The Critical Game Part 7

II.

The supreme service of William James to philosophy is the restoration of philosophy to the uses of life. At least that is the tendency of his philosophy. Even though much wisdom still remains shut up in a tower, indifferent to life, and though life may often be ungrateful to and suspicious of such wisdom as is offered to it, nevertheless James's attempt to bring about a _rapprochement_ was his finest contribution and is expressed in some of his most glowing pages. He came at the right time and ill.u.s.trated in himself one of his hearty beliefs that Humanity will produce all the types of thinker that it needs. At the moment when he entered the realm of philosophy, the physical sciences had arrogantly a.s.sumed, if not all wisdom, the possession of the correct method of searching for wisdom. On the other hand, the transcendental philosophers held themselves aloof from the physical sciences and ignored psychology. This division of interest in a world which James himself tried to keep manageably split up and pluralistic, was his first philosophic perplexity and, in his treatment of the problem, he committed himself to inconsistencies and self-contradictions, which were partly inherent in the situation and partly due to his temperament.

Through all his writings, from one of his earliest papers (that on Renan's "Dialogues," republished in "Collected Essays and Reviews") to the last chapters of "The Meaning of Truth," James saw philosophers as so many individuals, each fighting under his own banner of truth, and he was puzzled because they would not be reconciled and fight together against the powers of darkness which must be conquered if philosophy is ever to be worth anything, and if there is ever to be any reason why there should be philosophers to sit in comfortably endowed chairs.

No critic took more keenly humorous delight than James did in the disputes of the schools, or stirred up with more lively argument the factions whose lack of solidarity he deplored.

Take two examples. While James was young and still under the influence of his laboratory studies he made out a good case for psychology as a natural science, admitting that in its present stage of development it is rather a loose subject, but demanding for its best interests an application of the scientific method. Then he saw that he had gone counter to his own belief in the unity of knowledge, or the unity of study. It occurred to him that something valuable might be lost to psychology if metaphysical and epistemological inquiries were debarred. So in an address to the American Psychological a.s.sociation, he openly renounced his first position, adding, however, as a half-smiling reservation, that metaphysics should give up some of its nonsense as a condition of admission.

In one of his last papers, that on "Bradley or Bergson," James takes a shrewd pleasure in tracing their resemblances as far as they go, and then laments that they diverge, because if they had kept together they could between them have buried post-Kantian rationalism. For a complexity of partisans.h.i.+p in unity that can not be surpa.s.sed! But James's willingness to be pallbearer at the funeral of a philosophic idea was not inconsonant with his determination that some other ideas of doubtful character should be allowed to grow up and thrive. For the old idea had had its say. The new ideas might be strangled in infancy.

Let each new idea have its time and opportunity. Let everything be tried. It is better to be credulous than bigoted, but to be excessively one or the other is not befitting a philosopher.

Aside from certain technical problems, James's philosophic att.i.tude was always determined by his answer to the question: On which side lies the greater force and fullness of life, the possibility of richness, novelty, adventure? In 1895, at the height of his power as a man--though perhaps he grew wiser as he grew older--he ends a paper on "Degeneration and Genius" thus: "The real lesson of the genius-books is that we should welcome sensibilities, impulses, and obsessions if we have them, as long as by their means the field of our experience grows deeper and we contribute the better to the race's stores; that we should broaden our notion of health instead of narrowing it; that we should regard no single element of weakness as fatal--in short, that we should _not be afraid of life_." The italics are his. If that is not good psychological argument, then there is something the matter with the science of psychology. It is only just such good sense as this that a common man can understand, and the humanity and eloquence of it are better than argument.

Can a common man understand philosophy? James believed that he can both understand it and express it. Two or three times he quotes the saying of his friend the carpenter: "There is very little difference between one man and another, but what little difference there is is very important." He has a hot contempt for Renan's cool contempt for _l'homme vulgaire_, and he admires Clifford's "lavishly generous confidence in the worthiness of average human nature to be told all the truth, the lack of which in Goethe made him an inspiration to the few but a cold riddle to the many"--and the possession of which by James made him a greater teacher of youth.

He was an instinctive democrat and was always on the side of what, in his social environment, was the unpopular minority. Like Whitman, of whom he often speaks with admiration, he was a born individual aristocrat, with no delusions about the intelligence of the herd but an immense faith in its possibilities. His generosity towards the delusions of common men was warmer than towards the delusions of philosophers, because philosophers have opportunities for study--and should know better. He had only one fear, which sometimes took a belligerent form (there is something in his book on psychology about the relation between belligerency and fear); and that fear was lest he or some other philosopher should try to interfere with a possibly good idea, to put sand, not on the tracks, but in the machinery. The vaguely comforting fatalistic belief that good ideas will prevail and bad ones die he regarded as untrue to the history of human thought, and not good for people whose business it is to express thought. James held that it did make a real difference in the world that a saint or a monster, St. Paul or Bonaparte, did not die in his cradle. It does make a difference--the one ill.u.s.tration that James would have laughed at--that James lived to be a philosopher. Ideas do sometimes seem just to happen, to grow without human guidance, but the precious ideas have to be fought for. Matthew Arnold's idea, that it is our duty to make the best ideas prevail, may seem priggish and dictatorial, yet fundamentally James had the same idea. Pluralism, he says, is not for sick souls but for those in whom the fighting-spirit is alive.

Philosophy does not flourish by accident. Men make it.

Therefore, philosophy begins in the human mind, and is the history of the action of mind on experience. James was from the very beginning a student of the human mind. He began in epistemology and he ended there. One of his earliest essays is a rather too easy slipping of his knife into the "operose inept.i.tude" of Spencer's definition of mind, and his last word about a philosophic puzzle was: "We shall not understand these alterations of consciousness either in this generation or the next."

The right self-contradiction consists not in turning in obedience to others, but in going against the wind from whichever direction it blows. James attacked the too-much in any philosophy, even his own. To the over-credulous he preached caution; to the over-sceptical, faith.

This sort of antagonism between two ideas is not contradiction but balance of mind. Apropos Professor Schiller and others he demands an "all-round statement in cla.s.sic style," and, himself the jolliest joker that ever was in philosophy, he recommends that Mr. Schiller "tone down a little the exuberance of his polemic wit." But to the too sober he says, "Our errors are not such awfully solemn things. A certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness in their behalf."

As a philosopher, James had to use the terms peculiar to his craft, but he so strongly sustained those terms in a structure of words which can be found in a pocket-dictionary that the peculiar terms of the craft become intelligible to simple literate men, and it may be that thereby they become more intelligible as mere philosophic terms. Like Bergson he is a poet and a humorist in his a.n.a.logies and ill.u.s.trations. When we read that "the feeling of 'q' knows whatever reality it resembles," many of us, including the philosophers, I suspect, are lost in the dark. But when we read that "the Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a residuum in the shape of their undevoured tails, but the Kilkenny cats of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all-devouring, and leave no residuum"--then we begin to believe that philosophy may be a human and amusing study and that to be great in philosophy it is not necessary always to be thinking of the other side of the moon.

BIOGRAPHIES OF POE

The biography of Poe got a wrong start immediately after his death when Griswold slandered him or at least put a false emphasis on certain aspects of his character. Since then, every book about Poe has had an argumentative tone, a defensive spirit, which in a way is as unfair to Poe as was the first misrepresentation. One sometimes feels like crying: "For heaven's sake read his work and let the man alone!"

Yet it is not possible to let Poe alone if you have once looked into his life; his story is one of the fascinating chapters of literary history. Professor Smith says that his book, "Edgar Allen Poe, How to Know Him," "is an attempt to subst.i.tute for the travesty the real Poe, to suggest at least the diversity of his interests, his future-mindedness, his sanity, and his humanity." On the whole, Professor Smith's attempt is successful and he does help us to realize Poe's personality, "that co-ordination of thought and mood and conduct, of social action and reaction, of daily interest and aim,"

which Professor Smith justly says, "finds no portrayal in the biographies of Poe."

It is an odd fact that after Griswold two of the more authoritative biographers of Poe did not like him. One was Richard Henry Stoddard; the other, Mr. George E. Woodberry. Neither one, I suspect, chose Poe as a congenial, or even as an interesting subject. The task of writing his biography seems to have fallen to both men as a literary ch.o.r.e; to Stoddard as an official critic who knew Poe, and to Mr. Woodberry as a rising young man of literary talent who thirty years ago was selected by the editor of the "American Men of Letters" to write the life of Poe. Of course, Mr. Woodberry is a competent workman. When, in the year of Poe's centennial, he enlarged his "Life" to two volumes, he put together in a judicial, objective style probably all the facts that we need to know. But his aesthetic judgments are at best unsympathetic. It may be that the lyric "To Helen" has been overpraised, though it is difficult to understand how there can be too much praise for a masterpiece. And when Mr. Woodberry says of our American writers that they were concerned "not with the transitory, but the eternal; and, excepting Poe, they were all artists of the beautiful," we seem to have an example of that sort of moralistic aesthetics which sounds lofty but is only bosh. "If Poe was not an artist of the beautiful," Professor Smith asks, "what was he an artist of?"

That is a good, sensible question and Professor Smith's answer, if not as eloquent as some things that have been written by Poe's European admirers, is sound and appreciative. If it be an American tendency to overrate our national men of genius, we have certainly not displayed that tendency in relation to the American writer who more than any other has captured the imagination of Europeans, for undoubtedly the finest criticism of Poe has come from our brethren overseas. Stoddard had but a grudging sense of Poe's merits and ends his account with a remark which contains a partial truth but which, although it is quoted from Dr. Johnson, is a flat anti-climax: "All that can be told with certainty is that he was poor." There seems to be a good deal more to tell than that, and, indeed, the implications of Poe's poverty, as it affected the artist, are better expressed by Stoddard himself when he says that Poe "wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid."

American criticism of Poe is thick with moralisms. Thus Lowell wrote: "As a critic Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient ... he seemed wanting in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art." But, we may well ask, what is "the profounder ethics of art," and who, except a New England preacher, wants to be bothered with it in lyric poetry?

Poe always focused his attention on beauty, on excellence of workmans.h.i.+p, both in the work of other craftsmen and in his own. The Scottish critic, Mr. John M. Robertson, seems to be nearer the truth than Lowell when he says that Poe "has left a body of widely various criticism which, as such, will better stand critical examination to-day than any similar work produced in England or America in his time." I am glad to see that Professor Smith regards Mr. Robertson's essay on Poe as "the ablest brief treatment in any language." The only exception, which Mr. Robertson himself would be the first to make, is the essay by the French critic Emile Hennequin.

But Professor Smith does not quite escape American moralism in his effort to accentuate Poe's virtues. He makes too much of Poe's interest in religion, which was surely nothing but a purely intellectual and critical interest, and his recurrent emphasis on Poe's Americanism is too tiresomely patriotic even for a professor in the United States Naval Academy. Poe was keen for the best interests of American literature, zealous in searching out any note of promise in a new poet and in pointing to the weak spots in men of acknowledged talent. He sometimes exhibits a kind of local Southern patriotism which does not much interest us now. But on the whole, he was detached from the issues of politics, an unlocalized, almost disembodied genius whose apparition in the United States of America is still an endless wonder to European critics.

One possible influence of Poe's environment on his art Professor Smith is, so far as I know, the first to point out; and it is a very valuable suggestion, even if it can not be thoroughly proved. In Virginia, more than in any other American State, the English and Scots ballads survive by oral tradition. It is possible that as a child Poe heard these ballads recited or sung, and from them derived his sense of refrain and repet.i.tion. To the influence of the ballad Professor Smith adds the possible influence of plantation melodies as "subsidiary sources of Poe's lyrical technique." He is certainly right in thinking that Poe's originality consists not in the contribution of a new form to poetry but in his individual development of forms already established. His charm resides in the color of his words rather than in the shape of his stanzas. But of course the two things are inseparable and whoever tries to a.n.a.lyse them is hopelessly baffled. Poe's own attempt to explain how the trick is done is far from explaining it, and if he could not expound in prose the secret of poetry, n.o.body can.

For Poe was first and always a critic, inquisitive of methods, and making his effects with cool calculation. Even if his tales of horror no longer give us the creeps, they will always give to any one who cares about writing, that s.h.i.+ver of pleasure which comes when we watch a dexterous craftsman at work. Professor Smith calls Poe the "father of the short story," but he came too late to be credited with such paternity. After all, Boccaccio and whoever made "The Arabian Nights"

lived long before Poe and in Poe's stories are evident traces of old tales of magic and mystery. What Poe did was to rationalize the short story so highly, in some cases, as to sacrifice the illusion of spontaneity which is one of the merits of a tale that seems to tell itself.

With the purpose of suggesting the range of Poe's intellectual interest and of cla.s.sifying some of his miscellaneous work that does not fall into certain obvious groups, Professor Smith has adopted the term "frontiersman." The image evoked by that word somehow does not fit Poe. He was, in a sense, an explorer of ideas, and he had a genuine gift for philosophy which he did not live to develop. We could spare many of his short stories rather than lose "Eureka." If it is not profound philosophy and if it does not solve the riddle of the universe, it is profound in its beauty, a prose poem. Poe's science is obsolete, no doubt, and even in the science of his day he was little more than an amateur. But the mark of a great intellect is on every page. An amazing mind! He succeeded in all forms of literary art which he tried. If the poet or the critic or the short-story writer should be obliterated, there would still remain a man of genius.

Critics and biographers of Poe, like Poe himself, cannot let his drink alone. They deny or blame or pity without understanding. The question of Poe and alcohol seems to have been finally answered by a California physician, John W. Robertson, in a book which I have not seen but which I know only through reviewers' accounts of it. This physician finds from the evidence that Poe was a dipsomaniac. Dipsomania is not drunkenness nor riotous dissipation; it is a disease. Poe, like other victims of the disease, had to have periodic bouts with the demon, got fearfully sick, and when he recovered stayed cold sober until his next attack. This accounts for Poe's written anathemas against alcohol, which puzzled Remy de Gourmont. De Gourmont says: "_Il ne pouvait plus travailler que dans l'hallucination de l'ivresse._" Quite the contrary is the case. Poe could not do a stroke of work under the inspiration of whiskey; he was not one of those mad geniuses who conceive masterpieces in a tavern or with a bottle beside the ink-pot.

That is proved, or indicated, by his critical clarity, the almost pa.s.sionless rationality of his tales and poems, and even by the physical perfection of his ma.n.u.scripts. He worked between his joyless debauches, and he worked hard. His melancholy and love of terror, his preoccupation with defects of will and remorse, whatever "morbidity"

there is in his writings, may have some relation to his disease. But as an artist he achieved his dark effects by sheer force of intellect in hours of clear-eyed sobriety. Only in a literary sense is he the author of "MS. Found in a Bottle."

BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN

The one fault that can be found with Traubel's "With Walt Whitman in Camden" is that there is too much of it. But that is a fault easily remedied without blotting a line of the record. Books that contain too little may cheat us of desired knowledge, whereas books that contain too much can do no harm; every reader has the privilege of not reading at all or of dipping into a book here and there. Traubel's method is admirable; it is that of a doc.u.mentary historian. He set down Whitman's talk and such impressions and facts as the biographer recorded at the moment, and he reproduced the letters in the order in which Whitman gave them to him. He did not presume to select from Whitman's conversation what now seems most interesting or most to Whitman's credit, but he gave you all that he had for you to enjoy or ignore and for other biographers and historians to make use of as they will.

Traubel made no concessions to the fact that readers have to catch trains and read other books, and he ignored, perhaps to his personal disadvantage, certain exigencies of publication, such as the publisher's obvious need to interest as many people as possible with the least possible expenditure. Traubel's method is simple from an artistic point of view, requiring nothing but accuracy, courage and industry. Yet the method is a great strain on all concerned. Traubel could stand it. Evidently the publishers thought they could stand it.

The reader can stand it, because, as I have said, he can take as much or as little as suits him. The real question is whether Whitman can stand it. And the amazing man _can_ stand it. Consider that in the years when Traubel knew him Whitman was an invalid, broken by his services as nurse and brother of soldiers during the war. He was a garrulous old man talking to men who loved him and who, though no servile wors.h.i.+ppers of him or anyone else, encouraged him to reminiscence and the utterance of offhand opinion. Now that is a severe test. Not many old men, even men of great achievement in action or art, could last for more than a small volume. Whitman is worth these hundreds and hundreds of pages. For he was a great talker, full of experience and endowed with the gift of speech. Almost every day, according to Traubel's record, he hit off an interesting idea and turned it in a Whitmanese way. He repeats himself. He makes remarks that do not amount to much. But he is never a bore. Line by line he and Traubel, egotists both, but honest, thoughtful, artfully inartistic, have drawn a portrait, the like of which is not to be found. For once a literary man is as big as his literary work. Traubel was a very happy biographer, for he had a sort of monopoly of a great subject, and he had not the slightest temptation to omit or defend.

An admirer has called Traubel's work "the most truthful biography in the language." To use the informal mode of Walt Whitman and of his biographer, that ain't exactly so. It ain't the most truthful biography; it's simply a true biography.

"Lincoln," said Whitman, "don't need adorers, wors.h.i.+ppers--he needs friends.... The great danger with Lincoln for the next fifty years will be that he will be overdone, over-explained, over-exploited--made a good deal too much of--gather about himself a rather mythical aureole." From such danger Traubel did his best to protect Whitman; the biographer's mult.i.tudinous veracity preserves a real man and is a heavy impediment to the critic and literary historian of the future who may try to disobey Whitman's injunction not to "prettify" him. If that impossible and tedious universe, the "whole" truth, is not comprehended in these prolific pages, the errors and omissions are due not to the biographer, but to Whitman himself, who had a silent as well as a loquacious side; he had unexplained depths which probably he did not understand himself. When he spoke he tried to say what he thought, but often he did not speak at all, and at least once he said to Traubel: "I don't care to talk about that."

The writer of fiction may invent substance to fit an artistic scheme.

The compiler of facts may, under certain conditions, disregard literary form. The biographer or the historian who will have his work read must play skilfully between the double restriction of substance and form. He must be at once man of science and artist. Because of its very great difficulties, because of the high demands it makes upon the writer, biography is rarely well done. One can name few masterpieces of biography in English. Perhaps the only masterpiece that everybody will name is Boswell's Johnson, that extraordinary performance which heaved literary history out of shape and keeps it in a permanent state of distortion. For Johnson was not a first-rate man of letters; he wrote little that is even tolerable to read; his letter to Chesterfield and the preface to the Dictionary are his most vital productions. Moreover, Boswell was a foreordained nonent.i.ty. Yet he was a great artist and Johnson was a great person, and the two of them made a great book; it is a puzzle which makes one fall back, outwitted, to the last ditch of adjectives.

Whitman's opinion of Johnson is interesting, if only in relation to his own biographer's methods. Johnson knew that Boswell was making notes. Traubel, whose word is infallibly good, says that Whitman did not know that his biographer was keeping a record. Whitman did know that Traubel would write about him and he selected the letters and other doc.u.ments for the "archives." But he was not aware that Traubel was making a diary. Therefore when he talked he was free at least from the constraint imposed on a man who knows that his spoken words are to appear in print.

When Whitman was 69 years old he began to read Boswell; he refers to him a dozen times in the course of the year, thereby showing that Boswell interested him, for when Whitman was not interested in a book he simply forgot it. He thought that Johnson "talked for effect--seemed rather inclined to bark men down, like the biggest dog--indeed, a spice of dishonesty palpably possessed him. Johnson tried rather to impress than to be true." "He was on stilts always--he belongs to the self-conscious literary cla.s.s, who live in a house of rules and never get into the open air." However, note this significant confession: "I read it through, looked it through, rather--persisted in spite of fifty temptations to throw it down. I don't know who tried me most--Johnson or Boswell. The book lasts--it seems to have elements of life--but I will do nothing to pa.s.s it on." There is the comment of the lion on the bear. No, these zoological metaphors are quite false.

Benevolent and burly male persons are not, even by Whitmanian identifications, to be named with the brutes.

Some day a biographer with the right talent and in possession of all Traubel's material, cognizant of social ideals and facts and sensitive to poetry, will write a good life of Whitman. So far as I know, there is no satisfactory biography of our one magnificent American poet.

Traubel was not able to do it. He was properly employed in gathering and publis.h.i.+ng the fundamental record. Moreover, his style, perfectly fitted to short hand notes, is, in continuous composition, abominable.

I loved him with all my Whitmanian heart and read him, because of every four of his sentences one says something worth while. But ten sentences of his in a row hurt like a corduroy road. I have to get out and walk and rub myself.

Several literary men have tried to write Whitman's life and they have failed. Professor Bliss Perry's book is fatuous. He had no excuse to write about Whitman at all, except in so far forth as a publisher's request to an alleged literary man to do a book for an established series furnishes a practical excuse.

The critical study of Whitman by Mr. Basil De Selincourt is sympathetic and discerning as regards what may be called the purely literary side. He understands what Whitman says and takes him for granted as one of the world's supreme poets. He conceives the essential unity of Whitman's thought, a unity that should be obvious but evidently is not to some readers and critics who treat Whitman as a collection of more or less impressive fragments. Mr. De Selincourt's a.n.a.lysis of Whitman's form is instructive, appreciative, though a trifle academic, not wholly emanc.i.p.ated from schoolroom rules of prosody. If you will read Whitman aloud, p.r.o.nouncing the words as they are p.r.o.nounced in prose, and emphasizing them according to the sense, the scansion will take care of itself. When a line is bad (and Whitman, like most of the other great poets, wrote bad lines) it won't work by any effort of elocution. The good lines, if you have an ear in your head and a tongue in your mouth, chant themselves, and you can forget all about iambics and hexameters.

Where Mr. De Selincourt fails is in his account of Whitman's notions of liberty, democracy, America, the future. Book-people do not understand these things, especially English book-people, who a.s.sume that America produced Whitman because it was a land of liberty. It was not. It was, like the rest of the world, a land of plutocracy, convention, servility. It is complimentary to us but unhappily not true to say that "America stands for the pa.s.sionate re-a.s.sertion of certain beliefs which life, to those who look back upon it, seems always to stultify, but which, to those who can look forward, appears as the very spirit and power of life itself--'the urge, the ardour, the unconquerable will'."

As a matter of fact, America does not stand for any such thing and Whitman does not stand for America. He is a revolutionist in revolt against the American fact and celebrating a possible American future.

Official America tried to throttle him. Conventional America ignored him. Literary and revolutionary spirits in England and America welcomed him, for they are free spirits, intellectually free, under any economic conditions and in any part of the world. Whitman himself did not understand why he was acclaimed in England by more men and better men than in America. It was simply because English thinkers, writers, poets, with minds capable of appreciating him, outnumbered their American brothers ten to one.

Two American ladies once called on Tennyson. He asked them whether they knew Walt Whitman. They confessed that they did not. "Then," said he, "you do not know the greatest man in America."

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY