[In the following essay, Wheatley surveys such major works by Douglas as South Wind, Experiments, and Goodbye to Western Culture, commenting favorably on his main themes and style and comparing his main themes and style and comparing his writings to those of other authors, both contemporary and classical.]

Here in America and perhaps in general elsewhere, Norman Douglas has suffered from neglect. Except for the attention paid to South Wind and the rather craven acceptance of Goodbye to Western Culture, he has not been properly introduced to a public who could reasonably enjoy him by taking pains to do so. There have been few articles in American magazines: the best of them was "The Early Work of Norman Douglas", by Edward D. McDonald, in The Bookman for September, 1927. There have been reviews of his books, ephemeral tributes. And there is always, for the Douglas lover and student, the Centaur Bibliography of the Writings of Norman Douglas, (Centaur Book Shop, Philadelphia, 1927), also by Edward D. McDonald. While this is now incomplete, since it ends, as to the books, with Experiments published in 1925, it is an enviably careful record of all printed matter up to 1927. Nevertheless, Mr. Douglas has not been adequately received here. The neglect may in part be attributed to the difficulty of reading him, and to the fact that he is totally unlike any other living writer. He has incalculable depths of culture and knowledge under his feet, and the magnetism of his work rests largely on that hard stratum.

One appears to find, on approaching Mr. Douglas, that a great deal of erudition is necessary to enjoy him. If one wishes to absorb him, one is led, like Mr. Eames, annotating the work of Monsignor Perrelli in South Wind, into a multitude of divergent roads of learning, into: "minerals, medicine, strategy, heraldry, navigation, palaeography, statistics, politics, botany", and into letters, philosophy, psychology, history, biology, bibliography, and all the arts. It seems too difficult to reach æsthetic relaxation by such a hard road. But that difficulty is Mr. Douglas' tonic quality, the thing that makes him perennially interesting. One cannot wallow in him as in Cabell or Erskine, in Hemingway, or Faulkner. He requires to be met by the spirit alert, erect, and stubborn. He is the touch of earth that renews Antœus. His claim to immortality rests upon his difficulty as well as upon his crystalline hardness and fragrance. He who wishes to understand the firm splendor of the Douglas spirit can do so by a process of patient innoculation. He should begin with Experiments. He should read the first chapter on Doughty's Arabia Deserta, the chapter on Isabelle Eberhart, the essay on Poe, and above all things, the pamphlet on Lawrence and Magnus, most fortunately included. He should leave the rest of Experiments and go on to Alone. And with convenient intervals of rest from so much vigor, he should read Together, South Wind, and Old Calabria. Now he is ready for anything. He has imbued himself with a master, and he will always be coming back for more.

And what will the reader of Douglas find? He will find that Norman Douglas stands out in the field of contemporary letters like an historic pine, divorced from its forest fellows, lofty and alone on a mountain slope; an erect, wind-warped figure from which emanates an aromatic spice. And yet, there is too much that is turbid, restless, homeless, and voracious, about Mr. Douglas to let such a static comparison remain unchallenged. He is more like a torrential, flood-swollen river, a stream that in its onward rush carries away hindering banks, devours fields, scours out caverns, and bears in its breast innumerable forms of strange life; a stream that splits the solid earth with its terrible silver beauty. But whether he be compared to a tree, or to living waters, the fact of his solitary uniqueness remains. In spite of his many and opposing phases of character, there is still a oneness, a "uniquity", a marked and over-powering personality which differentiates him from the diffused and nervous intellects of modern literature. It is said of him that he does not like analogies drawn between himself and other writers. And to compare him with the moderns is impossible. One must go back to the giants of other times; to Voltaire, Darwin, and Nietzsche. These men and their like, and Douglas are the center of a storm of which the moderns are the diminishing and weary waves. Norman Douglas himself has been, so it seems, a follower in one case only. He has absorbed Nietzschean principles, perhaps unconsciously, and has made of himself a super-man. His last works indicate that he has reached that point of cold sanity which borders perilously on insanity. In fact, one might, not unreasonably, think on reading In the Beginning, that the leaf had fallen which turns the scale. In times past Douglas had a thousand Protean shapes both terrible and sweet. He has become by the strictures of time, and, one fears, of neglect, a stiffening figure, sometimes negatively and peevishly ferocious. He is hardening into a grinning garden god, a battered Priapus. And still he stands alone, superior in golden, Hellenic vitality. It is as if Priapus stood in a glade of eternal sunshine.

I

The work of Norman Douglas divides itself roughly into three classes; scientific, critical, and creative. It covers intermittently a period of over forty years. The first printed thing was a small contribution to The Zoologist, a Monthly Journal of Natural Science, in 1886. The last was Goodbye to Western Culture, in 1930. The early treatises on natural science, (1886-95), can have little interest for letters, except as an indication of their author's inexhaustible, insatiate zest for curious knowl-edge, and as a clue to his continuous preference for nature over man. The archaeological studies of Capri, (1904-15), may long continue to interest the leisured and scholarly traveler; but a great deal of the material from them has been incorporated in Siren Land, and Old Calabria. The Centaur Bibliography gives the information that hints from The Forestal Conditions of Capri found their way into the second chapter of Siren Land: and that the monograph on "Tiberius", and the Life of the Venerable Suor Serafino Di Dio, became respectively the fourth and ninth chapters of Siren Land: and that material on the "Saracens in Italy" became chapter eighteen of Old Calabria. Some of the Capri work was also rewritten for various magazines. This reworking of material is very characteristic of Mr. Douglas. He seems loath to part with anything which his brain has tested and moulded. He is constantly scrutinizing, perfecting, and giving new birth to those of his writings for which he has most respect. One might be tempted to deduce from this that he exhibits a scientist's hunger for infallibility, rather than a creator's exuberance.

It would be an interesting and profitable labor to extract from all his critical writings that entity, Mr. Douglas the critic. One may venture the supposition from what little is known, that he could not be proven an originator or creator in the field of criticism. He would be a follower, but a follower of what has been most noble in the past. He would be found a commentator, rather than a critic; and his mind charged with Hellenism would be a touchstone to determine the intrinsically pure from the base. He would be discovered, perhaps, as the last exemplar of Renaissance Humanism, as it has been explained by Santayana in The Genteel Tradition at Bay.

Norman Douglas' critical work contributed chiefly to the English Review over a period of about four years, (1912-16), and to several other journals up until 1925, has been scantily collected. He seems to value it less than other kinds of his writing. When one reads the list of reviews tabulated by McDonald in the Centaur Bibliography one wishes profoundly that more of them had been put into book form. What, for instance, has he said about Francis Brett Young's critical study of Robert Bridges; what about Irving Babbitt's Masters of French Criticism; or about Van Wyck Brooks' John Addington Symonds? It seems a shame that the activity of his mind on these subjects and others of equal importance should be contained only in the comparatively ephemeral records of a journal. A few samples of reviewing work are included in Experiments, which is entirely a collection of early writings. By comparison with the really critical essays in the same book, these reviews seem sketchy and impatient. That is no great wonder, however, when one observes the trivial subjects which he has, for the most part, dealt with. It is like seeing a giant play with a child's jack-straws. Why were these inept things saved at the expense of what must have been better? Why have they been allowed to encumber a book otherwise radiant with charm? That is one of the peculiar Douglas mysteries of which there are many. These reviews are fragile little hooks upon which to hang reflections and prejudices that are more firmly expressed elsewhere.

It is not wrenching the natural order of things to put Experiments and Goodbye to Western Culture side by side. The ideas that are the backbone of Experiments have become lively with time, and have broken out in the later book into an angry flame that gives forth acrid and sulphurous odors; a flame in which prance ribald and ridiculous devils. Mr. Douglas reminds us here of another uneasy, sulphurous, and revolting soul of an earlier generation, Mark Twain. Both of these men are rebels against material stagnation, against bourgeois primness, and the fawning habits of a people who are uncertain of their culture and nervous about their safety in this world and the next. Mr. Douglas has advanced in courage beyond Twain, and attacks both Christianity and its legal institutions with blundering ferocity. He is beside himself with rage, like a man devoured by ants. And he succeeds in leaving the general impression with the puzzled reader of Goodbye to Western Culture, that Christianity is an evil spirit flown out of India, a demon exorcised which has left behind it, in that pleasant Eastern land, a life and society entirely wholesome, excellent, and righteous. It is a very amusing book; and some of it is sadly true. But one must finally feel that the shoe pinches Mr. Douglas somewhere or he would not have troubled to write his tirade. He is not sufficiently in love with human beings to care very much what absurdities they commit. With the exception of his very righteous remarks on reform schools and education, he is furious only about those annoyances that interfere with his comfort, and quite complacent about others that do not. Goodbye to Western Culture has the ear-marks of a private spleen. It is something of a sport from the rest of Douglas' work.

However, were Norman Douglas, speaking in literary manner, always perfect, he would be as intolerable as Emerson. When he takes the pains to be genuinely critical, (and that is when he honors his subject), the result of his thought is a penetrative rightness which comes, not so much from fixed or original critical principles, as from what is naturally right and vigorous in Douglas himself. In Doughty's Arabia Deserta, for example, he appreciates those qualities which are most firmly imbedded in his own nature, and which break forth again and again in his own writing, like the craggy out-cropping of an upland pasture. He says of Doughty: "What drove him, besides an Homeric love of adventure, to endure those hardships was pure intellectual curiosity, the longing of a brain that feeds on disinterested thought." The Homeric quality, the intellectual longing—that is Douglas. Speaking of authors of travel literature, he says: "Those earlier ones were gentlemen scholars who saw things from their own individual angle. Their leisurely, aristocratic flavor, their wholesome discussions about this or that, their waywardness, and all their mercurial touch of a bygone generation, where is it now?" It is kept in Douglas. But in one respect what he says about Doughty will not do for himself. He remarks upon Doughty's reserve and his sublime detachment. Mr. Douglas is at times neither reserved not detached. He has moments of submitting to his own crustacean prejudices, of hysterically bowing to his own idols, that constitute a sort of temporary blind staggers, an intoxication of bitterness such as has occasionally infected our frantic Mr. Mencken.

II

And now the lesser, and still great Mr. Douglas can be left for the time, firm in the superior qualities of his scientific curiosity, his endless knowledge, his generosity for the things he trusts, his outrageous and sometimes medicating sanity. Leaving his irritations, his flair for the reversed platitude, we can pass on to the truly immortal Mr. Douglas, he who creates. Under the head of creative writing must come, not only his short stories and novels, but also and in particular, his reminiscences, his memoirs of wandering: Siren Land, Fountains in the Sand, Old Calabria, Alone, and Together. Creative memoirs! There is no better word for these things in their golden fullness. They are the kind of memoirs that Douglas is always asking other people to write, the revelations of a rich, various, an instinctively noble personality.

The first effect of these travel books and the others is that Douglas is a non-creative and purely exploratory writer. That impression persists for a long time, because he has a trick of repeating his work as if at loss for new material. Nearly all of his few short stories have had several printings, each with an improving revision. And the material of the Capri studies has entered not only into Siren Land and Old Calabria, but into the structure of South Wind. Mr. Douglas has apparently only one poem to his credit, and no plays, unless he himself undertook the dramatization of South Wind. He is not a plot maker; and his characters, however vigorous, are few. The best of them may be discovered to be emanations from his own variegated personality. But when one puts side by side Mr. Douglas' work as a whole, and the judgment of Mr. Edward D. McDonald, who has named him reasonably and truly a realist and stylist, the creative element comes to light by contrast. It is true that Mr. Douglas is a realist in his inexhaustible and thoughtful observations. It is also true that he is a stylist in the perfect impact of thought and word and in mellow sequences. But he is more; he has something beyond the nervous modern fad for minutiae. This something is mythopoesis, the ability, the need to invest natural phenomena with sprites and demons, to shroud the bones of life with fair flesh, and breathe an individual spirit into the body of his creation. He has, in short, the Coleridgean esemplastic imagination. Let us take his own word for it.

To hear the "subtle harmony" and respond to the gentle promptings of the genius loci, the unseen presence, is what Doughty found to be a talisman. So might others find, but never will among the unseemly and restless conditions of modern life… The drying up of the fountains of mythopoesis, the elimination of mystery might well sadden and sterilize a poetic soul.

Experiments, "Arabia Deserta."

I have only a diary of dates to go upon, out of which with the help of memory and imagination have been extracted these pages … Imagination—why not? Truth blends well with untruth, and phantasy has been so sternly banned of late from travelers' tales that I am growing tenderhearted toward the poor old dame; quite chivalrous in fact, especially on those rather frequent occasions when I find myself unable to dispense with her services.

m̵Alone.

The elusive fascination and magnetism of Mr. Douglas' writing, the compulsion of it, lie in his refulgent poetic quality. He is a maker of dreams and dragons. These travel books are full of such infectious moments of beauty as only the creative genius can produce. Consider two extracts from Together, perhaps the most personal and revealing of the books of reminiscence, if not the finest.

They dig peat here as in many of these upland bogs, and the rank vegetation with its pungent odours, sweet and savage, has not yet been mowed down—a maze of tall blue gentians, and mint and mare's tail, and flame-like pyramids of ruby color, and meadowsweet, and the two yellows, the lusty and the frail, all tenderly confused among the mauve mist of flowering reeds.

Stars are out; the Tschallenga hill confronting us has become pitch black; those Rhaetian peaks are like steel, and their snow-patches have a dead look at this hour. Tawny exhalations as of lingering day, flit about the Swiss mountains on our west. Some grass has been mown up here, during the host afternoon; the air is full of its fragrance.

Simple things these two quotations, but how difficult to do without over-doing! They are alive! Only the creative hand can so master the color in prose and weave it into a vital entity. It is not every one who will think of snow gone dead at twilight, of tawny exhalations, of frail and lusty yellows. There is a jewel-H like quality about this writing, as if it were a diamond with an eternity of light playing in its depths.

Norman Douglas is creative also in his writing of men, whether they be garnered from the past, or men of his own knowing. He seems to have held few women in sufficient respect to make living personalities of them in his books: Ouida, Isabelle Eberhardt, his dour old grandmother, the housewife from whom he extracts the information that she roasts coffee "to the color of a capuchin's frock". That is his method of creating with people. He extracts something of their individuality, or their oddity, something dear to his heart, and embodies in it an ever fresh fragment of his writing. There is Ramage, for example, author of that ripe companion of Douglas' Italian wanderings, The Nooks and Byways of Italy; and there are the guides, the innkeepers, the stray acquaintances, those rural Italian family men, and all the innumerable people of the distant past upon whom he touches so frequently. They all live for us under his hand, and require a returning, a constant renewal of their friendship. This is creation; it is not realism, which hands you actualities as a stone for bread.

And now we come to creation as it is more usually understood, the synthesis of plot, the birth of characters.

Mr. Douglas' record is slender but glowing. It begins with the short stories which were first published pseudonymously in Unprofessional Tales, (1901). In the Centaur Bibliography, Mr. McDonald tells us that all of these tales but one had a collaborator, and that they were, "tentative and derivative work". They were obviously little flowers offered on the altar of Poe. In later years they were frequently worked over, and must have been invested with the peculiar Douglas originality. Those that are included in Experiments have become deft and elvish little intaglios, sometimes grotesque and terrible, sometimes weirdly beautiful, but always delicate.

There are two novels and one long mythological tale, In the Beginning, (1928). The writing of this last seems to have been rather a mistake on Mr. Douglas' part. The particular kind of ribaldry which is its essence has become a little stale since Candide, and Penguin Island; and it has been much overworked by Cabell. But even In the Beginning has its moments of beauty; for Mr. Douglas cannot touch anything without imparting to it a fiery phoenix charm.

How many mistakes a man may be forgiven for the sake of They Went and South Wind! Innumerable literary errors may be allowed to slip into the blackness of forgetting, while one remembers: Theophilus, and the green Princess; Keith, Count Caloveglia, Don Francesco, and the decent Eames who loved the "ballon captif". These two novels are glowing things, full of seductive poetry and summer enchantment. Mr. Douglas is said to have remarked of South Wind that it took a long period of happiness to write. He must have had that happiness for They Went, also. The two books are different in music and color. They are greatly differentiated by the fact that They Went, which should have been named "Theophilus" after its Miltonic fiend, is pure fantasy, the frothy incarnation of a legend. South Wind has the dash of reality that makes its illusion credible. The one is a fairy tale; the other might have happened. They Went is, however, the firmer book of the two, the more severely patterned; it has a backbone in the character of Theophilus which is lacking to the other. In spite of the fact that Douglas is constantly using a leif-motif of rainbow mist; it is hard, green, and malicious like an emerald. South Wind is hot and multicolored. Both of these books are invaded by the sea, the ever-beloved companion of Mr. Douglas, the great and joyous philosopher who is never troubled by categorical imperatives, whose moods, terrible, devouring, playful or serene, reflect his own.

There was quite a little commotion, at least in the author's mind, about the plot of South Wind. Some unfortunate reviewers said that it had none. It is presumable that they could give honest reasons for their opinion, but Mr. Douglas' ire was aroused. In a subsequent book, Alone, he proved that South Wind was all plot from beginning to end. The plot, he says, was to provide subtle means whereby a Bishop should be fuddled into overlooking a murder. The very fineness of the plot lay in its obscurity. It is indeed so obscure that one is tempted to believe Mr. Douglas thought about it after the book was written. The Bishop was to be secretly unravelled and unmoralized by the langorous airs, and by the savage beauty of the island of Nepenthe, until the murder, committed by a woman for whom he had great respect, seemed of no importance. In short, the poor Bishop was the butt of Douglas' Voltairean priest-hatred. He made the mistake, however, of creating in the Bishop a flexible dummy instead of a man. It is child's play to knock down a dummy. Had Mr. Douglas faced a real Bishop with his golden absurdities, he would have met an impasse. For it is the business of Bishops to forgive and forget more terrible crimes than murder.

There are numbers of little plots in South Wind, elusive things, perfect for short stories, but almost lost in the glowing mass of the whole. The best of them is the story of Count Caloveglia, the Hellenic impostor, the creator of that glorious fraud, the Locri Faun. There is no one plot for the whole book; but it does not need one. Its fascinations are endless without. I have said that it is real, and so it is, in the sense that it might happen, but the very name of the island which is its scenic background, gives it the unsubstantiality of a summer dream; Nepenthe, surcease of sorrow. It is a holiday performance; a masque, a revel, into which are poured all of the author's most joyous pagan humours and no small share of his learning. The torrential Mr. Douglas has become playful and serene, content for sunny hours to spray his wit in deathless conversations.

One puzzles a little about the fiftieth and last chapter of South Wind. It seems at first sight an obvious afterthought, but one realizes, finally, that the book could end only so, with the disintegration of the whole Nepenthe crowd, except Caloveglia, in an orgie of drunkeness. It strikes a fair balance for the disintegration of the straw Bishop. One particularly rejoices in the last feebleness of Keith, the Bishop's anti-type. An admirable conversationalist is Mr. Keith; a poor pagan, with his Achilles heel of fear. One feels no little contempt for him, and his life carefully garnered for ever more and more peculiar pleasures of the senses. He is really likable only when he is naïve and boring. Caloveglia, on the other hand, is a man with a cult of perfection in moderation, and with genius. He is one of the few persons upon whom Mr. Douglas has not exercised his malicious desire for defamation and detraction. Perhaps because Caloveglia has from the beginning the unmoral gift for regal lying, his creator feels no need to unpedestal him as he does so many other estimable people. Eames is an example of it. To rip away the pitiful tatters of self-respect, to undermine the foundations of pomposity, and find worms in fair roses—that is Douglas' particular notion of irony. South Wind is not a book to be comprehended in a day. One must put oneself in a receptive and amiable mood for it, and then paradoxically be on guard against too much receptiveness. In all his work Douglas can never be submitted to, and particularly in this. Summer madness as it is, South Wind requires continuous agility on the part of the reader lest he, too, be fuddled by the sirocco. This playful ocean mood of Mr. Douglas is very treacherous.

Something is the matter with both South Wind and They Went. Something they lack. Urbanity, distinction, beauty, they have all this, and a highly charged life. They have also a disarming naiveté. They lack ultimate emotions. These books are the products of hedonism; they are the embodiment of the aesthetic moment for its own sake. Let is be said with truth that to embody such a moment is the artist's goal. Is it enough? The answer to that is, of course, that both South Wind and They Went are only a glorious kind of fooling, like The Shaving of Shagpat. But the fooling is so large and impressive that one is cajoled into taking it seriously, and into hunting for the germ of a truth such as is to be found in Shagpat. One must take care to remember that They Went and South Wind are the unwinding of all truth by a summer hurricane. It is useless to look to Douglas for any emotional satisfaction; he is too experimental. One wearies at last of the metallic and bitter beauty of They Went, and of the hot commotion of South Wind. One must go back to Alone, and Old Calabria for completer satisfaction.

III

Innumerable essays and books could be written about Mr. Douglas to dissect, analyse, and track to their source the infinite facets and contradictions of his literary personality. One of his chief values to modern literature is that Renaissance zest which supplies for the aspiring critic an inexhaustible field of creative work. One might write a complete book replete with quotations, on the Douglas humour, which is ever present, either boisterously or under the surface. It is as varied as the rest of his personality, sometimes heavy-treading and ponderous, sometimes illusive and glancing as marsh lights. One might write an amusing monograph on Mr. Douglas' preferences in inns, and wines, and his taste in food. Much could be written on his contradictions: on the hermaphroditic character of him by which he is at times, brusque and "robustious", even goatish, and at other times, more tender and winsome than a woman; on the fact that he calls all religious symbols absurd, and yet is constantly making of everything that he touches into beauty, a symbol of some ghostly quality; and on the still greater contradiction that he is at once modest, almost shy, and yet highly egotistical. In the last analysis, Mr. Douglas writes of little but himself. He never interprets anything human except in the flood of his own personality. Like all Nietzschean folk, who are terribly afraid of dissolving in the crowd, he will listen with infinite, sweet patience to the unseen sprites of wood, and water, and mountain, and to the shy talk of animals; but never will he quite surrender himself to the human mood. Like all complete egotists, he is insentient to the murmur of the human heart, unless it beats in tune with his own. That is why his creation, which is the liquefaction of external things in his own chemistry, exists chiefly in memoirs, rather than in poems, or plays, or novels.

Mr. Douglas' ultimate value for modern literature lies in the fact that, although he is a rebel, he is not one of the disillusioned. Life is not bleak for him, never a thing to whine about. He escapes, it is true, but into such things as may profitably offer themselves with infinite variety, to any one; into mountain and woodland fastnesses, into the cleansing lore of antiquity. He freshens such sour humours as produce a Sinclair Lewis, or a Faulkner, with the wind of wider horizons. His philosophy seems to be a mingling of Epicureanism, Nietzscheanism, and fortitude; and fortitude is the greater part. He is assuredly one of the immortals. So much vitality, so much "terrific sunshine" cannot soon die away. In the introduction to Wyndham Lewis' Francois Villon, Hilaire Belloc speaks of a quality of "hardness" in Villon, which assures him deathless literary value. It is by this same kind of hardness that Douglas also will survive the erosions of time. And by that other quality named by Nietzsche in speaking of himself, fragrance. Douglas works not in butter, nor yet in oak, but in veined marble and crystal; and his work gives forth a myriad of living scents, as if it had the warmth of flesh. In years to come, some one taking down Old Calabria from a dusty shelf of antiquities, will find in it that timeless summer odor, that resilient unsubmissiveness.