The Critical Game Part 6

REMY DE GOURMONT

In "Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas,"[1] Mr.

William Aspenwall Bradley has made an excellent selection from the work of Remy de Gourmont; one only regrets that s.p.a.ce did not permit him to give us more. He has a gift unfortunately rare among translators: he knows his original and he knows how to write the language into which he translates. He even corrects his master in one place: where de Gourmont, stumbling in a language which he has not quite mastered, writes that the English words, "sweet," and "sweat,"

are _mots de p.r.o.nonciation identique_, Mr. Bradley gently wipes out the blunder with "words which resemble each other." Not that de Gourmont, with his enormous knowledge, made many such mistakes! I merely note the care and delicacy of the translator.

[1] Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas. Remy de Gourmont. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1921.

Without pretending too much to the wisdom which should have ensued, I remember like a shock of light, as if a blind man had suddenly gained his vision, my introduction, a few years ago, to the work of de Gourmont (for which my thanks are due to Mr. Martin Loeffler, who is a distinguished musician and only potentially a man of letters). If you wish to have your darkness illuminated, a.s.sociate with the wise. If you are groping in a foreign literature, the first man to meet is the critic. The little I know about France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries I owe to having clung to the broad and often elusive coat-tails of Sainte-Beuve. As a guide to the nineteenth century and much else beside--back to Rome and Greece--the most stimulating cicerone is Remy de Gourmont.

When he was born, the G.o.ds went crazy and put into one person an elf and a sage, Ariel and Prospero, Morgan and Merlin. It is no uncommon thing when you are reading a French book, by an author with whose work you are not familiar, to find facing the t.i.tle-page a list of books _du meme auteur_ and to discover that he has published something in all the main divisions of imaginative literature, plays, poems, romances, criticism. It takes a Frenchman to box the literary compa.s.s.

He a.s.sumes that the business of a writer is to write, and he learns and practises all the forms, with varying degrees of success, to be sure, just as a musician, trying all forms, may be at his best in songs or quartettes for strings or symphonies or operas.

De Gourmont played every instrument in the band and played it well.

His range and versatility are remarkable even for a Frenchman. He took all knowledge for his province. In spreading his interests wide he never became thin; even when he played on the surface of an idea he somehow, in a page or two, showed the depth of mind and matter underneath. He was, as his American publishers say, poet, critic, dramatist, scholar, biologist, philosopher, novelist, philologist, and grammarian. He was an experimenter and explorer. When he died, just under sixty, he was still looking round with his keen roaming eye, and he was looking sadly, for the war, according to his brother Jean, who writes not sentimentally but like a de Gourmont, killed him.

Even the colossal, universal genius, the Hugo, the Goethe, can not be supreme in every realm of thought, in every type of literary expression. De Gourmont's poetry, to my ignorant alien ear, is not among the best in that prolific and still living period of French poetry which he as critic did so much to encourage. As for de Gourmont's fiction, "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," which he might have tossed with a wink into the lap of Anatole France, does not greatly enrich French fiction, which is already rich in similar achievements.

"Couleurs" consists of delightful twittings on ideas, and surely is not greatly important in a nation where one man of letters out of four has mastered the art of the _conte_.

De Gourmont is supremely the critic, the man who digests, interprets, reorganizes the thoughts of other men and in the process adds to those thoughts. His favorite method of reorganization is disorganization, "dissociation" (and by the way, that word is good in English, as in French, and better than Mr. Bradley's "disa.s.sociation"). He pulls ideas to pieces and skilfully puts them together again. He is an a.n.a.lyst, a dissector. But the flowers of the garden are not all plucked to shreds and scattered on the paths, nor are they all taken to the laboratory and subjected to the microscope. De Gourmont is interested in things living and in propagating life. "_Toutes nos fleurs sont fraiches, jeunes et pleines d'amour._" He surveys wildernesses and lays out gardens. No other man was ever blessed with such a combination of the safe, sane, intellectually comfortable and the restless, daring, venturesome.

He loves paradoxes because life is full of contradictions, and his paradoxes are often elucidations and conciliations of conflicting ideas, never the cheap and facile paradoxes of a Chesterton. Is Mallarme obscure? There is never absolute, literal obscurity in an honestly written work. Besides, there are too few obscure writers in French. This from a Frenchman whose own writing is a marvel of clarity even when he is handling subtle and difficult ideas! Moreover, de Gourmont's essays on language and style are studies in precision, in definition.

De Gourmont is a wise man, who, like Socrates and William James, is not afraid to joke, and some of his perversities are uttered with his ironic tongue in his cheek. Like all fine humorists he is profoundly serious, and the delicate play of his fingers is backed by terrific muscular scholarship. His method is to appear to be casual, to make the review of a book "_une occasion de parler un peu_" and then to pack into six pages the reading of a lifetime. He manipulates Brunetiere into the corner and annihilates him before you have time to realize that there is no b.u.t.ton on the rapier.

For all his tolerant smile and sceptical shrug, de Gourmont is fighting valiantly for ideas. He wants ideas liberated but not loose, and in the very act of freeing them he defines and fixes them. He divides long-mated notions in order to rea.s.semble them according to his private logic. For he is the most wilful and individual of critics. The journalistic multiplicity of his subjects is unified by a great personality. The "dissociator" of ideas is a constructive thinker, one of the greatest of critics in a nation of critics and sufficient in himself to stand as smiling refutation of Croce's dictum that "French criticism is notably weak whenever the fundamentals of art are concerned." If there is a fundamental of art that de Gourmont missed, I doubt whether it is to be discovered in any German or Italian book. For de Gourmont's reading embraced the literature of Europe, and he was especially alert to philosophic criticism. He was forever in search of principles; but the result of his quest is not a ma.s.sive disquisition. The solidity of his learning and the systematic coherence of his ideas are concealed from the unwary reader by the lightness of his tone and also by his brevity, the gift, which belongs to the race of Montaigne and Voltaire, of saying everything in a few sentences. His essays are light as a feather and yet they carry tons of information. The aeroplane looks like a bird but it is a heavy and elaborate piece of machinery.

De Gourmont lived in an ivory tower, the tower of a wizard who combined the knowledge of an ancient necromancer with that of a modern chemist. He was much alone, for only in solitude can a man read as much as de Gourmont read and write about it in serene meditation.

Nevertheless, he was in and of the world of writers; he was an active and friendly editor; he made the _Mercure de France_; he encouraged the youngest and bravest of his day; many of his notes record conversations with the finest men of his time. He spent his days with _la jeunesse_ and his nights with aged wisdom. When he retired to his ivory tower he carried under one arm a volume of mediaeval Latin, to add to his enormous library, already neatly stowed in his head, and under the other arm the ma.n.u.script of the youngest French poet.

In one of his essays de Gourmont plays charmingly with the reviewer's too facile use of "great"; "great writer," "very great writer."

Despite that delightful warning I dare say that de Gourmont is a _tres grand ecrivain_, not a great poet nor a great novelist, but the greatest critic that has been born, even in France where critics are wont to be born.

SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN

"Controversy," says the editor of the Swift-Vanessa letters,[1] "might have been more moderate in tone and more fruitful of result, if writers had always remembered that, though grounds of conjecture are abundant, the data for forming a judgment are manifestly incomplete."

Leslie Stephen, a shrewd and cautious biographer, with a lawyer's gift for handling evidence, says "This is one of those cases in which we feel that even biographers are not omniscient; and I must leave it to my readers to choose their own theory, only suggesting that readers, too, are fallible."

[1] Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift.

Letters edited for the first time from originals. With an introduction by A. Martin Freeman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

I propose an explanation of Swift, but propose it only as a conjecture, an hypothesis. I shall not even argue it up to the point of positive belief; certainly I shall not push it beyond the line where belief borders knowledge. Conjecture is good if it remains clearly in the realm of conjecture, an honest area of thought, and does not try to sneak over into the land of things proved.

All of Swift's relations with women, and much else in his life, may be accounted for by the supposition that early he discovered or suspected that he was insane, that he believed his insanity might be transmissible, that he was consequently afraid to have children, that he was honest and strong enough to keep himself in check, that the resulting suppression made him irascible and bitter, that he was a vigorous and pa.s.sionate man, that his quick shifts from tender fooling to savage satire, his friendly and brutal moods, his strutting arrogance that amazed the coffee houses, were not due to any tom-foolery of politics or thwarted ambition in the petty matter of advancement in the church but were due to a conflict, honorably won by Swift, in the place where a man lives. The "early" in this supposition is important. Leslie Stephen, quoting the familiar dark prophecy of Swift at the age of fifty: "I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top," justly observes that "a man haunted perpetually by such forebodings might well think that marriage was not for him." But Stephen is dealing with Swift in middle age and offering an explanation of why, a.s.suming that Swift was not already married to Stella, he did not marry Vanessa. Let us place the beginning of the perpetual foreboding early in Swift's life and see if the main facts, so far as we know them, will lie upon this supposition.

Swift's attacks of vertigo began in his youth. He attributed his illness to an over-consumption of fruit when he was twenty-one. Swift knew better than that. Even if we a.s.sume that medical science in the eighteenth century was stupid and backward, Swift was too intelligent to believe that an early period of indigestion accounted for the suffering which afflicted him all his life. He knew, or suspected and feared, what was the matter with him. In 1699, when he was thirty-two, he wrote some resolutions, headed "when I come to be old." Among them is this: "Not to be fond of children or let them come near me hardly."

Stephen quotes a friendly commentator as saying: "We do not fortify ourselves with resolutions against what we dislike but against what we feel in our weakness we have reason to believe we are really inclined to." That friendly commentator was right and understood human nature, though he had never lived (Stephen does not name him) to hear about libido, suppression, defence, inversion, and other wise words now current.

Stephen goes wrong, it seems to me, in his following friendly commentation: "Yet it is strange that a man should regard the purest and kindliest of feelings as a weakness to which he was too much inclined." I have not s.p.a.ce to quote the rest, which is on page 31 of Stephen in the English Men of Letters. Swift was not fighting against a weakness, he was fighting against a strength. He resolves "not to marry a young woman." In a letter he calls a woman's children her "litter," and that has been quoted by some critics as an example of his brutality. He loves Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry but he hates mankind. Is it not clear? He can not have what he wants, and what he wants is what normally results in children, in more mankind. His resolution, superficially harsh and misanthropic, is a masked, or inverted, expression of desire. Such expression is not, of course, peculiar to literary satirists, but it should be remembered that Swift had supremely the ironic trick of thought, the gift of saying a thing by saying exactly the opposite.

The resolution should be read in the light of the fact that Stella was eighteen years old, a grown and comely woman. But the interpretation of it depends much more closely on the termination of Swift's affair with Varina. The date, 1699, suggests this. He had proposed to Varina, Miss Waring, in 1696, in a letter which is pa.s.sionate enough, and had been rejected, at least provisionally, on the score of her ill health and his poverty. Four years later, after he had received the living at Laracor and seemed to be on the way to other preferments, she wished to hold him to his word, and he jilted her. There are three explanations. One is that he had fallen in love with Stella and so out of love with the other woman. The second explanation, Leslie Stephen's, is that his ambitions had not been realized, his advancement had not been brilliant, and marriage would have kept his nose to the grind-stone in an obscure living. That explanation is not good, for, though Swift always had an eye to the main chance and was worried about money, power, and position, it is only men of cool blood or men who have extra-marital opportunities to gratify their desires who are ever deterred by considerations of thrift and economy from marrying the beloved woman. Swift was not cold but pa.s.sionate. And it is inconceivable that he, a clergyman in a small parish, was finding his pleasure in illicit intercourse.

The third explanation, which I venture to suggest, is that between his proposal to Varina in 1696 and his insulting rejection of her in 1700, between his twenty-ninth and thirty-third years, he had discovered a reason why he must not live with a woman. His resolutions, remember, not to marry a young woman and not to be fond of children were written in 1699. How could Stephen believe that those resolutions, with others "pithy and sensible," were "for behavior in a distant future?" Swift's heading, "when I come to be old," means nothing; he is writing from the misery of the moment. Why is the letter in which Swift puts an end to poor Varina so brutal and insulting that, in Stephen's words, no one with a grain of self-respect could accept the conditions of marriage which he lays down? Because he could not tell her the real reason, a reason based on fear rather than on physiological certainty.

It is an honestly dishonest letter. It is a perfect example of that perplexing contradiction which appears everywhere in his life and writings, that he was brutally honest, saw through the postures and masks of everybody else, and yet postured, att.i.tudinized, and lied himself. He carried his secret agony with fort.i.tude and alternately raged against the world and fooled with it. In relation to the Varina episode Stephen misses the point, though what he says is true enough: "Swift could be the most persistent and ardent of friends. But when anyone tried to enforce claims no longer congenial to his feelings, the appeal to the galling obligation stung him into ferocity, and brought out the most brutal side of his imperious nature." Though a man has but one heart, yet his relations with his friends are quite different from his pa.s.sions for women. A proud, ferocious and imperious nature is not the whole story of Swift. It does not give us the real foundation of the story of Varina, of Stella, of Vanessa and the man they loved.

On the foundation which I propose the story of Stella will rest securely, intelligibly. If Swift was married secretly to Stella in 1716--the evidence is not conclusive--the marriage was only a legal ceremony performed perhaps for the purpose of securing her in case her fortunes went wrong or gossip or other circ.u.mstances made necessary the protection of his name. Almost certainly there was no physical marriage, no union legal or illegal. Why? He was free and she was free. She was, by his own account, a charming person who would have been quite presentable to his friends and in all ways helpful to a man in middle age who is supposed to need a woman to take care of him. The answer is simply that Swift feared to propagate his tainted stock, that he refrained and suffered. And the "Journal to Stella" is a record of suffering, of pa.s.sion disguised and writhing. A busy man, with other things to write, does not write that much to a woman he does not love, and he does not write that way to a woman he openly and avowedly loves. The "little language," the silliness, the foolings, the avoidance of direct declaration of love, the semi-paternal injunctions, the gossip about big people, much of it whimsical chatter in which we get only by implication the serious view of Swift and his times that has made it an important historical doc.u.ment, the two or three hintful promises of felicity which commit Swift to nothing, the pa.s.sages of melancholy and half-humorous old man's grouch--all this is a veiled love letter. It is tingling and nervous and alert and full of pain, not the idle recreation of a tired man of affairs entertaining a child, but the heartbreak of a powerful man of forty-five expressed by indirections to a woman of thirty. Perhaps she understood his spleen and his complaints of ill-health. We may be on the way to understanding them now. Certainly Stephen is off the track when he says that there are "grounds for holding that Swift was const.i.tutionally indisposed to the pa.s.sion of love." Unless he means by that that Swift knew that there was something in his const.i.tution which made the ultimate realization of love impossible. And Stephen does not mean that, for he speaks of the absence of traces of pa.s.sion from writings "conspicuous for their amazing sincerity." An amazing example of a sincere biographer missing the trace! Swift's insistence on his "coldness" and his a.s.sertion that he did not understand love are precisely an affirmation of what the words deny.

Now enters the third woman of record--there may have been more--in Swift's unhappy s.e.xual life, Vanessa, Esther Vanhomrigh. At the same time that he is writing his long love letter, the "Journal to Stella,"

he is seeing Vanessa. Of course. It is all explicable. The man can not have the woman he wants and is tantalized by another woman who wants him. He plays and he won't play. He is tormented by the same restraint that keeps him out of Stella's bed. He is handsome, virile, and distinguished. The woman is crazy about him. He is unable to keep away from her, but he is fighting, for reasons known to him, against the impulse to possess her. He plays again, as with Stella, a game which, viewed superficially, is fraudulent and unfair. He is teacher, guide, philosopher, and Dutch uncle. But she is not a docile, gentle girl like Stella. Mr. Freeman, who handles his doc.u.ments admirably and is not slanted from the truth by moralistic concern for hero or heroine, is, nevertheless, nave and blind to the facts which he has so carefully considered. He says: "The tragedy, then, was inevitable from the day when Vanessa attempted to arouse in him a love of which he was incapable. It might have been hastened, or its form might have been different, if he had sternly broken with Vanessa as soon as he discovered the nature of her desires." Swift was not incapable, in that sense, and he knew the nature of her desires, for he was not a fool. What he knew also was the nature of his own desires and their possible consequences. That is, I conjecture, the heart of the story of Swift's heart.

WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS

I.

The letters of a philosopher usually have the primary, if not exclusive, interest of elucidating and extending in an informal way the ideas expounded in his professional writings. It is for this interest that one would turn to the letters of a thinker who was nothing but a thinker, such as Kant (if, indeed, there is a collection of Kant's letters), and to the correspondence of such a philosopher as Nietzsche, who, aside from his technical contributions to human wisdom, presents fascinating problems in human character, personality, biography. The letters of Williams James[1] have two distinct values.

They appeared at the same moment with his "Collected Essays and Reviews"[2] and the two publications, taken together, complete the intellectual record of the man. Though master and man can not be separated, yet, as good disciples of James's pluralism, we may be permitted to divide an individual into two "aspects." First let us enjoy the letters, simply as the letters of a man who was, incidentally, a philosopher.

[1] The Letters of William James. Edited by his son Henry James. Two Vols. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press.

[2] Collected Essays and Reviews. William James. New York; Longmans, Green and Co.

And what letters! The letters of Lamb, of Edward Fitzgerald, are not more delightful. The easiest and pleasantest way to prove that would be to fill the rest of this essay with quotations, and that way would be in consonance with the whimsical spirit of James, who wrote to his youngest son: "Your Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosofer like me and write books. It is easy enough, all but the writing. You just get it out of other books and write it down." To write a jolly letter to a child, to ridicule yourself and your profession and at the same time to defend an idea with vigor and determination, to poke fun at colleagues and heartily respect them, to be dignified in mental shirt sleeves, to wink one eye and keep two keen eyes on the page or the fact that has to be studied, to fling words with apparent carelessness and never for a moment to lose control of words or thought--all this means a great character and a fine literary artist.

James says of Duveneck, the painter: "I have seen very little of him.

The professor is an oppressor of the artist, I fear." It may be that the professor, which James was and officially had to be, oppressed the artist in him. But the artist would not down. If all the philosophic work of James were wiped out by an act of G.o.d or by the arguments of philosophers, James, the man of letters, would still survive. I believe that part of the success of James as philosopher was due to his ability to say what he meant not only with logical clarity but with charm, with the skill of the literary artist. Technical Philosophy may immortalize or bury his work. The man, the startling, original person must be imperishable. No matter what subject he touches, his way of saying things is superb. He had an artist's interest in the art of writing. Of a volume of his essays he says: "I am sure of your sympathy in advance for much of their contents. But I am afraid that what you will never appreciate is their wonderful English style! Shakespeare is a little street-boy in comparison!" The wise man has his tongue in his cheek, of course, but there is a serious idea behind the fooling. Of a correspondent's "strictures on my English" he writes: "I have a tendency towards too great colloquiality." What sort of laborious philosopher was it who worried James about his style, his fluent, accurate, imaginative vehicle of thought? It may be that some of James's philosophic ideas are quite wrong. But there is a presumption in favor of the truth of an idea which is well expressed.

James argues somewhere that a style as thick as Hegel's can not be the "authentic mother-tongue of reason." If that is unfair to Hegel, it is a fair revelation of the mind of James. He was an advocate and an exemplar of lucidity of expression, and was always putting to himself and other philosophers the plain question: "Just what do you mean?"

But his sharpness of mind, though often aggressive, was never offensive. He seems at times to have dulled the edge of his wit in order not to hurt the other fellow. The editor of the letters has, perhaps wisely, "not included letters that are wholly technical or polemic." Probably the ideas expressed in the technical letters are repeated in James's books. But I should like to see the polemic letters. The editor himself in the act of withholding them has defined their merits: "He rejoiced openly in the controversies which he provoked and engaged in polemics with the good humor and vigor that were the essence of his genius." The touches of polemic writing which appear in the correspondence that is given us reveal this good humor and vigor and make one hungry for more. He was staunch and dexterous in argument and never yielded an inch, but he could stop and laugh at his opponent and at himself. He objected to Huxley's somewhat solemn devotion to "Truth," yet he had a kind of skill in argument that was not unlike Huxley's. He could give a man a smashing blow in the ribs, and even show a quite human irritation, but his exquisite courtesy never failed. His letters to G.o.dkin, of the _Nation_, protesting against unfair criticism of the work of the elder Henry James, are a lesson for critics, and no doubt G.o.dkin's reply was a model of magnanimous contrition.

James had an immense variety of interests outside philosophy, though perhaps it is unphilosophical to imply that anything can lie outside the range of a true philosopher's vision. His letters are written to many different kinds of persons; the best of them, naturally, are to philosophers and men of letters, who evoked from him an amazing multiplicity of ideas and to whom he let fly a delicious compound of sound reason and jocularity. In characterizing other men he characterized himself. For example, what he says about Royce embraces both men perfectly: "that unique mixture of erudition, originality, profundity and vastness, and human wit and leisureliness." He was fortunate in his human and intellectual contacts. An early and abidingly fortunate contact was that with his father, who was also a "filosofer." His last letter to his father is beautiful. It brings tears, of which the most stoical philosopher need not be ashamed; indeed, one might rather be ashamed if the tears did not come. No one outside the family and a few friends has a right to read that letter, but print has extended the privilege. If Mr. E. V. Lucas or any other anthologist makes a new collection of examples of "the gentlest art,"

the letter from James to his father should be included. In it two men are portrayed, father and son, both magnificently; if either man had been less than great the letter could not have been written.

James was born a philosopher; philosophy was in the blood and in the very air of the household. There is no better instance of the heredity of genius and of predestination to a career. Yet James did not find himself immediately; he floundered about in the world of thought long after the age at which most men have hung out shingles. He was thirty when he was appointed instructor in physiology at Harvard, and his tardiness in establishing himself as a bread-winning citizen fretted him. Lesser men who feel that the expression of their talents has been thwarted or postponed may take comfort from the fact that James's first printed book, the "Psychology," appeared in 1890, when he was forty-eight years old.

The fact that James was an intellectual roamer and did not proceed docilely from a doctor's degree to a position as teacher, in a groove forever, accounts, in part, for the flexibility and variety of his thought. His "dribbling," as he calls it, during years when he suffered from physical illness and a depressing sense of impotence, was not altogether bad for the man or for the philosopher. He wandered about Europe, became bilingual, if not trilingual (he was never quite happy in German speech or German philosophy). His learning was enriched with odds and ends of information such as belong rather to the man of the world than to the professor. If he had lived all his life in Konigsberg or Cambridge he would have been neither Kant nor James. To him philosophy was never an affair of remote abstract heavens or of little dusty cla.s.s rooms. He served academic interests faithfully and did more than any other man to make the department of philosophy at Harvard the finest thing in American university life.

But he was in constant rebellion against the academic world and, indeed, against all inst.i.tutionalism. He wrote to Thomas Davidson: "Why is it that everything in this world is offered to us on no medium terms between either having too much of it or too little? You pine for a professorship. I pine for your leisure to write and study." Yet he had more leisure and freedom than most men. He went abroad whenever he wanted to go, and never knew what it was to be down to his last dollar.

His lateness in finding himself professionally and philosophically is, perhaps, related to his perpetual youth, his eagerness for new ideas, his inability to be fixed and settled. He sometimes grasped at ideas too hastily and welcomed such new arrivals as Wells and Chesterton with a heartiness which, perhaps, they did not quite deserve. But that was the fault of his enthusiastic catholicity. He hated shut minds and shut doors of thought and feared nothing except that some possibly valuable inquiry might be hindered or stopped by stupidity and prejudice. His colleague, Professor Palmer, called him "the finest critical mind of our time." Let the philosophers decide whether that is excessive praise. We mere laymen can know him and enjoy him as he reveals himself in his letters, a vivacious, humorous, affectionate man.