My life and loves Vol. 3 Page 3

  Schopenhauer saw that there is "no quality of style to be gained by reading writers who possess it. We must have the gifts before we can learn how to use them. And without the gifts, reading teaches us nothing but cold, dry mannerisms, and makes us shallow imitators." Another word of his is better still.

  "Be careful," he advises, "to limit your time for reading and devote it exclusively to the works of those great men of all times and countries who overtop the rest of humanity. These alone educate and instruct."

  There should be "a tragical history of literature," he adds, "which should tell of the martyrdom of almost all those who really enlightened humanity, of almost all the really great masters of every kind of art: it would show us how, with few exceptions, they were tormented to death without recognition, without followers; how they lived in poverty and misery, while fame, honor, and riches were the lot of the unworthy."

  Yet, from intimacy with the greatest, one gets a certain strength and a certain courage, like Browning's here:

  Careless and unperplexed

  When I wage battle next What weapon to select, what armour to endue.

  You should find thoughts, too, that Schopenhauer has not found, get outside his mind, so to speak. For example, he does not tell you the chief advantage of authorship. Bacon says that writing makes "an exact man", but neither Bacon nor Schopenhauer seems to see that writing should teach you how to think, and that no other business is so favorable to mental growth as authorship properly understood: teaching is the best way of learning. Even Schopenhauer is sometimes uninspired. It is not enough to have new things to say, as he believes; you should also say them in the best and most original way, and that is something the German in Schopenhauer prevented him from understanding.

  I have praised Schopenhauer so freely that I feel compelled to state one or two of the important points in which I differ from him. For instance, he sneers at those who study personalities; he says, "It is as though the audience in a theatre were to admire a fine scene, and then rush upon the stage to look at the scaffolding that supports it." In this he is mistaken: we should study the development of a great man, if for nothing else, in order to see what helped him in his growth. What was it, for instance, about mid-way in his life, say from 1600 or so on, that set Shakespeare to the writing of his great tragedies?

  He tells you the whole story in his sonnets and in his plays of this period, as I have shown in my book on him.

  And this knowledge is of supreme importance for any complete realization of Shakespeare, but Schopenhauer did not understand the creative intellect.

  Whenever he talks about novels he is not so sure a guide as when he is talking of philosophies. "Good novelists," he says, "take the general outline of a character from some real person of their acquaintance, and then idealize and complete it to suit their purpose." This is not true of the novelists or dramatists: the creative artist goes differently to work, I believe.

  It is perfectly clear, for instance, that Cervantes painted himself in Don Quixote, idealized, if you like, a little, but rather by omission of faults than by heightening of idealistic touches. Nor do I imagine that Sancho Panza was taken from any real person of Cervantes' acquaintances; it is to me a generalized portrait of ordinary Spanish characteristics.

  And if we go to an even greater imagination, to Shakespeare's, we shall find that he wrote in much the same way. His Hamlet is a portrait of himself, with the omission of his worst fault, which was an overpowering sensuality. His Falstaff, as I have shown elsewhere, is indeed a portrait taken from life, probably from Chettle, the fat man, half-poet, half-wit, a friend of his early days in London. I have proved this, I think, by showing that when the Queen ordered him to picture Falstaff over again and show "the fat Knight" in love, he was unable to find a single new characteristic of his hero; he had to copy his previous work almost word for word. If he had invented the new character, he would have been able to add some new traits at will.

  But then I may be asked about the multitude of his other characters, and in order to answer it properly, I should have to take them seriatim. But the main truth can be put shortly. Nearly all of the fine lovable characters are partial portraits of himself, and his villains, such as Iago, are really his view of life, as it acts on inferior intelligences. "Put money in your purse… Drown cats and blind puppies"-all Iago's chief sayings might have been put in the mouth of Sancho Panza. They are from the heart of the common Englishman, who is very like the common Spaniard. Shakespeare's expressions are more pregnant, for he was a greater master of language than even Cervantes: but the wicked and hateful purpose of Iago was not sufficiently and so he does not live for us as effectively as Sancho.

  It was my love of Shakespeare and my study of him that gave me most of what I know, for my study of him taught me to read all other great men, taught me how they grow and how their peculiarities often dwarf them. From this passionate study of Shakespeare I came to see how the high lights of noble feeling and high endeavor were continually shadowed by little snobbisms and pitiful shortcomings.

  A better lesson, still, I learnt from Shakespeare. As I have told in my book on him, the greatest disappointment in his life came when his beloved Mary Fitton married and left London for good in 1608; and when, in the same year, he got the news of his mother's death. He went back to Stratford and there got to know his daughter Judith. The dramas he wrote afterwards show an astounding growth in beauty of character. He not only forgives his lost love, Mary Fitton, but acknowledges with perfect comprehension all she had taught him, and meant to him. The modesty of his daughter, Judith, too, adds a new tinge of Puritan morality to his judgments of life. It was Shakespeare's sovereign fairness of mind and nobility of soul first taught me that I ought to modify my native selfishness and pugnacity. Through studying him I came to see gradually that the greater natures and wiser minds owe a certain duty to themselves: we must forgive, he taught me, for little people cannot; and so I came to that modification of the prayer of Jesus, which has been condemned as blasphemous. "Give us this day our daily bread," he says, "and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us."

  "Give and forgive," I said, "is the true gospel"; and from this time on, with many lapses, due for the most part to selfishness or temper, I tried, in my own life, to realize this striving.

  This was my "conversion" to a better life, and it occurred about my fortieth year as a result partly of complete success in material strivings; but more, I am fain to believe, as a natural incident of growth. I came to see that if I would be with the great ones in the future, I too must lead a life of generosity and kindness. It was and is my most profound conviction that all progress in this life comes from gifted individuals, and if we desire the bettering of things or think of this earthly pilgrimage as a slow journeying upward to perfection, we must do our little best to help all the abler men of our time to selfrealization and achievement.

  Like chooses like in this world, and the natural affinity of the noble is a stronger tie than can easily be imagined. Now, for the first time, I began to live the higher life, as I understood it. And soon new lessons from it began to drift in upon me. I found almost immediately, that certain persons, whom I felt to be among the best, now began to seek me out and show me affection. Lord Grimthorpe became a close friend, and charming people in every walk of life began to show me kindness.

  "He came to His own, and His own received Him not," is one of the few sayings in the New Testament which must be construed in a narrow way: in this world, our own, in the large sense of those like us or on our level, always receive us and treat us with loving-kindness beyond our deserts. If "the way of the transgressor is hard," the way of the heavenly pilgrim becomes the primrose path to the divine life.

  It must not be understood that I became a saint, or that ideal strivings dominated me; far from it, alas! Now and then I was hatefully selfish and once, at least, to a woman detestable: she is still living and I cannot confess my meanness without exposin
g her, but my treatment of her still brings a hot flush of shame to my cheeks. Even wounded vanity, though it may explain, cannot excuse my paltry, detestable conduct. I was as self-centered as ever, and as confirmed an epicurean: a Hellene always, as Heine would have said, and not a Jew, and still less a Saxon; for the Saxons love to accept promissory notes of ecstatic happiness in eternity, whereas the Hellenes are intent on making the best of this present life, and enjoying themselves here below as much as possible.

  My worst fault, I think, has always been my impatience: it often gave the impression of bad temper, or cynicism, or worse, for it was backed by an excellent tongue that translated most feelings into words of some piquancy.

  Consequently, this man spoke of me as truculent and the other as callous and the third as domineering, when in reality I wished to be kind, but was unable to suffer fools gladly. This impatience has grown on me with the years, and as soon as I gave up conducting journals, I limited my intercourse to friends who were always men of brains, and so managed to avoid a myriad occasions of giving offense unnecessarily.

  This sharp-tongued impatience was allied to a genuine reverence for greatness of mind or character; but again this reverence brought with it an illimitable disdain for the second-rate or merely popular. I was more than amiable to Huxley or Wallace, to Davidson or Dowson, and correspondingly contemptuous of the numerous mediocrities who are the heroes of the popular press. So I got a reputation for extraordinary conceit and abrupt bad manners.

  All the early part of this period I was in love and therefore did not run after new experiences in what the French call le pays du tendre. I had an excellent home and troops of friends: I had brought living to a science; I rode every morning in the park, ate and drank in moderation, watched my weight, and by hard exercise kept myself in good condition.

  About 1895 I began, little by little, to alter my purpose in life, trying, as far as vanity would let me, to live to the best in me; and when I took control of the Saturday Review in that year, I modified the general method of criticism, as I shall tell; I found it better to praise than to condemn.

  Even in this world, loving-kindness is a key to most of the great doors. And though it was in England that I learned this good lesson, strange to say, all the while I worked and thought, England grew smaller to me and more provincial, while America seemed to expand with undreamed of possibilities.

  But now and again some law case or some presidential or public announcement shamed me to the soul by flaunting some outworn brainless prejudice.

  Little by little I turned to France as the motherland of my spirit, though there were Germans, too, and Italians and Spaniards that quickened and inspired me with enthusiasm similar to my own; cosmopolitan, I called myself from this time on, or perhaps it would suit English and American prejudice better if I invented a new French word and called myself cosmopolisson.

  CHAPTER II

  Heine

  In connection with Heine I must begin by relating one event that happened before 1890: I was lunching one day about 1889 with the Princess of Monaco at Claridge's when for some reason or other the talk fell upon Heinrich Heine, the Princess being a grand-niece of the famous poet. I had just been reading some things of his for the hundredth time with huge delight, and curiously enough, a morning or two before in a Vienna paper, I had come across the announcement that the poet's sister was still living and in full possession of all her faculties, though she was nearing ninety.

  "Instead of editing a London review," I exclaimed, "I would give anything to go to Germany, get to know Heine's sister, and then write the best life possible of the great poet."

  "How could she help you?" asked the Princess.

  "It is the first manifestations of a great talent," I said, "that discover the secret, and show the heart. His sister would know his first successes and his first disappointments: all his beginnings; she could recall childish memories throwing light on his growth-unimaginable things-indicating how he came so early to maturity. What he tells of his visit to England as a young man is astounding, his condemnation of English pedantry, snobbishness, and cruelty is extraordinary. 'The figure of justice in England,' he said, 'had a naked sword on her knee, but was quite blind!' "

  "Why don't you write his life," asked the Princess, "if you admire him so intensely?"

  "It would cost me five thousand pounds to abandon my work here and go abroad for a year," I said, "and I haven't the money to spare."

  "I'll give it you," she replied.

  "In that case, Madame," I said, "I'll go and do the work without a moment's delay, for Heine's sister is certain to be able to throw new light on a myriad doubtful things, and assuredly she will be able to solve for us the inexplicable tragedy of his life: how did he come to suffer for years in his mattress-grave in Paris and die at six and fifty? Was it syphilis? Or merely sexual selfindulgence?

  We know he was never very strong; but his sister must have heard the truth, and fancy being in a position to tell the true truth about Heine, the greatest German poet after Goethe; the first of the moderns, as I always call him, because he was a rebel at heart and soul-free of that respect for convention that maimed even Goethe."

  The next weeks I spent reading Heine, his Reisebilder, his latest poetry and all the books I could get on his life and art; but I heard nothing from the Princess Alice. At length I thought of writing to her, but I couldn't do that.

  "She may have spoken in haste," I said to myself, "and I should be forcing her perhaps to give me five thousand pounds which she could ill spare." I resolved to put the whole incident out of my mind.

  Some time later I read in a German paper of the death of Heine's sister: she was ninety-odd. The very next day I was again lunching with the Princess at Claridge's and I told her of the death. "No one now," I said, "will ever be able to tell the true truth about Heine's long illness and death."

  "I thought you were going to do it," said the Princess.

  "I told you, Madame, it would cost five thousand pounds and I couldn't afford it."

  "But I said that I would give you the money willingly," was her reply; "why didn't you ask me for it?"

  "I was afraid it might embarrass you," I said. "However, it is now too late!"

  I should have loved to write Heine's life, infinitely rather than the life of Oscar Wilde, because he was a far greater man and had new and true things to say on the vital problems of modern Europe.

  What he has written on Italy and France and Germany constitutes the best criticism in literature, and his Fragments on England are almost as penetrating. I have here a personal confession to make. I knew that Heine had only been in England for a few weeks as a young man, and so, half- English as I was, I thought I could afford to neglect what he had written about it. When I went to New York in November, 1914, I was asked to lecture at the German Club, and I selected Heine as my theme; but the committee wanted me to speak on England as well, to say what I really thought of it, so I talked on England for some time. At the end of the evening, a man came over to me and said, "You never quoted the English Fragments of Heine, and yet you repeated almost word for word things he had said about the English people."

  "How extraordinary," I exclaimed, "to tell you the truth, I never read the English Fragments, but I will read them at once."

  I found that I had almost used Heine's very words; that my point of view on England and English faults was all but the same as his; but, though he saw all the weaknesses of the people with astonishing clearness and put them in a high light, some of the virtues of that strange folk seemed to have escaped him: for the true Englishman has a deep love for what is fair and large and kindly; he allows himself to maltreat Ireland for hundreds of years, but when his sin is brought home to him, he will give the Irish their freedom in a kindly and generous spirit. After the Civil War in America, eight or nine states contracted debts to England, but England has never called them in nor insisted on repayment; surely there is something nobly generous in such a people. Beside
s, their high poetry and astounding love of physical beauty should have endeared them to Heine. But Heine's view of English limitations and surface faults is astoundingly acute. It taught me that there was a strange likeness of view between us, and of judgment. Time and again I had been struck by some half-truth pungently expressed, only to find on wider reading that he had seen the other half just as clearly. Much of the piquancy of his writing comes from this peculiarity of his. I went on to read him completely; and the more I read, the more I grew to love and admire him.

  The Germans always talk of Goethe and Schiller as their greatest, just as the English foolishly talk of Shakespeare and Milton, without realizing that in Hyperion Keats has written far better blank verse than anything ever reached by Milton. And in the same way Heine is a greater poet and a greater prose writer, too, than Schiller, who, like Milton, was rather a rhetorician than a master-singer. Both nations accept the Immortal reluctantly, but console themselves with what is related to them and commonplace.

  I love Heine perhaps even more than Goethe, though I recognize that he is inferior to Goethe in philosophic range and deep-thoughted wisdom; he was almost as great a lyric poet as Goethe himself, though Goethe's best lyrics are the finest in all literature-and a far better prose writer. Besides, Goethe was in love with the conventional, whereas Heine was a born rebel, the first, indeed, to voice the revolt of the modern man against all the outworn and irrational forbiddings and prohibitions of our ordinary life.

  And how lovable Heine was, and how human-charming, and what a friend of man! Can one ever forget the poem he wrote when Karl Heine, heir of old Solomon Heine, his banker-uncle, who had always allowed him five or six thousand francs a year, wrote to him that he heard he was writing his life and so wished to warn him that if he wrote anything derogatory of the Heines, he would immediately cut off his allowance.