appreciation, or enjoyment, is a subjective condition which cannot be
commanded. For a great deal of his waking life, even the most cultivated
person has no aesthetic feelings whatever, and the power to have
aesthetic feelings is very easily destroyed. When you are frightened, or
hungry, or are suffering from toothache or sea-sickness, KING LEAR is no
better from your point of view than PETER PAN. You may know in an
intellectual sense that it is better, but that is simply a fact which you
remember: you will not FEEL the merit of KING LEAR until you are normal
again. And aesthetic judgement can be upset just as disastrously--more
disastrously, because the cause is less readily recognized--by political
or moral disagreement. If a book angers, wounds or alarms you, then you
will not enjoy it, whatever its merits may be. If it seems to you a
really pernicious book, likely to influence other people in some
undesirable way, then you will probably construct an aesthetic theory to
show that it HAS no merits. Current literary criticism consists quite
largely of this kind of dodging to and fro between two sets of standards.
And yet the opposite process can also happen: enjoyment can overwhelm
disapproval, even though one clearly recognizes that one is enjoying
something inimical. Swift, whose world-view is so peculiarly
unacceptable, but who is nevertheless an extremely popular writer, is a
good instance of this. Why is it that we don't mind being called Yahoos,
although firmly convinced that we are NOT Yahoos?
It is not enough to make the usual answer that of course Swift was wrong,
in fact he was insane, but he was "a good writer". It is true that the
literary quality of a book is to some small extent separable from its
subject-matter. Some people have a native gift for using words, as some
people have a naturally "good eye" at games. It is largely a question of
timing and of instinctively knowing how much emphasis to use. As an
example near at hand, look back at the passage I quoted earlier, starting
"In the Kingdom of Tribnia, by the Natives called Langdon". It derives
much of its force from the final sentence: "And this is the anagram-made
Method." Strictly speaking this sentence is unnecessary, for we have
already seen the anagram decyphered, but the mock-solemn repetition, in
which one seems to hear Swift's own voice uttering the words, drives home
the idiocy of the activities described, like the final tap to a nail. But
not all the power and simplicity of Swift's prose, nor the imaginative
effort that has been able to make not one but a whole series of
impossible worlds more credible than the majority of history books--none
of this would enable us to enjoy Swift if his world-view were truly
wounding or shocking. Millions of people, in many countries, must have
enjoyed GULLIVER'S TRAVELS while more or less seeing its anti-human
implications: and even the child who accepts Parts i and ii as a simple
story gets a sense of absurdity from thinking of human beings six inches
high. The explanation must be that Swift's world-view is felt to be NOT
altogether false--or it would probably be more accurate to say, not
false all the time. Swift is a diseased writer. He remains permanently in
a depressed mood which in most people is only intermittent, rather as
though someone suffering from jaundice or the after-effects of influenza
should have the energy to write books. But we all know that mood, and
something in us responds to the expression of it. Take, for instance, one
of his most characteristic works, The Lady's Dressing Room: one might add
the kindred poem, Upon a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed. Which is
truer, the viewpoint expressed in these poems, or the viewpoint implied
in Blake's phrase, "The naked female human form divine"? No doubt Blake
is nearer the truth, and yet who can fail to feel a sort of pleasure in
seeing that fraud, feminine delicacy, exploded for once? Swift falsifies
his picture of the world by refusing to see anything in human life except
dirt, folly and wickedness, but the part which he abstracts from the
whole does exist, and it is something which we all know about while
shrinking from mentioning it. Part of our minds--in any normal person it
is the dominant part--believes that man is a noble animal and life is
worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least
intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence. In the queerest
way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is
beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be
verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of desire
and also of loathing, so much so that in many languages, if not in all
languages, their names are used as words of abuse. Meat is delicious, but
a butcher's shop makes one feel sick: and indeed all our food springs
ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others
seem to us the most horrible. A child, when it is past the infantile
stage but still looking at the world with fresh eyes, is moved by horror
almost as often as by wonder--horror of snot and spittle, of the dogs'
excrement on the pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the sweaty
smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with their bald heads and
bulbous noses. In his endless harping on disease, dirt and deformity,
Swift is not actually inventing anything, he is merely leaving something
out. Human behaviour, too, especially in politics, is as he describes it,
although it contains other more important factors which he refuses to
admit. So far as we can see, both horror and pain are necessary to the
continuance of life on this planet, and it is therefore open to
pessimists like Swift to say: "If horror and pain must always be with
us, how can life be significantly improved?" His attitude is in effect
the Christian attitude, minus the bribe of a "next world"--which,
however, probably has less hold upon the minds of believers than the
conviction that this world is a vale of tears and the grave is a place of
rest. It is, I am certain, a wrong attitude, and one which could have
harmful effects upon behaviour; but something in us responds to it, as it
responds to the gloomy words of the burial service and the sweetish smell
of corpses in a country church.
It is often argued, at least by people who admit the importance of
subject-matter, that a book cannot be "good" if it expresses a palpably
false view of life. We are told that in our own age, for instance, any
book that has genuine literary merit will also be more or less
"progressive" in tendency. This ignores the fact that throughout history
a similar struggle between progress and reaction has been raging, and
that the best books of any one age have always been written from several
different viewpoints, some of them palpably more false than others. In so
far as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask of him is that he
shall genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall not be
something blazingly silly. To-day, for example, one can imagine a good
book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, pacifist, an
anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative:
one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a
Buchmanite or a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan. The views that a writer holds
must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power
of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is
probably another name for conviction. Swift did not possess ordinary
wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision, capable of
picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting
it. The durability of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS goes to show that, if the force
of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of
sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art.
RIDING DOWN FROM BANGOR
The reappearance of HELEN'S BABIES, in its day one of the most popular
books in the world--within the British Empire alone it was pirated by
twenty different publishing firms, the author receiving a total profit of
�40 from a sale of some hundreds of thousands or millions of copies--will
ring a bell in any literate person over thirty-five. Not that the present
edition is an altogether satisfactory one. It is a cheap little book with
rather unsuitable illustrations, various American dialect words appear to
have been cut out of it, and the sequel, OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN, which
was often bound up with it in earlier editions, is missing. Still, it is
pleasant to see HELEN'S BABIES in print again. It had become almost a
rarity in recent years, and it is one of the best of the little library
of American books on which people born at about the turn of the century
were brought up.
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and
good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a
series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments
throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a
visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent. The
pampas, the Amazon, the coral islands of the Pacific, Russia, land of
birch-tree and samovar, Transylvania with its boyars and vampires, the
for a long time. But one other imaginary country that I acquired early in
life was called America. If I pause on the word "America", and,
deliberately putting aside the existing reality, call up my childhood
vision of it, I see two pictures--composite pictures, of course, from
which I am omitting a good deal of the detail.
One is of a boy sitting in a whitewashed stone schoolroom. He wears
braces and has patches on his shirt, and if it is summer he is
barefooted. In the corner of the school room there is a bucket of
drinking water with a dipper. The boy lives in a farm-house, also of
stone and also whitewashed, which has a mortgage on it. He aspires to be
President, and is expected to keep the woodpile full. Somewhere in the
background of the picture, but completely dominating it, is a huge black
Bible. The other picture is of a tall, angular man, with a shapeless hat
pulled down over his eyes, leaning against a wooden paling and whittling
at a stick. His lower jaw moves slowly but ceaselessly. At very long
intervals he emits some piece of wisdom such as "A woman is the orneriest
critter there is, 'ceptin' a mule", or "When you don't know a thing to
do, don't do a thing"; but more often it is a jet of tobacco juice that
issues from the gap in his front teeth. Between them those two pictures
summed up my earliest impression of America. And of the two, the
first--which, I suppose, represented New England, the other representing
the South--had the stronger hold upon me.
The books from which these pictures were derived included, of course,
books which it is still possible to take seriously, such as TOM SAWYER
and UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, but the most richly American flavour was to be
found in minor works which are now almost forgotten. I wonder, for
instance, if anyone still reads REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, which
remained a popular favourite long enough to be filmed with Mary Pickford
in the leading part. Or how about the "Katy" books by Susan Coolidge
(WHAT KATY DID AT SCHOOL, etc), which, although girls' books and
therefore "soppy", had the fascination of foreignness? Louisa M. Alcott's
LITTLE WOMEN and GOOD WIVES are, I suppose, still flickeringly in print,
and certainly they still have their devotees. As a child I loved both of
them, though I was less pleased by the third of the trilogy, LITTLE MEN.
That model school where the worst punishment was to have to whack the
schoolmaster, on "this hurts me more than it hurts you" principles, was
rather difficult to swallow.
HELEN'S BABIES belonged in much the same world as LITTLE WOMEN, and must
have been published round about the same date. Then there were Artemus
Ward, Bret Harte, and various songs, hymns and ballads, besides poems
dealing with the civil war, such as "Barbara Fritchie" ("Shoot if you
must this old grey head, But spare your country's flag,' she said") and
"Little Gifford of Tennessee". There were other books so obscure that it
hardly seems worth mentioning them, and magazine stories of which I
remember nothing except that the old homestead always seemed to have a
mortgage on it. There was also BEAUTIFUL JOE, the American reply to BLACK
BEAUTY, of which you might just possibly pick up a copy in a sixpenny
box. All the books I have mentioned were written well before 1900, but
something of the special American flavour lingered on into this century
in, for instance, the Buster Brown coloured supplements, and even in
Booth Tarkington's "Penrod" stories, which will have been written round
about 1910. Perhaps there was even a tinge of it in Ernest Thompson
Seton's animal books (WILD ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN, etc), which have now
fallen from favour but which drew tears from the pre-1914 child as surely
as MISUNDERSTOOD had done from the children of a generation earlier.
Somewhat later my picture of nineteenth-century America was given greater
precision by a song which is still fairly well known and which can be
found (I think) in the SCOTTISH STUDENTS' SONG BOOK. As usual in these
bookless days I cannot get hold of a copy, and I must quote fragments
from memory. It begins:
Riding down from Bangor
On an Eastern train,
Bronzed with weeks of hunting
In the woods of Maine
Quite extensive whiskers,
Beard, moustache as well
Tall and slim and swell.
Presently an aged couple and a "village maiden", described as "beautiful,
petite", get into the carriage. Quantities of cinders are flying about,
and before long the student fellow gets one in his eye: the village
maiden extracts it for him, to the scandal of the aged couple. Soon after
this the train shoots into a long tunnel, "black as Egypt's night".
When
it emerges into the daylight again the maiden is covered with blushes,
and the cause of her confusion is revealed when:
There suddenly appeared
A tiny little ear-ring
In that horrid student's beard!
I do not know the date of the song, but the primitiveness of the train
(no lights in the carriage, and a cinder in one's eye a normal accident)
suggests that it belongs well back in the nineteenth century.
What connects this song with books like HELEN'S BABIES is first of all a
sort of sweet innocence--the climax, the thing you are supposed to be
slightly shocked at, is an episode with which any modern piece of
naughty-naughty would START--and, secondly, a faint vulgarity of language
mixed up with a certain cultural pretentiousness. HELEN'S BABIES is
intended as a humorous, even a farcical book, but it is haunted all the
way through by words like "tasteful" and "ladylike", and it is funny
chiefly because its tiny disasters happen against a background of
conscious gentility. "Handsome, intelligent, composed, tastefully
dressed, without a suspicion of the flirt or the languid woman of fashion
about her, she awakened to the utmost my every admiring sentiment"--thus
is the heroine described, figuring elsewhere as "erect, fresh, neat,
composed, bright-eyed, fair-faced, smiling and observant". One gets
beautiful glimpses of a now-vanished world in such remarks as: "I believe
you arranged the floral decorations at St Zephaniah's Fair last winter,
Mr Burton? 'Twas the most tasteful display of the season." But in spite
of the occasional use of "'twas" and other archaisms--"parlour" for
sitting-room, "chamber" for bedroom, "real" as an adverb, and so
forth--the book does not "date" very markedly, and many of its admirers
imagine it to have been written round about 1900. Actually it was written
in 1875, a fact which one might infer from internal evidence, since the
hero, aged twenty-eight, is a veteran of the civil war.
The book is very short and the story is a simple one. A young bachelor is
prevailed on by his sister to look after her house and her two sons, aged
five and three, while she and her husband go on a fortnight's holiday.
The children drive him almost mad by an endless succession of such acts
as falling into ponds, swallowing poison, throwing keys down wells,
cutting themselves with razors, and the like, but also facilitate his
engagement to "a charming girl, whom, for about a year, I had been
adoring from afar". These events take place in an outer suburb of New
York, in a society which now seems astonishingly sedate, formal,
domesticated and, according to current conceptions, un-American. Every
action is governed by etiquette. To pass a carriage full of ladies when
your hat is crooked is an ordeal; to recognise an acquaintance in church
is ill-bred; to become engaged after a ten days' courtship is a severe
social lapse. We are accustomed to thinking of American society as more
crude, adventurous and, in a cultural sense, democratic than our own, and
from writers like Mark Twain, Whitman and Bret Harte, not to mention the
cowboy and Red Indian stories of the weekly papers, one draws a picture
of a wild anarchic world peopled by eccentrics and desperadoes who have
no traditions and no attachment to one place. That aspect of
nineteenth-century America did of course exist, but in the more populous
eastern States a society similar to Jane Austen's seems to have survived
longer than it did in England. And it is hard not to feel that it was a
better kind of society than that which arose from the sudden
industrialisation of the later part of the century. The people in HELEN'S
BABIES or LITTLE WOMEN may be mildly ridiculous, but they are
uncorrupted. They have something that is perhaps best described as
integrity, or good morale, founded partly on an unthinking piety. It is a
matter of course that everyone attends church on Sunday morning and says