by James Joyce
James A. Joyce 7 S. Peter’s Terrace Cabra, Dublin
New Fiction
1903
This little volume is a collection of stories dealing chiefly with Indian life. The reader will find the first five stories — the adventures of Prince Aga Mirza — the more entertaining part of the book, if he is to any extent interested in tales of Indian magic. The appeal, however, of such stories is, frankly, sensational, and we are spared the long explanations which the professional occultists use. The stories that treat of camp life are soundly seasoned with that immature brutality which is always so anxious to be mistaken for virility. But the people who regulate the demand for fiction are being day by day so restricted by the civilization they have helped to build up that they are not unlike the men of Mandeville’s time, for whom enchantments, and monsters, and deeds of prowess were so liberally purveyed.
The Mettle of the Pasture
A book written by the author of ‘The Increasing Purpose’ is sure of a kind hearing from a public which can be thankful to those who serve it well. Mr. Allen has not yet written any work of extraordinary merit, but he has written many which are, so far as they go, serious and patient interpretations of his people. Whether it be in the writer or in his theme, one cannot fail to recognize here the quality of self-reliant sanity — the very mettle (to employ the Shakespearian phrase which serves him for the title) of the pasture. The style is nearly always clean and limpid, and is at fault only where it assumes ornateness. The method is psychological, very slightly narrative, and though that epithet has been used to cover a multitude of literary sins, it can be as safely applied to Mr. Allen as longo intervallo to Mr. Henry James.
It is a tragedy of scandal, the story of a love affair, which is abruptly terminated by a man’s confession, but which is renewed again years later when it has passed through the trials which the world proposes to such as would renew any association and so offer offence to time and change. This story is surrounded with two or three other love affairs, all more or less conventional. But the characterization is often very original — as in the case of old Mrs. Conyers — and the general current of the book arrests the reader by its suggestion of an eager lively race working out its destiny among other races under the influence of some vague pantheistic spirit which is at times strangely mournful. ‘For her’, he says somewhere in a passage of great charm, ‘for her it was one of the moments when we are reminded that our lives are not in our keeping, and that whatsoever is to befall us originates in sources beyond our power. Our wills may indeed reach the length of our arms, or as far as our voices can penetrate space; but without us and within us moves one universe that saves us or ruins us only for its own purposes; and we are no more free amid its laws than the leaves of the forest are free to decide their own shapes and seasons of unfolding, to order the showers by which they are to be nourished, and the storms which shall scatter them at last.’
A Peep Into History
1903
One may have no satirical reference either to the subject of this book, or to its treatment by Mr. Pollock, in saying that this account of the Popish Plot is far more diverting than many works of fiction. Mr. Pollock, though he seems thoroughly initiated into the mysteries of the historical method, has set forth an account of the ‘Plot’ which is clear, detailed, and (so far as it is critical) liberal-minded.
By far the most interesting part of the book is the story of the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey — a murder so artistically secret that it evoked the admiration of De Quincey, a murder so little documented, yet so overwhelmed with false testimonies, that Lord Acton declared it an insoluble mystery. But justice was freely dealt out in those days of political and religious rancour, and Green and Berry suffered the last penalty for a crime of which posterity (unanimous in this one thing at least) has acquitted them.
As for those who swore against the poor wretches, Prance and Bedloe cannot be accorded the same condemnation. Prance, after all, was only lying himself out of a very awkward position, but Bedloe was a more enterprising ruffian, second only to his monstrous, moon-faced leader8 the horrible Oates. It is bewildering to read all the charges and counter-charges made in connection with the Plot, and it is with a sigh of sympathy that we read of Charles’s conduct. ‘In the middle of the confusion the King suddenly left for the races at Newmarket, scandalizing all by his indecent levity.’ Nevertheless he conducted the examination of Oates in a very skilful manner, and he described Oates very succinctly as ‘a most lying knave’.
Mr. Pollock’s treatment of those who have been accused as instigators justifies him in citing a concise phrase from Mabillon on his title page, and the reader will know how patient and scholarly this book is if he compares it with the garbled, ridiculous account set down by L’Estrange.
A French Religious Novel
This novel, reprinted from the pages of one of the leading French reviews, and now very successfully translated into English, seems to have attracted more attention in London than in Paris. It deals with the problem of an uncompromising orthodoxy, beset by a peculiarly modern, or (as the Churchmen would say) morbid scepticism, and sorely tried by that alluring, beautiful, mysterious spirit of the earth, whose voice is for ever breaking in upon, and sometimes tempering, the prayers of the saints.
Augustine Chanteprie, the descendant of an old Catholic family, many of whose members have been disciples of Pascal, has been brought up in an atmosphere of rigid, practical belief, and is destined, if not for a clerical life, at least for such a life in the world as may be jealously guarded from the snares of the devil, sacrificing as little as may be of innocence and piety. Among his ancestors, however, there was one who forsook the holy counsel given him in youth, and assumed the excellent foppery of the world. He built, in protest against the gloomy house of his family, a pleasant folly, which afterwards came to be known as ‘The House of Sin’. Augustine, unfortunately for himself, inherits the double temperament, and little by little the defences of the spiritual life are weakened, and he is made aware of human love as a subtle, insinuating fire. The intercourse of Augustine and Madame Manole is finely conceived, finely executed, enveloped in a glow of marvellous tenderness. A simple narration has always singular charm when we divine that the lives it offers us are themselves too ample, too complex, to be expressed entirely:
‘Augustine and Fanny were now alone. They retraced their steps toward Chene-Pourpre, and suddenly stopping in the middle of the road, they kissed each other .... There was neither light nor sound. Nothing lived under the vault of heaven but the man and the woman intoxicated by their kiss. From time to time, without disengaging their hands, they drew away and looked at each other.’
The last chapters of the book, the chapters in which the tradition of generations overcomes the lover, but so remorselessly that the mortal temple of all those emotions is shattered into fragments, show an admirable adjustment of style and narrative, the prose pausing more and more frequently with every lessening of vitality, and finally expiring (if one may reproduce the impression somewhat fantastically) as it ushers into the unknown, amid a murmur of prayers, the poor trembling soul.
The interest in the politico-religious novel is, of course, an interest of the day, and, perhaps, it is because Huysmans is daily growing more formless and more obviously comedian in his books that Paris has begun to be wearied by the literary oblate. The writer of The House of Sin’, again, is without the advantage of a perverted career, and is not to be reckoned among the converts. The complication of an innocent male and a woman of the world is, perhaps, not very new, but the subject receives here very striking treatment, and the story gains much by a comparison with Bourget’s ‘Mensonges’ — a book that is crude, however detailed and cynical.
‘Marcelle Tinayre’, who seems to have a finer sympathy with Catholicism than most of the neo-Catholics have, is a lover of life and of the fair shows of the world; and though piety and innocence are interwoven with every change of affection and every mood of our
manifold nature in these pages, one is conscious that the writer has suspended over her tragedy, as a spectre of sorrow and desolation, the horrible image of the Jansenist Christ.
Unequal Verse
1903
Mr. Langbridge, in his preface to this volume of his verses, has confessed to so great a number of literary discipleships that one is well prepared for the variety of styles and subjects of which the book is full. Mr. Langbridge’s worst manner is very bad indeed; here the worst vices of Browning are united with a disease of sentiment of which the ‘Master’ cannot be justly accused; here ‘tears splash on ground’, blind beggars, mothers’ girlies, pathetic clerks, and cripples are huddled together in dire confusion, and the colloquial style, half American half Cockney, is employed to adorn their easily-imagined adventures. Anything more lamentable than the result would be difficult to conceive; and the result is all the more lamentable because the few sonnets which Mr. Langbridge has inserted in his volume are evidences of some care and a not inconsiderable technical power. The lines, ‘To Maurice Maeterlinck’, are, therefore, curiously out of place in this farrago of banal epics, so dignified are they in theme, so reserved in treatment, and one can only hope that Mr. Langbridge, when he publishes again, will see fit to sacrifice his taste for ‘comédie larmoyante’, and attest in serious verse that love which he professes for the muse.
Hardly I dare to carry to the feet
Of your presaging dreams, occult, apart.
My book of rhymes, where clamorous wants compete,
And all the air is venal with the mart:
And yet, like you, I hear the white wings beat.
And the dark waters, and the breaking heart.
Mr. Arnold Graves’ New Work
1903
In the introduction which Dr. Tyrrell has written for Mr. Graves’s tragedy, it is pointed out that ‘Clytemnaestra’ is not a Greek play in English, like ‘Atalanta in Calydon’, but rather a Greek story treated from the standpoint of a modern dramatist — in other words it claims to be heard on its own merits merely, and not at all as a literary curio. To leave aside for the moment the subordinate question of language it is not easy to agree with Dr. Tyrrell’s opinion that the treatment is worthy of the subject. On the contrary there would appear to be some serious flaws in the construction. Mr. Graves has chosen to call his play after the faithless wife of Agamemnon, and to make her nominally the cardinal point of interest. Yet from the tenor of the speeches, and inasmuch as the play is almost entirely a drama of the retribution which follows crime, Orestes being the agent of Divine vengeance, it is plain that the criminal nature of the queen has not engaged Mr. Graves’s sympathies.
The play, in fact, is solved according to an ethical idea, and not according to that indifferent sympathy with certain pathological states which is so often anathematized by theologians of the street. Rules of conduct can be found in the books of moral philosophers, but ‘experts’ alone can find them in Elizabethan comedy. Moreover, the interest is wrongly directed when Clytemnasstra, who is about to imperil everything for the sake of her paramour, is represented as treating him with hardly disguised contempt, and again where Agamemnon, who is about to be murdered in his own palace by his own queen on his night of triumph, is made to behave towards his daughter Electra with a stupid harshness which is suggestive of nothing so much as of gout. Indeed, the feeblest of the five acts is the act which deals with the murder. Nor is the effect even sustained, for its second representation during Orestes’ hypnotic trance cannot but mar the effect of the real murder in the third act in the mind of an audience which has just caught Clytemnaestra and Egisthus red-handed.
These faults can hardly be called venial, for they occur at vital points of the artistic structure, and Mr. Graves, who might have sought to cover all with descriptive writing, has been honest enough to employ such a studiously plain language as throws every deformity into instant relief. However, there are fewer offences in the verse than in most of the verse that is written nowadays, and it is perhaps only an indication of the mental confusion incident upon seership when Tiresias, the prophet, is heard exclaiming:
Beware! beware! The stone you started rolling down the hill Will crush you if you do not change your course,
A Neglected Poet
1903
Tennyson is reported to have said that if God made the country and man made the city, it must have been the devil that made the country town. The dreary monotonousness, the squalor, the inevitable moral decay — all, in fine, that has been called ‘provincial’ — is the constant theme of Crabbe’s verse. Patronized in his own day by Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, the friend of Scott, and Rogers, and Bowles, the literary godfather of Fitz- Gerald, Crabbe has so far fallen in our day from his high estate that it is only by a favour that he is accorded mention in some manual of literature.
This neglect, though it can be easily explained, is probably not a final judgment. Of course, much of Crabbe’s work is dull and undistinguished, and he never had such moments as those which Wordsworth can always plead in answer to his critics. On the contrary, it is his chief quality that he employs the metre of Pope so evenly, and with so little of Pope’s brilliancy that he succeeds admirably as narrator of the obscure tragedies of the provinces. His tales are, therefore, his claim to a place in the history of English fiction. At a time when false sentiment and the ‘genteel’ style were fashionable, and when country life was seized upon for exploitation as eagerly as by any of the modern Kailyard school, Crabbe appeared as the champion of realism. Goldsmith had preceded him in treating rural subjects, treating them with an Arcadian grace, it is true, but with what remoteness and lack of true insight and sympathy a comparison of Auburn with ‘The Village’, ‘The Borough’, and ‘The Parish Register’ will show. These latter are no more than names in the ears of the present generation, and it is the purpose of the present monograph to obtain a hearing, at least, for one of the most neglected of English writers.
The name of its author is one of the most honourable and painstaking in contemporary criticism, and amid a multitude of schools and theories perhaps he may succeed in securing a place for one like Crabbe, who, except for a few passages wherein the world of opinion is divided, is an example of sane judgment and sober skill, and who has set forth the lives of villagers with appreciation and fidelity, and with an occasional splendour reminiscent of the Dutchmen.
Mr. Mason’s Novels
1903
These novels, much as they differ in their subjects and styles, are curiously illustrative of the truth of one of Leonardo’s observations. Leonardo, exploring the dark recesses of consciousness in the interests of some semi-pantheistic psychology, has noted the tendency of the mind to impress its own likeness upon that which it creates. It is because of this tendency, he says, that many painters have cast as it were a reflection of themselves over the portraits of others. Mr. Mason, perhaps, in like manner, has allowed these stories to fit themselves into what is doubtless one of the ‘moulds of his understanding’.
Among Mr. Mason’s ‘properties’ the reader will not fail to notice the early, effaceable husband. In ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’ it is Julian Harwood, in ‘The Philanderers’ it is the outcast Gorley, in ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ it is Ralph Warriner. In all three books a previously-implicated girl of wayward habits is associated with a young man, who is a type of class common enough in novels — the sturdy, slow-witted Englishman. It is curious to watch this story reproducing itself without the author’s assent, one imagines, through scenes and times differing so widely.
A minor phenomenon is the appearance of Horace in each story. In ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’ the plan of the castle in the Tyrol, which is the centre of gravity of the story, is made on a page of a little Elzevir copy of Horace. In ‘The Philanderers’ Horace is laid under tribute more than once for a simile worthy of the classical beauty of Clarice. And once again in ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ that interesting figure ‘Major�
�� Wilbraham is represented as engaged on a translation of Horace in the intervals of marauding and blackmailing.
Mr. Mason is much more successful when he is writing of a time or scene somewhat remote from big towns. The Belgravian atmosphere of ‘The Philanderers’ (a title which Mr. Mason has to share with Mr. George Bernard Shaw) is not enlivened by much wit or incident, but ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ has a pleasing sequence of Spanish and Moorish scenes. Mr. Mason’s best book, however, is certainly ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’. The story is of the cape and sword order, and it passes in the years after Sedgemoor. Germany is an excellent place for castles and intrigues; and in the adventurous air of this romance those who have read too many novels of modern life may recreate themselves at will. The writing is often quite pretty, too. Isn’t ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ a pretty name?