The rest of the book is all England. There is a sketch: “Conrad Is Dead.” And another, an appreciation of Moby Dick. But for the rest, it is the cruel disillusion, and then the infinitely soothing illusion of this world of ours.
Mr. Tomlinson has at the back of his mind, for ever, the grisly vision of his war experience. In itself, this is a horror of disillusion in the world of man. We cannot get away from it, and we have no business to. Man has turned the world into a thing of horror. What we have to do is to face the fact.
And facing it, accept other values and make another world. “We now open a new volume on sport,” says Mr. Tomlinson, “with an antipathy we never felt for Pawnees, through the reading of a recent narrative by an American who had been collecting in Africa for an American museum. He confessed he would have felt some remorse when he saw the infant still clinging to the breast of its mother, a gorilla, whom he had just murdered; so he shot the infant without remorse, because he was acting scientifically. As a corpse, the child added to the value of its dead mother.”
We share Mr. Tomlinson’s antipathy to such sportsmen and such scientists absolutely. And it is not mere pity on our part for the gorilla. It is an absolute detestation of the insentience of armed, bullying men, in face of living, sentient things. Surely the most beastly offence against life is this degenerate insentience. It is not cruelty, exactly, which makes such a sportsman. It is crass insentience, a crass stupidity and deadness of fibre. Such overweening fellows, called men, are barren of the feeling for life. A gorilla is a live thing, with a strange unknown life of its own. Even to get a glimpse of its weird life, one little gleam of insight, makes our own life so much the wider, more vital. As a dead thing it can only depress us. We must have a feeling for life itself.
And this Mr. Tomlinson conveys: the strangeness and the beauty of life. Once be disillusioned with the man-made world, and you still see the magic, the beauty, the delicate realness of all the other life. Mr. Tomlinson sees it in flashes of great beauty. It comes home to him even in the black moth he caught. “It was quiet making a haze,” etc. He sees the strange terror of the world of insects. “A statue to St. George killing a mosquito instead of a dragon would look ridiculous. But it was lucky for the Saint he had only a dragon to overcome.”
Life! Life exists: and perhaps men do not truly exist. “And for a wolf who runs up and down his cage, sullenly ignoring our overtures, and behaving as though we did not exist, we begin to feel there is something to be said.”
“And consider the fascination of the octopus!”
“I heard a farmer,” etc.
“At sunrise today,” etc.
“Perhaps the common notion,” etc.
One gradually gets a new vision of the world, if one goes through the disillusion absolutely. It is a world where all things are alive, and where the life of strange creatures and beings flickers on us and makes it take strange new developments. “But in this estuary,” etc. And it is exactly so The earth is a planet, and we are inhabitants of the planet, along with many other strange creatures. Life is a strange planetary phenomenon, all interwoven.
Mr. Tomlinson gives us glimpses of a new vision, what we might call the planetary instead of the mundane vision. The glimpses are of extreme beauty, so sensitive to the other life in things. And how grateful we ought to be to a man who sets new visions, new feelings sensitively quivering in us.
The World of William Clissold, by H. G. Wells
The World of William Clissold is, we are told, a novel. We are assured it is a novel, and nothing but a novel. We are not allowed to think of it even as a “mental autobiography” of Mr. Wells. It is a novel.
Let us hope so. For, having finished this first volume, nothing but hope of finding something in the two volumes yet to appear will restrain us from asserting, roundly and flatly, that this is simply not good enough to be called a novel. If Tono-Bungay is a novel, then this is not one.
We have with us the first volume of The World of William Clissold. The second volume will appear on October ist, the third on November ist. We may still hope, then, if we wish to.
This first volume consists of “A Note before the Title-Page,” in which we are forbidden to look on this book as anything but a novel, and especially forbidden to look on it as a roman a clef: which means we mustn’t identify the characters with any living people such as, for instance, Mr. Winston Churchill or the Countess of Oxford and Asquith; which negative command is very easy to obey, since, in this first volume, at least, there are no created characters at all: it is all words, words, words, about Socialism and Karl Marx, bankers and cave-men, money and the superman. One would welcome any old scarecrow of a character on this dreary, flinty hillside of abstract words.
The next thing is the title-page: “The World of William Clissold: A Novel from a New Angle” — whatever that pseudo-scientific phrase may mean.
Then comes Book I: “The Frame of the Picture.” All right, we think! If we must get the frame first, and the picture later, let’s make the best of the frame.
The frame consists of William Clissold informing us that he is an elderly gentleman of fifty-nine, and that he is going to tell us all about himself. He is quite well off, having made good in business, so that now he has retired and has bought a house near Cannes, and is going to tell us everything, absolutely everything about himself: insisting rather strongly that he is and always has been a somewhat scientific gentleman with an active mind, and that his mental activities have been more important than any other activity in his life. In short, he is not a “mere animal,” he is an animal with a ferocious appetite for “ideas,” and enormous thinking powers.
Again, like a submissive reader, we say: “Very well! Proceed!” and we sit down in front of this mental gentleman. William Clissold immediately begins to tell us what he believes, what he always has believed, and what he hasn’t always believed, and what he won’t believe, and we feel how superior he is to other people who believe other mere things. He talks about God, is very uneasy because of Roman Catholics — like an Early Victorian — and is naughtily funny about Mr. G. — which can mean either Mr. Gladstone or Mr. God.
But we bear up. After all, God, or Mr. G., is only the frame for William Clissold. We must put up with a frame of some sort. And God turns out to be Humanity in its nobler or disinterestedly scientific aspect: or the Mind of Men collectively: in short, William Clissold himself, in a home-made halo. Still, after all, it is only a frame. Let us get on to the picture.
Mr. Clissold, being somewhat of an amateur at making a self- portrait and framing it, has got bits of the picture stuck on to the frame, and great angular sections of the frame occupying the space where the picture should be. But patience! It is a sort of futuristic interpenetration, perhaps.
The first bit of the story is a little boy at a country house, sitting in a boat and observing the scientific phenomena of refraction and reflection. He also observes some forget-me-nots on the bank, and rather likes the look of them. So, scrambling carefully down through mud and sedges, he clutches a handful of the blue flowers, only to find his legs scratched and showing blood, from the sedges. “Oh! Oh! I cried in profound dismay. . . . Still do I remember most vividly my astonishment at the treachery of that golden, flushed, and sapphire-eyed day. — That it should turn on me!”
This “section” is called “The Treacherous Forget-me-nots.” But since, after all, the forget-me-nots had never asked the boy to gather them, wherein lay the treachery?
But they represent poetry. And perhaps William Clissold means to convey that, scrambling after poetry, he scratched his legs, and fell to howling, and called the poetry treacherous.
As for a child thinking that the sapphire-eyed day had turned on him — what a dreary old-boy of a child, if he did! But it is elderly- gentleman psychology, not childish.
The story doesn’t get on very fast, and is extremely sketchy. The elderly Mr. Clissold is obviously bored by it himself. Two little boys, their mother and fathe
r, move from Bexhill to a grand country house called Mowbray. In the preface we are assured that Mowbray does not exist on earth, and we can well believe it. After a few years, the father of the two boys, a mushroom city magnate, fails, is arrested as a swindler, convicted, and swallows potassium cyanide. We have no vital glimpse of him. He never says anything, except “Hello, Sonny!” And he does ask the police to have some dejeuner with him, when he is arrested. The boys are trailed round Belgium by a weep ing mother, who also is not created, and with whom they are only- bored. The mother marries again: the boys go to the London University: and the story is lost again in a vast grey drizzle of words.
William Clissold, having in “The Frame” written a feeble resume of Mr. Wells’s God the Invisible King, proceeds in The Story, Book II, to write a much duller resume of Mr. Wells’s Outline of History. Cave-men, nomads, patriarchs, tribal Old Men, out they all come again, in the long march of human progress. Mr. Clissold, who holds forth against “systems,” cannot help systematizing us all into a gradual and systematic uplift from the ape. There is also a complete expose of Socialism and Karl Marxism and finance, and a denunciation of Communism. There is a little feeble praise of the pure scientist who does physical research in a laboratory, and a great contempt of professors and dons who lurk in holes and study history. Last, and not least, there is a contemptuous sweeping of the temple, of all financiers, bankers, and money-men: they are all unscientific, untrained semi-idiots monkeying about with things they know nothing of.
And so, rather abruptly, end of Vol. I.
Except, of course, William Clissold has been continually taking a front seat in the picture, aged fifty-nine, in the villa back of Cannes. There is a slim slip of a red-haired Clem, who ruffles the old gentleman’s hair.
“ ‘It’s no good!’ she said. ‘I can’t keep away from you today.’ And she hasn’t! She has ruffled my hair, she has also ruffled my mind” — much more important, of course, to William C.
This is the young Clementina: “She has a mind like one of those water-insects that never get below the surface of anything. . . . She professes an affection for me that is altogether monstrous” — I should say so — ”and she knows no more about my substantial self than the water-insect knows of the deeps of the pond. . . . She knows as little about the world.”
Poor Clementina, that lean, red-haired slip of a young thing. She is no more to him than an adoring sort of mosquito. But oh! wouldn’t we like to hear all she does know about him, this sexagenarian bore, who says of her: “the same lean, red-haired Clem, so absurdly insistent that she idolizes me, and will have no other man but me, invading me whenever she dares, and protecting me,” etc.
Clementina, really, sounds rather nice. What a pity she didn’t herself write The World of William Clissold: it would have been a novel, then. But she wouldn’t even look at the framework of that world, says Clissold. And we don’t blame her.
What is the elderly gentleman doing with her at all? Is it his “racial urge,” as he calls it, still going on, rather late in life? We imagine the dear little bounder saying to her: “You are the mere object of my racial urge.” To which, no doubt, she murmurs in the approved Clissold style: “My King!”
But it is altogether a poor book: the effusion of a peeved elderly gentleman who has nothing to grumble at, but who peeves at everything, from Clem to the High Finance, and from God, or Mr. G., to Russian Communism. 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 of peevishness 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 or 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?
And in that case the superficial Clementina no doubt knows far more about the “deeps of the pond” of Mr. Clissold than that tiresome gentleman knows himself. He grinds on and on at the stale bones of sociology, while his actual living goes to pieces, falls into a state of irritable peevishness which makes his “mental autobiography” tiresome. His scale of values is all wrong.
So far, anyhow, this work is not a novel, because it contains none of the passionate and emotional reactions which are at the root of all thought, and which must be conveyed in a novel. This book is all chewed-up newspaper, and chewed-up scientific reports, like a mouse’s nest. But perhaps the novel will still come: in Vols. II and III.
For, after all, Mr. Wells is not Mr. Clissold, thank Godl And Mr. Wells has given us such brilliant and such very genuine novels that we can only hope the Clissold “angle” will straighten out in Vol. II.
Said the Fisherman, by Marmaduke Pickthall
Since the days of Lady Hester Stanhope and her romantic pranks, down to the exploits of Colonel T. E. Lawrence in the late war, there seems always to have been some more or less fantastic Englishman, or woman, Arabizing among the Arabs. Until we feel we know the desert and the Bedouin better than we know Wales or our next- door neighbour.
Perhaps there is an instinctive sympathy between the Semite Arab and the Anglo-Saxon. If so, it must have its root way down in the religious make-up of both peoples. The Arab is intensely a One-God man, and so is the Briton.
But the Briton is mental and critical in his workings, the Arab uncritical and impulsive. In the Arab, the Englishman sees himself with the lid off.
T. E. Lawrence distinguishes two kinds of Englishmen in the East: the kind that goes native, more or less like Sir Richard Burton, and takes on native dress, speech, manners, morals, and women; then the other kind, that penetrates to the heart of Arabia, like Charles M. Doughty, but remains an Englishman in the fullest sense of the word. Doughty, in his rags and misery, his blond beard, his scrupulous honesty, with his Country for ever behind him, is indeed the very pith of England, dwelling in the houses of hair.
Marmaduke Pickthall, I am almost sure, remained an Englishman and a gentleman in the Near East. Only in imagination he goes native. And that thoroughly.
We are supposed to get inside the skin of Said the Fisherman, to hunger, fear, lust, enjoy, suffer, and dare as Said does, and to see the world through Said’s big, dark, shining Arab eyes.
It is not easy. It is not easy for a man of one race entirely to identify himself with a man of another race, of different culture and religion. When the book opens, Said is a fisherman naked on the coast of Syria, living with his wife Hasneh in a hut by the sands. Said is young, strong-bodied, and lusty: Hasneh is beginning to fade.
The first half of the novel is called: The Book of his Luck; the second half: The Book of his Fate. We are to read into the word Fate the old meaning, of revenge of the gods.
Said’s savings are treacherously stolen by his partner. The poor fisherman wails, despairs, rouses up, and taking a hint about evil genii, packs himself and his scraps on an ass, and lets Hasneh run behind, and sets off to Damascus.
The Book of his Luck is a curious mixture of Arabian Nights and modern realism. I think, on the whole, Scheherazade’s influence is strongest. The poor fisherman suddenly becomes one of the lusty Sinbad sort, and his luck is stupendous. At the same time, he is supposed to remain the simple man Said, with ordinary hu
man responsibilities.
We are prepared to go gaily on with Said, his sudden glory of impudence and luck, when straight away we get a hit below the belt. Said, the mere man, abandons the poor, faithful, devoted Hasneh, his wife, in circumstances of utter meanness. We double up, and for the time being completely lose interest in the lucky and lusty fisherman. It takes an incident as sufficiently realistic and as amusing as that of the missionary’s dressing-gown, to get us up again. Even then we have cold feet because of the impudent Said; he looks vulgar, common. And we resent a little the luck and the glamour of him, the fact that we have to follow him as a hero. A picaresque novel is all very well, but the one quality demanded of a picaro, to make him more than a common sneak, is a certain reckless generosity.
Said is reckless enough, but, as shown by Mr. Pickthall, with impudence based on meanness, the sort of selfishness that is mongrel, and a bit sneaking. Vet Mr. Pickthall still continues to infuse a certain glamour into him, and to force our sympathy for him.
It is the thing one most resents in a novel: having one’s sympathy forced by the novelist, towards some character we should never naturally sympathize with.
Said is a handsome, strong, lusty scoundrel, impudent, with even a certain dauntlessness. We could get on with him very well indeed, if every now and then we didn’t get another blow under the belt, by a demonstration of his cold, gutter-snipe callousness.
One almost demands revenge on him. The revenge comes, and again we are angry.
The author hasn’t treated us fairly. He has identified himself too closely with his hero: he can’t see wood for trees. Because, of course, inside the skin of Said, Mr. Pickthall is intensely a good, moral Englishman, and intensely uneasy.
So with an Englishman’s over-scrupulous honesty, he has had to show us his full reactions to Said. Marmaduke Pickthall, Englishman, is fascinated by Said’s lustiness, his reckless, impudent beauty, his immoral, or non-moral nature. We hope it is non-moral. We are shown it is immoral. Marmaduke Pickthall loathes the mean immorality of Said, and has to punish him for it, in the Book of his Fate.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1033