BACK TO BOWDLER!

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23053, 22 June 1940, Page 14

BACK TO BOWDLER!

Bowdler, it may nowadays be j necessary to explain, was an English I physician and member of tire Royal Society, who in 1818 published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare for family reading, and is by no means to be confounded with the French poet, Baudelaire, whom I shall have occasion to mention presently. One rarely sees a copy of the Family Shakespeare now, though it went through several editions. But Bowdler himself has secured immortality by getting his name into the dictionary. His successors in the field of Shakespearean studies have little good to say of him. In his labours on behalf of the family circle, Bowdler, it seems, was given to making too many hedges about the law: he bowdlerised to excess. But he has received one testimonial which should go far to redeem his name from obloquy. “No man, ’ says Swinburne, “ever did better service to Shakespeare.” That, when one recalls the names and services of Condcll and Heminges, of Theobald and Johnson, of Lamb and Coleridge, is about as handsome a eulogy as any man could receive or desire!

Swinburne's tribute came to my mind the other day when I read a slighting reference to Bowdler in Mr Logan Pearsall Smith’s book, “On Reading Shakespeare.” The author of that ingenious work, speaking of Shakespeare’s ribaldry, tells us that not only does he “not mind it,” but in fact “rather likes it,” and enlarges on the pleasure he gets from being'able to join in “the learned giggles,” which are reserved as a reward for those who will take the necessary trouble to understand the precise import of Shakespeare’s indecent jokes and innuendoes. Now when a scholar of ripe taste and discrimination drops into that vein of undergraduate facetiousness. I confess I am not amused. Those giggles do not become the fastidious editor of Donne and Jeremy Tayloi’,

(SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR THE PRESS.) [By F. SIN CLAIRE. 3

I say with Mr Pecksniff that they I tr; grieve me. Or rather, they would es if I believed in them. For then I ti< should have to lament the decay, p« not of Mr Pearsall Smith’s morals, v« but of his taste. But of course I do fa not believe that a reader of such or avowed fastidiousness can find anything to giggle over in Shakespeare’s dull jokes about syphilis. I suspect our learned giggler of a pose which L has for some time now been one of £ the major calamities of our litera- " ture—the pose of inverted Bowdler- * ism. Against this pose I raise the ~1 banner which goes forth with the blessing of Swinburne. Back to g Bowdler! v j Old Prudery, New Rowdyism p When and why the new pose be- I came the fashion, I do not stop to in- y quire. No doubt it began in what 1 literary historians call a reaction. l> Like other reactions, it has ended by s becoming a nuisance. “Don’t write j me pretty,” said Walt Whitman to a r prospective biographer half a cen- y tury ago, “don’t leave out the hells ‘ and the damns.” A little later J. M. ■ Synge, on the other side of the £ Atlantic, was calling for a return to « “brutality.” But brutality is no more y a prescription for good writing than it is for good living. Hells and I damns by all means, so far as they are really relevant and significant. , But when all the spades have been _ beaten into bloody shovels, what shall we do when it happens that J; all we want is a spade? Convention r for convention, it is clear, to judge by results, that the old prudery was c less fatal to good writing than the t new rowdyism. And it did at least r impose some restraint on the yahoo. ( One might illustrate the new con- f vention by a statistical study of the t fauna of contemporary literature. , For the present I must content myself with a single example, taken j. from another writer of great distinc- j tion. In one of his best known poems, Mr T. S. Eliot invites the c reader to “remark” something which - the author calls a cat. But the more t I remark that four-footed imposter, the less easy do I find the effort to i suspend my disbelief in its existence t anywhere but in print. I simply cannot allay the suspicion aroused by the formula with which Mr Eliot introduces his animal; that vile ] euphuism bodes no good: it warns j me, as a hardened not to j expect a real cat i*ke Cowper’s sedate c and grave companion. Mr Eliot’s s cat is not even harmless and neces- t , sary: it is unnecessary and aestheti- t cally harmful. That simulacrum is r a purely literary cat, whose pattern e | is laid up nowhere hut in the con- c ’ ventional world inhabited by the 1 fauna of modern poetry. It was t I only by some unaccountable mis- J carriage, I suspect, that it was not 1 ; born a rat. The rat, I gather from i my rough statistical tables, is the most over-worked literary animal of . . them all, with the louse and the worm as runners-up. Not that I , would deny those humble creatures \ their x-ight to a place in literature. ] There are lice and worms in the £ Bible and in Homer, and a mid- 1 Victorian poet wrote a capital poem T about rats. (He wrote it for chil- * dren.) My quarrel is with a dull ; and hampering convention. f No Flies in “In Memoriam” * Here one of the young lions of c contemporary criticism elucidates my point with a truculent roar. 1 There is a way to do it, he says in £ effect, and a way not to do it. Sup- ■; • posing, for example, that the \ . poet’s theme is death: Baude- ; 1 laire has shown us how to do c 1 it, and Tennyson how not to i ’ do it. The French poet de- j ’ scribes a woman’s dead body in- j ; fested with flies and vermin; but in s t all the hundred cantos of “In ‘ • Memoriam,” as our critic puts it i 1 with some asperity, the English ■ ! dastard has not once given us such a picture of his friend Hallam. With ' r this naive pronouncement, Mr Eliot’s 1 t cat is out of the bag, and with it the ’ whole menagerie of fearful wild * fowl which drag on a shadowy subsistence in the pages of some = modern poets, like the insubstantial - ghosts in Homer’s underworld. One - had long felt of those little creai tures thaf their bark was worse than 1 their bite, that those rats and lice - smelt of the lamp, and those worms ’ were only bookworms. One ingeni- * ous young critic has as good as told 1 us that those beasties are period de- . corations, as indispensable to the making of a modish poem as nymphs and turtle-doves to an eighteenth century pastoral. Tennyson has con-

:avened the unwritten law. It is no xcuse to say that in his preocqjipaion with science and religion and a iersonal sorrow, he forgot the ermin. Besides, the plea would be alse. He did not forget them; he mitted them. Homage to Hooliganism But the convention. of inverted Sowdlerisin has a much'wider orbit. \ little while ago, to occupy the eisure of a sea voyage, I amused nyself with a little piece of research. I took a small representaJve collection of recent books, and made for each of them a select index and glossary. One of these books ivas a collection of letters, in which the foremost of our younger English poets professes to describe a trip to Iceland. In the course of a not very big book, the au..ior records 11 visits to what he calls lavatories. Now I suppose that details of that sort are of no interest whatever to the adult reader, and I cannot believe they are of any interest to the writer. They are merely the author’s credentials. He is many times bored; once at least, definitely bored. More credentials! —for there are sets in which the capacity for boredom is regarded as. a measure of intellectual superiority, and not—as it is—of resourcelessness. However, our author’s heart is in the right place, for though his friends live either in Cambridge or Gordon square, and though for his part he travels first class, ye, he finds second class passengers “nicer,” his references to the proletariat arc adequately frequent and condescending, and he is at some pains to let us know that he will -Stand no nonsense from bourgeois politicians. Once, visiting a historic church and finding the light dim, our author climbs on the altar and strikes matches to see the frescoes. Some people might call this last escapade by a hard name. But the hero of it has been to Cambridge, and a gentleman is one who never gives offence unintentionally: these freaks and sallies of his have all the extenuating notes of deliberateness. They are the homage which, in the ritual of inverted Bowdlerism, gentility pays to hooliganism. Manhandling the Bible But this immature pose of Rabelaisianism is the sort of unresisting imbecility against which Dr. Johnson has warned us that the shafts of criticism are unavailing. Against such crude frontal attacks the artistic law of reticence, one would have supposed, hardly needs defending. That any defence should be necessary is a sign of the chaos to which our life and art are tending. In what other age could a writer of the eminence of D. H. Lawrence have written the tirade which I am about to quote, and have put it in the mouth of Christ? Your name is Mammon? You arc the selfish hog that’s got hold of the world, aren’t you? Well, look here, my boy, I’m going to take it away from you. . . Mammon, I hate it. I hate it, Mammon. I hate you, and am going to push you off the face of the earth. . . . But if you turn to the sources, you will find that what Christ said was: “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” The difference in style could hardly be more striking. In the modern version you get a deluge of catch-phrases and cliches, of dead words which the writer tries to galvanise into the semblance of life by a forcible-feeble splutter of hatred. The Gospel phrase consists of six words, enunciated with the economy and restraint which are the best ornaments of truth. For truth does not become any truer for being shouted at the top of the voice, or printed in large type. Lawrence’s screed rings false from enJ to end. We hear in it the voice of one who is whipping up his own courage because he is not sure of himself. It is significant that one finds the same offence against reticence and dignity, the same emotional licence and lusciousness, in some modern translations of the Bible. “What joy for those who have the poor man’s feelings runs the first beatitude in one of these new versions. But the beatitudes were not uttered in that exclamatory fashion. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The new version, apart from the banality of its phrasing, is a paraphrase which seriously misrepresents the tone of the original saying. We have all heard of the American tourist who thought some of the historic buildings in Europe would be the better for a little “jazzing up.” Some of these manhandlings of the Bible are inspired by the same taste.

Fifty years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson saw signs in literature of what he called a “love of the styleless, of the shapeless, of the slapdash and the disorderly,’ and added the prophetic comment, “There is trouble coming, I think.” Yes disorderliness, violence and brutality masquerading as strength, disregard fur restraint and reticence—these are symptoms of trouble coming, or already here. It has become a platitude to say that we live to-day in a world of increasing lawlessness. The responsibility of literature for this state f affairs is very grave. Art reflects life, but life in its turn reflects art. In the beginning was the word: nothing is being done today but was thought and proclaimed in words yesterday. For the sake of to-morrow, as well as for its own sake, literature must set its house in order. I am going beyond my text, and my time is up. But I cannot end until I have given myself the pleasure of transcribing some sentences which arc very relevant to this matter of the place of reticence and restraint in art and life. “In vulgar minds,” says Coventry Patmore, “the idea of passion is inseparable from that of disorder; in them the advances of love, or anger, or any other strong energy towards its end, is like the rush of a savage horde, with war-whoops, tom-toms, and confused tumult, and the great decorum of a passion, which keeps, and is immensely increased in force by, the discipline of God’s order, looks to them like weakness and coldness. . . . Virtues are nothing but ordered passions, and vices nothing but passions in disorder.” WAR PAMPHLETS The series of Round Table War Pamphlets—reprints from the “Hound Table”—is inaugurated with How Shall We Pay for the War, a comparative study of German and Allied resources, with special reference to the British economic problem. Tile second is a reasoned and eloquent statement of The Issue between democracy and dictatorshio. The third lucidly sets out The Facts about Finland. —Macmillan and Co. (Prices: No. 1, Gd; Nos. 2 and 3,3 d.) An Australian series, issued by Messrs Angus and Robertson at the uniform price of Gd, already includes seven pamphlets; Origins and Issues of the War (H. S. Nicholas). Real Costs of War (R. C. Mills), Transport of Food in War (Eric Ashby), The Old A.I.F. and the New (C. E. W. Bean), Great Britain, France, and Ourselves (A. H. McDonald), Hitler and the Trade Unions (J. A. McCallum), and Poland (Margot Hentze).