Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump Part 4

Such was Boon's plan for the second chapter of "The Mind of the Race."

But that chapter he never completely planned. At various times Boon gave us a number of colloquies, never joining them together in any regular order. The project of taking up the discussion of the Mind of the Race at the exact point Mr. Mallock had laid it down, and taking the villa by the sea for the meeting-place, was at once opposed by Hallery and his American friend with an evidently preconcerted readiness. They pointed out the entire democratization of thought and literature that had been going on for the past four decades. It was no longer possible to deal with such matters in the old aristocratic country-house style; it was no longer possible to take them up from that sort of beginning; the centre of mental gravity among the English-speaking community had s.h.i.+fted socially and geographically; what was needed now was something wider and ampler, something more in the nature of such a conference as the annual meeting of the British a.s.sociation. Science left the gentleman's mansion long ago; literature must follow it--had followed it. To come back to Mr. Lankester's Villa by the sea was to come back to a beaten covert. The Hearst representative took up a strongly supporting position, and suggested that if indeed we wished to move with the times the thing to do was to strike out boldly for a special annex of the Panama Exhibition at San Francisco and for organization upon sound American lines. It was a case, he said, even for "exhibits." Sir Henry Lunn, however, objected that in America the Anglo-Saxon note was almost certain to be too exclusively sounded; that we had to remember there were vigorous cultures growing up and growing up more and more detachedly upon the continent of Europe; we wanted, at least, their reflected lights ...

some more central position.... In fact, Switzerland ... where also numerous convenient hotels ... patronized, he gathered from the ill.u.s.trated papers, by Lord Lytton, Mrs. Asquith, Mr. F. R. Benson ...

and all sorts of helpful leading people.

-- 2

Meanwhile Boon's plan was to make Mr. George Moore and Mr. Henry James wander off from the general dispute, and he invented a dialogue that even at the time struck me as improbable, in which both gentlemen pursue entirely independent trains of thought.

Mr. Moore's conception of the projected symposium was something rather in the vein of the journeyings of Sh.e.l.ley, Byron, and their charming companions through France to Italy, but magnified to the dimensions of an enormous pilgrimage, enlarged to the scale of a stream of refugees.

"What, my dear James," he asked, "is this mind of humanity at all without a certain touch of romance, of adventure? Even Mallock appreciated the significance of _frou-frou_; but these fellows behind here...."

To ill.u.s.trate his meaning better, he was to have told, with an extraordinary and loving mastery of detail, of a glowing little experience that had been almost forced upon him at Nismes by a pretty little woman from Nebraska, and the peculiar effect it had had, and particularly the peculiar effect that the coincidence that both Nebraska and Nismes begin with an "N" and end so very differently, had had upon his imagination....

Meanwhile Mr. James, being anxious not merely to state but also to ignore, laboured through the long cadences of his companion as an indefatigable steam-tug might labour endlessly against a rolling sea, elaborating his own particular point about the proposed conference.

"Owing it as we do," he said, "very, very largely to our friend Gosse, to that peculiar, that honest but restless and, as it were, at times almost malignantly ambitious organizing energy of our friend, I cannot altogether--altogether, even if in any case I should have taken so extreme, so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put it violently, _stand out_; yet I must confess to a considerable anxiety, a kind of distress, an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, of the kerbstone, at all this stream of intellectual trafficking, of going to and fro, in a superb and towering manner enough no doubt, but still essentially going to and fro rather than in any of the completed senses of the word _getting there_, that does so largely const.i.tute the aggregations and activities we are invited to traverse. My poor head, such as it is and as much as it can and upon such legs--save the mark!--as it can claim, must, I suppose, play its inconsiderable part among the wheels and the rearings and the toots and the whistles and all this uproar, this--Mm, Mm!--let us say, this _infernal_ uproar, of the occasion; and if at times one has one's doubts before plunging in, whether after all, after the plunging and the dodging and the close shaves and narrow squeaks, one does begin to feel that one is getting through, whether after all one _will_ get through, and whether indeed there is any getting through, whether, to deepen and enlarge and display one's doubt quite openly, there is in truth any sort of ostensible and recognizable other side attainable and definable at all, whether to put this thing with a lucidity that verges on the brutal, whether our amiable and in most respects our adorable Gosse isn't indeed preparing here and now, not the gathering together of a conference but the a.s.sembling, the _meet_, so to speak, of a wild-goose chase of an entirely desperate and hopeless description."

At that moment Mr. George Moore was saying: "Little exquisite shoulders without a touch of colour and with just that suggestion of rare old ivory in an old shop window in some out-of-the-way corner of Paris that only the most patent abstinence from baths and the brutality of soaping----"

Each gentleman stopped simultaneously.

Ahead the path led between box-hedges to a wall, and above the wall was a pine-tree, and the Editor of the _New Age_ was reascending the pine-tree in a laborious and resolute manner, gripping with some difficulty in his hand a large and very formidable lump of unpleasantness....

With a common impulse the two gentlemen turned back towards the house.

Mr. James was the first to break the momentary silence. "And so, my dear Moore, and so--to put it shortly--without any sort of positive engagement or entanglement or pledge or pressure--I _came_. And at the proper time and again with an entirely individual detachment and as little implication as possible I shall _go_...."

Subsequently Mr. James was to have b.u.t.tonholed Hallery's American, and in the warm bath of his sympathy to have opened and bled slowly from another vein of thought.

"I admit the abundance of--what shall I say?--_activities_ that our friend is summoning, the tremendous wealth of matter, of material for literature and art, that has acc.u.mulated during the last few decades.

No one could appreciate, could savour and watch and respond, more than myself to the tremendous growing clangour of the mental process as the last half-century has exhibited it. But when it comes to the enterprise of gathering it together, and not simply just gathering it together, but gathering it _all_ together, then surely one must at some stage ask the question, _Why_ all? Why, in short, attempt to a comprehensiveness that must be overwhelming when in fact the need is for a selection that shall not merely represent but elucidate and lead. Aren't we, after all, all of us after some such indicating projection of a leading digit, after such an insistence on the outstandingly essential in face of this abundance, this saturation, this fluid chaos that perpetually increases? Here we are gathering together to celebrate and summarize literature in some sort of undefined and unprecedented fas.h.i.+on, and for the life of me I find it impossible to determine what among my numerous a.s.sociates and friends and--to embrace still larger quant.i.ties of the stuff in hand--my contemporaries is considered to be the literature in question. So confused now are we between matter and treatment, between what is stated and doc.u.mented and what is prepared and presented, that for the life of me I do not yet see whether we are supposed to be building an ark or whether by immersion and the meekest of submersions and an altogether complete submission of our distended and quite helpless carca.s.ses to its incalculable caprice we are supposed to be celebrating and, in the whirling uncomfortable fas.h.i.+on of flotsam at large, indicating and making visible the whole tremendous cosmic inundation...."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Mr. James converses with Mr. George Moore upon matters of vital importance to both of them._]

-- 3

It was entirely in the quality of Boon's intellectual untidiness that for a time he should go off at a tangent in pursuit of Mr. Henry James and leave his literary picnic disseminated about the grounds of Mr.

Mallock's villa. There, indeed, they remained. The story when he took it up again picked up at quite a different point.

I remember how Boon sat on the wall of his vegetable garden and discoursed upon James, while several of us squatted about on the cuc.u.mber-frames and big flowerpots and suchlike seats, and how over the wall Ford Madox Hueffer was beating Wilkins at Badminton. Hueffer wanted to come and talk too; James is one of his countless subjects--and what an omniscient man he is too!--but Wilkins was too cross to let him off....

So that all that Hueffer was able to contribute was an exhortation not to forget that Henry James knew Turgenev and that he had known them both, and a flat denial that d.i.c.kens was a novelist. This last was the tail of that Pre-Raphaelite feud begun in _Household Words_, oh!

generations ago....

"Got you there, my boy!" said Wilkins. "Seven, twelve."

We heard no more from Hueffer.

"You see," Boon said, "you can't now talk of literature without going through James. James is unavoidable. James is to criticism what Immanuel Kant is to philosophy--a partially comprehensible essential, an inevitable introduction. If you understand what James is up to and if you understand what James is not up to, then you are placed. You are in the middle of the critical arena. You are in a position to lay about you with significance. Otherwise....

"I want to get this Hallery of mine, who is to be the hero of 'The Mind of the Race,' into a discussion with Henry James, but that, you know, is easier said than imagined. Hallery is to be one of those enthusiastic thinkers who emit highly concentrated opinion in gobbets, suddenly. James--isn't...."

Boon meditated upon his difficulties. "Hallery's idea of literature is something tremendously comprehensive, something that pierces always down towards the core of things, something that carries and changes all the activities of the race. This sort of thing."

He read from a sc.r.a.p of paper--

"'The thought of a community is the life of that community, and if the collective thought of a community is disconnected and fragmentary, then the community is collectively vain and weak. That does not const.i.tute an incidental defect but essential failure. Though that community have cities such as the world has never seen before, fleets and hosts and glories, though it count its soldiers by the army corps and its children by the million, yet if it hold not to the reality of thought and formulated will beneath these outward things, it will pa.s.s, and all its glories will pa.s.s, like smoke before the wind, like mist beneath the sun; it will become at last only one more vague and fading dream upon the scroll of time, a heap of mounds and pointless history, even as are Babylon and Nineveh.'"

"I've heard that before somewhere," said Dodd.

"Most of this dialogue will have to be quotation," said Boon.

"He makes literature include philosophy?"

"Everything. It's all the central things. It's the larger Bible to him, a thing about which all the conscious direction of life revolves.

It's alive with pa.s.sion and will. Or if it isn't, then it ought to be.... And then as the antagonist comes this artist, this man who seems to regard the whole seething brew of life as a vat from which you skim, with slow, dignified gestures, works of art. ... Works of art whose only claim is their art.... Hallery is going to be very impatient about art."

"Ought there to be such a thing as a literary artist?" some one said.

"Ought there, in fact, to be Henry James?" said Dodd.

"I don't think so. Hallery won't think so. You see, the discussion will be very fundamental. There's contributory art, of course, and a way of doing things better or worse. Just as there is in war, or cooking. But the way of doing isn't the end. First the end must be judged--and then if you like talk of how it is done. Get there as splendidly as possible. But get there. James and George Moore, neither of them take it like that. They leave out getting there, or the thing they get to is so trivial as to amount to scarcely more than an omission...."

Boon reflected. "In early life both these men poisoned their minds in studios. Thought about pictures even might be less studio-ridden than it is. But James has never discovered that a novel isn't a picture....

That life isn't a studio....

"He wants a novel to be simply and completely _done_. He wants it to have a unity, he demands h.o.m.ogeneity.... Why _should_ a book have that? For a picture it's reasonable, because you have to see it all at once. But there's no need to see a book all at once. It's like wanting to have a whole county done in one style and period of architecture.

It's like insisting that a walking tour must stick to one valley....

"But James _begins_ by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness.

Some one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn't find things out. He doesn't even seem to want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to accept things--elaborately. You can see from his books that he accepts etiquettes, precedences, a.s.sociations, claims. That is his peculiarity. He accepts very readily and then--elaborates. He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type. Or else he would have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his wonderful brother.... But here he is, spinning about, like the most tremendous of water-boatmen--you know those insects?--kept up by surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would drown. It's incredible. A water-boatman as big as an elephant. I was reading him only yesterday 'The Golden Bowl'; it's dazzling how never for a moment does he go through."

"Recently he's been explaining himself," said Dodd.

"His 'Notes on Novelists.' It's one sustained demand for the picture effect. Which is the denial of the sweet complexity of life, of the pointing this way and that, of the spider on the throne. Philosophy aims at a unity and never gets there.... That true unity which we all suspect, and which no one attains, if it is to be got at all it is to be got by penetrating, penetrating down and through. The picture, on the other hand, is forced to a unity because it can see only one aspect at a time. I am doubtful even about that. Think of Hogarth or Carpaccio. But if the novel is to follow life it must be various and discursive. Life is diversity and entertainment, not completeness and satisfaction. All actions are half-hearted, shot delightfully with wandering thoughts--about something else. All true stories are a felt of irrelevances. But James sets out to make his novels with the presupposition that they can be made continuously relevant. And perceiving the discordant things, he tries to get rid of them. He sets himself to pick the straws out of the hair of Life before he paints her. But without the straws she is no longer the mad woman we love. He talks of 'selection,' and of making all of a novel definitely _about_ a theme. He objects to a 'saturation' that isn't oriented. And he objects, if you go into it, for no clear reason at all. Following up his conception of selection, see what in his own practice he omits. In practice James's selection becomes just omission and nothing more. He omits everything that demands digressive treatment or collateral statement. For example, he omits opinions. In all his novels you will find no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisans.h.i.+ps or with l.u.s.ts or whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing. There are no poor people dominated by the imperatives of Sat.u.r.day night and Monday morning, no dreaming types--and don't we all more or less live dreaming? And none are ever decently forgetful. All that much of humanity he clears out before he begins his story. It's like cleaning rabbits for the table.

"But you see how relentlessly it follows from the supposition that the novel is a work of art aiming at pictorial unities!

"All art too acutely self-centred comes to this sort of thing. James's denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those egg-faced, black-haired ladies, who sit and sit, in the j.a.panese colour-prints, the unresisting stuff for an arrangement of blacks....

"Then with the eviscerated people he has invented he begins to make up stories. What stories they are! Concentrated on suspicion, on a gift, on possessing a 'piece' of old furniture, on what a little girl may or may not have noted in an emotional situation. These people cleared for artistic treatment never make l.u.s.ty love, never go to angry war, never shout at an election or perspire at poker; never in any way _date_....

And upon the petty residuum of human interest left to them they focus minds of a Jamesian calibre....

"The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely att.i.tudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins.... His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is _about_ is always there.

It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-sh.e.l.l, a bit of string.... Like his 'Altar of the Dead,' with nothing to the dead at all.... For if there was they couldn't all be candles and the effect would vanish.... And the elaborate, copious emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made endurable by the elaborate, copious wit. Upon the desert his selection has made Henry James erects palatial metaphors.... The chief fun, the only exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast metaphors....