VIII. A Casual Shelf
Honesty Is a Gift
A good many people think that honesty is a trait which a man chooses out of the various traits offered him by life. Perhaps it is nearer the truth to think that honesty is a gift, and innate, like a man’s complexion or the shape of his skull. It can be hurt by abuse or encouraged by proper treatment, but its roots are deeper than experience. Clarence Day must have been born honest and he has, so far as I can see, never done anything to waste his birthright. The eyes with which he looks at things are as level as E. W. Howe’s, but his language is lighter and his fancy nimbler. In This Simian World it was his fancy which perhaps did most to get him a hearing. In The Crow’s Nest, without giving up his fancy, he ranges over more varied fields than in his first book and seems even wiser. He has a perfect temper. He has known pain but it has not soured him—or at least his book. He has known passion but it has left no visible ruts or hummocks in his mind. He has done all that a human being can do with his reason but he feels no resentment that reason at its best can do so little. Having a perfect temper he sits at ease in his crow’s nest and surveys the deck, the sailors, rival ships, the waves, the horizon, and the sky, without heat, of course, but also without pride in his position or in his self-control. Having a perfect temper he is not harried into any violence of style by his instinct to express himself. As shrewd as a proverb, he never plays with epigrams. As much of a poet as he needs to be, he yet seems to have no need for eloquence. Such lucidity as his is both prudent and elevated.
He is primarily an anthropologist, as he showed in This Simian World. The race of man is for him “a fragile yet aspiring species on a stormy old star.” It has lived a long while and has gone a long way from its original slime, but plenty of the old stains still colour its nature. Its impulses are tangled with the impulses of the ape and with the inhibitions of the amoeba. “The test of a civilized person is first self-awareness, and then depth after depth of sincerity in self-confrontation.” By this test Mr. Day is thoroughly civilized. Nor does he merely search in his own mind and admit what he finds there. He observes others with the same awareness and the same sincerity. Hardy, he sees, takes his pleasure in portraying gloom. “That’s fair,” says Mr. Day. Shaw has had a vision of the rational life that men might lead and can never stop insisting that they lead it: a master of comedy when he paints the contrast and rather tiresome when he insists too much. Maeterlinck is king in the realms of romance he has created, like any other child; he is also a child when it comes to judging the “real” world. We know what Fabre thinks of wasps, but we wish we knew what the wasps think of Fabre. Mr. Day’s ideas are never gummed together with their hereditary associations. He talks always as if he had just come into this universe and were reporting it for other persons as intelligent as he. What a compliment to mankind! And what a compliment to mankind, too, that he should find it quite unnecessary to lecture it! A whimsical fable, a transparent allegory, a scrap of biography, a few verses, a humorous picture—these are his only devices.