635 / 676
BOOKS
637
apprised that
"Women in Love
has perhaps a better claim than either
Ulysses
or
Finnegans' Wake
to be the radically original English novel
of its age"; that "the ten lines of [Yeats's] 'The Chambermaid's First
Song' achieve as full a statement as do the concluding 20,000 words of
Joyce's
Ulysses";
that Kipling, "to a landsman, at least," was at one
fell swoop able to achieve the ability to write about the sea that Conrad
painstakingly evolved, and to do it "with an impetus and verve such as
Conrad seldom achieves." It is further suggested that, confronted with
quintessential evil, Graham Greene is more effectual than either Conrad
or James. And we learn that Kipling's "The Last Rhyme of True
Thomas" is "quite as good a ballad as W. B. Yeats's
The King's Threshold
is a poetic drama," which, assuming that blimps and helicopters could
be compared, is rather like comparing the best of the former with the
most antiquated of the latter to the immortal glory of blimpdom.
We need not dwell on Stewart's carelessnesses, as when he refers
to Villiers, which is the correct short form, as "de L'Isle-Adam" (the
incorrectness compounded by the capital L), or when he is fooled by
the title of Mallarme's highly formal poem, "Prose pour des Esseintes,"
into describing it as not verse but prose. Nor need we detain ourselves
with occasional pruderies, as when Maud Gonne's illegitimate daughter
Iseult is referred to as "adoptive," or when a bit of morbidity in
Lawrence must not be inquired into because this would be "impertinent
or indecent." What should, however, give us pause
is
a narrowly
moralizing Christian undertone which might be more acceptable
if
it
came out into the open, but, in its subliminal form, makes the book
uncourageously tendentious.
Thus Stewart the moralizer wonders whether Hardy's esthetic is
"not rather the ingenious rationalizing of a constitutional morbidity,"
implying that other esthetics are independent from the psyche that
begets them and that neurosis makes for inferior esthetics: the first
assumption always, the second frequently, unfair. Thus, too, Maud
Gonne is told that "she ought to have abrupted" her relationship with
Yeats; and Yeats is rapped on the knuckles for having given the Christian
story in
The Resurrection
an orgiastically Dionysian background. Again,
Joyce is ironically reprimanded because, though living modestly, he also
indulged "in sporadic improvidence no doubt congruous with the artistic
nature" but, presumably, beneath the sober frugality of a Scottish
academician and writer of mystery novels such as Professor Stewart.
Academicism becomes schoolmarmishness when poor Bloom's pathetic
masturbation iii labeled "misconduct." The "flux of passion" in Lawrence
sometimes "loses such dignity as
it
draws from suffering," and unsuffer-