Critical Woodcuts/Mr. Brownell on the Quest of Perfection
IT is generally understood, without argument or illustration, that after the late war our morale, using the word in its most comprehensive sense, was "shot to pieces. "The task of gathering up the fragments and putting them together again has been undertaken by all sorts of people with various degrees of success or failure. The reconstructors have encountered some opposition from the small group of anarchical minds who really prefer their morale in pieces, and still more opposition from the large body of malcontented minds who would rather have morale remain shattered than see it reconstructed on the antebellum model.
Temperamental reactionaries react and are at peace. Some rest in the capacious old bosoms of Academic Orthodoxy, some in Business as Usual, some in Fundamentalism, some in the Ku-Klux Klan. But among the younger sort who have tasted the uncharted freedom of recent years there is a manifest disposition to say: "Yes, we, too, are a little weary of roaming like homeless winds. We, too, recognize in ourselves what you call the elementary human craving to be formed. But rather than submit to be shaped by such molds as you offer us we will shamelessly incur the reproach of aimlessness, futility and shapelessness."
The problem is to raise a flag from which every one that you wish to attract—every one with Ram Dass's endowment of "fire in his belly"—does not turn away in disgust. If you mark your flag with "Prohibition," "Inhibition," "Restriction," "Conventions," "Frein Vital" or "Inner Check" there is danger that it will rally only, or mainly, those merely gap-filling persons who could not be blasted out of their sterile conventionality with dynamite. From all youths, dear to the gods, in whose blood the spring flames, "wintry negativity," as William James called it, meets with negation. The only point of view to which they can possibly be persuaded to repair is one which promises them some positive object for their expansive and creative energies; some better, more expeditious, route to a felicity of which they have already tasted the sweetness; some glory so unmistakable that the difficulty of compassing it will not seem altogether "not worth while. "To the sense of young people, a day passed in positive achievement is better than a thousand years of renunciation, and a small artist who will show them how to paint grasshoppers perfectly is a far more welcome counselor than a great prophet who dissuades them from taking a city.
In recognition of this fact, there emerge, or reemerge, in France enthusiastic cults, like that of M. Motherlant, for the athletic life; and M. André Beaunier gives eleven pages of the "Revue des Deux Mondes" (August 1, 1924) to extolling a moralist, meet for our times, M. Eugène Marsan, an author whose most significant work is a little manual for the man of fashion (l'homme élégant), entitled "The Walking Sticks of M. Paul Bourget."
What is all this about? Well, the moment you reflect upon your own walking stick you see that in the
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click, click, click of that bit of crabtree or malacca there is something which introduces into your formless slouch the tension of art, time in ordered intervals, the sweep and seduction of rhythm. Yes, that, perhaps; but morality, too, in a meticulous solicitude about canes and cravats?
The reviver of "elegance" replies:
Oh, to be sure, the existence of God and the frontiers of Poland have importance of another order. We might walk the earth, clad in sackcloth and girdled with a rope. But if man is the only clothes-wearing animal, elegance of costume is commendable. It is moral. It is one of the means of maintaining one's dignity as a civilized white man. So long as a man clings to his clothes he preserves a barrier between himself and barbarism. Let us guard what guards us.
"There are no questions but social questions." It is an utterance of Gambetta's, applauded many years ago by Mr. Brownell, the critic among us who looks most searchingly into every question that he considers. Following this hint, I have been sketching the general social considerations which, I conceive, may have stimulated Mr. Brownell to compose his latest and timely book[1]—a book savory with wit, of remorseless penetration, packed with wisdom and informed throughout by that nobility of feeling which is quite the rarest note in contemporary literature. In some respects "The Genius of Style" is Mr. Brownell's most beautiful book—high praise, because each of its major predecessors has been quite the best thing of its kind hitherto produced in America.
Looking into the field of literature with eyes instructed by lifelong study of the "principle of beauty" in painting, sculpture, architecture, letters and social life, Mr. Brownell has marked, in common with less instructed observers, the growing tendency of authors to appear au naturel "to leave off agony, leave off style"; and he regards this tendency as essentially barbaric. As M. Marsan raises the little pennant of "elegance," so Mr. Brownell raises, on a far loftier standard, the flag of "style" as a positive objective which, clearly explained and persuasively commended, may conceivably enlist the loyalties of an age which acknowledges few. Quoting a Persian poet, he says: "The lion on the flag is but a painted lion, but in the wind it moves and marches." It marches in the chiding wind of current doctrine.
Style, what is it? In "The Nation" of October 8, 1924, you will find, in the resonant and only slightly ungrammatical language of Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, a sharp, clean-cut answer, which I will cite because it expresses adequately, I believe, the idea of style entertained by a large number of our younger writers—perhaps by most of our "movement" writers who give time to the entertainment of such ideas. According to Mr. Bodenheim, the literary creator is "a dangerous, persuasive and unfair liar." Well, that is candid, at any rate. We see what he means. We know the type. "The literary creator," he continues, "must look upon creation as the egotistic, unscrupulous branding of himself upon human beings and episodes whose essence is a thousand confused faces, neither of them [sic] one whit more plausible than the other. He enters a distraught, elusively vicious and crisscrossed realm—life—and changes it to the world in which, directly or by reference, he would like to live, or to the ruins by means of which his ego brings distinctness to its dream of solitary disdain."
"The egotistic unscrupulous branding of himself" upon his subject matter. We have seen the operation of that passion in the caricatures of Hogarth, in the novels of Laurence Sterne, in the "Sartor" of Carlyle; also, to take only two or three salient recent examples, in the strange "Rahab" of Mr. Waldo Frank, in Mr. Hecht's "Erik Dorn," and in the "Crazy Man" of Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. It is interesting work—work of undeniable power, of a sort. The author's name is in every line like an obvious cryptogram, "branded" there. Mr. Middleton Murry thinks that this is a questionable stylistic ideal; that, in the long run, this remorseless insistence on one's idiosyncrasy becomes insufferably tedious. But Mr. Brownell, clearing the way for re-definition, tells us that this is not style, properly so called, but manner or mannerism, often violently embraced in the misconception that "style is the man himself"—a misconception largely responsible for the vogue of stylistic nudity and the exploitation of undisciplined impulse.
The celebrated phrase—"style is the man himself," casually dropped by Buffon near the close of his discourse on his admission to the Academy, Mr. Brownell has no difficulty in showing has been wrested from its context—like the "simple, sensuous and passionate," now erroneously but almost universally accepted as Milton's recipe for poetry. It does not represent Buffon's conception of style, but is almost antithetical to it. Style, according to the French Academician, is not the man himself, is not a spirit of personal self-assertion. It is rather a kind of human imitation of the celestial order and motion, informing the whole work as the spirit of God informs creation. It is a spirit which pre-establishes harmony in the movement of one's ideas by reference to a thoroughly preconceived design. Indeed, in the body of his discourse, Buffon declares it to be "nothing but the order and movement which one puts into one's thought." In its essence, therefore, it is almost as little personal as the mathematical element in music. A sound style isn't a rigid thing; it isn't a thing to prescribe and impose from without; it isn't a thing to fear as repressive of personality. It is just the order and movement of one's own thoughts when they are going right.
Mr. Brownell is susceptible to the charms of perfection. Whenever he contemplates them, in matter or in idea, his own style takes wings; and this, he declares with contagious ardor, is the high reward of those who, in letters, seek not their own idiosyncrasy but that moving order which is "art's and heaven's first law."
For the effect of the spirit of style in a work of art is precisely to add wings to it. The effect of following any objective ideal is elevation. Uplift means first of all getting out of one's self. It appeals in this way to the imagination as adventure does. But it also involves what adventure does not, definite aspiration rather than vague enthusiasm. And this aspiration to achieve rather than to experience, to reach a goal rather than to explore the unknown, to attain the normal rather than invent the novel, springs from perceiving the existence in the ideal sphere of a quality for which we have no other word so apt as perfection.
Nothing melts us like nobility of thought caught up into style. Nobility stirs us more exquisitely than exquisiteness. Imagination, however sympathetic, warms us but superficially compared with the high disinterestedness of personal detachment exhibited in impersonal exaltation. This moves us like music that strings the sensibility taut and affirms its capacity for forgetfulness of self. Style, in fine, has a play of interrelations and a sustained rhythm, when in combination with adequate substance, that stanch the personal preoccupation of self-pity and stimulate the generous fervor of self-abandonment to the ideal.
In an effort to convey, or at least to suggest, the singular fire and potency of Mr. Brownell's special virtue, his enkindling passion for the ideal in art, letters and life, I have left no space to comment upon his fruitful, many-sided development of his theme, which he has enriched from an extensive field under perfect cultivation. I particularly regret the necessity of abridgment, because Mr. Brownell has here given full and most stimulating development to that aspect of his subject which the high intellectuality of his talent has hitherto led him to postpone, or to underemphasize, in behalf of the more abstract, structural elements of style. I refer to his illuminating discussion of "poetic prose," to his finely eloquent justification of emotion and, above all, to his plea for the cultivation by our own writers of the too long neglected poetic resources of prose speech. Those who are familiar with Mr. Brownell's previous books—as every one who cares for our distinguished criticism is—will doubtless regard this salient as the point at which he has most signally advanced his flag of leadership. It gives a curious relief to a reviewer to know that all Mr. Brownell's admirers will understand why no review can give any adequate notion of the artistic tension and fullness of his treatment: "No man ever spake more neatly, more weightily or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered."
When a man of letters of Mr. Brownell's eminent talent spends a lifetime in an inflexible pursuit of perfection, it is not strange, yet it is singularly inspiring, to consider how fittingly the fine things which have been said of other men may be applied to him. As, for instance, with reference to his social consciousness, this tribute of Pater's to the Greek master of all those who seek to think straight and feel nobly: "It is life itself, action and character, he professes to color; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all, into its energetic or impassioned acts." And this tribute of Joubert's to the same master:
Somehow or other the habit of reading him augments in us the capacity for discerning and entertaining whatever fine truths may afterward present themselves. Like mountain air it sharpens our organs and gives us an appetite for wholesome food.
Yes, Mr. Brownell belongs to the Academy, to the true sons of that Academy which met under the plane trees outside the city wall and asked the gods that haunted the spot, not in vain, for "beauty in the inner man."
- ↑ The Genius of Style, New York, 1924.