The Critical Game Part 11

Furness lugs in that tiresome phantom, a playhouse copy. "Our only recourse is to accept the explanation given by Resch, viz., that these words between Brutus and Messala are an interpolation from a MS.

addition which appeared first in a playhouse copy, and which, by mistake, became incorporated in the text." Now, is not that a "soft, downy, pink-cheeked peach of an idea" (Jonson's "Seja.n.u.s," act IV., sc. 13, I, 23. Potter's edition: Oshkosh, Scholar and Sellum, 1913)?

Resch be hanged! What playhouse copy? When? Whose mistake? How incorporated? A solid page and two-thirds of a page are devoted to explaining a difficulty which does not exist.

This is the true history of the pa.s.sage in question. Shakespeare and Bacon and Raleigh met in the Mermaid Tavern for the purpose of turning out a few yards of Elizabethan blank verse in the post-Tennysonian style of Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was a very difficult job and Will of Stratford got roaring full. He went home on foot to Stratford, a long journey, and found Anne with another pair of twins, one of whom was the poet Davenant. This was very disturbing to Will. He did not know until after his death which twin was Davenant. He was then in that fateful year, 1599-1600, writing his play, "Julius Caesar", and making extensive use of Suetonius's "The Lives of the Caesars" (Dr. Furness thinks this doubtful, but if you are going to guess, why not guess good and plenty?). Anne got on Will's nerves and he had a bad morning head. That is why he made that slightly confused pa.s.sage, which has bothered the scholars ever since.

The following example of how Shakespeare's biography is written is not a parody. It appears in the New York _Nation_ of November 27, 1913, page 513, in a review of Arthur S. Pier's "Story of Harvard."

"Every good story has a prologue, and the story of Harvard has one which by no means should be left out. In Stratford-on-Avon stands the 'Old House in the High Street,' identified by the most eminent of our antiquaries, the late H. F. G. Waters, by certain doc.u.mentary evidence, as the early home of Katharine Rogers, mother of John Harvard, from whom proceeded the little inheritance that first kindled in the western hemisphere the torch of a liberal culture. For this we have distinct contemporaneous chapter and verse.

"At circ.u.mstantial evidence we look askance, but without pressing the matter unduly this may be said--that the families of Rogers and Shakespeare lived in close neighborhood and intimacy at Stratford during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.; that the poet knew Katharine Rogers well, as, on the other hand, he knew well Robert Harvard, at length her husband, in his shop at Southwark, in London, hard by the Globe Theatre. So far the conjunction would seem to be inevitable.

"Then looms up a possibility amounting perhaps to a likelihood, that no other than Shakespeare was the intermediary who brought together the Londoner and the fair, well-dowered maid in the remote midlands, that he was a familiar guest in the home in Southwark which he had helped to establish, and that he, the genial family friend, held on his knee the little John Harvard, the first-born in the household.

"Could this touch of their foster-father with the most ill.u.s.trious name in literature be fairly established (and who can say after the feats of Mr. Waters what sc.r.a.ps may yet be found in the dust-heaps?), Harvard men would indeed have a tradition to prize."

Why not get down to bra.s.s tacks? We do not know much about Shakespeare's life. We do not know anything about his ma.n.u.scripts, or the playhouse versions. We cannot even rely on the printed date of a quarto. We do not know whether a corrupt line was corrupted by Shakespeare or the printer or somebody else. Many emendations consist largely in a kind of scholarly punning. For example: Shakespeare wrote a line that every scholar remembers, for it is a causer of gray hairs and a prodigal spender of the midnight taper: "The blind Rush hath proclaimed his Bowells search." Johnson conjectures that four lines have been omitted. Steev. conj.: For "blind rush," read "mind rush."

That is, the impetuousness of his thought makes one aware of how his instinct is struggling for the solution of his difficulties. Malone conj.: "Bowells lurch." Evidently referring to the sea-sickness of Antony after the battle of Actium. Craik conj.: "Rowell's search, meaning that his blind rush, that is headlong rush, is caused or indicated by the speed of his horse into which he has thrust his rowels." Cf. B. Jonson, "Every man out of His Humor"; "One of the rowels catched hold of the ruffle of my boot." Oechelhauser (_Einleitung_, p. 1185): But this must refer to the speed of the intellect going through purely idealistic experiences. There is no question here of either sea or land. Macbeth has not been near the sea and Henry V. has not yet set sail for France. As for horses, it is now well established that there were no horses in England; otherwise why should Richard have cried, "My kingdom for a horse"? If there had been horses, one could surely have bought one, especially a King, for 80 marks, the then ruling price in Schleswig-Holstein; and even the ecstasies of expression would not have made appropriate the offer of an entire kingdom.

So they go "conjing" and "conjing" through desolate miles of notes.

In spite of the fact that now and again a genuine bit of historic information, a light of interpretative intuition flas.h.i.+ng from a scholar's note, does vivify and elucidate a puzzling line, or a line that you might pa.s.s over in an oblivious mood, nevertheless, is it not true that this whole inst.i.tution of literary theology is a stupid superst.i.tion? There are plenty of unsolved problems in Shakespeare, fascinating questions of biography and interpretation to which conjectural answers are legitimate. But for illuminating answers, or partial answers, one has to go outside orthodox scholars.h.i.+p, to Walter Begley, to "The Shakespeare Problem Restated," by George C. Greenwood, to "Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest" by Colin Still, and to other heretical inquirers whom the pundits dismiss as cranks.

The scholars do not confine their thick-headed learning to old poets whose language is strange and who are made clearer by a note here and there. For some stranger reason scholars are hired to edit the modern poets in the popular series, those valuable and inexpensive reprints which help to spread poetry over the face of the earth and make it accessible to increasing numbers of readers. I pick up the "Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti," edited with introduction and notes by Charles Bell Burke, Ph.D., professor of English in the University of Tennessee. The volume is in Macmillan's Pocket Cla.s.sics. I come upon "A Green Cornfield," a lovely lyric that must have made Sh.e.l.ley look down with interest "from the abode where the eternal are." There is reference to a note. I turn to it and find this: "An inverted simile?

Consult Genung's 'Working Principles of Rhetoric,' p. 79, 2, example."

I will not consult Genung. I will advise all the pupils in my school never to consult Genung while they are reading poetry.

I commend to those hard-working young men and women in the universities who are now studying under editors of Shakespeare to fit themselves to be editors of Shakespeare these sentences from Mr. Max Eastman's "Enjoyment of Poetry": "A misfortune incident to all education is the fact that those who elect to be teachers are scholars. They esteem knowledge not for its use in attaining other values, but as a value in itself; and hence they put an undue emphasis upon what is formal and nice about it, leaving out what is less pleasing to the instinct for cla.s.sification but more needful to the art of life. This misfortune is especially heavy in the study of literature. Indeed the very rare separation of the study of literature from that of the subjects it deals with suggests the barren and formal character of it. As usually taught for three years to postgraduates in our universities, it is not worth spending three weeks upon."

GEORGE MOORE AND OTHER IRISH WRITERS

"Though I may have lost the habit of reading," says Mr. Moore, "I have acquired, perhaps more than any other human being, another habit, the habit of thinking. I love my own thoughts." It must be a great pleasure to be Mr. George Moore, to have confidence in one's intellectual habits, to enjoy the memories and opinions that the mind excogitates, and to be able to phrase them with beautiful precision.

The mind that honestly likes itself is sure to attract other minds and to interest even those that are antipathetic. If Mr. Moore does not persuade you that all his judgments are to be accepted, he provokes you to examine your own. He is stimulant, irritant, but there is no depressant reaction from him. One can stand a large dose of him, both of his exquisite fiction and of his repet.i.tive reminiscences, which may or may not be fiction.

There is a remark ascribed to Lady Gregory: "Some men kiss and do not tell; George Moore does not kiss, but he tells." It is the business of the writer of fiction to "tell," and it makes little difference to the reader who reads for fun whether the gallant adventures are biographical or not. Early in his literary career Mr. Moore tried the confessional form of narrative and succeeded masterfully. The young man who "confessed" twenty-five years ago grew older, and in "Memoirs of My Dead Life" looked back upon his youth from the quiescence of middle age. Mr. Moore says that "if the reader of 'Vale' be wishful to know what happened at Orelay he can do so in a volume ent.i.tled 'Memoirs of My Dead Life,' but he need not read this novel to follow adequately the story of 'Vale.'" So the "Memoirs" is fiction. What, then, is "Hail and Farewell"? Simply an extension of the autobiographic novel, it includes real persons living and dead and calls them by their names, but it is as obviously a "made-up" book as anything in literature. It is the work of an artist and critic, the artist who gave us two masterpieces, "Esther Waters" and "Evelyn Innes," and the critic, who, apropos books and pictures, writes, if not with infallible judgment, ever with an unfailing sense of beauty.

Mr. Moore's lady-loves have not, according to his own testimony, direct and unconscious, been the most interesting affairs of his life.

He writes better about Manet than about an amatory encounter of yesteryear. The women of his "regular" novels are more vivid than the women who perturb his mature reminiscences. He says that the critics complain that "instead of creating types of character like Esther Waters," he is wasting his time describing his friends, "mere portrait painting," and he asks an argumentative question: "In writing 'Esther Waters' did I not think of one heroic woman?"

For once the critics are on the right side. Lady Gregory is interesting in her own person and her own work, but Mr. Moore can never make her so interesting in a book as he has made Esther and Evelyn. And the ladies of his experience are more alive when he uses them as matter for fiction than when he sits behind a cigar dictating memories. That in creating Esther he was thinking of an heroic woman is his concern, not ours. His private kisses undoubtedly taught him something of the art of making fict.i.tious kisses public; they furnished him, as such experiences furnish every author, with the story which as an artist he was to "tell." But his purely personal revelations are not startling. Ladies flit into his memory, receive the most delicate literary treatment and flit out again. Nothing unusual happens at Orelay or anywhere else, and what happens is handled finely, timidly even, with what may have been audacity in 1890, but no longer strikes us as valiantly candid. The introduction to "Memoirs of My Dead Life" now seems much ado over little; it is out of proportion and is a wobbly piece of thinking such as Mr. Moore's Irish born and French trained mind is seldom guilty of. The "Memoirs"

and "Hail and Farewell" are to be enjoyed and admired. Even an Irishman ought not to find in them occasion for more than a contest of wit.

No page of "Hail and Farewell" is flat; no opinion of Mr. Moore's leaves you quite indifferent. The most interesting pages, more interesting than his portrait of himself as a lover in France or a member of the landed gentry of county Mayo, are those which criticize the personalities and the ideas of the so-called Celtic Revival. His comments on Lady Gregory and "Willie" Yeats just miss being insults.

To say that "Lady Gregory has never been for me a very real person" is gratuitous and not quite consonant with that honesty which Mr. Moore advocates and for the most part practises. For in his portrait of her and his comments on her he shows that she is a very real person to him and a writer who compels his consideration. In the act of putting a pin through the humb.u.g.g.e.ry of others he buzzes himself.

However, his literary criticism of their work is delightful. Whether it is true or not we Yankees have no sure means of judging. He says that Lady Gregory's style which Mr. Yeats so highly values, the speech that she learned from the people and puts into the mouths of her characters, "consists of no more than a dozen turns of speech, dropped into pages of English so ordinary, that redeemed from these phrases it might appear in any newspaper without attracting attention." Well, is not that true of the speech of the Irish or any province of England or America? Our dialectic differences are few but important. The speech of Lady Gregory's characters is effective, and more than that, the humor and the pathos of them is deeper than their speech or any peculiar turns of phrase.

Doubtless (as would say Sir Sidney Lee, whom Mr. Moore despises), doubtless Mr. Yeats makes too much of Lady Gregory's discovery of dialect and of his own discovery of Lady Gregory. In the revised version of "Red Hanrahan," he thanks Lady Gregory "who helped me to rewrite The Stories of Red Hanrahan in the beautiful country speech of Kiltartan, and nearer to the tradition of the people among whom he, or some likeness of him, drifted and is remembered." It is little I care, myself being a literary man, whether the metaphors and the syntax and the sentence rhythms were contrived by Mr. Yeats or Lady Gregory or the people of Kiltartan, or whether they are natural to the English tongue of other times and other regions of the world. They are impressive, they convey the story, and they give to the story the strange color appropriate to it. Mr. Yeats plays with verbal color, with lights and darkness in a way that should appeal to so sympathetic a student of the French impressionists as Mr. Moore.

To be sure, there is always the danger of affectation, and the concluding sentences of Mr. Yeats's dedicatory letter to "AE" are pretty close to buncombe. "Ireland, which is still predominantly Celtic, has preserved, with some less excellent things, a gift of vision which has died out among more hurried and more successful nations; no s.h.i.+ning candelabra have prevented us from looking into the darkness, and when one looks into the darkness there is always something there." Not always; there may not be anything there worth talking about, not even a black cat. And the man of poetic vision may be a citizen of a relatively successful nation. The eye does not thrive in the dark, but is gradually atrophied. It was not by scrutinizing the dark, but by using his ear and his wonderful visual imagination that Mr. Yeats learned to write the verses in "Red Hanrahan's Curse," verses the like of which no other man can write.

In such verses lives and will live the real Yeats. That some of his verses are obscure and weak does not matter. Greater poets than he have failed at times. And the best of his later verse is his very best; he grows and keeps young, for he has been dipped in some magic well. That he has foibles a plenty is of little moment; greater poets than he have allowed the fool to triumph over the genius sometimes.

The divine fool is one of the common themes in poetic legend. Later criticism will a.s.sess the value of the "school" that he has founded and appraise his influence in the literary history of Ireland. The function of criticism at the present time is to proclaim the lyric poet and persuade readers to subject themselves to the enchantment of his songs. It is surprising that Mr. Moore, who preaches the gospel of beauty with a fervor worthy of Keats, should not balance his witty strictures with a little more hearty appreciation. He quotes one of his friends as saying that Yeats "took his colleen to London and put paint upon her cheeks and dye upon her hair and sent her up Piccadilly."

And another critic added that the hat and feathers were supplied by Arthur Symons. That is funny enough and serves the purpose of criticism by arousing interest. It also gives other critics opportunity to remind their readers that Yeats's colleen, whether in Sligo or London, is a lovely witch.

One story that Mr. Moore tells of Mr. Yeats is beyond my un-Celtic sense of humor. He represents Mr. Yeats as coming down to luncheon at Lady Gregory's house and saying: "I have had a great morning. I have written eight lines." Where is the joke? It does not seem to be at the expense of the poet. Eight of his lines may seem a poor day's work to so great a man as George Moore. But some of us who have not earned the right to be patronizing would cheerfully devote a month of Sundays, if we knew how, to making one line as good as the best of Yeats. These Irish people rag each other delightfully, and it is more delightful to poke fun than to admire too mutually; perhaps it is more Irish.

Of living Irishmen the two most distinguished writers of prose are George Moore and Bernard Shaw. They resemble each other in two or three particulars. Both are out of sympathy with the modern movement in Irish literature, with the "Celtic revival," with all that revolves about the person of Mr. Yeats. In the introduction to "John Bull's Other Island," Mr. Shaw says (I quote from memory) that he is an old-fas.h.i.+oned Irishman who sees other Irishmen as they really are and not as the young people of the Abbey Theatre imagine them to be. Mr.

Moore somewhat grudgingly concedes that Synge was a man of genius and that Lady Gregory's plays, though inferior to the "Playboy" are all meritorious. But he implies, if he does not directly say, that the only man who really understands the diction of the Irish is George Moore, Esq., of Moore Hall. Another point of resemblance between Shaw and Moore is that both insist on calling themselves shameless; they boast their independence and find satisfaction in contemplating their difference from other people. It is amusing to think that the reading world has long taken them for granted and is no longer shocked. Both are masters of the English tongue, not of a new style full of strange idioms, natural or artificial, but of the straightest sort of cla.s.sic English, firm as the best prose of the eighteenth century.

It is that English which shall save these Celtic iconoclasts who are now respectable old gentlemen. Irish to the back-bone, they took for foster mother the finest prose of the race that betrayed their country; they became favorite sons of an empire superior to the political and racial divisions of the world. Mr. Moore thinks that the English are a tired race and their weariness betrays itself in the language. "G.o.d help the writer who puts pen to paper in fifty years'

time, for all that will be left of the language will be a dry shank-bone that has been lying a long while on the dust-heap of empire." A dismal prophecy which is cheerfully contradicted by the facts of literary history. The political empire may be disrupted, Ireland may be freed from English yoke and split in twain. But the language is safe. Artists like Mr. Moore preserve its integrity and renew its vitality. And we have not heard the last of James Joyce and James Stephens, or of one or two young men who were born on the island that lies east of Dublin.

JAMES JOYCE

In the preface of "Pendennis" Thackeray says: "Since the author of 'Tom Jones' was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art." If Thackeray felt that, why did he not take his reputation and his fortune in his hands and, defying the social restrictions which he deplored, paint us a true portrait of a young gentleman of his time? He might have done much for English art and English honesty. As it was, he did as much as any writer of his generation to fasten on English fiction the fetters of a hypocritical reticence. It was only in the last generation that English and Irish novelists, under the influence of French literature, freed themselves from the cowardice of Victorian fiction and a.s.sumed that anything human under the sun is proper subject-matter for art. If they have not produced masterpieces (and I do not admit that they have not), they have made a brave beginning. Such a book as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" would have been impossible forty years ago. Far from looking back with regret at the good old novelists of the nineteenth century (whom, besides, we need never lose), I believe that our fiction is in some respects freer[1] and richer than the fiction of our immediate forefathers.

[1] If it gets too free, as in Joyce's "Ulysses," it has an official hand clapped on its mouth!

Joyce's work is outspoken, vigorous, original, beautiful. Whether it faithfully reflects Irish politics and the emotional conflicts of the Catholic religion one who is neither Irish nor Catholic can not judge with certainty. It seems, however, that the noisy controversies over Parnell and the priests in which the boy's elders indulge have the sound of living Irish voices; and the distracted boy's wrestlings with his sins and his faith are so movingly human that they hold the sympathy even of one who is indifferent to the religious arguments. I am afraid that the religious questions and the political questions are too roughly handled to please the incurably devout and patriotic. If they ever put up a statue of Joyce in Dublin, it will not be during his lifetime. For he is no respecter of anything except art and human nature and language.

There are some who, to turn his own imaginative phrase, will fret in the shadow of his language. He makes boys talk as boys do, as they did in your school and mine, except that we lacked the Irish imagery and whimsicality. If the young hero is abnormal and precocious, that is because he is not an ordinary boy but an artist, gifted with thoughts and phrases above our common abilities. This is a portrait of an artist, a literary artist of the finest quality.

The style is a joy. "Cranly's speech," he writes, "had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms." In that Joyce has defined his own style. It is Elizabethan, yet thoroughly modern; it is racily Irish, yet universal English. It is unblus.h.i.+ngly plain-spoken and richly fanciful, like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The effect of complete possession of the traditional resources of language is combined with an effect of complete indifference to traditional methods of fiction. Episodes, sensations, dreams, emotions trivial and tragic succeed each other neither coherently nor incoherently; each is developed vividly for a moment, then fades away into the next, with or without the mechanical devices of chapter divisions or rows of stars. Life is so; a fellow is pandied by the schoolmaster for no offense; the cricket bats strike the b.a.l.l.s, pick, pock, puck; there is a girl to dream about; and Byron was a greater poet than Tennyson anyhow....

The sufferings of the poor little sinner are told with perfect fidelity to his point of view. Since he is an artist his thoughts appropriately find expression in phrases of maturer beauty than the speech of ordinary boys. He is enamored of words, intrigued by their mystery and color; wherefore the biographer plays through the boy's thoughts with all manner of verbal loveliness.

Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their a.s.sociations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

From the fading splendor of an evening beautifully described, he tumbles into the sordid day of a house rich in p.a.w.n tickets. That is life. "Welcome, O life!" he bids farewell to his young manhood. "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."

The sketches in "Dubliners" are perfect, each in its own way, and all in one way: they imply a vast deal that is not said. They are small as the eye-gla.s.s of a telescope is small; you look through them to depths and distances. They are a kind of short story almost unknown to the American magazine if not to the American writer. An American editor might read them for his private pleasure, but from his professional point of view he would not see that there was any story there at all.

The American short story is explicit and thin as a moving-picture film; it takes nothing for granted; it knows nothing of the art of the hintful, the suggestive, the selected single detail which lodges fertilely in the reader's mind, begetting ideas and emotions. America is not the only offender (for patriotism is the fas.h.i.+on and bids criticism relent); there is much professional Irish humor which is funny enough but no more subtle than a s.h.i.+llalah. And English short stories, such at least as we see in magazines, are obvious and "express" rather than expressive. Joyce's power to disentangle a single thread from the confusion of life and let you run briefly back upon it until you encounter the confusion and are left to think about it yourself--that is a power rare enough in any literature.

Except one story, "A Painful Case," I could not tell the plot of any of these sketches. Because there is no plot going from beginning to end. The plot goes from the surface inward, from a near view away into a background. A person appears for a moment--a priest, or a girl, or a small boy, or a street-corner tough, or a drunken salesman--and does and says things not extraordinary in themselves; and somehow you know all about these people and feel that you could think out their entire lives. Some are stupid, some are pathetic, some are funny in an unhilarious way. The dominant mood is irony. The last story in the book, "The Dead," is a masterpiece which will never be popular, because it is all about living people; there is only one dead person in it and he is not mentioned until near the end. That's the kind of trick an Irishman like Synge or Joyce would play on us, and perhaps a Frenchman or a Russian would do it; but we would not stand it from one of our own writers.

D. H. LAWRENCE