Affairs and Letters

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

“As a rule,” says Mr. Stedman, “distrust the quality of that product which is not the result of legitimate professional labor. Art must be followed as a means of subsistence to render its creations worthy, to give them a human element.” The dictum comes very gracefully from one who has never himself had to pluck the waterfowl before he apostrophized it; yet Mr. Stedman would hardly be called an amateur in letters. No doubt the literary hack gets along more expeditiously on account of the bur under his saddle, but he is likely to be moving in a zigzag haste, with an eye to more nutritious wayside refreshment than Atalanta’s. The literary profession, like pugilism, has its corollaries; theatrical starring, for instance, or even bag-punching,— a creditable form of exercise which some people pay to see. But one does not like to feel that professionalism in literature, if it is a title to honor, should turn upon the point of support. Pretty much the same mediocrity is the rule in Grub Street as elsewhere, and a good deal of the best work gets itself done far from that ancient via dolorosa. Arnold was not an amateur because he inspected schools, or Lowell because he taught, or Lamb because he clerked it. Nor is Austin Dobson’s work likely to change in character or quality because he has now ceased to spend certain hours of the day in the Foreign Office.

But these men, it might be said, were really literary men, whatever method of boiling the pot they may have found convenient; the genuine man of affairs, eminent in his own field, very seldom produces pure literature. Granted: but the thing does sometimes happen; and when it does, the world is not likely to wish that something else had happened instead, least of all that the man had never concerned himself with affairs. On the contrary, it recognizes that the work owes its merit to the man as he is. Some men have to be doing a great many things in order to do anything well. If their everyday brains were not busied with finance or politics or scholarship, their holiday brains would remain unnourished and sterile. They do not care for solitude or meditation. They are not interested in landscape, natural or human. They must have a tangible end in view, whether it is the proving of a thesis or the making of a million. That end attained or in sight leaves the spirit free for fresh woods and pastures new.

Walter Bagehot was this sort of man. He took the liveliest interest in banking and politics and economics, had his say about them all, and, in byplay, had his say about literature also. He was too busy to be anxious to say things or to be fussy about his manner of speech. His somewhat testy American editor fumes in many a footnote over the essayist’s slipshod syntax and inaccuracies of quotation and allusion. Probably most of his readers feel that these details do not matter much; a worse thing would have befallen if by taking thought of his predicates and his authorities he had deprived us of the open, vigorous style, the hearty talking voice, refined yet unstudied, for which we value him.

One of Bagehot’s earliest essays has just been handsomely reprinted from the standard Traveler’s Company edition.¹ In that essay he expresses what he expressed more whimsically later,— a good-humored contempt for the professional writer: “The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people that can write know anything. In general, an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors. But he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.” Bagehot could not foresee that in the course of a half century the author would have deserted his comfortable quarters, and would be sleeping in byways and eating by hedges for fear some stray vagabond of copy should not be brought in to the literary feast. When this was written, the common ideal of the author’s life was very different ; there was the admired Southey tradition, for example. “Southey had no events, no experiences, ” wrote Bagehot. “His wife kept house and allowed him pocket money, just as if he had been a German professor devoted to accents, tobacco, and the dates of Horace’s amours.” Rough as the judgment is, one hardly knows what to say for the benefits of seclusion and leisure when an active man can write like this. Bagehot’s own love of action made him somewhat uncharitably impatient of anything like physical or mental sedentariness. It was a grown man’s business to be doing as well as thinking, to “get into the game,” whatever it might be, and to let earned insight and unbidden zeal wield the pen if it must be wielded. Even action without thought is better than thought without action, he thinks. “Shakespeare was too wise not to know that for many of the purposes of human life stupidity was a most valuable element. He had nothing of the impatience which sharp, logical, narrow minds habitually feel when they come across those who do not apprehend their quick and precise deductions. . . . We must have cart horses as well as race horses, draymen as well as poets. It is no bad thing, after all, to be a slow man and have one idea a year.” But if Bagehot did not mind dullness, narrow and “grim people ” of all sorts shared the contempt which he felt for the idle and speculative. “Meeting a certain religionist is like striking the corner of a wall; he is possessed of a firm and rigid persuasion that you must leave off this and that, stop, be anxious, be advised, and, above all things, refrain from doing what you like, for nothing is so bad for any one as that.”

It would be shallow to suggest that Bagehot’s contribution to literature is confined to his critical essays. He wrote on the English Constitution, on banking, on political economy, as directly, vigorously, and humorously as on Shakespeare or Gibbon. He had only one manner; and his final triumph was, perhaps, that he could be even a mystic without numbering himself among the army of the “grim people.”

This fact would be enough in itself to recommend him to so lively a spirit as Mr. Birrell, who has made him the subject of one of the most interesting papers in his recent volume.² Mr. Birrell, too, is a man of affairs, whose interest in life is in no sense reflected from literature. He records with much satisfaction that Bagehot “most surely had an experiencing nature, and impressed the stamp of life on everything he wrote. . . . This is the reason why Mr. Bagehot is so great a favorite with literary men. Most authors who write books in their libraries cherish at the bottom of their hearts, if not a dislike, at least a gloomy suspicion, of books and bookishness.” On the other hand, Mr. Birrell does not consider the practical point of view altogether a good thing for the author. “It is very delightful to have a man of affairs writing about books,” he says. “It is most refreshing and invigorating as well as unusual,

but of course qualities have their defects. Mr. Bagehot is too much alive to the risks of the social structure, far too anxious lest any convention on which it seems to rest should be injured in the handling, to be quite at his ease on the pleasant slopes of Parnassus. For example, he never cared for Tristram Shandy, which, he thought, should be read in extracts. He calls it an indecent novel written by a clergyman.”

Mr. Birrell’s present papers will be of uneven interest to the incompendious mind. Like Bagehot, this barrister, member of Parliament, and critic has several mental avenues, along any of which he may happen to take his constitutional. Like Bagehot, he is at once mystic, humorist, and man of affairs. Besides the critical and biographical papers, this volume contains two theological essays, two discursive addresses (on education and on reading), and a vivacious description of the House of Commons. Lovers of Obiter Dicta and the companion volumes will perhaps be disappointed that the character of many of these papers has precluded the free play of Mr. Birrell’s delicate effrontery. “It is a great shame,” he says, in speaking of Bagehot, “ but one always remembers the playfulness of a writer — some purely human touch of his — so much better than one does his philosophy or history.” One is likely to carry away from this book the memory of some such touches as when the writer speaks of “sugared phrases, which seem intended, like lollipops, for suction; ” or of the fierce competition among publishers “who puff their own productions and extol the often secret charms of their kept authors with an impetuosity almost indelicate.” But there are soberer passages to remember; like this, for example, from the address on The Ideal University: “The teaching in the Ideal University is without equivocation and without compromise. Its notes are zeal, accuracy, fullness, and authority. The education it essays to give will not teach you to outgabble your neighbor in the law courts, to unseat him in his constituency or undersell him in the market place. Gentlemen, let it be understood once and for all, these things do not require a university education. The commonwealth may safely leave them to be performed by the cooperation of the three primary forces, — ambition, necessity, and greed.”

Mr. Birrell does not go much beyond the affirmation that “ the great business of the university is to teach,” The methods and the end of such teaching are discussed somewhat at length in two recent American volumes, — the work, according to Mr. Stedman’s definition, of unprofessional writers.³ President Hadley’s book, like Mr. Birrell’s, is a collection of addresses and essays. Its scope, as the title indicates, is confined to problems of education and citizenship. It is without obvious literary graces and unleavened by humor; but it is a most interesting book in substance, and so direct and compact in style as to endure easily the crucial second reading. The brief initial address, in particular, is so tense and terse a piece of composition that the quotation from the Gettysburg Address with which it closes surprises one by its lack of contrast with what has gone before.

Mr. Münsterberg’s volume of collected essays also concerns American education and citizenship. He is speaking professedly from the point of view of a German, but with the tongue of a highly cultivated American, fluent, idiomatic, and varied (to carp would be to note the repeated quaintness “still much more, ” which certainly ought to be good English). If the native phrase-maker is disconcerted by this graceful command of language, the native satirist will be equally put to it to account for the lightness of spirit and free humor which mark these essays. May it dawn upon him at last that the testimony of Fliegende Blätter is no more trustworthy than Punch’s ; that national taste in jokes may differ, but that humor is much the same everywhere. Cervantes was a Yankee, and so was Heine, and so was Shakespeare; at all events, we should be loath to admit that Mr. Münsterberg is not. It is reassuring to know that he has also a German audience, to which he is accustomed to speak of Germany from the point of view of an American. We ought to be willing to go halves with the Fatherland for such a purpose.

President Hadley and Mr. Münsterberg are in perfect agreement as to the main principles of the higher education. Readers of the Atlantic will recall Mr. Münsterberg’s strictures upon the elective system. “Many a student in our modern schools, ” says President Hadley, “ has been simply stuffed with the sugarplums of education. By offering a child a pound of candy, you can very rapidly increase his weight by one pound, and can produce all the external symptoms of a vigorous appetite; but any sensible man or woman knows that the weight thus gained is transient, and the appetite thus evoked worse than illusory.” The main contention of both writers is for the education of power as against the education of knowledge. “The whole activity of the citizen is a course of higher education in morality, ” says President Hadley, “an education which may be rightly directed or wrongly directed, used or misused, but in which the citizen is engaged as long as he lives. If this is true, — and there is no question of its truth, — any attempt to make information take the place of discipline is a menace to our national life for a generation to come. As a preparation for the school of national politics, ten hours of training in civics are not the equivalent of one minute of training in order and obedience.” In his very rich essay on American Democracy, Mr. Münsterberg expresses the same truth even more vigorously. He has just concluded a paragraph by saying, “Where a genius is needed, democracy appoints a committee; ” and goes on: “ Perhaps still more closely are defect and virtue bound together in the case of the democratic spirit of individual activity. Every one feels himself lawmaker and authority; the immediate result is the tendency to disregard every other authority but one’s own self. A lack of reverence pervades the whole community, and controls the family, the school, the public life. The pert American boy, who does just what he pleases, may thus get an early training in democratic politics; but while he wastes the best of the home and of the classroom, he gets at the same time the worst possible training for the duties of life, all of which demand that he do later quite other things than those which he likes to do. He will learn too late that it is a great thing to command, but a greater thing to obey, and that no one can sign early enough the declaration of dependence.”

Mr. Münsterberg is inclined to lay the greater stress upon the importance of productive scholarship to the university and to American culture. Our deficiency in such scholarship he traces in part to another cause than habitual indulgence of individual caprice. In the essay on Woman, he says, among other uncompromising things: “ A lack of respect for really strenuous thought characterizes women in general. Dilettantism is the keynote. The halfeducated man is much more likely to show an instinctive respect for trained thought, and to abstain from opinions where he is ignorant. But the halfeducated woman cannot discriminate between the superficial and the profound, and, without the slightest hesitation, she effuses, like a bit of gossip, her views on Greek art, or on Darwinism, or on the human soul, between two spoonfuls of ice cream. Even that is almost refreshing as a softening supplement to the manly work of civilization, but it would be a misfortune if such a spirit were to gain the controlling influence. ” American culture, this stern critic thinks, is in serious danger of effemination, partly through the shaping of educational methods to fit the feminine capacity, and partly because in every community the diligent half cultivation of women is going on, while the men make little effort toward cultivation of any sort. To offset the effect of this double process, only one means is possible: “No one can suggest that woman’s education in this country ought to take any steps backward; all the glorious opportunities must remain open, and only one practical change must come in response to the urgent needs of our period, — the American man must raise his level of general culture. In short, the woman’s question is, in this country, as ultimately perhaps everywhere, the man’s question. Reform the man, and all the difficulties disappear.”

But scholars and men of affairs are not the only unprofessional writers to whom we are owing much, now that toil has at last found a voice of its own. What the eighteenth century thought simply vulgar, and the nineteenth valued as material for the artist or the sociologist, is now received on even terms in the “best literary circles;” the annals of the poor are to be short and simple no longer. To the records of men like Wyckoff and Flynt there clings necessarily something of the laboratory odor; the real revelation has come in the first-hand reality of work like Gorky’s or Rosenfeld’s or Bullen’s. Of Mr. Bullen’s latest book⁴ it must be said that it possesses little of the power which belonged to his earlier work. This, indeed, is a story of humble life, but not of the life which the first mate knows best. The Cruise of the Cachalot, The Log of a Sea-Waif, and Idylls of the Sea brought something fresh into literature, a new sense of the glamour and the horror of old ocean. We have heard before of the hardships and brutalities of the fo’c’s’le, and we have taken part in so many imaginary shipwrecks and mutinies that the truth of the matter looks barely life-size. But no landsman and few seamen can have known the sea itself as this man knows it; he has the “experiencing nature, ” and, what is equally important to us, the faculty of speech. His style is uneven, not seldom rhetorical in an old-fashioned way,— loaded to the rail with adjectives, and at times consciously “poetical” (for example, “the fullorbed moon in a molten glow of purest silver traverses the purple concave as a conquering queen escorted by her adoring subjects ”); at its best it is strong and vivid. Altogether its most striking quality, however, is the haunting sense of awe tinged with quiet melancholy, from which the writer, with all his active cheerfulness, never quite escapes. “When that familiar freshness was found to be giving place to a stale, stagnant greasiness, to which a mawkish, uninvigorating atmosphere clung, what wonder that uneasiness — all the more difficult to bear because undefinable — became generally manifest! . . . Not only fish of bizarre shape abounded, but vast numbers of great medusæ — semitransparent simulacra of all the hideous things that ever haunted a maniac’s dream — crawled greasily about us, befouling the once clear blue of the sea, and coating its sleek surface with stagnant slime. And, deeper down, mighty shadows passed sluggishly to and fro, filling the gazers with wordless terror as the days crept wearily away and those formless apparitions gradually chose higher levels.” Where else could this be found, unless among the opium-fed imaginations of De Quincey ? Coleridge knew somehow of this effect of a long tropical calm (his “slimy things did crawl with legs ” has long formed the charming motif of a favorite dream of the writer’s); but the mighty formless submarine shadows are a touch beyond him.

In The Apostles of the Southeast, unfortunately, there are only a few glimpses of the sea; it is a story of Loudon mission life, very earnest, very pious, and not very interesting. But we can only suppose that this is an experiment or a momentary lapse, and not a sign that Mr. Bullen has worked out his vein, or has resolved to edify the readers whom he has hitherto delighted.

To the literal, the name of Edward FitzGerald will seem to figure oddly among these active men. If we are to believe him, he liked nothing less than any sort of systematic activity. Happily, the creative spirit springs forth now and then from the slough of dilettantism as well as from the paved highways of trade or the trodden paths of the quadrangle. FitzGerald on FitzGerald is not to be taken too seriously. It was his whim to represent himself as idle and vacillating, but few men have been more consistent or more genuinely employed. Taking him, however, as the type of inaction, he would still have, in common with the other subjects of this paper, his technical amateurship in letters. He never made or desired to make any money by writing.

It is amazing how much really valuable material remains to be unearthed, after all these years of literary excavation. This is especially true of letters, which in the nature of things are likely to turn up from time to time in unexpected quarters. The new letters of FitzGerald ⁵ are very much like the old; they express in the old delightful way the simple charm of the man: the steady loyalty, the sound though limited taste, the amiable querulousness, the touching undervaluation of self, — all the gentle humanness, in short, which has given FitzGerald place beside Lamb among the beloved figures in English letters. The two Tennysons, Pollock, Spedding, Thackeray, and Carlyle, — once again they appear in these pages as the cherished friends of the hermit of Little Grange. He could judge them freely, — deploring the rancor of Carlyle, the sentimentalism of Tennyson, the wasted Baconian labors of Spedding, or the worldliness of Thackeray; but he could not stop loving them.

A few passages from these letters will hang more closely in the memory of those who read them for the sake of their writer; as, for example, his note on traveling: “He [Tennyson] is come back from Switzerland rather disappointed, I am glad to say. How could such herds of gaping idiots come back enchanted if there were much worth going to see ? I think that tours in Switzerland and Italy are less often published now than formerly; but there is all Turkey, Greece, and the East to be prostituted, also; and I fear we shan’t hear the end of it in our lifetimes. Suffolk turnips seem to me so classical compared to all that sort of thing.” Or there are the two characteristic allusions to his Persian translations. The first was made in 1870: “ They have their merits, and do very well to give to friends, and to please a few readers for the time, and then to subside — things of taste, not of genius at all — which, you know, is the one thing needful.” And ten years later: “As to the Americans you met, if I were ten years younger I should really be disquieted by such overestimation (I mean as translator, not poet, of course) as must make me ridiculous here. It is very odd.” The letter closes with a whimsical allusion to himself as “the great American Pote.”

An interesting reprint was published not long ago of FitzGerald’s Polonius,⁶ a scrapbook sort of work of which the author was fond, though he claimed little for it. “It is,” he wrote in the preface, “not a book of Beauties — other than as all who have the best to tell have also the best way of telling it; nor of the limbs and outward flourishes of truth, however eloquent; but, in general, and as far as I understand, of clear, decided, wholesome, and available insight into our nature and duties.” Among the sober or witty vestigia which make up the book, one finds himself culling out those which connect themselves most plainly with FitzGerald’s idiosyncrasy; none more unmistakably than this: “Themistocles said he could not fiddle, but he could rule a city. If a man can rule a city well, let him; but it is better to play the fiddle well than to rule a city ill.”

H. W. Boynton.