The Upton Letters Part 9

ASHFIELD, SETTLE, Aug. 27, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--You ask me to send you out some novels, and you have put me in a difficulty. It seems hardly worth while sending out books which will just be read once or twice in a lazy mood and then thrown aside; yet I can find no others. It seems to me that our novelists are at the present moment affected by the same wave which seems to be pa.s.sing over the whole of our national life; we have in every department a large number of almost first-rate people, men of talent and ability; but very few geniuses, very few people of undisputed pre-eminence. In literature this is particularly the case; poets, historians, essayists, dramatists, novelists; there are so many that reach a high level of accomplishment, and do excellent work; but there are no giants, or they are very small ones. Personally, I do not read a great many novels; and I find myself tending to revert again and again to my old favourites.

Of course there are some CONSPICUOUS novelists. There is George Meredith, though he has now almost ceased to write; to speak candidly, though I recognise his genius, his creative power, his n.o.ble and subtle conception of character, yet I do not feel the reality of his books; or rather I feel that the reality is there, but disguised from me by a veil--a dim and rich veil, it is true--which is hung between me and the scene. The veil is George Meredith's personality. I confess that it is a dignified personality enough, the spirit of a grand seigneur. But I feel in reading his books as if I were staying with a magnificent person in a stately house; but that, when I wanted to go about and look at things for myself, my host, with splendid urbanity, insisted on accompanying me, pointed out objects that interested himself, and translated the remarks of the guests and the other people who appeared upon the scene into his own peculiar diction. The characters do not talk as I think they would have talked, but as George Meredith would have talked under the given circ.u.mstances. There is no repose about his books; there is a sense not only of intellectual but actually of moral effort about reading them; and further, I do not like the style; it is highly mannerised, and permeated, so to speak, with a kind of rich perfume, a perfume which stupefies rather than enlivens. Even when the characters are making what are evidently to them perfectly natural and straightforward remarks, I do not feel sure what they mean; and I suffer from paroxysms of rage as I read, because I feel that I cannot get at what is there without a mental agility which seems to me unnecessarily fatiguing. A novel ought to be like a walk; George Meredith makes it into an obstacle race.

Then, again, Henry James is an indubitably great writer; though you amused me once by saying that you felt you really had not time to read his later books. Well, for myself, I confess that his earlier books, such as Roderick Hudson and the Portrait of a Lady, are books that I recur to again and again. They are perfectly proportioned and admirably lucid. If they have a fault, and I do not readily admit it, it is that the characters are not quite full-blooded enough. Still, there is quite enough of what is called "virility" about in literature; and it is refreshing to find oneself in the company of people who preserve at all events the conventional decencies of life. But Henry James has in his later books taken a new departure; he is infinitely subtle and extraordinarily delicate; but he is obscure where he used to be lucid, and his characters now talk in so allusive and birdlike a way, hop so briskly from twig to twig, that one cannot keep the connection in one's mind. He seems to be so afraid of anything that is obvious or plain-spoken, that his art conceals not art but nature. I declare that in his conversations I have not unfrequently to reckon back to see who has got the ball; then, too, those long, closely printed pages, such as one sees in The Wings of a Dove, without paragraphs, without breathing places, pages of minute and refined a.n.a.lysis--there is a high intellectual pleasure in reading them, but there is a mental strain as well. It is as though one wandered in tortuous pa.s.sages, full of beautiful and curious things, without ever reaching the rooms of the house. What I want, in a work of imagination, is to step as simply as possible into the presence of an emotion, the white heat of a situation. With Henry James I do not feel certain what the situation is. At the same time his books are full of fine things; he has learnt a splendid use of metaphor, when the whole page seems, as it were, stained with some poetical thought, as though one had shut a fruit into the book, and its juice had tinted the whole of a page. But that is not sufficient; and I confess I close one of his later volumes in a condition of admiring mystification. I do not know what it has all been about; the characters have appeared, have nodded and smiled inscrutably, have let fall sentences which seem like sparkling fragments of remarks; I feel that there is a great conception behind, but I am still in the dark as to what it is.

There are two or three other authors whose books I read with interest.

One of these is John Oliver Hobbes. Her books do not seem to me to be exactly natural; it is all of the nature of a scenic display. But there is abundance of n.o.bility and even of pa.s.sion; and the style is original, nervous, and full of fine aphorisms. There is a feeling of high and chivalrous courage about her characters; they breathe perhaps too lofty an air, and are, if anything, too true to themselves. But it is a dignified romance, rather mediaeval than modern, and penetrated with a pungent aromatic humour which has a quality of its own.

Mrs. Humphry Ward is another writer whose books I always read. I am constantly aware of a great conscientiousness in the background. The scenery, the people, are all studied with the most sedulous and patient care; but I somehow feel, at all events in the earlier works, that the moral att.i.tude of the writer, a kind of Puritan agnosticism, interferes with the humanity of the books; they seem to me to be as saturated with principle as Miss Yonge's books, written from a very different standpoint, were. I feel that I am not to be allowed my own preferences, and that to enjoy the books I must be in line with the auth.o.r.ess. Mrs. Ward's novels, in fact, seem to me the high-water mark of what great talent, patient observation, and faithful work can do; but the light does not quite shine through. Yet it is only just to say that every book Mrs. Ward writes seems an improvement on the last.

There is a wider, larger, freer conception of life; more reality, more humanity, as well as more artistic handling; and they are worth careful reading; I shall certainly include one or two in my consignment.

George Moore seems to me to be one of the best writers on the stage.

Esther Waters, Evelyn Innes, and Sister Theresa, are books of the highest quality. I have a sense in these books of absolute reality. I may think the words and deeds of the characters mysterious, surprising, and even sometimes disgusting; but they surprise and disgust me just as the anomalies of human beings affect me. I may not like them, but I do not question the fact that the characters spoke and behaved as they are supposed to behave. Moreover, Evelyn Innes and Sister Theresa are written in a style of matchless lucidity and precision; they have pa.s.sages of high poetry. Old Mr. Innes, with his tiresome preoccupations, his pedantic taste, his mediaeval musical instruments, affects me exactly as an unrelenting idealist does in actual life. The mystical Ulick has a profound charm; the Sisters in the convent, all preoccupied with the same or similar ideas, have each a perfectly distinct individuality. Evelyn herself, even with all her frank and unashamed sensuality, is a deeply attractive figure; and I know no books which so render the evasive charm of the cloistered life. But George Moore has two grave faults; he is sometimes vulgar and he is sometimes brutal. Evelyn's worldly lover is a man who makes one's flesh creep, and yet one feels he is intended to represent the fascination of the world. Then it does not seem to me to be true realism to depict scenes of frank animalism. Such things may occur; but the actors in such a carnival could not speak of them, even to each other; it may be prudish, but I cannot help feeling that one ought not to have represented in a book what could not be repeated in conversation or depicted in a picture. One may be plain-spoken enough in art, but one ought not to have the feeling that one would be ashamed, in certain pa.s.sages, to catch the author's eye. If it were not for these lapses, I should put George Moore at the head of all contemporary novelists; and I am not sure that I do not do so as it is. Do give them another trial; I always thought you were too easily discouraged in your attempt to grapple with his books; probably my admiration for them only aroused your critical sense; and I admit that there is much to criticise.

Then there is another writer, lately dead, alas, whose books I used to read with absorbing interest, George Gissing. They had, when he treated of his own peculiar stratum, the same quality of hard reality which I value most of all in a work of fiction. The actors were not so much vulgar as underbred; their ambitions and tastes were often deplorable.

But one felt that they were real people. The wall of the suburban villa was gently removed, and the life was before your eyes. The moment he strayed from that milieu, the books became fantastic and unreal. But in the last two books, By the Ionian Sea and the Papers of Henry Rycroft, Gissing stepped into a new province, and produced exquisitely beautiful and poetical idealistic literature.

Thomas Hardy is a poetical writer. But his rustic life, dreamy, melancholy, and beautiful as it is, with the wind blowing fragrant out of the heart of the wood, or the rain falling on the down, seems to me to be no more real than the scenes in As You Like It or The Tempest.

The figures are actors playing a part. And then there is through his books so strong a note of s.e.x, and people under the influence of pa.s.sion seem to me to behave in so incomprehensible a way, in a manner so foreign to my own experience, that though I would not deny the truth of the picture, I would say that it is untrue for me, and therefore unmeaning.

I have never fallen under the sway of Rudyard Kipling. Whenever I read his stories I feel myself for the time in the grip of a strong mind, and it becomes a species of intoxication. But I am naturally sober by inclination, and though I can unreservedly admire the strength, the vigour, the splendid imaginativeness of his conceptions, yet the whole note of character is distasteful to me. I don't like his male men; I should dislike them and be ill at ease with them in real life, and I am ill at ease with them in his books. This is purely a matter of taste; and as to the animal stories, terrifically clever as they are, they appear to me to be no more true to life than Landseer's pictures of dogs holding a coroner's inquest or smoking pipes. The only book of his that I re-read is The Light that Failed, for its abundant vitality and tragicalness; but the same temperamental repugnance overcomes me even there.

For pure imagination I should always fly to a book by H. G. Wells. He has that extraordinary power of imagining the impossible, and working it out in a hard literal way which is absolutely convincing. But he is a teller of tales and not a dramatist.

Well, you will be tired of all these fussy appreciations. But what one seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. For one thing, most people seem to me to write too much. The moment a real success is scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly whispered by publishers, to produce a similar book on similar lines, becomes very strong. Few living writers are above the need for earning money; but even that would not spoil a genius if we had him.

These writers whom I have mentioned seem to me all like little bubbling rivulets, each with a motion, a grace, a character of its own. But what one craves for is a river deep and wide, for some one, with a great flood of humanity like Scott, or with a leaping cataract of irrepressible humour like d.i.c.kens, or with a core of white-hot pa.s.sion like Charlotte Bronte, or a store of brave and wholesome gaiety and zest, such as Stevenson showed.

Well, we must wait and hope. Meanwhile I will write to my great book-taster; one of the few men alive with great literary vitality, who has never indulged the temptation to write, and has never written a line. I will show him the manner of man you are, and a box of bright volumes shall be packed for you. The one condition is that you shall write me in return a sheet of similar appreciations. The only thing is to know what one likes, and strike out a line for oneself; the rest is mere sheep-like grazing--forty feeding like one.--Ever yours,

T. B.

ASHFIELD, SETTLE, Sept. 4, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have been reading FitzGerald's pretty essay Euphranor.

It is Platonic both in form and treatment, but I never feel that it is wholly successful. Most of the people who express admiration for it know nothing of the essay except a delicious pa.s.sage at the end, like a draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus. But the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous. However, it is not of that that I wish to speak, it is rather of the pa.s.sage from Digby's G.o.defridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets out to a.n.a.lyse the joyful and generous temperament of Youth. "They [the young] are easily put to Shame" (so runs the script), "for they have no resources to set aside the precepts which they have learned; and they have lofty souls, for they have never been disgraced or brought low, and they are unacquainted with Necessity; they prefer Honour to Advantage, Virtue to Expediency; for they live by Affection rather than by Reason, and Reason is concerned with Expediency, but Affection with Honour."

All very beautiful and n.o.ble, no doubt; but is it real? was I, were you, creatures of this make? Could these fine things have been truthfully said of us? Perhaps you may think it of yourself, but I can only regretfully say that I do not recognise it.

My boyhood and youth were, it seems to me, very faulty things. My age is faulty still, more's the pity. But without any vain conceit, and with all the humility which is given by a knowledge of weakness, I can honestly say that in particular points I have improved a little. I am not generous or n.o.ble-hearted now; but I have not lost these qualities, for I never had them. As a boy and a young man I distinctly preferred Advantage to Honour; I was the prey of Expediency, and seldom gave Virtue a thought. But since I have known more of men, I have come to know that these fine powers, Honour and Virtue, do bloom in some men's souls, and in the hearts of many women. I have perceived their fragrance; I have seen Honour raise its glowing face like a rose, and Virtue droop its head like a pure snowdrop; and I hope that some day, as in an early day of spring, I may find some such tender green thing budding in the ugly soil of my own poor spirit.

Life would be a feeble business if it were otherwise; but the one ray of hope is not that one steadily declines in brightness from those early days, but that one may learn by admiration the beauty of the great qualities one never had by instinct.

I see myself as a boy, greedy, mean-spirited, selfish, dull. I see myself as a young man, vain, irritable, self-absorbed, unbalanced. I have not eradicated these weeds; but I have learnt to believe in beauty and honour, even in Truth. . . .--Ever yours,

T. B.

MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON, Sept. 13, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have just come back after a long, vague holiday, feeling well and keen about my work. The boys are not back yet, and I have returned to put things ready for next half. But my serene mood has received a shock this morning.

I wonder if you ever get disagreeable letters? I suppose that a schoolmaster is peculiarly liable to receive them. The sort of letter I mean is this. I come down to breakfast in good spirits; I pick up a letter and open it, and, all of a sudden, it is as if a snake slipped out and bit me. I close it and put it away, thinking I will read it later; there it lies close by my plate, and takes away the taste of food, and blots the sunshine. I take it upstairs, saying that it will want consideration. I finish my other letters, and then I take it out again. Out comes the snake again with a warning hiss; but I resist temptation this time, read it through, and sit staring out of the window. A disagreeable letter from a disagreeable man, containing anxious information, of a kind that I cannot really test. What is the best way to deal with it? I know by experience; answer it at once, as dispa.s.sionately as one can; extract from it the few grains of probable truth it holds, and keep them in mind for possible future use; then deliberately try and forget all about it. I know now by experience that the painful impression will gradually fade, and, meanwhile, one must try to interpret the whole matter rightly. What is there in one's conduct which needs the check? Is it that one grows confident and careless? Probably! But the wholesome thing to do is to deal with it at once; otherwise it means anxious and feverish hours, when one composes a long and epigrammatic answer, point by point. The letter is over-stated, gossipy, malicious; if one lets it soak into the mind, it makes one suspicious of every one, miserable, cowardly. It is useless in the first hours, when the sting is yet tingling, to remind oneself philosophically that the suggestion is exaggerated and malignant; one does not get any comfort that way. No, the only thing is to plunge into detail, to work, to read--anything to recover the tone of the mind.

It is a comfort to write to you about it, for to-day I am in the sore and disquieted condition which is just as unreal and useless as though I were treating the matter with indifference. Indifference indeed would be criminal, but morbidity is nearly as bad.

I once saw a very dramatic thing take place in church. It was in a town parish near my old home. The clergyman was a friend of mine, a wonderfully calm and tranquil person. He went up to the pulpit while a hymn was being sung. When the hymn concluded, he did not give out his text, but remained for a long time silent, so long that I thought he was feeling ill; the silence became breathless, and the attention of every one in the church became rivetted on the pulpit. Then he slowly took up a letter from the cushion, and said in a low, clear voice: "A fortnight ago I found, on entering the pulpit, a letter addressed to me in an unknown hand; I took it out and read it afterwards; it was anonymous, and its contents were scandalous. Last Sunday I found another, which I burnt unread. To-day there is another, which I do not intend to read"--he tore the letter across as he said the words, in the sight of the congregation--"and I give notice that, if any further communications of the kind reach me, I shall put the matter into the hands of the police. I am willing to receive, if necessary, verbal communications on such subjects, though I do not think that any good purpose can be served by them. But to make vague and libellous accusations against members of the congregation in this way is cowardly, dishonourable, and un-Christian. I have a strong suspicion"--he looked steadily down the church--"of the quarter from which these letters emanate; and I solemnly warn the writer that, if I have to take action in the matter, I shall take measures to make that action effective."

I never saw a thing better done; it was said without apparent excitement or agitation; he presently gave out his text and preached as usual. It seemed to me a supremely admirable way of dealing with the situation. Need I add that he was practical enough to take the pieces of the letter away with him?

I once received an anonymous letter, not about myself, but about a friend. I took it to a celebrated lawyer, and we discovered the right way to deal with it. I remember that, when we had finished, he took up the letter--a really vile doc.u.ment--and said musingly: "I have often wondered what the pleasure of sending such things consists in! I always fancy the sender taking out his watch, and saying, with malicious glee, 'I suppose so-and-so will be receiving my letter about now!' It must be a perverted sense of power, I think."

I said, "Yes, and don't you think that there is also something of the pleasure of saying 'Bo' to a goose?" The great man smiled, and said, "Perhaps."

Well, I must try to forget, but I don't know anything that so takes the courage and the cheerfulness out of one's mind as one of these secret, dastardly things. My letter this morning was not anonymous; but it was nearly as bad, because it was impossible to use or to rely upon the information; and it was, moreover, profoundly disquieting.

Tell me what you think! I suppose it is good for one to know how weak one's armour is and how vulnerable is one's feeble self.--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON, Sept. 20, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have been reading lately, not for the first time, but with increased interest, the Memoir of Mark Pattison. It was, you will remember, dictated by himself towards the end of his life, and published after his death with a few omissions. It was not favourably received, and was called cowardly, cynical, bitter, a "cry in the dark," treacherous, and so forth. It is very difficult not to be influenced by current opinion in one's view of a book; one comes to it prepared to find certain characteristics, and it is difficult to detach one's mind sufficiently to approach a much-reviewed volume with perfect frankness. But I have read the book several times, and my admiration for it increases. It does not reveal a generous or particularly attractive character, and there are certain episodes in it which are undoubtedly painful. But it is essentially a just, courageous, and candid book. He is very hard on other people, and deals hard knocks. He shows very clearly that he was deficient in tolerance and sympathy, but he is quite as severe on himself. What I value in the book is its absolute sincerity. He does not attempt to draw an ideal picture of his own life and character at the expense of other people. One sees him develop from the shy, gauche, immature boy into the mature, secluded, crabbed, ungracious student. If he had adopted a pose he might have sketched his own life in beautiful subdued colours; he might have made himself out as misrepresented and misunderstood. He does none of these things. He shows clearly that the disasters of his life were quite as much due to his own temperamental mistakes as to the machinations of others. He has no illusions about himself, and he does not desire that his readers should have any. The sadness of the book comes from his failure, or rather his const.i.tutional inability, to see other people whole. After all, our appreciations for other people are of the nature of a sum. There is a certain amount of addition and subtraction to be done; the point is whether the sum total is to the credit of the person concerned. But with Mark Pattison the process of subtraction was more congenial than the process of addition. He saw and felt the weakness of those who surrounded him so keenly that he did not do justice to their good qualities. This comes out very clearly when he deals with Newman and Pusey. Pattison was a member for a time of the Tractarian set, but he must have been always at heart a Liberal and a Rationalist, and the spell which Newman temporarily cast over him appeared to him in after life to have been a kind of ugly hypnotism, to which he had limply submitted. Certainly the diary which he quotes concerning his own part in the Tractarian movement, the conversations to which he listened, the morbid frame of mind to which he succ.u.mbed are deplorable reading.

Indeed the reminiscences of Newman's conversation in particular, the pedantry, the hankering after miracles, the narrowness of view, are an extraordinary testimony to the charm with which Newman must have invested all he did or said. Pattison is even more severe on Pusey, and charges him with having betrayed a secret which he had confided to him in confession. It does not seem to occur to Pattison to consider whether he did not himself mention the fact, whatever it was, to some other friend.

On the other hand the book reveals an extraordinary intellectual ideal.

It holds up a standard for the student which is profoundly impressive; and I know no other book which displays in a more single-minded and sincere way the pa.s.sionate desire of the savant for wide, deep, and perfect knowledge, which is to be untainted by any admixture of personal ambition. Indeed, Pattison speaks of literary ambition as being for the student not an amiable weakness, but a defiling and polluting sin.

Of course it is natural to feel that there is a certain selfish aridity about such a point of view. The results of Mark Pattison's devotion are hardly commensurate with his earnestness. He worked on a system which hardly permitted him to put the results at the disposal of others; but there is at the same time something which is both dignified and stately in the idea of the lonely, laborious life, without hope and without reward, sustained only by the pursuit of an impossible perfection.

It is not, however, as if this was all that Mark Pattison did. He was a great intellectual factor at Oxford, especially in early days; in later days he was a venerable and splendid monument. But as tutor of his college, before his great disappointment--his failure to be elected to the Rectorship--he evidently lived a highly practical and useful life.

There is something disarming about the naive way in which he records that he became aware that he was the possessor of a certain magnetic influence to which gradually every one in the place, including the old Rector himself, submitted.

The story of his failure to be elected Rector is deeply pathetic.

Pattison reveals with terrible realism the dingy and sordid intrigues which put an unworthy man in the place which he himself had earned. But it may be doubted whether there was so much malignity about the whole matter as he thought; and, at all events, it may be said that men do not commonly make enemies without reason. It does not seem to occur to him to question whether his own conduct and his own remarks may not have led to the unhappy situation; and indeed, if he spoke of his colleagues in his lifetime with the same acrimony with which his posthumous book speaks of them, the mystery is adequately explained.