Air and Earth

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

“ IN London the first man one meets will put any high dream out of one’s head, for he will talk to one of something at once vapid and exciting, some one of those many subjects of thought that build up our social unity.” It is significant of Mr. Yeats’s power that when we come upon this sentence in his recent volume of essays,¹ we straightway begin to wonder what it all amounts to, this civil habit of life toward which we have been given to understand that the whole creation has thus far moved. It suddenly seems ridiculous that vapid subjects of thought should be allowed to excite us simply because they concern the practical comfort of the majority. We cannot help admitting, in mere candor, that our common interests are both tame and absorbing, and that we are lucky to escape them for the moment, now and then, by contact with some individual interest.

I.

Mr. Yeats himself is well able to afford us such an interest. He really possesses, what the world is always looking for among the younger generation of writers, individuality and distinction. There is, perhaps, no individuality in current literature which imposes itself so directly and ungrudgingly upon the reader. “ Reader ” seems hardly the word to use, so strong is the sense of personal contact; in his later work, especially, there is a vocal quality which a mere writer could not compass. We find ourselves listening for the next sentence, not looking for it; and when here and there the eloquence or the point of view of the speaker is beyond us, we feel, maybe, a little embarrassment: we are afraid he will notice our dullness or remoteness and be disconcerted by it, and so we shall lose the rest of the music. This is only one of the evidences that Mr. Yeats may yet recapture an audience almost lost to men of letters ; an audience which can only be attracted by some writer with the heart and fancy of a child and the subtle skill of an artist. To be childlike and accomplished, to keep perfect balance, not to be either childish or sophisticated, this is the great thing in lyrical writing; we note with some anxiety that Mr. Yeats possesses theories, and we pray that he may never he possessed by them.

These theories are two : that the middle classes have been the death of good literature, and that symbolism is to be its new birth. His exposition of the former theory is extremely interesting : —

“ What we call popular poetry never came from the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and Macaulay in his Lays, and Scott in his longer poems, are the poets of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of themselves, to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the world, and who have not learned the written tradition which has been established upon the unwritten. I became certain that Burns, whose greatness has been used to justify the littleness of others, was in part a poet of the middle class, because though the farmers he sprang from and lived among had been able to create a little tradition of their own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech, they had been divided by religious and political changes from the images and emotions which had once carried their memories backward thousands of years. Despite his expressive speech, which sets him above all other popular poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the imperfect sense of beauty, of a poetry whose most typical expression is in Longfellow.” . . .

“ There is only one kind of good poetry, for the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition. Both are alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not understanding, and both . . . glimmer with thoughts and images whose ‘ ancestors were stout and wise,’ ‘ anigh to Paradise,’ ' ere yet men knew the gift of corn.’”. . .

“ If men did not remember or half remember impossible things, and, it may be, if the worship of sun and moon had not left a faint reverence behind it, what Aran fisher-girl would sing : —

“ ‘ It is late last night the dog was speaking of you ; the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird throughout the woods ; and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

“ ‘ You promised me, and you said a lie to me, that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked. I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you ; and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb. . . .

“ ' My mother said to me not to be talking with you, to-day or to-morrow or on Sunday. It was a bad time she took for telling me that, it was shutting the door after the house was robbed. . . .

“ ‘ You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me, you have taken what is before me and what is behind me ; you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me, and my fear is great you have taken God from me.’”. . .

“ Before the counting-house had created a new class and a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister, the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the coteries as was the speech of the people, that delighted in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion, with the unchanging speech of the poets.”

Here we have suggested the basis of Mr. Yeats’s own best achievement. As a boy he became absorbed in the songs and legends which he found still budding upon Irish country-sides. Many of them he recorded in prose and verse, in prose with especial ingenuousness and grace.² Then came a season of London life, of experiences “ vapid and exciting,” which, as he presently found, diverted him from his true field and vein. He had, thereupon, the extraordinary good fortune to realize his mistake, to return to his Irish folk, and to renew and deepen his acquaintance with the Irish atmosphere and lore. The first-fruits of this renewal are several essays of exceptional power, and a play written for an Irish theatre which the author and others of his acknowledged coterie have proposed to establish in Dublin. He tells us plainly what he expects of this theatre and of the plays that are to be produced in it: —

“ Why should we thrust our works, which we have written with imaginative sincerity and filled with spiritual desire, before those quite excellent people who think that Rossetti’s women are ‘ guys,’ that Rodin’s women are ‘ugly,’ and that Ibsen is ‘ immoral,’ and who only want to be left at peace to enjoy the works so many clever men have made especially to suit them ? We must make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought. We have planned the Irish Literary Theatre with this hospitable emotion, and, that the right people may find out about us, we hope to act a play or two in the spring of every year; and that the right people may escape the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce which clings even to them, our plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual, and ideal.”

It is probably fortunate that this experiment is being made in Ireland, where there is still a response to the remote and the ideal, even apparently as they are interpreted by the forms of symbolism : “ All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded and immortal things. . . . Cuchullan in the Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves, because they alone had strength to overcome him. . . . Oisin, new come from his three hundred years of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids St. Patrick cease his prayers awhile and listen to the blackbird, because it is the blackbird of Derrycarn that Finn brought from Norway, three hundred years before, and set its nest upon the oak tree with his own hands. Surely if one goes far enough into the woods, one will find there all that he is seeking ? Who knows how many centuries the birds of the woods have been singing?”

II.

Mr. Yeats does not hesitate to range himself frankly with those whom we commonly call the superstitious : “ I often entangle myself in arguments more complicated than even those paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at other times I say, as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion about the nymph of the Ilissus, ‘The common opinion is enough for me.’ I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly and grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me.”

It is evidently impossible to consider the work of so credulous, fanciful, and ingenuous a spirit as we consider the work of an ordinary man of letters, or even an ordinary poet. And we can see why symbolism should be the natural resource for the higher expression of an intelligence to which figures of speech are hardly more than literal statements of truth. Mr. Yeats has, however, not only an instinct for symbolism, but a theory of it; he is a scholar as well as a child and a seer. He has a good deal to say of the emotional symbol and the intellectual symbol. He chooses to call what is commonly termed “ the decadence ” by the much more poetic title, “the autumn of the body; ” and considers that it really represents a first step upward toward a lost estate : “ We are, it may be, at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment when man is about to ascend, with the wealth he has been so long gathering upon his shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from the first days. The first poets, if we may find their images in the Kalevala, had not Homer’s preoccupation with things, and he was not so full of their excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic which, although he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention of minds trained by the labor of life, by a traffic among many things, and not a spontaneous expression of an interior life ; while Shakespeare shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might file them with things and their accidental relations to one another.”

Follows upon this double belief in folk poetry and coterie poetry that Mr. Yeats’s early prose mainly consisted in a simple and unmoralized record of certain legends and superstitions which he had from the mouths of Irish peasants, and his early verse and drama contained unmistakable reminders of Mallarmé and Maeterlinck. His new prose play,³ a first experiment in writing plays for the proposed Irish Theatre, is in many respects unlike his former work. There is no faëry-lore or magic in it, and its simple, almost bald style precludes lavishness in the use of verbal symbols. It has no distinctly drawn human characters, but probably the author did not mean to make any. “ Maeterlinck,” he says in the paper called The Autumn of the Body, “ has set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic shadows already half vapor and sighing to one another upon the borders of the last abyss.” The central figure in Where There is Nothing is less filmy and unhuman than all that, but it is not quite a person. It is a symbol, perhaps, an embodied situation, a Hamlet, let us say, without personality and without bowels. As for the play, as a whole, he may as well confess that he has not been able to get farther than the suspicion that the play means something. He is sure it is not an allegory, for Mr. Yeats has taken pains to explain that symbolism and allegory are very different things, and that allegory is a comparatively trivial thing. He is sure it is not a study of life, for, considered from that point of view, Paul Ruttledge must be owned a mere lunatic with a desire “ to have great iron claws, and to put them about the pillars, and to pull and pull till everything fell to pieces.” He does in the end get pulled to pieces himself, and that reasonable fact, perhaps, has something to do with the meaning of the play. Even then the flightiness of the victim precludes the possibility of our considering his death a tragedy; it is a mere pathos; but probably Mr. Yeats would not care about that either. Before he had determined to set himself against the middle classes, with their middling intelligence excited by vapid subjects of thought, he had doubtless conceived a distaste for anything so coarse and obvious as tragedy ; and it is much that we should have an interpreter in English even of the naked and pathetic futilities, the pale and disembodied shadows of emotion, which haunt the background of human consciousness.

But this is not quite all we wish to expect from so indubitable a genius as that of Mr. Yeats. He has, he says, learned from the people themselves “ that they cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea of a cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries.” Every art is in some sense a cult, as every true artist is a seer. We may be ready to agree with Mr. Yeats that most nineteenth-century poetry, even the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning, suffered under the burden of journalistic and philosophical and scientific material with which it was saddled. The pure art, the pure cult of poetry, was compromised. In Mr. Yeats’s own line of descent, in Blake and Shelley and Rossetti and Morris, it was not. The “ancient technicalities and mysteries” were preserved, to become, in due order, the property of the initiate in this generation. From these sources, to mention only those which are English, Mr. Yeats has derived his knowledge of the “ written tradition.” By direct contact with the Irish peasantry he has gained knowledge also of the “unwritten tradition.” The danger is that insensibly he will get to following his theory of symbolism, rather than his instinct for it, and that, instead of making toward a free use of symbols, he may be really constructing a code at once arbitrary and rigid. One is struck by nothing more, in reading the symbolists, than by their narrow range of motive. They prefer hallucination to fact, the sound of a wind blowing through a rag of tapestry to the human voice, fancies that glimmer and loom upon the dim borders of the mind to sound and fruitful imaginations. There seems to be something fresh and sane and independent about Mr. Yeats which makes one reluctant to believe that he will be able to give himself entire to his visions and his symbols. He has a power of vigorous imaginative prose which the world needs even more, perhaps, than his power of suggesting preter-human emotion by code.

III.

The middle class, or as we may say, to bring the matter closer to our bosoms, the “ average person” in Anglo-Saxon society, has been getting rough treatment of late at other hands than those of Mr. Yeats. In A Fight for the City,⁴ Mr. Alfred Hodder delivers himself of some uncomfortable truths ; fortunately the average person is by nature an Artful Dodger, and is likely to come quite unscathed from a nominal encounter, whether with Mr. Hodder’s frank bludgeon or with Mr. Yeats’s courteously proffered point. The method of attack is of course quite different. Mr. Hodder finds in the spectacle of municipal politics a subject highly exciting and not in the least vapid. He speaks not as an artist, but as a “ fellow citizen,” and the vigor of his presentation is (as may happen in journalism) made rather more effective by its intemperance. The substance of his argument it would be hard to gainsay. The rottenness of our municipal governments, the continually losing fight between theory and practice, he attributes to our fondness for “ the administrative lie: ” —

“ The belief of the puritan that the administrative lie redounds to the advantage of the public is best to be defended on the ground of the hypnotic force of the administrative lie. . . .‘This day England expects every man to do his duty,’ was Nelson’s message to his navy at the battle of Copenhagen. England was old and wise with the wisdom of ages, and expected nothing of the kind; but still the lie was a good, thrilling, historic lie. . . . People of English blood have a robust talent for administration, and a sturdy faith in the administrative lie. They believe in the power of good words; they have an innate gift for words, and are subject to their charm. They are a fighting race and a commercial race, yet they cannot go to battle on an openly avowed ground of public or commercial expediency; they must first have for battle-cry a decorative or thrilling phrase, not meant to bear the light of sober scrutiny. ‘ Taxation without representation is tyranny ; ’ ‘all men are born free and equal; ’ ‘ a house divided against itself cannot stand ; ’ ‘this nation cannot exist half slave and half free ; ’ such decorative and thrilling phrases lift their lives in their own mind into the realm of the ideal, dignify the conflict, let their deepest passions loose in the service of their will. It may well seem a tenable hypothesis, that by sheer reiteration of audacious but inspiring falsities concerning what men are or may be, they may be transmuted into some sort of likeness to the nature asserted to be theirs. But the hypothesis has in the case in question been tested by experience : for generation after generation there have been maintained upon the statute book the formulas of the hypnotic lie. And some twenty thousand gamblers, young and old, according to the report made by Mr. Nixon, nightly crowd the gambling houses of the city, and the saloons stand open Sunday, with at most closed shutters and a change of entrance, and prostitutes by scores of thousands ply their trade where he may know who will.”

This is only a portion of one of the many suggestive passages with which Mr. Hodder illuminates his narrative of the Jerome campaign. We have not space here to enlarge upon the details of his treatment. Enough has been quoted to suggest that it is the product of a strong and uncompromising, rather than delicately balanced intelligence : the voice of one crying in the metropolis and not an expression of artistic instinct or theory. Mr. Hodder’s book must be taken as a record or an opinion rather than as an interpretation. But “ human documents ” have their importance, and to this order Mr. Hodder’s book belongs, in a very worthy sense.

Of The Autobiography of a Thief ⁵ it is not so easy to be sure ; yet it seems, so far as an “ edited ” narrative can, to be a true document; and it has certain qualities which differentiate it from such books as Mr. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, or Messrs. Flynt and Hapgood’s The Powers that Prey. The authorship of the book appears to be pretty clearly what it claims to be, vicarious only as Mr. Hapgood’s help was needed in getting the narrative into intelligible form. “ The method employed,” says the editor or “ recorder,” “ was that, practically, of the interview. From the middle of March to the first of July we met nearly every afternoon, and many evenings, at a little German café on the East Side. There I took voluminous notes, often asking questions, but taking down as literally as possible his story in his own words ; to such a degree is this true that the following narrative is an authentic account of his life, with occasional descriptions and character-sketches of his friends of the Under World.”

Mr. Hapgood is right in asserting that “ the autobiography bears sufficient internal evidence of the fact that, essentially, it is a thief’s own story.” The fact is borne out with especial clearness by the thief’s habit, now and then, when it occurs to him that he is bearing a part in the production of a book, of attempting to be literary. At such moments his conventional moralizing, his cheap “ literary ” graces, his sentiment of the vaudeville order, are somewhat repellent to one who wishes to take the narrative as a “ human document.” As a whole, however, it is human enough in all conscience, so grimly human that one has to go back to Defoe to get an analogue in English prose. Mr. Hodder tells us that the women of the upper classes are largely responsible for the maintenance of the administrative lie : “ For her victory in words she obtains a prize in words — in laws newly inscribed or else retained upon the statute book ; and sometimes even in a show or a reality of zeal for the enforcement of those laws. The presence of those laws upon the statute book, and even their rigorous enforcement for a season, is precisely what the grafter most desires ; she is one of ‘ those good souls whose credulous morality is so invaluable a treasure to crafty politicians ; ’ where her aid has been invoked in politics, it has invariably been invoked upon the side of the administrative lie.” Mr. Hodder speaks here of the political “ grafter,” but the administrative lie works also to the advantage of professional thieves, as the narrative of Mr. Hapgood’s thief sufficiently shows.

“I was a good pickpocket and a fairly successful burglar,” is his modest preliminary boast, “and I have known many of the best crooks in the country.” The author is now thirty-five years old ; he has spent many years at Sing-Sing and Mount Auburn, and several years in asylums for the criminally insane. He realizes that “ graft” does not pay. He retains, nevertheless, throughout his narrative, the tone and point of view of the professional criminal ; and it is curious and moving to see him continually reverting from what he is given to understand is the proper (and profitable) moral attitude toward life, to the thieves’ religion in which he was reared : —

“ These three girls certainly were a crack-a-jack trio. You can’t find their likes nowadays. Even in my time most of the girls I knew did not amount to anything. They generally married, or did worse. There were few legitimate grafters among them. Since I have been back this time I have seen a great many of the old picks and night-workers I used to know. They tell the same story. There are no Molls [women] now who can compare with Big Lena, Blonde Mamie, and Sheenie Annie. Times are bad anyway.” One can see the reformed thief looking back quite innocently, with the eye of a connoisseur, to the day when there were women in New York who really knew something about shoplifting. Otherwise they were not quite paragons. His own relations to one of them do not appear to have been of the most formal; but they were all that the code of his own guild required. Apparently there are no administrative lies employed in the internal working of the world of graft.

Elsewhere, at points of contact with the society which makes the laws, that lie is reckoned among the assets of the criminal. The present autobiographer states the case with appalling frankness. “ If a thief wants to keep out of the ‘pen’ or ‘stir’ (penitentiary), capital is a necessity. The capital of a grafter is called ‘ spring-money,’ for he may have to use it at any time in paying the lawyer who gets him off in case of an arrest [this apparently means by “ influence,” not by defending the case in court], or in bribing the policeman or some other official. . . . If a thief has not enough money to hire a mouthpiece (criminal lawyer) he is in a bad way. He is greatly handicapped, and cannot ‘ jump out ’ (steal) with any boldness.”

This may be taken as a sufficient illustration of the ingenuousness with which the ex-convict relates his experience. There is nothing picturesque about it, nothing ironical ; and this is what stamps it as a document and distinguishes it from a work of art. Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, Dr. Mitchell’s Adventures of François— all are extraneous literary interpretations of criminal life. All are more picturesque, more engaging, and, on the whole, less illuminating than this true narrative, which only Defoe, of all English writers, could have conceivably hit upon as an invention.

There is always doubt whether we should class such books as literature. “A book,” said Ruskin, “is essentially not a talked thing, but a written thing, and written not with a view of mere communication, but of permanence.” Very well, then, let us call Mr. Hodder’s volume a piece of bound journalism, and Mr. Hapgood’s a collection of depositions. The fact remains that they are both immensely interesting; as interesting in their way as Mr. Yeats’s work is in its way; the expression of immediate practical issues which not even our responsiveness to the remote ideal issues of mysticism can lead us to regard as merely vapid.

H. W. Boynton.