The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces Part 9

Make way there, constable. (_Cracks his whip and sings._) Come all ye jolly rovers As wants to hear a tale Will make your hearts as merry As a bellyful of ale.

I'll sing of Captain Thunder, And his dashing slashing way, How he kissed the queen and he cuffed the king, And threw the crown away!

(_Exit_)

POLICEMAN

Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned!

THE BEAR THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN

It would be a relief to meet a man who would tell honestly why he likes Artzibashev and some of the rest of the modern Russian realists. It would be a relief to have some young radical say: "Yes, I know Chekhov is dull and prolix, but then the atmosphere of his work is delightfully unwholesome, and every now and then there is something pleasantly morbid, like the man with phosphorous poisoning in 'The Steppe,' and his agreeable custom of eating live fish. And then there's dear Michael Artzibashev. Of course his style is no better than that of Laura Jean Libbey, and his plots are cheap melodrama, but you can't deny that he is consistently nasty. And I do like to read about s.e.xual depravity."

But the young radical of this sort is hard to meet. Instead we find the lofty-foreheaded young man who praises Artzibashev's psychological insight, Gorky's sympathy with humanity, and--actually!--Chekhov's humor! Of course he does not mean what he says. He likes "Sanine" for the same reason that he likes "Three Weeks." But he would not dare to confess a liking for "Three Weeks" because that book is English trash.

And "Sanine" is Russian trash. And from the point of view of intellectual sn.o.bbery, there's all the difference in the world between these two sorts of trash.

Now, it would of course be absurd to condemn all modern Russian fiction, or to characterize all admirers of contemporary Russian novelists as hypocrites and sensualists. Americans and Englishmen who know almost by heart the great poems and stories of Pushkin, who know Lermontov as they know Byron, and Gogol as they know d.i.c.kens, who were brought up on the novels of Turgenieff, have every right in the world to seek for new delight among the outpourings of the presses of Petrograd and Moscow.

But the sort of person who is feverishly enthusiastic over Gorky and Artzibashev has discovered Russian literature, in all probability, during the few years which have pa.s.sed since his graduation from Harvard. His most serious offense is not that he prefers that which is evil to that which is good, and praises untrue and inartistic work because the worst part of his nature responds to its salacious appeal.

His most serious offense is that he thinks that the Hall Caines and Marie Corellis of Russia really are representative writers, and that he insults a race of great romanticists and great realists by calling works that are thoroughly morbid and vile "very Russian."

What is the remedy for this unfortunate condition? The ideal course to pursue would be, of course, to spank the serious-minded young men who think that the Russian novel is a cross between Nijinsky's dancing and a pogrom. They should be sentenced to a year in solitary confinement, during which they should be obliged to read daily a very thoroughly expurgated edition of all Artzibashev's works. This would convince them that it was not Artzibashev's "power of psychological a.n.a.lysis" that attracted them, and they would return to the world sadder and more honest men.

But this most desirable course has not the virtue of practicality.

Perhaps some of the more or less recent activities of American publishers will so educate the public that they will no longer be impressed by critics whose acquaintance with Russian literature is confined to "Sanine" and some of Gorky's plays. Not long ago was published Stephen Graham's admirable translation of Gogol's "Dead Souls," a novel which in its rich humor and sympathetic realism suggests "Pickwick Papers," while its whimsical romanticism brings to mind some parts of "Don Quixote." It is one of the world's cla.s.sics; no one who has not read it has a right to an opinion on Russian literature.

About the same time appeared Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch," a book of short stories by the great novelist, half genius and half mountebank, who wasted his genuine talent in developing a new religion, which is merely a grotesque parody of Christianity. The stories in this book are compelling, in spite of their somewhat mad philosophy, for they faithfully reflect Russian manners and certain picturesque phases of Russian idealism. Another volume issued at about this period is Maurice Baring's "Russian Literature," the best one-volume work on the subject in existence. And it is to be hoped that other publishers will publish those Russian novels which really belong to literature, rather than those which are of interest chiefly to the pathologist and alienist.

But meanwhile the market is flooded with viciously sensational works which are tolerated only because their exotic quality gives them a certain distinction in the eyes of the provincial. Here, for example, is Maxim Gorky's "Submerged." Mr. Jerome's "The Pa.s.sing of the Third Floor Back," and Charles Rand Kennedy's "The Servant in the House" were sentimental, but on the whole, effective treatments of a very dangerous theme: that of the miraculous reformation of certain phases of modern society or groups of individuals through the appearance on earth of a man possessing Divine attributes. Gorky's plan has a similar plot, but, of course, he differs from the two English writers in making vice triumph in the end. The poor wretches who have endeavored to regain a little of their lost decency are thrust back into the slime. The people who make up this typical Gorky offering are drunkards, thieves, depraved creatures of every kind. They are utterly lost and the author seems to gloat over their depravity and misery. But then what else is he to do?

He must live up to his name. Gorky, you know, is a pen name meaning "bitter," and Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkov feels that he must justify the t.i.tle he has so proudly a.s.sumed. But ridiculous affectation it is! It is as if Matthew Arnold had called himself "Matthew Sweetness and Light."

And there is a translation of Leonidas Andreiev, "The Red Laugh." This was an attempt to flash upon the astonished world the novel idea that war is a very, very unpleasant thing. Mr. Andreiev spills gore on every page, and the publisher a.s.sists him by making the t.i.tle of the book blood red on a black ground. All the characters in the book go mad, and the author's utter inapt.i.tude for literature turns what might have been pa.s.sable third-rate melodrama into a farce. As a contribution to letters, and as a piece of pacifist propaganda "The Red Laugh" is inferior to "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier."

And then there is Artzibashev: so much boomed and press-agented; praised by the radical magazines for his "a.s.sault on ordinary morality" and his "desperately poignant artistry"; long-haired young men with large eyes have told the women's clubs all about him. Well, of course, "desperately poignant artistry" means nothing at all, and "artistry" is meaningless when used in connection with a man like the author of "The Millionaire."

He doesn't write novels, he merely throws something evil-smelling into the reader's face.

If the scene of "The Millionaire" and "Nina" were laid in the United States, these stories would never have been printed. They are without literary merit; they are the crudest melodrama, but their grossness makes them appeal to the prurient, and their foreign origin charms the literary sn.o.b. To say that they reflect Russian life is to insult Russia grievously. They do reflect, it is true, the basest part of Russian life, the part which no friend of Russia or of literature can wish reflected. They reflect the gross and hideous b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of the Russian criminal cla.s.s, they reflect the life of people who have added to their native savagery the vices of civilization. They call to mind a picture of the Russian people as something at once b.e.s.t.i.a.l and human, a monstrosity, a nightmare: perhaps the thing that Kipling had in mind when he wrote of the bear that walks like a man.

ABSINTHE AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE

Belonging rather to gossip than to literary history, the following anecdote is nevertheless significant when considered merely as an ill.u.s.trative legend. A certain London publisher, it is said, recently had in his possession a notebook that had been found, after his death, among the effects of Lionel Johnson. The poet had scribbled in it memoranda of all sorts: notes for essays, stray epigrams, rough drafts of poems. He had also copied into it, from books and magazines, bits of prose and verse that gave him pleasure. Well, one day this friend said to Johnson's loyal friend, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney--and, by the way, Miss Guiney is not my authority for this story--"Do you know, I have found in this notebook an unpublished poem by Lionel Johnson! It is very beautiful, far better than any of Johnson's published poems. I'll read it to you." Thereupon he opened the notebook and began to declaim:

Last night, ah, yesternight, between her lips and mine There fell thy shadow, Cynara!

Of course Lionel Johnson, like every other lover of good poetry, had felt the charm of Ernest Dowson's now famous poem which is headed by the phrase, "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae," and had hastily copied it in his notebook, perhaps from Dowson's ma.n.u.script at some meeting of the Rhymers' Club. The point of this story is that the publisher, knowing Johnson chiefly as a celebrant of the Catholic faith, attributed to him not one of Dowson's poems about nuns, or Extreme Unction, or the Blessed Sacrament, but a lyric which at least in tradition and phrasing is obviously pagan.

Out of the mouths of babes and publishers! That wise and sympathetic critic, Miss Katherine Bregy, has justly praised the lovely poetry which resulted from Ernest Dowson's return to the faith of his ancestors. She has demonstrated, for all time, the genuineness of his Catholicism, and made Mr. Victor Plarr's recent sneer at his dead friend's conversion seem the most futile thing in his entertaining but ineffective book. It would be absurd for me to attempt to add to Miss Bregy's interpretative appreciations of the "sculptural beauty" of Dowson's religious poems.

But, like the simple-minded publisher previously mentioned, I find indications, if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity, wholesomeness, virtue, in nearly every poem which this so-called "decadent" wrote.

There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine "decadents." That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worse appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent: often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive.

Now, this is exactly what Ernest Dowson never could do. He was a member, it will be remembered, of that little band of "esthetic" poets which was called the Rhymers' Club. With them he spent certain evenings at the Cheshire Cheese and there he drank absinthe. This is a significant and symbolic fact. Not in some ominous Parisian cellar, but beneath the beamed ceiling of a most British inn, still stained with smoke from the pipe of Dr. Samuel Johnson, among thick mutton chops and tankards of musty ale, in a cloud of sweet-scented steam that rose from the parted crust of the magnificent pigeon-pie, Ernest Dowson drank absinthe.

Of course it is true--more's the pity!--that in the melancholy years just before his death he drank absinthe in places where it is terribly fitting to drink absinthe. But this does not destroy the splendid symbolism of his act of drinking absinthe in the Cheshire Cheese. The wickedness in his poems and in his prose-sketches are always as affected and incongruous as is that pallid medicine in any honest tavern.

He tried hard to be pagan. In the manner of Mr. Swinburne, he exclaimed: "G.o.ddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, befriend! Let me have peace of thee, truce of thee, golden one, send!" And not even Mr. Swinburne ever wrote lines so absolutely unconvincing. He said, "I go where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all." And from this lyric no one can fail to get the impression that the poet was very sorry indeed. He imitated, even less successfully than Oscar Wilde, the unpleasant prose poems of Baudelaire, and he made the very worst of all English versions of Paul Verlaine's "Colloque Sentimental."

When Dowson took hashish during his student days, Mr. Arthur Symons tells us, it was before a large and festive company of friends. I do not think that he convinced them that he was that supposedly romantic character, an habitual user of the drug. The hashish, so to speak, in his poems is similarly incongruous and unconvincing. He was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman. And so, in his best-known poem, he uses all the pagan properties, all the splendors of sin's pageantry, but his theme, his over-mastering thought--very different from the over-mastering thought of, say, Mr.

Arthur Symons in similar circ.u.mstances--is a soul-shaking lament for his stained faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chast.i.ty.

He could not write poems that really were pagan. He was not a true decadent. And for this undoubtedly he now is thanking G.o.d. He had his foolish hours: he sometimes misused his gift of song. But--and this is the important thing about it--he did not know how to misuse it successfully. The real Ernest Dowson was not the picturesque vagabond about whom Mr. Arthur Symons and Mr. Victor Plarr have written, but the man who with all his heart praised "meekness and vigilance and chast.i.ty," who "was faithful" in his pathetic, ineffective fashion, but who knew at least the fidelity of his eternal Mother, who, in Miss Bregy's beautiful words, "laid his broken body in consecrated ground and followed this bruised soul with her pitiful, asperging prayers."

j.a.pANESE LACQUER

What was the matter with Lafcadio Hearn? No American has written prose more delicate and vividly beautiful than his, nor has any one else--not even Yone Noguchi--put into English so clear a revelation of j.a.pan's soul. Yet after an hour with "Kwaidan" or "Glimpses of Unfamiliar j.a.pan"

the normal reader is wearied and, instead of being grateful to the erudite and skillful author, regards him with actual dislike.

Why is this? Is it because Hearn had a morbid fondness for the tragic, and loved to dwell on mental, physical and spiritual disease? This is partly the reason, yet De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe inspire no such aversion. Is it because Hearn's style is too rich, exquisite and precious? Walter Pater had the same fault, but Walter Pater is read with delight by Hearn's enemies. Is it because of Hearn's ridiculous religious prejudices--his hatred for the Jesuits, for example? No, Hearn's hatred for the Jesuits is simply a bad little boy's impudence toward his schoolmaster. He had none of George Borrow's fiery, romantic pa.s.sion against the "Man in Black." And Borrow's "Lavengro" and "Romany Rye" were loved even by so un-Protestant a writer as Lionel Johnson.

No, the reason lies deeper, and is simpler, than any of these. Hearn failed, not because he was precious, not because he was morbid, not because he was prejudiced, but because he had no imagination.

Lafcadio Hearn was, in the worst sense of the word, a realist. He had thoroughly the materialistic att.i.tude toward life; he could see only the dull outside of things, not the indwelling splendor. An imaginative man would have delighted in his mixed Greek and Irish blood, would have realized that as a newspaperman he was a member of the most romantic profession the world has known, would have seen that New Orleans was no mean city. But Hearn was so prosaic and matter-of-fact that he saw only the forms and outlines of the things about him, and so sentimentally credulous that he believed that j.a.pan contained greater wonders than Louisiana. Dr. George M. Gould, in his interesting but unpleasant work, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," blames many of his dead friend's faults on his defective vision. But Hearn's myopia was spiritual as well as physical: he could not see the soul.

What terrible results came from this spiritual myopia! Of course, its worst result was the unspeakable tragedy of Hearn's rejection of Christianity for that cruel burlesque on religion called Buddhism. But the minor results were many and dreadful ... chief among them was the loss to the world of a great writer.

Lafcadio Hearn might have been a great writer. If proof of this were needed, it would be found in a posthumously published book of singular interest--"Fantastics and Other Fancies." This is a collection of Hearn's earliest writings, resurrected from the brittle yellow pages of old New Orleans newspapers by Charles Woodward Hutson.

The brief essays in this book are as charmingly phrased as anything this master of charming phrases ever wrote, and they are--unlike his later work--imaginative. That is, they are interpretations and idealizations of the things naturally familiar to Hearn. He had not yet committed the artistic heresy of confusing strangeness with beauty. He was not yet deluded into the belief that romance belongs exclusively to Nippon. He still was loyal to the traditions of his own civilization.

The literary value of Hearn's work is not to be questioned. No living writer (not even Algernon Blackwood) has so great and fiery an imagination as had this quondam reporter of the New Orleans _Daily Item_; no living writer (except Alice Meynell) understands so thoroughly the art of putting together a few hundred words so as to form a structure of enduring loveliness.

It was in 1878 that Lafcadio Hearn, half starved and dressed in rags, persuaded Colonel John W. Fairfax, owner of the New Orleans _Item_, to give him work. He was called "a.s.sistant editor," but it may be supposed that the "a.s.sistant editor" of this little two-page paper did most of the reportorial work. What treasures of glowing narrative its news columns may hold can only be conjectured. But on its editorial page appeared from time to time for several years brief sketches, some whimsical, some sombre, all highly imaginative and beautifully phrased.

These, with other writings which Hearn contributed later to the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_, Dr. Hutson has searched out and brought together in this volume of real charm and value.

Any trivial incident of his daily round, any quaint bit of history or legend that he came upon in his amazingly extensive reading, would furnish this strangest of newspaper men with a theme. He saw in some antique shop a faun and dryad pictured in enamel on a little golden case, and, sitting at his littered, ink-stained desk in his noisy office, he wrote the exquisite "Idyl of a French Snuffbox." Riding to work in a clanging street car, he found on its floor a j.a.panese fan of paper, and wrote of its unknown owner with a gay fervor surprising in such an amateur of grief. Mark Twain came to New Orleans, and the result was that masterpiece of vivid and sympathetic description, "A River Reverie."

He was not always absolutely original, this obscure hack whose genius was one day to surprise and delight the world. Subconsciously, he remembered his spiritual brother, Edgar Allan Poe, when he wrote those tales of the grotesque and arabesque, "The Black Cupid" and "The One Pill Box." Also there are echoes of Coleridge, and of those Parna.s.sian Frenchmen whose methods and ideals Hearn always shared.

But no Frenchman of his time could match the tender humor of "The Post Office," nor were Poe and Coleridge standing at his elbow when he wrote "Hiouen-Thrang." These were written by Lafcadio Hearn himself, by that strange nomad who called no one race his own, who looked at life with huge and perilous curiosity, who gave to most un-English thoughts a splendidly English dress, who just missed being a poet, who just missed being a mystic, who just missed being happy.

Already, the "Fantastics" show, Hearn was hearing the Orient's alluring voice. New Orleans, that brave old bright-colored Latin city, struggling with the aftermath of war and pestilence, was just the place for a man of his exotic tastes. "I cannot say how fair and rich and beautiful this dead South is," he wrote. "It has fascinated me." But not the venerable splendors of New Orleans, not the picturesque sh.o.r.es of Grand Isle, could take the place of the radiant East, to which he continually referred, of which clairvoyantly he seemed to know himself already a citizen.

There are sketches in this extraordinary little book, notably "Les Coulisses" and "The Undying One," which remind the reader, strangely enough, of certain prose fancies of another son of Ushaw, Francis Thompson. A healthier Lafcadio Hearn, with a broader vision and a tradition more clearly English, might have written "Finis Coronat Opus." And the thought makes one, perhaps, a little regretful that Hearn was so sincerely a gypsy, that he was drawn away from the scenes of his young manhood to a lovely but wholly alien land. Of course, he wrote beautifully of j.a.pan. But these youthful sketches show that j.a.pan was not necessary to his artistic expression. And to take on that strange new culture he had to give up some heritages of thought and belief that he could ill spare, the loss of which, it may be, is the cause of that melancholy, shading sometimes into despair, which permeates even his richest and most sympathetic j.a.panese studies.

Hearn did not ruin himself as a writer by writing about j.a.pan. He ruined himself by trying to be a j.a.panese. Now, one can write about j.a.pan without being a j.a.panese, just as one can write about h.e.l.l without being d.a.m.ned. But Hearn was not sufficiently imaginative to perceive this.

So he gave up European civilization for that of j.a.pan. His Irish father's faith held all that was n.o.ble of his Greek mother's pagan tradition, but Hearn chose the novelties of Buddhism. He went to j.a.pan: he devoted the gifts that G.o.d had given him, and the technical skill that the Jesuits had taught him, to the celebration of anti-Christian legends and ceremonials. But cherry-blossoms bloom only for a season--unlike Sharon's rose. And the tragic letters published after Hearn's death show that this fantastic adventurer learned at last that he had forsaken the splendid adventure first appointed for him. His bitter revilings of the people and customs of the land he had spent years in praising show that within Nippon's golden apples, too, are ashes.