[In the following essay, Flint surveys Douglas's career, praising his travel writings but concluding: "his literary reputation must remain a small one."]

So, while her arm rested lightly on mine, we wandered about those gardens, the saintly lady and myself; her mind dwelling, maybe, on memories of her one classic love-adventure and the part she came nigh to playing in the history of Europe, while mine was lost in a maze of vulgar love-adventures which came nigh to making me play a part in the police courts of Rome.

—from Alone, referring to Malida von Meyserberg the mystic.

Norman Douglas died last spring on Capri, a handsome, white-haired, venerably boisterous old gentlemen of eighty-four who had survived many reverses of fortune, including official banishment from Italy by the Fascists from the mid-thirties until 1946. Like Lawrence and several other writers of the between-wars period, Douglas was taken more literally than dramatically or critically by his American readers. That is, one took (or rejected) his more declamatory ideas about modern civilization, as put into the mouths of the two principal spokesmen of South Wind, straight, so to speak, and read the fiction and memoirs as more or less successful illustrations of these ideas. But this, as is often the case with Lawrence and Faulkner on the superficial levels of criticism, is to miss his proper substance and flavor altogether. Douglas was no Lawrence or Faulkner, but neither was he merely a British version of Cabell, Hergesheimer or Van Vechten. South Wind, which everyone knows, contains at least as much of his worst writing as it does of his best. My epigraph comes from his own favorite among the books of memoirs (and mine too, if one overlooks his extravagant praise of Ouida) and is a fair specimen of the Douglas manner—mildly ritualized, mildly literary, mildly incongruous—the gallant and scholarly old scamp. It is a minor version of the Augustan comic style, a cultivated anachronism, an encompassing, outlandish, amateur talent, one that frames an era rather than dominating it.

What with "peace," Volkswagens and superhighways, the Grand Tour of Europe is once again a lure for writers. Every valley has been exalted and the rough places planed. One has little protection against seeing more than eye can see and feeling more than heart can feel. So many of the useful old bogies are gone—each city cleaner than New York or Boston, every guide a Ph. D. in turismo! (How few buildings Dante was obliged to admire in his spiritual travels!) No one foresaw all this better than Douglas, and few exiles of his generation knew better how to play host among the newly-weeded ruins. For Douglas knew how to take his time; he was first of all a memoirist, historian, scientist, scholar, last of all a "creative" artist. V. S. Pritchett in his memorial essay (in The New Statesman and Nation), commenting on Douglas' "very original contribution to landscape in literature," on the superb scientific conscience which got its effect without the overt poetic organization of Joyce, Lawrence or Hemingway, finds that it comes "from the mastery of a defect of temperament, a defect of heart." Let us say at any rate a difference of temperament, and let hearts go for a moment.

"Indeed, any volume of European travels, however dull, is interesting provided that it be written before the age of railways and Ruskin," wrote Aldous Huxley. But Huxley, like Symonds and Symons before him, had played the cultural circuit in the time-worn spirit of Oxford Greats. Huxley's rage at the Church of Brou, for example, would be unthinkable without Arnold's poem or Ruskin's polemics. Each of these university wits has something solid to give us, but it is not what Douglas can or wants to provide. Like D. H. Lawrence, an admirable sidestepper and bypasser of the Ruskinian agon, he finds his subject not by taking a donkey-cart when a railway is available nor by ignoring Ruskin, but simply by having a life of his own. Doughty, T. E. Lawrence, Conrad, Gregorovius, Burkhardt, Darwin, Gibbon, Lucian, Pausanias, the Greek Anthologists were the kind of writers who fed his mind. Inglese italianato e vero diavolo. Such a devil was Norman Douglas, "an autocthonous gentleman of the north country."

In his generally sympathetic essay, Mr. Pritchett summarizes the best and the worst that can be said of Douglas without quite making the two sides seem the answers to the same question, namely, why read him at all? "It was a mere irony," he writes, "that South Wind became the Apocrypha of a younger generation of sophisticates and cads in the Twenties, for sophistication is not a word one would think of applying to this author." So much for the rather shallow popular obituaries. But Mr. Pritchett is fresh from a series of papers on the French pagans of the fin-de-siècle and after and likes to take a jocular tone toward their English opposites, finding a paganisme voulu, jackdaws strutting in peacocks' feathers. The scheme which fits a Wilde or a Chesterton, those thoroughly domesticated exotics, serves less well, however, for Douglas, who escaped into a larger actual world precisely because he lived in a narrower world of phantasy and craft. We don't see Douglas spinning about, no hands, on a bicycle called Paradox, but we do see a corner of the spinning world. "Compared to Anatole France," continues Mr. Pritchett, "he's a dom-inie… a muscular non-Christian, a hardened sceptic, an immoralist by sheer tirelessness, even assertion, of the Scottish conscience, a powerful egotistical nagger in continuous moral argument, and filled with the sectary's fine palate for ethical conundrums." And so on. Which would all be ghastly enough, were it essentially rather than peripherally, incidentally, true. It would make Douglas as wearisome as Carlyle, without the Carlyle élan. But Douglas was more a Gibbon than a Carlyle, more a Boswell than a Wilde. His "solution" to the ills of the world, to which Mr. Pritchett gives so much more importance than it deserves, is like the tea the Chinese use to pack the real tea in, a borrowed ethos not brought up to literary date, a rhetoric to make the party go until fresh drinks are mixed. For Douglas was a courtly Mynheer Peeperkorn who went a little more deeply into the tears of things than Mann's circus-master. Nor did he make people drunk. Even his scorn was affectionate.

The best critics of Hawthorne, of Emily Dickinson, of Arnold, Ruskin and D. H. Lawrence have seen that "Puritanism" need not always be a source of limitation. Mr. Pritchett admits his ignorance of Douglas' early life and accuses him of over-reacting to Puritan influences. But these early years are amply recorded and seem to have been providentially free of any sort of extreme except health and energy. His true extremes were not so much metaphysical and religious as geographical—his hearty Scotch-Bavarian ancestry and his classical-scientific education at Heidelberg—and temperamental, his immense gusto. Before starting to write seriously, Douglas had read widely, composed briefly, put in three years as Third Secretary at Moscow, written articles for the zoological and geological magazines, sent a number of specimens home to the British Natural History Museum (Darwin had said that toads don't grow on volcanic islands, and Douglas had submitted a toad from a volcanic island), founded and helped manage a cut-rate London nightclub called "Gardenia" until the police closed it, served as British representative for a scheme to drain the Pontine Marshes until the Italian government sat on it, acted as assistant editor and copious reviewer for The English Review under Austin Harrison, where he became friendly with Conrad and the Georgians. His first book was a genial and thorough account of London street games, his first printed essay a study of Poe. Not the career one would expect from a man battling with the ghost of Calvin! He was forty-six when the 1914 war broke out. South Wind, which made him famous, appeared in 1917 when England was at its dreariest. But Douglas had something better than gusto and curiosity; he had a generously lyric sense of life ("tragic" might be too strong a word), a molle et facetum in-genium. He was the host of British and American exiles in Italy as Landor once had been. The list of his acquaintance with impoverished scholars, professors, librarians, poets, popular novelists and noble ne'er-do-wells is astonishing, and he beheld the spectacle of Lord Roseberry re-moving a flea from his person with the same relish as when he heard a Calabrian wine-seller's story for the twentieth time. His pietas brought him with flowers to the graves of such erstwhile friends as Rupert Brooke and D. H. Lawrence, though he had a famous public spat with Lawrence and had found Brooke's conversation "a collection of radiant platitudes."

Whatever may have been Douglas' "palate" for "ethical conundrums," his own efforts in that line were meager, the very opposite of "fine." "Let there be no virgins in the land!" is a typical mot of this class, convivial outbursts not worth the irritation one might feel at the cockier sayings of Voltaire. He was not really a "hardened" anything; his scepticism never crystallizes out. He took the scepticisms of other and applied them, to his-tory, to the world around him. Dilettantism was his true specialty, an attitude of the heart and manners as well as of the mind, stiffened by a scholarly conscience, a professional dilettantism which made him shy of every other sort of professionalism. In time, indeed, he became (how could he help it in Southern Italy?) something of a connoisseur of fraud, but it is utterly untrue to say that he didn't care for its opposite or its cure. It was easy and specious humanism which annoyed him, not the real thing. "There's enough goodness in the world without putting it into our books," was his reply to a particularly fatuous critic. His ideal of the "gentleman" was substantially Chesterfield's, softened and narrowed perhaps by Victorian domestic chivalry and Edwardian clubmanism. Douglas' gentleman does not betray his living friends in his books, speaks no evil of his family, is scrupulous of the honor of those ladies, usually volunteers of lower station, whom he happens to seduce. This code was no "myth" for Douglas, as Mr. Pritchett infers: it was the way he lived, and he rose above it to an impersonal sense of nature and history. "What is the lyric temper?" he wrote in Looking Back. "I should describe it as a sympathetic feeling for the myriad processes of Nature and the application of this gift towards interpreting human phenomena with concision and poignancy." A post-romantic toughness about that, as well as the slight dullness of all Douglas' abstract thinking. He gives us what he admired in others "… a loving and accurate student both of plants and animals and their literature … an affectionate waiting upon nature," a sense of affairs. Of his 18th Century prototype Craufurd Tait Ramage, L. L. D., a Scot who travelled Italy as purposefully as Johnson travelled Scotland, Douglas keens, "Where are they gone, those candid inquirers, so full of gentlemanly curiosity, so informative and yet so shrewdly human?"

D. H. Lawrence was certainly no gentleman after the Douglas model and very much more of a Puritan, but he had a too-little-appreciated humor and gallantry which made his clash with Douglas over the head of the unfortunate Maurice Magnus an amusing and revealing episode. Magnus was a moderately talented essayist and eccentric from Baltimore who had a grueling time as a volunteer in the Foreign Legion and had repaid Douglas extravagantly for some small earlier help. When he ran afoul of Lawrence by twice touching him for a loan, he was distracted and planning suicide. (He used to carry a small capsule of poison about with him and crack macabre jokes about it to his friends.) Lawrence somehow became literary executor (another of Magnus' jokes?) of the posthumous Memoirs of the Foreign Legion and wrote an introduction which contained one of his typically brilliant portraits of a man about whom he knew almost nothing. Naturally it drew blood from Douglas, who knew both men well, and was well aware of his antagonist's powers. "I commend this short paragraph," he wrote of the Lawrence Introduction, "to those simpletons who say that friend Lawrence cannot write: it is a perfect etching—not a stroke too much or too little: there he is, M. M. in matutinal garb, once and forever." But Lawrence had committed a breach of candor as well as of manners. Ignoring what he could easily have discovered of his victim's extraordinary generosity and scrupulousness in money matters, he thought he had found just enough shiftiness in Magnus to set him up as yet another object-lesson in that endless assault on the parasitic classes, that exhilarating proces moral which spared nobody, least of all Lawrence himself. In the abstract, I think one can prefer the magnificent disdain of the mythical and posthumous Magnus to Douglas' sometimes petulant reproaches against the living Lawrence, whose difficulties he knew and whom he genuinely admired. But more than the mere issue of Magnus entered into the quarrel. Lawrence had mildly caricatured Douglas, and although Douglas took it in fairly good part he couldn't understand Lawrence's literary "professionalism" because he drastically underestimated the place of the modern novel. Poetic justice, therefore, earned him a frivolous fame for his two resorts to a despised form, in South Wind and They Went, satirical novels very seriously marred by heavy moralizing. To cap the irony, we find Douglas grumbling in print, not too seriously perhaps, about the critics who found South Wind "plotless," as if the question were more than academic. To Aldington, Lawrence once confessed that his own father and Douglas had been the two figures in his experience who seemed most to live out of a natural joy in life; and Aldington adds, of their first talks in Florence: "After the bloodless abstractions of Russell and Murray, a course of Douglas, whose sole object was to live and enjoy life, was most salutary." More than Aldington was equipped to see or to care, both these men were also political idealists in the old English tradition. Both of them, no matter how far they might lose control of themselves on occasion, liked their hedonism in a framework of decency and just dealing. But Douglas couldn't grasp the way in which the novel is an exorcism of the evils it represents, though perhaps no "cure" in the popular sense. Lawrence knew that however "one sheds one's sickness in one's books," one does not cease to be sick. The cure, surely, is that a new life comes into being in which the sickness no longer undermines the glory and order of the world, a life granted only to those who care more for glory and order than for the baleful distinctions of being sick. "… it is no use appealing to his better nature," Douglas wrote of Lawrence, "since he has no nature at all; he is a cloaca maxima for the discharge of objectionable personalities." And so he is. This is "his antithetical self, perverse, destructive, hating, hateful, conceited as a gutter Lucifer," not the whole self, but as real and necessary a part of Lawrence as the gifted lyrist, the devoted impersonal literary craftsman, the valuable and difficult friend.

In avoiding the splendid but often rather glib rhetorical channels down which Ruskin and his school of literary travellers moved, Douglas made his work episodic, personal, reminiscent. Out of his half-dozen or so best books, one fat volume might be compounded worthy to stand with Stendhal on Lombardy and Rome, with Heine's Reisebilder or Lawrence's Twilight in Italy. He was less a poet, less an imaginative writer, less a man of the world, really, than these three. His comments on art in general, though often shrewd, never reach the first interest. "Only think: never to have vexed one's soul with Plato and Cimabue and Categorical Imperatives and the thousand other 'essentials' of Western Culture—what would one not give to feel really Russian for half an hour!" Russia in this case was the admirable Isabelle Eberhardt, one of those brooding, nobly ruined lady-profligates for whom Douglas had a great tendre and whom he hauntingly portrayed in Miss Wilberforce of South Wind. I doubt whether Douglas' attitude to-wards these women was wholly gallant; it seems to me the weakest point in his armor. He was a writer for whom a succession of not-quite-satisfying lady-loves had to serve. The "innocent" Lawrence was probably luckier.

One must realize what it cost Douglas in literal outlandishness to arrive at his (sometimes) cool gallantry ("I like to taste my friends, not to eat them") towards a collapsing world, how he struggled to save himself by various kinds of respectable askesis from the terrible over-intimacy, over-knowledge (as he saw it) which isolated his greater contemporaries. But in so doing he made one corner of the world thoroughly his own. He forever lays the island-nostalgia which has teased European thought since Sappho at least, and he becomes very angry at anyone who plays loose with Tiberius merely for taking his baths in a grotto. "How one stumbles upon delightful folks! Set me down in furthest Cathay and I will undertake to find soon afterwards some person with whom I am quite prepared to spend the remaining years of my life." A bit menacing, this gusto. What one remembers in Douglas are not "characters" in the sharp Dickensian sense, but mixtures of people and things, people and history, an endless humane ragging of the scholars. We remember the love-letters of Calabrian boys, the shower of ashes on "Nepenthe" (an amalgam of some dozen Mediterranean islands), the mountain festival of Pollino, the politics of Southern sainthood, the ingredients of the notorious Zuppa di Pesce, and finally, the life of caves, fountains, forests, dragons, cliffs and oases—all with an elegiac tinge. "And now, at the other end of life, one returns anew to Rosenegg on a sunny afternoon, purged of the mists of middle years, and delving into memories of that clear dawn and seeking to recapture its spirit, one marvels at the feverish joy which greeted discoveries such as these degenerate little garnets, not a single one of which had the right colour, nor made the slightest pretense at being the rhombic dodecahedron it should have been. How one changes!"

However richly and forthrightly he lived on the European stage of the early 20th Century, his literary reputation must remain a small one. He knew as much himself and used to tell a story about a certain very deaf Mrs. Whitbread who once accosted him on the street: " … for want of something better to say, I bawled into her ear: 'What wonderful weather we're having for November.' She said: 'Oh, you naughty man.…'"