BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS
Mr. Maugham's Essays
The Vagrant Mood. Six Essays by W. Somerset Maugham. (Heine- mann. 12s. 6d.) Tins book of various essays is held together by the strength and interest of the writer's. individuality. It opens with an urbane dis- cussion, partly affectionate and at the same time studiously disre- spectful, of Augustus Hare.. A study of Zurbaran and another of Burke are of solid value. "The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story" I confess to having skimmed because, though Mr. Maugham is worth reading on any aspect of craftsmanship, this aspect is, for me, less interesting than, perhaps, it ought to be. An elaborate comment on Kant's aesthetic is an opportunity to consider Mr. Maugham's own, as well as being, like everything else in the book, lucid and at ease. But what is really exciting in this collection, to those who have followed the author's work down the years, is the evidence it gives of a new phase in the long struggle between the intuitive and the microscopic in Mr. Maugham—a struggle between two unreconciled interpretations of life.
In the last essay, Some Novelists I Have Known, he recalls that the praise given to Arnold Bennett at his death "was cooler than one would have expected. Some of the critics said that notwithstanding everything he had a sense of beauty, and they quoted passages to show his poetic power and his feeling for the mystery of existence." Upon this Mr. Maugham makes a shrewd, and, by a side-wind, a self-revealing, comment: " I do not see the point," he says, " of making out that he had something of what you would have liked him to have a great deal more of and ignoring that in which his power and value lay. He was neither mystic nor poet. He was interested in material things and in the humours of common men in general and he described life, as every writer does, in the terms of his own temperament." This is good criticism of Bennett because it is, basically, good criticism. A critic's duty is (among much else) to discover a novelist's merit or demerit within the territory of the novelist's own purpose; not to praise or condemn him, as clique-critics and party-hacks invariably do, for having interpreted, or failed to interpret, life in terms of the critic's temperament or fashion. To apply this principle is difficult in Mr. Maugham's case because he himself makes it desperately. hard to know what his territory is. No one can have watched Sheppey in the theatre or can have read The Razor's Edge or The Summing Up or the paper, in the present volume, on the Spanish painter Zurbaran, and say of Mr. Maugham that he is "interested in material things" and is "neither mystic nor poet." And yet there are passages in this book which make one feel that the man who wrote them must repudiate mysticism as being an interpretation of life violently opposed to his own temperament. The truth is, I suppose, that Mr. Maugham when alone is one thing—a visionary artist by whom the smarties of this world would not be amused; and that Mr. Maugham, when he has his eye on the society that wishes only to be amused, is another thing—a caustic and brilliant ironist, groomed in the elegance of understatement. So it comes about that, though he is as well aware as the rest of us that as an intellectual he is of the first rank, he can, in his drawing- room mood, write this:
" Though my literary friends do not, I am sorry to say, look upon me as a member of the intelligentsia, I very much enjoy the conversation of cultured persons and I think (perhaps mistakenly) that I can adequately hold my own with them. Indeed sometimes I gently lead them down the garden path of mysticism and when I talk to them of Denis the Areopagite and Fray Luis de Leon, throwing in Samkaracharia for good measure, I often have them gasping for breath like speckled trout on a river bank."
How good that is in its own kind—as good as a nonchalant button- hole exquisitely composed of slightly poisonous flowers. And yet•the same hand which uses mysticism to catch silly trout is able, at the
end of a wisely sympathetic account of Zurbaran, to draw attention to a mystical quality in crtain of his pictures and to write with splendid seriousness:
" It is only by a rare combination of technique, deep feeling and good fortune that the artist, be he painter or poet, can achieve that beauty which in its effects is akin to the ecstasy which the saints won to by prayer and mortification. Then his poems or his pictures give the sense of deliverance, the exaltation, the happiness, the liberality of spirit which the mystics enjoy in union with'the Infinite. To me it is wonderfully moving that Zurbaran, this laborious, honest, matter-of-fact man, should on a few occasions in his long life have been, none can tell why, so transported out of himself as 'tp have done just this. It is as though the grace of God had descended upon him."
Or upon the observer.
If there were not an element of autobiography in this passage, it could scarcely have been written. It causes me to venerate the artist who wrote it. And yet he wrote also: "I have no power of veneration. It is more in my humour to be amused by people than -to respect them," and he found Elizabeth (and her German Garden) "very good company" although "she could be very malicious" and her tongue, he says, was neither delicate nor kind. The contra- diction is exceedingly odd, but as presumably it creates the tension which is Mr. Maugham, we must be grateful for it and not complain because he interprets life, even trout-life, "in the terms of his own temperament." We must not say, because we like him so much better on Zurbaran, that it isn't worth a greater writer's while to make the trout gasp. He thinks it is; they are part of his comedy; and, heaven knows, he has proved his right to people his own stage.
CHARLES MORGAN.
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