The Common Pursuit (34 page)

They (the English) are an intensely vulgar race, high and low. . . . They are not worth studying. The prejudices one has about them, even

when they are unjust, are scarcely worth correcting They belong,

all their good and their evil, to the past humanity, to the infantile development of the mind, and they don't deserve, more than any other European nation, the least reverence from a denizen of the new world.

The younger James—while he remained a good novelist, at any rate—was not as simple-minded as that. He knew that he preferred living in France and England to living in America, and in that drama of critical-constructive interplay between different traditions which provides the organization of so much of his best work, he shows himself capable of intelligent and convincing discriminations in favour of America. He evinces, nevertheless, a deep-seated desire to produce a transcendent and aboriginally pure American superiority—a desire, we can see, related to his filial devotion. James himself places The American as 'romantic*, and the romanticism is a matter of die insurrectionary prepotence of this desire, which comes out again, to take another familiar instance, in his Daisy Miller (who is real enough—so real that the implicit valuation of her presents the reader with a problem).

In James's creative phases the manifestations of the impulse are sporadic and anomalous. In The Wings of the Dove and The Golden H*

Bowl it rules unchastened and unchecked. We are to take Milly Theale as superlatively a Princess, and as a supremely fit object of awed and compassionate reverence, merely because she is an American heiress on a fabulous scale (she isn't even represented as intelligent). As for Adam Verver of The Golden Bowl, it may be true that he isn't to be taken as merely a more preposterous Christopher Newman, but both Newman and Verver, it is plain, are intimately associated with the optimistic Fourier-cum-Swedenborg Americanism in which the elder James (whose freedom from economic cares had been earned by his father) indulged his idealism and his sheltered ignorance of the more rigid facts of life. The younger James, yielding to the paternal inspiration, and preoccupied with elaborating in its interest the ambiguities and evasions of his late technique, had himself lost touch with concrete life.

The optimism, Mr Anderson reminds us, was incompatible with tragic art; that suggests its relation to James's greatness. Consider Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age . ..: these works are characteristic expressions of his essential genius, and they are tragic. If the optimism had prevailed we shouldn't have had them. Plainly, however intense may have been James's interest in his father's system, his relation to it can't ever have been quite what Mr Anderson suggests, and in so far as James did at any time incline to the optimism this was at odds with his essential genius. And it is surely significant that nowhere in die Notebooks, in the copious discussing of themes for novels and stories, is there the least reference to any symbolic intention.

It is true that a great artist's consciousness is in a profound way representative and never unconditioned by the age and culture to which he belongs. But it doesn't at all follow, as Mr Anderson seems to suggest, that James, because he was born in America, had, as great artist, to share that optimism. His strength was both American and more than American, and it enabled him, when he was a great artist, to transcend the optimism. He was, it is clear, also drawn to it. It seems to me equally clear that this weakness was closely correlated with another that looks like its antithesis. I am thinking of the very unpleasantly sentimental morbidity exemplified by The Altar of the Dead. And that morbidity seems in its turn to be related to the curious suggestion of abnormality, the

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preoccupation with indefinite evil, of which The Turn of the Screw is the best-known illustration.

I must before closing say that the facts adduced by Mr Anderson make no difference at all to my appreciation of those works of James which made him for me a great writer. I ought perhaps to confess that I couldn't antecedently have believed that facts of that kind would, in the nature of things, make any notable difference: the works I admired were what they clearly were, and the grounds of my admiration were such as I certainly hadn't put there myself. The works I am thinking of are The Europeans, Washington Square, The Bostonians, The Portrait of a Lady, The AivkwardAge, What Maisie Knew and a number o£nouvelles having virtues of the same order as the major works. I see no possibility at all of questioning the nature and conditions of the value of these things.

What strikes us first about them as we read them is the vivid concreteness of the rendering of this world of individual centres of consciousness we live in—a rendering such as seems to imply a kind of interest and a habit of discrimination that bear no relation to any Swedenborgian ethos. Then, the organization that, when we have completed the reading of the given book, is seen to give it significance as a work of art involves no reference to any such symbolism as Mr Anderson describes. What we have, for instance, in The Europeans and The Portrait of a Lady is a characteristic (as I see it) critical and constructive interplay, done in dramatic terms, between different cultural traditions; an interplay in which discriminations for and against are made in respect of both sides, American and European, and from which emerges the suggestion of an ideal positive that is neither. James here is unmistakably preoccupied with the thought of a possible world in which the country house, with its external civilization, shall also be a centre of the life of the spirit; in which manners shall be the index of an inner fineness; and in which die man of the world and the inveterate diner-out who is also an intellectual novelist shall be able to find congenial society and a public capable of appreciating his novels. The characters and the action are 'symbolic* (to use the treacherous word) in a Shakespearean way, and the discriminations made invoke criteria of personality and moral quality that the cultivated reader recognizes, and can accept, iimnediately.

The organization, again, of a representative success like The Lesson of the Master, is no more to be explained in terms of Swedenborgian mysticism. The relations between the young author and the veteran clearly dramatize the complex debate that has gone on in James himself, between the special exacting claims of his art, and his fears, both as man and artist, of missing the full experience of life.

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TAWRENCE is placed—is, in fact, distinctly passe; we are J-j no longer (if we ever were) very much impressed by him. He had, of course, a kind of genius, but to take him seriously as an intellectual and spiritual force, a force that could affect our attitude towards life and the problems of our time—it's amusing to think that there were once earnest souls who did so. To-day, while recognizing the queerly limited gifts he dissipated, we hardly bother to smile at his humourless fanaticisms.

At least, that's the impression one gets from the literary world to-day (I mean the milieu in which fashions are set and worn and the higher reviewing provided for). Lawrence is decidedly out of favour—in fact, he was never in, for it was without permission that he won his fame, and he was patently not the kind of writer who would ever earn permission. Phoenix is an admirable reminder of the qualities that make our ruling literary intellectuals feel that his fame had better be encouraged to fade as quickly as possible.

Here, for instance, in this collection of dispersed papers, he appears as an incomparable reviewer (presenting, that is, a standard that our higher literary editors couldn't be expected to take seriously). We remember that neglected critical masterpiece, Studies in Classical American Literature, and may very well go on to ask what kind of gift it was that made D. H. Lawrence the finest literary critic of our time—a great literary critic if ever there was one. We know it can't have been intelligence; for Mr QuennelTs view 1 that (in contrast to die superlatively intelligent Mr Aldous Huxley) he was, though a genius, muddle-headed is generally accepted (and did not Mr Eliot find in Lawrence *an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking' ?) 2

Yet here, in these reprinted reviews, we have Lawrence dealing under ordinary reviewing conditions (he needed the money) with books of all kinds—H. G. Wells, Eric Gill, Rozanov, Dos Passos,

1 See The English Novelists, edited by Derek Verschoyle.

Hemingway, Baron Corvo, fiction, poetry, criticism, psychology —-and giving almost always the impression of going straight to the centre with the masterly economy, the sureness of touch, of one who sees exactly what it is in front of him and knows exactly what he thinks of it. Here he is on H. G. Clissold-Wells:

His effective self is disgruntled, his ailment is a peevish, ashy indifference to everything, except himself, himself as centre of the universe. There is not one gleam of sympathy with anything in all the book, and not one breath of passionate rebellion. Mr Clissold is too successful and wealthy to rebel and too hopelessly peeved to sympathize.

What has got him into such a state is a problem; unless it is his insistence on the Universal Mind, which he, of course, exemplifies. The emotions are to him irritating aberrations. Yet even he admits that even thought must be preceded by some obscure physical happenings, some kind of confused sensation or emotion which is the necessary coarse body of thought and from which thought, living thought, arises or sublimates.

This being so, we wonder that he so insists on the Universal or racial mind of man, as the only hope of salvation. If the mind is fed from the obscure sensations, emotions, physical happenings inside us, if the mind is really no more than an exhalation of these, is it not obvious that without a full and subtle emotional life the mind itself must wither; or that it must turn itself into an automatic sort of grind-mill, grinding upon itself.

His critical poise is manifested in (pace Mr Eliot) a lively ironic humour—a humour that for all its clear-sighted and mocking vivacity is quite without animus. For, idiosyncratic as Lawrence's style is, it would be difficult to find one more radically free from egotism.

Professor Sherman once more coaxing American criticism the way it should go.

Like Benjamin Franklin, one of his heroes, he attempts the invention of a creed that shall 'satisfy the professors of all religions, and offend none'.

He smites the marauding Mr Mencken with a velvet glove, and pierces the obstinate Mr More with a reproachful look. Both gentlemen, of course, will purr and feel flattered .. .

So much for the Scylla of Mr Mencken. It is the first essay in the

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book. The Charybdis of Mr P. E. More is the last essay: to this monster the professor warbles another tune. Mr More, author of the Shelburne Essays, is learned, and steeped hi tradition, the very antithesis of the nihilistic stink-gassing Mr Mencken. But alas, Mr More is remote: somewhat haughty and supercilious at his study table. And even, alasser! with all his learning and remoteness, he hunts out the risky Restoration wits to hob-nob with on high Parnassus; Wycherley, for example; he likes his wits smutty. He even goes and fetches out Aphra Behn from her disreputable oblivion, to entertain her in public.

The humour seems to me that of a man whose insight into human nature and human experience makes egotism impossible, and I find myself, in fact, in thus attributing to him an extraordinary self-awareness and intelligence about himself, seeming to contradict Mr Eliot, who denies him 'the faculty of self-criticism' (op. cit., p. 59). Lawrence docs indeed characteristically exhibit certitude and isn't commonly to be found in a mood of hesitation or self-condemnation (though his art is largely a technique of exploration—exploration calling for critical capacity as well as courage); but in purity of interest and sureness of self-knowledge he seems to me to surpass Mr Eliot, even though he pays no respect to criteria that Mr Eliot indicates as essential.

A man like Lawrence, therefore, with his acute sensibility, violent prejudices and passions, and lack of intellectual and social training .. . (After Strange Gods, p. 59.)

I have already intimated that the acuteness of Lawrence's sensibility seems to me (whatever Bloomsbury may have decided) inseparable from tie play of a supremely fine and penetrating intelligence. And if one is to agree that Lawrence lacked intellectual and social training, one would like to be shown someone who didn't or doesn't. It's true that he didn't go to Oxford or Harvard, and that his family was of a social class the sons of which, at that time, had little chance of getting to one of the ancient universities. But few readers of the memoir of Lawrence by E. T. 1 will, I imagine, however expensive their own education, claim with any confidence that they had a better one than Lawrence had. At school, and later at University College, Nottingham, whafr

ever their faults (and he says some stringent things about the College), he got sufficient stimulus and sufficient guidance to the sources and instruments of knowledge to be able, in intercourse, social and intellectual, with his friends to carry on a real education. They discussed their way eagerly over an extraordinary range of reading, English and French, past and contemporary (Lawrence hit on the English Review, then in its great days), and it is difficult to imagine adolescents who should have read more actively and to greater profit. For, belonging as they did to the self-respecting poor in a still vigorous part of the country, not only was their intellectual education intimately bound up with a social training (what respectable meaning Mr Eliot, denying a 'social training* to Lawrence, can be giving the phrase I can't guess); they enjoyed the advantage of a still persistent cultural tradition that had as its main drive the religious tradition of which Mr Eliot speaks so contemptuously. And the setting of family life (quite finely civilized and yet pressed on by day-to-day economic and practical exigencies) in which these young people met and talked was in sight of—in immediate touch with—on one side the colliery (Lawrence's father was a miner) and on the other the farm (Miriam's father was a small farmer). It seems to me probable that D. H. Lawrence at twenty-one was no less trained intellectually than Mr Eliot at the same age; had, that is, read no less widely (even if lacking Greek), was no less in command of his capacities and resources and of the means of developing further, and had as adequate a sense of tradition and the nature of wisdom. And it seems to me probable that, even if less sophisticated than Mr Eliot, he was not less mature in experience of life.