Chapter V: Nooks and Fringes (2)

It is no essential contradiction of that title that during the era there throve such glorious barbarians as Whitman and Mark Twain; they came from a class and a region which flowered later than the Shantung of the nation, the New England of the image-breaking Emerson, the philosophical hired man Thoreau, the transcendental critic and artist Hawthorne, the fighting Quaker Whittier, the many-tongued translator Longfellow, the jolly Cantabrigian Lowell, the festive Bostonian Holmes. Nor is it a contradiction that at the end of the century came such a rollicking philosopher as William James or such a silken ironist as George Santayana, or such naturalistic young men as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and Jack London, or such a multitudinous cynic and sentimentalist as O. Henry; or even that during the era lived those three terrible infants of the Adams family, Charles Francis 2d, Henry, and Brooks, to flay the era and all its inherited conceptions. The background and the prevailing colour of the age were still silver. It was then that reminiscence began to enrich the texture of our literary past. Most of the epigones—Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Frank B. Sanborn, for instance—devoted a good part of their lives to writing about the lives of the protagonists. Holmes, of the greater line, wrote memoirs of Emerson and Motley; Howells, later but greater too, gave us dozens of precious memorial essays. Our classics settled into comfortable positions to wait till some revolution should spill them out. Washington as chief national hero gave way to Lincoln, whom the Silver Age softened and sweetened until his angularities hardly showed. The old flaming ardours about manifest destiny considerably cooled, not so much because the national humility was stronger but because there was a stronger sense of decorum current. Poetry was dainty and smooth and rounded as never before in this country. The short story after many experiments straitened itself to a few prevailing types of a distinctly native form and substance. The novel, with Howells as choragus, even subdued Mark Twain from the extravagance of his earlier burlesques to the suaver annals of Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc; and it taught the drama that reality had a place on the stage as well as in books. Our essayists grew lighter and gayer, not without a good deal of orthodoxy and a gusto which somehow seemed to have been trained upon sweet cider, but still mellow and kindly and urbane. After the faun Thoreau, the sage John Burroughs! Scholarship grew to Alexandrian proportions; dissertations showed their heads. At the best, these silver qualities all tended towards art; at the worst they bred dilettantism and languor.

Now such unaccustomed qualities as dilettantism and languor in the midst of a nation which had plunged into furious industrial competition and was beginning to cherish imperialistic schemes without quite realizing what it was about, hardly belonged to the setting. In the Silver Age this discrepancy had seemed not to matter very greatly, for the reason that the opinion of the day held that after all a fairly decisive cleavage exists between art and affairs. The trouble began when a more strenuous generation arose and demanded that literature perform a larger, or at any rate a different, share in the national work. It is a hot and impatient generation, not tolerant of its elders. It damns the gentle tradition by calling it genteel. It suspects it of lukewarmness, accuses it of prudery, and believes it to have been verbose and trivial. The older magazines were essentially the children of that Silver Age which is now under indictment. The question seems to be whether they can renounce their old virtues, now become sins, and acquire the new virtues, which certainly would have been sins in their proper day.

JOHN BURROUGHS

John Burroughs long seemed old to many of his readers, but measured by anything but mere linear years he was older than he seemed to most of them. Measured, for instance, by reference to the fame of Whitman, Burroughs went back to the days when he was a clerk in the Treasury, and Whitman, then likewise a Government clerk, was dismissed from his post by a Secretary of the Interior who now survives in the memory of his nation chiefly by reason of this episode. Burroughs wrote the earliest book ever written about his greatest friend, and for more than half a century he neither forgot nor long neglected to praise Whitman’s large sanity and seerlike wisdom. Measured by the reputation of Thoreau, of whom it was easy for the most casual to perceive that Burroughs was in some fashion a disciple, he went back so far that he had been seventeen when _Walden_ came into the world, and he began himself to write about birds and green fields before Thoreau died. And measured by a line even longer than the fame of either Whitman or Thoreau, Burroughs went back so nearly to the origins of American literature that he saw the Catskills, of which he was to remain the particular singer and annalist, within three or four years after Irving, heretofore acquainted with them only from the deck of a Hudson River boat, had first visited the neighbourhood already sacred to the quite mythical but also immortal spook of Rip Van Winkle.

To mention Irving is to suggest a comparison actually more fruitful than that which some thousands of pens have recently made between Burroughs and Thoreau. The bland old man whose beard was latterly as well known in these States as that of Bryant in its day, had hardly anything in common, except an affectionate concern for external nature, with the dry, hard, vivid Yankee who acted out his anarchistic principles on the shores of Walden Pond and fiercely proclaimed the duty of civil disobedience to all men who might find the world travelling along false paths. Burroughs had in him too much of the milk of American kindness to thrive in a comparison with an authentic genius like Thoreau, who might not be half the naturalist that Burroughs was but was twice the poet and a dozen times the pungent critic of human life. Nor, in another direction, does Burroughs appear to much advantage by comparison with Whitman, who had a cosmic reach and a prophetic lift and thrust that never visited Slabsides. Rather, for all Burroughs employed a modern idiom and took to the country instead of staying snugly in town, he points back to the earlier tradition of smoothness and urbane kindness and level optimism which Irving practised. Did Burroughs not but a few weeks before his death take a mild exception to the “naked realism” of Howells? In that phrase a very old school speaks. Perhaps we shall in the long run remember best that Burroughs annually made one of an odd triumvirate of campers which included besides him Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford. Let us, for the sake of seeing the group in its true perspective, call Mr. Ford the village blacksmith who happens to have the fortunate touch of Midas; let us call Mr. Edison the village inventor who happens to have the touch of a mechanical Merlin; let us call Burroughs the village naturalist who to his native instincts adds the winning gift of language and makes himself heard, as his friends do by their machines, outside the village.

BROAD HOUSE AND NARROW HOUSE

There is a broad house of life and there is a narrow house of life. What marks the broad house is not so much the breadth of the walls within which its people live nor the height of the deeds they do or of the passions they experience; rather it is the insulation—as it may be called—which protects their nerves against the agony of too rough contact. Custom is the larger part of this insulation. In the broad house men and women grow unconcerned about irritating things with which they are familiar. The minor imbecilities of their relatives and their companions do not pain them greatly. They do not tug at leashes or kick against pricks or cry over spilt milk or strain at gnats. They can live in the presence of their own thoughts without discomfort. And when custom is not enough to keep the insulation stout, change of scene or mood or occupation mends it. In the broad house memory is not very long. When the occupants begin to feel stifled they stir about and soon forget. When they begin to brood they expose themselves to laughter or excitement and pull themselves together. When they have been bored beyond a certain point they turn to a new job and get lost in it. From too much thinking they take refuge in sleep or liquor.

In the narrow house things are different. Custom does less there, being an insulation which does not fit the sorer nerves. Instead, it rasps them. They wince and keep on wincing more and more at the burden and the pressure of mere existence. Lying so near the surface they suffer from the proximity of other nerves in other people and nearly as much from the proximity of other people without nerves. Men and women who are so tender first feel irritation at minor imbecilities, then pain, then anger, and may go on to madness. The contempt which familiarity breeds is in them an active passion—not, as in the broad house, a comfortable ease or even entertainment. Their memories are too long and too alive for that. Each scratch leaves a scar and the scar smarts for ever. Imagination sets in with the neurotic when he feels stifled or begins to brood or grows bored or finds himself deep in thought. It carries him, as the imagination can, beyond the actual occasion, calling up future or conjectural irritations or injuries and bringing them to wound the nerves, which are already twitching. Retreating from the unendurable frontiers of his experience he lives tautly at the centre, his scrutiny fixed inward. He may hate what he sees there or he may love it.

Narcissus, the youth who loved himself until he died of his passion and was transformed by the gods into a flower, is in some respects the very symbol of the neurotic, whose fate it is to resemble a flower in fragility if not always in beauty or in fragrance. With a happy accuracy Evelyn Scott, who called her first novel _The Narrow House_, calls her second one _Narcissus_. Her creative faculty has allowed itself to seem submerged by the troubled flood of life which it chooses to represent. It does not laugh, it is rarely ironical or pitiful, it suggests no methods of escape. For the time being it is preoccupied with the inhabitants of the narrow house and with their careers. It accepts their own sense that the doors are locked and the windows tight and that there is nothing to do but to run round and round in the sticky atmosphere. By thus accepting her neurotics Mrs. Scott intensifies her art: she brings her characters upon a cramped stage under a glaring light; she crowds them into a cage which they think a trap and there inspects their struggles. With the fewest reticences she sets them forth, making stroke after stroke of the subtlest penetration, shearing away disguises and subterfuges till she reaches the red quick. What she finds in all of them is essentially narcism.

What further intensifies this biting art is that, narrowed to the narrow house and concentrated upon self-love, it anatomizes and subdivides self-love with minute analysis. The plight of practically all the characters in _Narcissus_ has the complication that they are in love and are therefore habitually on edge as they might not be in calmer circumstances. But love does not liberate them. Julia turns from her dullish husband first to one lover and then to another without any genuine escape from the inversion of her desire. Her husband cannot take her as seriously as she demands; he too is bound up in his own hard self. Her first lover, Allen, has no passion more expansive than a sort of sadistic cruelty; her second, Hurst, none more generous than a sort of masochistic modesty. Paul, the adolescent tortured by the longing to realize himself, flinches at the knowledge of his awkward movements towards freedom. Each of them, looking for love as Narcissus did in his pool, sees in lover or beloved something not entirely expected: sees, that is, another face and not a mere reflection of the looker’s. Here lies the particular ground of their irritations. Whereas the lovers of the broad house reach eagerly out for qualities unlike their own, the Narcissuses of the narrow house cannot endure unlikeness. And as there are no absolute likenesses in nature, they must be disappointed and must agonize.

One of the commonest devices in fiction is to show a narrow house with its inhabitants invaded and purged by a large breath from the broad house. Mrs. Scott denies herself this compromise. Her method, no less than her reading of life, compels her. She marshals her characters in a fugue of pain and exasperation. They have no career, in her novel, besides that of their passions; they do not appear at work or at play or in relaxed moments. When they try to speak lightly they speak stiffly. She never forgets the tense business in hand. That business, obviously, is not to make a general transcript of human existence, but to fit certain materials into a certain pattern in order to make a work of art. The pattern in this case does not equal the materials. Though the novel has form and proportion, its whole is partly hidden by the brilliance of its parts, which glitter with fiendish thrusts of observation delivered in a style of cruel curtness and vividness. The paths of the characters through the action seem tangled in a multitude of sensations. It is the tone which gives unity: the tone of passionate frustration sustained by art till the familiar sanities fade out of sight and the narrow house has shut out the sun, the wind, the soil, and the healing hands of time. Narcissus, heedless of the broad house, strikes through the skin to the nerves; it finds fierce atavisms, stubborn wilfulnesses, inexplicable perversities, rages, attacks, retreats in the forest, in the morass, in the jungle of the mind.

GOOD NAMES

There are good names and good names. Seedsmen use them to catch young gardeners; lovers woo with them; maps, full of them, become a sweet adventure to the eye; men and women who always wear them please the moralists. And since they play their part in life, they have a part in novels. Consider the course of English fiction, from Defoe to Thomas Hardy, with its many names and fashions of names.

Defoe, who lacked few other realistic arts, seldom named a character. In his anonymous underworld brisk Moll Flanders knows even her husbands better by their callings than by their names. Colonel Jacque speaks of only his fourth wife as if she had been christened. Roxana’s Europe has hardly more souls with names than Crusoe’s island. Some of the titles seem to come from the stage, such as Count Cog, “an eminent gamester,” Alderman Stiffrump, and Christallina the virgin; but Defoe was, perhaps, too much a democrat to care much for names for their own sake. So, it seems, was Richardson, though not in the same way; he named his people, but nearly all in plain and simple terms, as became a blunt tradesman: Andrews, Jones, Williams, Adams, Jenkins, Tomlinson. Pamela, indeed, can tell her children the fates of Coquetilla, Prudiana, Profusiana, Prudentia, yet the lady herself becomes Mrs. B—— without a backward sigh. At times, however, Richardson grew less neutral and wrote character neatly into proper nouns. Mrs. Jewkes could be only a wicked conspirator, Polly Barlow a faithful maid, Dorcas Wykes full of guile and arts, Sally Godfrey a woman of spirit. Could the Harlowes be people of no breeding, or Miss Harriet Byron? And there are syllables that breathe gentility: Lovelace, Grandison, Sir Rowland Meredith, Sir Harry Beauchamp, Sir Hargrove Pollexfen, Bart.

Fielding, turned novelist, remembered the old comedies of his nonage and christened half his younger children with a pun in his cheek. This is not true of the most important persons, as a rule. Tom Jones, Amelia Booth, Sophia Western, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams are nearly all as straight from life as Jonathan Wild himself, though Adams and Andrews do come through Richardson. In the second rank fall Mr. Booby, the importunate Slipslop, Heartfree and Allworthy, pictures of virtue, Partridge, whose name has both a poaching and pastoral air, Blifil, Thwackum, Square, and the unrelenting Mrs. Honour. And still further from the centre of his stories belong those men and women whom Fielding has too little time to portray at length but whom he dockets with names very appropriate to them. One thinks of Peter Pounce, usurer-general, the incompatible Tow-wouses, pig-keeping Trulliber, Tom Suckbribe the venal tipstaff, Mrs. Grave-airs the curious prude, Varnish and Scratch, painters, Arsenic and Dosewell, physicians, Fireblood, Blueskin, Strongbow, rogues all, Betty Pippin and Tom Freckle, rustics body and soul; and then one remembers that such names are less frequent in _Tom Jones_ and _Amelia_, by Mr. Justice Fielding, than in _Joseph Andrews_ and _Jonathan Wild_, written while the old Harry Fielding was not so far away.

For Smollett, alliteration was almost a necessity when it came to heroes: Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Fathom. In this and other artifices he outdid his age in general, for he had high spirits and he did not fret over little realisms. His sailors, Tom Bowling, Oakum, Jack Rattlin, Tommy Clewline, Lieutenant Hatchway, Pipes, and Commodore Hawser Trunnion, are sailors, that and nothing more. Roger Potion is a druggist, Comfit Colocynth a doctor, Obadiah Goosecap a Quaker, Captain Weazel a coward, Sir Giles Squirrel and Sir Timothy Thicket country gentlemen, Timothy Crabshaw, Dolly Cowslip, and Hodge Dolt, children of the greenest fields. Unsuccessful playwright that he was, Smollett could call an actor Mr. Bellower and a manager Mr. Vandal with a clear conscience and doubtless with some delight. He named a gentleman commoner of Christ Church Mr. George Prankley and he put the smack of Cambria in Cadwallader Crabtree, deaf and caustic.

After Smollett, whom Sterne called Smelfungus, there were many to practise the punning trick, which lasted, even after Jane Austen, whose names are nature itself, into Scott, who is a world of many natures. History kept him close to fact with a large part of his characters, but he could invent names, when he liked, as rich and varied as his plots. He was most fantastic, perhaps, with his clergymen: witness John Halftext the curate, canny Peter Poundtext, and the Episcopalian Mr. Cuffcushion; witness the two Presbyterian Nehemiahs, surnamed Solsgrace and Holdenough; witness martyred Richard Rumbleberry, covenanting Gabriel Kettledrummle, and the most violent Habakkuk Mucklewrath. Pedants, too, are broadly named in Scott, even to the extent of Jonathan Oldbuck, Jedidiah Cleishbotham, Cuthbert Clutterbuck, Chrystal Croftangry, and Dryasdust, who has fathered a tribe. With some others, besides parsons, the calling gives the titles, as in Tom Alibi the lawyer, Raredrench the druggist, Saddletree, who sells harness, and Timothy Thimblewaite, tailor. Such names are for the sake of comedy, and comedy, with Scott, generally plays with humble life. But he had names for the virtuous poor as well: Caleb Balderstone, David Deans, Dandy Dinmont, and on through the alphabet. Where Scott was best, however, seems to have been at naming those gentlemen and ladies who bring chivalry to his books. What certain signs of birth in the bare surnames Waverley, Redgauntlet, Glendenning, Mannering, Osbaldistone! Could Diana Vernon have changed names with Alice Lambskin, or Lucy Ashton with Meg Dods, or Rose Bradwardine with devoted Phoebe Mayflower even? Cosmo Conyne Bradwardine has not the same savour as Saunders Broadfoot; Quentin Durward is not of a rank with Giles Gosling. Scott could and did devise fit syllables for every order and station of life.

Dickens had no such pretty courtliness, but spoke brusquely of Lady Coldveal and Lady Jemima Bilberry and Lady Scadgers, Lord Snigsworth, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Sir Morbury Dedlock, Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle. But so he spoke of all the world, making names for every creature like a new comic Adam in a new topsy-turvy paradise. All the power of Smollett passed into him to be enlarged to quite new proportions. Smollett could call a bumpkin Hodge Dolt, but only Dickens could invent the gigantic titles of Nicodemus Boffin, Luke Honeythunder the unlaughing philanthropist, the Pardiggles, rapaciously benevolent, or Chevy Slyme. Smollett, indeed, might have called an undertaker Mould, as Dickens did, a visiting nobleman Count Smorltork, a schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, a canting preacher Melchisedech Howler; might even have named Nicholas Nickleby, Betsy Prig, Sally Brass, Miss Mowcher, Mr. Pugstyles, or Zephaniah Scadder; but Smollett could never have attained to Gradgrind, the Cheerybles, Mrs. Kidgerbury the oldest charwoman in Kentish town, Uriah Heep, Septimus Crisparkle, Daniel Quilp, Pecksniff, Podsnap, or the firm of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles. It is a quality and glory of Dickens that he could caricature words as he did people. Micawber and Skimpole and Pickwick are caricatures no more than the syllables which name them. Humorous hybrids of language, they sometimes seem to suggest parent words, as if Scrooge were the child of _screw_ and _gouge_, and Wardle of _warden_ and _waddle_, but they commonly elude analysis and seem new words for new persons.

Thackeray took certain advantages, not only in the linguistic gargoyles of his burlesques but in the wild words he coined from Germany and Ireland. In English, however, he was rather nearer nature and directories. He has his Lord Bishop of Bullocksmithy and the Archbishop of Mealypotatoes, indeed, as well as their humbler brethren of the black cloth, Charles Honeyman the unctuous, Silas Hornblower, missionary, Thomas Tufton Hunt, tufthunter, Felix Rabbits the curate with fourteen daughters, dull Thomas Tusher, and Lemuel Whey, “full of the milk and water of human kindness.” The Earl of Bagwig can, without leaving the Thackerayan world, consort with the Earl of Bareacres, Lord Trampleton, who walks on his dancing partners, Lord Tapeworm, Lord Brandyball, Lord Castlemouldy, Lord Deuceace, or with Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone and Sir Giles Beanfield. Jack Snaffle keeps a livery stable, the Hawbucks are parvenus, George Marrowfat, snob, eats peas with his knife, Poseidon Hicks is a drysalter with a turn for classical poetry, Tom Eaves gossips, Clarence Bulbul has travelled in the Orient, Squire Ballance holds the scales of justice. But these are fun and ornament. Foreigners aside, Thackeray chose to be more real than Dickens, in this matter, though not commonplace. He leaned a little towards distinction and genteel dignity in his families: the Gaunts, Warringtons, Sedleys, Newcomes, Osbornes, Kews, Amorys, Claverings, Crawleys, Esmonds. The Kickleburys, after all, are snobs, and the Hoggartys are Irish.

Meredith the iridescent does not flaunt such colour in his names as one might expect. He has his puns, or nearly: persuasive Lady Blandish, Farmer Broadmead, Squire Uploft of Fallowfield, Mr. Parsley the curate, Isabella Current, prim and kindly and not young virgin, Mabel Sweetwinter, too fair to be always a shepherdess, Sir Willoughby Patterne the world’s model, the swooping Lord Mountfalcon, the blazing Countess of Cressett, Gower Woodseer the poet studied from R. L. S. Meredith has his plain souls: Tobias Winch, of course a green grocer, the immemorial Mrs. Berry, Farmer Blaize, Jonathan Eccles, and Anthony Hackbut. He has his fantastics: Sir Meeson Corby, Lord Pitscrew, Lord Lockrace, Lady Denewdney. But for the most part it is not comedy which names Meredith’s characters, but gentility. Lucy Desborough, Dahlia Fleming, Letitia Dale, Clara Middleton, are dewy and fragrant, as are Carinthia Jane Kirby, Clara Forey, Janet Ilchester, Rose Jocelyn, Diana Antonia Merion. And the gentlemen mount from Evan Harrington, son of a tailor, and Blackburn Tuckham, through Nevil Beauchamp, Normanton Hipperdon, naturally a tory, and the Hon. Everard Romfrey to those superb fathers Sir Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel, Bart., and Mr. Augustus Fitz-George Frederick William Richmond Guelph Roy, who made princes laugh.

Gentlemen and ladies are not the special care of Thomas Hardy, and yet he has done well by them: witness Elfride Swancourt, passionate, thwarted Eustacia Vye, the Earl of Uplandtowers, Barbara Grebe, who married him, Swithin St. Cleeve, merely a curate’s son, and Lady Viviette Constantine, who loved him. One of Hardy’s tricks is to match with stout Saxon words others that come from Greece or Rome or Judea, as Cytherea Aldclyffe, Damon Wildeve, Aeneas Manston, Bathsheba Everdene. The effect is like that of the ruins of Roman Britain which always stand behind the scene to lend it depth and tragic atmosphere. And the Saxon words have hints in them. Caroline Aspent is a trembling, uncertain creature, like Thomas Leaf; Donald Farfrae is a wanderer from his own heath; Gabriel Oak will not bend; Sue Bridehead carries into middle age the shock and fear of the bride. Philology, ready servant of art, makes the difference between Smollett’s stolid rustics and such as Anne Garland, Fancy Day, Tabitha Lark, Phyllis Grove, Diggory Venn, Giles Winterbourne, and Thomasin Yeobright. Philology, too, makes the comedy more subtle in comic names which Shakespeare could not better: Laban Tall, Joseph Poorgrass, Cain Ball, whose mother had misheard the scripture, Anthony Cripplestraw, the distressed lovers Suke Damson and Tim Tangs, Tony Kytes, who wooed too many, and Unity Sallet, who declined him. Not even to speak of his dialect and place names, which are unspeakably rich, Thomas Hardy’s well-christened children are enough to show that his knowledge goes to the roots of the language.

Of all these, smaller novelists being left out for brevity, which have been conscious of the full savour and perfume of their syllables? What traits come out in the choice? What had the age of each of them to do with it? Who saw the sober hues in Defoe and Richardson, the candid puns of Fielding and Smollett, the large fecundity of Scott, the hugeness and exuberance of Dickens, the polyglot mockeries of Thackeray, the flash and fragrance of Meredith, the deep, native colour of Thomas Hardy? Words, words, words!

PICTURES OF THE PAST

When we read or think about the past, what images actually form in our minds? Take the average American, for instance. He probably has two sets of such images and no more. One is of bunchy persons in preposterous garments—something between a toga and a burnoose—moving over the garish landscape of a Sunday-school card. The other is of heroic gentlemen in the blue-and-buff of the American Revolution, with powdered wigs and elaborate manners, either engaging in battle or else dancing minuets with the furbelowed dames who, like their gallants, abound in the illustrations of the old-fashioned history books. As the blue-and-buff habiliments represent actually a very brief period of history, and those of the Sunday-school pictures none at all, this is but a scanty wardrobe for the imagination. And in matters not quite so sartorial, things are little better. There are probably only a few persons alive anywhere who can sit down and assemble anything like an accurate mental picture of a street in Athens or Rome or Florence or Paris or London or Weimar or Philadelphia, even in the days which mean most and are consequently most studied in the history of those cities. We have generally but the vaguest notions of the physiognomy of the ancients, or even of the remoter moderns. We cannot actually visualize them at their meals, at their work, at their relaxations.

If this is the case now, when we possess libraries of archaeology to draw upon if we care to, what was the case before illustrated books had become common? To judge by the paintings of the Middle Ages, the past then was visualized as merely like the present in its outward details. On the Elizabethan stage the Greeks and Romans were set forth pretty much after the fashions contemporary with the audiences. And even far down through the eighteenth century this custom prevailed. Garrick acted Lear in breeches and wig and nobody minded. It is certain that, while many in his audience would have known better if they had been questioned, they did not experience the shock that we should feel. Lear belonged to an age about which the eighteenth century readers knew little. They were, however, hardly more exact in their images of the Greek and Roman past. Examine, for instance, the illustrations of Pope’s Homer, completed a little over two hundred years ago. It was issued in a magnificent folio with elaborate plates. The frontispiece to the second volume, “Troja cum Locis pertingentibus,” aims to exhibit the plains of Troy, with the sea in the foreground and at the back the city itself. It is true that the ships have slightly Grecian prows, and the warriors on the plains fight with bows and spears and shields and chariots. But the citadel towers above the surrounding houses suspiciously as does St. Paul’s above the City of London. The landscape rolls across the page with the soft curves of England. Here and there are English hedgerows, and the brooks and mountains, so far as they have any vraisemblance at all, are of English make. Quaint and incredible! But what chance, after all, had the illustrator for knowing better? Not for a generation did the excavations begin at Herculaneum and Pompeii or Winckelmann begin the great career which taught the world to think of the ancients very much in their true proportions, though not in their true colours or movements. The fact of the matter is that the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spiritual great-grandchildren of Greece and Rome and worshippers of their ancestors, did not really know what their ancestors looked like. Yet in those ages a great and truthful art grew out of that worship.

The moral seems to be that we lean very little upon definite images in our imagination of the past. The vaguest images will do for most people. Even when we deal with more recent periods and have striking illustrations to help us out, such as Hogarth’s for his age, or those of Phiz for Dickens and Ainsworth, or those of the too-much-neglected F. O. C. Darley for the old American frontier, we probably depend less upon them than we think. We create our favoured personages from history or fiction in our own image. Let any reader of an historical novel, even of so incomparably vivid a series of pictures as _Salammbô_, examine himself as he reads, and the chances are he will find that, having seized upon a few mental or moral traits of the characters, he follows them by this scent and hardly notices their outward appearances again, any more than he carefully visualizes the landscape, much pleasure as he may take from its presence in the action. Such an examination is likely to show, on simple psychological grounds, that Lessing has not been wholly superseded in his doctrine of the true provinces of poetry and art. It is likely also to make us ask whether the Imagists, exquisite lyrics and vivid episodes as they have produced, can ever by images alone build up any great or sustained illusion of events really transacted in something like a real world.

THE GREAT LABORATORY

Modern poets can never praise Greek poetry too much; modern philosophers, Greek philosophy; modern orators, Greek oratory. But the shift away from ancient studies as the basis of all education has tended to leave such employments in the hands of the conservative, or at least of those whose imaginations live largely on the past, and has thus contributed to the notion that practical affairs—economy and polity—are not properly to be studied in Greek literature. To the extent that knowledge has been multiplied since Aristotle’s day, this is, of course, true. We cannot look to the Greeks for information which they did not have, and it would be most un-Greek to neglect superior sources of knowledge merely on the ground that other sources were better established in an old tradition. Undoubtedly this alienation of men of affairs from ancient studies has been due less to the deficiencies of the Greeks than to the deficiencies of the teachers of Greek, who, so long holding a vested interest in education everywhere, permitted themselves, like other vested interests, to fall into sluggish routine and tyranny, a pitiless round of grammar without sense and of words without life. The reaction against their monopoly has been, like most reactions so forced, excessive. In our discovery that we had overvalued the scanty amount of grammar and prosody which unwilling students actually carried away from their compulsory struggles with Greek, with the mere letter of its language without any deeper spirit or meaning, many have come to undervalue the Greek world as a laboratory in which, better than anywhere else in history, we may study human beings vividly and rationally engaged in the conduct of human life.

No other laboratory can ever compare with this in importance for us. Racial or national jealousies do not enter into our calculations here. We have no more right as Americans or Britons or Frenchmen or Germans to be jealous of the primacy of Greece in such matters than to be jealous of the multiplication tables because they happen to enjoy a certain strategic position with regard to other facts. It is true that we are no longer allowed the luxury of believing, with the eighteenth century, for instance, that in looking back to Greece we are looking at the very fathers of the race, who “discovered not devised” the rules of nature, which until then there had been no men to find out. All the more, however, are the Greeks instructive to us when we realize that they, too, had to free themselves from immensely ancient bonds of tradition and superstition. What clear reason did for them, ceaselessly revolving and inquiring, it has at least a chance to do for us, if we want it to. Study the Greeks and you are likely to stop hugging prejudices, or taking pride in them. Study the Greeks, and a hundred petty reverences fall away in a light as lucid as the Athenian atmosphere. Our own day’s work concerns us every day, as it did the Greeks, but, as a good maxim says, the man who knows only his business does not know his business. Why will some one not speak out and say what events have lately shown—that a knowledge of history and literature is indispensable in affairs, and that only those men, barring a genius or two, have shown any conspicuous talent for leadership in our terrible decade who have known something about history and literature? It is true. If we were beasts, we should not especially need history; we should have instinct. But having, as men, exchanged instinct for reason, we need as much of the past as we can get—remembering that every man is free, thanks to the multiplication of records, to choose his own past; that is, to choose that part of human history between him and Adam which to him is worth most. The Middle Ages are good to illustrate devotion; the Renaissance, passionate individualism; the rise of the Americas, civilized men pitted against virgin nature. But Greece surpasses them all not only in reasonableness but also in completeness and sharpness of outline. She is the best microcosm, with the scale best adjusted to our vision. She is the best crystal, most purely revealing the vast matters therein pictured; she is the best laboratory, and under the simplest and loveliest conditions exhibits the processes of life which ordinarily appear confused and vexed.

The claim frequently made, that we cannot find in Greek experience enough that is analogous with our problems, because Greece had so simple and circumscribed an existence and lived in a world so little complicated by machinery, means no more than to say that in a laboratory generations of guinea-pigs succeed one another with a lower mortality than in Guinean jungles, or that diamonds may be made out of their raw materials without the geological convulsions of which in nature they are admirable but accidental byproducts. That is what laboratories are for, to exhibit simply the behaviour of complex things. And the parallel between laboratories for matter and laboratories for mind has more than a fanciful value. Life in Greece was reduced to the simple facts of the human intelligence, leaning less than anywhere else upon mere tradition, upon mere materials, upon mere superfluities. Much as we have grown in range of knowledge by our study of the physical universe, and little as we can afford to reject any wisdom founded upon it, we need often to remember that in practice the centre of our universe is still the mind of man, that for the most part we have to conduct our affairs as if really the Ptolemaic system were good astronomy, as it is very fair politics and morals. The study of the material universe and all sorts of highly specialized studies tend to draw us away from these central facts, as pedants and casuists are continually being drawn away from fundamental principles. The principles, however, are still fundamental.