernard Shaw. Mr. Galsworthy sends Falder,
in his play "Justice," to prison and flattens him out. Mr. Shaw
sends Margaret Knox and Bobby Gilbert, in "Fannie's First Play," to
prison and amazingly enlarges their lives. What utterly depresses Mr.
Galsworthy, stimulates and even exalts Mr. Shaw. If Mr. Galsworthy
tortures us to the point at which we wish to rush out of the theatre
and raze Wormwood Scrubbs and Pentonville to the ground, Mr. Shaw
causes us to feel that each of us might be considerably benefitted by a
sojourn there. Mr. Galsworthy sees a gaol as a place where thought is
destroyed or embittered: Mr. Shaw sees it as a place where thought is
provoked and clarified; and between them, a simple-minded person cannot
make up his mind whether to subscribe to the funds of the Howard League
for Penal Reform or to advocate penal servitude for every one in the
interests of Higher Thought. Adversity, says Mr. Galsworthy, knocks a
man down. Adversity, says Mr. Shaw, braces him up. The first statement
may fill a man with pity, but the latter is more likely to make a hero
of him.


VI

I like "The Country House" and "Five Tales" and "To Let" better than
anything else that Mr. Galsworthy has written. The human sense is more
truly felt in these books than in any others that he has done. There
are few figures in modern fiction so tender and beautiful as Mrs.
Pendyce in "The Country House" and few figures so immensely impressive
and indomitable as the old man in the story called "The Stoic" which
is the first of the "Five Tales." The craftsmanship of "To Let" is
superb--this novel is, perhaps, the most technically-correct book of
our time--but its human value is even greater than its craftsmanship.
In a very vivid fashion, Mr. Galsworthy shows the passing of a
tradition and an age. He leaves Soames Forsyte in lonely age, but he
does not leave him entirely without sympathy; for this muddleheaded
man, unable to win or to keep affection on any but commercial terms,
contrives in the end to win the pity and almost the love of the reader
who has followed his varying fortunes through their stupid career.
The frustrate love of Fleur and Jon is certainly one of the tenderest
things in modern fiction. Mr. Galsworthy has a love of beauty which
permeates everything that he writes and reconciles his more critical
readers to his dubious characterization. I suppose the truth about his
work is that he has not sufficiently disciplined his feelings and,
for this reason, allows his sympathies with his suffering people to
swamp his judgments. He is, in every act and thought, a chivalrous
man, and his instinct is, not to examine the facts of a case, but to
rush instantly and hotly to the defence of the seemingly defenceless.
An artist is never indifferent to the wrongs of men, but his artistry
prevents him from making mistakes about the persons who are suffering
the wrongs. One's fear is that Mr. Galsworthy is inclined to allow his
philanthropy to take the place of his artistry. Even in that fine book,
"The Country House," he sometimes makes a formula or a trick out of
some fine, instinctive sentiment. In the fourth chapter of part II, Mr.
Pendyce, during a period of stress, treads on a spaniel's foot.


     The spaniel yelped. "D----n the dog! Oh, poor fellow, John!" said
     Mr. Pendyce.


Now, in those words, one has exemplified the acute penetration into
people's minds and emotions which is discoverable in Mr. Galsworthy;
but he is not content to leave the incident in its simplicity and
nature. Before we have reached the end of the chapter, that instinctive
utterance by Mr. Pendyce has become a rather threadbare literary trick
by Mr. Galsworthy. Mr. Pendyce treads on the dog again two pages
later, and Mr. Pendyce repeats himself exactly: "D----n the dog! Oh,
poor fellow, John!" And five pages later, he treads on the spaniel
a third time, and a third time he says, "D----n the dog! Oh, poor
fellow, John!" It is obvious, surely, that on the first occasion, Mr.
Galsworthy made Mr. Pendyce speak from his heart, but on the second
and third occasions he made him speak like a ventriloquist's doll.
One can find many similarly inapt things even in this book, where Mr.
Galsworthy keeps very close to humanity. Mr. Pendyce ejaculates, on
hearing that his son has gone after illicit love, "What on earth made
me send George to Eton?" when he himself had been educated at another
school. One knows what Mr. Galsworthy is here trying to do, to express
the love of tradition and custom which governs the life of such a man
as Mr. Pendyce, but he does not achieve the effect by such speeches.
The reader feels certain that whatever else Mr. Pendyce may have said
on that occasion, he did not say, "What on earth made me send George
to Eton?" Too many of his people make impotent gestures, and it is
remarkable that these important people are nearly always his most
idealistic characters. Such an one is Gregory Vigil in "The Country
House" who constantly clutches his forehead and tilts his face towards
the sky and generally strikes attitudes of despair until one begins to
feel that he is the weakest of weaklings. And it is extraordinary to
observe what havoc Mr. Galsworthy, ordinarily a very fastidious writer,
sometimes makes of the English language. In "The Man of Property" he
gives a detailed description of Mrs. Septimus Small in the course of
which he states that "an innumerable pout clung all over" her face,
and on the page immediately succeeding the one on which that queer
description occurs, he states that Mrs. Small "owned three canaries,
the cat Tommy, and half a parrot--in common with her sister Hester...."
We may, perhaps, pass "an innumerable pout" as an impressionistic
phrase, but it is quite clear that carelessness caused Mr. Galsworthy
to say that Mrs. Septimus Small owned "half a parrot--in common with
her sister Hester" when what he wished to say was that Hester and she
were joint owners of a parrot! He sometimes uses images which are
almost ludicrous. In "Saints Progress," we get this curious account of
an old woman in tears:


     A little pasty woman with a pinched yellowish face was already
     sitting there, so still, and seeming to see so little, that Noel
     wondered of what she could be thinking. While she watched, the
     woman's face began puckering, and tears rolled slowly down,
     _trickling from pucker to pucker_....


The italics are mine.

It is his sincerity and his chivalry and his pity and his sense of
beauty, a little too conscious, perhaps, which, much more than his
powers of thought, make us read his novels and witness the performance
of his plays. These qualities tend to become obsessions in him with the
result that his sense of proportion and his verity are disorganized and
he is led into sentimentalities, some of which, on first sight, have an
impressive appearance which is not maintained after closer scrutiny.
In one of his plays, "A Bit o' Love," he makes the chief character, a
young clergyman, end the play with this prayer:


     God, of the moon and the sun; of joy and beauty, of loneliness and
     sorrow--Give me strength to go on, till I love every living thing.


That is a prayer which sounds impressive until it is critically
considered. It is not possible for a man to love every living thing.
There are certain things which he hates with his mind and certain
things which he hates with his instincts, and it is either very
difficult or impossible for him to control those hatreds. The best
he can hope for is the power to restrain his hatred from active
demonstrations. There are hatreds which he ought to possess, hatreds
which Mr. Galsworthy himself possesses in a high degree; hatred
of cruel men, hatred of oppressive men, hatred of men who promote
discord out of sheer devilish delight; but these hatreds are feeble
in comparison with the instinctive hatreds most of us have without
understanding why we have them. To pray for strength to go on until
one loves every living thing is, therefore, to pray for the moon,
and exalted desires which are insusceptible of realization become
banalities. There are times, in his anger at coarseness and cruel
insult and lack of pity, when Mr. Galsworthy attributes a degree
of ruffianliness to people which is lacking in verity. In "Saint's
Progress," he causes "two big loutish boys" to jeer at the old
clergyman, Pierson, whose daughter has had a war-baby without being
married. The two "loutish boys" shout after him, "Wot price the
little barstard?" Now, I simply do not believe that such a thing
happened or could have happened in London during the war. Cruelty
did not manifest itself in just that way, and it is here, I think,
that one discovers Mr. Galsworthy's chief disability, the fact that
his powers of observation are not so acute as one might reasonably
expect them to be. There is an old saying that the looker-on sees
most of the game--and there is some truth in it; but it is true
also that the looker-on may be totally ignorant of, or misinformed
about, the game, whereas those who are engaged in it have a fairly
comprehensive notion of what they are doing. Mr. Galsworthy gives
me the impression of being a looker-on at the game rather than a
participator in it, and although he is sometimes a very impassioned
spectator, yet he suffers from the disability of all spectators that
they are not clearly instructed in the principles and the prejudices
of the contest. He is praying for strength to love every living thing
when he should be praying for the power to distinguish between what is
lovable and what is detestable, between true things and false things.
There are few people who can depict the helplessness of dull men so
skilfully and movingly as Mr. Galsworthy can. I doubt whether any of
his contemporaries could so revealingly describe the state of mind
of a man, spiritually imperceptive and puzzled by his inability to
understand, as Mr. Galsworthy in his novel "In Chancery" has described
Soames Forsyte after he has obtained a divorce from his first wife.
The dumb animal bewilderment of this man, still in love with Irene but
utterly confounded by her complete revulsion from him, is done with the
most extraordinary penetration; and it is scenes such as this, which
cause his readers all the more to marvel at his obsessions and their
attendant failures.

One rises from a consideration of his work in the belief that he
pities mankind, but does not love it. He is a spectator of our
struggles rather than a comrade in them. He stands at the side of
the road or perhaps on an eminence a little way off and watches the
procession as it goes by. We feel certain that if we are in trouble
he will display signs of sorrow for us, but we are equally certain
that he will never share our common qualities and faults. Rabelais
would have been self-conscious in the presence of Mr. Galsworthy, had
they been contemporaries, and Mr. Galsworthy might have despised,
would certainly have been uncomfortable with that foul physician who,
nevertheless, corresponded more closely to this various clay we call
mankind, would have known and understood more certainly the ups and
downs of human character, the mixture of coarseness and refinement,
of falsity and faith, of chivalry and treachery, of generosity and
meanness, of selfishness and unselfishness, of rare and common, than
Mr. Galsworthy is ever likely to do. Mr. Hardy, in a preface to "Tess
of the D'Urbervilles" declares that "a novel is an impression, not an
argument" and in those eight words has summarized the whole business
of story-telling. Mr. Galsworthy can tell a story very skilfully. His
technique is remarkable, as any one who has read "To Let" or seen
a performance of "Loyalties" can testify; but there are too many
occasions when he seems to have let go his hold on reality and to be
writing out of dim memories which are growing dimmer. His characters
resemble people who are hurriedly seen through a window by one who
is ignorant of their identity and anxious, chiefly, to be at home.
They are making gestures and their lips move, but the hasty footfarer
outside cannot hear what they are saying and he sees only the gestures,
incomplete, perhaps, but does not know why they are made; and because
he knows so little, he is likely to misunderstand all. I imagine that
when Mr. Galsworthy goes into a garden, his delight in it is dashed by
the thought that somewhere near at hand a thrush is killing a snail!...

FOOTNOTE:

[4] _Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi_, by Maxim Gorki.




GEORGE MOORE


I

I was in Dublin on the day when the news of the Battle of Jutland was
announced in such abrupt terms that most people imagined the British
Fleet had been irretrievably defeated. The affairs of the Abbey
Theatre, of which I was then in control, had been brought to a pause
because of the military regulations imposed upon the city after the
Easter Rising, and Mr. Moore, new from London, asked me to employ
some of my leisure in making a reconciliation between Lady Gregory
and Mr. Yeats on the one hand and himself on the other. I foolishly
consented to see what could be done, chiefly because of the innocent
wonder which I detected in Mr. Moore at the fact that any one could
possibly take offence at anything he might say, however revelatory
of private affairs it might be; and I spent some time in the pursuit
of peace. Lady Gregory declared that she had no feeling against Mr.
Moore because of what he had said about her in his trilogy, "Hail and
Farewell," but that she could never forgive the insults it contained to
Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats, endeavouring to think deeply about the Rising,
declared that he had forgotten, if indeed he had ever remembered, the
insults to himself in the trilogy, but that he could not pardon those
offered to Lady Gregory. Moore had broken bread in her house, and then
had gone away and made fun of her! Worse than that, he had belittled
her work. He had said that her plays were not great plays and that her
"Kiltartan" dialect was not the dialect of the people of Ireland, but a
tortured, unrhythmic invention of her own!... I proposed to them that
they should pool their pardons and receive him into the fold again,
but my proposal was not accepted, and so I set off from Lady Gregory's
lodgings in Dublin to tell Mr. Moore, staying in the Shelbourne Hotel,
of the failure of my mission. On the way, I encountered newspaper
boys, carrying placards on which was printed the news of the Battle
of Jutland. When I got to the hotel and was shown into Mr. Moore's
private sitting-room, I found assembled there, Mr. Moore, white with
anger and dismay, "A. E.," "John Eglinton" (William Magee) and the
late W. F. Bailey, a Land Commissioner, a Privy Councillor and a
Trustee of the Abbey Theatre, who had the most extensive acquaintance
of any man I have ever known. Mr. Moore was seated in the middle of the
room, looking very like a portrait of himself, facing his friends, who
were huddled together on a sofa in the shadow as if they were three
misbehaving schoolboys receiving a severe rebuke from their master. I
could not tell Mr. Moore at that moment of the result of my mission,
and in the excitement of the subsequent argument I forgot to do so, but
I doubt whether he was then in a mood to care whether he was forgiven
or not.


II

It is several years now since that day when I heard Mr. Moore
haranguing Mr. Russell and Mr. Magee and Mr. Bailey on the Battle of
Jutland, but my recollection of the occasion is very vivid, partly
because I have a good memory for things which interest me (and none
at all for things in which I am not interested) but chiefly because
it seemed to me that on that day Mr. Moore definitely became an old
man. His age is not stated in the books of reference, for Mr. Moore
is as reticent as an actress on this point, but he is older than
Mr. Shaw, who is much older than Mr. Yeats or "A. E." It may seem
singular that he, so destitute of reserve in other and more intimate
matters, should be secretive on this, but I fancy that his failure
to publish the number of his years is due less to vanity than to
inability to believe that he is as old as they denote. Judged by the
rules of arithmetic his age is--so much; but judged by his feelings,
it is--much less. Facts are stubborn things, so we are told, demanding
acceptance and unquestioned admission, but Mr. Moore declines to accept
the fact of time: he ignores it. But on the day on which the news of
the Battle of Jutland was made public, the fact of time ceased to be
ignorable, and Mr. Moore, for the first moment in his life, yielded to
his years. He looked old and he talked as old men talk. There was a
note of panic in his voice, of frightened urgency, and he complained
bitterly of those who saw importance in a mean brawl in Dublin, but
remained indifferent to an event which might result in the destruction
of a desirable civilization. I doubt whether anything in the world
had ever until that day been serious to Mr. Moore in the sense that
loss and suffering and great grief are serious. I am certain that he
never understood why people were angry with him because of "Hail and
Farewell." The resentment manifested against him by Lady Gregory and
Mr. Yeats was to him incomprehensibly petty: the deeper resentment of
other people, more grievously wounded by his revelations which they
declared to be untrue, filled him with astonishment. The spectacle of
life was so much of a spectacle to him that he could not conceive of
it as anything else to others. He had made himself so completely, not
a participant in affairs, but an observer of them, that he had lost
the faculty of personal feeling. His interest in acts and motives
was so intense that he could not understand any one objecting to his
prying into the more entertaining of their private relationships.
Equally difficult was it for him to understand that they should deeply
disrelish the idea of having their affairs, intimate and even secret,
used as material for a book by Mr. Moore. Any human experience, he
seems to argue, particularly when narrated in his exquisite style, is
of value to mankind, and it must have seemed to him that there was
something, not only absurd, but also disgraceful in the objection many
people had to the publication of their private concerns. Had he not
paid tribute to privacy by omitting names or inventing others than the
proper ones? True, everyone knew who were the persons portrayed, but
was that his fault? And since every one knew already of the affairs,
what possible harm could there be in his putting them into perfect
and publishable prose? The objection raised by some persons that the
incidents narrated by him as facts were pure inventions was frivolous!
What was truth? Mr. Moore, like jesting Pilate, asked the question,
but did not wait for a reply: he published as quickly as he could. The
three volumes which make up "Hail and Farewell" are remarkable and have
much value, but it is necessary to remember that Mr. Moore has not
always been careful in them to distinguish between the historian and
the novelist, between the recorder and the inventor. There are many
dull passages in the trilogy, especially those in which he relates
his experiences with his kinsman, Mr. Edward Martyn, a charge which
Mr. Moore would not deny, but, on the contrary, proudly admit, for he
insists that dullness is a prominent feature of all great books. It
is only the newspapers and ephemeral books which are interesting from
beginning to end, he asserts--a statement which implies that Mr. Moore
has been happier in his newspapers than most people have. In this
matter of privacies, Mr. Moore was, and still is, the most complete and
consistent of communists. He believes in private property, but not in
private feelings. One imagines him, in the days before the Battle of
Jutland, asking in puzzled fashion, "What do you mean when you say you
_feel_ things? What _is_ feeling? Why should it ever be _private_?"
"This lady is in love with that gentleman who is not her husband! How
interesting! I shall write a book about their love for each other.
They may object! But why? Her husband's feelings!... Now, isn't that
absurd!" And so on. Miss Susan Mitchell, in a very entertaining, but
not entirely sympathetic book, entitled "George Moore," declares
that he seceded from the Roman Catholic Church because be objected
to the secrecy of the confessional. His sins, he considered, were so
absorbingly interesting that they ought to be publicly confessed rather
than confided to an undivulging priest. The flaw in Miss Mitchell's
argument is her assumption that Mr. Moore had any sins to confess!...


III

But on this day when the news of the Battle of Jutland was announced,
Mr. Moore seemed, for the first time in his life, to realize that
men and women do feel and suffer and bear loss; and the discovery
instantly aged him. The War which had so teasingly disturbed the
amenities of Ebury Street became in a moment something more than an
irritating scuffle in the dark--it became an immense disaster which
might make amenities forever impossible. The solidities of life were
in process of dissolution. Literary style amazingly mattered less than
the power of the commonest guttersnipe to kill. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in
the preface to "Heartbreak House," exclaims, "Imagine exulting in
the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!"
in a rebuke administered to the people who rejoiced in the news of
appalling death-rolls among Germans during the War. But on the field
itself, Beethoven and Bill Sykes cease to be Beethoven and Bill Sykes
and become, each, a very frightened man with a rifle and bayonet and
a strong desire to live. In that dreadful encounter, Bill Sykes would
not be thinking to himself, "Here comes Beethoven, a great master of
music, by whom it will be an honor to be killed!" but "'Ere comes a
bloody 'Un who will kill me unless I kill 'im!" The perception of
what was happening in Europe, of the horrible reduction of Beethovens
to the level of Sykeses, of Shakespeares to the level of Prussian
drill-sergeants (for they had to come down to those levels if they were
to have any hope of survival) made an old man of Mr. Moore. He threw up
his hands and made submission to his years. I listened to him while he
talked volubly and bitterly to "A. E." and "John Eglinton" and "Bill"
Bailey, as people called him, and marvelled to find him displaying so
much emotion over the naval disaster and its probable consequences. He
had written a preface for his brother, Colonel Moore's life of their
father, in which he had romantically stated that George Henry Moore,
his father, had committed suicide because his heart was broken by the
dishonourable behaviour of politicians. Colonel Moore printed the
preface, but denied the statement about his father, to which, however,
George still romantically clings. An English newspaper, _The Observer_,
in its issue for Sunday, April 10, 1921, printed the preface which Mr.
Moore had written for a new book to be published very soon thereafter.
In this preface, he very interestingly described the way in which he
was educated, and in the course of it occurred this paragraph:


     He was unhappy in the strife, for he loved his father; his father
     was always, and still is, the intimate and abiding reality of his
     life, and the evening that his father started for Ireland for the
     last time is quick among his memories. George's father returned
     from the front door to bid his son good-bye, and in obedience to
     a sudden impulse he took a sovereign out of his pocket and put it
     into the boy's hand, and went away to his death resolute, for he
     had come to see that his death was the only way to escape from his
     embarrassments, without injury to his family, and I can imagine
     him walking about the lake shores bidding them good-bye for ever.


I suppose that if George Henry Moore were to rise from the grave and
deny that he had died by his own hand, his son and heir, George, would
murmur aggrievedly, "You know, father, you are spoiling a very charming
story!..." He is still sufficiently insensitive not to understand that
life is something more than material for the storyteller's art--he
may, perhaps have relapsed from the state of understanding to which the
Battle of Jutland brought him,--but for that time, at all events until
the news of the Battle was amended, George Moore knew what private
feelings were, even although he could not keep them to himself. "A.
E.," looking woolly and worried, seemed to be completely deprived of
his powers of speech by Mr. Moore's angry rhetoric. "John Eglinton," a
scholarly essayist and the sanest man in Dublin, having much respect
for, but no delusion about, the ancient Gaelic literature of which we
hear so much and see so little, remained customarily mum. Mr. Bailey,
nervously garrulous as a rule, uttered jerky, but inarticulate, sounds
to which Mr. Moore paid absolutely no heed. I discreetly sat in a
corner and did not make a sound. The words flowed steadily from Mr.
Moore's lips--hot denunciation of the Rising, contemptuous references
to Kuno Meyer, rebukes for "A. E." (discovered to have flaws) and a
tremendous indictment of German culture, with a proviso in favour of
German music, together with admiring references to France, to French
literature and to the French Impressionists, particularly Manet. A
waiter intruded into the room for some purpose and was ordered out
again....


IV

Of all that Mr. Moore said on that extraordinary occasion, I remember
most his sudden outburst into what he called practical politics.
He demanded the impeachment of Mr. Asquith, the restoration of the
Coronation Oath and the abolition of all dogs! The comic incongruity of
those three items in a plan to win the war was apparent neither to him
nor his three elderly auditors, or so it seemed, and I deemed it wise
to control my laughter. Mr. Moore declared that Mr. Asquith's inertia,
of which we were hearing so much then, was certain to bring defeat to
the Allies. One of Mr. Asquith's daughters had sat beside Mr. Moore at
dinner one night in London and had informed her neighbour that "Father
is bored with the War!" whereupon Mr. Moore informed her (or so he
said) that her father's boredom might cause the Allies to lose the War.
Mr. Asquith was guilty of more serious crimes than that: he had ruined
the Irish gentleman and delivered the country over to hobbledehoys and
low minded peasants. Not content with ruining Ireland, no longer fit
to be inhabited by gentlemen, fit only to be the country of publicans,
pawnbrokers, priests and politicians, Mr. Asquith had tried to make
equal ruin in England. He has abolished the Coronation Oath which,
until his advent, had always been administered to the kings of England
at their crowning. In this Oath, they declare their belief that the
Mass is an idolatrous ceremony, not to be acknowledged by reasonable
persons and likely to be accepted only by vulgar Papists. Mr. Asquith,
mindful of the fact that many hundreds of thousands of Catholics are
members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, decided that the kings
of England should not be humiliated and embarrassed at their coronation
by the compulsion to insult the faith of many of their subjects; and so
he introduced a Bill into Parliament to abolish the Oath, which was,
in due time, abolished. Mr. Moore seemed to think that all the evils
from which mankind has suffered since 1914 directly sprang from that
political achievement.

As for dogs, these abominable animals, he said, are nuisances at any
time, but during a war and period of food shortage, they are a positive
menace to the country. He begged us to consider (a) the great quantity
of food consumed by dogs, (b) the amount of nervous irritability
brought about by their incessant yapping, and (c) the extent to which
they defile the streets. He threatened us with famine, insanity and,
finally, plague!... There is an English poet who is also a breeder
of bulldogs. Whenever he reads one of Mr. Moore's periodical canine
denunciations, he becomes so enraged that only the strongest efforts of
his friends prevent him from emptying the contents of his kennels on to
Mr. Moore's doorstep that they may there do their worst. The ambition
of his life is to see one of his bulldogs fasten its teeth firmly in
the calf of Mr. Moore's venerable leg....


V

All that has been written here so far will seem to support the
superstition that Mr. Moore is a trifler with life, that he is a man
destitute of serious purposes; but I am anxious to make plain to
my readers that this superstition is a superstition. His lack of
reticence about his own and other people's affairs and his perverse
incursions into what he imagines to be practical politics are obviously
responsible for the belief that he is what is called "a typical
Irishman," that is to say, a man without a sense of responsibility.
My experience is that "typical Irishmen" are generally discovered
to be Englishmen or Welshmen or New York East Side Jews--the late
Padraic Pearse, Mr. Arthur Griffith and Mr. de Valera correspond to
those descriptions--but it is undeniable that Mr. Moore, not without
deliberation, has helped to maintain the legend that Irishmen are
without a sense of responsibility. When, for example, during one of
the many Home Rule crises, he suggested that the trouble between the
two islands of Great Britain and Ireland might easily be settled by
intelligent engineers, many persons were of the opinion that a man
who could talk such twaddle, as they called it, in a time of much
difficulty ought to be imprisoned. The proposal, when the details were
disclosed, confirmed pessimists in their profound belief that the
unsurmountable obstacle to the solution of Irish affairs is the Irish
themselves! What Mr. Moore suggested was this: that a thick wall
should be built across the North Channel between the Giant's Causeway
and the Mull of Kintyre, and that another thick wall should be built
across St. George's Channel between Carnsore Point and St. David's
Head. These operations completed, the engineers should then pump out
all the water in the Irish Sea, fill in the resultant gap with earth,
and make one island out of two! He seemed not to have considered the
case of Liverpool. What, some one jestingly demanded, would become
of that great port when deprived of its "pool"? What also, he might
have added, would become of Belfast and Dublin, deprived, the one of
its Lough, and the other, of its Bay? Mr. Moore might have retorted
that what Ireland lost on Belfast Lough it would more than gain on
Galway Bay, but he preferred to remain silent. One could, of course,
draw a conclusion, packed with thought and judgment, from Mr. Moore's
playful proposal, and I do not doubt that such was his intention; but
the average person is either too busy or disinclined to draw such
conclusions from anything; and so, having glanced casually at the
details of Mr. Moore's plan to settle the Irish Question, he turned
impatiently away, convinced (a) that Mr. Moore was an incorrigible
buffoon, and (b) that the government of Ireland must ever remain an
unsolved problem because of the Irish people's amazing inability to
conduct themselves reasonably!

But Mr. Moore has a serious purpose in life, and he pursues that
serious purpose with indefatigable industry. The immediate and
unmistakable fact about him is that he is an artist. There are few
writers in English, not even excepting Mr. Conrad, who have so much
power over words as is possessed by George Moore, and this power has
been achieved, as all power is achieved, by incessant labour and the
most pure devotion. He is, in the real sense, a self-made man. The
artistry that is undeniably his has been wrought not only in the sweat
of his brain, but in face of powerful obstacles. His position as the
heir of a fairly well-to-do landowner in Ireland might have resulted
in him becoming a minor poet, publishing tiny verses in tiny volumes,
or a small author of fragile essays about butterflies and pierrots.
He did, in fact, begin his writing career, as most reputable writers
do, by composing poems, but he speedily turned to prose. He actually
published verses in books entitled "Flowers of Passion"--a name which
incongruously suggests Baudelaire and Ella Wheeler Wilcox--and "Pagan
Poems," but, so far as I have been able to discover, no one has ever
seen these books or read the poems contained in them. The first was
published in 1877 and the second in 1881 and we may conclude that they
have been dissolved by the chemicals of time. Miss Mitchell, in the
book to which reference has already been made, states that "nobody in
Ireland has ever seen any of Mr. Moore's paintings except 'A. E.' to
whom he once shyly showed a head, remarking that it had some 'quality.'
'A. E.' remained silent." The poems remain under the same kindly
condemnation. The favourable fortune which might have made a minor
poet, and nothing but a minor poet, out of Mr. Moore was one of the
powerful obstacles to his becoming a master of prose.

The other was the attempt made by his father to influence his mind.
In the preface from which I have already made a brief quotation, he
gives an account of his education at the Roman Catholic school of
Oscott. George, it seemed, had a reticence in his childhood which he
remarkably lost in maturity: he refused to confess his sins on the
singular ground that he had not got any sins to confess. He had not
then learned, seemingly, that he who has not got any sins to confess,
can easily invent a few. The story of this episode is fully narrated
in "Hail and Farewell," but in the new preface Mr. Moore summarizes it
and tells how his father was summoned to Oscott by the president of
the school "to inquire into his son's lack of belief in priests and
their sacraments." The upshot of the business was that the boy, "not
only the last boy in the class, but in the last class in the school--in
a word, the dunce of the school" was removed from Oscott for private
instruction at home in Mayo. "George's case is really very alarming,"
the president wrote to his father, and the letter contained the
admission that he did not know whether George would not or could not
learn.

It is exceedingly illuminating to observe how his prose style has grown
through a series of very diverse books into its present condition. One
of his most remarkable novels, as it is also one of his earliest, "A
Mummers Wife," was clearly written under the influence of Zola, but
with such individual quality that Zola might profitably have taken
lessons from his pupil. The difference between Emile Zola and George
Moore is that while Zola never forgot to be a doctrinaire, Moore never
forgot to be an artist. "A Mummer's Wife" was unaccountably banned by
the circulating libraries in England, and, such is the conservatism
of these remarkable institutions, that I believe the ban is still
maintained, although a generation has arisen which regards it as very
restrained indeed. The style in which it is written is somewhat arid,
and the reader is not carried forward by the flow of the story itself,
but is forced along by its weight. A comparison between "A Mummer's
Wife," or "Esther Waters," and such later books as "The Lake" or "The
Brook Kerith" reveals such a difference in manner that the critic has
some difficulty in believing that all four novels came from the mind
of the same author. Mr. Wells is a writer with many manners, but the
reader can discover a unifying characteristic, unmistakably Wellsian,
in all of them. Mr. Shaw, a more consistent author than most men of his
quality, has kept so closely to one level that the difference between
his earliest, his best and his latest work is merely the difference
of degree between growing powers, highest powers and declining powers.
The style in the novels, "Love Among the Artists," "The Unsocial
Socialist," "The Irrational Knot" and "Cashel Byron's Profession"
is the same style, under less control, as the style of "Man and
Superman," "John Bull's Other Island," "Heartbreak House" and "Back To
Methuselah." But in Mr. Moore's case the style of "A Mummer's Wife" has
no obvious relationship to that of "The Lake" or "The Brook Kerith."
The difference between the earlier books and the later ones is the
difference between the flow of a river through a canal and the flow of
a river through its natural bed.


VI

"A Mummer's Wife" is a powerful story, told in a skilful and impressive
fashion, but it leaves the reader less conscious of life than of
mechanics. As a piece of construction it is a better novel than "The
Brook Kerith," but as a piece of literature it is not. The quality
of life is dusty and arranged in the early book, but it is alert and
vibrant and natural in the later one. One notable feature of "A
Mummer's Wife" is the display of knowledge by Mr. Moore of things
and of places with which one would not expect him to be familiar.
His acquaintance with grooms and horse-racing, manifested in "Esther
Waters," is understandable in a man who was reared in a country-house
where the language of the stable must have been familiar. But how did
Mr. Moore obtain his intimacy with the interior of a small draper's and
milliner's shop in one of the Five Towns in Staffordshire, together
with his knowledge of the details of life lived by a touring theatrical
company? Mr. Arnold Bennett's knowledge of the Five Towns and the
interior of a small shop is explained by the fact that he was born in
such circumstances in one of the Five Towns. Mr. Leonard Merrick's
intimate knowledge of the life of a travelling theatrical company is
explained by the fact that he was once an actor in such a company.
But how did Mr. Moore, the son of a prosperous Irish landowner of
aristocratic origin, acquire his close intimacy with the details of
such life? It is this aspect of the book which reveals the existence
in Mr. Moore of a high faculty which was absent from the mind of his
first master, Zola, the faculty of imagination. Zola made his novels
out of things actually witnessed or learned from books, but Mr. Moore
made his novels out of his own imagination. Zola could only write about
life in a small shop in a small town after he had actually lived in it,
but Mr. Moore wrote "A Mummer's Wife," with no more knowledge of Hanley
than a person passing through it might possess, and gave his readers an
impression of deep intimacy with it.

This book, notable in itself, had a notable result. It was read by a
young writer, named Enoch Arnold Bennett, then engaged in journalism
and the production of semi-sensational novels. Bennett was a native
of "the Five Towns" district, born in a place called Shelton to the
north-east of the town of Hanley which is the scene of "A Mummer's
Wife." Mr. Bennett himself told me that until he read "A Mummer's Wife"
he never thought of writing about "the Five Towns." The Staffordshire
people had no literary significance to him until that significance
was revealed by "A Mummer's Wife." Mr. Bennett probably exaggerates
the extent of his debt to Mr. Moore. He would, sooner or later, have
explored the rich mine from which he produced the ore of "The Old
Wives' Tale" and "Clayhanger"--it is ludicrous to imagine that but for
the happy accident of reading "A Mummer's Wife" he would never have
done so--but it is not improbable that Mr. Moore's story brought him
to his proper milieu earlier than he might otherwise have reached it.
The reader can profitably entertain himself by comparing "the Five
Towns," the places and the people, of "A Mummer's Wife" with "the Five
Towns," places and people of "The Old Wives' Tale" and "Clayhanger."
The difference between Mr. Moore's account and Mr. Bennett's is the
difference between careful and acute observation by an intelligent
stranger, alien in birth and tradition and training, and the knowledge,
inherited from his forefathers and acquired in childhood and youth, of
a native. Mr. Moore had to "mug up" his subject, as schoolboys say,
but Mr. Bennett was born with most of it. The description of Hanley
in the first chapter of "The Old Wives' Tale" (where it is named
Hanbridge by Mr. Bennett) contrasts remarkably with the description
of the same town in "A Mummer's Wife," as does the description of a
pottery seen through Mr. Bennett's eyes in "Leonora" with that of
a pottery seen through Mr. Moore's eyes in the fourth chapter of "A
Mummer's Wife." These differences of description are, of course, the
result of a difference in temperament between the two men which is
perhaps most clearly revealed in the way in which they portray old
women in their books and deal with scenes of suffering. An intelligent
reader of "A Mummer's Wife" and "The Old Wives' Tale," having made
allowance for the fact that the first-named was written by a young man
beginning his career, and the second by a man approaching middle-age
and the apex of his power, could draw up a fairly accurate statement
of the character of each of the authors by comparing the figure of
old Mrs. Ede in Mr. Moore's novel with that of old Mrs. Baines in Mr.
Bennett's. The contrast between the scene of suffering pictured in
the first chapter of "A Mummer's Wife" and that in the first chapter
of "The Old Wives' Tale" would considerably assist him in making the
statement. The painful insistence on the details of the asthma which
afflicted Mr. Ede is in sharp opposition to the almost jocular fashion
in which Mr. Povey's toothache is described. Both books end with the
death of the principal figures. Kate Ede dies disquietly. One might
say that Constance and Sophia Baines also die disquietly. But there
is a difference in the disquiet. Constance and Sophia had had their
share of disappointment and trouble and had lost their illusions, but
at least they had had their fill of life, each as she desired it, and
if there had been disappointment, there had also been satisfaction:
the illusions were lost, but while they lasted they were agreeable.
Kate died before she had had her fill of life, without illusions and
also, which is worse, without agreeable memories. Youth insists that
life is either very gay or very dismal--and "A Mummer's Wife" was
written by a young man; but Maturity knows that the colours of life are
mingled rather than uniform, and that even when the end is a dismal
one, the journey to it has not been without moments of fragrance
and pleasure--and "The Old Wives' Tale" was written by a man in his
maturity. The similarities between these two books are as interesting
as their differences, and a close study of them leaves the reader at
once aware of very dissimilar personalities and with enhanced respect
for both of them.


VII

It is when we come to such novels as "The Lake" and "The Brook Kerith"
that we discover Mr. Moore at his greatest. Zola is forgotten and only
the strength of Mr. Moore himself is now displayed. "The Lake" is
among the most beautiful stories of our time, a finely-conceived and
finely-wrought book, more complete and unified than "The Brook Kerith,"
which, in spite of much beauty and scholarship, is marred organically
by a dispersal of the interest. The latter novel is in three sections,
the first dealing with Joseph of Arimathea, the second with Jesus, and
the third with Paul. Each of these sections by itself is well and even
superbly done, although in my judgment, the first of them is much the
best of the three; but the interest which the reader has in any one
of the three sections is not felt in the whole book because the three
great figures are not grouped together. We begin with Joseph and then,
at the point when we are absorbed in him, are hurried on to Jesus,
undergoing a similar experience with Him when we are hurried off to
Paul. The book is not a closely-knit drama in which the characters
constantly act and re-act upon each other, but is more akin to three
separate plays in which certain figures recur in greater or less
positions. Mr. Moore, in short, was uncertain whether to make Joseph
or Jesus or Paul the hero of his story, and he unwisely compromised
by making each of them hero for a portion of it, with the result
that each is of supreme importance for a third of the book and of
subordinate importance for the remainder of it. "The Brook Kerith" is,
nevertheless, a considerable achievement and is in itself sufficient to
secure a high place in English letters for its author.

The legend is that Mr. Moore is a trifler with life, a man without
purpose, immensely egotistical, having some of the simplicity of the
buffoon. The truth is that he is an audacious, exceedingly adroit and
utterly unthwartable artist who bends the visible world to his purpose
of discovering and perfecting a formula of words with which to express
his vision of the invisible world. He has, indeed, a simplicity of
character, but it is not the simplicity of the buffoon: it is the
immense and dissolving simplicity of the man of genius.




BERNARD SHAW


I

There is a kind of shy, embarrassed man of merit who cannot keep or
even reach to his proper position in the world without making some
sort of pretence about himself. Mr. Bernard Shaw is such a man. He has
created his legend with such extraordinary skill that those who know
him well have great difficulty in persuading the general public, which
has neither the time nor the intelligence to understand a man of marked
personality, to believe that the legend _is_ a legend, that the reputed
Bernard Shaw is not the real Bernard Shaw. The common notion is that
he has an insatiable craving for publicity, is immensely conceited and
self-centred, and does not care what folly of thought or conduct he
commits if by so doing he draws attention to himself. The truth about
him is that he is a shy and nervous man, singularly humble-minded
and sincere, very courageous and full of quick, penetrating wisdom,
and so generous and kindly that he may be said to be willing to do
more for his friends than his friends will do for themselves. He is
a Don Quixote without illusions. When he tilts at windmills, he does
so because they are _wind_mills in private ownership, and he wishes
them to be driven by electricity and owned by the local authority. In
print and on platforms, Mr. Shaw brags and boasts and lays claim to
an omniscience that would scandalize most deities, but no one who has
the ability to distinguish between sincerity and mere capering is in
the least deceived by his platform conceit. He is one of the very few
men in the world who can brag in public without being offensive to his
auditors. He can even insult his audience without hurting its feelings.
There is a quality of geniality and kindliness in his most violent
and denunciatory utterance that reconciles all but the completely
fat-headed to a patient submission to his chastisement; and his most
perverse statements are so swiftly followed by things profoundly true
and sincerely said that those who listen to him are less conscious of
his platform tricks than are those who merely read newspaper reports
of his speeches. This is largely due to the fact that the newspapers
print only his flippant and fantastic stuff, and omit his vital matter.
I have seen reporters at one of his meetings sitting with their pencils
loosely dangling from their fingers while Mr. Shaw spoke wisely and
deeply, and then, when he uttered some trivial or outrageous thing,
coming to life and hastily scribbling the jape into their notebooks.

It is my purpose here to insist that Mr. Shaw is a shy man with a
large element of the gawky school boy in him so that he is awkward
and embarrassed when he comes suddenly into the presence of strangers
without having been warned that strangers are to be encountered. I have
seen him blush like a boy on finding people in a room which he had
expected to find unoccupied, and when one meets him casually in the
street he is at first nonplussed and without conversation or power to
do more than smile amiably. It is not easy to make this shyness of his
plain to those who have met him once or twice because he has remarkable
powers of recovery and can cover up his initial embarrassment with very
great skill; and also because his platform manners are very easy and
his general social manners are exceedingly gracious. He has made many
pretences in his life, but the one pretence that he has never succeeded
in maintaining is the pretence that he is a bad-mannered man. There are
stories told of him that seem to show him in a graceless, even cruel,
character, but these are no more than might be expected from a man of
nervous temperament who is being bothered excessively by the demands of
people who have no right to make demands on him at all. Against those
stories may be set far more stories of acts of exceptional kindliness
to those who are in trouble or in need of advice and encouragement.
Very few great men have given so generously of their time and strength
to helping young men of talent to obtain recognition as Mr. Shaw has
done.

His awkwardness of manner when taken unawares is very different from
that of Mr. Yeats in similar circumstances. Mr. Shaw is shy and
awkward with strangers, but Mr. Yeats, who has never been shy in his
life, is only awkward. Mr. Shaw, because he is naturally gracious,
recovers himself more quickly than Mr. Yeats, who has cultivated his
graciousness; and it may be said of them that Mr. Shaw has the manners
of a man instinctively gentle, whereas Mr. Yeats has the manners of a
man who has practised deportment before a cheval glass.


II

It is obvious that a man so shy and easily embarrassed as Mr. Shaw is
cannot hope to make a swift impression upon his contemporaries unless
he commits an outrage upon his own nature. A world which regards
modesty as a sign of incompetence, if not of actual imbecility, is
slow to recognize the real merits of a man unless he lays claim to
merits which he has not got. In the long run, the crowd pays tribute to
great men, but Mr. Shaw was anxious that tribute should be paid to him
immediately. Fame at the age of eighty offered few inducements to him,
and posthumous fame offered no inducements at all. He had something to
say to a world disinclined to listen to him, and he felt that he could
not persuade it to do so unless he first of all performed some unusual
platform tricks to catch its attention. Something of his principle
seemed to be in the mind of a tipster whom I saw on Epsom racecourse
before the war began. I was walking in the crowd on the course, which
the police were not yet clearing, when suddenly a very well-dressed man
in my neighbourhood seemed to go out of his mind. He whirled violently
round, uttered a fierce yell, flung an expensive silk hat into the
air and waved his gold-headed cane in a very disturbing fashion. He
then began to chant in a manner not unlike the way in which Mr. Vachel
Lindsay recites his poem on the Congo!... By the time he had finished
this performance, a considerable crowd had collected around him. I was
in the forefront of it, and while I was wondering how long it would
be before the police arrived to take charge of the demented man, he
recovered his sanity and proceeded to sell tips for the two-thirty
race. I bought one of them. I put money that was rare and precious
on the horse which he commended to my patronage. And the horse lost
the race!... Mr. Shaw climbed on to platforms and into newspapers,
shouting at the top of his voice, "I am better than Shakespeare" in the
hope that he might convince the world that he had any merit at all.
He performed tricks in public in order to make people believe that he
could think in the theatre. He wore comic clothes and refused to shave
and conducted a rebellion against evening dress and silk hats and
boiled shirts. He declined to eat meat, to smoke tobacco or to drink
wine. He said that he was an atheist and an immoral writer. He tried to
train his eyebrows into the shape which is called Mephistophelian. He
saw himself in the role of the Fat Boy in "Pickwick Papers" trying to
make men's flesh creep, and was disgusted to find that the Fat Boy's
most valuable asset, his obesity, had been denied to him and given to
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, who would not make any one's flesh creep for
the value of the world! Finally, he announced that he was a Socialist.
His Socialism was not a platform trick: it was his serious faith; but
it became so associated in the public mind with his platform tricks
that he had only to say in public that he was a Socialist and his
audience would giggle as if that were the most amusing thing they had
ever heard. This habit of performing platform tricks undoubtedly drew
a large crowd to listen to him, and he did not fail to deliver himself
of his peculiar faith to that crowd when he had collected it; but
there were considerable drawbacks to his method of securing attention.
The crowd could never quite rid itself of the belief that he was "one
of those comic chaps." It admitted that he was a very clever "comic
chap," but firmly at the back of the popular mind was the belief that
he did not mean one half of what he said and was not entirely sincere
about the remaining half. It liked to see him performing in public,
and it paid large sums of money to hear him lecture in behalf of
causes that were abhorrent to it. Duchesses, for example, contributed
heavily to the funds of Socialist societies simply for the privilege
of hearing him speak, and duchesses do not love Socialist societies.
The crowd talked about him to a remarkable extent; it read his books;
it attended performances of his plays; it went to hear him lecture
... but it insisted that what was important about him was, not his
advocacy of this or that, but his power to excite laughter. When he was
most in earnest, the crowd said, "He's so witty!" and left the matter
there. That, perhaps, is why "Common Sense and the War" aroused so
much wrath in England. The crowd, accustomed to tittering behind its
hand or laughing outright at Mr. Shaw's wit, was disconcerted by the
serious way in which he dealt with the War in that notorious pamphlet.
It was so shocked by what he said that it professed to be indignant
that any man could cut comic capers at so awful a moment. Mr. Shaw was
not cutting any capers, comic or otherwise, but the crowd, trained by
him to believe that he was a comedian, could not believe that he was
capable of being anything else. That pamphlet, ill-timed, perhaps, in
some respects, was yet well-timed in this respect, that it reminded
the British people of their most priceless privilege, the right of
free speech. The whole of the British press collapsed before the Press
Censor, and editors were afraid to open their mouths about things which
were scandalous. Mr. Shaw restored the freedom of the press. He said
what he had to say and he said it with the utmost courage and force,
and within a week or two from the date of publication of his pamphlet,
the timid editors were rearing up their heads and daring to say "Bo!"
to the political geese.

There were times, perhaps, when he seemed to be yielding to the mob's
desire to be tickled, when the one thing apparently that moved him
was his delight in making the crowd giggle and guffaw; and now and
then his friends felt that he was overdoing the tricks, that he was
monotonously informing people that he was "better than Shakespeare," a
statement that seemed as idle as if Anatole France were to say that he
was "better than" Victor Hugo, when in fact the men are so dissimilar
that there is no means of comparing them. But the danger, such as it
was, amounted to little, for when all the discount is made that can
be made for possible charlatanry in his character, there remains this
indisputable fact that he has left a mark on the thought and life
not only of the English-speaking world, but of the whole of Western
civilization, which cannot be eradicated. We may go to the theatre to
laugh at Mr. Shaw, but we remain to think with him.


III

Oddly enough, there was another dramatist, also an Irishman, whose
practice was precisely the opposite of Mr. Shaw's: a shy, nervous man
who permitted himself to be cheated of a position of authority because
of his modesty. John Millington Synge was what Mr. Shaw might have
been had he allowed his nature to run off to dark corners and hide
itself. Synge could not compel himself to climb on to platforms or make
extravagant boasts. He may have had the desire to make boasts, but he
had not the courage to do so. An excellent comrade for an individual
on a country road, he was so nervous in the presence of an audience of
more than six people that he was in danger of physical sickness, and
he may be said to have died of sheer inability to assert himself. Had
it not been that Mr. Yeats was by to do Synge's boasting for him, the
world might never have heard of that singular man of twisted talent.
Mr. Yeats, indeed, boasted so loudly of Synge's gifts that superficial
persons began to believe that Synge was the greater man of the two, and
I remember on one occasion hearing young women, fresh from Newnham,
boldly declaring that Mr. Yeats's chief title to remembrance would
lie in the fact that he had discovered Synge! I have never been able
to convince myself that Synge was a great man of genius; it is not
necessary to convince oneself that Mr. Yeats is a great man of genius:
the fact is obvious. Synge was a man of peculiar and interesting
talent whose work smelt too strongly of the medicine bottle to be of
supreme merit. He was the sick man in literature, and he had the sick
man's interest in cruelty and harshness and violent temperaments. He
had the weak man's envy of strength and the weak man's tendency to
mistake violence for strength. His plays are better than Mr. Yeats's
plays--"Riders to the Sea" is immeasurably better than "Kathleen ni
Houlihan"--but Mr. Yeats is a greater poet than Synge was a dramatist.
I am disinclined to believe that Synge was a _great_ dramatist. He
brought a desirable element of bitterness and acrid beauty into the
sticky mess of self-satisfaction and sentimentalism which is known as
Irish Literature, but I feel that he was lacking in staying-power. He
shot his bolt when he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," the
chief value of which lay in the fact that it ripped up the smugness of
the Irish people, than whom there are no other people in the world so
pleased with themselves on such slender grounds, and taught them the
much-needed lesson that they are very like the rest of God's creatures.
Synge portrayed the Irish people faithfully as he saw them: he put in
the element of poetry in the Celtic character, but he also put in the
element of cruelty; he put in the wit and generosity, but he also put
in the dullness and the greed; he put in the gallantry, but he also
put in the cowardice; he put in the nobility, but he also put in the
gross brutality. In other words, he saw at the same time the idealism
of Padraic Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh permeated by the incredible
brutality of De Valera's ruffians. He knew the delicate sense of beauty
which suffuses the poetry of Mr. Padraic Colum and he smelt the odour
of the charnel-house that rises from the work of Mr. James Joyce,
and had he been able to keep the two sides of Irish character justly
poised, he would have been a great man of genius; but he was not able
to keep the balance between them. He tended more and more to see merit
in cruelty and harshness, and he turned away from the sensitive and
delicate beauty of Mr. Colum to the sewer-revelations of Mr. Joyce, who
may fitly be described as Rabelais after a nervous breakdown. People
tell me that "Deirdre of the Sorrows," his unfinished play, is the
greatest of all the plays that have been written about that unhappy
and romantic lady; and perhaps what they say is true, for none of the
plays that have been written about her, Mr. Herbert Trench's or "A.
E.'s" or Mr. Yeats's, are in the great line, though all of them are
interesting. But judged by itself or in relation to plays generally,
it does not seem to me to be a great drama nor is it so meritable as
some of Synge's own plays of earlier origin. It marks to me the limit
of his range, and shows signs of drooping energy. Some may say that I
am attributing to failing powers what should be attributed to sickness
and the imminence of death, but I think I am dealing justly with this
odd intruder into the realm of letters when I say that his talent was a
small one and that had he lived for twice as many years as he actually
did live, he would not have produced anything of greater note than he
had written when he died.


IV

Platform tricks saved Mr. Shaw from falling to the Synge level. Contact
with rude men and ruder women in public places kept him in familiar
alliance with normal things, and so it came about that his genius,
though it soared, never soared out of sight. He marched ahead of the
crowd, but he never went so far ahead of it that it could not catch
up with him. He urged reluctant men and women to follow him along the
paths that were obscure and difficult, but he never urged them to try
a path which he had not himself explored, or was unwilling to explore.
Not all of his advice was accepted ... not all of it was worthy of
acceptance ... but all of it, accepted or rejected, was listened to.
He would have found a readier agreement to take his advice if he had
been less logical in his arguments, but his mind governs his life so
completely that he cannot make any allowances for the wayward character
of the average man. He has given himself so completely to his mind that
his feelings seem to have atrophied. He is incapable, apparently, of
understanding the beauty and fascination of mere irrelevancy. A study
of his work reveals no consciousness on his part of natural beauty. He
seems not to know that a tree is a lovely thing, that its loveliness is
entirely without moral or sociological significance. He would probably
agree with Dr. Johnson that one field is very like another field, that
water in one part of the world is identical with water in another part
of the world ... and would be just as remote from the truth as Dr.
Johnson was: for one field is not like another field, and water in one
place can be very dissimilar in look from water in some other place.
Mr. Shaw would not suffer one pang at the destruction of St. Paul's
Cathedral if he felt that its destruction made the processes of life
more convenient to the ordinary citizen. If he had to choose between
Rheims Cathedral and an improved drainage system for France ... a thing
which France very badly needs, as any one with a nose can tell ... he
would choose the drainage system. The College of Cardinals is less
lovely in the eyes of Mr. Shaw than the members of a Borough Council.
He would rather possess a good fountain-pen than the first folio of
Shakespeare's plays. There was a man in Dublin who singularly resembled
him in everything except wit. Francis Sheehy Skeffington, who was
wrongly executed in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, had Mr. Shaw's
logical faculty without Mr. Shaw's redeeming wit. He was a very honest,
courageous, and personally attractive man, just as Mr. Shaw is, but he
was also a very wrong-headed man and totally incapable of any sort of
concerted action with other people. Mr. Shaw's wit brings him into more
cordial relationship with other human beings than Sheehy Skeffington
would ever have achieved. I remember, just before the war began,
meeting Skeffington in North Wales. He, too, was insensible to natural
beauty and was without respect for tradition or ancient institutions.
I took him one evening to a lake in Anglesey where many reeds grew. I
asked him to watch while I clapped my hands, and when I had done so,
thousands of starlings flew out of the reeds with a great fluttering
of wings, making a tremendous disturbance because they had been roused
from their sleep. Skeffington gazed at these birds as if he had never
seen a starling before. I judged by the look of astonishment in his
face that if he could have persuaded himself to believe in magic, he
would have regarded me as a magician. By merely smiting my hands, I had
filled the air with fluttering birds! This experience so interested
me that I decided to make other experiments with Skeffington, and
so, on the following day, I took him to a field outside the village
where some very fine druidical remains were to be seen. I led him
up to the stones and waited to see what effect they would have upon
him. He looked at them for a few moments, and then, quite unmoved by
the fact that they had been standing there for more than a thousand
years and were all that was left of an ancient religion, he took a
piece of paper from his pocket and, murmuring in his high-pitched
Ulster voice, "I think I'll do a little propaganda!" thrust it into a
crevice of the old altar. The paper had VOTES FOR WOMEN on it! He was
totally incapable of understanding why this act of his disgusted me.
His mind was indifferent to such things as tradition; he simply could
not visualize those stones as anything other than a remarkably useful
hoarding on which to advertise his latest enthusiasm. I suppose that if
he thought of the druids at all, he thought contemptuously of them as
barbarians to whom had been denied the enlightenment that he enjoyed;
and his desperately logical mind, working on the fact that many persons
would visit these remains, suggested to him that here was an excellent
opportunity of thrusting his propaganda upon the attention of people
reluctant to give any heed to it!...

I cannot conceive of Mr. Shaw doing just that thing because his wit
would save him from it; but I feel that if his wit were taken from him
or had been denied to him, he would have behaved exactly as Sheehy
Skeffington behaved then. It is his superb, spontaneous wit that keeps
him in continuous contact with normal men. Synge had no wit, and
because he had not, was thrust into solitude. Skeffington had no wit
... there never was on earth a man so destitute of a sense of humour
as Francis Skeffington ... and because he had not, he lived a life of
intellectual isolation from his fellows in spite of the fact that most
people liked him. Skeffington's courage and honesty ... and I have
known few men so courageous and honest as he was ... served him partly,
but not wholly, as Mr. Shaw's wit serves him. Mr. Shaw has great
intellectual courage and is a very honest man, but these qualities,
though they win respect in the long run, have an isolating effect on a
man in such a world as this, and were it not for his wit, he would be
an Ishmael, too. Take the wit from Mr. Shaw and the courage from Sheehy
Skeffington, substitute for them a fractious sense of beauty, and the
result is ... John Millington Synge.


V

Mr. Chesterton has illustrated the peculiar quality of the English
mind by comparing the roads of France with the roads of England; and
the comparison might be used to illustrate the difference between
the mind of Mr. Shaw and the mind of the average man. Mr. Chesterton,
with that startling profundity that is to be discovered in much of
his writing that seems at first merely to be conjuring stuff, asserts
that the design of English and French roads, the first all winding and
irregular, the second straight as if drawn with the aid of a ruler,
shows a fundamental difference between the two races: the English as
wayward and casual as their roads, going lazily and easily to their
journey's end; the French as logical and well-defined as their roads,
going without any circumlocution to their journey's end. Mr. Shaw's
mind goes directly to its goal, and he tries to persuade the rest of
mankind to follow his example. But the rest of mankind does not wish
to go by the most direct route to any goal: it wants to dally on the
ways; it wants to explore all the little bye-paths and hidden corners;
it even wants to turn back on its course to examine again some place
that it has already seen; and above all, it wants to waste time. When
Mr. Shaw contemplates the world engaged in this careless way of living,
he bursts into a passion of wit where less gifted men, such as Sheehy
Skeffington, would burst into anger; and he lashes the world with
his tongue. Mankind, because Mr. Shaw is a genius, listens to him, as
mankind always has listened to men of genius, in a puzzled fashion, and
even speculates on whether it ought not to follow his advice; but it is
in the nature of man to be illogical, and so, after a little thought,
man goes on being wayward and casual. Even in France, where logic has
become an obsession, men are more illogical than Mr. Shaw would have
them be; and it is a very curious commentary on his work that in so
logical a country as France, his plays make far less stir than in any
other country in Europe. I imagine that the French are so cursed with
logic that their minds revolt from the extreme reasoning of Mr. Shaw as
an overloaded stomach revolts from rich food. Once, in France, when my
battalion was marching along a road towards a part of the country in
which we had been some weeks before, I heard a soldier in my platoon
saying to his comrade as we came to familiar places, "Thank God,
they've cut down those bloody trees!" and immediately I understood why
the French roads bored the British soldier. That inexorable logic, all
that neatness, those terribly straight roads with the trees growing
at regular intervals ... "dressing by the right" as the soldiers said,
and looking as if the men who planted them had performed the operation
according to some mathematical formula ... all these things, inhumanly
tidy and well-ordered, nauseated the mind. I have done much walking
on English and French roads, and I will wager that boredom will seize
the traveller on a French road long before his interest on an English
road has been exhausted. And in their unintellectual, instinctive,
wayward fashion, the English are more right about life than the French
are. Mr. Shaw, I imagine, is incapable of understanding the state of
mind of my soldier who thanked God that the neatly-arranged trees on
the neatly-designed French road had been cut down. To him it would
seem right that if trees are to be grown at all, they should be grown
according to formula. He sees something stupid and wrong in the English
method of planting an acorn in any hole that is visible and letting the
tree grow as it pleases.


VI

In the chapter on Mr. Wells, I have printed an account of Mr. Shaw's
religious faith which ought properly to be printed here, but since the
reader can more easily turn to the next chapter than I can re-write
it, I will leave the account where it is and proceed with an account
of the latest developments of this faith as set forth in "Heartbreak
House" and "Back to Methusaleh." These two plays are notable for a
growth of religious conviction in their author which has brought him to
a condition resembling, in the eyes of some, that of John the Baptist
and, in the eyes of others (as I heard a clergyman of the Church of
Ireland angrily assert) that of a religious fanatic. They are also
notable for a weakening of technical skill as a dramatist. Mr. Shaw
has set himself so ably to the task of rejecting drama from his plays,
that unconsciously he ruins the effect of his lines by an excess of
garrulity. No one, reading and particularly seeing, "Heartbreak House"
and "Back to Methusaleh" can escape from the belief that Mr. Shaw is
using more words than are necessary to express his thought. Either
he despises us as people who are not sufficiently intelligent to
understand his meaning unless it is delivered to us in a variety of
sentences or he has lost his artistic sense and cannot understand that
a fine morning is not any finer for being described somewhat in this
fashion: "A fine morning is one on which the sun shines from a blue
sky in which occasional white clouds may be seen. _This_ morning is
such a morning as that. Therefore, this is a fine morning. What a fine
morning!" The whole of that extravagant speech, invented by me, not by
Mr. Shaw, is contained in the last four words. The rest is not only
excess, but insult, for it implies an ignorance in the person listening
to it which is not human. There are many passages in these two plays
which are not unlike that invented passage of mine. There is a passage
near the beginning of the second act of "Heartbreak House" which seems
to me to indicate a real decline in Mr. Shaw's sense of the theatre.
Ellie Dunn and Boss Mangan, to whom she is thinking of getting engaged,
are discussing themselves and marriage. He has just described himself
in terms which show that he is one of those financial ruffians who
are the modern equivalent, (not of highwaymen, for they were gay and
adventurous fellows,) but of slave-drivers:


     MANGAN. ... Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?

     ELLIE (_dropping her hands_): How strange! that my mother, who
     knew nothing at all about business, should have been quite right
     about you! She always said--not before papa, of course, but to us
     children--that you were just that sort of a man.

     MANGAN (_sitting up much hurt_): Oh! did she? And yet she'd have
     let you marry me.

     ELLIE: Well, you see, Mr. Mangan, my mother married a very good
     man--for whatever you may think of my father as a man of business,
     he is the soul of goodness--and she is not at all keen on my doing
     the same.


The parenthetical clause in each of Ellie's speeches is unnecessary,
and in the second speech, it has the effect of ruining a very good
"line." I assert, as a dramatist with some technical skill, that
Ellie's second speech, minus the parenthetical clause, will rouse
laughter every time it is spoken. I assert, with equal confidence,
that this speech, _with_ the parenthetical clause, will not provoke
more than a strangled laugh and may not provoke any laughter at all.
Mr. Shaw is entitled to reject laughter if he thinks it is likely
to destroy the thought in his speech, but no one can believe that
the parenthetical clause to which I object adds anything to Ellie's
thought. It is mere redundance, and redundance is destructive of drama.
It is also destructive of thought for a man is more likely to be
irritated than to be stimulated by hearing a thing repeated to excess.


I may, perhaps, note another matter of technical interest to the
student of the Shavian drama, namely, Mr. Shaw's economy in characters.
He has or had a strong sense of the theatre which is almost as strong
as that possessed by Mr. Galsworthy. The difficulty a critic has
in estimating Mr. Shaw's sense of the theatre is increased by the
wilfulness with which he rejects technique: one is not always able to
decide whether the lack of technique in the later plays is the result
of intention or weakness. Mr. Galsworthy is nearly the cleverest
technician now writing for the English theatre. He cannot think as
clearly as Mr. Shaw can, but he can construct much better. When Mr.
Galsworthy treats a theme dramatic in itself, such as the theme of
"Loyalties," and does not entangle the drama with arguments, he writes
an uncommonly good play. "Loyalties" has been called a "crook" play and
in a sense it is one, but the difference between it and such a piece as
"The Bat" by Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mr. Avery Hopwood is the
difference between a crook play written in terms of reality and a crook
play written in terms of trick. When, however, Mr. Galsworthy treats
a theme not dramatic in itself, such as the theme of "Windows," and
entangles any drama it has with much argument, the result is something
extraordinarily diffuse and nebulous. Mr. Galsworthy leaves you with
a sensation, not only that you do not know what he means, but also
that _he_ does not know what he means. Mr. Shaw, in his later pieces,
leaves you with the sensation that he knows only too well what he
means, but he will never admit that you are capable of understanding
him. His economy in characters is a certain sign of his mysticism. Mr.
Yeats told me on one occasion that when Sir Horace Plunkett invited "A.
E." to take a prominent position in the organization of co-operative
agriculture in Ireland, Mr. Arthur Balfour commended the choice on the
ground that a mystic is the most practical of men since he is willing
to use any instrument that will serve his purpose, whereas your plain,
blunt business man, destitute of imagination and firm purpose, will
quarrel with his tools and end up by botching his job. The mystic,
moreover, serves his purpose more than himself, whereas your plain,
blunt business man serves only himself. Mr. Shaw's method of working
is singularly interesting as a demonstration of the way in which the
mystic achieves his purpose. I do not know of any writer who is so
thrifty with his means as Mr. Shaw. Shakespeare, compared with him,
is a prodigal and a spendthrift. Mr. Shaw, compared with Shakespeare,
is a miser, uniquely stingy. But it is not stinginess which has made
Mr. Shaw so economical in his characters and even in his situations.
It is his mysticism which makes him extraordinarily indifferent to his
means. Any old plot, however disreputable it might be, would serve
Shakespeare for drawing on to the stage a crowd of dissimilar persons
and enriching their lives with his verse; and any old character,
however remote from human semblance will serve Mr. Shaw as a vent for
opinions. Shakespeare primarily was interested in people. Mr. Shaw
primarily is interested in doctrine. The principal difference between a
dramatist who is interested in people and a dramatist who is interested
in doctrines, is that the former will delight in the creation of the
greatest variety of characters whereas the latter will not trouble to
create a new character if an old one will do. I doubt whether there
are more than twelve distinct persons in the whole of Mr. Shaw's work.
When he began his career as a dogmatist, he set himself to writing
novels, but found after he had written five, of which only four have
been published, that he could not use this instrument so effectively
for his purpose as he could use the instrument of the play. And so he
turned his attention to the stage. But he did not waste his novels:
he dramatised them. He lifted passages from his books and put them
into his plays. He took some of the novel-characters and, after he had
tidied them and changed their names, forced them from between their
covers on to the stage. There is little in the thirty-eight plays
he has written which is not to be found, developed or suggested, in
his four novels. He has preached one doctrine all his life, and has
preached it with singular consistency. It is set out in the succeeding
chapter to this one. The parsimoniousness with which it has been
preached is remarkable. The whole of the first act of "Major Barbara"
is almost identically a repetition of the first act of "You Never Can
Tell." Lady Britomart Undershaft, of the first piece, is Mrs. Clandon,
of the second, under another name. The situation of two women is nearly
the same. They are living apart from their husbands whom they have
not seen for a number of years. Lady Britomart and Mrs. Clandon have
each two daughters and a son with the haziest or no recollections of
their fathers. A meeting between the two parents and their children
is arranged, in each case, on a flimsy pretext. Lady Britomart, like
Mrs. Clandon, is one of those strong-minded, silly women who flourish,
nowadays, more commonly in America than in England. (She is the sort of
dense female who belongs to the Lucy Stone League and refuses to bear
the name of the man she has chosen to be her husband although she is
willing to bear the name of the man whom she did not choose to be her
father!) Lady Britomart, like Mrs. Clandon, has abandoned her husband
for a particularly fatuous cause. Mr. Crampton (for Mrs. Clandon
is really Mrs. Crampton) was deprived of his wife's society (which
was probably no great loss) and that of his children (which probably
was) because he very properly spanked his elder daughter when she had
been naughty. Lady Britomart left her husband because he declined to
change the basis of his armaments-factory in the interests of his son.
Her excuse for her behaviour was more natural than Mrs. Clandon's
excuse for hers, for we are all susceptible to the attractions of
primogeniture; but a more sensible woman might have achieved her
purpose in being less headstrong. Barbara Undershaft, her elder
daughter, is Gloria Clandon, a little older and less priggish. Sarah
Undershaft, her younger daughter, is a chastened and spiritless Dolly
Clandon. There is a difference, however, between Stephen Undershaft
and Philip Clandon so remarkable that I can only surmise that Mr. Shaw
in transferring the Clandon family into the Undershaft family mislaid
Philip and, in searching for him, discovered another youth, this
Stephen, who was the product of an illicit love affair between Mrs.
Clandon and the austere Finch McComas! Adolphus Cusins, the Professor
of Greek who beats the big drum in the Salvation Army so that he may be
near to Barbara, is Valentine, the dentist, dragged out of "You Never
Can Tell," after a brief and misguided career as John Tanner in "Man
and Superman."

It is easy, I think, to trace the life of each one of the twelve
Shavian characters in this fashion. Consider, for example, the vivid
and very interesting career of that brutal ruffian, Bill Walker, in
"Major Barbara." Bill began his life in "Widowers' Houses" under
the name of Lickcheese and flourished so well as a speculative
property-owner that he was able to climb into middle-class society,
under the name of Burgess, and marry his daughter Candida to the
Reverend James Mavor Morell. His association with the clergy, however,
must have had a disastrous effect on him for we find him, in "Captain
Brassbound's Conversion," leading an adventurous, but misunderstood,
career under the name of Drinkwater. Religion had peculiar allurements
for Drinkwater, understandably enough when one remembers his former
association with his son-in-law, the clergyman, and we are not
surprised, therefore, to find him in the Salvation Army's West Ham
Shelter, now named Bill Walker and looking less than his years. He
suffers terribly from the spiritual garrulity of Major Barbara. The
reader who is familiar with the play will remember that Bill cruelly
misused a little Salvation Army lass, called Jenny Hill, who _would_
keep on praying for him and turning the other cheek. He struck her
on the mouth and twisted her arm and almost tore her hair out by the
roots. She cried with the pain, but she went on praying for him!...
Then Major Barbara twisted Bill's heart for him as cruelly as he had
twisted Jenny Hill's arm, by preaching with terrible iteration the
doctrine of forgiveness and non-resistance. We know how Bill, at the
penultimate moment, escaped from the penitent form, but few of us
realise what happened to him after he had fled, precipitately and full
of bitter cynicism, from that Salvation Army Shelter in West Ham. Who
could have believed, after witnessing his behaviour in the presence of
Barbara and snivelling Jenny Hill, that Jenny Hill herself would be the
means of his undoing in the wilds of America to which he had hurried
under the name of Blanco Posnet? And here we discover a characteristic
example of Mr. Shaw's sardonic humour. For Bill was nabbed, not by
the strong Barbara, not even by the weak, though willing, Jenny, but
by Jenny's helpless, croup-stricken child. The lion is caught by the
mouse; the strong are brought down by the weak; a little child shall
lead them into a trap. God, in Mr. Shaw's religion, is not a just God:
he is a God determined to have His own way and entirely indifferent
to the desires of His creatures. If man will not help God to fulfil
His purpose, then God will destroy man and invent another and more
submissive instrument whereby He may do so. Such is the Shavian gospel.
In what respect does it differ from the most devastating and blasting
form of Calvinism? When I was a child in Belfast, I was taught that if
I persisted in being a wicked boy, I would be roasted for ever in a
red-hot hell. Is there any real difference between the Calvinist who
tells a child that he will be burned for all eternity and Mr. Shaw
who tells it that it will be scrapped for all eternity. There is one
difference, in favour of the Calvinist. I was taught to believe in the
All-Perfection of God. Even if I persisted in being a wicked child and
thus damned myself for ever, my relatives could comfort themselves
with the reflection that God would fulfil Himself in His own time.
Somewhere, somewhen, there would be "peace, perfect peace." But Mr.
Shaw's God offers no such guarantee. He cannot assure us, even if we
help Him by every means in our power, that He will ever become perfect.
He makes inexorable demands upon our service, but cannot offer us any
hope that our labour will not be in vain. Serve me without question
or be scrapped, says the Shavian God, but he will not assure us that
we are not being bilked. And is not the desolation of desolations a
religious faith in which there is no certainty and very little hope? I
prefer the romantic delusions of my Ulster forefathers to the practical
religion of Mr. Shaw. I dislike the thought that I may be roasted for
ever in a red-hot hell, but I like even less the coal-black nullity
with which Mr. Shaw threatens me if I persist in my evil courses. There
will at least be colour and excitement in Calvin's hell, but there will
be nothing whatever in Mr. Shaw's. And I am not sure, after all, that
God, Perfect or Imperfect, will not prefer to spend eternity in the
company of people like me who decline to accept life on any but their
own terms, rather than in the society of servile instruments.

Mr. Shaw's thirty-eight plays are not thirty-eight separate plays but
one long, continuous piece, in which his twelve characters, in every
conceivable disguise and situation, strive to elude the hand of God but
are nabbed by Him in the end. Twist how you may, He'll get you in the
end, unless, indeed, He wearies of trying to make use of you, when,
inexorably, without a pang, He will cast you on to the scrap-heap where
you will perish utterly as your little brothers, the mammoth beasts,
perished long ago.


VII

Mr. Shaw has some of Shakespeare's carelessness over details. I have
sometimes wondered why Claudius succeeded to his brother's throne when
Hamlet was alive to do so. There is an explanation of this curious
succession in Frazer's "The Golden Bough," but I do not suppose that
the facts cited by Sir James Frazer were known to Shakespeare and even
if it were, he has not made the matter dramatically clear. Hamlet
does not appear to resent his uncle's accession to the throne of
Denmark. His resentment is roused by the marriage of his mother to her
brother-in-law. He probably never liked his uncle, but he is willing
to live in his castle as his heir. Shakespeare was always ready to
sacrifice verisimilitude to dramatic effects. Ophelia, for example,
is denied complete Christian burial because the Church authorities
suspect her of having committed suicide, although the account of her
death clearly establishes that she was accidentally drowned through
the breaking of a branch. Hamlet, too, is unaware of Ophelia's death
or dementia when he arrives in the graveyard where she is to be
buried, although he has been in the company of Horatio for some time,
and Horatio is fully acquainted with the circumstances of Ophelia's
misfortunes and death and knows that there have been passages of love
between Hamlet and her. Very little trouble was needed to put these
minor matters right, but when a god is creating a universe, he is
unlikely to trouble himself greatly about specks of dust. Mr. Shaw
shows himself equally indifferent to details when they no longer
serve his purpose. He has been charged with spoofing his audience on
occasion, notably in the first act of "Man and Superman" where he
trumps up a case of impending maternity for shocking effects, and
then, his purpose achieved, says no more about it for the remainder
of the play! He brings the Undershaft family together in the first
act of "Major Barbara" in the pretence that they are about to discuss
important questions of family finance which are never once discussed
during the act! I do not believe that Mr. Shaw had any intention of
spoofing his audience when he invented these situations. He simply did
not bother about the details. He had used the effect for his purpose,
and since it was no longer serviceable to him, he scrapped it without
even troubling to clear away the debris--which, presumably, is what
His God will do with us when He no longer needs us. Less happens in
the first act of "Major Barbara" than in any other first act by Mr.
Shaw. It is a protasis from which all mention of plot is deliberately
omitted. Bottom, had he been at Mr. Shaw's elbow while the play was
being written, might have begged him to "grow to a point," but Bottom
would have had less success with Mr. Shaw than he had with Quince, for
Bottom's point was a dramatic one, whereas Mr. Shaw's is doctrinal; and
a propounder of doctrine pays little heeds to the laws of stagecraft
or anything else. The mystic gets his way because he can neither be
frightened nor disconcerted. Death and Tradition have no terrors
for him. That is why, in face of the opposition of common sense and
practical experience, he always does what he wants to do.


VIII

One might profitably compare Mr. Shaw to Cassius in "Julius Cæsar."
Marcus Brutus, in that play, is surely the prototype of all muddlers
and gentlemanly idiots. It was he who, against the pleas of Cassius,
insisted that the life of Mark Anthony should be spared. It was he who,
disregarding the dissuasions of Cassius, permitted Anthony to speak in
the forum. It was he who, over-ruling the arguments of Cassius, ordered
the disastrous march to Phillipi. Cassius was the wise man of the two,
though his heart was made impotent by his asperities. The resemblance
between him and Mr. Shaw must not be drawn too closely, but it is
sufficient, as stated in Shakespeare's terms, to be interesting:


                         He reads much;
     He is a great observer, and he looks
     Quite through the deeds of men.


Cassius, of course, loved no plays and heard no music and smiled with
difficulty; and these disabilities prevent him from complete ancestry
to Mr. Shaw; but, if, like Cassius, Mr. Shaw sometimes feels that
he has lived "to be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus," he can,
like Cassius again, comfort himself with the thought that he was in
the right when Brutus was in the wrong, and that he told him so. His
Cassius mood is plainest in "Heartbreak House." This play is described
as "a Fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes," and was
written, presumably, after Mr. Shaw had witnessed performances of plays
by Chekhov. That is not to say, however, that there is any resemblance
between the work of Mr. Shaw and the Russian dramatist. There isn't.
Mr. Shaw is as talkative as Chekhov was reticent. Chekhov's purpose
is to make his people say as little as possible: Mr. Shaw's purpose
is to make his people say a great deal more than necessary. Chekhov
suggests _inactivity_ through dialogue: Mr. Shaw suggests through
argumentativeness. Chekhov writes drama: Mr. Shaw debates. No receptive
person can come away from a performance of "The Cherry Orchard"
unimpressed by a vision of life. A moderately-intelligent person,
having seen this play with eyes of understanding, could write a true
summary of the state of Russia in the last hundred years. I doubt
whether as much can be said of "Heartbreak House," the whole action
of which (though _action_ is an inappropriate word to use about it)
takes place in the course of an afternoon and evening, inside six or
seven hours, in England soon after the outbreak of the War. There is,
however, no mention of the War in the play, and the only link between
them is the sudden interruption of the conversation in the last act by
an air-raid, as a result of which two of the characters are blown to
pieces. There is some clumsiness in the use of this device for ending
the play, artistically at all events, though that is a consideration
which is unlikely to move Mr. Shaw much, but, ethically and socially,
it is not clumsy at all, for "Heartbreak House" is less a play than
a parable. The bombs drop as suddenly, and with as little warning,
on the gifted conversationalists sitting in the dusky garden as the
War burst upon Europe in 1914. There we were, all of us, living
pleasantly, as Burke begged us to live, and committing our affairs into
the hands of men concerning whose abilities to conduct them we had no
certificates--and suddenly the ship ran on to the rocks, the train went
off the rails, the ceiling fell. "I'm always expecting something,"
says Ellie Dunn in the last act. "I don't know what it is; but life
must come to a point some time." And while she and her companions are
arguing about the responsibility for the mess in which the world is,
bombs drop out of heaven and life comes to a full stop:


     HECTOR: And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we
     call England?

     CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled
     ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forcastle. She will
     strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be
     suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?

     HECTOR: Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I
     still have the will to live. What am I to do?

     CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an
     Englishman.

     HECTOR: And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?

     CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and
     be damned.


In other words of Mr. Shaw's, if you do not help God to perfect
Himself, He will scrap you. This play, in some respects the best that
Mr. Shaw has written, is full of mad laughter, of bitter, self-mocking,
torturing laughter. I knew a man who burst into shrieks of laughter
when he saw a comrade blown into the air by a German shell; but if
any one imagines that that man's terrible mirth came from an unkindly
heart, he imagines without understanding; for "even in laughter the
heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness." I feel
about "Heartbreak House" exactly as I felt about my friend who laughed
when his comrade was blown up and dismembered: that here is a depth
of feeling which cannot be fathomed. Like Job, Mr. Shaw cries out,
"changes and war are against me," but, unlike Job, he finds no comfort
in the end. "If men will not learn until their lessons are written
in blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference." As
for him, he throws up the sponge. Our culture is but the plaything of
fribbles; our democracy is merely government of fools by fools. "The
question is," said Boswell to Dr. Johnson and Mr. Cambridge, "which is
worst, one wild beast or many?" And the answer, in Mr. Shaw's terms,
is "Both!" He sees man, according to this play, refusing to help God
to perfect Himself, deliberately thwarting God, and he almost sees him
already on the scrap-heap.


In "Back to Methusaleh," he seems to me to have suffered a spiritual
set-back, and to be preoccupied by material considerations. We are
no longer concerned with Man's destiny and God's purpose, but with
matters of mere longevity. "So much to do--so little time in which to
do it!" If man could live for three hundred or three thousand or thirty
thousand years, he would then have time in which to profit by his
experience--so Mr. Shaw's argument seems to run. But would he? Do any
of us profit by our experience? If we could go back to the beginning of
our lives and start again with the knowledge we had acquired in the
previous existence, we might be able to avoid this or that mistake.
But we cannot do that. Each experience is a new one, and the wisdom we
have gained from those through which we have passed is of little help
to us in dealing with the new one, particularly if it comes upon us,
as most of the critical events of life do come upon us, unexpectedly,
without warning. There is not much difference, except physically,
between the Mr. Shaw who wrote "Candida" and the Mr. Shaw who wrote
"Back to Methusaleh," and I do not believe that he would be much, if
any different, at the age of three hundred or thirty thousand from what
he now is. Man may develop this or that aspect of himself more than
another, but essentially he remains the same. It is not length of years
that is important to us, but what we do in them. Keats and Shelley were
young when they died: Tennyson was old; but the length of their years
seems immaterial to their reputation. Mr. Shaw tells us that if we
_will_ hard enough, we can achieve longevity, but, apart from the fact
that longevity first happens in his play to people who have not willed
it, but had it thrust upon them, I am puzzled to understand how Mr.
Shaw expects mankind to will a state of existence which, portrayed by
him, is extraordinarily repellent. I do not wish to be born at the age
of seventeen out of an egg so that I may become a He-Ancient and live
for thousands of years in a state of inactive ratiocination. And if a
life of thought without action does not attract my fancy, how can I be
expected to aspire to it? I cannot find anything in the long lives of
Mr. Shaw's characters which seems to me likely to excite the desire and
hope of mankind. The He-Ancients and the She-Ancients are morose and
sterile, ugly and unsociable, hairless and unhappy, liable to death by
discouragement, long, lean and hopeless. I would rather be scrapped!...
Nor is there any greater virtue in the long-lived than there is in us.
In "The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman" (the fourth act of "Back to
Methusaleh") where mankind is divided into two classes, the long-lived
and the short-lived, we discover that the long-lived spend their three
hundred years of existence in humbugging the short-lived.... Man that
is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.
He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower: he fleeth as it were a
shadow, and never continueth in one place; but, in spite of his misery
and the shortness of his life, he gets more fun and satisfaction than
are likely to be enjoyed by man that is born out of an egg.


IX

I remember very vividly the first occasion on which I saw and heard Mr.
Shaw. He was lecturing on "Some Necessary Repairs to Religion" to a
religious organization, now defunct, called "The Guild of St. Mathew."
His lecture was extraordinarily startling to a young man, fresh from
Belfast and still influenced by his fathers' faith, although in revolt
against much of it. When the lecture was over, a lady asked him to say
what his belief was about the Resurrection, and he replied, that if she
would promise not to tell any one, he would say that he did not believe
it ever took place. And then came one of those strange lapses from
serious argument which are characteristic of him. Another questioner
asked him if he believed in the Immaculate Conception. "Of course I
do," he said. "I believe that all conceptions are immaculate!" The
questioner was so paralysed by this reply that she sat down without
pointing out to him that the Catholic Church believes in the Immaculate
Conception on the assumption that all conceptions are not immaculate.
On many occasions, Mr. Shaw has brilliantly dodged the point in that
manner; but they are not occasions that need be remembered against
him. Ever and always he has given his best and hardest thought to the
service of mankind. He has practiced what he preaches, and if we are
thrown on the scrap-heap, it will not be because Mr. Shaw has failed to
do his uttermost to help God to realise Himself. What a shock it will
be to him to find that the scrap-heap is a more likeable place than his
God's heaven!


X

He is greatly generous to young men. Like most of my contemporaries I
have imposed upon his good nature very often. I sent "Jane Clegg" and
"John Ferguson" in manuscript to him and asked him if he would read
them and tell me what his opinion of them might be. Probably a dozen
or more young men were doing exactly the same thing with their MSS.
He could spend the whole of his time reading other men's plays, if he
were to let his good nature go uncontrolled. But he read my plays and
wrote long, valuable letters of advice about them to me. I hesitate to
mention this fact lest it should cause an avalanche of MSS. to fall
upon him, but I am trying to draw his portrait, and unless I mention
his generosity to young men, the portrait will not be a faithful one.
I am under personal obligations to him of many sorts, and I do not
know of any man who so freely helps his friends and says so little
about it. He is now sixty-six years old, but there are no signs of age
about him other than the fact that his hair and his beard, once red,
have turned white. He still has the mind and eagerness of a young man.
His walk is as springy and alert as it was when I first knew him, as
I am sure it has always been. When I see him in the street sometimes,
tall, lean, very tidy and almost foppish in an unusual way, walking
with great assurance and ease, examining now and then his very shapely
hands, and gazing about him with that queer, quizzical, kindly look in
his pleasant eyes that is so significant of him, I feel that although
he is thirty years older than I am, according to the official records,
he is, in spirit, thirty years younger. He will never be old. If he
lives to be a centenarian, he will still be talking like a young man;
and perhaps it is his extraordinary youth and vitality, as much as his
disrespect for established things, that draws young men inevitably to
him. His fearless, challenging spirit attracted all those who were
in revolt against stagnant beliefs; and even now, when the multitude
seems to have caught up with him and his views are less startling
than they were a few years ago, he still stimulates the minds of the
young and the eager and sends them bounding forward. "You should so
live," he once said, "that when you die, God is in your debt!" He
bids men and women strive to put more into the common pool than they
take out, and he asserts with something like moral fury that any one
who is taking more from the common pool than he puts in, is cheating
both God and man. There are querulous persons who say that his work
will not live. Their forefathers probably said that Shakespeare's work
would not live, that Cervantes's work would not live, that Fielding's
work would not live, that Dickens's work would not live; and no doubt
they produced sound arguments to support their faith. Who could have
believed that "Don Quixote," a mere skit on contemporary novelettes,
would win universal favor, or that "Pickwick Papers," mere verbiage
for a set of pictures drawn by a popular artist, would live? Yet these
local, topical, and very contemporary things will not perish. Mr. Shaw
has indisputably affected the thoughts and lives of thinking men and
women on two continents for thirty years. He is a very daring fellow
who asks us to believe that this brilliant, original, forceful mind
will not continue to affect the thoughts and lives of men and women for
generations to come.




H. G. WELLS


I

There are men, such as Dr. Johnson, who are mentally active and
physically torpid, and there are other men, such as Mr. Jack Johnson,
who are very alert physically, but not quite so alert in their minds.
It seldom happens that a man combines great physical energy with great
intellectual energy. Such a man is Mr. Bernard Shaw. So is Mr. H. G.
Wells. I imagine that Mr. Wells is more active, both in body and in
mind, than Mr. Shaw, despite the fact that the latter is the slender
man of the two and that his tongue works more rapidly in conjunction
with his brain; for Mr. Shaw feels fatigue sooner than Mr. Wells.
I doubt whether Mr. Wells suffers from fatigue at all or to any
serious extent. He takes few, if any, holidays, works for many hours
every day, plays games very assiduously, and is unhappy if he has
not got some work on hand. He begins to write a new book immediately
he has completed its predecessor, having no belief, seemingly, in
fallow time. When he is not working or playing, he is talking. His
conversation has a curious resemblance in its shape, if I may use
that word, to the style of his writing. One listens for the suspended
sentence, for the dots with which, in his prose, he breaks a thought so
that the reader may himself complete it. Mr. Shaw once told me that he
could not work at creative writing for more than two hours every day,
and I suspect that he suffers more from physical fatigue than he will
admit. Mr. Wells works for considerably more than two hours every day
(and sometimes during the night) though I do not suppose he works for
two consecutive hours at any time. If you are a guest in his house, you
will see him engaged in some game, tennis or hockey or that wild game
of his own invention, "barn-ball," or perhaps playing demon patience;
and when you are inclined to imagine that he is settling down to a long
day of games, you discover that he is no longer with the players, but
back in his study working on a manuscript.

One expects a certain amount of sluggishness in every man, and probably
there are days when Mr. Wells's mind and body go to sleep or lie about
supine, but I do not believe that any one has ever seen him asleep or
supine. His mind is so active that one can almost see ideas leaping
off his tongue as he talks, and he has a very remarkable capacity for
engaging the attention of his auditors without making any perceptible
effort to do so. His conversation, unlike that of Mr. Yeats or Mr.
George Moore, is unrehearsed conversation. It has not the swift
brilliance of Mr. Shaw's talk, and it goes to its point rather jerkily,
but it reaches its destination. He is not so easily distracted from his
course as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton is, or perhaps I ought to say that he
does not take so long to get to his destination. Mr. Chesterton seems
to me to be falling with great amiability on his subject, whereas Mr.
Wells is eagerly struggling up to it. Mr. Chesterton defers to others
with great courtesy, but his mind, I imagine, is already made up. He
listens to a controversialist, not because he thinks he is likely to be
converted to an opposite opinion--he is fairly certain that he will not
be converted--but because he has excellent manners and an exceptionally
kindly character. It is hard to believe that any man of merit is
without some malice in his nature, some element of cattishness, but
if there is a man of merit without these things then that man is Mr.
Chesterton. If he could bring himself to throttle the creature he
most detests, the international financier, the man without a country,
he would, I am sure, do so entirely without prejudice. Mr. Wells
listens, not out of politeness, but in the hope that he will receive
information, and this hope of his causes him to listen very patiently
even to bad or inexpert talkers. He has the additional merit, rare
among men of genius, of being an uncommonly good host, very punctilious
about the comfort and pleasure of his guests. He is a sociable man,
mingling easily with very various people, gregarious where Mr. Yeats
and Mr. Shaw are solitary, and he is instinctively friendly. His
hospitality is lavish and with something of the Dickensian tradition
in it. He has none of the chilly aloofness of Mr. Yeats nor of the shy
constraint of Mr. Shaw nor of the nervous coldness of Mr. Galsworthy.
Were it not for a degree of cruelty in his nature, I should say that
Mr. Chesterton and he were as near to each other in temperament as any
two men of merit can be. It is this strain of cruelty in him which
makes him so attractive when he loses his temper, for he seems only to
be witty when he is about to hit some one very severely on the head.
I do not know any man who can lose his temper in print with so much
effect and so entertainingly as Mr. Wells can lose his. He is hardly a
witty man, as Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats and even Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
are witty men, but he has a neat, malicious humour which delights him
as much as it delights his friends, and is most often displayed when he
is attacking some one.


II

If a writer wished to create a character who would most aptly personify
the past thirty years of English or of world history, he would have
to create a character very like Mr. Wells: a questioning, variable,
demanding person, with some impatience and testiness of temper, with,
at times, a fantastic and wayward manner, but always superimposed on
these superficialities, an eager and unthwartable desire for a true
belief. Mr. Chesterton said of him once that "you lie awake at night
and hear him grow," and fundamentally that is true, in spite of the
temptation one has at times to believe that one lies awake at night
and merely hears him changing his mind. One could, were one silly
enough to do so, construct a plausible indictment of Mr. Wells of
hurriedly accepting a belief and as hurriedly rejecting it; but to do
so would be to charge oneself with a superficial mind. Mr. Wells, in
his eagerness to discover a reasonable and sane society in which the
spirit of man may grow and develop and achieve, has sometimes accepted
a theory too swiftly, but his scientific mind has come, sooner or
later, to the rescue of his eager heart and has caused him to reject
proposals which he had previously found acceptable.

In "First and Last Things" he decides against the community of
austere aristocrats who won his advocacy in "A Modern Utopia." The
self-disregard of the Samurai of Japan had pleased him as it must
please all who contemplate it, and he imagined a state in which
the best men would govern "the average, sensual men," formulating
their laws and doctrines from the sanctuary of a sort of monastic
establishment in which their fleshly desires would be chastened and
perhaps eliminated. Mr. Wells, having felt the allure of a select
company of selfless aristocrats, devoting themselves to the good
government of less gifted men, soon discovered that good government
cannot be administered by men who are remote from the emotions and
desires of the governed and so, with characteristic courage, he
abandoned his Samurai and boldly marched into the company of the crowd.
Can any one find ground for sneering in such behaviour as that? Are not
those who try to find solutions to puzzles more likely to be successful
in their efforts because Mr. Wells has offered one solution and then,
finding it useless, repudiated it and tried another?

There was a time when he saw hope for the world in the establishment
of a universal language, but I doubt whether he holds to that hope
now. A common speech does not keep men at peace any more than a common
purpose does, and, in any event, man's incorrigible habit of localizing
universal things until they cease to be universal tends in time to
make a common speech an impossible possession. The Catholic Church has
a common speech in the Latin tongue, but an Italian priest can preach
to an English priest in that language and remain incomprehensible.
The British and the American people have a common speech, but it has
become so permeated with local words that very often the two races are
unintelligible to each other, apart altogether from the difficulty of
accent.

Mr. Wells has plunged into a few bog-holes of that sort, but he has
always extricated himself from them, and less and less, as he develops,
does he insist upon uniformity and machinery, and more and more does
he insist on diversity and spirit. "Let us be Catholics in this great
matter," Mr. Birrell writes on Browning's poetry, "and burn our candles
at many shrines. In the pleasant realms of poesy, no liveries are worn,
no paths prescribed; you may wander where you will, stop where you
like, and worship whom you love. Nothing is demanded of you, save this,
that in all your wanderings and worships, you keep two objects steadily
in view--two, and two only--truth and beauty." It may fairly be said of
Mr. Wells that in all his "wanderings and worships" he has tried to do
so.


III

There is a photograph of Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, taken
by an American photographer, Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, in which the
two men are shown sitting side by side. It is the most illuminating
interpretation of their characters that I have ever seen. Mr. Shaw,
with something of the look of a prophet, sits beside Mr. Wells who has
a smile of disbelief on his face; Mr. Shaw shows a countenance full of
faith, while Mr. Wells shows one full of inquiry. Mr. Shaw accepts the
pose quite naturally, but Mr. Wells is deprecating. I felt when I saw
that photograph in Mr. Wells's study that while Mr. Shaw accepted the
status of a great man as his right, Mr. Wells felt uncomfortable about
the pose, not because he doubts his right to be regarded as a great
man, but because he is reluctant to live on pedestals. "I'm human just
as much as you are," he seems to be saying to the photographer, and
the smile of deprecation on his face means, if it means anything, that
while Mr. Shaw accepts the great man's altitude without a qualm, Mr.
Wells feels that the whole thing is humbug. "Shaw is taken in by this
Great Man business," the Wells of the photograph says as plainly as if
the picture were to take life and utter words, "but don't you imagine
I'm deluded by it!..."

These two men, one Irish, one English, George Bernard Shaw and Herbert
George Wells, between them have done more to influence the minds
of the young men of my generation than any other two men of their
time. Their attitude towards life may, perhaps, be summarized in an
account of the way in which they interpret the doctrine of Evolution.
Mr. Shaw believes that the Life Force, which ordinary men call God,
is an Imperfect Thing seeking to make Itself Perfect. How, when you
contemplate the miseries and inequalities and cruelties of existence,
can you believe in an All-Powerful God? he says. You must believe
that these horrible things happen because God cannot prevent them
from happening. The blind-alley argument that the Almighty inflicts
pain upon us for our good is insupportable when one considers that an
earthly father would not subject his child to convulsions or cause a
cancer to consume its life or endow it with a cruel disposition if such
things were within his powers of disposal. If, one reasonably argues,
an earthly father is incapable of such acts, how less likely is God
to be capable of them if He be All-Powerful and All-Good? Since these
inexplicable cruelties and horrors occur and recur, surely, argues
Mr. Shaw, it is only common sense to assume that they do so in spite
of God's good will towards man. Starting from this premise, he goes on
to argue that God seeks to obtain that control over material things
which He has not yet succeeded in obtaining. He imagines God engaged in
a magnificent research, the discovery of a harmonious universe, much
in the way in which one imagines a biologist in his laboratory seeking
for a preventative of disease. The Life Force uses such instruments
for its purpose as are to be found lying at hand. When these prove
abortive or useless or insufficient, the Life Force invents a new
instrument which it uses until that instrument, too, is found to be
useless or inadequate and is scrapped in favour of a new instrument.
Like all creators, God must express Himself through His creatures, and
the whole of Time has been spent so far in finding a suitable means
of expression. In the beginning, God used mammoth beasts, but finding
them unsuitable for His purpose, He scrapped them and invented other
creatures until at last He achieved His best instrument, Man. God's
latest and finest creature differs from all His other creatures in
this respect that he is conscious of God's purpose and can help it
forward or hold it back. God concealed His intention from all the
instruments that preceded the advent of Man, but, in the development
of His Being, He found that greater advantage would accrue to Him if
He made His instrument aware of its purpose. So we get the reason of
Man. God, before the creation of Man, had depended upon Himself. After
the creation of Man, he depended partly upon Himself, partly upon
His creature. _Man, in short, was the first of God's instruments to
have the power to help God to realize Himself._ To Mr. Shaw, it is an
obscuring of God's purpose for Man continually to pray, "God help me!"
when it is part of his purpose and duty to affirm, "I will help God!" I
have already quoted his dictum that we should so live that when we die,
God is in our debt.

It is obvious, from this belief, that Mr. Shaw does not believe in the
inevitable march of mankind from bad to good and from good to better.
We may be marching towards Utopia or the New Jerusalem, or we may be
marching back to Chaos. Man, having the choice between helping God and
thwarting Him, may so vex the Deity that He will become impatient with
him and throw this instrument away as he has thrown away other useless
instruments, and seek for a better one. God scrapped the mammoth beasts
because they were not adequate for the execution of His design; He
_may_ scrap Man for the same reason or because Man, while adequate,
wilfully refuses to help. This theory is expressed continually in
Mr. Shaw's plays and prefaces, for example, in a speech by Cæsar in
"Cæsar and Cleopatra," where the Emperor gives expression to a violent
antipathy to war. War, in Mr. Shaw's mind, is a plain perversion of
God's purpose, and he would probably declare that Man, in the Great War
whose end may yet be a bloody battle between the Allies, almost reached
the end of God's patience. In five years, the British alone had eight
hundred thousand of her most valuable men _killed_. France lost double
that number _killed_. Germany lost more even than France _killed_.
All the potentialities for good, all the fervour and chivalry and
idealism and courage that was in those men, their ability to help God
to achieve perfection, has vanished utterly from the world; and there
is nothing left of it. Most of them died without progeny, and so there
is not even the hope that their spirit has passed on to their children
and that, at the worst, God's purpose has only been suspended for a
generation. They have gone, irretrievably gone. Another such war and
Western civilization must perish, if, indeed, it has not already begun
to decay. In other words, God, sickened by Man's perversity and wilful
obstruction, will have scrapped him....

That is the Shavian doctrine of the Life Force, put plainly and simply.

Mr. Wells differs very sharply from Mr. Shaw in his doctrine. Mr. Shaw
believes that the progress from bad to good is not inevitable: Mr.
Wells believes that it is, and he produces the records of history to
support his belief. Mankind, at this moment, he will admit, is in a
very bloody mess, but that mess is not so frightful as, say, the mess
after the Thirty Years' War. We, who contemplate the organized Murder
of Youth which began in August, 1914, may fairly feel that mankind
has sunk very low in barbarism, but when we survey the whole range
of humanity so far as it has been recorded, the depths of 1914, deep
though they are, appear to be slightly less dreadful than the depths
of other days. There is a greater revolt from organized Murder to-day
than there was after the Thirty Years' War. There are fewer people
to-day who prate about the glories of war than there were then. (Oddly
enough, or perhaps naturally enough, most of the people who still
think of war as a jolly adventure live in America.) We are a little
nearer to a realization of the commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" than
we were before 1914. We are learning that there are no qualifications
or exceptions to that commandment. It does not say, "Thou shalt not
kill--except in defence of small nationalities!" It does not say,
"Thou shalt not kill--except for the purpose of self-determination!"
It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill--except for the establishment of
a Republic in Ireland!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill--except
for the purpose of preserving the Empire!" Tersely and without
modification, it states that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in any circumstances
whatever.

Here is a dilemma from which the Christian cannot easily escape, and
the difficulty of doing so, apart from all ordinary considerations of
decency, is bringing man sharply face to face with the fundamentals of
human existence. In spite of much occasion for pessimism to-day, there
is occasion for greater optimism than man ever before has had. There
is a social consciousness at work in our minds and hearts that will
yet deliver us from the wicked man. How few are the years since the
days when men in one part of England made war on men in another part!
How unthinkable it is that men in Lancaster should make war to-day in
Yorkshire! True, it is less than a century since men in the Northern
States of America made war on men in the Southern States. True, it is
less than ten years since men in Ulster prepared themselves to make war
on men in the rest of Ireland. True, at this moment, Russian fights
Russian, and Sinn Feiner slays Orangeman, and Orangeman slays Sinn
Feiner. True, that white man burns black man, that Christian persecutes
Jew, true all this and worse, yet it remains true that when the records
of time are made up and just balances are drawn in the accounts of
Mankind, there is seen to be a greater perception of common purpose
to-day than there was a century ago.

His scientific and historic sense keeps Mr. Wells secure in his belief
that Man, although he may hinder the development of God's purpose,
cannot thwart it. Mr. Shaw would perhaps agree with Mr. Wells in his
belief that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression, but
he would insist that that expression may be through another instrument
than man. Mr. Wells, however, would not yield to him on this point; he
would insist that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression
through man. Man may, indeed be obliterated by plague and pestilence or
cosmic disaster, but, failing those, man must achieve God's purpose.


IV

When one brings the Wellsian doctrine down to the details of life,
one discovers what I may call a _local_ pessimism in it. The anger
which breaks out of his work is directed against the incompetence
and stupidity of man which hold him back from the desirable country
towards which he is marching. The greatest optimists--the men who are
convinced that man's end is good and seemly--are almost always the
most bitter pessimists when they are considering contemporary affairs.
The visionary loves mankind in the abstract so much that when he
contemplates mankind in the concrete he loses his temper. The Utopian,
full of his dream of a decent and free civilization in which every man
may move easily to his proper station, feels a dreadful depression when
he looks upon society as it exists here and now; and there are times
when, in spite of his sure and certain hope that life will ultimately
find its level, he feels that man, that perverse, wayward, thwarting
creature, will never fulfill the promise of his potentialities because
he is too closely concerned with some tiny, personal vanity, because he
allows wickedness and stupidity to influence him to a greater degree
than goodness and fine thought. Who, thinking over the Big Four in
Paris, and remembering that millions of young men of all nations died
so that the Big Four might meet and make a more enduring peace than
this world has yet known, can feel anything but anger and humiliation
at what they did? Clemenceau, the "Tiger" who, having tasted blood,
seemed eager to taste more; Lloyd George, who never remembers a friend
or forgets an enemy; Orlando, shamelessly extending his itching
palm; and Wilson, the man who went to Europe to ask for the moon
and returned to America, having accepted a match ... can any of us,
contemplating those four men, given by God the greatest opportunity
that has ever been offered to men, that may ever be offered to men,
help feeling that this world is dead and damned and that the sooner a
disgusted God smashes it to pieces, the better will be the universe?
Mr. Wells cannot escape, any more than the rest of us, this tendency to
despair of human effort, and here and there in his books his _local_
pessimism is expressed; but his universal optimism remains unimpaired,
and one comes away from his writings in the knowledge that he believes
that man sooner or later will achieve a high destiny. He whips the
stupid and the selfish and the idle, but he will not permit them to
persuade him from his belief that even out of these elements, a finer
Man will yet be made.


V

There is a cartoon by Mr. Max Beerbohm in which he shows himself being
conducted through a gallery where Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Galsworthy,
Mr. Bennett and many other eminent writers are standing on inverted
tubs, haranguing the universe. Having listened to the preachers and
propagandists, Mr. Beerbohm turns to his guide and says, "But where
are the artists?" only to be informed that "_These_ are the artists!"
It has been said that Mr. Shaw would rather be known as a great
political economist than as a great dramatist, that Mr. Arnold Bennett
would rather be known as an eminent business man than as an eminent
novelist, that Mr. Galsworthy would prefer to be a reformer than a man
of letters, and that Mr. Wells seeks fame as a sociologist and not as
an artist. There is enough truth in this statement to give pause to
those about whom it is made, but not sufficient to frighten us who
admire them. Mr. Wells, for example, can no more elude artistry than
he can refrain from thinking. He is extraordinarily indifferent to
literary style, seems almost to delight in making a clumsy sentence
rather than a shapely one, and, so far as one can discover, does not
spend a single second on "finding the right word." The idea is his
chief concern, and he cares very little for the way in which it is
expressed. Nevertheless, he remains an artist, with a gift for apt
expressions and a far greater gift for selection. In one of his
books, he describes the prostitute as "that painted disaster of the
street." In "First and Last Things," in describing the inability of
the intellect to free itself from bias, he says, "the forceps of the
mind is a clumsy instrument and crushes the truth a little in seizing
it." At the end of "Tono-Bungay" there is an account of a trip down
the Thames which is among the great pieces of prose writing. In "The
Undying Fire," he gives an account of the purposeless cruelty of Nature
and an account of the state of mind of a young German who goes from
his remote village to join the Army at the beginning of the war, full
of patriotic ardour, offering for this service and for that until at
last he becomes a member of the crew of a submarine and his patriotism
suffers a sea-change and becomes the desperate courage of a rat in a
trap ... and these two accounts are so vivid that it is impossible for
any one to rise from them unaware that they have been written by a man
of genius, possessed of artistry.

He is probably the most prolific writer of his quality in the world,
and if I had exact knowledge of the world's greatest authors, I should
probably say that he is the most varied of them. Consider how very
dissimilar his books are in range and interest. Consider that the man
who wrote "The Time Machine," wrote also "The History of Mr. Polly"
and the "The Undying Fire." How many writers have shown such variety
as has been shown by the author of "The War in the Air," "Kipps" (that
beautiful and tender book), "Tono-Bungay" and "The Soul of a Bishop."
At one moment, Mr. Wells is writing "Bealby" and at the next, he
is writing "God, the Invisible King." He turns from "The Wonderful
Visit" to "The Outline History of the World," and writes "The Future
in America" in the trail of "Love and Mr. Lewisham." ("The Future
in America" is perhaps the best book of its kind that has ever been
written on the problems that lie before the American people.) Queen
Victoria, having been enchanted by "Alice in Wonderland," sent to a
book-seller for the remainder of "Lewis Carroll's" writings, and was
considerably disconcerted when she received "Plane Trigonometry" and
"Curiosa Mathematica" by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. What
that excellent old lady would have thought, if having read and liked
"The Sea Lady," she had been supplied with "Mankind in the Making" and
"The Island of Dr. Moreau" and "Joan and Peter" by the same author,
I cannot imagine. Mr. Wells faces life very fairly and squarely,
regarding it from all angles of vision. There is only one Truth, but it
may be approached by many different paths; and Mr. Wells has attempted
most of them. It may seem to some of his readers at times that he is
running away from things towards which he formerly ran, but it is more
likely that he is merely trying another way of getting to the same
point.


VI

One remembers men by odd things. I remember Mr. Yeats chiefly as a dark
image, obscurely seen, and Mr. Shaw as a shy, erect man with fine,
shapely hands, who talks emphatically because otherwise he would not
be talking at all. I remember Mr. Galsworthy as one who is biting his
lips or clenching his teeth lest he should say too much, and Mr. George
Moore as one who is consumed with the fear that he will not say enough.
Mr. Wells comes into my mind as an eager, friendly man, whose speech,
thinly uttered, suggests continual testing. But mostly I remember his
fine eyes because it is in them that most of his strength is stored.




WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS


I

I have been acquainted with Mr. Yeats for a longer time than I have
with any other man named in this book, but I seem to myself to know
very little about him, for he is extraordinarily aloof from life. His
aloofness is different from that of Mr. Galsworthy who is perturbed
about mankind. Mr. Yeats is totally unconcerned about problems of
any sort. He is more interested in the things men do than in men
themselves. He prefers the symbol to the thing symbolized. The
harshest condemnation I ever heard him utter was delivered on "A. E."
of whom he said that he had ceased to be a poet in order to become a
philanthropist! I met him last in Chicago, and I felt when we parted
that I knew no more of him then than I knew when I first met him ten
years earlier. Our meeting followed on the fact that I had sent a
one-act play, entitled "The Magnanimous Lover," to him. It seems to
me now to be a crudely-contrived, ill-written and violent piece, but
when I sent it to Mr. Yeats I thought it was a remarkable work. It was
performed after the production of Stanley Houghton's "Hindle Wakes"
and Mr. Galsworthy's "The Eldest Son," which have similar themes, but
was written several years before they were performed. One evening, a
few weeks after I had sent the manuscript of "The Magnanimous Lover"
to him, I received a letter from Mr. Yeats, written in that queer,
illegible, thick style which is so difficult to read. Many of the words
were incomplete: all of them were badly-formed. The contrast between
the handwriting of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats is remarkable. Mr. Shaw's
is very clear and neat and most beautifully-shaped, as delicate as a
spider's web, but Mr. Yeats's writing is obscure, untidy, sprawling
and hard to decipher, looking as if it had been done with a blunt
pen. Mr. Wells writes in a small, clean, but not very clear hand,
a deceptive fist, for it seems easier to read than it is. There is
some oddness in the fact that the handwriting of the poet should be
so coarse and ungainly, while the handwriting of the dramatist, with
so little of poetic emotion in him, is fine and shapely. The letter
from Mr. Yeats was to say that he liked my play, but could not make a
definite decision about it until he had consulted his co-director at
the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory. It had the formal, distant tone which
is characteristic of his speech and writing, but it had a postscript
which gave me great pleasure. In this postscript, he said that my
play was the only example of "wayward realism" that he had ever read.
I did not quite understand what he meant by the phrase, but it was a
compliment from a distinguished man and compliments from distinguished
men had never come my way before. I have had many praising letters from
him since then about my work, but none that ever raised me to such a
state of dizzy delight as that first letter did. He told me, in another
postscript, that he found in my "dialogue a quality of temperament,
as distinguished from the usual impersonal logic. You have more than
construction, and it is growing rare to have more." He thought highly
of "John Ferguson"--so did Mr. Shaw and "A.E."--and when I was attacked
in Dublin because of this play, I comforted myself with the thought
that my betters liked what was denounced by my inferiors. Mr. Yeats
wrote to me that "John Ferguson" was "a fragment of life, fully
expounded and without conventionality or confusion. I think it is the
best play you have done, though not likely to be the most popular."
His criticism is especially valuable when it is adverse. I had written
a play called "Mrs. Martin's Man" which I now know to have been a
dreadful mess of motives. I sent it to Mr. Yeats in the hope that he
would permit it to be done at the Abbey. He wrote lengthily to me about
it, and when I had read his letter I put my play in the fire, though
afterwards I used the theme, purged of the faults he had found in it,
for a novel with the same title. "I believe," he wrote,


     "I believe that the play is an error. I am very sorry indeed to
     say this, for I know what a blow it is to any dramatist to be
     told that about work which must have taken many weeks. Shaw has
     driven you off your balance, and instead of giving a vision of
     life, which is your gift and a most remarkable gift to have, you
     have begun to be topical, to play with ideas, to construct outside
     of life. Shaw has a very unique mind, a mind that is a part of a
     logical process going on all over Europe but which has found in
     him alone its efficient expression in English. He has no vision of
     life. He is a figure of international argument. There is an old
     saying, 'No angel can carry two messages. You have the greater
     gift of seeing life itself....'"


I print that extract from his letter, partly as a corrective to my own
pride, but chiefly because of its commentary on Mr. Shaw. Later, in
this chapter I will make specific reference to Mr. Yeats's relationship
to Mr. Shaw's work, but here I may say that, in spite of his sincere
regard and admiration for Mr. Shaw, Mr. Yeats seems to be totally
incapable of comprehending his work. He is able to communicate with
ghosts, but he cannot communicate with Mr. Shaw. He can understand
astrologers and necromancers and spiritualists and thimble-riggers of
all sorts and conditions, but he cannot understand Mr. Shaw. He told
me on one occasion of an experience he had with a medium, a young girl
who differed from all other mediums known to him in being a member
of the upper class. The spirits, seemingly, prefer to communicate
their messages through the lower orders. This girl's family were
ashamed of her cataleptic powers and tried to conceal them from their
neighbours, but they were persuaded to permit Mr. Yeats to see her in
a trance. "While she was in the trance," he said to me, "her fingers
closed on her palm. Then they opened again, and I saw a small green
pebble in the centre of her palm!" That was all! Immortal souls had
disturbed the harmony of the universe and thrown a young girl of the
upper class into a trance in order that they might place a small
green pebble in the centre of her palm! And Mr. Yeats saw something
wonderful and significant in that performance, but is unable to see
anything significant in the work of Mr. Shaw. That to me is a thing
so incomprehensible that I have abandoned all attempts to understand
it. But all of this is digression and anticipation. Soon after I
had received the letter in which he praised my "wayward realism,"
I heard from Mr. Yeats again. He invited me to call on him on the
following Sunday evening at his rooms in Woburn Buildings, behind the
Euston Road, in London; and thither, in a state of some excitement, I
repaired. I had no trouble in finding the house, for Mr. Yeats, who, in
some ways, is much more precise and clear-minded than people imagine or
his handwriting indicates, had given me very explicit directions how
to get to it, and had even drawn a rough sketch of the neighbourhood
so that I should not fail to find him. Woburn Buildings consists of
a number of tall houses in a narrow passage off Southampton Row, and
running parallel with the Euston Road. It is a dingy, dark place,
with an air of furtive poverty about it, and on Sunday nights it is
depressing enough to fill a man's mind with plots for drab dramas.
I have heard that H. G. Wells thought of the plot of that clever,
devilish story of his, "The Island of Dr. Moreau," in the Tottenham
Court Road on a Bank Holiday when he was in a mood of discontent. I
believe that the whole of the "drab drama" was first conceived on Mr.
Yeats's doorstep!

Shops form the ground floor of these houses, little, huckstering shops
that just contrive to support their proprietors, and Mr. Yeats's rooms
were on the third and fourth floors of a house which had a cobbler's
shop on the ground floor. The cobbler was a pleasant, bearded man,
wearing spectacles who had some share in the management of his affairs;
for when one, unable to obtain admission to the poet's rooms, required
information about him, the cobbler invariably supplied it. He could
tell whether Mr. Yeats had gone to Ireland or was merely taking the
air, and when he was likely to return, and he would offer, with great
courtesy, to take a message from you to be faithfully delivered to him
on his arrival.

Mr. Yeats has poor and failing sight, and in the dusk of the Sunday
evening on which I called on him, he could barely discern me. He stood
in the hall, holding the door, looking very tall and dark, and said in
that peculiar, tired and plaintive voice of his, "Who is it?" and I
answered "St. John Ervine." There is always something conspiratorial
about the manner in which he admits you to his rooms. You felt that you
want to give the countersign.

"Oh, yes!" he said, without any interest, and bade me enter.

In one of his books, he writes that life seems to him to be a
preparation for something that never happens; and the quality of his
voice suggests that thwarted desire which is expressed in so much of
his work. He is, in poetry, what Mr. Galsworthy is, in fiction: he
surrenders to life. I do not know of any one who can speak verse so
beautifully and yet so depressingly as he can. The very great beauty
that is in all his work does not stir you: it saddens you. There is no
sunrise in his writing: there is only sunset. In his lyrics, there
is the cadence of fatigue and of the lethargy that comes partly from
disappointment, partly from loneliness, partly from doubt, and partly
from inertia. "Innisfree," the beauty of which has not been diminished
by familiarity, does not sound glad: it sounds tired. The poets wish to
return to the lake island is not due to any pleasurable emotion, but
to weariness and exhaustion: he dreams of the island, not as a place
in which to work and to achieve, but in which to retire from work and
achievement that has not brought with it the gratification for which
he hoped; and the final impression left on the mind of the reader is
that the poet is too tired and disappointed to do more than wish that
he might go to Innisfree. One reads the beautiful poem in the sure and
certain belief that Mr. Yeats will not "arise and go now, and go to
Innisfree," but that he will remain where he is. There is no impulse
or movement in the poem: there is only a passive wish and a plaintive
resignation.

And all that inertia and negation and inactive desire is sounded in his
voice. It is very palpable in his manner.

He warned me not to make a noise as I ascended the uncarpeted
stairs: the people on the second floor might be disturbed. They were
working-people, I understood, and either there was a fretful baby
asleep or the people retired early because they had to rise early,
and he did not wish to break their rest. Yeats can be very harsh and
inconsiderate with his associates, but his bearing to poor men and
women, in my experience, is very courteous and very considerate.
He could not have been more gracious to a duchess--he probably was
sometimes less gracious to a duchess--than he was to the middle-aged
woman who cooked his meals and kept his rooms clean. I have seen
distinguished men being gracious to poor, unlettered men, but most
of them had an air of ... not exactly condescension in doing so, but
of altering their attitude slightly, of relaxing and unbending, of
modifying their style, as it were, and making it simpler. I did not
observe any effort at condescension in his manner towards that plain
and simple woman. He spoke to her in the same way that he would speak
to "A. E." or to Lady Gregory. I suppose that Queen Victoria was the
only woman in the world to whom Yeats ever spoke in a condescending
fashion.


II

He is a tall man, with dark hanging hair that is now turning grey, and
he has a queer way of focussing when he looks at you. I do not know
what is the defect of sight from which he suffers, but it makes his
way of regarding you somewhat disturbing. He has a poetic appearance,
entirely physical, and owing nothing to any eccentricity of dress; for,
apart from his neck-tie, there is nothing odd about his clothes. It is
not easy to talk to him in a familiar fashion, and I imagine that he
has difficulty in talking easily on common topics. I soon discovered
that he is not comfortable with individuals: he needs an audience to
which he can discourse in a pontifical manner. If he is compelled to
remain in the company of one person for any length of time, he begins
to pretend that the individual is a crowd listening to him. His talk is
seldom about common-place things: it is either in a high and brilliant
style or else it is full of reminiscences of dead friends. I do not
believe that any one in this world has ever spoken familiarly to him
or that any one has ever slapped him on the back and said "Helloa, old
chap!" His relatives and near friends call him "Willie" but it has
always seemed to me that they do so with an effort, that they feel
that they ought to call him "Mr. Yeats!" I doubt very much whether he
takes any intimate interest in any human being. It may be, of course,
that he took less interest in me than he took in any one else for I am
not a very interesting person; but I always felt that when I left his
presence, it was immaterial to him whether he ever saw me again or not.
I felt that, on my hundredth meeting with him, I should be no nearer
intimacy with him than I was on my first meeting. My vanity has since
been soothed by the knowledge that he has given a similar impression
regarding themselves to other people who know him better than I do.
I have seen him come suddenly into the presence of a man whom he had
known for many years, and greet him awkwardly as if he did not know
what to say. He never offers his hand to a friend: he will often stand
looking at one without speaking, and then bow and pass on, with perhaps
a fumbled "Good evening!" but never with a "How are you?" or "I'm glad
to see you!"

It is, I suppose, the result of some natural clumsiness of manner.
He has trained himself to an elegance of demeanour, an elaborate
courteousness, which is very pleasing to a stranger, but he has spent
so much time in achieving this elegance that he has forgotten or never
learned how to greet a friend.

He was expecting other people to come to his rooms that Sunday
evening.... I remember he mentioned that Madame Maud Gonne McBride
was expected to arrive in London from Paris on her way to Ireland,
and might call on her way to Euston Station ... but no one else came.
He talked to me about my play and told me that he liked it very much,
but that Lady Gregory did not greatly care for it. "She is a realist
herself," he said, "and all realists hate each other. Synge would have
disliked your play, and Robinson does not like it, but I do!" (Lennox
Robinson, himself a dramatist, was then manager of the Abbey Theatre.)
He asked me if I had written any other plays, and I told him that I
was half-way through a four-act play, called "Mixed Marriage," and I
described the theme of it to him. He urged me to complete this play
and bring the MS. to his rooms and read it to him. "The difficulty
about 'The Magnanimous Lover,'" he said, "is that it may provoke some
disturbance among the audience, and as our patent expires shortly we
do not wish to give the authorities any ground for refusing to renew
it. They were very angry over our production of Bernard Shaw's 'Blanco
Posnet' after the Censor refused to license it in England. We'll leave
the production of 'The Magnanimous Lover' until the patent has been
renewed. If your new play were ready, we could do it first and create a
public for you!..."

Mr. Yeats is one of the best advertising agents in the world, and I
did not doubt his ability to "create a public" for me, although I
thought that Lady Gregory would probably be more skilful even that he
could be. When one remembers that she has established a considerable
reputation as a dramatist on two continents entirely on the strength
of half-a-dozen one-act plays, it is impossible to doubt that she is
at least as skilful as he in drawing attention to herself. A great
amount of their advertising energy has, of course, been expended on
the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Renaissance, and a great many
Irish writers, myself included, have derived advantage, personal and
pecuniary, from their activities. It would have been better for us,
perhaps, if Mr. Yeats had employed his critical ability more freely
than his eulogy on our work. There is an immense amount of creative
power in Ireland, but it is raw, untutored, tumid stuff, and because
the critical faculty in Ireland is almost negligible, this creative
power is wasted in violent explosive plays and books or violent,
explosive beliefs.

I have always believed in the interdependence of all men and minds. It
seems to me that an ill-conceived, foolish political scheme must in
some manner react on every other department of man's life, and that
the labourer who is doing his job badly in a remote village is in
some measure adversely affecting the welfare of his countrymen miles
away. Violent, crude plays are inevitable in a land of violent, crude
beliefs; and it is, I think, not without significance that some of
the most violent, crude plays in the Abbey repertory were written by
dramatists who professed the violent, crude beliefs of Sinn Fein. When
one thinks of the generosity and courage and nobility of many of the
Sinn Feiners, it is hard not to lose faith in human perfectibility when
one considers how foolish are the political schemes they devise. If
men so good and exalted as these men are can produce schemes so stupid
and sometimes so cruel, how can we hope for any progress in the world
when we remember how many bad men there are? And have we not seen how
men of lofty ideals can tumble into cruelty and become brutal ruffians
in the name of patriotism?


III

But there is an explanation of all this crudity and violence in
Ireland. For all sorts of reasons, political, social, historical and
religious, the critical faculty has rarely been employed and certainly
has not been developed. Either you are for a thing or you are against
it. Doubt is treated as if it were antagonism. Reluctance to commit
oneself to any scheme however fantastic or ill-considered it may
be, is treated as treason to the national spirit. A man who asserts
his belief in the establishment of an Irish Republic, by force, if
necessary, is an Irishman, even though he be a "dago," and any one who
is doubtful of the feasibility of this proposal is denounced as a West
Briton, an anglicised Irishman, even, on occasions, as "not Irish at
all," although his forbears have lived in Ireland for generations.
The state of affairs in Ireland is not unlike the state of affairs in
Russia, where literary criticism, as a Russian writer has stated, has
always tended to be the handmaid of political faction. "Any writer of
sufficient talent" says a reviewer in the _Times Literary Supplement_,
"who adopted a liberal attitude was certain of the appreciation of the
_intelligentsia's_ acknowledged critical leaders, and hence of a wide
and enthusiastic audience. But writers whose instinct for the truth
led them to doubt the sufficiency of doctrinaire discontent with the
established order were debarred from the aids to literary advancement,
and had to struggle against the grain of popular, and even academic,
valuation."

It is even worse than that in Ireland, for there, generally speaking,
there is hardly any criticism at all, although there is plenty of
abuse. In great measure this lack of criticism is due to the fact that
all the mind of Ireland has been obsessed by the demand for, or the
opposition to, self-government. There has not been any reality in Irish
electoral contests for a great many years. Until the growth of Sinn
Fein, there seldom were any contests at all. Candidates for parliament
were nearly always returned unopposed. Contests, if there were any,
were between one Nationalist and another, concerned with matters of
detail and not with matters of principle, or, at the most, between
a Nationalist and a Unionist, concerned with the advocacy of, or
opposition to, Home Rule. Sinn Fein has, indeed, brought a contest to
every constituency, but even here the contest is concerned with the old
obsession, self-government in one form or self-government in another:
Home Rule within the British Commonwealth or a Republic outside it.
If one considers that this obsession was nearly always expressed in
bitter language, it is not difficult to understand how deplorable its
effects have been on the general life of the Irish people. It has
temporarily incapacitated them from judging any proposition in a sane
and dispassionate fashion; and so the critical faculty in Ireland has
languished until at times one fears that it has decayed.

Mr. Yeats is a great creative artist: he is also a great critic. Had he
chosen to do so, he could have had an enormous influence on the minds
of his countrymen. His pride in his craft, his desire for perfect
work, his contempt for subterfuges and makeshifts and ill-considered
schemes, his knowledge and his skill, all these would have affected the
faith and achievements of his countrymen, imperceptibly, perhaps, but
very surely. It is unfortunate that he was not appointed to the Chair
of Literature in Trinity College, Dublin. I know that he wished to
receive this appointment and was disappointed that he did not receive
it. The mind that might have disciplined and developed the imagination
of young Irishmen was rejected by Trinity College, and it has turned to
tiresome preoccupation with disembodied beings, to table-turning and
ouija-boards and the childish investigation of what is called spiritual
phenomena, but is, in fact, mere conjurer's stuff.


IV

I saw Mr. Yeats many times after that first visit. He told me that he
was always at home to his friends on Monday evening, and he invited
me to dine with him on the Monday immediately following the Sunday on
which I first met him. No one came on that evening. He talked about
acting and the theatre, and I said something that pleased him, and
he complimented me in his grave, courteous manner. "That was well
said," he exclaimed, and I flushed with pleasure. The praise of one
distinguished man is more than the applause of a multitude of common
men. His talk about the theatre, though interesting, was often remote
from reality. He was then interested in the more esoteric forms of
drama, and was eager to put masks on the actors' faces. He wished
to eliminate the personality of the player from the play, and had
borrowed some foolish notions from Mr. Gordon Craig about lighting and
scenery and dehumanised actors. He had a model of the Abbey Theatre
in his rooms and was fond of experimenting with it. There was some
inconsistency in his talk about acting: at one moment he was anxious
for anonymous, masked players, "freed" from personality, and at the
next moment, he was demanding that players should act with their entire
bodies, not merely with their voices and faces. Hazlitt, advocates
anonymity on the stage, and when one considers how excessive is the
regard paid to-day to the actor in comparison with that paid to the
play, one is tempted to support Hazlitt's demand; but I have never
understood why one should decline to exploit a personality that is rare.

There is a school of thinkers which holds that the best theatre is
that one in which a player may be the hero of the piece to-night and
the "voice off" to-morrow night. This is a ridiculous theory. Even
if it were practicable, which it is not, it would be a disgraceful
waste of material. The manager who consented to a proposal that Madame
Sarah Bernhardt should play the part of the servant with one line to
say would be an ass and a wastrel. It is, perhaps, unfair to treat a
man's "table-talk" as if it were a serious proposal, and I once got
into trouble with Mr. Gordon Craig for doing this; but so much of Mr.
Yeats's talk and writing is related to this matter of disembodiment and
passionless action, that it is difficult not to treat it seriously. For
my part, I have always been unable to understand how it is possible for
a human being to behave as if he were not a human being.

Most of the talking was done by Mr. Yeats, and he talked
extraordinarily well. He is one of the best talkers I have ever
listened to, in spite of the fact that his conversation tends to become
a monologue. But if you cannot talk well yourself, you are wise to
listen to a man who can. He spoke at length about the men who had
been his friends when he was a young man: of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey
Beardsley and Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson; of
Henley and Whistler and Mr. Bernard Shaw and of a host of others. He
had a puzzled, bewildered admiration for "that strange man of genius,
Bernard Shaw," but I never felt that he understood Mr. Shaw or was
happy with Mr. Shaw's mind. He could not make head or tail of "John
Bull's Other Island" when he read it in MS. Mr. Shaw, in a debate with
Mr. Belloc, which I had heard a night or two before the meeting with
Mr. Yeats, had said "I am a servant," and this statement pleased Mr.
Yeats very much. He was moved by the humility of it. Mr. Shaw, however,
hardly entered into Mr. Yeats's early life, and most of the talk that
evening was about Beardsley and Wilde and Lionel Johnson and Ernest
Dowson and the members of the Rhymers' Club. "Most of them," he said,
"died of drink or went out of their minds!"

It was late when I prepared to leave him. He had been saying that a man
should always associate with his equals and superiors and never with
his inferiors, when I recollected that the hour was late and that I
might miss the last tram from the Thames Embankment and so have to walk
several miles. I was tired, too, and a little depressed, for he seemed
to be a lonely man and an uneasy man. He had survived all his friends,
but had not succeeded in making any intimacy with their successors.
I sometimes feel about him that he is a lost man wandering around
looking for his period. When I had announced that I was going home, he
astonished me by saying that he would walk part of the way with me. He
had not had any exercise all day and felt that he needed some air and
movement. (He hates open windows and always keeps his tightly closed.)
We walked to the Embankment together, saying little, for silence had
fallen on him, and walked along it for a short while. I said some banal
thing about Waterloo Bridge, but he did not make any answer; and I did
not speak again, but contented myself with observing the difference
between his walk when he is moving slowly and his walk when he is
moving quickly. He is very dignified in his movements when he walks
slowly: he holds his head erect and carries his hands tightly clenched
behind his back; but when he begins to move quickly, the dignity
disappears and his walk becomes a tumbling shuffle. That, I suppose, is
because of his poor sight.

My tram came along, and I said "Good-night" to him, and he answered
"Good-night" in a vague fashion. I think he had completely forgotten me.


V

He had told me that he was going on the following day to Manchester to
lecture to some society there, and I was sufficiently interested in
his opinions to get a copy of the "Manchester Guardian" containing a
report of what he had said. I was amused to find that his lecture was
a repetition of all that he had said to me on the Monday before the
day on which he lectured. He had "tried it on the dog," and I was the
dog. All his speeches are carefully rehearsed before they are publicly
delivered. He told me once that Oscar Wilde rehearsed his conversation
in the morning and then, being word-perfect, went forth in the evening
to speak it. I imagine that he does that, too, on occasions. It is a
laudable thing to do in many respects, although it tends to make talk
somewhat formal and liable to be scattered by an interruption. When
Mr. Yeats rehearses a speech before making it in public, he is paying
a great tribute to his audience by declining to offer them scamped or
hastily-contrived opinions. Those who listen to him may be deceived
into believing that he is speaking spontaneously, but they may be
certain that what he says has been carefully considered, that he is
speaking of things over which he has pondered and not just "saying the
first thing that comes into his head."

Most men of letters do something of this sort. I have listened to Mr.
Moore saying things which I subsequently read in the preface to the
revised version of one of his novels; and I remember meeting "A. E." in
Nassau Street, Dublin, one evening and being told a great deal about
co-operation which I read in his paper, "The Irish Homestead" on the
following morning.

I saw Mr. Yeats many times after that. I completed the MS. of "Mixed
Marriage" and, much embarrassed, read it to him in his rooms. I read
it very badly, too, and I am sure I bored him a great deal; but he
was kind and patient and he made some useful suggestions to me which I
did not accept. I had too much conceit, as all young writers have, to
be guided by a better man than myself. I know now that I should have
done well to take his advice. He warned me against topical things and
against politics and urged me to flee journalism as I would flee the
devil; and he advised me to read Balzac. He was always advising me to
read Balzac, but I never did....


VI

My memories of those days when I first knew him begin to be
disconnected, and I find myself putting down things which happened
after other things which I have still to relate; but I have never found
a consecutive narrative very interesting, which, perhaps, is why I
cannot read Pepys' Diary or Evelyn's Diary. I like to take things out
of their turn, to go forward to one thing and then back to an earlier
thing. I can only connect one incident or memory with another by taking
them out of their order and doing violence to the natural sequence of
things. Life is not so interesting when all the factors between 1 and
100 are in sequence as it is when 26 and 60 are taken out of their
place and put into coherence, temporary or permanent, with each other.

He said to me one evening that a man does not make firm friendships
after the age of twenty-five. There is a good deal of truth in that
statement, but I doubt whether it is generally true. It is true of
him, for his mind turns back continually to the men who were his
contemporaries twenty-five years ago, but it was not true of Dr.
Johnson, who shed his friends as he grew in stature of mind. And
perhaps what Dr. Johnson said to Sir Joshua Reynolds is more generally
true than what Mr. Yeats said to me. "If a man does not make new
acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself
alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair." I
do not think that anything is so remarkable about Mr. Yeats as his
aloofness from the life of these times. He has very little knowledge of
contemporary writing. I doubt whether he has read much or even anything
by Mr. H. G. Wells or Mr. Arnold Bennett or Mr. John Galsworthy or Mr.
Joseph Conrad. He said to me one night that after thirty a man ought
to read only a few books and read them continually. Some one had said
this to him--I have forgotten who said it--and he passed on the advice
to me; but he added, after a while, that "perhaps the age of thirty is
too young," and suggested that the age should be raised to forty. It
seemed very wrong advice to me.

An active mind will surely keep itself acquainted with new books
and familiar with old books. I have heard many men, particularly
schoolmasters and classical scholars, say with pride that they never
read modern books. Such people boast that when a new book is published,
they read an old one. They are, in my experience, dull people,
sluggardly in mind, and pompous and set in manner. In many cases,
particularly if they are schoolmasters, they neither read new books
nor old ones. Dr. Johnson and his friends, however, appear to have
been familiar with all the current literature of their time: history,
fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy and theology; as well as with the
ancient writings. They would not have _boasted_ of their ignorance of
the work of their contemporaries. In Mr. Yeats's case, however, this
unfamiliarity with the work of men writing to-day is explainable when
one remembers that he cannot read easily because of his sight. When I
first knew him, a friend came several times a week to read to him out
of a copy of the Kelmscott Press edition to William Morris's "Earthly
Paradise."

He had, like most young men of his time, been much influenced by
William Morris, the only man for whom I ever heard him profess anything
like affection, but I remember hearing him say once that he no longer
got pleasure from reading or listening to Morris's poetry.


VII

One night, I was at his rooms when Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, the historian
and biographer of Garibaldi and John Bright, was present with his wife,
a daughter of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Mr. Yeats talked much and well, and I
remember his story of a dream he had had. He often told stories of his
dreams, but some of them smelt of the midnight oil. A friend of his, he
said, was contemplating submission to the Catholic Church. He had tried
to dissuade her from this, but she went away to another country in a
state of irresolution. One night, he dreamt that he saw her entering
a room full of beautiful people. She walked around the room, looking
at these beautiful people who smiled and smiled and smiled, but said
nothing. "And suddenly, in my dream," he said, "I realized that they
were all dead!" "I woke up," he proceeded, "and I said to myself, 'She
has joined the Catholic Church,' and she had." Mr. Trevelyan thought
that the description of the Catholic Church as a room full of beautiful
people, all smiling and all dead, was the most apt he had ever heard.
He chuckled with contented anti-clericalism. Another night, when I
was in his rooms, Miss Ellen Terry's son, Mr. Gordon Craig, came to
see him; and a model of the Abbey Theatre was brought down from his
bedroom to the candle-lit sitting room, where Mr. Craig experimented
with lighting effects. Mr. Craig is a man of genius, but he is a very
difficult and childish person, whose view of the theatre is nearly as
damnable as that of the most vain of the lost tribe of actor-managers
or their successors, the shop-keeper syndicates. Scenery and lighting
effects were of greater consequence to Mr. Craig than the play itself!
His designs for scenery were very beautiful, indeed, but they were
suitable only to romantic and poetical plays.

I remember that when he had manipulated Mr. Yeats's model theatre to
his liking, he stood back from the scene, and said, "What a good thing
it would be if we were to take all the seats out of the theatre so that
the audience could move about and see my shadows!" Mr. Yeats dryly
replied that this was hardly a practical proposal. I was irritated by
Mr. Craig's remark which was in keeping with his general theory of the
theatre. It seemed to me that he would, were he less difficult to work
with, be as great a nuisance and danger to drama as any actor-manager
in London. Sir Henry Irving and Sir Herbert Tree, turning the attention
of the audience away from the play to the player and the scenery,
were not any worse than Mr. Craig, anxious to turn the attention of
the audience to his shadows. I was glad when this remarkable man was
carried off by Mr. Albert Rutherston and Mr. Ernest Rhys to exhibit
himself somewhere else.

Mr. Yeats was bitten with Mr. Craig's theories about lighting and
scenery, and a large sum of money for so poor a theatre as the Abbey,
was spent on some of his "screens" for use in plays like "Deirdre."
They were never used for anything else. When I went to Dublin to
manage the Abbey, I was very anxious that we should employ a competent
scene-builder to make some good "sets" for us, but Mr. Yeats said that
scenery was of no consequence: the dirty hovel which we always employed
to represent an Irish cottage or farm house would do well enough. I
thought there was some oddness in this opinion when I remembered that
the theatre had been almost bankrupted in order to purchase "screens"
for occasional performances of his own one-act plays. He would spend
hours in rehearsing the lighting of a scene for one of them: this
"lime" was too strong and that "lime" was too weak or there was too
much colour or there was not enough or the mingling of colours was
not sufficiently delicate. One day, when he had worn out the patience
of every one in the theatre, with his fussing over the lighting, he
suddenly called out to the stage-manager, "That's it! That's it!
You've got it right now!" "Ah, sure the damned thing's on fire," the
stage-manager answered.


VIII

I have written already that he is not happy with an individual: he must
have an audience; and I remember now something that he said to me which
supports my belief. We had been talking about Synge and his habit of
listening at key-holes and cracks in the floor in order to hear scraps
of conversation that he might put into his plays. I said I had been
told that Synge, though excessively shy and silent in company, was a
very companionable person with an individual. He was a good comrade
on a country road, talking easily and naturally, and had the gift of
friendliness with plain and simple people. Labourers and countrymen
would talk to him as easily as they talked to one another, and would
confide in him. I wondered whether there were as many entertaining
tales to be heard from working-people in England as were to be heard
from working-people in Ireland. Mr. Yeats thought that perhaps there
were. He told me that the woman who cooked his meals and cleaned his
rooms had begun to tell some story of a love affair to him, but that he
had been too diffident to encourage her to go on with it. He thought
that if he had talked to her more than he had, she would have told him
many stories of her youth in the country; but all his talk to her had
been of food and household things. He is not a man in whom poor men and
women confide. His civility to them is magnificent, but it overawes
them and makes them as uneasy in one way as it pleases them in another.
He is an excellent entertainer in a crowded room, but he is a poor
companion on a road. He can talk well to a company of educated men and
women, but he is tongue-tied in the presence of those who have little
learning. When I survey my acquaintance with Yeats, I find strangely
diverse thoughts rising in my mind. I am drawn to him and repelled by
him. He stimulates me and depresses me. I am moved by the beauty of
his work and distracted by its vagueness. I find in his writing and in
his speech, great spiritual loveliness but curiously little humanity,
and I have often wondered why it is that while Irishmen, even such as
I am, are deeply moved by his little play, "Kathleen ni Houlihan,"
men of other countries--not only Englishmen--are left unmoved by it,
unable, without a note in the program, to understand it. I have seen
this play performed very many times. I never missed seeing it, when
it was done at the Abbey during the time that I was manager there. It
moved me as much when I last saw it as it did when I first saw it; and
I do not doubt that if I live to be an old man, it will move me as much
in my old age as it has moved me in my youth. But it does not move men
of other races. That is a singular thing. It denotes, I suppose, that
while there is much that is national in Mr. Yeats's work, there is less
that is universal.

One rises from his work, as one comes from his company, with a feeling
of chilled respect that may settle into disappointment. It is as if
one had been taken into a richly-decorated drawing-room when one had
hoped to be taken into a green field. I have read Blake's poems and
then I have read his and sought to see the resemblance that I am told
is between them, but have not always found it. Blake wrote about
things that he felt, but Mr. Yeats writes about the things that he
thinks; and thought changes and perishes, but feeling is permanent and
unchangeable; thought separates and divides men, but feeling brings
them together; and it may be that Mr. Yeats's aloofness from men is
due to the fact that he thinks too much and feels too little.


IX

I think of him as a very lonely, isolated, aloof man. He is, so far as
I am aware, the only English-speaking poet who did not write a poem
about the War, a fact which is at once significant of the restraint
he imposes upon himself and of his isolation from the common life of
his time. I have never met any one who seems so unaware of temporary
affairs as Mr. Yeats, and this unawareness is due, not to affectation,
but to sheer lack of interest. He probably would not have known of the
War at all had not the Germans dropped a bomb near his lodgings off the
Euston Road. When Macaulay's New Zealander comes to examine the ruins
of London, he will probably see Mr. Yeats, disembodied and unaware that
he is disembodied or that London is in ruins, sitting on a slab with a
planchette. He is younger than Mr. Shaw by ten years, but might be ten
years older. His verse and his speech and his manner are all elderly,
and his conversation is composed chiefly of reminiscences of men who
have been dead for many years, so that one imagines he has not had a
friend since 1890. There is absolutely no suggestion of youth in his
writings. In the poem entitled, "To a Child Dancing in the Wind," he
says:


     I could have warned you, but you are young,
     So we speak a different tongue


and again:


     But I am old and you are young,
     And I speak a barbarous tongue.


I do not know what age Mr. Yeats was when he wrote those lines, but
they are included in a collection of poems, dated "1912-1914," and at
most he could not have been fifty, for he was born in Dublin in 1865.

The sense of age seems to have oppressed his mind for many years,
perhaps for the whole of his creative life. He feels that he has
outlived his generation and is lost in a period of time peculiarly
alien to him.


                     When I was young,
     I had not given a penny for a song
     Did not the poet sing it with such airs
     That one believed he had a sword upstairs:
     Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
     Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.


This coldness closing on his heart and congealing all his generous
emotions, causes him, at the end of a graceful book, "Reveries Over
Childhood and Youth" (in itself, significant of the age-obsession
which possesses his mind) to declare that "all life, weighed in the
scales of my own life, seems to me a preparation for something that
never happens," and leaves his readers wondering why a man who began
his life by singing songs with such airs "that one believed he had a
sword upstairs" should stumble into dismal prose towards the end of it,
pronouncing life to be a cheerless deceit.

His effect on young men is peculiar. His brilliant conversation is very
attractive to them, but his insensibility to the presence of human
beings repels them. "A. E." once told me that Mr. Arthur Griffith, the
founder of the Sinn Fein movement, drew young people to him by the
strength of his hatred, but finally repelled them by his complete lack
of charity and love. A nature compounded principally or exclusively
of hatred must be destructive. No man can construct anything unless
love and charity predominate in his heart. Mr. Griffith, throughout his
career, has never been notable for his power to make things. He could
not even make his own movement grow, for Sinn Fein became a popular
and appealing force only after Padraic Pearce and Thomas Macdonagh
and James Connolly had put a fire into the machinery of it on Easter
Monday, 1916. There is something terribly ironical in the fact that
James Connolly, to whom Mr. Griffith offered every possible opposition
in his lifetime, should by his death have helped to put Mr. Griffith
in a position of authority to which his own intellectual and spiritual
qualities could never have raised him. Mr. Yeats has something of the
unhumanity of Mr. Griffith. His talk is brilliant, indeed, but it is
not comradely talk. It never lapses from high quality to the easy
familiarities which humanize all relationships. He is more fastidious
about his speech than he is about his friends. It would shock him more
to use a bad word than to make a bad friend, because he is more aware
of bad words than of bad men; and he would be quicker to forgive a
crime than to forgive a vulgar phrase. I have never heard him use a
common expression. He once repeated an angry speech of William Morris
to me with an air almost apologetic for using profane language, not
because it was profane but because it was inelegant. He never says
"Damn!" or "Blast!" when he is angry.... He is one of the loneliest
men in the world, for he cannot express himself except in a crowd. Dr.
Stockman said that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands
absolutely alone--a feat which is surely impossible--and this specious
statement has supported many ineffective egoists in their belief that
neurosis is strength and misbehaviour a sign of individuality. But
the penalty of isolation is that the isolated cannot dispense with
an amenable crowd. The hermit must have a succession of respectful
pilgrims to his cave, each one murmuring, "There is but one God and
Thou art His Prophet!" until at last the hermit begins to believe
that _he_ is God and God is _his_ prophet. Hermits have followers,
or, perhaps one ought to say, curious visitors, but they have no
friends. Why should they have friends? They have not got the social
sense nor can they take part in the common labours of mankind. They
live in caves and desert places because they are not fit to live in
houses and places that are inhabited. But even the hermits, wrapped in
self-sufficiency, realize that no man is effective without his fellows,
and so, though they cannot make friends, they make disciples. This is a
truth which all the great lonely men from Adam to Robinson Crusoe have
discovered, that a man by himself is ineffective and without interest.
Life for Adam remained uneventful until the arrival of Eve: the island
of Juan Fernandez was livelier after Man Friday came to keep Crusoe
company. For fellowship is life, as Morris said, and lack of fellowship
is death.

There is no poet, not even Keats or Shelley, who has so much of pure
poetry in his work as Mr. Yeats has in his, and perhaps that is
enough; but there is no other poet, not even Mr. Kipling, who has so
little understanding of human kind. It is an odd commentary on his
relationship to his countrymen that while he was writing the bitter
poem, entitled "September, 1913," with the desolating refrain:


     Romantic Ireland's dead and gone--
     It's with O'Leary in the grave.


Thomas Macdonagh and Padraic Pearse and James Connolly were preparing
themselves for a romantic death.

John Davidson, in a book called "Sentences and Paragraphs," writes of
Keats that, "beginning and ending his intemperate period with the too
ample verge and room, the trailing fringe and sample-like embroidery of
'Endymion,' he was soon writing the most perfect odes in the language."
Mr. Yeats, in spite of some reluctant instructions into enthusiastic
movements, escaped "the intemperate period"; but he did so at the cost
of his youth and ardour. Like the Magi in his poem of that name, he,
"being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied," seeks "to find once more"
"the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor"; but it eludes him,
and will always elude him, because he thinks of its habitation as "a
bestial floor." It can only be found by a poet who, whatever happens,
still believes that the earth is a place where God may yet walk in
safety. Mr. Yeats is the greatest poet that Ireland has produced, but
he has meant very little to the people of Ireland, for he has forgotten
the ancient purpose of the bards, to urge men to a higher destiny
by reminding them of their high origin, and has lived, aloof and
disdainful, as far from human kind as he can conveniently get.




+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber's note:                              |
|                                                 |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.  |
|                                                 |
+-------------------------------------------------+





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