Plum Pudding by Christopher Morley

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We had long wanted to see Mr. McFee in his sea-going quarters,
where he writes his books and essays (so finely flavoured with a
rich ironical skepticism as to the virtues of folk who live on
shore). Never was a literary sanctum less like the pretentious
studios of the imitation litterateurs. In a small cabin stood our
friend, in his working dungarees (if that is what they are called)
talking briskly with the Chief and another engineer. The
conversation, in which we were immediately engulfed, was so
vivacious that we had small chance to examine the surroundings as we
would have liked to. But save for the typewriter on the desk and a
few books in a rack, there was nothing to suggest literature.
"Plutarch's Lives," we noticed--a favourite of Mac's since boyhood;
Frank Harris's "The Bomb" (which, however, the Chief insisted
belonged to him), E.S. Martin's "Windfalls of Observation," and some
engineering works. We envied Mac the little reading lamp at the head
of his bunk.

We wish some of the soft-handed literary people who bleat about only
being able to write in carefully purged and decorated surroundings
could have a look at that stateroom. In just such compartments Mr.
McFee has written for years, and expected to finish that night (in
the two hours each day that he is able to devote to writing) his
tale, "Captain Macedoine's Daughter." As we talked there was a
constant procession of in-comers, most of them seeming to the opaque
observation of the layman to be firemen discussing matters of
overtime. On the desk lay an amusing memorandum, which the Chief
referred to jocularly as one of Mac's "works," anent some problem
of whether the donkeyman was due certain overtime on a Sunday when
the _Turrialba_ lay in Hampton Roads waiting for coal. On the cabin
door was a carefully typed list marked in Mr. McFee's hand "Work to
Do." It began something like this:

_Main Engine Pump-Link Brasses
Fill Up Main Engine Feed Pump and Bilge Rams
Open and Scale After Port Boiler
Main Circulator Impeller to Examine
Hydrokineter Valve on Centre Boiler to be Rejointed_

The delightful thing about Mr. McFee is that he can turn from these
things, which he knows and loves, to talk about literary problems,
and can out-talk most literary critics at their own game.

He took us through his shining engines, showing us some of the
beauty spots--the Weir pumps and the refrigerating machinery and the
thrust-blocks (we hope we have these right), unconsciously
inflicting upon us something of the pain it gives the bungling jack
of several trades when he sees a man who is so fine a master not
merely of one, but of two--two seemingly diverse, but in which the
spirit of faith and service are the same. "She's a bonny ship," he
said, and his face was lit with sincerity as he said it. Then he
washed his hands and changed into shore clothes and we went up to
Frank's, where we had pork and beans and talked about Sir Thomas
Browne.

[Illustration]

FALLACIOUS MEDITATIONS ON CRITICISM

I

There are never, at any time and place, more than a few literary
critics of genuine incision, taste, and instinct; and these
qualities, rare enough in themselves, are further debilitated, in
many cases, by excessive geniality or indigestion. The ideal
literary critic should be guarded as carefully as a delicate thermal
instrument at the Weather Bureau; his meals, friendships, underwear,
and bank account should all be supervised by experts and advisedly
maintained at a temperate mean. In the Almost Perfect State (so many
phases of which have been deliciously delineated by Mr. Marquis) a
critic seen to become over-exhilarated at the dining table or to
address any author by his first name would promptly be haled from
the room by a commissionaire lest his intellectual acuity become
blunted by emotion.

The unfortunate habit of critics being also human beings has done a
great deal to impair their value to the public. For other human
beings we all nourish a secret disrespect. And therefore it is well
that the world should be reminded now and then of the dignity and
purity of the critic's function. The critic's duty is not merely to
tabulate literary material according to some convenient scale of
proved niceties; but to discern the ratio existing in any given work
between possibility and performance; between the standard the author
might justly have been expected to achieve and the standard he
actually attained. There are hierarchies and lower archies. A pint
pot, full (it is no new observation), is just as full as a bathtub
full. And the first duty of the critic is to determine and make
plain to the reader the frame of mind in which the author approached
his task.

Just as a ray of sunshine across a room reveals, in air that seemed
clear, innumerable motes of golden dancing dust and filament, so the
bright beam of a great critic shows us the unsuspected floating
atoms of temperament in the mind of a great writer. The popular
understanding of the word _criticize_ is to find fault, to pettifog.
As usual, the popular mind is only partly right. The true critic is
the tender curator and warden of all that is worthy in letters. His
function is sacramental, like the sweeping of a hearth. He keeps the
hearth clean and nourishes the fire. It is a holy fire, for its fuel
is men's hearts.

It seems to us probable that under present conditions the cause of
literature is more likely to suffer from injudicious and excessive
praise rather than from churlish and savage criticism. It seems to
us (and we say this with certain misgivings as to enthusiasms of our
own) that there are many reviewers whose honest zeal for the
discovering of masterpieces is so keen that they are likely to burst
into superlatives half a dozen times a year and hail as a flaming
genius some perfectly worthy creature, who might, if he were given a
little stiff discipline, develop into a writer of best-readers
rather than best-sellers. Too resounding praise is often more
damning than faint praise. The writer who has any honest intentions
is more likely to be helped by a little judicious acid now and then
than by cartloads of honey. Let us be candid and personal. When
someone in _The New Republic_ spoke of some essays of our own as
"blowzy" we were moved for a few moments to an honest self-scrutiny
and repentance. Were we really blowzy, we said to ourself? We did
not know exactly what this meant, and there was no dictionary handy.
But the word gave us a picture of a fat, ruddy beggar-wench trudging
through wind and rain, probably on the way to a tavern; and we
determined, with modest sincerity, to be less like that in future.

The good old profession of criticism tends, in the hands of the
younger generation, toward too fulsome ejaculations of hurrahs and
hyperboles. It is a fine thing, of course, that new talent should so
swiftly win its recognition; yet we think we are not wholly wrong in
believing that many a delicate and promising writer has been
hurried into third-rate work, into women's magazine serials and
cheap sordid sensationalism, by a hasty overcapitalization of the
reviewer's shouts. For our own part, we do not feel any too sure of
our ability to recognize really great work when we first see it. We
have often wondered, if we had been journalizing in 1855 when
"Leaves of Grass" appeared, would we have been able to see what it
meant, or wouldn't we have been more likely to fill our column with
japeries at the expense of Walt's obvious absurdities, missing all
the finer grain? It took a man like Emerson to see what Walt was up
to.

There were many who didn't. Henry James, for instance, wrote a
review of "Drum Taps" in the _Nation_, November 16, 1865. In the
lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on
smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so
clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the
chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that
seem so plain to us to-day. Whitman himself, writing about "Drum
Taps" before its publication, said, "Its passion has the
indispensable merit that though to the ordinary reader let loose
with wildest abandon, the true artist can see that it is yet under
control." With this, evidently, the young Henry James did not agree.
He wrote:

It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a
still more melancholy one to write about it. Perhaps since the
day of Mr. Tupper's "Philosophy" there has been no more
difficult reading of the poetic sort. It exhibits the effort of
an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged
muscular strain, into poetry. Like hundreds of other good
patriots, Mr. Walt Whitman has imagined that a certain amount
of violent sympathy with the great deeds and sufferings of our
soldiers, and of admiration for our national energy, together
with a ready command of picturesque language, are sufficient
inspiration for a poet.... But he is not a poet who merely
reiterates these plain facts _ore rotundo_. He only sings them
worthily who views them from a height.... Mr. Whitman is very
fond of blowing his own trumpet, and he has made very explicit
claims for his book.... The frequent capitals are the only
marks of verse in Mr. Whitman's writing. There is, fortunately,
but one attempt at rhyme.... Each line starts off by itself, in
resolute independence of its companions, without a visible goal
... it begins like verse and turns out to be arrant prose. It
is more like Mr. Tupper's proverbs than anything we have
met.... No triumph, however small, is won but through the
exercise of art, and this volume is an offence against art....
We look in vain through the book for a single idea. We find
nothing but flashy imitations of ideas. We find a medley of
extravagances and commonplaces.

We do not know whether H.J. ever recanted this very youthful
disposal of old Walt. The only importance of it at this moment seems
to us this: that appreciation of all kinds of art is so tenderly
interwoven with inherited respect for the traditional forms of
expression by which they are conveyed that a new and surprising
vehicle quite unfits most observers for any reasonable assessment of
the passenger.

As for Walt himself, he was quite unabashed by this or any other
onslaught. He was not gleg at argument, and probably rolled up the
issue of the _Nation_ in his pocket and went down to Coney Island to
lie on the sand and muse (but no, we forget, it was November!). In
the same issue of the _Nation_ he doubtless read, in the "Literary
Notes," that "Poems Relating to the American Revolution," by Philip
Freneau, was "in press under the scholarly editing of Evart A.
Duyckinck to form a complete presentment of the genius of an author
whose influence in the affairs of his time would alone impart a
lasting value to his works." At this Walt smiled gently to himself,
wondered how soon "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" would
get into the anthologies, and "sped to the certainties suitable to
him."

II

These miscellaneous thoughts on the fallibility of critics were
suggested to us by finding some old bound volumes of the _Edinburgh
Review_ on a bookstall, five cents each. In the issue for November,
1814, we read with relish what the _Review_ had to say about
Wordsworth's "Excursion." These are a few excerpts:

This will never do.... The case of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive,
is now manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether
incurable, and beyond the power of criticism ... making up our
minds, though with the most sincere pain and reluctance, to
consider him as finally lost to the good cause of poetry....
The volume before us, if we were to describe it very shortly,
we should characterize as a tissue of moral and devotional
ravings, in which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very
simple and familiar ideas.

The world of readers has not ratified Jeffrey's savage comments on
"The Excursion," for (to reckon only by the purse) any frequenter of
old bookshops can pick up that original issue of the _Edinburgh
Review_ for a few cents, while the other day we saw a first edition
of the maligned "Excursion" sold for thirty dollars. A hundred years
ago it was the critic's pleasure to drub authors with cruel and
unnecessary vigour. But we think that almost equal harm can be done
by the modern method of hailing a new "genius" every three weeks.

For example, there is something subtly troublesome to us in the
remark that Sinclair Lewis made about Evelyn Scott's novel, "The
Narrow House." The publishers have used it as an advertising slogan,
and the words have somehow buzzed their way into our head:

"Salute to Evelyn Scott: she belongs, she understands, she is
definitely an artist."

We have been going about our daily affairs, climbing subway stairs,
dodging motor trucks, ordering platters of stewed rhubarb, with that
refrain recurring and recurring. _Salute to Evelyn Scott!_ (we say
to ourself as we stand in line at the bank, waiting to cash a small
check). _She belongs, she understands._ And then, as we go away,
pensively counting the money (they've got some clean Ones down at
our bank, by the way; we don't know whether the larger denominations
are clean or not, we haven't seen any since Christmas), we find
ourself mumbling, _She is definitely an artist._

We wonder why that pronouncement annoys us so. We haven't read all
Mrs. Scott's book yet, and doubt our strength to do so. It is a riot
of morbid surgery by a fumbling scalpel: great powers of observation
are put to grotesque misuse. It is crammed with faithful particulars
neither relevant nor interesting. (Who sees so little as he who
looks through a microscope?) At first we thought, hopefully, that it
was a bit of excellent spoof; then, regretfully, we began to realize
that not only the publishers but even the author take it seriously.
It feels as though it had been written by one of the new school of
Chicago realists. It is disheartening that so influential a person
as Mr. Lewis should be fooled by this sort of thing.

So there is something intensely irritating to us (although we admire
Mr. Lewis) in that "_She belongs, she understands, she is definitely
an artist._" In the first place, that use of the word _artist_ as
referring to a writer always gives us qualms unless used with great
care. Then again, _She belongs_ somehow seems to intimate that there
is a registered clique of authors, preferably those who come down
pretty heavily upon the disagreeable facts of life and catalogue
them with gluttonous care, which group is the only one that counts.
Now we are strong for disagreeable facts. We know a great many. But
somehow we cannot shake ourself loose from the instinctive
conviction that imagination is the without-which-nothing of the art
of fiction. Miss Stella Benson is one who is not unobservant of
disagreeables, but when she writes she can convey her satire in
flashing, fantastic absurdity, in a heavenly chiding so delicate and
subtle that the victim hardly knows he is being chidden. The
photographic facsimile of life always seems to us the lesser art,
because it is so plainly the easier course.

We fear we are not acute enough to explain just why it is that Mr.
Lewis's salute to Mrs. Scott bothers us so. But it does bother us a
good deal. We have nourished ourself, in the main, upon the work of
two modern writers: Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad; we
like to apply as a test such theories as we have been able to glean
from those writers. Faulty and erring as we are, we always rise from
Mr. Conrad's books purged and, for the moment, strengthened.
Apparent in him are that manly and honourable virtue, that strict
saline truth and scrupulous regard for life, that liberation from
cant, which seem to be inbred in those who have suffered the
exacting discipline of the hostile sea. Certainly Conrad cannot be
called a writer who has neglected the tragic side of things. Yet in
his "Notes on Life and Letters," we find this:

What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is
just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many
men at various times that there is much evil in the world were
a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern
writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to
approach seriously the art of fiction.... To be hopeful in an
artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is
good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
its being made so.... I would ask that in his dealings with
mankind he [the writer] should be capable of giving a tender
recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him
impatient with their small failings and scornful of their
errors.

We fear that our mild protest is rather mixed and muddled. But what
we darkly feel is this: that no author "belongs," or "understands,"
or is "definitely an artist" who merely makes the phantoms of his
imagination paltry or ridiculous. They may be paltry, but they must
also be pitiable; they may be ridiculous, but they must also be
tragic. Many authors have fallen from the sublime to the ridiculous;
but, as Mr. Chesterton magnificently said, in order to make that
descent they must first reach the sublime.

[Illustration]

LETTING OUT THE FURNACE

The prudent commuter (and all commuters are prudent, for the others
are soon weeded out by the rigours of that way of life) keeps the
furnace going until early May in these latitudes--assuming that
there are small children in the house. None of those April hot waves
can fool him; he knows that, with cunning management, two or three
shovelfuls of coal a day will nurse the fire along, and there it is
in case of a sudden chilly squall. But when at last he lets the fire
die, and after its six months of constant and honourable service the
old boiler grows cold, the kindly glow fades and sinks downward out
of sight under a crust of gray clinkers, our friend muses tenderly
in his cellar, sitting on a packing case.

He thinks, first, how odd it is that when he said to himself, "We
might as well let the fire go out," it kept on sturdily burning,
without attention or fuel, for a day and a half; whereas if he had,
earlier in the season, neglected it even for a few hours, all would
have been cold and silent. He remembers, for instance, the tragic
evening with the mercury around zero, when, having (after supper)
arranged everything at full blast and all radiators comfortably
sizzling, he lay down on his couch to read Leonard Merrick,
intending to give all hands a warm house for the night. Very well;
but when he woke up around 2 A.M. and heard the tenor winds singing
through the woodland, how anxiously he stumbled down the cellar
stairs, fearing the worst. His fears were justified. There, on top
of the thick bed of silvery ashes, lay the last pallid rose of fire.
For as every pyrophil has noted, when the draught is left on, the
fire flees upward, leaving its final glow at the top; but when all
draughts are shut off, it sinkst downward, shyly hiding in the heart
of the mass.

So he stood, still drowsily aghast, while Gissing (the synthetic
dog) frolicked merrily about his unresponsive shins, deeming this
just one more of those surprising entertainments arranged for his
delight.

Now, on such an occasion the experienced commuter makes the best of
a bad job, knowing there is little to be gained by trying to cherish
and succour a feeble remnant of fire. He will manfully jettison the
whole business, filling the cellar with the crash of shunting ashes
and the clatter of splitting kindling. But this pitiable creature
still thought that mayhap he could, by sedulous care and coaxing,
revive the dying spark. With such black arts as were available he
wrestled with the despondent glim. During this period of guilty and
furtive strife he went quietly upstairs, and a voice spoke up from
slumber. "Isn't the house very cold?" it said.

"Is it?" said this wretched creature, with great simulation of
surprise. "Seems very comfortable to me."

"Well, I think you'd better send up some more heat," said this
voice, in the tone of one accustomed to command.

"Right away," said the panic-stricken combustion engineer, and
returned to his cellar, wondering whether he was suspected. How is
it, he wondered, that ladies know instinctively, even when vested in
several layers of blankets, if anything is wrong with the furnace?
Another of the mysteries, said he, grimly, to the synthetic dog. By
this time he knew full well (it was 3 A.M.) that there was naught
for it but to decant the grateful of cinders and set to work on a
new fire.

Such memories throng in the mind of the commuter as he surveys the
dark form of his furnace, standing cold and dusty in the warm spring
weather, and he cleans and drains it for the summer vacation. He
remembers the lusty shout of winter winds, the clean and silver
nakedness of January weather, the shining glow of the golden coals,
the comfortable rustling and chuckle of the boiler when alive with a
strong urgency of steam, the soft thud and click of the pipes when
the pressure was rising before breakfast. And he meditates that
these matters, though often the cause of grumbles at the time, were
a part of that satisfying reality that makes life in the outposts a
more honest thing than the artificial convenience of great apartment
houses. The commuter, no less than the seaman, has fidelities of his
own; and faithful, strict obedience to hard necessary formulae
favours the combined humility and self-respect that makes human
virtue. The commuter is often a figure both tragic and absurd; but
he has a rubric and discipline of his own. And when you see him
grotesquely hasting for the 5:27 train, his inner impulse may be no
less honourable than that of the ship's officer ascending the bridge
for his watch under a dark speckle of open sky.

[Illustration]

BY THE FIREPLACE

We were contemplating our fireplace, in which, some of the
hearth-bricks are rather irregularly disposed; and we said to
ourself, perhaps the brick-layer who built this noble fireplace
worked like Ben Jonson, with a trowel in one hand and a copy of
Horace in the other. That suggested to us that we had not read any
Ben Jonson for a very long time: so we turned to "Every Man in His
Humour" and "The Alchemist." Part of Jonson's notice "To the Reader"
preceding "The Alchemist" struck us as equally valid as regards
poetry to-day:

Thou wert never more fair in the way to be cozened, than in
this age, in poetry; wherein ... antics to run away from
nature, and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that
tickles the spectators ... For they commend writers, as they do
fencers or wrestlers; who if they come in robustuously, and put
for it with a great deal of violence, are received for the
braver fellows.... I deny not, but that these men, who always
seek to do more than enough, may some time happen on some thing
that is good, and great; but very seldom ... I give thee this
warning, that there is a great difference between those, that
utter all they can, however unfitly; and those that use
election and a mean. For it is only the disease of the
unskilful, to think rude things greater than polished; or
scattered more numerous than composed.

Ben Jonson's perpetual allusions to tobacco always remind one of the
odd circumstance that of two such cronies as he and Will
Shakespeare, one should have mentioned tobacco continually, the
other not at all. Undoubtedly Ben smoked a particularly foul old
pipe and was forever talking about it, spouting his rank strangling
"Cuban ebolition" across the table; and Will, probably rather nice
in his personal habits, grew disgusted with the habit.

At any rate, Shakespeare's silence on the subject has always been a
grief to smokers. At a time when we were interested in that famous
and innocent way of wasting time, trying to discover ciphers in
Shakespeare's sonnets, we spent long cryptogrammarian evenings
seeking to prove some anagram or rebus by which the Bard could be
supposed to have concealed a mention of tobacco. But the only
lurking secret we ever discovered seemed to suggest that the sonnets
had been written by an ex-President of the United States. Observe
the 131st sonnet:

*T*hou art as tyrannous, so as thou art
*A*s those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
*F*or well thou know'st to my dear doting heart
*T*hou art the fairest and most precious jewel.

And evidently Shakespeare intended to begin the 51st sonnet with the
same acrostic; but, with Elizabethan laxity, misspelled Mr. Taft's
name as TOFT.

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