Why we should read Part 11

So, she was gone, she who had been so near, So breathing-warm--soft mouth and hands and hair-- A moment since. Had she been really there, Close at his side and had he kissed her? It seemed Unlikely as something somebody else had dreamed And talked about at breakfast, being a bore."

The first thing we feel tempted to say about this poem is that we should vastly prefer to be possessed of an Olympian libido for Leda than to be burdened with John Ridley's "feebly sceptical, inefficient, profoundly unhappy" emotion for Jenny. Jove was, at any rate, healthy in his l.u.s.ts: there is something terribly anaemic about our modern love-making, with our one eye on the intellect lest we should do anything without a reason. I am fully aware that this is not criticism: it is merely making a note of the feeling that is uppermost in our minds on finishing the poem. But that is one of the reasons why we should read Aldous Huxley: he is not lacking in daring: what he sees and feels he shows: he is very boyish in his desire to shock: in these days one would have thought that there was no one left to shock except the undergraduate, and those who preserve the callowness of the undergraduate through life. He exaggerates the importance of material joys and miseries: he is easily disgusted: his fastidious intellect rebels at many things that most of us accept complacently ... but it is to his credit that he makes us feel that we ought to be more fastidious, that we ought to think more, that we ought to accept less. At present he is engaged in the process of destruction, a joyous, youthful pastime: when he grows up he will give us something constructive. At present we rejoice in his vitality, energy and alertness. The rest will come. Above all, he is generously endowed with the comic spirit: that alone would make him readable in such an age of dullness.

V

THE POEMS OF ROBERT GRAVES

There are not many reasons why we should read Robert Graves, but one reason is of such outstanding importance that it overshadows the want of many. While Siegfried Sa.s.soon and Osbert Sitwell have vented their vitriol on the old, Mr Graves in _Country Sentiment_ has run away into the land of nursery rhymes as an escape from the haunting horrors of our post-war era. There are strong men of little imagination who have wiped off the memory of the war from their minds like chalk-marks off a slate: there are others who will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.

Robert Graves is one of the latter:

"Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine, Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing And lay ghost hands on everything, But leave the noonday's warm sunshine To living lads for mirth and wine.

I met you suddenly down the street, Strangers a.s.sume your phantom faces, You grin at me from daylight places, Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet Dead men down the morning street."

That is why he prays that

"[But may] the gift of heavenly peace And glory for all time Keep the boy Tom who tending geese First made the nursery rhyme."

Only in the contemplation of childish toys can he regain repose. But nursery rhymes and childish toys are as flimsy as gossamer, the latter too easily get broken, the former are too often patently absurd.

There is a gnat-like thinness even in this delicious little song:

"Small gnats that fly In hot July And lodge in sleeping ears, Can rouse therein A trumpet's din With Day-of-Judgment fears.

Small mice at night Can wake more fright Than lions at midday.

An urchin small Torments us all Who tread his p.r.i.c.kly way.

A straw will crack The camel's back, To die we need but sip, So little sand As fills the hand Can stop a steaming ship.

One smile relieves A heart that grieves Though deadly sad it be, And one hard look Can close the book That lovers love to see."

He listens to the pale-bearded Ja.n.u.s, who urges him to

"Sing and laugh and easily run Through the wide waters of my plain, Bathe in my waters, drink my sun, And draw my creatures with soft song; They shall follow you along Graciously with no doubt or pain."

So he extols the simple rhymes that we learnt in childhood's days and seeks to add to them.

"So these same rhymes shall still be told To children yet unborn, While false philosophy growing old Fades and is killed by scorn."

Unfortunately it is not given to any modern to imitate with any degree of success either the ballads our ancestors loved or the nursery rhymes which all children have learnt: this age is too sophisticated and this avenue of escape is denied to Mr Graves: one of the lessons that we find most painful in the learning is that we are the product of our own age and cannot get away from it. Mr Graves antic.i.p.ates his reviewers in his _L'Envoi_ when he says:

"Everything they took from my new poem book But the fly-leaf and the covers."

But there are one or two other things I should leave inside the singularly attractive covers, and one of them is this:

"Restless and hot two children lay Plagued with uneasy dreams, Each wandered lonely through false day A twilight torn with screams.

True to the bed-time story, Ben Pursued his wounded bear, Ann dreamed of chattering monkey men, Of snakes twined in her hair ...

Now high aloft above the town The thick clouds gather and break, A flash, a roar, and rain drives down: Aghast the young things wake.

Trembling for what their terror was, Surprised by instant doom, With lightning in the looking-gla.s.s, Thunder that rocks the room.

The monkey's paws patter again, Snakes hiss and flash their eyes: The bear roars out in hideous pain: Ann prays and her brother cries.

They cannot guess, could not be told How soon comes careless day, With birds and dandelion gold, Wet gra.s.s, cool scents of May."

This is no nursery rhyme, but it is a very important parable. Mr Robert Graves is by nature a poet, but his vision has become blurred, his senses distorted, his nerves jangled by the war. Can no one tell him of the approach of careless day, of birds and dandelion gold, wet gra.s.s, cool scents of May? Surely the nightmare of his soul is nearly over, and he can creep out from under the soft quilt of nursery rhymes to the clear light of day and sing us the golden songs that we know are in him, as yet unexpressed.

VI

J. D. BERESFORD

A common criticism levelled against novelists is that when they depict failures we find it unnecessary to turn to the last page to prove these failures successes. No novelist except Gissing has dared to write the story of a failure who remained a failure till the end. Mr J. D.

Beresford's art is frankly autobiographical, and the very fact of his having a novel published proves that he at any rate has ceased to be a failure, and yet the fact is that Jacob Stahl at each stage of his life looks upon himself as a failure; the truth of the matter is that Mr Beresford, like his hero, fully realises that "virtue lies only in the continual renewal of effort; the boast of success is an admission of failure." Jacob never boasts of success.

In _W. E. Ford_ Mr Beresford talks of his architectural experiences, his unfortunate first marriage, his temporary inhibitions and his ultimate literary success; his hero in the trilogy is just such a man as Mr Beresford declares himself to be. Jacob Stahl was lame, Mr Beresford suffers from a like physical disability. At every point in these three books we feel convinced that he is setting down the facts of his own struggle, and if it needed proof that genius does not necessarily manifest itself through the imagination, but through a careful selection of actual autobiographical experiences, we should get that proof in these remarkable novels. He even goes so far as to interpolate into the body of his novels the actual eulogistic criticism that his own early works received from the reviewers. We know that he was actually employed by W. H. Smith & Son to do much the same work as Jacob Stahl is called upon to do for Price & Mallinson.

A conversation with Meredith that Jacob has on the subject of literary art is equally illuminating as descriptive of Beresford's own theories.

"Why shouldn't a novelist describe life as he sees it?... I simply don't understand all that stuff about art," replied Jacob. "Method, technique, yes. You have got to find words to express what you've seen."

He agreed that the essential thing was the accurate representation of the commonplace, and realised when it was put to him that he had put a piece of life under the microscope and not related it to the whole; we feel, furthermore, that Mr Beresford was thinking solely of himself when he impressed upon us the importance of realising that at the end of his struggle Jacob Stahl "could never rest content with any such attainment as was provided by the comfort of his wife's love ... in the care of his three children, or, least of all, by such satisfactions as come to him from his modest achievements in the world of letters; he is ever at the beginning of life reaching out towards those eternal values that are ever beyond his grasp ... and that earnest search of his for some aspect of permanent truth keeps his spirit young." Mr Beresford is pre-eminently among the novelists of to-day a candidate for truth.

Surely no one has been so completely honest over his relations with the other s.e.x; it is true that in _G.o.d's Counterpoint_ Philip is so puritanically distorted in his att.i.tude towards s.e.x as to become as vile and disgusting as the most degenerate physical profligate, and we feel that a more normal man than Mr Beresford's hero (the shadow of himself) in the trilogy would not have taken Madeline so seriously or have believed in, much less have married, such a woman as Lola so casually, or have caused such a perfect type of womanhood as Betty so many heart-burnings. Anyone but Jacob would have seen through Mrs Latimer in half-an-hour. It would have served Jacob right if she had made him marry her. At the same time a more normal man than Mr Beresford would have been quite unable to make such people not only live but actually interesting, not so much for what they do as for what they are as betrayed in their conversations; an underbred clerk, a temporarily reclaimed drunkard of a curate, a courtesan countess, a saviour of souls, a self-sacrificing aunt, a pedantic successful brother, a woman of the streets, whist-playing inhabitants of a boarding-house, literary giants, omniscient commercial travellers, pretty typists, truculent compositors, Cornish villagers, flit in and out of the pages of the trilogy, who, once met, can never be forgotten. They are all flesh and blood. These two perfect cameos of psychological a.n.a.lysis may be taken as typical:

"When Laurence's brain grew dull and futile after a period of clean living and close application, he could find no stimulus for it save by a concession to the brute in him. When the brute was tired by excess, it found rest and the means of recovery during the activity and temporary dominance of the spirit.... If he had lived for the spirit he would have died in a madhouse, as it was the brute gradually absorbed him."

Again, of Cecil Barker: "Truly, the man was honest when he was not fishing (for the souls of men). He could beget love for himself in the mind of man or woman; and he could reject it without compunction when offered--a far harder thing.... He was only selfish in the rigour of his self-denial ... he was a superman who worked for no rewards here, and none ever heard him speak of any hope of reward hereafter.... Even those who--like Jacob Stahl--suffered bitterly at his hands, still remembered him in after years with admiration and love."

The fact is that in common with all true artists Mr Beresford (like his hero) was extraordinarily impressionable, and therefore saw further into the hearts of men than most of us, even if, as he says of himself, he resembled rubber rather than wax in that he was only impressed momentarily. But his resilience is opposed to the woodenness of ordinary writers in exactly the same proportion as his protagonists have as much likeness to life as theirs have none.

One of the most pleasing traits in Mr Beresford's work comes from what he calls his "scattered education"; there is always in his work a pleasing absence of mere cleverness which endears him to all those who regard life as less of an intellectual problem than something which every man has to live for himself; we are shown in one page of absorbing interest how books affected the life of Jacob Stahl; from standard novels of which _Robert Elsmere_ may be taken as a typical example he rises to the _Origin of Species_, works on biology, physics and philosophy; only after his life with the swearing mission parson, Cecil Barker (an exquisitely drawn character), does he realise the shortcomings of orthodox Christianity and the fact that experience is the only school that matters; he feels quite honestly ignorant in the presence of his brother as he does in the presence of all so-called "well-read" men. He owed more to his financial and marital disasters than to anything else in his life except the influence of Betty; by inclination he was tempted to deny G.o.d through his foolish tendency to immolate himself. Only when he got clear of cant, from a morality that depended on repression to one that depended upon the liberation of impulse, did he achieve freedom and success. Mr Beresford, it will be seen at once, by presenting us with a slice of life (unconsciously perhaps) teaches us how to live. Like Wells, he becomes more and more interested as life goes on in linking up science, religion and art; the unity of life, the beauty of truth, the truth of beauty, these are the things at which he aims; the methods by which he would attain them are best presented to us in his educational experiment, _W. E. Ford_. There in the shortest possible compa.s.s we get the trend of his teaching, for like all great artists he is first and foremost a teacher; and if his own observations have taught him nothing else, they have at any rate taught him "that a positive immorality (as we now regard it) is a far more admirable thing than a negative virtue." It would be hard to ask a man to give a more convincing proof than the results of his own observations, especially when he can express them, as Mr Beresford does, with subtle irony, genial humour and an uncanny knowledge of the motives which govern human action.

VII

_NIGHT AND DAY_

There is one thing that Virginia Woolf demands of all her readers before she can be appreciated at her true worth, and that is leisure. Try to read _Night and Day_ at the rate you read W. J. Locke and you will hear a faint buzz of conversation amid an interminable rattle of tea-cups ...

and nothing more. For it is certainly true that people in this novel rarely stop talking, and it is equally true that when they do stop it is usually to have another cup of tea with a thin slice of lemon in it. It treats on the one side of a type that one finds "at the tops of professions, with letters after their names"; sitting "in luxurious public offices, with private secretaries attached to them"; writing "solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great universities"; and "when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his biography."