Among Literary Shallows

NOT Shakespeare’s Shallow is intended, — nothing so personal, — but the brook’s analogy. And neither shall we wade, for wading as a form of mental locomotion connotes the tedious; let us paddle, rather. These are the prettiest places in the brook, these level, rippling reaches that sparkle on the sun’s least encouragement, and sing, in tune, whether the sun shine or no; the prettiest places and the safest, since there is reasonable surety that the loiterer cannot slip beyond his depth. Yet there are pools even among the shallows, and the waters that lap at one man’s heart may well flow over another man’s head. But of pools later; let us consider first the music and the sparkle, the limpid clearness and the pricking spray.

Here is Vernon Lee, who, on her own confession, began by believing she was to be a historian and a philosopher, and ended by recognizing the world’s need for a holiday. If anything could convince the utilitarian critic that the world does need a holiday, it must be the frank sincerity of this migratory sketcher who is able, contentedly, to liken her own later writings to a necklace of carved cherrystones, and to avow that the only justification for her idle wanderings is that their sunshine and romance amuse people more useful, though not more willing, than herself. There are many writers of travel-sketches to-day, but few who trouble to make excuse for their frivolity, and fewer still whose writing is so truly its own best excuse for being, as is that of Vernon Lee. No one more subtly defines the spirits and moods of places, in phrases more sympathetically cadenced; no one more delicately diffuses atmosphere, the golden and the gray; no one more surely knows when the next touch will ruin the sketch, — and pauses, brush in air. Touraine, Tuscany, ancient Swiss cities, quaint German towns, the Marble Mountains, the Lakes of Mantua, these the genius loci reveals, the Sentimental Traveller interprets and re-interprets, now in one mood, now in another, but always through glamour. And not in the travel-sketches only do we find this glamour, but in the fantastic tales, the ancient literary motifs, as of Le Fier Baiser, Alkestis, and others, upon which she has embroidered her own Prince Alberic and his Snake Lady, German Frau Agnes, and St. Eudæmon of the truly catholic mind. One among these tales, “ The Wedding Chest,” we could wish still shrouded in the decent obscurity of its mediæval chronicle; with this one morbid exception the little volume ¹ is a very perfect bit of playful artistry.

But all the world does not travel for a holiday; the mental stay-at-home, whom outward shows bewilder, may yet quicken to the light touch in philosophy. It is this light touch that Maeterlinck supplies. Howsoever weighty the theme, whether of “ Our Anxious Morality,” “ Our Social Duty,” “The Psychology of Accident,” “ Rome,” “ Immortality,” it floats as light as thistledown, let him but toss it skyward and gently fan the breeze. Not ideas, but the ghosts of ideas, haunt these pages; tenuous, unbodied outlines that set the imagination vibrating one moment, and the next are fading off into the vague commonplace. Even in “ Our Social Duty,” where he is his most definite self, destiny whispers her fatal word and immediately his energy is dissipated. One does not always find a serious nobility allied to the light touch; radicalism of conviction combined with vagueness of outlook is less rare, as is also earnestness yoked to timidity. All these qualities dance hand in hand through the essays of Maeterlinck,² a stately, slow dance, with posing and soft music. But if of late we detect a certain languor in his attitude toward philosophy, toward science he is still refreshingly alert, marshaling his pretty array of experiments and observations with the poet’s enthusiasm. The Intelligence of the Flowers is a charming companion piece to the Life of the Bee, briefer, more modest, the special pleading of a reverent true lover.

And now, the pool; the little intimate deep that mirrors a bit of sky, a drooping branch, the wing of a passing bird, and one’s own face. The author of The Altar Fire³ does not lack certain essential qualities of depth, as intimacy of vision, intensity of interpretation, spiritual clarity, religious penetration; all these we find in an unusual degree in his English paraphrase of the experiences of Job, and they are emphasized by the surface excellences — urbanity, taste, tranquil rhythm — of an irreproachable prose. Nevertheless, as between the very real, yet decorous, despair of an English gentleman whose power to write novels is suddenly inhibited, and the soul-heavings of Job, we measure the one by fathoms and do not touch bottom, the other is plumbed in the sharpening of the eye. But to quarrel with Mr. Benson because he fails to make his hero strike the universal note is to miss his point and to underrate his art; an English Job, graduating from Cambridge, has, perhaps of necessity, a limited outlook. The AltarFire is, of its kind, a singularly perfect book; even its prolixity, from the point of view of art, is a part of its perfection. Our question has to do, not with the individual book, but with the monotony of its relation to the author’s earlier books; and here we strike a limitation not artistic but personal, inherent in the condition of one who, seeing life only from the college window, is driven to perpetuate his emotions in replica.

Yet, there are other points of view. Adventures in Contentment,⁴ for example, is a theme after Mr. Benson’s own heart. We know just how he would have developed it. We taste in anticipation the sensitive refinement of his burdened city man who, struck down by overwork and the complicated claims of modern business, retires with Christian resignation to the Manor House in Nature, there, by meditation and a kindly benevolence towards his neighbors, to renew his soul. But David Grayson does it differently. Ambition is extinct before he sets pen to paper. He leaps to the simple life, hoe in hand. He does not meditate, he sentimentalizes — there is a difference; but he sentimentalizes horny-handed, behind the plough, and we forgive him. He has no depths, except of enthusiasm. He is not urbane, he is genial. He fraternizes with his neighbors in a familiar fashion undreamed of by the hero of The House of Quiet. His opinions are entirely without distinction, but he hugs each rural experience to his breast with a gush of gratitude and a twinkle of humor. Frankly, it is the twinkle that fetches us. David Grayson’s merry, commonplace adventures with the book-agent, the millionaire, the infidel, will nourish dozens of earnest readers to whom Mr. Benson s exquisite interpretation of the one hundred and nineteenth psalm must still be as husks.

But “ Let the gamboling author caper while he may, or make literary snowballs, jack-o-lanterns, or birch-whistles, as he trudges along the stony paths that lead to the Parnassian Way. For all too soon, perchance, his literary gambols, which have added so much to the gayety of nations, will sober down to the measured tread of a dignified dealer in platitudes, or worse still, into the gouty hobble of a pessimist,” pleads Ellen Burns Sherman in her essay on “The Root and Foliage of Style;”⁵ and herself is not above an occasional pigeon-wing. She, too, has her enthusiasms, and proclaims them with refreshing vigor; she too, again like David Grayson, has her didactic impulse, but indulges it with more discretion. Her plea for honesty in criticism is just and imperative. Unfortunately, her intellectual standard for the critic is not up to her moral standard ; honesty she demands of him, courage, sympathy, capacity for enthusiasm, delicacy of feeling, — emotional and moral qualities, all these, — and, in addition, a sense of humor, and discrimination, mental and moral; discrimination being, according to Miss Sherman, a matter of intuition alone, rather than the resultant of accurate knowledge and mental discipline illumined by intuition. But we incline to believe that the flabbiness of much American book-reviewing to-day is due, not merely to the critic’s fear of saying unpleasant things, but to his desire not to uncover his own ignorance. Miss Sherman, in the earlier pages of her essay “ When Steel Strikes Punk,” does mention this intellectual vacuity of the ordinary reviewer, but leaves us to infer that intuition can adequately fill the vacuum. Her own critical essays admirably exhibit the qualities for which she pleads, although her powers of discrimination are not infallible. If superficial, yet she is always sincere, whether she lightly trifles with psychic possibilities, as in “A Plea for the Naturalization of Ghosts,” and “Serendipity,” or briefly estimates the world’s debt to Ruskin. She and Maeterlinck touch in their enthusiasm for international peace, if Maeterlinck’s calm brooding can be described as enthusiasm. His prophetic soliloquy upon the Gods of War finds its complement in her elegy upon “ The Slain that are not Numbered.” But the range of her enthusiasm is wide, embracing the concrete as well as the abstract. The closing essay in her readable little volume is a defense of the American short story, and here, where taste is still legitimately a matter of intuition, her powers of discrimination show themselves most penetrating.

We find a less superficial but not less sympathetic defense of the short story in Essays Out of Hours,⁶ by Charles Sears Baldwin, and here we have the critic whose intellect delicately steers his taste. Evidences are there also of the sly pedagogue, for manifestly not all these charming essays were written “ out of hours.” The first seven are brief fantasies, but beneath this froth there lies “ The Literary Influence of Sterne in France,” an influence which Mr. Baldwin reduces to the minimum, claiming that one book alone, Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Autour de ma Chambre, witnesses to the influence on French literature of Sterne’s best piece of art, The Sentimental Journey, although of Tristram Shandy there is “ more imitation and far more reminiscence.” “The Secret of John Bunyan,” a study in the causes of the apparently undying popularity of The Pilgrim’s Progress, follows “ The Literary Influence of Sterne,” and the little book closes with “ Three Studies in the Short Story,” “ The Question of Derivation.” “The Tale in America before 1835.” and “ Poe’s Fixing of the ShortStory Form.” Evidently we have come to the edge of the shallows; another step and we must know how to swim; for these longer essays of Mr. Baldwin are serious by virtue not of intention only, but of achievement as well.

Matthew Arnold tells us that the critic, rather than the poet or the novelist, foreshadows the ideal of the new day. There is a dearth of critics, just now; America, at least, is living in the present and writing short stories; but it is significant that in the midst of commercialism and materialism the sparse critics are making holiday, returning to nature and the simple life, to elusive harmonies of sensation, keeping themselves unspotted from the world. It is a hopeful sign.