Human Failings in Literature

As All Roads Lead to Rome

I am glad your little daughter gives you pleasure and that you agree that affection for children is part of nature. Indeed if this is not the case there can be no natural tie between one human being and another, and once you abolish that, you abolish all society. “And good luck!”, says Carneades—an abominable thing to say, but not too naive as the position of our friend Lucius and Patro; when they make self-interest their only yardstick while refusing to believe in any altruistic act and maintain that we should be good only to avoid getting into trouble and not because goodness is naturally right, they fail to see that they are talking about an artful dodger, not a good man. [Brundisium, 25 November (?) 50]

For mercy’s sake, put all your affection, lavished on me as it is, and all your wisdom, remarkable in every field as I do assure you I regard it, into one single concern, the consideration of my position in toto. I fancy I see the greatest struggle—unless the same Providence that delivered me from the Parthian war better than I could have dared to hope takes pity on our country—, the greatest that history has ever known. Well, that is a calamity which I shall have to bear along with the rest of the world. I don’t ask you to think about that. But do pray take up this personal problem of my own. You see, don’t you, that at your instigation I have made friends with both the contestants. And I only wish I had listened to your affectionate admonitions from the first. “The heart within my breast thou ne’er couldst sway.” However in the end you persuaded me to make friends with one of them because of all he had done for me and with the other because of his power. So I did, and by conciliating them in every possible way I managed to win as high a place in their several good graces as any other man’s. We calculated that on the one hand joined with Pompey I should never be obliged to go politically astray, while on the other hand as Pompey’s ally I ought not to be at loggerheads with Caesar—they were so closely linked. Now, as you represent and as I see myself, there looms ahead a tremendous contest between them. Each counts me as his man, unless it be that one of them is only pretending—for Pompey has no doubts, judging correctly that I strongly approve of his present politics. Moreover I received letters from both at the same time as yours, conveying the impression that neither has a friend in the world he values more than myself.

But what am I to do? I don’t mean in the proceedings that will be set on foot when I get back to prevent his candidature in absentia and to make him give up his army. “Speak, M. Tullius!” What shall I say? “Be so kind as to wait until I see Atticus”? There’s no room for fence-sitting. Against Caesar then? “Where are those close-clasped hands?” For I helped to get him this privilege, as requested by himself at Ravenna in connexion with Caelius who was Tribune—and not only by him but by our Gnaeus too in that immortal third Consulship of his. Or shall I take a different line? “I fear” not Pompey only but “the Trojan men and dames”. “Polydamas will foremost cry me shame.” Being who? You yourself of course, the encomiast of my doings and writings.

I escaped this dilemma during the two earlier Marcelline Consulships when the Senate discussed Caesar’s command; now I am coming in just at the crisis. [Athens, 16 October 50]

The Intemperance of Father Brown

[His] output was prodigious, and it would be unreasonable to expect all the short stories to be equally successful, but the quality of writing never disappoints. Chesterton never wrote an inelegant or clumsy sentence. The Father Brown stories are written in a style richly complex, imaginative, vigorous, poetic and spiced with paradoxes.
. . .
I have never suffered from literary indigestion when reading the stories, partly because of Chesterton’s imaginative power and his all-embracing humanity. (P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction)

I confess that I have been had by Mrs. Christie. I did not guess who the murderer was, I was incited to keep on and find out, and when I did finally find out, I was surprised. Yet I did not care for Agatha Christie and I hope never to read another of her books.

Mrs. Christie, in proportion as she is more expert and concentrates more narrowly on the puzzle, has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it. In this new novel, she has to provide herself with puppets who will be good for three stages of suspense: you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of the two men the heroine will marry. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may. But in [such] a performance... the patter is a constant bore and the properties lack the elegance of playing cards.

My sister the embroidress has a pleasant memory of Chesterton. She was staying there. He got very drunk one night. Next morning he did not appear at breakfast. Presently a servant came in to say “Mr. Chesterton asks for a Bible and a tumbler of milk”. Mrs. Chesterton in unbroken gloom told the servant where the Bible could be found.

A Poem by E.E. Cummings

or, Familiarity Breeds Contempt

In spite of everything that can be said in defense of Mohammed’s religious integrity and his loyalty to his call, his endurance, his liberality, and his generosity, we are not doing the Prophet of Islam an injustice when we conclude that this moral personality does not stand upon the same level with his other endowments; and indeed, not even upon the same level with his religious endowments. But if we would be fair to him we must not forget that, consciously or unconsciously, we Christians are inclined to compare Mohammed with the unsurpassed and exalted figure whom we meet in the Gospels, and that we cannot avoid seeing his historical personality against the background of the perfect moral ideal to which the faith of his followers tried to exalt him. And when it is measured by such a standard, what personality is not found wanting?

Then Chesterton Was Done

Literary Chronicles Toward Posterity

I have no intention of persecuting any religion; but I am myself a complete unbeliever, and I know from experience that both the Catholics and the Christian Scientists invariably make a squawk if anything critical is said about them.... Now I know that the Catholic Church is a formidable power at the present time; but I think it is important to stand up to it. For example, I have just read the Catholic biography of G.K. Chesterton, published by Sheed and Ward. If I had been reviewing books, I should certainly have had to review it; and if I had reviewed it, I should certainly have had to say that it suffered from the intellectual squalor of the Catholic Church in America. This would have brought you indignant letters and probably some people would have stopped their subscriptions. (October, 1943)

For the rest, you have mainly G.K. Chesterton, who turned out in his books on Dickens some of the best work of which he was capable and who said some excellent things, but whose writing here as elsewhere is always melting away into that peculiar psuedo-poetic booziness which verbalizes with large conceptions and ignores the most obtrusive actualities.
. . .
Chesterton asserted that time would show that Dickens was not merely one of the Victorians, but incomparably the greatest English writer of his time; and Shaw coupled his name with that of Shakespeare. It is the conviction of the present writer that both these judgments were justified.

Some Recent Play Sightings

When Heresy Becomes Orthodoxy

Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of Inner Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.

Marcus Aurelius and his friends [sic] had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the god within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature, and hardly any hope of any virtue in society. They had not enough interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionize it. They did not love the city enough to set fire to it.

Nature worship is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words, Pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan. But Nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped. Stars and mountains are not to be taken seriously. If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended. Because earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.

Further Readings in Ancient Rome