Americans (Sherman)/An Imaginary Conversation With Mr. P. E. More
American criticism, as I think Mr. Bliss Perry remarked a few years ago, has been singularly unsociable, reserved, and poor in personality. The academic critic delivers his discourse to his audience of ten or a hundred thousand people in the style of a surpliced clergyman reading a presidential proclamation in a great cathedral. Consequently he is not much impressed by them nor they by him. How to get the audience and the speaker in touch with one another is a question that needs to be treated; for the solitude which many of our most serious men of letters inhabit, their remoteness from stimulating living companionship, is like that of the inter-stellar spaces explored by the astronomer's telescope. Lately some of the young people have attempted a solution, which is not, I think, wholly satisfactory. In order to provoke some one to notice them, to speak to them, if only to expose and flagellate them, they have banded themselves, like the Grub Street wits of old, into a league against virtue and decorum and even against the grammar and idiom of English speech.
Impudence is one mode of familiarity, and its vogue is increasing. But there are other ways to make literature affable and engaging which may be recommended to those whose talent for impudence is imperfectly developed. On my desk lies a tattered volume of selections, six hundred pages of the Causeries du Lundi, which is like a circle of charming people conversing. It is intimate: many of the writers introduced in these delightful pages were contemporaries and personal friends of the author. Frequently Sainte-Beuve presents no formal treatment of their works. He does something for you which quickens your literary sensibilities as no formal analysis does: he admits you to the inner circle. He makes his writer live for you by dissolving his books and ideas back into the character and personality which they imperfectly expressed, and by then presenting you a speaking portrait, executed with the appreciativeness, the gentle firmness, the candor, the affectionate malice of a friend who, from looking into your eyes year after year, has come to love the crow's feet that time and thought have etched around them.
Mr. More, our American Sainte-Beuve, has painted an abundance of such portraits of celebrities who are dead. But, like the students in the Royal Academy of Art in Sir Joshua's day, he has given little attention to drawing from the life. He has never, like Rossetti, gone to market before breakfast to paint a calf in a farmer's cart. In the hundred and sixteen Shelburne essays, there are only a dozen American subjects; and of these only four or five at the most can be called in any sense "contemporary." This proves, I think, a partial retrogression from the purpose indicated by the epigraph of his First Series: "Before we have an American literature, we must have an American criticism." Mr. More has written distinguished and important criticism in America for Americans apropos of English themes. But he has done too little to meet his poor living fellow-countrymen half way; and to give and to receive the recognitions which are among the functions and the rewards of letters. He has not done as much as he might have done to establish a place for easy colloquial intercourse at some point between the news-papering reading public and that hermit's retreat of his with the Sanskrit inscription above the door.
For this reason, I welcome, as a token of amendment, his preface to his recent volume on The Wits. Mr. More has not the prefatory habit. It is his custom to plunge in medias res, like an epic poet or a member of the Modern Language Association. But here, like a man of this world, he begins with a preface, affable, familiar, charming, provocative. He chats about the way he composed these essays—that was before he withdrew from New York to Princeton in order that his children might grow up among the English-speaking peoples—through the strenuous years in New York, when a Sunday dinner broke up his one precious day of "scholarly leisure," and, when, as critic, he wrote for immortality with one hand what, as editor of The Nation, he ruthlessly abridged with the other. He pleasantly discusses the vices and foibles of reviewers; and so by insensible degrees he passes to the prevailing foibles and vices of man; and thence to the present and perennial need for satire.
If I understand him aright, he intimates that the unifying spirit of this book is a hope that it will "vex somebody." It has vexed me sharply at some points and pleased me much at others, as everything that he writes does. I shall explain my pleasure and my vexation with that freedom which I learned from him and from his equally independent predecessor, Hammond Lamont, two editors, who taught their reviewers to fear nothing but deviations from the truth and the insidious vices of puffery and log-rolling. Of the terrible integrity of that office I fondly cherish one recollection. I had sent in—it was long ago—a very "pleasant" review of an amusing novel by an author who, as I happened to know, was an old friend of the editor; and I added a note to the effect that, though the book had some defects, it seemed not worth while to speak of them in so brief a notice. Back came the proof, inscribed in Mr. Lamont's bold hand, with the only suggestion that he ever made for an alteration in my copy. "You had better give it," he said, "the full measure of damnation." Mr. More, as all contributors and authors know, sustained the great tradition.
An inheritor of the high mission of damnation does not fluently mix with the various literary adulation societies of the metropolis. To a man of Mr. More's internal preoccupations the great city offers in vain that life which impresses the eye of a Maupassant from Texas as so rich and various. Her highway pageantry, her chirping slopes of Helicon, her "colorful" coast of Bohemia, her swarming literary proletariat, leave him as cold as Nineveh and Babylon. And so Mr. More does not conceal from us that he is happier since he left New York. There are more days in a Princeton week. There is more leisure in a Princeton chair. A man of immense intellectual possessions, he has from the outset manifested a marked predilection for literary society in the grand style; to have much of which, one must choose one's avenue and residence. I conceive the Shelburne essays, to which he adds a wing year after year, as a many-chambered mansion, conspicuously withdrawn from the public highway, built and maintained for the reception of Indian sages, Greek philosophers, great poets, moralists, scholars, statesmen, and other guests from the Elysian Fields, who, but for his lordly pleasure-house, would be hard put to it for a resting place when, of a week-end, they revisit the glimpses of the moon. Let us be thankful—we academic cottagers, we journalistic occupants of three-rooms-and-a-bath—let us be thankful for an intellectual capitalist or so with means and inclination to entertain these shadowy ambassadors from other ages, and so to establish for our undistinguished democratic society fruitful and inspiring relations with the deathless grand monde of antiquity.
If W. D. Howells was the dean of our fiction, Mr. More is the bishop of our criticism. His classical and Oriental scholarship, his reverence for tradition, his reasoned conservatism, his manner, a little austere at first contact, and his style, pure and severely decorous, all become the office. By the serenity of his pleasure in letters and the life of the mind he recalls those substantially happy old churchmen-scholars of the eighteenth century, Warton and Percy and Warburton; by the range of his deep and difficult reading he suggests Coleridge, to whose intellectual dissoluteness, however, his intellectual organization and concentration are antithetical; by his aloofness from the spirit of the hour and its controversies he reminds one of Landor, striving with none, because none is worth his strife; by his touch of mystic ardor and his sustained moral intensity and philosophic seriousness, he belongs with Savonarola and the great French ecclesiastics of the seventeenth century. One may visualize him in these later years, since his retirement from editorial duties, as sitting in external and internal placidity under a pallid bust of Pallas in a commodious library, learnedly annotating in fine small hand an interleaved edition of Plato, or poring with a reading glass over the Greek folio of Origen, or perhaps quite lost to the world in the wide wilderness of Leo XIII's Aquinas.
Men with such companions are less solitary than they seem. Upon a scholarly leisure so austerely industrious, you and I would not lightly venture to intrude, even though we had heard that after a week with St. Augustine Mr. More enjoys a Saturday evening with a tale of Anna Katherine Green; or will good-humoredly meet the Princeton pundits and Bluestockings at a rubber of bridge, bringing to the solution of its problems the logical rigor of Duns Scotus and the transcendental insight of Plotinus. On another night, at tea-time or after, Samuel Johnson would not hesitate to stumble in, and, stretching his great legs towards the fire, challenge Mr. Henry Holt's views of Patience Worth and the ouija board, or summon Mr. More to a defence of the thesis, somewhat wearily stoical, which he has carved in tall Greek letters across the wide face of his mantel shelf—a thesis of which this is the gist: "Man's affairs are really of small consequence, but one must act as if they were, and this is a burden." Later in the evening one can imagine that saturated student of Queen Anne's time, Professor Trent, completing the semi-circle; and then the three of them, confirmed Tories all three, joining in an amiable but heated altercation on the merits of Milton and Defoe, or more harmoniously discussing, judging, and gossiping over the "wits" of tavern and coffee-house whom Mr. More has gathered into his latest volume: first, Beaumont and Fletcher, Halifax, Mrs. Behn, Swift, Pope, Lady Mary, Berkeley, the Duke of Wharton, Gray; and then, more summarily, those golden bugs, those "decadent" fellows who wore the green carnation and sipped absinthe for coffee between the reign of Wilde and the reign of G. B. Shaw.
It is good literary talk—better is not to be heard in these degenerate days. It is talk now grave, now gay, richly allusive and erudite and deliciously seasoned with malice—"at every word a reputation dies." For the host, quoting Samuel Butler, has given his guests this note: "There is nothing that provokes and sharpens wit like malice." What a lurking whig or a modern Democrat or a Romanticist would miss, if he were eavesdropping there, is a clash of fundamental belief and theory. Professor Trent may differ tenaciously on a nice point, such as the circumstantial evidence in the case of Lady Mary's virtue. But as to the apriori evidence they are all in substantial agreement; they accept with a dreadful Calvinistic accord man's natural predisposition to evil. They all applaud the wits for saying so sovereignly well those infamous things about human nature, which, alas, every now and then, human nature deserves to hear. They all speak suspiciously and derogatively of the mobile vulgus. And they fail, as nearly every militant classicist does, to recognize the "grand style" in Shakespeare, though, as Mr. More's favorite abomination, Professor Saintsbury truly says, the heretic has but to open the plays anywhere and read fifty lines, and the grand style will smite him in the face, "as God's glory smote Saint Stephen." Mr. More, receding from the position taken in the second series, now admits, indeed, that the greater plays are in their substance "profoundly classic," which is as much as one ever extorts from a defender of the Acropolis; but he clings to his heresy in the case of Romeo and Juliet, ranking its exquisite symphonies of meaning and music below the ethical plain-song of the Hippolytus.
We are interrupting better talk than our own. "Stay, stay," as the German visitor exclaimed on another occasion, "Toctor Shonson is going to say something."
"Sir," cries the Doctor, dashing at "P. E. M." with brutal downrightness, "in your essay on a Bluestocking of the Restoration, you have applied a vile phrase to Congreve. You have done an injustice to Congreve by coupling him with Wycherley and Mrs. Behn as 'wallowing contentedly in nastiness.' A critic should exert himself to distinguish the colors and shades of iniquity. Wycherley splashed through the filth of his time like a gross wit. Mrs. Behn dabbled in it like a prurient and truckling wit. Swift, indeed, wallowed in it, not contentedly but morosely, truculently, like a mad wit. But Congreve picked his way through it disdainfully, like a fastidious wit."
"But did you not," inquires Mr. More, "in your Lives of the Poets, remark that the perusal of Congreve's works will make no man better?"
"True," retorts the Doctor, "but I acknowledged that I knew nothing of Congreve's plays. Years had passed since I had read them. I am better acquainted with them now. Sir, in the Elysian Fields, Hazlitt, Thackeray, and Meredith, your best judges of wit and the beauties of English prose, converse with the members of my Literary Club in the language of Congreve. Conversational English reached its height in Congreve. In my days of nature, I did him at least the justice of recording that he could name among his friends every man of his times, Whig and Tory alike, whom wit and elegance had raised to reputation. A man who wallows in filth does not win universal esteem. No, sir, Congreve was an acute critic, a man of taste, and a fine gentleman, a very fine gentleman. In your next edition you must retrieve your blunder of representing the patrician wit of the Restoration as wallowing in nastiness."
"I will make a note of it," says Mr. More with an audible sigh of regret. For, to tell the plain truth, Mr. More values the writers of the Restoration chiefly for their wickedness. It is such good ammunition to use on the humanitarian enthusiasts and the whitewashers of human nature. He can forgive Pope his virulent personal satire, but not his deistic optimism. He praises Swift above Pope for his consistent adherence to the representation of his fellows as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the earth." He requires, or thinks he requires, the Yahoos as hideous caryatydes to uphold the towering superstructure of his aristocratic political and social philosophy.
"Cheer up, More," interposes Professor Trent jocosely; "don't let the loss of Congreve shake your beautiful faith in human depravity. The Doctor allows that Congreve was a rare bird, a very phenix. I'll tell you a Yahoo friend of Defoe's that you can put in his place. Swift knew his English people. For my part, give me the Turks."
A belief in the baseness of average human nature is, as I have said, something that Mr. More requires as a builder requires a basement, not expecting to live in it. Despite his profession of love for Pope, I suspect he has little more fellow-feeling for the sad wags of Anne's time or of Victoria's than Milton had for his kitchen-folk. When Professor Trent and Doctor Johnson grow weary of impaling ghosts on epigrams and are packed off to a nightcap and to bed, one can fancy P. E. M. returning to the library to recover possession of his soul. Extinguishing the lights, he sinks into his easy chair, and watches for a time the flickers of his expiring fire, fingering the dusky folios, while the Princeton chimes announce the midnight, and silence envelops that quaint little imitation English city, striving so bravely amid the New Jersey oil refineries to be a home of lost causes and to dream, under the Cleveland memorial tower, like the Oxford of 1830. As he meditates there in the fitful gloaming by the hearthside—Mr. More is one of the last of the meditative men—the gossip and scandal of the evening's talk rise from his mind like a phantasmal smoke, in which the huge illusory bulk of Johnson appears but a whirling eddy in knee-buckles and the slighter form of Professor Trent but a momentary shape in frock coat, floating wisp-like heavenwards.
From his mood of recreative dissipation "P. E. M." passes into his mood of critical self-collection; thence, into his mood of philosophic contemplation; and so to his mood of mystical insight, in which space and time, like insubstantial figments of the imagination, dissolve and mingle with the smoke and the Professor and the Doctor, and drift up the flue into night and nothingness. "Such stuff as dreams are made of," murmurs the mystic, in a mood like that in which Carlyle saw through the transparent body of Louis XVI the Merovingian kings wending on their ox-carts into eternity. A chill pervades the still air of the study. Into the vacant chairs glide one by one the quiet ghosts of Henry More, the Platonist, and Sir Thomas Browne, for whom Oblivion scattered her poppy in vain, and Cudworth rising from his tomb in The True Intellectual System of the Universe, and pale John Norris of Bemerton, wafted thither by a passion of loneliness from his dim prison in The Theory of an Ideal World. There is no sound of greeting; but the five silent figures commune together in perfect felicity on That Which Endureth Forever. They speak not a word, yet they understand one another by a mere interpenetration of their beings. . . . And when the Northern Waggoner has set his sevenfold team behind the steadfast star, and Chaunticlere warns erring spirits to their confines, "P. E. M." rouses himself from his deep trance, and says to himself, softly under his breath, "Hodie vixi—to-day I have lived!"
After two cups of coffee and a bit of toast, he goes to his desk and, without haste or rest, sets to work upon—what? A man who keeps such company and lives such an internal life should write his memoirs, a new Biographia Literaria, a philosophical autobiography. Such a book from Mr. More, delivering in his pure grave style a continuous narrative of the travels and voyages of his spirit from Shelburne, New Hampshire, by way of India to ancient Athens, making all ports which for storm-tossed sailors trim their lamps,—such a narrative, plangent through all its reserves with nostalgia for the infinite, would be of unique interest and value to us, complementing the spiritual adventures of Henry Adams, and deepening the resonance of American letters.
But Mr. More, returning to his desk, either continues his history of Neo-Platonism, which I wish he could leave to a scholar with no autobiography to write, or else—which fills me with "malice"—he supplants that great work by a Shelburne essay on Aphra Behn. This "pilgrim of the infinite"—what has Aphra to do with him, or he with Aphra? But what is a Shelburne essay? It is generally an imperfect, fragmentary cross-section, sometimes only the outer bark of a cross-section, of the character and personality which I have been sketching. It is criticism, it is history, it is philosophy, it is morality, it is religion, it is, above all, a singularly moving poetry, gushing up from deep intellectual and moral substrata, pure, cold, and refreshing, as water of a spring from the rocks in some high mountain hollow. This poetry of ideas was abundant in the first and the sixth series of the Shelburne essays and was nearly continuous in some of the single essays like The Quest of a Century in the third and Victorian Literature in the seventh. By its compression of serious thought and deep feeling it produces an effect as of one speaking between life and death, as the Apology of Socrates does. There is a pulse in the still flow of it, as if it had been stirred once and forever at the bottom of the human heart. It is for this poetry that we love Mr. More. But one has to go so far for it! In the long series, it is so intermittent! There is so much territory through which it does not flow.
A young friend of mine who takes his world through his pores, little experienced in literary exploration, unable to discover the spring, announced to me, after a brush with the "wits," that the essays are "dry." He is mistaken. A Shelburne essay is not infrequently, however, astonishingly difficult. Mr. More has not attended to the technique of ingratiation by which a master of popularity plays upon an unready public with his personality, flattering, cajoling, seducing it to accept his shadow before his substance arrives. He takes so little pains, I will not say to be liked but to be comprehended, that I sometimes wonder whether he has ever broadly considered the function of criticism—in a democracy as different as ours is from that in Athens. He writes as if unaware that our General Reading Public is innocent of all knowledge of the best that has been said and thought in the world. He writes at least half the time as if he contemplated an audience of Trents, Coleridges, Johnsons, and Casaubons.
Let me illustrate. Occasionally he will give you some paragraph of literary history as plain as a biographical dictionary and as dry as, let us say in deference to Mr. Mencken, as dry as a professor of English. But of a sudden, in a harmless-looking essay, say that on the eighteenth century dilettante, William Beckford, you, if a plain man, stumble and lose your footing over "the law of autarkeia, the perception of the veritable infinite within harmonious self-completeness which was the great gift of the Greeks to civilization"; and down you go whirling headlong into the bottomless pitfall and abyss of a discussion of the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental sentiment towards the infinite and towards personality, while Hinduism, Semitism, Alexandrianism, Platonism, and the Gnostic and Manichean heresies rush past you with the flash and roar of the wheels within wheels that dazzled Ezekiel when the heavens were opened and he saw "visions of God"—and "my word," as Mr. Drinkwater's Lincoln would say, what a God! You are, it is true, brought out of that headlong plunge into the unfathomable, as a skilful sky-pilot brings you out of a "nose spin," or as a dentist brings you out of the gyrations of a nitrous oxid trance; and you hear Mr. More at your side quietly, suavely assuring you that now you understand "why Goethe curtly called romanticism disease and classicism health." Maybe you do; but it is not by reason of your ride behind him on the Gnostic nightmare. What passed in that flight is only a shade more intelligible to you than a Chinese incantation. Your education was imperfect: you are neither a Coleridge nor a Cudworth.
"Perverse as it seems to say so," remarked Matthew Arnold in reply to Professor Newman's charge that he was ignorant, "I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is." How often one wishes that Mr. More would steal an hour from the study of Neo-Platonism to meditate on that paradoxical utterance! How often one wishes that Mr. More's ignorance were far, far greater than it is. With many of Arnold's fundamental intentions in criticism he is profoundly sympathetic; but he has never, as it appears to me, felt in a compelling way the Englishman's passion for diffusing his ideas, for making them "prevail," for carrying them from one end of society to the other. He has never taken adequately to heart Arnold's true and memorable description of the "great men of culture." They are those, Arnold declares, "who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light."
When I ask myself why "P. E. M." has not taken these words more obviously home, why he writes so exclusively for the "clique of the cultivated and learned," I come invariably to one conclusion, namely, that his interest in the uncultivated and unlearned is horribly chilly, is not much livelier, in fact, than his master Plato's concern for the Helots, who are silently to bear on their shoulders the burden and splendor of the Athenian Republic; is not much warmer than his master Burke's concern for the driver of oxen, the carpenter, and work-master, who are not to be sought for in counsel, but are "to maintain the state of the world." When I consider how rich "P. E. M." is in the very wisdom which our democratic populace needs and vaguely desires, and when I observe how persistently he repels the advances of the vulgar by flinging a handful of political and social icicles in their faces, I wish from the bottom of my heart that he had loved the exclusive, metaphysical, aristocratic Plato less and the hobnobbing, inquisitive, realistic, democratic Socrates more.
If Socrates were among us to-day, I am convinced that he would be leader of the Democrats in the House; but Plato, I suspect, would be a member of the Senate from Massachusetts. Having Plato as his monitor, Mr. More sides politically and socially with the little group of Americans who hold that there are only half a dozen great families, all in the Republican party, capable of governing and guiding the destinies of the United States. Though they may pass without question for "good" citizens, distinguished and patriotic, they have never accepted one characteristic word that Jefferson wrote into the political Scriptures of the American nation; they have never felt one generous throb of the faith, regenerative and sustaining and uniting, which Jefferson poured broadcast upon the spirit of the American people—faith in the sense and virtue of the community and in the sense and virtue of the majority of its components.
With Socrates as his guide through the modern world, "P. E. M." might have left his library and have broken from the circle of his Immortals, to stand on one leg and grow wise in the market-place. He might have suppled and vulgarized his tongue to chat with the work-master and carpenter and the driver of oxen who have had an American education and have fought under the American flag from Verdun to Archangel for, as they thought or hoped, an American democratic faith. He might have fallen in with the young carpenter, cited for gallantry in the Argonne, who is repairing my roof; or with another, concealing a Carnegie medal, who built me a tolerable bookcase after saving, singlehanded, seventeen lives in a fire. He might have met with a Northern peasant farmer of my acquaintance who, after recounting the hardships of his winter work in the absence of his eldest son, said to me, with a smile as profoundly philosophical as anything in Epictetus: "Well, I suppose that is what we are here for." He might have read the halting, ill-spelled letters of that stalwart eldest son who, while breaking mules for the Expeditionary Force in France, wrote to his old mother with a filial piety as beautiful as anything that Mr. More commends in Pope.
If he had enjoyed opportunities such as these—somehow he seems always to have evaded them—he would have recognized with dismay that Swift and the wits have coarsely libeled the mobile vulgus and have deceived him about its capacities and tendencies. He would have discovered in the average man—along with healthy self-interest, petty vices, and envy enough to keep him stirring—courage, fortitude, sobriety, kindness, honesty, and sound practical intelligence. If he could have pressed critically into the matter, he would have discovered something even more surprising. He would have learned that the average man is, like himself, at heart a mystic, vaguely hungering for a peace that diplomats cannot give, obscurely seeking the permanent amid the transitory; a poor swimmer struggling for a rock amid the flux of waters, a lonely pilgrim longing for the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land. And if "P. E. M." had a bit more of that natural sympathy of which he is so distrustful, he would have perceived that what more than anything else to-day keeps the average man from lapsing into Yahooism is the religion of democracy, consisting of a little bundle of general principles which make him respect himself and his neighbor; a bundle of principles kindled in crucial times by an intense emotion, in which his self-interest, his petty vices, and his envy are consumed as with fire; and he sees the common weal as the mighty rock in the shadow of which his little life and personality are to be surrendered, if need be, as things negligible and transitory.
I am speaking of the average man and traits of his which I can never contemplate, being one myself, without a lift of the heart; and I frankly avow that it vexes me to hear this emotion which does so much to keep us average men from weariness, and from the devastating cynicism of the wits, and the horrid ennuis of the great, and from their sense that the affairs of men are really of small consequence—it vexes me to hear this emotion dismissed as fatuous democratic self-complacency.
But even as I write these words, I seem to hear Mr. More, in an accent slightly eighteenth century, exclaiming, not without asperity, yet rather in pity than in anger: "Sir, I perceive that you are a vile Whig!"
To which I reply, not without animation, yet more in affection than in malice: "Sir, I perceive that you are a stubborn Tory!"
"Sir," says Mr. More, "I am obliged to lean a bit backward to counterbalance the vileness of your Whiggery."
"And, sir," I conclude, "I am obliged to lean a bit forward to counterbalance the stubbornness of your Toryism."