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<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2> <h2>ON REREADING MALLOCK</h2> It seems the "dark backward and abysm of time" when writing the name of William Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he was the most discussed author of his day. The old conundrum, Is Life Worth Living? he revived, and newly orchestrated with particular reference to the spiritual needs of the hour. And A Romance of the Nineteenth Century was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier was read then and Swinburne's lilting paganism quite filled the lyric sky. Mr. Mallock's rôle was that of a philosophical novelist and essayist who reproved the golden materialism of his age, not with fuliginous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with melodious indignation, like Ruskin, but with a more subtle instrument of castigation, irony. He laughed at the gods of the new scientific dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and he put them in the pages of his New Republic for the delectation of the world, and most appealing foolery it was; this and the sheer burlesque of The New Paul and Virginia. Mr. Mallock was an individualist. The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet waned in the seventies—he occupied then a [Pg 152] place midway between Bentham and Spencer. His birth, breeding, and temperament made Mallock a foe to socialism, to the promiscuous in politics, religion, society, therefore an apostle of culture, not missing its precious side; witness Mr. Rose in The New Republic, and one who abhorred the crass and the irreverent in the New Learning. He enjoyed vogue. His ideas were boldly seized and transformed by the men of the nineties, yet to-day it is difficult to get a book of his. They are mostly out of print—which is equivalent to saying, out of mind. With what personal charm he invested his romances! He is the literary progenitor of a long line of young men, artistic in taste, a trifle sceptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly, widely cultured, and aristocratic. The staler art of Oscar Wilde gives the individual of Mallock petrified into a rather unpleasant type. Walter Pater's fear that the word "hedonist" would be suspected as immoral came true in Wilde's books. The heroes of A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, Tristram Lacy and The New Republic have a strong family resemblance. They were supermen before Nietzsche was discovered. They are prepossessed by theological problems, they love the seven arts, and are a trifle decadent; though when action is demanded they do not fail to respond. As stories go, A Romance is the best of Mallock's; the canvas of Tristram Lacy is larger, the intrigue [Pg 153] less intense, and the characterisation more human. The unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters, who so shocked our mothers, is not duplicated in Tristram. Mr. Mallock wrote a preface to the second edition of A Romance, a superfluous one, for the book needs no apology. It never did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though not as pleasant. The Triangle is a revered convention in French fiction, but the naturalistic photographs in A Romance are not agreeable, and Cynthia's epitaph, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the mode ironical almost projected to the key of cynicism. No doubt the leisurely gait of these fictions would be old-fashioned to the present generation, with its preference for staccato English, morbid sensationalism, and lack of grace and scholarship. Mr. Mallock is a scholar and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction, and he is also a thinker, reactionary, to be sure, but a tilter at sham philosophies and sham religions. Last, but not least, he has abundant humour and a most engaging wit. Possibly all these qualities would make him unpopular in our present century. What a gathering of choice spirits in The New Republic: Matthew Arnold, Professor Jowett—a fine character etching—Huxley, Tyndall, Carlyle, Pater—rather cruelly treated—Ruskin, Doctor Pusey, Mrs. Mark Pattison, W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane—how the [Pg 154] author juggles with their personalities, with their ideas. It's the cleverest parody of its kind. Otho Laurence and Robert Leslie are closely related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon, Alie Campbell, and the priest Stanley of A Romance. As portraits, those of the Premier Lord Runcorn in Tristram Lacy, and the faded dandy, poet, and man about town, Lord Surbiton, of A Romance, are difficult to match outside of Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes. The décor is always gorgeous—Monte Carlo, Provence, Cap de Juan, countries flowing with milk and honey, marble ruins, the ilex, cypress, and palm. Palaces there are, and inhabited by languid, fascinating young men who anxiously examine in the glass their expressive countenances, asking the Lord whether He is pleased with them. And lovely girls, charming, and in Cynthia Walters's case a lily with a cankered calyx. Then there are the Price-Bousefields and the inimitable Mrs. Norham, "celebrated authoress and upholder of the people." One of the notable blackguards in fiction is Colonel Stapleton; and the Poodle and the new-rich Helbecksteins—a complete picture-gallery may be found in these interesting novels. Romance rules; poetry, tenderness in the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and a pity for living things. Poor Cynthia Walters, the "dear, dead woman," lingers in the memory, as modern as yesterday, and as effaced as a daguerreotype. [Pg 155] But if his heroes sow their oats tamely Mr. Mallock as an antagonist is most vigorous. He went at the scientific men with all the weapons in his armoury. To-day there no longer exists the need of such polemics. In the moral world there are analogies to the physical, and particularly in geology, with its prehistoric stratifications, its vast herbarium, its quarries and petrifications, its ossuaries, the bones of vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of a leaf to the flying crocodile, the horrid pterodactyl—now reduced to the exquisite and iridescent dragon-fly; from the monstrous mammoth to the tiny forerunner of the horse. Philosophy and Religion, too, have their mighty dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose the bones of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete systems. And on the sands of time lie the arch-images of antique thought awaiting the condign catastrophe. There are Kant and his followers, and near the idealists are the materialists; next to Hegel is Büchner, and at the base of the vast structure so patiently reared by Herbert Spencer the mists are already dense, though not as obscuring as the clouds about the mausoleum of Comte. That great charmless woman, George Eliot, smiles a smile of sombre ennui before the Spencer tomb, and the invisible voice of Ernest Haeckel is heard whispering: Where is your Positivism? Where is your Rationalism? What has become of your gaseous invertebrate god? Surely [Pg 156] there is sadly required in the cynical universities of the world a Chair of Irony with subtle Edgar Saltus as its first incumbent. Now, Mr. Mallock knows that religion and philosophy may travel on parallel lines, therefore never collide. He took the catch-word "the bankruptcy of science" too seriously. Notwithstanding the persuasive rhetoric of that silken sophist Henri Bergson, a belated visionary metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend of latter-day thought is toward the veritable victories of science. A new world has come into being. And what discoveries: spectral analysis, the modes of force, matter displaced by energy, the relations of atoms in molecules—a renewed geology, astronomy, palæontology, biology, embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest of the air, and, last but not least, the discovery of radium. The slightly war-worn evolution theory is now confronted by the Transformism of Hugo de Vries, who has shown in a most original manner that nature also proceeds by sudden leaps as well as in slow, orderly progress. And the brain, that telephonic centre, according to Bergson, is become another organ. Ramon y <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Cujol" id="tnote14">Cajal</ins>, the Spanish biologist, with his neurons—little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred to motor impulses when a message is sent them from the sensory nerves—has done more for positive knowledge than a wilderness of metaphysicians. [Pg 157] That famous interrogation, "Is life worth living?" may be viewed to-day from a different angle. Mr. Mallock acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the individual only. Here we encounter a new crux. What is the individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual. And the autonomous "I" exists no longer, except as a unit in the colony of cells which are "We." Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations. Society demands the co-operation of its component cells, else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself to play a humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That protean theory Socialism has changed its chameleonic hues many times since Mr. Mallock wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with great clearness in the apprehension of details, but with little feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded not on a metaphysical but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities. Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. There never was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the socialists say. Content is the summum bonum of mankind; the content that comes with [Pg 158] sound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling over Free Will is now considered a sign of ghost-worship. Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live are both rather amusing survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will. But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that "the feeling we have of a necessity for such an explanation [the attempt to explain the universe] arises from the conformation of our brains, which think by associating disjoined ideas; ... no last explanation is possible or perhaps even exists," which will please the relativists and pain the absolutists. But deprive mankind of its dreams and it is like the naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. A fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber. Without vision, old as well as young limp through life. Pessimism as a philosophy, it has been pointed out, is the last superstition of primordial times. It is a form of egomania. From Byron to D'Annunzio pessimism filled poetry; [Pg 159] from Werther to Sanine it has ruled fiction. It is less a philosophy than a matter of temperament. It was the mode during the last century, and as an issue is as dead as the humanitarianism that followed. Is life worth living? was properly, if somewhat cynically, answered: It depends on the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic fallacy reduced to medicinal formula. It is now merely in our stock of mental attitudes, usually a pose; when it is not, it's bound to be pathological. Yet Bossuet has spoken of "the inexorable ennui which forms the basis of life." Mr. Mallock was once accused of dilettanteism, æsthetic and ethical; nevertheless, there is no mistaking his moral earnestness at the close of Is Life Worth Living? Furthermore, he foresaw the muddle the world is making to-day in the conduct of life. All the self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation during the Buddhist upheaval some decades ago has been translated into a veritable annihilation. The holy name of Altruism—social emotion made functional—has vanished into the intense inane. The higher forms of discontent have modulated into the debasing superstition of universal slaughter. With Bergson the divinity of diving into the subconscious—what else is his intuition?—is set before the lovers of the mystic to worship. Years ago the Sufi doctrine declared that the judging faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive. Don't reason! Just dream! The poet Rogers [Pg 160] replied to a lady who asked his religion that his was the religion of all sensible men. "And what is that?" she persisted. "That no sensible men ever tell." But Mr. Mallock has told, and four decades after his confession he is still worth rereading. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 161] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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