Mr. Baring’s book Comfortless Memory is, thank heaven, only a little book, but it is sheer pretence of taking seriously things which its own author can never for a moment consider serious. That is, it is faked seriousness, which is utterly boring. I don’t know when Mr. Baring wrote this slight novel. But he ought to have published it at least twenty years ago, when faked seriousness was more in the vogue. Mr. Byron, the young author, says that progress is the appreciation of Reality. Mr. Baring, the elderly author, offers us a piece of portentous unreality larded with Goethe, Dante, Heine, hopelessly out of date, and about as exciting as stale restaurant cake.
A dull, stuffy elderly author makes faked love to a bewitching but slightly damaged lady who has “lived” with a man she wasn’t married toll She is an enigmatic lady: very! For she falls in love, violently, virginally, deeply, passionately and exclusively, with the comfortably married stuffy elderly author. The stuffy elderly author himself tells us so, much to his own satisfaction. And the lovely, alluring, enigmatic, experienced lady actually expires, in her riding- habit, out of sheer love for the comfortably married elderly author. The elderly author assures us of it. If it were not quite so stale it would be funny.
Mr. Somerset Maugham is even more depressing. His Mr. Ashen- den is also an elderly author, who becomes an agent in the British Secret Service during the War. An agent in the Secret Service is a sort of spy. Spying is a dirty business, and Secret Service altogether is a world of under-dogs, a world in which the meanest passions are given play.
And this is Mr. Maugham’s, or at least Mr. Ashenden’s world. Mr. Ashenden is an elderly author, so he takes life seriously, and takes his fellow-men seriously, with a seriousness already a little out of date. He has a sense of responsibility towards humanity. It would be much better if he hadn’t. For Mr. Ashenden’s sense of responsibility oddly enough is inverted. He is almost passionately concerned with proving that all men and all women are either dirty dogs or imbeciles. If they are clever men or women, they are crooks, spies, police-agents, and tricksters “making good,” living in the best hotels because they know that in a humble hotel they’ll be utterly declass£, and showing off their base cleverness, and being dirty dogs, from Ashenden himself, and his mighty clever colonel, and the distinguished diplomat, down to the mean French porters.
If, on the other hand, you get a decent, straight individual, especially an individual capable of feeling love for another, then you are made to see that such a person is a despicable fool, encompassing his own destruction. So the American dies for his dirty washing, the Hindu dies for a blowsy woman who wants her wrist-watch back, the Greek merchant is murdered by mistake, and so on. It is better to be a live dirty dog than a dead lion, says Mr. Ashenden. Perhaps it is, to Mr. Ashenden.
But these stories, being “serious,” are faked. Mr. Maugham is a splendid observer. He can bring before us persons and places most excellently. But as soon as the excellently observed characters have to move, it is a fake. Mr. Maugham gives them a humorous shove or two. We find they are nothing but puppets, instruments of the author’s pet prejudice. The author’s pet prejudice being “humour,” it would be hard to find a bunch of more ill-humoured stories, in which the humour has gone more rancid.
Fallen Leaves, by V. V. Rozanov
Rozanov is now acquiring something of a European reputation. There is a translation in French, and one promised in German, and the advanced young writers in Paris and Berlin talk of him as one of the true lights. Perhaps Solitaria is more popular than Fallen Leaves: but then, perhaps it is a little more sensational: Fallen Leaves is not sensational: it is on the whole quiet and sad, and truly Russian.
The book was written, apparently, round about 1912: and the author died a few years later. So that, from the western point of view, Rozanov seems like the last of the Russians. Post-revolution Russians are something different.
Rozanov is the last of the Russians, after Chekhov. It is the true Russian voice, become very plaintive now. Artzybashev, Gorky, Merejkovski are his contemporaries, but they are all three a little bit off the tradition. But Rozanov is right on it. His first wife had been Dostoievsky’s mistress: and somehow his literary spirit showed the same kind of connexion: a Dostoievskian flicker that steadied and became a legal and orthodox light; yet always, of course, suspect. For Rozanov had been a real and perverse liar before he reformed and became a pious, yet suspected conservative. Perhaps he was a liar to the end: who knows? Yet Solitaria and Fallen Leaves are not lies, not so much lies as many more esteemed books.
The Fallen Leaves are just fragments of thought jotted down anywhere and anyhow. As to the importance of the where or how, perhaps it is important to keep throwing the reader out into the world, by means of the: At night: At work: In the tram: In the w.c. — which is sometimes printed after the reflections. Perhaps, to avoid any appearance of systematization, or even of philosophic abstraction, these little addenda are useful. Anyhow, it is Russian, and deliberate, done with the intention of keeping the reader — or Rozanov himself — in contact with the moment, the actual time and place. Rozanov says that with Solitaria he introduced a new tone into literature, the tone of manuscript, a manuscript being unique and personal, coming from the individual alone direct to the reader. And “the secret (bordering on madness) that I am talking to myself: so constantly and attentively and passionately, that apart from this I practically hear nothing” — this is the secret of his newness, and of his book.
The description is just: and fortunately, on the whole, Rozanov talks sincerely to himself; he really does, on the whole, refrain from performing in front of himself. Of course he is self-conscious: he knows it and accepts it and tries to make it a stark-naked self- consciousness, between himself and himself as between himself and God. “Lord, preserve in me that chastity of the writer: not to look in the glass.” From a professional liar it is a true and sincere prayer. “I am coquetting like a girl before the whole world, hence my constant agitation.” “A writer must suppress the writer in himself (authorship, literariness).”
He is constantly expressing his hatred of literature, as if it poisoned life for him, as if he felt he did not live, he was only literary. “The most happy moments of life I remember were those when I saw (heard) people in a state of happiness. Stakha and A.P.P-va, ‘My Friend’s’ story of her first love and marriage (the culminating point of my life). From this I conclude that I was born a contemplator, not an actor. I came into the world in order to see, and not to accomplish.” There is his trouble, that he felt he was always looking on at life, rather than partaking in it. And he felt this as a humiliation: and in his earlier days, it had made him act up, as the Americans say. He had acted up as if he were a real actor on life’s stage. But it was too theatrical: his “lying,” his “evil” were too much acted up. A liar and an evil bird he no doubt was, because the lies and the acting up to evil, whether they are “pose” or spontaneous, have a vile effect. But he never got any real satisfaction even out of that. He never felt he had really been evil. He had only acted up, like all the Stavrogins, or Ivan Karamazovs of Dostoievsky. Always acting up, trying to act feelings because you haven’t really got any. That was the condition of the Russians at the end: even Chekhov. Being terribly emotional, terribly full of feeling, terribly good and pathetic or terribly evil and shocking, just to make yourself have feelings, when you have none. This was very Russian — and is very modern. A great deal of the world is like it today.
Rozanov left off “acting up” and became quiet and decent, except, perhaps, for little bouts of hysteria, when he would be perfectly vicious towards a friend, or make a small splash of “sin.” As far as a man who has no real fount of emotion can love he loved his second wife, “My Friend.” He tried very, very hard to love her, and no doubt he succeeded. But there was always the taint of pity, and she, poor thing, must have been terribly emotionally overwrought, as a woman is with an emotional husband who has no real virile emotion or compassion, only “pity.” “Europ
ean civilization will perish through compassion,” he says: but then goes on to say, profoundly, that it is not compassion but pseudo-compassion, with an element of perversity in it. This is very Dostoievskian: and this pseudo-compassion tainted even Rozanov’s love for his wife. There is somewhere an element of mockery. And oh, how Rozanov himself would have liked to escape it, and just to feel simple affection. But he couldn’t. “ ‘Today’ was completely absent in Dostoievsky,” he writes. Which is a very succinct way of saying that Dostoievsky never had any immediate feelings, only “projected” ones, which are bound to destroy the immediate object, the actual “today,” the very body which is “today.” So poor Rozanov saw his wife dying under his eyes with a paralysis due to a disease of the brain. She was his “today,” and he could not help, somewhere, jeering at her. But he suffered, and suffered deeply. At the end, one feels his suffering was real: his grief over his wife was real. So he had gained that much reality: he really grieved for her, and that was love. It was a great achievement, after all, for the most difficult thing in the world is to achieve real feeling, especially real sympathy, when the sympathetic centres seem, from the very start, as in Rozanov, dead. But Rozanov knew his own nullity, and tried very hard to come through to real honest feeling. And in his measure, he succeeded. After all the Dostoievskian hideous “impurity” he did achieve a certain final purity, or genuineness, or true individuality, towards the end. Even at the beginning of Fallen Leaves he is often sentimental and false, repulsive.
And one cannot help feeling a compassion for the Russians of the old regime. They were such healthy barbarians in Peter the Great’s time. Then the whole accumulation of western ideas, ideals, and inventions was poured in a mass into their hot and undeveloped consciousness, and worked like wild yeast. It produced a century of literature, from Pushkin to Rozanov, and then the wild working of this foreign leaven had ruined, for the time being, the very constitution of the Russian psyche. It was as if they had taken too violent a drug, or been injected with too strong a vaccine. The affective and effective centres collapsed, the control went all wrong, the energy died down in a rush, the nation fell, for the time being completely ruined. Too sudden civilization always kills. It kills the South Sea Islanders: it killed the Russians, more slowly, and perhaps even more effectually. Once the idea and the ideal become too strong for the spontaneous emotion in the individual, the civilizing influence ceases to be civilizing and becomes very harmful, like powerful drugs which ruin the balance and destroy the control of the organism.
Rozanov knew this well. What he says about revolution and democracy leaves nothing to be said. And what he says of “officialdom” is equally final. I believe Tolstoi would be absolutely amazed if he could come back and see the Russia of today. I believe Rozanov would feel no surprise. He knew the inevitability of it. His attitude to the Jews is extraordinary, and shows uncanny penetration. And his sort of “conservatism,” which would be Fascism today, was only a hopeless attempt to draw back from the way things were going.
But the disaster was inside himself already; there was no drawing back. Extraordinary is his note on his “dreaminess.” “At times I am aware of something monstrous in myself. And that monstrous thing is my dreaminess. Then nothing can penetrate the circle traced by it.
“I am all stone.
“And a stone is a monster.
“For one must love and be aflame.
“From that dreaminess have come all my misfortunes in life (my former work in the Civil Service), the mistake of my whole proceedings (only when ‘out of myself was I attentive to My Friend [his wife] — and her pains), and also my sins.
“In my dreaminess I could do nothing.
“And on the other hand I could do anything [‘sin’].
“Afterwards I was sorry: but it was too late. Dreaminess has devoured me, and everything round me.”
There is the clue to the whole man’s life: this “dreaminess” when he is like stone, insentient, and can do nothing, yet can do “anything.” Over this dreaminess he has no control, nor over the stoni- ness. But what seemed to him dreaminess and stoniness seemed to others, from his actions, vicious malice and depravity. So that’s that. It is one way of being damned.
And there we have the last word of the Russian, before the great debacle. Anyone who understands in the least Rozanov’s state of soul, in which, apparently, he was born, born with this awful insentient stoniness somewhere in him, must sympathize deeply with his real suffering and his real struggle to get back a positive self, a feeling self: to overcome the “dreaminess,” to dissolve the stone. How much, and how little, he succeeded we may judge from this book: and from his harping on the beauty of procreation and fecundity: and from his strange and self-revealing statements concerning Weininger. Rozanov is modern, terribly modern. And if he does not put the fear of God into us, he puts a real fear of destiny, or of doom: and of “civilization” which does not come from within, but which is poured over the mind, by “education.”
Art Nonsense and Other Essays, by Eric Gill
First published in the Book Collector’s Quarterly, this review was accompanied by a note from Mrs. Lawrence to this effect: “Lawrence wrote this unfinished review a few days before he died. The book interested him, and he agreed with much in it. Then he got tired of writing and I persuaded him not to go on. It is the last thing he wrote.”
Art Nonsense and Other Essays, reads the title of this expensive, handsomely printed book. Instinctively the eye reads: Art Nonsense and Other Nonsense, especially as the letter “O” in Mr. Gill’s type rolls so large and important, in comparison with the other vowels.
But it isn’t really fair. “Art Nonsense” is the last essay in the book, and not the most interesting. It is the little essays at the beginning that cut most ice. Then in one goes, with a plunge.
Let us say all the bad things first. Mr. Gill is not a born writer: he is a crude and crass amateur. Still less is he a born thinker, in the reasoning and argumentative sense of the word. He is again a crude and crass amateur: crass is the only word: maddening, like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in a pub — argefying would describe it better — and banging his fist. Even, from his argument, one would have to conclude that Mr. Gill is not a born artist. A born craftsman, rather. He deliberately takes up the craftsman’s point of view, argues about it like a craftsman, like a man in a pub, and really has a craftsman’s dislike of the fine arts. He has, au fond, the man-in-a-pub’s moral mistrust of art, though he tries to get over it.
So that there is not really much about art in this book. There is what Mr. Gill feels and thinks as a craftsman, shall we say as a medieval craftsman? We start off with a two-page “Apology”: bad. Then comes an essay on “Slavery and Freedom” (1918), followed by “Essential Perfection” (1918), “A Grammar of Industry” (1919), “Westminster Cathedral” (1920), “Dress” (1920), “Songs without Clothes” (1921), “Of Things Necessary and Unnecessary” (1921), “Quae ex Veritate et Bono” (1921), on to the last essay, the twenty- fourth, on “Art Nonsense,” written in 1929. The dates are interesting: the titles are interesting. What is “Essential Perfection”? and what are “Songs without Clothes”? and why these tags of Latin? and what is a “Grammar of Industry,” since industry has nothing to do with words? So much of it is jargon, like a workman in a pub.
So much of it is jargon. Take the blurb on the wrapper, which is extracted from Mr. Gill’s “Apology.” “Two primary ideas run through all the essays of this book: that ‘art is simply the well making of what needs making’ and that ‘art is collaboration with God in creating.’ “
Could anything, I ask you, be worse? “Art is simply the well making of what needs making.” There’s a sentence for youl So simple! Imagine that a song like “Sally in our Alley” — which is art — should be “simply the well making of what needs making.” Or that it should be “collaboration with God in creating.” What a nasty, conceited, American sort of phrasel And how one dislikes this modern hob-
nobbing with God, or giving Him the go-by.
But if one once begins to quarrel with Mr. Gill, one will never leave off. His trick of saying, over and over, “upon the contrary” instead of “on the contrary,” his trick of firing off phrases, as in the essay on “Essential Perfection,” which opens: “God is Love. That is not to say merely that God is loving or lovable, but that He is Love. In this, Love is an absolute, not a relative term. The Love of God is man’s Essential Perfection. The Essential Perfection of man is not in his physical functions — the proper material exercise of his organs — but in his worship of God, and the worship of God is perfect in Charity” — all of which means really nothing: even his trick of printing a line under a word, for emphasis, instead of using italics — an untidy proceeding; if he doesn’t like italics, why not space wider, in the Continental fashion? — all this is most irritating. Irritating like an uneducated workman in a pub holding forth and showing off, making a great noise with a lot of cliches, and saying nothing at all.
Then we learn that Mr. Gill is a Roman Catholic: surely a convert. And we know these new English Catholics. They are the last words in Protest. They are Protestants protesting against Protestantism, and so becoming Catholics to Protestants, they have protested against every absolute. As Catholics, therefore, they will swallow all the old absolutes whole, swallow the pill without looking at it, and call that Faith. The big pill being God, and little pills being terms like Charity and Chastity and Obedience and Humility. Swallow them whole, and you are a good Catholic; lick at them and see what they taste like, and you are a queasy Protestant. Mr. Gill is a Catholic, so he uses terms like “Holy Church” and “a good R.C.” quite easily, at first; but as the years go by, more rarely. The mere function of swallowing things whole becomes tedious.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1038