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REV I E W
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makes the difficult unreadable, the reviewer in praising it is under the
disadvantage of not being able to state frankly that he does not know
what he
is
talking about. This treatment of the difficult has sometimes
had strange results, as in the case of Henry James.
The later novels of James were considered so important that, as
Ford Madox Ford has somewhere explained, they had to be reviewed
immediately upon publication; reading came later if ever. The reviewer
who does not want to give himself away, like the funeral orator who does
not want to give away the deceased, can safely be only vague and re–
verential; the real life of the subject must be shunned. So convincing
was the funereal piety of the reviews, so successfully did they avoid any
stir of life, that their deadness was assumed to be a quality of the author
himself, and during the years of
h,is
best work he was often referred
to as the late Henry James; until several acts of violence-the damage by
English suffragettes to the Sargent portrait of him, and the German in–
vasion of Belgium which made him become an English citizen-brought
him universal recognition as a great living English writer.
The amount of praise given to an unknown work of art varies in–
versely with the ease with which critical ignorance of it may be over–
come. This may in part be the reason fo11 the greater success of Joyce in
his lifetime than of James in his. But each was alike in always giving
the clearest indication that time (sooner for one than the other, but
inevitably for each) would bring his work to the light of day and compel
a reckoning with him as knowable artist.
Ignorance is invincible only as to those unknown works of art which
must forever continue unknown for the reason that they do not exist;
at some point or other of time they have been lost without adequate
memory or remains. The lost plays of Menander have suffered somewhat
because the comedy of manner is now under a cloud, but they are still
the finest of their kind; Stevenson does not count for much today, but
the novel which his wife threw into the fire is still his best effort; re–
search has discovered Greek painting, but the greatest Greek painters
are those who have escaped survival. Time cannot undo such verdicts.
It works against all other ignorances; but this ignorance it has comm,itted
itself irrevocably to protect.
It
would be a diseased imagination which
would dare suggest that Mrs. Stevenson may have been right and that
the burned novel was just dreary stuff.
On occasion something close to the supreme aesthet,ic effect of a lost
work is achieved even by work which is peculiarly present. The funniest
lines of Preston Sturges are those we never hear because the audience
is laughing too much. At what we have heard we have laughed until we
are ill; by what we have missed-had we been but quiet-we must sure–
ly have been undone. It is sad at best to have lost such lines and their
laughter, unbearably bitter to lose them by our own noisy folly.
If
these
unheard sounds fail of the utmost exquisiteness of poignancy in later
