- MAN'S UNCONQUERABLE MIND Man's Unconquerable Mind. By R. W.
Chambers. (Cape. iss.) THERE is nothing dry-as-dust about the scholarship of Professor Chambers, for he has those attributes, often denied to the learned, which must nevertheless go to make the com- plete scholar ; historical imagination, acquaintance with several fields, independence of mind, wisdom, and that sense of humour without which wisdom itself cannot be perfect—as Millamant knew. Moreover, he brings a whole man, not merely a specialised mind, to bear on each of his topics, so that the book, though composed of essays or lectures on writings and men ranging from Bede to A. E. Housman, has a unity of theme. It is "man's unconquerable mind," which makes him testify to the things he believes to be right, how- ever much his universe may seem engulfed in darkness : and Dr. Chambers offers this work in our own time of moral eclipse In the hope that it may give us reflective calm, and even, perhaps, that "courage never to submit or yield," which, though a Satanic virtue, is one left over from the time when our first seducer was himself one of the glorious sons of light.
It is the spirit that matters, not whether a man is right or wrong politically ; for though to Dr. Chambers Shelley and Byron were politically wrong, as opposed to Castlereagh and the later Southey and Wordsworth, yet they were spiritually right (and whatever else they may or may not have been, they were poets); indeed, Dr. Chambers thinks that on many occasions of strife and struggle both sides were right. It is a generous attitude ; yet one cannot but feel that it may lead to difficulties ; it may be that even with Dr. Chambers it has done so ; for if the repressive Tory measures of the early nineteenth century (no doubt including the Peterloo massacre) were a natural "stiffening of discipline," so also may have been Henry VIII's—shall we call them preventive?—decapita- tions, which elsewhere Dr. Chambers has described as the outcome of a Fascist tyranny. Because those who are politi- cally wrong may in some ways be morally saved—oh yes, the later Wordsworth had his fling at the Industrial Revolution— it does not follow that they were in the main right. For politics must ultimately be based on morals, and it can never be right to make a pact with the Devil.
And it is precisely on this ground that Dr. Chambers defends Isabella in Measure for Measure, in what is perhaps the most delightful chapter in a delightful book. It is difficult for us today to stomach Isabella, for we cannot believe that God can attach such immense importance to physical chastity. We prefer the saint—was it one of the many St. Annes?— who, journeying from Egypt to the Holy Land, and finding that the price of being ferried across the Red Sea was her virginity, willingly surrendered so trifling a thing. But Isabella felt differently. Well, we can understand that up to a point ; we know that there are some excellent people like that, though we may think they need some drastic treatment to humanise them. After all, a brother's life! Some of us, too, can applaud her trick for getting Angelo and Mariana legitimately bedded. But it is difficult for us to reconcile the two, and here Dr. Chambers shows us the path. With him also we feel a just scorn for those who want to have it both ways ; you cannot dislike Isabella for her self-regarding virtue, and dislike her again for giving us the good old comedy turn of the substituted bedfellow. With him, again, we find it difficult to understand this prudish abhorrence of the substituted:bed- fellow (and why should it be considered perfectly right in Boccaccio and most reprehensible in All's Well that Ends Well?). But to return to Isabella. The chief puzzle about her has been her shocking rounding upon her unfortunate brother after his piteous plea, "Sweet sister, let me live!" surely, placed as it is, one of the most sublimely comic remarks in all literature, which in its high comedy must have enraptured Meredith. What is here done for the first time is to make Isabella a wholly comprehensible and even lovable person, for he shows us that this speech is the outcry of a tortured creature ; but what a convincing case he makes of it must be left for the reader to find out. As Dr. Chambers insists, Measure for Measure, far from being painful, as Coleridge found it, is one of the loveliest and most consistent comedies Shakespeare ever wrote ; but in his discovery that Measure for Measure is a marvellously Christian play of forgiveness he has been forestalled by Mr. Wilson Knight, who investigated the matter in detail, and Mr. Middleton Murry, who bases his proof rather upon his feeling for the whole than upon textual parallels with the Gospels.
The entrancing chapter on Measure for Measure is one of two in which Dr. Chambers disposes, finally, we hope, of the old, utterly unjustified picture of the Shakespeare who was once happy, then plunged "into the depths," and finally emerged "on the heights." Lytton Strachey made the first attack, and threw a ball or two at this Aunt Sally, and Dr. Chambers, it seems likely, has knocked her down, though in all modesty he explains that he has, as a Spenserian knight, merely been enjoying "a joust against Sir Arthur [Quiller- Couch], Sir Edmund [Chambers], and the Lady Una Britomart Ellis Fermoor, backed by the spells which the Wizard' pro- fessor of the North [Dr. Dover Wilson], the Prince of thc Power of the Air, can weave from his chair amid the mists of high Dunedin." The protest, especially against the idea of an age of Jacobean depression, he reminds us has already been made by Professor Sisson : may it now at last prove effective. There is no " cynicism " in Shakespeare, though since he saw things more clearly than most his advantagt was often revenged by his statements being dubbed " cyniciim " ; a common position of which Dr. Chambers reveals his know- ledge by referring to Swift as "that great philanthropist." The "dark comedies" are comedies still ; even Troilus! and Cressida is a tragedy shot with the courageous laughteti it is the function of great comedy to provide.
The mention of Troilus brings us to the chapter on the play of More, where, by a comparison of the political passage in that play with the famous " degree " speech of Ulysses, Dr. Chambers adds one more proof to the contention that one scene at least in that play is by Shakespeare, basing his argu- ment not upon imagery alone, but upon the sequence of imag:,. The thoughts were the commonplaces of the time ; you meet them in the Homilies, in Elyot's The Booke Called the Governour, in Hooker ; but the way in which, in more than one place, the same original idea led to the same train of images is so striking, that any lingering doubt must fade away All this as set down here may seem to have little to do with man's unconquerable mind, yet in the book the theme is quite dear ; the heroic quality of Bede and Alcuin, in Beowulf, of Langland—no longer the singer of peasant despair and miseries—of More and Tyndale, of Shakespeare and Byron, and even in their way of Ker and Housman, is made plain throughout. But if this is a unifying quality in the book, there is another of perhaps equal importance, that of common sense ; the historico-critical passages are indeed a triumph ef common sense, which is another virtue often denied to scholar- ship, but which Dr. Chambers possesses in graceful abundance.
BONAKY DosfitE.
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