Recent Books of Essays and Ideas

ARRAYED with elegance in sombre black, to match the title, honored by every service that respectful scholarship can offer, come two volumes of Boswell’s essays, The Hypochondriack. Name and content suggest the arresting contrast in the eighteenth century between the zeal for temperance and sanity and the number of celebrated men who were either melancholic or insane. The spleen was supposed to be distinctively English. To find Bozzv inflicted with it is a grievous surprise, but that he truly suffered, and fought the malady with pluck and the best resources of his time, these essays bear witness.

His description of symptoms would do credit to a modern psychoanalyst. On the whole, common sense triumphed and the essays are cheerful reading. Taken in connection with the admirable Introduction and Notes of the editor, Dr. Margery Bailey, they are a mine of information about the period. And if Bosw ell cannot vie with Addison in lightness of touch, or with the Rambler in weight of matter, we find none the less that he was a considerable person in his own right, beside being the greatest hero-worshiper in English letters, It is agreeable to hear him discourse on Luxury and Conscience, on Thinking, on With and Age, no less than on the subjects the editor tells us were nearer his heart, like Marriage, Drinking, and Country Life. One cannot feel that Boswell’s melancholy struck very deep.

Like all his contemporaries, he wavered between the romantic and the neoclassic mood, and Dr. Bailey diagnoses his hypochondria and that of his age as due to the hesitant restlessness of men who had lost old sanctions and not yet discovered new. Perhaps; but no such explanation accounts for the accidia of the Middle Ages, that, vicious misery of the wretches whom Dante plunged into mud because they had been sad under the sweet sun. The diagnosis, however, would cover very well our twentieth-century form of the disease. The Middle Ages considered its acchlia a sin; the eighteenth century apologized for its spleen. But the twentieth jauntily parades an ultimate pessimism, and exploits the situation, describing its disillusion with gusto.

Harvey Wickham in The Impuritans discusses contemporary authors to some of whom this attitude is not unknown — Havelock Ellis, Cabell, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, and Aleneken. With politic strategy he joins at first in the popular pursuit of slaying the slain, and treats severely those very dead Puritans who really are not bothering us much. But we soon discover that lie is of the reaction beyond the reaction. An obsession with sex is queerly frequent with the disillusioned modern, and it is this obsession which Mr. Wickham attacks. He heats his authors at their own game, insisting that they are romanticists, not realists; is as witty as they, and writes with quite as little reserve on themes which the Puritans declined to mention. Too little for some tastes. One questions whether the discussion of sexual perversions, even on a biological basis, need loom quite so large, and wonders if the exposure of indecency must inevitably become tainted with what it denounces. It is not only in Mr. Wickham, of course, but in the men discussed that one wearies of the assumption that I he Seventh Commandment is the only one in the Decalogue. The Puritans did not think so, though Mr. Wickham says they did; Moses thought the nine others just as important, and Jesus laid a good deal more stress on some of them. Frankly, though the opinion be unorthodox, too much harping oil sex can be a boree. It is a relief when Mr. Wickham turns to poking clever and justifiable fun at Ulysses. He hardly does justice to Joyce’s brilliant parodies of successive English styles, the best burlesque history of style ever written; but he will be savored by all readers who, if the contents of consciousness, some of them very dirty, must be emptied out in a heap, would prefer it should be into the wastebasket. And he is in general refreshingly rational in his treatment of all ‘those discouraged Aryans who solve their dilemma by a plunge rather than a climb.’ He comes out frankly on the side of the angels, if not of the Puritans, in his brief last chapter, ‘Divinamore, with its quotation from that extraordinary genius, Frederick William Rolfe, Baron Corvo.

This is not the only volume that suggests sanity on the defensive. Here come three books from England; they impart to us a sense of sharing in the best talk going. Inge, Chesterton, Wells — typical of three schools of thought. To live with each in turn helps the suppleness of mind that makes for good cheer; and it is reassuring to find men who regard life from such diverse angles agreeing in their healthy-minded defiance of depression and faint-heartedness. Reprints of magazine articles, these books are not of primary importance; but they show the keen vitality in current English thinking. Even the Gloomy Dean, who beams genially on his jacket, refutes his reputation. Labels and Libels runs cheerfully atilt against his usual adversaries, the Roman Catholic Church, the Labor Party, and the ‘diabolical’ government of Russia. He dislikes a remarkable number of things; but a good hearty dislike can be very enjoyable, and there is nothing elegiac in his thinking. He has borrowed a leaf from Mr. Wells, and amused himself with prognostications. Some are dismal, but not all. It is his candid conviction that “the Northern nations and the Protestant religion have not yet found themselves, and have a future greater than their past.’

’ Personally,’ says he, ' I rest my hopes on a new Reformation on Erastian lines.’ Of course it is easy to say, anent this enthusiasm for Protestantism, that the Dean, who starts out with denouncing partisanship, is a dyed-in-the-wool partisan himself; but he has his surprises for us. Hating radicalism and all its works, he is yet not so far from the radical Kingdom of Heaven. We find him remarking that social equality is a Christian ideal, and, however doleful he may be about democracy, saying that ’Christianity as a form of society is on its side.’ He drops challenging ideas, that Hope was a virtue unknown to classic antiquity, that the Roman Church would have happened just the same if Jesus had not lived. He is always good-humored under criticism; one cannot help liking Dean Inge. The last two essays are autobiographical, and especially welcome as he states his wish that no formal biography be ever written.

G. K. C. even at his most casual is a pleasing companion. A glance at the table of contents of Generally Speaking shows refreshing variety. From grave to gay, from lively to severe, he rambles, now protesting against the despairs of Buddhism, now against the speed of the movies; talking with zest now of detective novels, now of that forgotten classic, Helen’s Babies. Epigrams and paradoxes explode round him as he moves, ceaseless minute sparkles and surprises, while we hold our breath with joy and our minds give little jumps. Some readers may be bored, as by a surfeit of firecrackers on the Fourth. But there is always an idea, there is usually a conviction, behind each small explosion. Real constructive thinking, obstinate defense of fine traditions, are always to be found in Chesterton; like Mr. Wickham, he shows that good people with correct views can be just as clever as naughty people with sex obsessions.

Only England could have produced these three men. Wells is not the least English, despite his inveterately cosmopolitan mind. He is also the most modern of the three. But will he always stay modern? The Way the World Is Going, articles written for the New York Times in 1926, dates already; readers indignant at the suppression of his article on Sacco and Yanzetti will be glad to find it here. In essentials, Wells’s mind has not moved. Even without his kind signpost in the preface, the average reader would realize that the most serious contribution of the book was in the article ‘ Democracy under Revision,’ a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne. Mr. Wells gave the occasion of his best. Not one of these men professes toward democracy the orthodox faith — the fact may well give Mr. Hoover’s followers to think. Yells is the most hopeful of them; his title gives his clue. He has never put better or more succinctly the need on which he has long been harping, for synthetic sequence to the long individualistic phase. His great grief is the indifferent ism of the mass, who clamor for self-government when deprived of it, but won’t practise it when they get it. In contrast, the devotion of Fascists and Bolshevik! shines bright. Wells has a desirable power of recognizing good in systems he disapproves; all the more pity that he indulges in ill-natured pages about Shaw. Shaw not a thinker? It is too bad that The Intelligent Woman’s Guide came out too soon to be grouped with this trio.

Finally we reach a book of graver significance than any yet mentioned: Stuart Chase’s Men and Machines. Here are no occasional essays, but a volume that, bears the stamp of long and keen investigation and of balanced thought. It is well that so searching a book could be so excellently written. Mr. Chase does not pepper us with paradoxes like Chesterton, but he is capable of neat epigram and fine phrasing, and the ordinary flow of his prose is eminently readable. His style can even stand the weight of statistical tables without sinking into the gulf of dullness. The book achieves the rare triumph of remaining literature in spite of conveying a lot of valuable information. It tackles our deepest reason for discouragement and melancholy — that endlessly discussed mechanization of t he age, which the intelligentsia is so ready to survey with annoyed revolt. And at first, we resign ourselves to the old arraignment, for the book begins with summarizing protests against the machine from Butler down. But presently conies relief; for Mr. base’s impartial sweep of vision perceives all that is good in the machine age, and this not only or chiefly in regard to the multiplication of bathtubs and electrical appliances. We learn more than ever before about the human reactions of machine labor. Ground is given for hope that the worst is past; that mechanical development holds, in its future, diminution of the number of Robots, and increased incentive to individual expression in industry; that the personality of the plain man may have a better chance than is given it now. The book must be read, to find for what fresh, interesting, and solid reasons, based on careful investigation, these unfamiliar theses are maintained. Not that optimism is unbroken; the final note is one of anxious warning. Presented with some possible developments, the mind shudders aghast. But things are not ’in the saddle’ yet, and man may dominate them if he chooses.

By and large, one rises from perusal of this crop of the season’s books reassured against the invasion of the dark powers. While the swift play of minds continues to be as exhilarating and varied as in these volumes, we should be ungrateful and sodden creatures if we indulged in chronic low spirits about the civilization that produced them.

VIDA D. SCUDDER