The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Comment (December 1923)
COMMENT
GRYLL GRANGE, by the author of Headlong Hall, is no masterpiece, but it is full of nearly everything and reading it for no accountable reason we have discovered in it texts for two discourses. One of Peacock's bêtes noirs, it would appear, were the Pantopragmatists, those who fancied that by reducing all knowledge to easily assimilatable terms, they could make all humanity virtuous and wise. The process has gone on, and with no snobbish desire to save any portion of art or science for ourselves we must confess our feeling that some of the pantopragmatists have done their work ill. They have made their large section of the life of the mind easy; but they haven’t cared enough for it to make it noble. We doubt even whether they have made it interesting.
Books for children, if we may add our word to the annual discussion, are still superior in one way—they have to be interesting. Perhaps entertaining is the better word—for entertainment is true nourishment, and only a small mind conceives entertainment as trivial. Children are not yet dragooned into reading, and many books published for them are delicately conceived and presented with allurement. Theirs are long, long thoughts, and they know where to take their fun.
The second, graver, matter is suggested by the structure of Gryll Grange. It is a series of conversations about everything; an Aristophanic comedy is produced and nine love affairs (seven, however, at one blow) are consummated in the course of these endless talks, full of allusions and citations from all the learned tongues. It is in a society based on leisure that this occurs; it is also in a society which knew what to do with leisure.
From that to the texture of our actual lives is a long step. We fight bitterly for our leisure and, gaining it, fret it away in the search of such a society as will nourish it and make it fruitful. Because earnest artists flee vulgar society, they are occasionally compelled to be solitary, and there is seldom the free communication between workers in the seven arts which the workers in each require for sanity and for a little happiness.
We have heard that a society capable of satisfying the necessities of artists exists abroad. It seems so to us indeed; in Paris, for example, where an American is outside the quarrels of groups and individuals, it seems to him that painters and poets and musicians and critics can meet, without forming rigid groups, and interchange ideas—and even half-ideas.
We do not see such a free interchange in America. In New York one must be "grouped" or not exist. And the intellectual poverty, the thinness, of some of the artists whose natural gifts are great is due in part to this. Mr Van Wyck Brooks has traced in his essays on James a few steps in the passage of a genius who needed an intellectual web more varied, more cunningly and more lovingly wrought than our own. One can anticipate the conclusion that flight from America is inadvisable; for many it is impossible; and the deep damnation which seems to threaten Europe is not reassuring for its own future, not to speak of its capacity to offer anything to a stranger. We must try once more at home for this association of creative minds, we must find for ourselves the means and the method to bring them into fructifying contact.