Mr. Bell, Miss Cather and Others

EDMUND WILSON, Jr.

The New Encyclopaedists

THERE has lately arisen in England a group of writers far more interesting than either its contemporary novelists novelists or or its its contemporary poets. Though they are essentially critics and philosophers, they give the impression of caring more about literature and of expending more taste and pains to make their compositions excellent as art than either the empty and tasteless novelists who have succeeded Wells and Bennett or the pseudo-romantic Georgian poets and their arid opponents of the "Wheels" clique. The men I mean are Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell. Though I have never seen it publicly stated, these men really do constitute a group: all, I think, are graduates of Cambridge or at any all are apparently intimate friends. And if we put their books side by side, we observe that they have not only certain common ideas—or rather, perhaps, beta common attitude toward life and thought—but also common ideals about how those ideas should be presented.

In politics, philosophy and art they are fearless and logical radicals and have concocted almost all the intellectual bombs which have recently been exploded in England—from Clive Bell's once earth-shaking Art to The Economic Consequences of the Peace and the life of Queen Victoria; and in letters they are among the most orderly and lucid writers—and the most persuasive and graceful—whom England has ever produced. They are, in fact, like an Indian summer of the eighteenth century Encyclopaedists. They have brought to English expository writing the best qualities of French—clearness, brevity, ease and tranquil wit—for the rhetoric and prose poetry which has most often served the ends of English radicals, Without raising their voices at all—where Ruskin or Wells would have rhapsodized —they invoke the new dawn—though quite admitting the possibility of its never appearing—not after the conventional English fashion, in confused and tumultuous clouds of glory, aflame with all the purple bonfires of the English poetic genius, but with a radiance cool and intense that in its paleness leaves the landscape more distinct, and no less lovely because those ruddy splendors are not streaming in the firmament.

Mr. Clive Bell

YOU will perhaps say that it is a far cry from all this to Mr. Clive Bell's Since Cezanne (Harcourt, Brace & Co.) and that you cannot conceive Mr. Bell as a herald of the millennium. Yet just as Mr. Bertrand Russell preaches a new order by analyzing the old, as Mr. Maynard Keynes would restore life to Europe by writing a popular exposition of its economics, as Mr. Strachey brings an indictment against the nineteenth century by writing a chronicle without commentary, so Clive Bell, too, in his fashion—though he cares little for political and social problems—is essentially a bringer of enlightenment. His aim is to explain as simply as possible what he believes the great tradition of art to be, to destroy the swarm of irrelevant ideas which have lately done so much to swamp it. He is preoccupied almost exclusively with the visual arts—it seems to me that on literature he is much less reliable than on sculpture and painting —but in attacking the fundamental problems of these he has become one of our most important critics, as well as a sort of official interpreter to the Anglo-Saxon world of the great movement which has reached its maturity in France under the leadership of Matisse and Picasso.

I admit that Mr. Bell is a little complacent about all this—one of the characteristics of his group is the imperturbability of their self-confidence—that he betrays a warm gratification at the fact that he is one of the only living Englishmen who understands Derain and knows Augustus John's small significance and appreciates the greatness of Maillol, and that he has got into the elation of the doctrine of his "significant first revform" as if it were the Hegira or the birth of Christ or some other event which had fixed an era in the progress of mankind. But the reader who wants really to understand the aesthetic ideals at the base of modern art should not let himself be put off by this. Why should not Mr. Bell be complacent? Is he not an Englishman and yet does he not love beauty for its own sake, has he not deal accurately with ideas and to write lightly and wittily about the profoundest aesthetic problems, is he not almost as much at home as a European among the culture and history of the continent? Has there ever been an art critic like him in England? No wonder Mr. Bell is pleased.

Willa Cather's New Novel

CAN Mr. Mencken have been mistaken when he decided that Miss Willa Cather was a great novelist? I have not read My Antonia—which I suppose is her best book—but I have not been able to find anything in her two last ones which seemed to bear out his description. Her new novel—One of Ours (Knopf)—seems to me a pretty flat failure. She has taken what might under happier circumstances have proved a very interesting theme—the career of an imaginative Nebraska boy who, though charged with the energy for great achievements, is balked and imprisoned first by the necessity of shouldering the responsibility for his father's farm and then by marriage with a cold, pious and prosaic Prohibition worker, but whose noble and romantic impulses are finally liberated by the war. But she has certainly never succeeded in making her hero a reality.

The publishers hint that Claude Wheeler is a sort of symbol of the national character—or rather, I suppose, of the more generous elements of the national character—and one can see that Miss Cather has taken pains to make her personages typical; the jocular, unintelligent money-making farmer father, the sympathetic religious mother, the son made miserable with fine passions for which he can find about him no fit objects, which are outlawed among his neighbors, and which he is finally obliged to extinguish in the dubious crusade of the war—these might have made the heroic materials of a tremendous national document. But I feel in the case of this book—as I did in that of Youth and the Bright Medusa— that it costs Miss Cather too much effort to summon her phantoms from the void and that when she has done so they are less like human beings or even the ghosts of human beings than like the pale silhouettes of men and women cut neatly out of neutral-colored paper and put through the paces of a skilful but slightly mechanical minuet. Even when the incidents are felicitously invented—as in the first night of Claude's wedding-trip, when his new bride coldly informs him that she is ill and requests him not to share her stateroom—the feelings of the hero are not created. We do not experience the frustration of Claude when his wife will not return his love and in the latter part of the book, where Miss Cather has imposed an extra handicap upon herself by attempting to present the development the hero under the stimulus of the war we feel that she has told us with commendable accuracy almost everything about the engagements she describes except the thing which is really germane to the novel—what they did to the soul of her hero.

(Continued on page 27)

(Continued from page 26)

Admirers of Miss Cather will tell me that I do not understand her method— that she is not trying to depict emotions from the inside, like Dostoevsky, but is rather, like Turgenev merely telling you what people do and letting the inner blaze of their glory and grief shine through the simple recital. But, in this case, though the method is different, the effect should be the same: the people should come to life for us; but Miss Cather's never do. Flaubert by a single phrase—a description of some external object—could convey all the pathos and beauty of human desire and defeat; his statement of some prosaic matter will have the dying fall of great music. But Miss Cather has never found this phrase.

Let it be counted to her for righteousness, however, that she has devoted all her life to the search. She knows how fine work should be done even if the life with which she animates it is shadowy. She knows that in a decent novel every word should be in its place and every character in its right perspective and that every incident should be presented with its appropriate economy of detail. If her novel only had more vitality it might put the fear of God into all our hearts—as Ulysses has done to those who have read it. It might bring the salutary blush of shame to many a complacent cheek. But, as it is, "the younger novelists" can evade the moral of Miss Cather's example by protesting that she is dull; and I am sorry that I should not be able to contradict them.

A Handful of Crystals

IN 1913, at the age of thirty-five Adelaide Crapsey was obliged to give up teaching and go to a sanitarium for consumptives. In 1914 she died there But in the year which had intervened she had suddenly become a poet. She had all her life written verse and had been preparing a study of metrics, but it was not until she knew that she was to die that she really let her voice be heard. The handful of poems that she left are among the best things in American poetry. They have just been republished by Knopf with a number of additional pieces—some of them among her best,

I do not think we have ever had any other poet quite like Miss Crapsey: there is an important difference between her and even the other American woman poets, whose work hers in some ways resembles. I suppose it was the imminence of death which gave her poems, in spite of their irreducible brevity, their almost unrivalled definitiveness and dignity. They are like epitaphs cut in diamond—sighs which, in death's presence, have been frozen by his breath, invested—when all exaltation fell blighted—with the tearless majesty of fate. Miss Edna Millay can afford to stroke a poignant violin at the thought that death will end her loves; she can exult in the transience of beauty and make us water our gardens with tears, because she knows that she very young and in no actual danger death. But Miss Crapsey was really going to die and her grief was too stark and deep for tears. It was as if her heart, in its inexorable agony, were bleeding crystal instead of blood and as if each rare drop had reflected and held some image of external beauty—a white moth, her own hands, the cold landscape of winter or some stalks of blue hyacinth that seemed to speak of the seas and headlands of Greece.

An African Idyll

BATOUALA, of which an English translation has just been published by Thomas Seltzer, is a brief but comprehensive picture of the native life of Central Africa. The author — Ren6 Maran — is a Negro who writes in French and who has brought to the savage life he describes the traditional method of the French novelists. When he writes of the naive mental processes of Batouala and Bissibingui, it is with the sophisticated irony of Anatole France describing Crainquebille, and he gives the details of butchery their value with the dry strokes of Flaubert licking his chops over the barbarities of Carthage. He has, in fact, written a tableau de moeurs according to the best French formula.

And the careful economy and order which are of the essence of this form enable him to present in the small compass of a hundred and eighty-nine pages and in the course of a simple narrative an extraordinarily complete account of the primitive society of the African: its rites, its institutions, its ideas about life, love and death, its mythology and its hunting customs, its relations with and reactions to the whites, as well as a picture of the landscape and weather, the flora and fauna among which they 'live. It constitutes, on the whole, a remarkmuch to predentthe savage from inside. It would appear, when all has been said, that there is not very much to present; but what there is M. Maran has put before us with admirable intelligence and detachment—he romanticizes neither the virtues nor the ferocity of his primitive men—and with no effort to make anything more pretentious of it than its interest and importance warrant.

The English translation is quite vigorous but rather ruthlessly expurgated and lies open to the suspicion of having omitted not only passages which might be thought to disturb Mr. Sumner but also perfectly innocent passages which seem to have presented difficulties of French. It appears further that the translator was half way through the book before she discovered that groin in French means the snout of a pig and not the English "groin." M. Maran, as I say, has not mitigated the barbarities of his characters any more than he has exaggerated them. It has remained for the pressure of American opinion—for which I do not blame the translator— to make the savage less savage, and to suppress not only the description of certain violent sexual rites but also the simple notation of certain harmless natural phenomena universal not only among savages who have never learned that their passions were improper but among the whole of human kind.