Complete Works of James Joyce (348 page)
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Authors: Unknown
This novel, reprinted from the pages of one of the leading French reviews, and now very successfully translated into English, seems to have attracted more attention in London than in Paris. It deals with the problem of an uncompromising orthodoxy, beset by a peculiarly modern, or (as the Churchmen would say) morbid scepticism, and sorely tried by that alluring, beautiful, mysterious spirit of the earth, whose voice is for ever breaking in upon, and sometimes tempering, the prayers of the saints.
Augustine Chanteprie, the descendant of an old Catholic family, many of whose members have been disciples of Pascal, has been brought up in an atmosphere of rigid, practical belief, and is destined, if not for a clerical life, at least for such a life in the world as may be jealously guarded from the snares of the devil, sacrificing as little as may be of innocence and piety. Among his ancestors, however, there was one who forsook the holy counsel given him in youth, and assumed the excellent foppery of the world. He built, in protest against the gloomy house of his family, a pleasant folly, which afterwards came to be known as ‘The House of Sin’. Augustine, unfortunately for himself, inherits the double temperament, and little by little the defences of the spiritual life are weakened, and he is made aware of human love as a subtle, insinuating fire. The intercourse of Augustine and Madame Manole is finely conceived, finely executed, enveloped in a glow of marvellous tenderness. A simple narration has always singular charm when we divine that the lives it offers us are themselves too ample, too complex, to be expressed entirely:
‘Augustine and Fanny were now alone. They retraced their steps toward Chene-Pourpre, and suddenly stopping in the middle of the road, they kissed each other .... There was neither light nor sound. Nothing lived under the vault of heaven but the man and the woman intoxicated by their kiss. From time to time, without disengaging their hands, they drew away and looked at each other.’
The last chapters of the book, the chapters in which the tradition of generations overcomes the lover, but so remorselessly that the mortal temple of all those emotions is shattered into fragments, show an admirable adjustment of style and narrative, the prose pausing more and more frequently with every lessening of vitality, and finally expiring (if one may reproduce the impression somewhat fantastically) as it ushers into the unknown, amid a murmur of prayers, the poor trembling soul.
The interest in the politico-religious novel is, of course, an interest of the day, and, perhaps, it is because Huysmans is daily growing more formless and more obviously comedian in his books that Paris has begun to be wearied by the literary oblate. The writer of The House of Sin’, again, is without the advantage of a perverted career, and is not to be reckoned among the converts. The complication of an innocent male and a woman of the world is, perhaps, not very new, but the subject receives here very striking treatment, and the story gains much by a comparison with Bourget’s ‘Mensonges’ — a book that is crude, however detailed and cynical.
‘Marcelle Tinayre’, who seems to have a finer sympathy with Catholicism than most of the neo-Catholics have, is a lover of life and of the fair shows of the world; and though piety and innocence are interwoven with every change of affection and every mood of our manifold nature in these pages, one is conscious that the writer has suspended over her tragedy, as a spectre of sorrow and desolation, the horrible image of the Jansenist Christ.
1903
Mr. Langbridge, in his preface to this volume of his verses, has confessed to so great a number of literary discipleships that one is well prepared for the variety of styles and subjects of which the book is full. Mr. Langbridge’s worst manner is very bad indeed; here the worst vices of Browning are united with a disease of sentiment of which the ‘Master’ cannot be justly accused; here ‘tears splash on ground’, blind beggars, mothers’ girlies, pathetic clerks, and cripples are huddled together in dire confusion, and the colloquial style, half American half Cockney, is employed to adorn their easily-imagined adventures. Anything more lamentable than the result would be difficult to conceive; and the result is all the more lamentable because the few sonnets which Mr. Langbridge has inserted in his volume are evidences of some care and a not inconsiderable technical power. The lines, ‘To Maurice Maeterlinck’, are, therefore, curiously out of place in this farrago of banal epics, so dignified are they in theme, so reserved in treatment,
and one can only hope that Mr. Langbridge, when he publishes again, will see fit to sacrifice his taste for ‘comédie larmoyante’, and attest in serious verse that love which he professes for the muse.
Hardly I dare to carry to the feet
Of your presaging dreams, occult, apart.
My book of rhymes, where clamorous wants compete,
And all the air is venal with the mart:
And yet, like you, I hear the white wings beat.
And the dark waters, and the breaking heart.
1903
In the introduction which Dr. Tyrrell has written for Mr. Graves’s tragedy, it is pointed out that ‘Clytemnaestra’ is not a Greek play in English, like ‘Atalanta in Calydon’, but rather a Greek story treated from the standpoint of a modern dramatist — in other words it claims to be heard on its own merits merely, and not at all as a literary curio. To leave aside for the moment the subordinate question of language it is not easy to agree with Dr. Tyrrell’s opinion that the treatment is worthy of the subject. On the contrary there would appear to be some serious flaws in the construction. Mr. Graves has chosen to call his play after the faithless wife of Agamemnon, and to make her nominally the cardinal point of interest. Yet from the tenor of the speeches, and inasmuch as the play is almost entirely a drama of the retribution which follows crime, Orestes being the agent of Divine vengeance, it is plain that the criminal nature of the queen has not engaged Mr. Graves’s sympathies.
The play, in fact, is solved according to an ethical idea, and not according to that indifferent sympathy with certain pathological states which is so often anathematized by theologians of the street. Rules of conduct can be found in the books of moral philosophers, but ‘experts’ alone can find them in Elizabethan comedy. Moreover, the interest is wrongly directed when Clytemnasstra, who is about to imperil everything for the sake of her paramour, is represented as treating him with hardly disguised contempt, and again where Agamemnon, who is about to be murdered in his own palace by his own queen on his night of triumph, is made to behave towards his daughter Electra with a stupid harshness which is suggestive of nothing so much as of gout. Indeed, the feeblest of the five acts is the act which deals with the murder. Nor is the effect even sustained, for its second representation during Orestes’ hypnotic trance cannot but mar the effect of the real murder in the third act in the mind of an audience which has just caught Clytemnaestra and Egisthus red-handed.
These faults can hardly be called venial, for they occur at vital points of the artistic structure, and Mr. Graves, who might have sought to cover all with descriptive writing, has been honest enough to employ such a studiously plain language as throws every deformity into instant relief. However, there are fewer offences in the verse than in most of the verse that is written nowadays, and it is perhaps only an indication of the mental confusion incident upon seership when Tiresias, the prophet, is heard exclaiming:
Beware! beware! The stone you started rolling down the hill Will crush you if you do not change your course,
1903
Tennyson is reported to have said that if God made the country and man made the city, it must have been the devil that made the country town. The dreary monotonousness, the squalor, the inevitable moral decay — all, in fine, that has been called ‘provincial’ — is the constant theme of Crabbe’s verse. Patronized in his own day by Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, the friend of Scott, and Rogers, and Bowles, the literary godfather of Fitz- Gerald, Crabbe has so far fallen in our day from his high estate that it is only by a favour that he is accorded mention in some manual of literature.
This neglect, though it can be easily explained, is probably not a final judgment. Of course, much of Crabbe’s work is dull and undistinguished, and he never had such moments as those which Wordsworth can always plead in answer to his critics. On the contrary, it is his chief quality that he employs the metre of Pope so evenly, and with so little of Pope’s brilliancy that he succeeds admirably as narrator of the obscure tragedies of the provinces. His tales are, therefore, his claim to a place in the history of English fiction. At a time when false sentiment and the ‘genteel’ style were fashionable, and when country life was seized upon for exploitation as eagerly as by any of the modern Kailyard school, Crabbe appeared as the champion of realism. Goldsmith had preceded him in treating rural subjects, treating them with an Arcadian grace, it is true, but with what remoteness and lack of true insight and sympathy a comparison of Auburn with ‘The Village’, ‘The Borough’, and ‘The Parish Register’ will show. These latter are no more than names in the ears of the present generation, and it is the purpose of the present monograph to obtain a hearing, at least, for one of the most neglected of English writers.
The name of its author is one of the most honourable and painstaking in contemporary criticism, and amid a multitude of schools and theories perhaps he may succeed in securing a place for one like Crabbe, who, except for a few passages wherein the world of opinion is divided, is an example of sane judgment and sober skill, and who has set forth the lives of villagers with appreciation and fidelity, and with an occasional splendour reminiscent of the Dutchmen.
1903
These novels, much as they differ in their subjects and styles, are curiously illustrative of the truth of one of Leonardo’s observations. Leonardo, exploring the dark recesses of consciousness in the interests of some semi-pantheistic psychology, has noted the tendency of the mind to impress its own likeness upon that which it creates. It is because of this tendency, he says, that many painters have cast as it were a reflection of themselves over the portraits of others.
Mr. Mason, perhaps, in like manner, has allowed these stories to fit themselves into what is doubtless one of the ‘moulds of his understanding’.
Among Mr. Mason’s ‘properties’ the reader will not fail to notice the early, effaceable husband. In ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’ it is Julian Harwood, in ‘The Philanderers’ it is the outcast Gorley, in ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ it is Ralph Warriner. In all three books a previously-implicated girl of wayward habits is associated with a young man, who is a type of class common enough in novels — the sturdy, slow-witted Englishman. It is curious to watch this story reproducing itself without the author’s assent, one imagines, through scenes and times differing so widely.
A minor phenomenon is the appearance of Horace in each story. In ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’ the plan of the castle in the Tyrol, which is the centre of gravity of the story, is made on a page of a little Elzevir copy of Horace. In ‘The Philanderers’ Horace is laid under tribute more than once for a simile worthy of the classical beauty of Clarice. And once again in ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ that interesting figure ‘Major’ Wilbraham is represented as engaged on a translation of Horace in the intervals of marauding and blackmailing.
Mr. Mason is much more successful when he is writing of a time or scene somewhat remote from big towns. The Belgravian atmosphere of ‘The Philanderers’ (a title which Mr. Mason has to share with Mr. George Bernard Shaw) is not enlivened by much wit or incident, but ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ has a pleasing sequence of Spanish and Moorish scenes. Mr. Mason’s best book, however, is certainly ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’. The story is of the cape and sword order, and it passes in the years after Sedgemoor. Germany is an excellent place for castles and intrigues; and in the adventurous air of this romance those who have read too many novels of modern life may recreate themselves at will. The writing is often quite pretty, too. Isn’t ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ a pretty name?
1903
Except for a book in the English and Foreign Philosophical Library, a book the interest of which was chiefly biographical, no considerable volume has appeared in England to give an account of the life and philosophy of the heresiarch martyr of Nola.
Inasmuch as Bruno was born about the middle of the sixteenth century, an appreciation of him — and that appreciation the first to appear in England — cannot but seem somewhat belated now. Less than a third of this book is devoted to Bruno’s life, and the rest of the book to an exposition and comparative survey of his system. That life reads like a heroic fable in these days of millionaires. A Dominican monk, a gipsy professor, a commentator of old philosophies and a deviser of new ones, a playwright, a polemist, a counsel for his own defence, and, finally, a martyr burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori — Bruno, through all these modes and accidents (as he would have called them) of being, remains a consistent spiritual unity.
Casting away tradition with the courage of early humanism, Bruno has hardly brought to his philosophical enquiry the philosophical method of a peripatetic. His active brain continually utters hypotheses; his vehement temper continually urges him to recriminate; and though the hypothesis may be validly used by the philosopher in speculation and the countercheck quarrelsome be allowed him upon occasion, hypotheses and recriminations fill so many of Bruno’s pages that nothing is easier than to receive from them an inadequate and unjust notion of a great lover of wisdom. Certain parts of his philosophy — for it is many-sided — may be put aside. His treatises on memory, commentaries on the art of Raymond Lully, his excursions into that treacherous region from which even ironical Aristotle did not come undiscredited, the science of morality, have an interest only because they are so fantastical and middle-aged.
As an independent observer, Bruno, however, deserves high honour. More than Bacon or Descartes must he be considered the father of what is called modern philosophy.’ His system by turns rationalist and mystic, theistic and pantheistic is everywhere impressed with his noble mind and critical intellect, and is full of that ardent sympathy with nature as it is —
natura naturata —
which is the breath of the Renaissance. In his attempt to reconcile the matter and form of the Scholastics — formidable names, which in his system as spirit and body retain little of their metaphysical character — Bruno has hardily put forward an hypothesis, which is a curious anticipation of Spinoza. Is it not strange, then, that Coleridge should have set him down a dualist, a later Heraclitus, and should have represented him as saying in effect: ‘Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency to reunion.’?
And yet it must be the chief claim of any system like Bruno’s that it endeavours to simplify the complex. That idea of an ultimate principle, spiritual, indifferent, universal, related to any soul or to any material thing, as the Materia Prima of Aquinas is related to any material thing, unwarranted as it may seem in the view of critical philosophy, has yet a distinct value for the historian of religious ecstasies. It is not Spinoza, it is Bruno, that is the god-intoxicated man. Inwards from the material universe, which, however, did not seem to him, as to the Neoplatonists the kingdom of the soul’s malady, or as to the Christians a place of probation, but rather his opportunity for spiritual activity, he passes, and from heroic enthusiasm to enthusiasm to unite himself with God. His mysticism is little allied to that of Molinos or to that of St. John of the Cross; there is nothing in it of quietism or of the dark cloister: it is strong, suddenly rapturous, and militant. The death of the body is for him the cessation of a mode of being, and in virtue of this belief and of that robust character ‘prevaricating yet firm’, which is an evidence of that belief, he becomes of the number of those who loftily do not fear to die. For us his vindication of the freedom of intuition must seem an enduring monument, and among those who waged so honourable a war, his legend must seem the most honourable, more sanctified, and more ingenuous than that of Averroes or of Scotus Erigena.