The Gospel According to Moore

Ave, by George Moore. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]

Mr. George Moore has finished his autobiographic triology, Hail and Farewell, and has shaken the dust of Ireland from his feet. The Celtic Renaissance must make its way without his help or hindrance. He came, he pondered, he withdrew. In these astonishing volumes we have the whole story of his adventures and his thoughts, and an unrivalled series of impressionistic portraits of his friends. We see Yeats in his long cloak, looking like a melancholy rook; Lady Gregory, the poet’s devoted disciple; Edward Martyn and his soul; Plunkett and Gill, the Bouvard and PÉcuchet of real life; AE “who settles everybody’s difficulties and consoles the afflicted”; Colonel Moore, the author’s brother; and we catch an occasional glimpse of Arthur Symons, Synge, James Stephens, and many others. But the book is very different from the ordinary Sunlights and Shadows of My Short Life. It is a remarkable piece of self-portraiture and an explanation of the author’s attitude toward art and the Christian religion.

It was during the composition of the stories contained in The Untilled Field that Mr. Moore came to realize that the Celt was but a herdsman, and that art had steadily declined in Ireland since the Irish Church was joined to Rome. But what was the reason for this decline? Was it due to the race or to Catholicism? Mr. Moore and his friends discussed this question at length and considered the history of literature in relation to the Roman Catholic Church. Their discoveries astonished him, for the case against Catholicism was even stronger than he had hoped for.

About two thousand years ago the Ecclesiastic started out to crush life, and “in three centuries humility, resignation and obedience were accepted as virtues; the shrines of the gods were abandoned; the beautiful limbs of the lover and athlete were forbidden to the sculptor and the meagre thighs of dying saints were offered him instead. Literature died, for literature can but praise life. Music died, for music can but praise life, and the lugubrious Dies Irae was heard in the fanes. What use had a world for art when the creed current among men was that life is a mean and miserable thing? So amid lugubrious chant and solemn procession the dusk thickened until the moment of deepest night was reached in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. In the fifteenth century the dawn began in Italy, and sculptors and painters turned their eyes toward Greece.” Dante was a Catholic, although not a very orthodox one, and Catholicism can make a valid claim to the cathedrals and the choral music of Vittoria and Palestrina. But the painters of the Renaissance were as pagan as CÆsar Borgia and only chose religious subjects as a pretext for drawing and to meet a certain demand. In fact, the whole spirit of the Renaissance was pagan and progressive, and a return to the Middle Ages was averted when “that disagreeable monk, Savonarola,” was burned at the stake. After this new birth came the Reformation, resulting in the Council of Trent, which forbade all speculation on the meaning and value of life and arranged “the Catholic’s journey from the cradle to the grave as carefully as any tour planned by that excellent firm, Messrs. Cook and Sons.” As a result there has been practically no Catholic literature since that time.

“Art is but praise of life, and it is only through the arts that we can praise life. Life is a rose that withers in the iron fist of dogma, and it was France that forced open the deadly fingers of the Ecclesiastic and allowed the rose to bloom again.” Descartes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Merimee, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant are all agnostics. The most important Christians are Pascal, Racine, and Corneille, who wrote mere imitations of the Greek drama without any criticism of life, and Verlaine, who embraced the Church in an ecstasy more sensuous than religious. In Germany there are Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche—no Catholics and mainly agnostic. In Russia we find the utterly unmoral Turgenev and Tolstoy, who professed to be a Christian, but, as Mr. Moore points out, did not believe in the Resurrection of the Body. In Italy the main figure since the Reformation is an artist of today, the pagan D’Annunzio. In Spain there is one great Catholic work, Don Quixote, but it is completely unethical. Among the Scandinavians, Ibsen, Bjornson, and Strindberg are agnostics. In England the main evidence for the defence is found in Pope, who called himself a Christian, but wrote The Essay on Man, and Cardinal Newman, who, according to Carlyle, had a brain like a half-grown rabbit. In America there are Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, and Whitman—Protestant and agnostic.

The reason for all this has been explained by Mr. Moore again and again. It lies in the fact that the Church has always preferred the obedient and poor in spirit to the courageous and the wise. Religion is strongest among ignorant and weak-minded people, and as far back as the book of Genesis we read of God’s anger at the man and woman who ate of the forbidden fruit. “The two great enemies of religion are the desire to live and the desire to know,” and the whole tendency of art is to increase and strengthen these desires. Another thing for which the Church is responsible is the present attitude toward love. Mr. Moore writes with pride of “the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead.” He insists with Gautier that earth is as beautiful as heaven.

When he had decided that literature was incompatible with dogma, Mr. Moore found himself in a decidedly unpleasant situation. He had changed the course of his life to take part in the Irish Renaissance, and now he realized that the Irish Renaissance was a mere bubble. The whole history of the world showed that literature could not be produced in a Roman Catholic country. The only thing for him to do was to leave Ireland, but in the meanwhile he felt that he must declare himself a Protestant. Between art and religion there could be but one choice for him; the religion must be changed. It is true that he had never acquiesced in any of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, but he had been baptized in that Church, and he had always been considered a Catholic. Protestantism seemed much preferable, because Protestantism leaves the mind very nearly free. In the Confessions of a Young Man, he had already expressed his prejudice in its favor. “Look at the nations that have clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incensed silence of the Vatican.” And so Mr. Moore after several futile interviews with the Anglican priest wrote to The Irish Times announcing his change from the Church of Rome, and began the composition of Hail and Farewell as the best means in his power to liberate his country priestcraft.

P. M. Henry.

Smile and Scream: Chekhov and Andreyev

Stories of Russian Life, by Anton Tchekoff; translated by Marian Fell. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]

Savva and The Life of Man, by Leonid Andreyev; translated from the French (!) by Thomas Seltzer. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

A French critic characterized Russian literature as Heroic. Tragic would perhaps be a happier definition; what has been Russian life, and hence its literature, but a continuous tragedy? Gogol looked into that life and burst into a homeric laughter which ultimately drove him insane; the “repenting nobleman” Turgenyev was devoured by melancholy over his sad heroes and heroines; the “cruel genius” of Dostoyevsky convulsively writhed in contemplation of the “humiliated and offended”; Chekhov, who had begun his career in the gayest humor, turned eventually gloomy and pronounced his diagnosis: Such life is impossible; even Gorky, the chanter of hymns to the proud Man, was crushed and silenced by grim reality, and his scepter of the idol of young Russia passed into the hands of the most pessimistic writer, Andreyev.

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Tutchev found a mysterious beauty in the brightness of autumn evenings:

Such was the smile of Anton Chekhov. Run through his works, look at the sad faces of his heroes, listen to the yearning effusions of his women, observe his Nature, his skies and steppes, and your heart will shrink before that smile of fading autumn. He knew and understood Russian life better than any other writer, and keenly felt its tragicness and ... hopelessness. Therefore he did not protest or advocate, did not denounce or propagate, did not shout or curse, as most of his colleagues did: for what is the use? He only smiled, a sad gripping smile that maddens the sensitive reader—a smile of ennui and helplessness characteristic of the Russian “soilless” intellectual. I believe it was this smile, which masqued an abyss of sorrow and pain, that early extinguished Chekhov’s life; it is so much easier and more healthful to scream and howl than to smile under torture.

The stories translated by Miss Fell are far not of the best (by the way: why not use a correct transliteration? Why that half-German, half-English “Tchekoff”?). I suspect that the translator endeavored to choose the least typically-Russian sketches in the hope that they would be more “understandable” to the foreign reader; such attempts generally fail to convey the real atmosphere. “If you wish to know the Poet, you must go into the Poet’s land,” said Goethe. On the whole, however, the book is imbued with the Chekhovian leit-motif—the longing, struggling, crippled Russian soul.

Leonid Andreyev is of a dual personality: the artist, and the mouthpiece of society. In his early sketches, in his short stories, and in his greatest achievement, The Seven Who Were Hanged, he is the wonderful psychologist, the unveiler of the soul mysteries with an art that approaches that of Maeterlinck. Russian reality, however, is a Moloch clamoring victims; the powerful tragedy of life absorbs and subjugates all individual forces, and it requires great artistic strength to preserve aloofness from the burning problems of the day. Andreyev has witnessed the most appalling epoch in his country’s history: disastrous war, revolution, reaction, famine, national demoralization. He has been tempted to interpret the passing events, a perilous path for an artist whose field of observation must lie either in the crystallized past or in the dim future, never in chronicling the floating present. In his stories and plays of that later period, Andreyev revealed such horrors, such gruesome scenes, that we have felt as if we were in a Gallery of Tortures. Horror shrieks, screams, beats upon our senses, maddens us. But the colors are too loud, the medium of tickling our sensations too vulgar. I recall a passage from Merezhkovsky, a description of one of the museums in Florence. There is a head of Dante; the face is calm, almost indifferent, yet one sees at once that it is a face of one who saw hell. In the same room hangs a wax-image of Plague, with hideous details—rotting cadavers with outpouring bowels in which swarm enormous worms. The Sunday-visitors pass by Dante’s head yawning, but wistfully crowd at the wax Plague. I confess this scene, at times, makes me draw an analogy with Chekhov and Andreyev.

As a playwright Andreyev has utterly failed; he lacks dramatic constraint and proportion. He puts into the mouths of his actors bombastic phrases, to the delight of the gallery; but there is absolutely too much talking in his plays, with very little drama. The two plays published in the book now before me, Savva and Life of Man, have caused more discussion than any of his other plays,—a fact due not to their particular merit, but to their pyrotechnic effects and “understandableness.”

Savva, a young man “with a suggestion of the peasant in his looks,” has a modest intention to annihilate everything.

Well, how is this enfant terrible—the trumpeter of a popularized edition of Schopenhauer, Bakounin, Stirner, Nietzsche, etc., etc.—how is this “bad man” going to carry through his gigantic plans? In a very simple manner: he will destroy the wonder-working ikon of the Saviour, that made the monastery of his native town famous; he will place a bomb behind the ikon, and its explosion will open the eyes of the ignorant believers. A tempest in a cup of water! But hark and tremble:

Monologues, long and pretentious like those quoted, fill up the play to a point of dizziness; yet there are a few oases in that unhappy work, where you find the real Andreyev, the unrivalled painter of sorrow and suffering. Here is, for instance, one of the pilgrims, a man who had killed accidentally his son and has since been wandering from monastery to monastery, fasting, wearing heavy chains, and indulging in all sorts of self-chastisement. The cynical monks give him the cruel nickname of King Herod, which he bears, like his other burdens, with the joy of a martyr. Listen to his unsophisticated talk:

Our hero, Savva, is naturally offended, for his motto is Ignis sanat, and he is determined to cure the world with fire. The pilgrim calmly rejoinds:

In depicting individual sorrow Andreyev approaches Dostoevsky; it is when he raises general, universal questions, that he miserably fails in answering them. The Russian public has “spoiled” him, has crowned him with the title of a genius, when he is only a man of big talent. Unfortunately Andreyev took the flattery of the beast-public seriously; he said to himself: Who knows? Maybe I am, indeed, an Atlas. Let me try and shake the world. And he did try! As a result we have, among his other sore failures, the loudest commonplace—Life of Man.

I think it was Maurice Baring, a Russologue and an admirer of the playwright, who defined Life of Man as an algebraic play, with Man standing for x and Fate for y. Not the tragedy of a certain life under certain conditions, but Life in general, under all circumstances, was the object of the drama. It is the world-old problem, the futility of man’s struggles in the face of blind unreasoning fate that may at any moment overthrow his toy-castles. Perhaps a Goethe might attempt to say something new on that subject, or at least to put it in a new way. With Andreyev the task proved to be not “up to his shoulder,” as the Russians say. The annoying pretentiousness of the play appears a hundred times more convex when on the stage. I saw it once in the “symbolized” theatre of Mme. Kommissarzhevskaya in St. Petersburg, and another time in the performance of the Moscow Artistic Theatre. On the first occasion I was bored to death, and pitied the gifted manager, Mr. Meyerhold, in his futile attempt to veil the platitudes of the play in mysticism, to create an atmosphere, a “Stimmung.” The Moscow people succeeded in emphasizing the ridiculous awkwardness of the drama, the shrill incongruities of the situations and styles,—and I shall ever be grateful to them for the minutes of hearty laughter that they caused me then and which I cannot escape even now, as soon as I recall the harmony between the symbolicized Someone in Gray (sh-sh ...—Fate!) and the super-realistic shrieks of the mother giving birth to a child. The actors did their best, but no miracle could have saved the doomed loud nothingness.

As I have mentioned, Andreyev’s “heel of Achilles” demonstrates its vulnerability when he obeys the call of the public and speaks on up-to-date topics. Life of Man was written, evidently, in response to the symbolistic moods that became noticeable among Russian society at the beginning of the twentieth century. For more than ten years the group of Symbolists, under the leadership of Valery Brusov, had been ridiculed and unrecognized. Then came the reaction: All began to talk symbols; the press, the stage, the art galleries, the public lectures, became symbolistic over night. A torrent of parodies and imitations gushed on the market, and the public did not differentiate between the real and false coins. It became bon-ton to quote Brusov, Balmont, Viacheslav Ivanov, Sollogub; schoolboys declaimed about “the ostrich feathers that wave in my brains,” and janitors whined to “the moon, in a white bonnet with embroidery.”

Life of Man reaped broad success, a fact that speaks volumes on the taste of the Public. I am sure that in this country Andreyev’s play would be a more “paying proposition” for the producer than even “Everywoman.” The plaintive philosophy of Job clothed in modern phraseology; Maeterlinckian Fates dancing in a saloon around the drunken Man; symbolization of Destiny and squeals of the new-born Man; quasi-primitiveness turned into wood-cut allegory and melodramatic effects (of course, there occur several deaths: there is not a single play by Andreyev not spiced with two or three natural or unnatural deaths),—is it any wonder that Life of Man vied in popularity with its contemporary, The Merry Widow?

No, messrs. stage-managers and publishers, we reject your popular Andreyev.

Alexander S. Kaun.

Horace Traubel’s Whitman

With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traubel. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

The wheat that eager work extricates from huge masses of chaff is worth what it costs. Leaves of Grass does not contain all the solid nutrition that stands for Whitman’s durable contribution to the literary food supply of America: he added to it substantially by talking to his friend, Horace Traubel, during the poet’s residence at Camden, N. J., from 1888 to the end of his life in 1892, and that comrade, who jotted down every word, has scattered the resultant wheat through its own chaff. Three of the eight volumes through which the mixture is to run have been published.

It is inevitable that inconsequential stuff—sheer nonsense in instances—should find its way into this morbidly complete story of the harvest years of Whitman’s life; but it is surprising how much personality and interpretative value lie hidden in some of his most commonplace utterances. A tremendous personality descends to occasional banality because of the inadequacy and commonness of words. It is too much to expect Whitman even to revitalize the vocabulary of a democracy. But great as he was as a cosmic voice, Whitman exhibited and confessed kinship with common clay. In fact, Leaves of Grass could never have grown out of an artificial soil, inoculated with classic cultures; it sprang as the first vegetation upon the surface of a wild, primal clay. Whitman was first of all a big, magnificent animal-man; he was secondarily a powerful poetic instrumentality, giving sound and articulation to the wee sma’ voices exhaled by the earth. That is why the essence of his message was an appeal and a challenge to and an expression of democracy. (Of course, I do not mean the institutionalized democracy of politicians, for no Jeffersonian goes to Whitman for solace when his faith is wobbling; I mean the bio-economic democracy that some of us believe in as a part of natural law.)

As a man and as a poet Whitman was simply, daringly, and resolutely himself. He had achieved a large, strong selfhood before Traubel began to Boswellize him, and to that intimate friend he revealed in the languages of pen, tongue, countenance, and silence all the bigness and littleness that a long and intimate relationship could evoke. It would therefore be unfair to ascribe to Whitman all the sapless hay with which these three volumes are padded; it is largely a product of mutual reactions. But in relation to Traubel more than to any other person, Whitman was consistently, habitually, and subconsciously himself, and the result is that this discursive, unedited “story” of the poet’s life and work will live as the most personal and valuable revealment of his character. It is the last word about him as a man. Whitman the poet effected his supreme expression in the poem beginning with the words, “I celebrate myself.” Other features which give permanent distinction to these volumes are the letters to Whitman from noted men and women in America and Great Britain, and numerous portraits of himself and some of his friends.

Despite the fact that this work is padded with arid minutÆ, which I should be the last person to abridge, every page is interesting to readers of Whitman and students of American literature. The first page of the first volume, for example, contains an allusion to Emerson’s senility that is worth reading—in Whitman’s words. Reading at random in the third volume I found this striking quotation:

Turning back a hundred pages I found this:

This is the thought of the natural man who would die like a man. One could quote indefinitely from this extraordinary autobiography of the most outstanding figure in American literature.

DeWitt C. Wing.

Midstream

Midstream, by Will Levington Comfort. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]

A direct, big thing—so simple that almost no one has done it before—this Mr. Comfort has dared. He gives us the story of his own life to the mid-way mark. It is not an autobiography—one of those deferential veilings of truth, a blinding of the spectator by the scattering of fact-dust. After reading it one does not remember clearly the author’s various removals from Detroit to other centers of activity; one remembers the vital events in his consciousness, the shames, triumphs, and searchings of his body and soul. Here is a man’s life laid absolutely bare.

There is no use in explaining the value of such a book to those who do not admit it. People to whom reserve is more important than truth; people who are made uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything—these will not read Midstream through.

The others will see here a chance to understand. And they will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility of Mr. Comfort’s frankness. If a thousand writers should give us such books we should understand better the much-befogged basis of all human problems—“human nature.” Every man draws his own conclusions about vital matters from just such introspection as this, whether it be conscious or unconscious. But every man does not have the candor and the hard-won insight of the trained writer.

It would be possible to enter into futile discussions about the “artistic” value of such a book—whether naturalism can give us as fine a work as imagination. Whatever might be the result of such a discussion, Mr. Comfort’s book remains interesting, and interest is the first value of any written work. He is neither a Wilde nor a Turgenev, but he is a true writer.

To recapitulate the adventures of the sensitive and often unwholesome boy, the degradations and victories of the young newspaper reporter, the soldier, the war correspondent, the husband, and the writer, would be to undermine the novel itself. If you want to experience them, let Mr. Comfort be the narrator.

It may not be out of place, however, to quote a few of the conclusions, in order to give a taste of the book’s direction.

This of man:

This of publishers and the public:

This of woman’s status:

And this of the future:

G. S.

A Defense of the Grotesque

Sonnets from the Patagonian, by Donald Evans. [Claire Marie, New York.]

It has become the fashion, even among intelligent people, to fling tawdry sneers at something not understood—especially the intensely grotesque. The indulgent smile has disappeared, and the little peevish joke has taken its place. Perhaps this is obvious, but some obvious things cannot be made too obvious.

Sonnets from the Patagonian is a type of book which will be almost universally laughed at. Yet it is something like a gold nugget: one must use his mind as a pick with which to isolate streaks of poetry from the coarse rock. The rock is simply grotesqueness. The gold is protesqueness mixed with unconscious simplicity.

I took out my pick one night and started the mental manual-labor. At the end I had extracted six of the most startling, clutching, beautiful lines of verse ever written in English. Perhaps the twisted dreariness of their surroundings made them stand out more vividly, gave them a false value to me. I shall let the reader judge.

Six lines almost lost in the mirage the poet speaks off, but well worth finding.

M. B.