[Note: I have made the following spelling changes: intransigeant tointransigent, rythm of the secret to rhythm of the secret, accummulated to accumulated, potentious and solemn to portentiousand solemn, terrestial to terrestrial, Light-cormer to Light-comer, Aldeboran to Aldebaran, enter competely to enter completely, aplomb and nonchalence to aplomb and nonchalance, Hyppolytus toHippolytus, abyssmal to abysmal, appelations to appellations, intellectual predominence to intellectual predominance, deilberatelyoutraging to deliberately outraging, pour vitrol to pour vitriol, Gethsamene to Gethsemane, Sabacthani to Sabachthani, conscience-strikento conscience-stricken, abssymal gulfs to abysmal gulfs, rhymmic incantations to rhythmic incantations, perpetual insistanceto perpetual insistence, and water-cariers to water-carriers. Next, Ihave also incorporated the errata listed at the end of the book intothe text. Finally, I have standardized all the poetry quotations withindentation and spacing which were not in the original text. ]

VISIONS AND REVISIONS

A BOOK OF LITERARY DEVOTIONS

BY

JOHN COWPER POWYS

_Ham. _--Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers--if the rest ofmy fortunes turn Turk with me--with two Provincial roses on my ras'dshoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir?_Her_. --Half a share. 

1915G. ARNOLD SHAWNEW YORK

Copyright, 1915, by G. Arnold ShawCopyright in Great Britain and Colonies

First Printing, February, 1915Second Printing, March, 1915Third Printing, October, 1915

BROOKLYN EAGLE PRESS

To Those who love Without understanding;To Those who understand Without loving; And to ThoseWho, neither loving or understanding, Are the Cause Why Books are written. 

CONTENTS

Preface 9Rabelais 25Dante 35Shakespeare 55El Greco 75Milton 87Charles Lamb 105Dickens 119Goethe 135Matthew Arnold 153Shelley 169Keats 183Nietzsche 197Thomas Hardy 213Walter Pater 227Dostoievsky 241Edgar Allen Poe 263Walt Whitman 281Conclusion 293

PREFACE

What I aim at in this book is little more than to give completereflection to those great figures in Literature which have so longobsessed me. This poor reflection of them passes, as they pass, image by image, eidolon by eidolon, in the flowing stream of myown consciousness. 

Most books of critical essays take upon themselves, in unpardonableeffrontery, to weigh and judge, from their own petty suburbanpedestal, the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! Howshould Professor This, or Doctor That, whose furthest experiences of"dangerous living" have been squalid philanderings with theirneighbours' wives, bring an Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall putShakespeare and Hardy, Milton and Rabelais, into appropriateniches?

Every critic has a right to his own Aesthetic Principles, to his ownEthical Convictions; but when it comes to applying these, intiresome, pedantic agitation, to Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Lamb, we must beg leave to cry off! What we want is not the formulatingof new Critical Standards, and the dragging in of the great mastersbefore our last miserable Theory of Art. What we want is an honest, downright and quite _personal_ articulation, as to how these greatthings in literature really hit us when they find us for the momentnatural and off our guard--when they find us as men and women, and not as ethical gramaphones. 

My own object in these sketches is not to convert the reader towhatever "opinions" I may have formulated in the course of myspiritual adventures; it is to divest myself of such "opinions, " and inpure, passionate humility to give myself up, absolutely andcompletely, to the various visions and temperaments of these greatdead artists. 

There is an absurd notion going about, among those half-educatedpeople who frequent Ethical Platforms, that Literary Criticism mustbe "constructive. " O that word "constructive"! How, in the name ofthe mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistakethese people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived andwrote in order to buttress up such poor wretches as these are uponthe particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present theirmoral security and refuge. 

No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Proteanreceptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells, one by one, are thrown and withdrawn. 

Who wants to know what Professor So-and-so's view of Life may be?We want to use Professor So-and-so as a Mirror, as a Medium, as aGo-Between, as a Sensitive Plate, so that we may once more get thethrill of contact with this or that dead Spirit. He must keep histemperament, our Critic; his peculiar angle of receptivity, hiscapacity for personal reaction. But it is the reaction of his ownnatural nerves that we require, not the pallid, second-hand reactionof his tedious, formulated opinions. Why cannot he see that, as anatural man, physiologically, nervously, temperamentally, pathologically _different_ from other men, he is an interestingspectacle, as he comes under the influence first of one great artistand then another, while as a silly, little, preaching school-master, heis only a blot upon the world-mirror!

It is thus that I, moi qui vous parle, claim my humble and modestrole. If, in my reaction from Rabelais, for instance, I find myselfresponding to his huge laughter at "love" and other things, and amoment later, in my reaction from Thomas Hardy, feeling as if"love" and the rest were the only important matters in the Universe;this psychological variability, itself of interest as a curious humanphenomenon, has made it possible to get the "reflections, " eachabsolute in its way, of the two great artists as they advance andrecede. 

If I had tried to dilute and prune and "correct" the one, so as to makeit "fit in" with the other, in some stiff, ethical theory of my own, where would be the interest for the reader? Besides, who am I to"improve" upon Rabelais?

It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for"variable reaction" that there are so few good critics. But we are all, I think, more multiple-souled than we care to admit. It is our foolishpride of consistency, our absurd desire to be "constructive, " thatmakes us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the worldfrom the "pluralistic" angle; but there must be something of such"pluralism" in his natural temper, or the writers he can respond towill be very few!

Let it be quite plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to agreat genius halfway. It is a case of all or nothing. If you lack thecourage, or the variability, to _go all the way_ with very differentmasters, and to let your constructive consistency take care of itself, you may become, perhaps, an admirable moralist; you will never bea clairvoyant critic. All this having been admitted, it still remainsthat one has a right to draw out from the great writers one lovescertain universal aesthetic tests, with which to discriminate betweenmodern productions. 

But even such tests are personal and relative. They are not to befoisted on one's readers as anything "ex cathedra. " One such test isthe test of what has been called "the grand style"--that grand styleagainst which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our racebeats in vain! I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting mydevotion to the "grand style" into an academic "narrow way, "through which I would force every writer I approach. Some mostwinning and irresistible artists never come near it. 

And yet--what a thing it is! And with what relief do we return to it, after the "wallowings" and "rhapsodies, " the agitations andprostitutions, of those who have it not!

It is--one must recognize that--the thing, and the only thing, that, inthe long run, _appeals. _ It is because of the absence of it that onecan read so few modern writers _twice!_ They have flexibility, originality, cleverness, insight--but they lack _distinction_--theyfatally lack distinction. 

And what are the elements, the qualities, that go to make up this"grand style"?

Let me first approach the matter negatively. There are certain thingsthat _cannot_--because of something essentially ephemeral inthem--be dealt with in the grand style. 

Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problemof Sex. We may be Feminists or Anti-Feminists--what you will--andwe may be able to throw interesting light on these complicatedrelations, but we cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, inthe grand style, because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because, with all its gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimatelymatter!

Such, to take another example, are our elaborate arguments aboutthe interpretation, ethical or otherwise, of Christian Doctrine. Wecan be very entertaining, very moral, very eloquent, very subtle, inthis particular sphere; but we cannot deal with it in the "great style, "because the permanent issues that really count lie out of reach ofsuch discussion and remain unaffected by it. 

Let me make myself quite clear. Hector and Andromache can talk toone another of their love, of their eternal parting, of their child, andthey can do this in the great style; but if they fell into dispute overthe particular sex conventions that existed in their age, they might beattractive still, but they would not be uttering words in the "greatstyle. "

Matthew Arnold may argue eloquently about the true modernisticinterpretation of the word "Elohim, " and very cleverly and wittilygive his reasons for translating it "the Eternal" or "the Shining One";but into what a different atmosphere we are immediately transportedwhen, in the midst of such discussion, the actual words of thePsalmist return to our mind: "My soul is athirst for God--yea! evenfor the living God! When shall I come to appear before the presenceof God?"

The test is always that of Permanence, and of immemorial humanassociation. It is, at bottom, nothing but human association thatmakes the great style what it is. Things that have, for centuries uponcenturies, been associated with human pleasures, human sorrows, and the great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives, can beexpressed in this style; and only such things. The great style is a sortof organic, self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable unitsof the great human family have all put their hands. That is why solarge a portion of what is written in the great style is anonymous--likeHomer and much of the Bible and certain old ballads and songs. It is for this reason that Walter Pater is right when he says that theimportant thing in Religion is the Ceremony, the Litany, the Ritual, the Liturgical Chants, and not the Creeds or the Commandments, ordiscussion upon Creed or Commandment. Creeds change, Moralitychanges, Mysticism changes, Philosophy changes--but the Word ofour God--the Word of Humanity--in gesture, in ritual, in the heart'snatural crying--abideth forever!

Why do the eloquent arguments of an ethical orator, explaining to usour social duties, go a certain way and never go further, whereas wehave only to hear that long-drawn _Vox Humana, _ old as theworld--older certainly than any creed--"Santa Maria, Mater Dei, ora pronobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae"--and we arestruck, disarmed, pierced to the marrow, smitten to the bone, shotthrough, "Tutto tremente?" Because arguments and reasoning;because morality and logic, are not of the nature of the "great style, "while the cry--"save us from eternal death!"--addressed by thepassion and remorse and despair of our human heart to theunhearing Universe, takes that great form as naturally as a manbreathes. 

Why, of all the religious books in the world, have "the Psalms ofDavid, " whether in Hebrew or Latin or English, touched men's soulsand melted and consoled them? They are not philosophical. They arenot logical. They are not argumentative. They are not moral. Andyet they break our hearts with their beauty and their appeal!

It is the same with certain well-known _words. _ Is it understood, forinstance, why the word "Sword" is always poetical and in "the grandstyle, " while the word "Zeppelin" or "Submarine" or "Gatling gun"or "Howitzer" can only be introduced by Free Versifiers, who let the"grand style" go to the Devil? The word "Sword" like the word"Plough, " has gathered about it the human associations ofinnumerable centuries, and it is impossible to utter it without feelingsomething of their pressure and their strain. The very existence ofthe "grand style" is a protest against any false views of "progress"and "evolution. " Man may alleviate his lot in a thousand directions;he may build up one Utopia after another; but the grand style willstill remain; will remain as the ultimate expression of those aspectsof his life that _cannot change_--while he remains Man. 

If there is any unity in these essays, it will be found in a blurred andstammered attempt to indicate how far it may be possible, in spite ofthe limitations of our ordinary nature, to live in the light of the"grand style. " I do not mean that we--the far-off worshippers ofthese great ones--can live _as they thought and felt. _ But I mean thatwe can live in the atmosphere, the temper, the mood, the attitudetowards things, which "the grand style" they use evokes and sustains. 

I want to make this clear. There are a certain number of solitaryspirits moving among us who have a way of troubling us by theiraloofness from our controversies, our disputes, our arguments, our"great problems. " We call them Epicures, Pagans, Heathen, Egoists, Hedonists, and Virtuosos. And yet not one of these words exactlyfits them. What they are really doing is living in the atmosphere andthe temper of "the grand style"--and that is why they are so irritatingand provocative! To them the most important thing in the world is torealize to the fullest limit of their consciousness what it means to beborn a Man. The actual drama of our mortal existence, reduced tothe simplest terms, is enough to occupy their consciousness and theirpassion. In this sphere--in the sphere of the "inevitable things" ofhuman life--everything becomes to them a sacrament. Not a symbol--beit noted--but a Sacrament! The food they eat; the wine they drink;their waking and sleeping; the hesitancies and reluctances of theirdevotions; the swift anger of their recoils and retreats; their longloyalties; their savage reversions; their sudden "lashings out"; theirhate and their love and their affection; the simplicities of theseeverlasting moods are in all of us--become, every one of them, matters of sacramental efficiency. To regard each day, as it dawns, as a "last day, " and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of itssun-setting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods--this is to live inthe spirit of the "grand style. " It has nothing to do with "right" or"wrong. " Saints may practise it, and sometimes do. Sinners oftenpractise it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious ofthose moods and events which are permanent and human, ascompared with those other moods and events which are transitoryand unimportant. 

When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy, devotion, admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces, that can speak, if they will, in "the great style. " When a man orwoman "argues" or "explains" or "moralizes" or "preaches, " they arethe victims of accidental dust-storms, which rise from futility andreturn to vanity. That is why Rhetoric, as Rhetoric, can never be inthe great style. That is why certain great revolutionary Anarchists, those who have the genius to express in words their heroic defianceof "the something rotten in Denmark, " move us more, and assume agrander outline, than the equally admirable, and possibly morepractical, arguments of the Scientific Socialists. It is the eternalappeal we want, to what is basic and primitive and undying in ourtempestuous human nature!

The grand style announces and commands. It weeps and it pleads. Itutters oracles and it wrestles with angels. It never apologizes; itnever rationalizes; and it never explains. That is why the greatineffable passages in the supreme masters take us by the throat andstrike us dumb. Deep calls unto deep in them, and our heart listensand is silent. To do good scientific thinking in the cause of humanityhas its well-earned reward; but the gods throw incense on a differenttemper. The "fine issues" that reach them, in their remoteness andtheir disdain, are the "fine issues" of an antagonist worthy of theirown swift wrath, their own swift vengeance, and their own swiftlove. 

The ultimate drama of the world, a drama never-ending, liesbetween the children of Zeus and the children of Prometheus;between the hosts of Jehovah and the Sons of the Morning. God andLucifer still divide the stage, and in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and Goethe the great style is never more the great style thanwhen it brings these eternal Antagonists face to face, and compelsthem to cross swords. What matter if, in reality, they have theirkingdoms in the heart of man rather than the Empyrean or Tartarus?The heart of man, in its unchangeable character, must ever remainthe true Coliseum of the world, where the only interesting, the onlydramatic, the only beautiful, the only classical things are born andturned into music. 

Beauty! That is what we all, even the grossest of us, in our heart ofhearts are seeking. Lust seeks it; Love creates it; the miracle of Faithfinds it--but nothing less, neither truth nor wisdom nor morality norknowledge, neither progress nor reaction, can quench the thirst wefeel. 

Yes, it is Beauty we crave, and yet, how often, in the strain andstress of life, it seems as though this strange impossible Presence, rising thus, like that figure in the Picture, "beside the waters" of thefate that carries us, were too remote, too high and translunar, toafford us the aid we need. Heine tells us somewhere, how, driven bythe roar of street-fighting, into the calm cool galleries of the Louvre, sick and exhausted in mind and body, he fell down at the feet of theGoddess of Beauty there, standing, as she still stands, at the end ofthat corridor of mute witnesses, and as he looked to her for help, heknew that she could never bend down to him, or lift him up out ofhis weariness, for they had broken her long ago, and _she had noarms!_

Alas! It is true enough that there are moments, when, under thepressure of the engines of fate, we can only salute her--the immortalone--afar off. But if we have the courage, the obstinacy, theendurance, to wait--even a short while longer--she will be near usagain; and the old magical spell, transforming the world, will thrillthrough us like the breath of spring!

Why should we attempt to deceive ourselves? We cannot alwayslive with those liberating airs blowing upon our foreheads. We haveto bear the burden of the unillumined hours, even as our fathersbefore us, and our children after us. Enough if we keep our souls soprepared that when the touch, the glimpse, the word, the gesture, that carries with it the thrilling revelation of the "grand manner", returns to us in its appointed hour, it shall find us not unworthy ofour inheritance. 

RABELAIS

There are certain great writers who make their critics feel even aschildren, who picking up stray wreckage and broken shells from theedge of the sea waves, return home to show their companions "whatthe sea is like. "

The huge suggestiveness of this tremendous spirit is not easy tocommunicate in the space of a little essay. 

But something can be done, if it only take the form of modest"advice to the reader. "

Is it a pity, one asks oneself, or is it a profound advantage, thatenjoyment of Rabelais should be so limited? At least there are nofalse versions to demolish here--no idealizations to unmask. 

The reading of Rabelais is not easy to everyone, and perhaps tothose for whom it is least easy, he would be most medicinal. What inthis mad world, do we lack, my dear friends? Is it possibly_courage?_ Well, Rabelais is, of all writers, the one best able to giveus that courage. If only we had courage, how the great tides ofexistence might sweep us along--and we not whine or wince at all!

To read Rabelais is to gather, as if from the earth-gods, spirit toendure anything. Naturally he uses wine, and every kind of wantonliquor, to serve as symbols of the intoxication he would produce. Forwe must be "rendered drunk" to swallow Life at this rate--toswallow it as the gods swallow it. We must be drunk but not mad. For in the spiritual drunkenness that Rabelais produces there is notthe remotest touch of insanity. He is the sanest of all the greatwriters; perhaps the only sane one. What he has the power ofcommunicating to us is a renewal of that _physiological energy, _which alone makes it possible to enjoy this monstrous world. Otherwriters interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabelais takes usby the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids usdrink and be satisfied. What else could he use, if not _wine, _ as asymbol for such quenching of such thirst. And after wine, sex. Thereis no other who treats sex as Rabelais does; who treats it socompletely as it _ought_ to be treated!

Walt Whitman is too obsessed by it; too grave over it--Rabelaisenjoys it, fools with it, plunges into it, wallows in it; and then, withmultitudinous laughter, shakes himself free, and bids it go to theDevil!

The world will have to come to this, sooner or later--to theconfusion of the vicious--and the virtuous!

The virtuous and the vicious play indeed into each others hands; andneither of them love laughter. Sexual dalliance is either too serious amatter to be mocked by satyr-laughter; or it is too sad anddeplorable to be laughed at at all. In a few hundred years, surely, thehuman race will recognize its absolute right to make mock at thegrotesque elements in the sex comedy, and such laughter will clearthe air of much "virtue" and much "vice. "

Wine is his first symbol of the large, sane, generous mood hebequeaths to us--the focusing of the poetry of life, and the glow anddaring of it, and its eternal youthfulness. 

But it is more than a symbol--it is a sacrament and an initiation. It isthe sap that rises in the world's recurrent spring. It is the ichor, thequintessence of the creative mystery. It is the blood of the sons ofthe morning. It is the dew upon the paradisic fields. It is the red-roselight, upon the feet of those who dance upon graves. Wine is a signto us how there is required a certain generous and sane intoxication, a certain large and equable friendliness in dealing with people andthings and ideas. It is a sign that the earth calls aloud for thepassionate dreamer. It is a sign that the truth of truth is not in laborand sorrow, but in joy and happiness. It is a sign that gods and menhave a right to satisfy their hearts desire, with joy and pleasure andsplendid freedom. And just as he uses wine, so he uses meat. Breadthat strengthened man's heart (and bologna-sausages, gammons ofbacon, or what you will, else) this also is a symbol and a sacrament. And it is indeed more, for one must remember that Rabelais was agreat doctor of medicine, as well as of Utopian Theology--and thestomach, with the wise indulgence thereof, is the final master of allarts! Let it be understood that in Rabelais sex is treated with thesame reverence, and the same humor, as meat and wine. Why not? Isnot the body of man the temple of the Holy Ghost? Is it notsacrosanct and holy within and without; and yet, at the same time, isit not a huge and palpable absurdity?

Those who suffer most from Rabelais' manner of treating sex are theincurably vicious. The really evil libidinous people, that is to say thespiteful, the mean, the base and inhuman, fly from his presence, andfor the obvious reason that he makes sex-pleasure so generous, sogay, so natural, so legitimate, that their dark morbid pervertednatures can get no more joy out of it. Their lust, their lechery, is acold dead Saurian thing, a thing with the gravity of a slow-worm--andwhen this great laughing and generous sage comes forth intothe sunshine with his noble companies of amorous and happypeople, these Shadow-lovers, these Leut-lovers, these FleshlySentimentalists, writhe in shame, and seek refuge in a deeperdarkness. How strained and inhuman, too; and one might add, howmad and irrelevant--that high, cold, disdainful translunar scorn withwhich the "moral-immoralism" of Nietzsche scourges our poor fleshand blood. One turns with relief to Zarathustra after associating withpious people. But, after Rabelais, even that terrific psychologistseems contorted and _thin. _

For after all it is generosity that we cry out for. Courage withoutgenerosity hugs its knees in Hell. 

From the noble pleasures of meat and drink and sex, thus generouslytreated; we must turn to another aspect of Rabelais' work--hispredilection for excrement. This also, though few would admit it, isa symbolic secret. This also is a path of initiation. In this peculiarityRabelais is completely alone among the writers of the earth. Othershave, for various reasons, dabbled in this sort of thing--but nonehave ever piled it up--manure-heap upon manure-heap, until theanimal refuse of the whole earth seems to reek to the stars! There isnot the slightest reason to regret this thing or to expurgate it. Rabelais is not Rabelais, just as life is not life, without it. 

It is indeed the way of "salvation" for certain neurotic natures. Hasthat been properly understood? There are people who sufferfrightfully--and they are often rare natures, too, though they aresometimes very vicious--from their loathing of the excremental sideof life. Swift was one of these. The "disgusting" in his writing is apathological form, not at all unusual, of such a loathing. ButRabelais is no Dean Swift--nor is there the remotest resemblancebetween them. Rabelais may really save us from our loathing by thehuge all-embracing friendliness of his sense of humor. 

There are certain people, no doubt, who would prefer the graveenthusiasm of Whitman in regard to this matter to the freerRabelaisian touch. I cannot say that my personal experience agreeswith this view. 

I have found both great men invaluable; but I think as far as dealingwith the Cloaca Maxima side of things is concerned, Rabelais hasbeen the braver in inspiration. In these little matters one can only say, "some are born Rabelaisian, and some require to have Rabelaisthrust upon them!"

Surely it is wisdom, in us terrestrial mortals, to make whatimaginative use we can of _every phase_ of our earthly condition?

Imagination has a right to play with everything that exists; andhumor has a right to laugh at everything that exists. Everything inlife is sacred and everything is a huge jest. 

It is the association of this excremental aspect of life, with thosehigh sacraments of meat and drink and sex, which some find so hardto endure. Be not afraid my little ones! The great and humorousgods have arranged for this also; and have seen to it that no brave, generous, amorous "sunburnt" emotion shall ever be hurt by suchassociations! If a person _is_ hurt by them, that is only an indicationthat they are in grievous need of the wholesome purgative medicineof the great doctor! When one comes to speak of the actual contentsof these books criticism itself must borrow Gargantua's mouth. 

What characters! The three great royal giants, Graugousier, Gargantua and Pantagruel--have there ever been such kings? Andthe noble servants of such noble masters! The whole atmosphere isso large, so genial, so courteous, so sweet-tempered, so entirelywhat the life of man upon earth should be. 

Even the military exploits of Friar John, even the knavish tricks ofPanurge, cannot spoil our tenderness for these dear bully-boys, thesemellow and magnanimous rogues! Certain paragraphs in Rabelaisrecur to one's mind daily. That laudation of Socrates at thebeginning, and the description of the "little boxes called _Silent"_that outside have so grotesque an adornment, but within are full ofambergris and myrrh and all manner of precious odours. 

And the picture of the banquet "when they fell to the chat of theafternoon's collation and began great goblets to ring, great bowls toting, great gammons to trot; pour me out the fair Greek wine, theextravagant wine, the good wine, Lacrima Christi, supernaculum!"And, above all, the most holy Abbey of Thelema, over the gate ofwhich was written the words that are never far from the hearts ofwise Utopian Christians, the profound words, the philosophicalwords, the most shrewd Cabalistic words, and the words that"lovers" alone can understand--"Fay que ce Vouldray!" Do as ThouWilt!

Little they know of Rabelais who call him a lewd buffoon--theprofanest of mountebanks. He was one of those rare spirits thatredeem humanity. To open his book--though the steam of thegrossness of it rises to Heaven--is to touch the divine fingers--thefingers that heal the world. 

How that "style" of his, that great oceanic avalanche of learning andpiety and obscenity and gigantic merriment, smells of the honestearth!

How, with all his huge scholarship, he loves to depend for hisrichest, most human effects, upon his own peasant-people ofTouraine! The proverbs of the country-side, the wisdom of tavern-wit, the shrewdness and fantasy of old wives tales, the sly earthlyhumors of farmers and vine-tenders and goat-herds and goose-girls--theseare things out of which he distils his vision, his oracles, his courage. 

There is also--who could help observing it?--a certain large andpatriarchal homeliness--a kind of royal domesticity--about much thathe writes. Those touches, as when Gargantua, his little dog inadvance, enters the dining hall, when they are discussing Panurge'smarriage, and they all rise to do him honor; as when Gargantua bidsPantagruel farewell and gives him a benediction so wise and tender;remain in the mind like certain passages in the Bible. These are thethings that aesthetic fools "with varnished faces" easily overlook andmisunderstand; but good simple fellows--"honest cods" as Rabelaiswould say--are struck to the heart by them. How proud the manmight be, who in the turmoil of this troublesome world and beneaththe mystery of "le grand Peut-être" could answer to the ultimatequestion, "I am a Christian of the faith of Rabelais!"

Such a one, under the spell of such a master, might indeed be able tocomfort the sick and sorry, and to whisper in their ears that cosmicsecret--"Bon Espoir y gist au fond!" "Good Hope lies at theBottom!" "Good Hope" for all; for the best and the worst--for thewhole miserable welter of this chaotic farce!

Therefore, "with angels and archangels" let us bow our heads andhold our tongues. Those who fancy Rabelais to be lacking in thekind of religious feeling that great souls respect, let them read thatpassage in the voyage of Pantagruel that speaks of the Death of Pan. Various accounts are given; various explanations made; of the greatcry, that the sailors, "coming from Paloda, " heard over land and sea. At the last Pantagruel himself speaks; and he tells them that to him itrefers to nothing less than the death of Him whom the Scribes andPharisees and Priests of Jerusalem slew. "And well is He called Pan, which in the Greek means 'All'; for in Him is all we are or have orhope. " And having said this he fell into silence, and "tears large asostrich-eggs rolled down his cheeks. "

To all who read Rabelais and love him, one can offer no better wishthan that the mystic wine of his Holy Bottle may fulfil their heart'sdesire. Happy, indeed, those who are not "unwillingly drawn" by the"Fate" we all must follow! "Go now, my friends, " says the strangePriestess, "and may that Circle whose Centre is everywhere and itsCircumference nowhere, keep you in His Almighty protection!"

DANTE

The history of Dante's personal and literary appeal would be anextremely interesting one. No great writer has managed to excitemore opposite emotions. 

One thing may be especially noted as significant: Women havealways been more attracted to him than men. He is in a peculiarsense the Woman's great poet. There is a type of masculine geniuswhich has always opposed him. Goethe cared little for him; Voltairelaughed at him; Nietzsche called him "an hyaena poetizing amongthe tombs. "

The truth is, women love Dante for the precise reason that these menhate him. He makes sex the centre of everything. One need not bedeceived by the fact that Dante worships "purity, " while Voltaire, Goethe and Nietzsche are little concerned with it. This verylaudation of continence is itself an emphasis upon sex. These otherswould play with amorous propensities; trifle with them in their life, in their art, in their philosophy; and then, that dangerous playthinglaid aside would, as Machiavel puts it, "assume suitable attire, andreturn to the company of their equals--the great sages of antiquity. "

Now it is quite clear that this pagan attitude towards sex, thistendency to enjoy it in its place and leave it there, is one that, morethan anything else, is irritating to women. If, as a German thinkersays, every woman is a courtezan or a mother, it is obvious that theartists and thinkers who refuse alike the beguilements of the one andthe ironic tenderness of the other, are not people to be "loved. "Dante refuses neither; and he has, further, that peculiar mixture ofharsh strength and touching weakness, which is so especiallyappealing to women. They are reluctantly overcome--not withoutpleasure--by his fierce authority; and they can play the "littlemother" to his weakness. The maternal instinct is as ironical as it istender. It smiles at the high ideals or the eccentric child it pets, but itwould not have him different. What a woman does not like, whethershe is mother or courtezan, is that other kind of irony, the irony ofthe philosopher, which undermines both her maternal feeling andher passionate caresses. 

Women, too, even quite good women, have the stress of the sexualdifference constantly before them. Indeed it may be said that theclass of women who are least sex-conscious are those who havehabitually to sell themselves. It all matters so little then!

How fiercely is the interest of the most virtuous aroused, when anyquestion of a love affair is rumored. In this sense every woman is aborn "go-between. " Sex is not with them a thing apart, an excitingvolcanic thing, liable to mad outbursts, to weird perversions, butoften completely forgotten. It is never completely forgotten. It isdiffused. It is everywhere. It lurks in a thousand innocent gesturesand intimations. The savage purity of an Artemis is no realexception. Sex is a thing too pressing to be dallied with. It is all ornothing. 

One cannot play with fire. When we make observations of this kindwe do not derogate from the charm or dignity of women. It is noaspersion upon them. They did not ask to have it so. It is so. 

Domestic life as the European nations have evolved it is a queercompromise. Its restraints weigh heavily, in alternate discord, uponboth sexes. 

Masculine depravity rebels against it, and the whole modernfeministic movement shakes it to the base. It remains to be seenwhether Nature will admit of any satisfactory readjustment. 

Certainly, as far as overt acts are concerned, women are far "purer"than men. It is only when we leave the sphere of outward acts andenter the sphere of cerebral undercurrents, that all this is changed. There the Biblical story finds its proof, and the daughters of Everevert to their mother. This is the secret of that mania for thepersonal which characterizes women's conversation. She can sayfine things and do fine work; but both in her wit and her art, one isconscious of a mind that has voluptuously welcomed, or vindictivelyrepulsed, the approach of a particular invasion; never of a mind that, in its abstract love for the beautiful, cannot even remember how itcame to give birth to such thoughts!

It is the close psychological association between the emotion ofreligion and the emotion of sex which has always made womenmore religious than men. 

This is perhaps only to say that women are nearer the secret of theuniverse than men. It may well be so. Man's rationalizing tendencyto divorce his intelligence from his intuition--may not be the precisekey which opens those magic doors! _Sanctity_ itself--that mostexquisite flower of the art of character--is a profoundly femininething. The most saintly saints, that is to say those who wear theindescribable distinction of their Master, are always possessed of acertain feminine quality. 

Sanctity is woman's ideal--morality is man's. The one is based uponpassion, and by means of love lifts us above law. The other is basedupon vice and the recoil from vice; and has no horizons of any sort. 

That is why the countries where the imagination is profoundlyfeminine like Russia and France have sanctity as their ideal. Whereas England has its Puritan morality, and Germany itsscientific efficiency. These latter races ought to sit at Dante's feet, tolearn the secret of the "Beatific Vision" that is as far beyondmorality as it is outside science. There are, it is true, certainmoments when the Italian poet leads us up into the cold rarified airof that "Intellectual Love of God" which leaves sex, as it leavesother human feelings, infinitely behind. But this Spinozistic mood isnot the natural climate of his soul. He is always ready to revert, always anxious to "drag Beatrice in. " Wagner's "Parsifal" is perhapsthe most flagrant example of this ambiguous association betweenreligion and sex. The sentimental blasphemy of that feet-washingscene is an evidence of the depths of sexual morbidity into whichthis voluptuous religion of pity can lead us. O that figure in thewhite nightgown, blessing his reformed harlot!

It is a pity Wagner ever touched the Celtic Legend--Germansentimentality and Celtic romance need a Heine to deal with them!

It is indeed a difficult task to write of the relations between romanticlove and devotional religion and to do it in the grand style. That iswhere Dante is so supremely great. And that is why, for all hisgreatness, his influence upon modern art has been so morbid andevil. The odious sensuality of the so-called "Pre-Raphaelite School"--a sensuality drenched with holy water and perfumed with incense--hasa smell of corruption about it that ought never to be associatedwith Dante's name. 

The worst of modern poets, the most affected and the mostmeticulous, are all anxious to seal themselves of the tribe of Dante. But they are no more like that divine poet than the flies that feed ona dead Caesar are like the hero they cause to stink!

Our brave Oscar understood him. Some of the most exquisitepassages in "Intentions" refer to his poetry. Was the "DivineComedy" too clear-cut and trenchant for Walter Pater? It is strangehow Dante has been left to second-rate interpreters! His illustrators, too! O these sentimentalists, with their Beatrices crossing the PonteVecchio, and their sad youths looking on! All this is an insult--asacrilege--to the proudest, most aristocratic spirit who ever dwelt onearth! Why did not Aubrey Beardsley stop that beautiful boy on thethreshold? He who was the model of his "Ave atque vale!" mighthave well served for Casella, singing among the cold reeds, in thewhite dawn. 

For there are scenes in Dante which have the strange, remote, perverted, _archaic_ loveliness of certain figures on the walls ofEgyptian temples or on the earliest Greek vases. Here the real artistin him forgets God and Beatrice and the whole hierarchy of thesaints. And it is because of things of this kind that many curiouspeople are found to be his worshipers who will never themselvespass forth "to re-behold the stars. " They are unwise who find Danteso bitter and theological, so Platonic and devoted, that they cannotopen his books. They little know what ambiguous planets, what darkheathen meteors move on the fringe of his great star-lit road. HisEarthly Lady, as well as his Heavenly Lady, may have the moonbeneath her feet. 

But neither of them know, as does their worshiper and lover, _whatlies on the other side of the moon. _

What Dante leaves to us as his ultimate gift is his pride and hishumility. The one answers the other. And both put us to shame. He, alone of great artists, holds in his hand the true sword of the Spiritfor the dividing asunder of men and things. There is no necessity tolay all the stress upon the division between the Lower andthe Higher Love, between Hell and Heaven. There are other_distinctions_ in life than these. And between all distinctions, between all those differences which separate the "fine" from the"base, " the noble from the ignoble, the beautiful from the hideous, the generous from the mean; Dante draws the pitiless sword-strokeof that "eternal separation" which is the most tragic thing in theworld. In the truest sense tragic! For so many things, and so manypeople, that must be thus "cut off, " are among those who harrow ourhearts with the deadliest attraction and are so wistful in theirweakness. Through the mists and mephitic smoke of our confusedage--our age that cries out to be beyond the good, when it is beneaththe beautiful--through the thick air of indolence masquerading astoleration and indifference posing as sympathy, flashes thescorching sword of the Florentine's Disdain, dividing the just fromthe unjust, the true from the false, and the heroic from thecommonplace. What matter if his "division" is not our "division, "his "formula" our "formula"? It is good for us to be confronted withsuch Disdain. It brings us back once more to "Values"; and whetherour "Values" are values of taste or values of devotion what matter?Life becomes once more arresting. The everlasting Drama recoversits "Tone"; and the high Liturgy of the last Illusion rolls forward toits own Music!

That Angel of God, who when their hearts were shaken with fearbefore the flame-lit walls of Dis, came, so straight across the waters, and quelled the insolence of Hell; with what Disdain he turns awayhis face, even from those he has come to save!

These "messengers" of God, who have so superb a contempt for allcreated things, does one not meet them, sometimes, even in this life, as they pass us by upon their secret errands?

The beginning of the Inferno contains the cruellest judgment uponour generation ever uttered. It is so exactly adapted to the spirit ofthis age that, hearing it, one staggers as if from a stab. Are we notthis very tribe of caitiffs who have committed the "Great Refusal?"Are we not these very wretches whose blind life is so base that theyenvy every other Fate? Are we not those who are neither for God orfor his Enemies but are "for themselves"; those who may not eventake refuge in Hell, lest the one damned get glory of them! The veryterror of this clear-cutting sword-sweep, dividing us, bone frombone, may, nay! probably will, send us back to our gentle "lovers ofhumanity" who, "knowing everything pardon everything. " But onesometimes wonders whether a life all "irony, " all "pity, " all urbane"interest, " would not lose the savor of its taste! There is a danger, not only to our moral sense, but to our immoral sense, in that genialair of universal acceptance which has become the fashion. 

What if, after all--even though this universe be so poor a farce--themad lovers and haters, the terrible prophets and artists, _wereright?_

Suppose the farce had a climax, a catastrophe! One loves to repeat"all is possible;" but _that_ particular possibility has little attraction. It would be indeed an anti-climax if the queer Comedy we have sodaintily been patronizing turned out to be a Divine Comedy--andourselves the point of the jest! Not that this is very likely to occur. Itis more in accordance with what we know of the terrestrial stage thatin this wager of faith with un-faith neither will ever discover whoreally won!

But Dante's "Disdain" is not confined to the winners in the cosmicdicing match. There are heroic hearts in hell who, for all theirdespair, still yield not, nor abate a jot of their courage. Such a onewas that great Ghibelline Chief who was lost for "denyingimmortality. " "If my people fled from thy people--_that_ moretorments me than this flame. " In one respect Dante is, beyond doubt, the greatest poet of the world. I mean in his power of heighteningthe glory and the terribleness of the human race. Across the three-foldkingdom of his "Terza Rima" passes, in tragic array, the wholeprocession of human history--and each figure there, each solitaryperson, whether of the Blessed or the Purged, or the Condemned, wears, like a garment of fire, the dreadful dignity of having been aman! The moving sword-point that flashes, first upon one and thenupon another, amid our dim transactions, is nothing but the angryarm of human imagination, moulding life to grander issues;_creating, _ if not discovering, sublimer laws. 

In conveying that thrilling sense of the momentousness of humandestiny which beyond anything else certain historic names evoke, none can surpass him. The brief, branding lines, with which theenemies of God are engraved upon their monuments "more lastingthan brass, " seem to add a glory to damnation. Who can forget howthat "Simonist" and "Son of Sodom" lifts his hands up out of thedeepest Pit, and makes "the fig" at God? "Take it, God, for at Thee Iaim it!" There is a sting of furious blasphemy in this; _personaloutrage_ that goes beyond all limits. 

Yet who is there, but does not feel _glad_ that the "Pistoian" utteredwhat he uttered--out of his Hell--to his Maker?

Is not Newman right when he says that the heart of man does notnaturally "love God?"

But perhaps in the whole poem nothing is more beautiful than thatgreat roll of honor of the unchristened Dead, who make up thecompany of the noble Heathen. Sad, but not unhappy, they walk toand fro in their Pagan Hades, and occupy themselves, as of old, indiscoursing upon philosophy and poetry and the Mystery of Life. 

Those single lines, devoted to such names, are unlike anything elsein literature. That "Caesar, in armour, with Ger-Falcon eyes, "challenges one's obeisance as a great shout of his own legionaries, while that "Alone, by himself, the Soldan" bows to the dust ourChristian pride, as the Turbaned Commander of the Faithful, withhis ghostly crescent blade, strides past, dreaming of the Desert. 

It is in touches like these, surely, rather than in the Beatrice scenesor the devil scenes, that the poet is most himself. 

It needs, perhaps, a certain smouldering dramatic passion, in regardto the whole spectacle of human life, to do justice to such lines. Itneeds also that mixture of disdain and humility which is his ownparamount attribute. 

And the same smouldering furnace of "reverence" characterizesDante's use of the older literatures. No writer who has ever lived hassuch a dramatic sense of the "great effects" in style, and the ritual ofwords. 

That passage, _"Thou_ art my master and my author. It is from_thee_ I learnt the beautiful style that has done me so much honour, "with its reiteration of the rhythmic syllables of "honour, " opens up asalutary field of aesthetic contemplation. His quotations, too, fromthe Psalms, and from the Roman Liturgy, become, by theirimaginative inclusion, part of his own creative genius. That "Vexillaregis prodeunt Inferni!" Who can hear it without the same thrill, aswhen Napoleonic trumpets heralded the Emperor! In the presence ofsuch moments the whole elaboration of the Beatrice Cult falls away. That romantic perversion of the sex instinct is but the psychicmotive force. Once started on his splendid and terrible road, the poetforgets everything except the "Principle of Beauty" and the"Memory of Great Men. " Parallel with these things is Dante'spassion of reverence for the old historic places--provinces, cities, rivers and valleys of his native Italy. Even when he lifts up his voiceto curse them, as he curses his own Firenze, it is but an inversion ofthe same mood. The cities where men dwelt then took to themselvesliving personalities; and Dante, who in love and hate was Italian ofthe Italians, was left indifferent by none of these. How strange tomodern ears this thrill of recognition, when one exile, even amongthe dead, meets another, of their common citizenship of "no meancity!" Of this classic "patriotism" the world requires a Renaissance, that we may be saved from the shallowness of artificial commercialEmpires. The new "inter-nationalism" is the sinister product of ageneration that has grown "deracinated, " that has lost its roots in thesoil. It is an Anglo-Germanic thing and opposed to it the proudtenacity of the Latin race turns, even today, to what Barres calls the"worship of one's Dead. "

Anglo-Saxon Industrialism, Teutonic Organization, have their worldplace; but it is to the Latin, and, it may be, to the Slav also, that thehuman spirit must turn in those subtler hours when it cannot "live bybread alone. "

The modern international empires may obliterate local boundariesand trample on local altars. In spite of them, and in defiance of them, the soul of an ancient race lives on, its saints and its artists forgingthe urn of its Phoenix-ashes!

Dante himself, dreaming over the high Virgilian Prophecy of aWorld-State, under a Spiritual Caesar, yearned to restore the PaxRomana to a chaotic world. Such a vision, such an Orbis Terrarumat the feet of Christ, has no element in common with the materialdominance of modern commercial empires. It much more closelyresembles certain Utopias of the modern Revolutionary. In its spiritit is not less Latin than the traditional customs of the City-States itwould include. Its real implication may be found in the assimilativegenius of the Catholic Church, consecrating but not effacing localaltars; transforming, but not destroying, local pieties. Who can denythat this formidable vision answers the deepest need of the modernworld?

The discovery of some Planetary Synthesis within the circle ofwhich all the passionate race cults may flourish; growing not lessintense but more intense, under the new World-City--this is nothingelse than what the soul of the earth, "dreaming on things to come"may actually be evolving. 

Who knows if the new prominence given by the war to Russianthought may not incredibly hasten such a Vita Nuova? We knowthat the Pan-Slavic dream, even from the days of Ivan the Terrible, has been of this spiritual unity, and it may be remembered that itwas always from "beyond the Alps" that Dante looked for theLiberator. Who knows? The great surging antipodal tides of life lashone another into foam. Out of chaos stars are born. And it may bethe madness of a dream even so much as to speak of "unity" whilecreation seethes and hisses in its terrible vortex. Mockingly laughthe imps of irony, while the Saints keep their vigil. Man is asurprising animal; by no means always bent on his own redemption;sometimes bent on his own destruction!

And meanwhile the demons of life dance on. Dante may build up hisgreat triple universe in his great triple rhyme, and encase it in wallsof brass. But still they dance on. We may tremble at the supremepoet's pride and wonder at the passion of his humility--but "thedamned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind upon the sand!"

SHAKESPEARE

There is something pathetic about the blind devotion of humanity toits famous names. But how indiscriminate it is; how lacking indiscernment!

This is, above all, true of Shakespeare, whose peculiar and quitepersonal genius has almost been buried under the weight of popularidolatry. No wonder such critics as Voltaire, Tolstoi, and Mr. Bernard Shaw have taken upon themselves to intervene. TheFrenchman's protest was an aesthetic one. The more recent objectorshave adopted moral and philosophic grounds. But it is theunreasoning adoration of the mob which led to both attacks. 

It is not difficult to estimate the elements which have gone to makeup this Shakespeare-God. The voices of the priests behind the Idolare only too clearly distinguishable. We hear the academic voice, theshowman's voice, and the voice of the ethical preacher. They are allabsurd, but their different absurdities have managed to flow togetherinto one powerful and unified convention. Our popular oratorsgesticulate and clamour; our professors "talk Greek;" our ethicalBrutuses "explain;" and the mob "throw up their sweaty night-caps;"while our poor Caesar of Poetry sinks down out of sight, helplessamong them all. 

Charles Lamb, who understood him better than anyone--and wholoved Plays--does not hesitate to accuse our Stage-Actors of beingthe worst of all in their misrepresentation. He doubts whether evenGarrick understood the subtlety of the roles he played, and the fewexceptions he allows in his own age make us wonder what he wouldsay of ours. 

Finally there is the "Philosophical Shakespeare" of the Germanappreciation, and this we feel instinctively to be the least like theoriginal of all!

The irony of it is that the author of Hamlet and the Tempest does notonly live in a different world from that of these motley exponents. He lives in an antagonistic one. Shakespeare was as profoundly theenemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritansqueamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of theprofane crowd. And his melancholy scepticism, with its half-humorousassent to the traditional pieties, is at the extremest oppositepole from the "truths" of metaphysical reason. The Shakespeareof the Popular Revivals is a fantastic caricature. The Shakespeareof the College Text-Books is a lean scarecrow. But the Shakespeareof the philosophical moralists is an Hob-goblin from whom one fleesin dismay. 

Enjoying the plays themselves--the interpreters forgotten--anormally intelligent reader cannot fail to respond to a recognisablePersonality there, a Personality with apathies and antipathies, withprejudices and predilections. Very quickly he will discern the absurdunreality of that monstrous Idol, that ubiquitous Hegelian God. Verysoon he will recognize that in trying to make their poet everythingthey have made him nothing. 

No one can read Shakespeare with direct and simple enjoymentwithout discovering in his plays a quite definite and personalattitude towards life. Shakespeare is no Absolute Divinity, reconciling all oppositions and transcending all limitations. He is notthat "cloud-capped mountain, " too lofty to be scanned, of MatthewArnold's Sonnet. He is a sad and passionate artist, using his bitterexperiences to intensify his insight, and playing with his humoursand his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which hewas doomed to unmask. The best way of indicating the personalmood which emerges as his final attitude is to describe it as that ofthe perfectly natural man confronting the universe. Of course, thereis no such "perfectly natural man, " but he is a legitimate lay-figure, and we all approximate to him at times. The natural man, in hisunsophisticated hours, takes the Universe at its surface value, neitherrejecting the delicate compensations, nor mitigating the cruelty ofthe grotesque farce. The natural man accepts _what is given. _ Heswallows the chaotic surprises, the extravagant accidents, the wholefantastic "pell-mell. " He accepts, too, the traditional pieties of hisrace, their "hope against hope, " their gracious ceremonial, theirconsecration of birth and death. He accepts these, not because he isconfident of their "truth" but because _they are there;_ because theyhave been there so long, and have interwoven themselves with thechances and changes of the whole dramatic spectacle. 

He accepts them spontaneously, humorously, affectionately; notanxious to improve them--what would be the object of that?--andcertainly not seeking to controvert them. He reverences this Religionof his Race not only because it has its own sad, pathetic beauty, butbecause it has got itself involved in the common burden; lighteningsuch a burden here, making it, perhaps, a little heavier there, butlending it a richer tone, a subtler colour, a more significant shape. Itdoes not trouble the natural man that Religion should deal with "theImpossible. " Where, in such a world as this, does _that_ begin? Hehas no agitating desire to reconcile it with reason. 

At the bottom of his soul he has a shrewd suspicion that it rathergrew out of the earth than fell from the sky, but that does notconcern him. It may be based upon no eternal verity. It may lead tono certain issue. It may be neither very "useful" or very "moral. " Butit is, at any rate, a beautiful work of imaginative art, and it lends lifea certain dignity that nothing can quite replace. As a matter of fact, the natural man's attitude to these things does not differ much fromthe attitude of the great artists. It is only that a certain lust forcreation, and a certain demonic curiosity, scourge these latter on tosomething beyond passive resignation. 

A Da Vinci or a Goethe accepts religion and uses it, but between itand the depths of his own mind remains forever an inviolable film ofsceptical "white light. " This "qualified assent" is precisely whatexcites the fury of such individualistic thinkers as Tolstoi andBernard Shaw. It were amusing to note the difference between the"humour" of this latter and the "humour" of Shakespeare. Shaw'shumour consists in emphasizing the absurdity of human Custom, compared with the good sense of the philosopher. Shakespeare'shumour consists in emphasizing the absurdity of philosophers, compared with the good sense of Custom. The one is the humour ofthe Puritan, directed against the ordinary man, on behalf of theUniverse. The other is the humour of the Artist, directed against theUniverse, on behalf of the ordinary man. 

Shakespeare is, at bottom, the most extreme of Pessimists. He hasno faith in "progress, " no belief in "eternal values, " notranscendental "intuitions, " no zeal for reform. The universe to him, for all its loveliness, remains an outrageous jest. The cosmic is thecomic. Anything may be expected of this "pendant world, " exceptwhat we expect; and when it is a question of "falling back, " we canonly fall back on human-made custom. We live by Illusions, andwhen the last Illusion fails us, we die. After reading Shakespeare, the final impression left upon the mind is that the world can only bejustified as an aesthetic spectacle. To appreciate a Show at once sosublime and so ridiculous, one needs to be very brave, very tender, and very humorous. Nothing else is needed. "Man must abide hisgoing hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all. " WhenCourage fails us, it is--"as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. " When tenderness fails us, itis--"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pacefrom day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. " When humourfails us, it is--"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to meall the uses of this world!"

So much for Life! And when we come to Death, how true it is, asCharles Lamb says, that none has spoken of Death like Shakespeare!And he has spoken of it so--with such an absolute grasp of ourmortal feeling about it--because his mood in regard to it is the moodof the natural man; of the natural man, unsophisticated by falsehopes, undated by vain assurance. His attitude towards death neithersweetens "the unpalatable draught of mortality" nor permits us to letgo the balm of its "eternal peace. " How frightful "to lie in coldobstruction and to rot; this sensible warm motion to become akneaded clod!" and yet, "after life's fitful fever, " how blessed to"sleep well!"

What we note about this mood--the mood of Shakespeare and thenatural man--is that it never for a moment dallies with philosophicfancies or mystic visions. It "thinks highly of the soul, " but in thenatural, not the metaphysical, sense. It is the attitude of Rabelais andMontaigne, not the attitude of Wordsworth or Browning. It is thetone we know so well in the Homeric poems. It is the tone of thePsalms of David. We hear its voice in "Ecclesiastes, " and thewisdom of "Solomon the King" is full of it. In more recent times, itis the feeling of those who veer between our race's traditional hopeand the dark gulf of eternal silence. It is the "Aut Christus aut Nihil"of those who "by means of metaphysic" have dug a pit, into whichmetaphysic has disappeared!

The gaiety and childlike animal spirits of Shakespeare's Comediesneed not deceive us. Why should we not forget the whips and scornsfor a while, and fleet the time carelessly, "as they did in the goldenage?" Such simple fooling goes better with the irresponsibility ofour fate than the more pungent wit of the moral comedians. Thetragic laughter which the confused issues of life excite in subtlersouls is not lacking, but the sweet obliquities of honest clowns carryus just as far. Shakespeare loves fools as few have loved them, and itis often his humour to put into their mouth the ultimate wisdom. 

It is remarkable that these plays should commence with a"Midsummer Night's Dream" and end with a "Tempest. " In theinterval the great sombre passions of our race are sounded anddismissed; but as he began with Titania, so he ends with Ariel. Fromthe fairy forest to the enchanted island; from a dream to a dream. With Shakespeare there is no Wagnerian, Euripidean "apologia. "There is no "Parsifal" or "Bacchanals. " From the meaningless tumultof mortal passions he returns, with a certain ironic weariness, to themagic of Nature and the wonder of youth. Prospero, dismissing hisspirits "into thin air, " has the last word; and the last word is as thefirst: "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life isrounded with a sleep. " The easy-going persons who reluct at the ideaof a pessimistic Shakespeare should turn the pages of Troilus andCressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens. What weguessed as we read Hamlet and Lear grows a certainty as we readthese plays. 

Here the "gentle Shakespeare" does the three things that are mostunpardonable. He unmasks virtue; he betrays Woman; and he cursesthe gods. The most intransigent of modern revolutionaries mightlearn a trick or two from this sacred poet. In Lear he puts the veryvoice of Anarchy into the mouth of the King--"Die for adultery?No!" "Handy-dandy, which is the Magistrate and which is theThief?" "A dog's obeyed in office. "

Have I succeeded in making clear what I feel about theShakespearean attitude? At bottom, it is absolutely sceptical. Deepyawns below Deep; and if we cannot read "the writing upon thewall, " the reason may be that there is no writing there. Having lifteda corner of the Veil of Isis, having glanced once into thatDeath-Kingdom where grope the roots of the Ash-Tree whose name isFear, we return to the surface, from Nadir to Zenith, and become"superficial"--"out of profundity. "

The infinite spaces, as Pascal said, are "frightful. " That waymadness lies. And those who would be sane upon earth must drugthemselves with the experience, or with the spectacle of theexperience, of human passion. Within this charmed circle, and herealone, they may be permitted to forget the Outer Terror. 

The noble spirit is not the spirit that condescends to pamper in itselfthose inflated moods of false optimistic hope, which, springing frommere physiological well-being, send us leaping and bounding, withsuch boisterous assurance, along the sunny road. Such pragmaticself-deception is an impertinence in the presence of a world like this. 

It is a sign of what one might call a philosophically ill-bred nature. Itis the indecent "gratitude" of the pig over his trough. It is the littleyellow eye of sanctified bliss turned up to the God who _"must_ bein His Heaven" if _we_ are so privileged. This "never doubtinggood will triumph" is really, when one examines it, nothing but theinverted prostration of the helot-slave, glad to have been allowed toget so totally drunk! It blusters and swaggers, but at heart it is baseand ignoble. For it is not sensitive enough to feel that the Universe_cannot be pardoned_ for the cry of one tortured creature, and thatall "the worlds we shall traverse" cannot make up for the despair ofone human child. 

To be "cheerful" about the Universe in the manner of these people isto insult the Christ who died. It is to outrage the "little ones" overwhose bodies the Wheel has passed. When Nietzsche, the martyr ofhis own murdered pity, calls upon us to "love Fate, " he does notshout so lustily. His laughter is the laughter of one watching hisdarling stripped for the rods. He who would be "in harmony withNature. " with those "murderous ministers" who, in their blind abyss, throw dice with Chance, must be in harmony with the giants ofJotunheim, as well as with the lords of Valhalla. He must be able tolook on grimly while Asgard totters; he must welcome "the Twilightof the Gods. " To have a mind inured to such conceptions, a mindcapable of remaining on such a verge, is, alone, to be, intellectuallyspeaking, what we call "aristocratic. " When, even with eyes likepoor Gloucester's in the play, we can see "how this world wags, " itis slavish and "plebeian" to swear that it all "means intensely, andmeans well. " It is also to lie in one's throat!

No wonder Shakespeare treats reverently every "superstition, " everyanodyne and nepenthe offered to the inmates of this House of theIncurable. Such "sprinkling with holy water, " such "renderingourselves stupid, " is the only alternative. Anything else is the insightof the hero, or the hypocrisy of the preacher!

Has it been realized how curiously the interpreters of Shakespeareomit the principal thing? They revel in his Grammar, his History, hisBiology, his Botany, his Geography, his Psychology and his Ethics. They never speak of his Poetry. Now Shakespeare is, aboveeverything, a poet. To poetry, over and over again, as our Puritansknow well, he sacrifices Truth, Morality, Probability, nay! the veryprinciples of Art itself. 

As Dramas, many of his plays are scandalously bad; many of hischaracters fantastic. One can put one's finger in almost every caseupon the persons and situations that interested him and upon thosethat did not. And how carelessly he "sketches in" the latter! So farfrom being "the Objective God of Art" they seek to make him, he isthe most wayward and subjective of all wandering souls. 

No natural person can read him without feeling the pulse of extremepersonal passion behind everything he writes. 

And this pulse of personal passion is always expressing itself inPoetry. He will let the probabilities of a character vanish into air, ordwindle into a wistful note of attenuated convention, when oncesuch a one has served his purpose as a reed to pipe his strange tunesthrough. He will whistle the most important personage down thewind, lost to interest and identity, when once he has put into hismouth his own melancholy brooding upon life--his own imaginativereaction. 

And so it happens that, in spite of all academic opinion, those whounderstand Shakespeare best tease themselves least over hisdramatic lapses. For let it be whispered at once, without furtherscruple. As far as _the art of the drama_ is concerned, Shakespeareis _shameless. _ The poetic instinct--one might call it "epical" or"lyrical, " for it is both these--is far more dominant in our "greatestdramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely whythose among us who love "poetry, " but find "drama, " especially"drama since Ibsen, " intolerably tiresome, revert again and again toShakespeare. Only absurd groups of Culture-Philistines can readthese "powerful modern productions" more than once! One knowsnot whether their impertinent preaching, or their exasperatingtechnical cleverness is the more annoying. 

They may well congratulate themselves on being different fromShakespeare. They are extremely different. They are, indeed, nothing but his old enemies, the Puritans, "translated, " like poorBottom, and wearing the donkey's head of "art for art's sake" inplace of their own simple foreheads. 

Art for art's sake! The thing has become a Decalogue of forbiddingcommandments, as devastating as _those Ten. _ It is the new avatarof the "moral sense" carrying categorical insolence into the sphere ofour one Alsatian sanctuary!

I am afraid Shakespeare was a very "immoral" artist. I am afraid hewrote as one of the profane. 

But what of the Greeks? The Greeks never let themselves go! No!And for a sufficient reason. Greek Drama was Religion. It wasRitual. And we know how "responsible" ritual must be. The godsmust have their incense from the right kind of censer. 

But you cannot evoke Religion "in vacuo. " You cannot, simply byassuming grave airs about your personal "taste, " or even about the"taste" of your age, give it _that consecration. _

Beauty? God knows what beauty is. But I can tell you what it is not. It is not the sectarian anxiety of any pompous little clique to get"saved" in the artistic "narrow path. " It is much rather what Stendhalcalled it. But he spoke so frivolously that I dare not quote him. 

Has it occurred to you, gentle reader, to note how "Protestant" thisNew Artistic Movement is? Shakespeare, in his aesthetic method, aswell as in his piety, had a Catholic soul. In truth, the hour hasarrived when a "Renaissance" of the free spirit of Poetry in Drama isrequired. Why must this monstrous shadow of the HyperboreanIbsen go on darkening the play-instinct in us, like some ugly, domineering John Knox? I suspect that there are many generousRabelaisian souls who could lift our mortal burden with oceanicmerriment, only the New Movement frightens them. They are afraidthey would not be "Greek" enough--or "Scandinavian" enough. Meanwhile the miserable populace have to choose betweenBabylonian Pantomimes and Gaelic Mythology, if they are notdriven, out of a kind of spite, into the region of wholesome"domestic sunshine. "

What, in our hearts, we natural men desire is to be delivered at oneblow from the fairies with weird names (so different from poorTitania!), and from the three-thousand "Unities!" What "poetry" wedo get is so vague and dim and wistful and forlorn that it makes uswant to go out and "buy clothes" for someone. We veer between theabomination of city-reform and the desolation of Ultima Thule. 

But Shakespeare is Shakespeare still. O those broken and gasped-outhuman cries, full of the old poignancy, full of the old enchantment!Shakespeare's poetry is the extreme opposite of any "cult. " It is theineffable expression, in music that makes the heart stop, of thefeelings which have stirred every Jack and Jill among us, from thebeginning of the world! It has the effect of those old "songs" of thecountryside that hit the heart in us so shrewdly that one feels asthough the wind had made them or the rain or the wayside grass; forthey know too much of what we tell to none! It is the "one touch ofNature. " And how they break the rules, these surpassing lines, inwhich the emotions of his motley company gasp themselves away!

It is not so much in the great speeches, noble as these are, as in thebrief, tragic cries and broken stammerings, that his unapproachablefelicity is found. "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the godsthemselves throw incense. " Thick and fast they crowd upon ourmemory, these little sentences, these aching rhythms! It is with theflesh and blood of the daily Sacrifice of our common endurance thathe celebrates his strange Mass. Hands that "smell of mortality, " lipsthat "so sweetly were forsworn, " eyes that "look their last" on allthey love, these are the touches that make us bow down before thefinal terrible absolution. And it is the same with Nature. Not toShakespeare do we go for those pseudo-scientific, pseudo-ethicalinterpretations, so crafty in their word-painting, so cunning in theirrational analysis, which we find in the rest. A few fierce-flung words, from the hot heart of an amorist's lust, and all the smouldering magicof the noon-day woods takes your breath. A sobbing death-dirgefrom the bosom of a love-lorn child, and the perfume of all the"enclosed gardens" in the world shudders through your veins. 

And what about the ancient antagonist of the Earth? What about theGreat Deep? Has anyone, anywhere else, gathered into words thehuman tremor and the human recoil that are excited universallywhen we go down "upon the beached verge of the salt flood, whoonce a day with his embossed froth the turbulent surge doth cover?"John Keats was haunted day and night by the simple refrain in Lear, "Canst thou not hear the Sea?"

Charming Idyllists may count the petals of the cuckoo-buds in theriver-pastures; and untouched, we admire. But let old Falstaff, as helies a' dying, "babble o' green fields, " and all the long, long thoughtsof youth steal over us, like a summer wind. 

The modern critic, with a philosophic bias, is inclined to quarrelwith the obvious human congruity of Shakespeare's utterances. Whatis the _use_ of this constant repetition of the obvious truism: "Whenwe are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools?"

No use, my friend! No earthly use! And yet it is not a premeditatedreflection, put in "for art's sake. " It is the poetry of the pinch of Fate;it is the human revenge we take upon the insulting irony of our lot. 

But Shakespeare does not always strike back at the gods with bitterblows. In this queer world, where we have "nor youth, nor age, but, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both, " there comemoments when the spirit is too sore wounded even to rise in revolt. Then, in a sort of "cheerful despair, " we can only wait the event. And Shakespeare has his word for this also. 

Perhaps the worst of all "the slings and arrows" are the intolerablepartings we have to submit to, from the darlings of our soul. Andhere, while he offers us no false hope, his tone loses its bitterness, and grows gentle and solemn. 

It is--"Forever and forever, farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again, why then 'tis well; if not, this parting was well made. " And for theFuture:

 "O that we knew The end of this day's business ere it comes! But it suffices that the day will end; And then the end is known. "

EL GRECO

The emerging of a great genius into long retarded pre-eminence isalways attended by certain critical misunderstandings. To a cynicalobserver, on the lookout for characteristic temperamental lapses, two recent interpretations of El Greco may be especiallycommended. I mean the _Secret of Toledo, _ by Maurice Barres, andan article in the "Contemporary" of April, 1914, by Mr. Aubrey Bell. 

Barres--Frenchman of Frenchmen--sets off, with captivating andplausible logic, to generalize into reasonable harmlessness thisformidable madman. He interprets Toledo, appreciates Spain, andpatronizes Domenico Theotocopoulos. 

The _Secret of Toledo_ is a charming book, with illuminatingpassages, but it is too logical, too plausible, too full of the preciosityof dainty generalization, to reach the dark and arbitrary soul, eitherof Spain or of Spain's great painter. 

Mr. Bell, on the contrary, far from turning El Greco into anepicurean cult, drags him with a somewhat heavy hand before thefootlights of English Idealism. 

He makes of him an excuse for disparaging Velasquez, and launchesinto a discourse upon the Higher Reality and the Inner Truth whichleaves one with a very dreary feeling, and, by some ponderousapplication of spiritual ropes and pulleys, seems to jerk into emptyspace all that is most personal and arresting in the artist. 

If it is insulting to the ghostly Toledoan to smooth him out intopicturesque harmony with Castillian dances, Gothic cloisters andMoorish songs, it is still worse to transform him into a rampantIdealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to theAesthetics nor to the Idealists. He belongs to every individual soulwhose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse andsufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle of his tyrannicalspell. 

When, in that dark Toledo Church, one presses one's face against theiron bars that separate one from the Burial of Count Orguz, it isneither as a Dilettante nor an Idealist that one holds one's breath. Those youthful pontifical saints, so richly arrayed, offering withslender royal hands that beautiful body to the dust--is theirmysterious gesture only the rhythm of the secret of Death?

Those chastened and winnowed spectators, with their withdrawn, remote detachment--not sadness--are they the initiated sentinels ofthe House of Corruption?

At what figured symbol points that epicene child?

Sumptuous is the raiment of the dead; and the droop of his limbs hasa regal finality; but look up! Stark naked, and in abandonedweakness, the liberated soul shudders itself into the presence of God!

The El Greco House and Museum in Toledo contains amazingthings. Every one of those Apostles that gaze out from the wall uponour casual devotion has his own furtive madness, his ownimpossible dream! The St. John is a thing one can never forget. ElGreco has painted his hair as if it were literally live flame and theexotic tints of his flesh have an emphasis laid upon them that makesone think of the texture of certain wood orchids. 

How irrelevant seem Monsieur Barres' water-colour sketches ofprancing Moors and learned Jews and picturesque Visi-Goths, assoon as one gets a direct glimpse into these unique perversions! Andwhy cannot one go a step with this dreamer of dreams withoutdragging in the Higher Reality? To regard work as mad andbeautiful as this as anything but individual Imagination, is to insultthe mystery of personality. 

El Greco re-creates the world, in pure, lonely, fantastic arbitrariness. 

His art does not represent the secret Truth of the Universe, or theEverlasting Movement; it represents the humour of El Greco. 

Every artist mesmerizes us into his personal vision. 

A traveller, drinking wine in one of those cafes in the crowdedZocodover, his head full of these amazing fantasies, might well letthe greater fantasy of the world slip by--a dream within a dream!

With El Greco for a companion, the gaunt waiter at the table takesthe form of some incarcerated Don Quixote and the beggars at thewindow appear like gods in disguise. 

This great painter, like the Russian Dostoivsky, has a mania forabandoned weakness. The nearer to God his heroic Degenerates get, the more feverishly enfeebled becomes their human will. 

Their very faces--with those retreating chins, retroussé noses, looselips, quivering nostrils and sloping brows--seem to express theabandonment of all human resolution or restraint, in the presence ofthe Beatific Vision. Like the creatures of Dostoievsky, they seem toplunge into the ocean of the Foolishness of God, so much wiser thanthe wisdom of men!--as divers plunge into a bath. 

There is not much attempt among these ecstatics to hold on to thedignity of their reason or the reticence of their self-respect. Naked, they fling themselves into the arms of Nothingness. 

This passionate "Movement of Life, " of which Mr. Bell, quotingPater's famous quotation from Heraclitus, makes so much, is, afterall, only the rush of the wind through the garments of theWorld--Denier, as he plunges into Eternity. 

Like St. John of the Cross, El Greco's visionaries pass from theNight of the Reason to the Night of the Senses; from the Night ofthe Senses to the Night of Soul; and if this final Night is nothing lessthan God Himself, the divine submersion does not bring back anymortal daylight. 

Domenico's portraits have a character somewhat different from hisvisions. Here, into these elongated, bearded hermits, into these grave, intellectual maniacs, whose look is like the look of Workers in someunlit Mine, he puts what he knows and feels of his own identity. 

They are diverse masks and mirrors, these portraits, surfaces of deepwater in various lonely valleys, but from the depths of them rises upthe shadow of the same lost soul, and they are all ruffled by thebreath of the same midnight. 

The Crucifixion in the Prado, and that other, which, by some freakof Providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgroundswhich carry our imagination very far. Is this primordial ice, with itslivid steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods make otherplanets than ours--dead planets, without either sun or star? Are thesethe sheer precipices of Chaos, against which the Redeemer hangs, orthe frozen edges of the grave of all life?

El Greco's magnificent contempt for material truth is a lesson to allartists. We are reminded of William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley. He seems to regard the human-frame as so much soft clay, uponwhich he can trace his ecstatic hieroglyphs, in defiance both ofanatomy and nature. 

El Greco is the true precursor of our present-day Matissists andFuturists. He, as they, has the courage to strip his imagination of allmechanical restrictions and let it go free to mould the world at itsfancy. 

What stray visitor to Madrid would guess the vastness of theintellectual sensation awaiting him in that quiet, rose-colouredbuilding?

As you enter the Museum and pass those magnificent Titianscrowded so close together--large and mellow spaces, from a moreopulent world than ours; greener branches, bluer skies and a moreluminous air; a world through which, naturally and at ease, thedivine Christ may move, grand, majestic, health-giving, a veritablegod; a world from whose grapes the blood of satyrs may bequickened, from whose corn the hearts of heroes may be madestrong--and come bolt upon El Greco's glacial northern lights, youfeel that no fixed objective Truth and no traditional Ideal has a rightto put boundaries to the imagination of man. 

Not less striking than any of these is the extraordinary portrait of"Le Roi Ferdinand" in the great gallery at the Louvre. 

The artist has painted the king as one grown weary of his differencefrom other men. His moon-white armour and silvery crown showlike the ornaments of the dead. Misty and wavering, the longshadows upon the high, strange brow seem thrown there by thepassing of all mortal Illusions. 

Phantom-like in his gleaming ornaments, a king of Lost Atlantis, hewaits the hour of his release. 

And not only is he the king of Shadows; he is also the king ofPlayers, the Player-King. 

El Greco has painted him holding two sceptres, one of which, resembling a Fool's Bauble, is tipped with the image of a nakedhand--a dead, false hand--symbol of the illusion of Power. The verycrown he wears, shimmering and unnaturally heavy, is like thecrown a child might have made in play, out of shells and sea-weed. 

The disenchanted irony upon the face of this figure; that look as ofone who--as Plato would have us do with kings--has been draggedback from Contemplation to the vulgarity of ruling men; has beendeliberately blent by a most delicate art with a queer sort of fantasticwhimsicality. 

"Le Roi Ferdinand" might almost be an enlarged reproduction ofsome little girl's Doll-King, dressed up in silver tinsel and left out ofdoors, by mistake, some rainy evening. 

Something about him, one fancies, would make an English childthink of the "White Knight" in _Alice Through the Looking Glass, _so helpless and simple he looks, this poor "Revenant, " propped upby Youthful Imagination, and with the dews of night upon hisarmour. 

You may leave these pictures far behind you as you re-cross theChannel, but you can never quite forget El Greco. 

In the dreams of night the people of his queer realm will return andsurround you, ebbing and flowing, these passionate shadows, stretching out vain arms after the infinite and crying aloud for therest they cannot win. 

Yes, in the land of dreams we know him, this proud despiser of earth!

From our safe inland retreat we watch the passing of his Dance ofDeath, and we know that what they seek, these wanderers upon thewind, is not our Ideal nor our Real, not our Earth or our Heaven, buta strange, fairy-like Nirvana, where, around the pools ofNothingness, the children of twilight gambol and play. 

The suggestive power of genius plays us, indeed, strange tricks. Ihave sometimes fancied that the famished craving in the eyes andnostrils of El Greco's saints was a queer survival of that tragic lookwhich that earlier Greek, Scopas the Sculptor, took such pains tothrow upon the eyelids of his half-human amphibiums. 

It might even seem to us, dreaming over these pictures as the gustsof an English autumn blow the fir branches against the window, asthough all that weird population of Domenico's brain were tossingtheir wild, white arms out there and emitting thin, bat-like criesunder the drifting moon. 

The moon--one must admit that, at least--rather than the sun, wasever the mistress of El Greco's genius. He will come more and moreto represent for us those vague uneasy feelings that certaininanimate and elemental objects have the power of rousing. It is ofhim that one must think, when this or that rock-chasm cries aloudfor its Demon, or this or that deserted roadway mutters of itsunreturning dead. 

There will always be certain great artists, and they are the mostoriginal of all who refuse to submit to any of our logical categories, whether scientific or ideal. 

To give one's self up to them is to be led by the hand into thecountry of Pure Imagination, into the Ultima Thule of impossibledreams. 

Like Edgar Allan Poe, this great painter can make splendid use ofthe human probabilities of Religion and Science; but it is none ofthese things that one finally thinks, as one comes to follow him, butof things more subtle, more remote, more translunar, and far moreimaginative. 

One may walk the streets of Toledo to seek the impress of ElGreco's going and coming; but the soul of Domenico Theotocopoulosis not there. 

It is with Faust, in the cave of the abysmal "Mothers. "

MILTON

It is outrageous, the way we modern world-children play with words. How we are betrayed by words! How we betray with words! Westeal from one another and from the spirit of the hour; and with ourphrases and formulas and talismans we obliterate all distinction. Onesees the modern god as one who perpetually apologises and explains;and the modern devil as one who perpetually apologises andexplains. Everything has its word-symbol, its word-mask, itsword-garment, its word-disgrace. Nothing comes out clear into the open, unspeakable and inexplicable, and strikes us dumb!

That is what the great artists do--who laugh at our word-play. That iswhat Milton does, who, in the science and art of handling words, hasnever been equalled. Milton, indeed, remains, by a curious fate, theonly one of the very great poets who has never been "interpreted" or"appreciated" or "re-created" by any critical modern. And they haveleft him alone; have been frightened of him; have not dared to slimetheir "words" over him, for the very reason that he is the supremeartist in words! He is so great an artist that his creations detachthemselves from all dimness--from all such dimness as modern"appreciation" loves--and stand out clear and cold and "unsympathetic";to be bowed down before and worshipped, or left unapproached. 

Milton is a man's poet. It would be a strange thing if women lovedhim. Modern criticism is a half-tipsy Hermaphrodite, in love onlywith what is on the point of turning into something else. Milton isalways himself. His works of art are always themselves. He and theyare made of the same marble, of the same metal. They are neverlikely to change into anything else! Milton is, like all the greatestartists, a man of action. He, so learned in words, in their history, intheir weight, in their origin, in their evocations; he, the scholar ofscholars, is a man, not of words, but of deeds. That is why the styleof Milton is a thing that you can touch with your outstretchedfingers. It has been hammered into shape by a hand that could graspa sword; it has been moulded into form by a brain that coulddominate a council-chamber. No wonder we word-maniacs fear toapproach him. He repels us; he holds us back; he hides hiswork-shop from us; and his art smites us into silent hatred. 

For Milton himself, though he is the artist of artists, art is not thefirst thing. It is only the first thing with us because we are life'sslaves, and not its masters. Art is what we protect ourselveswith--from life. For us it is a religion and a drug. To Milton it was aweapon and a plaything. 

Milton was more interested in the struggle of ideas, in the struggleof races, in the struggle of immortal principles, in the struggle ofgods, in the great creative struggle of life and death, than he wasinterested in the exquisite cadences of words or their laboriousarrangement. A modern artist's heart's desire is to escape from theworld to some "happy valley" and there, sitting cross-legged, like aChinese Idol, between the myrtle-bushes and the Lotus, to makebeautiful things in detachment forever, one by one, with no pause orpain. Milton's desire was to take the whole round world between hishands, with all the races and nations who dwell upon it, and mould_that, _ and nothing less, into the likeness of what he believed. Andin what did he believe, this Lord of Time and Space, this accompliceof Jehovah? He believed in Himself. He had the unquestioning, unphilosophical belief in himself which great men of action have;which the Caesars, Alexanders and Napoleons have, and whichShakespeare seems to have lacked. 

Milton, though people have been misled into thinking of him as verydifferent from that, was, in reality, the incarnation of theNietzschean ideal. He was hard, he was cold, he was contemptuous, he was "magnanimous, " he "remembered his whip" when he wentwith women, he loved war for its own sake, and he dwelt alone onthe top of the mountains. To Milton the world presented itself as aplace where the dominant power, and the dominant interest, was thewrestling of will with will. Why need we always fuss ourselvesabout logical _names_? Milton, in reality--in his temperament andhis mood--was just as convinced of _Will_ being the ultimate secretas Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Bergson or the modern Pragmatist. Nothing seemed to him noble, or dramatic, or "true, " that did notimply the struggle to the death of opposing _wills_. 

Milton, in reality, is less of a Christian than any European writer, since the Gospel appeared. In his heart, like Nietzsche, he regardedthe binding into one volume of those "Two Testaments" an insult to"the great style. " He does, indeed, in a manner find a place for Christ, but it is the place of one demigod among many other demi-gods; theconqueror's place possibly, but still the place of one in a hierarchy, not of one alone. It is absurd to quarrel with Milton's deification ofthe Judaic Jehovah. Every man has his own God. The God he _has aright to_. And the Jewish Jehovah, after all, is no mean figure. He, like Milton, was a God of War. He, like Milton, found Will--humanand divine Will--the central cosmic fact. He, like Milton, regardedGood and Evil, not as universal principles, but as arbitrary_commands_, issued by eternal personal antagonists! It is one of theabsurd mistakes into which our conceptual and categorical minds soeasily fall--this tendency to eliminate Milton's Theology as merePuritanical convention, dull and uninteresting. Milton's Theologywas the most _personal creation_ that any great poet has ever daredto launch upon--more personal even than the Theology of Milton'sfavourite Greek poet, Euripides. 

Milton's feeling for the more personal, more concrete aspects of"God" goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. At heart hewas a savage Dualist, who lapsed occasionally into Pluralism. Hewas, above all, an Individualist of the most extreme kind--anIndividualist so hard, so positive, so inflexible, that for him nothingin the world really mattered except the clash of definite, clear-cutWills, contending against one another. 

Milton is the least mystical, the least pantheistic, the least monistic, of all writers. That magical sense of the brooding Over-Soul whichthrills us so in Goethe's poetry never touches his pages. TheWordsworthian intimations of "something far more deeplyinterfused" never crossed his sensibility; and, as far as he isconcerned, Plato might never have existed. 

One feels, as one reads Milton, that his ultimate view of the universeis a great chaotic battlefield, amid the confused elements of whichrise up the portentous figures of "Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers, " and in the struggle between these, themost arbitrary, the most tyrannical, the most despotic, conquers therest, and, planting his creative Gonfalon further in the Abyss thanany, becomes "God"; the God whose personal and unrestrainedCaprice creates the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, out of Chaos; andMan out of the dust of the Earth. Thus it is brought about that whatthis God _wills_ is "Good, " and what his strongest and mostformidable antagonist wills is "Evil. " Between Good and Evil thereis no eternal difference, except in the eternal difference between theconquering Personality of Jehovah and the conquered Personality ofLucifer. So, far from it being true that Milton is the dull transcriberof mere traditional Protestantism, a very little investigation revealsthe astounding fact that the current popular Evangelical view of theorigin of things and the drama of things is based, not upon the Bibleat all, but upon Milton's poem. In this respect he is a true ClassicPoet--a Maker of Mythology--a Delphic Demiurge. 

One of the most difficult questions in the world to answer would bethe question how far Milton "believed" simply and directly, in theGod he thus half-created. Probably he did "believe" more than hisdaring, arbitrary "creations" would lead us to suppose. His naturedemanded positive and concrete facts. Scepticism and mysticismwere both abhorrent to him; and it is more likely than not that, in thedepths of his strange cold, unapproachable heart, a terrible andpassionate prayer went up, day and night, to the God of Isaac andJacob that the Lord should not forget his Servant. 

The grandeur and granite-like weight of Milton's learning was fedby the high traditions of Greece and Rome; but, in his heart of hearts, far deeper than anything that moved him in Aeschylus or Virgil, wasthe devotion he had for the religion of Israel, and the Fear of Himwho "sitteth between the Cherubims. " It is often forgotten, amid thewelter of modern ethical ideals and modern mystical theosophies, how grand and unique a thing is this Religion of Israel--a religionwhose God is at once Personal and Invisible. After all, what do weknow? A Prince of Righteousness, a King of Sion, a Shepherd of hisPeople--such a "Living God" as David cries out upon, with thosedramatic cries that remain until today the most human and tragic ofall our race's wrestling with the Unknown--is this not a Faith quiteas "possible" and far more moving, than all the "Over-Souls" and"Immanent All's Fathers" and "Streams of Tendency" which havebeen substituted for it by unimaginative modern "breadth of mind"?It is time that it was made clear that the alternative at present for allnoble souls is between the reign of "crass Casuality" and the reign ofHim "who maketh the clouds His chariot and walketh upon thewings of the wind. " Those who, "with Democritus, set the worldupon Chance" have a right to worship their Jesus of Nazareth, and, in him, the Eternal Protest against the Cruelty of Life. But if Life isto be deified, if Life is to be "accepted, " if Life is to be worshipped;if Courage, not Love, be the secret of the cosmic system, then let uscall aloud upon it, under personal and palpable symbols, in the oldimaginative, _poetic_ way, rather than fool ourselves with thinmysticities, vague intuitions, and the "sounding brass" of "ethicalideals"!

The earlier poems of Milton are among the most lovely in theEnglish language. Lycidas is, for those who understand what poetrymeans, the most lovely of all. There is nothing, anywhere, quite likethis poem. The lingering, elaborate harmonies, interrupted in pauseafter pause, by lines of reverberating finality; and yet, sweetly, slowly leading on to a climax of such airy, lucid calm--it is one's"hope beyond hope" of what a poem should be. 

The absence of vulgar sentiment, the classic reserve, the gentlemelancholy, the delicate gaiety, the subtle interweaving of divine, rhythmic cadences, the ineffable lightness of touch, as of cunningfingers upon reluctant clay; is there anything in poetry to equal thesethings? One does not even regret the sudden devastating apparitionof that "two-handed engine at the door. " For one remembers howwickedly, how mercilessly, the beauty of life is even now beingspoiled by these accursed "hirelings"--and now, as then, "nothingsaid. "

The Nativity Hymn owes half the charm of its easy, natural grace tothe fact that the victory of Mary's infant son over the rest is treatedas if it were the victory of one pagan god over another--the finaltriumph being to him who is the most "gentle" and "beautiful" of allthe gods. In the famous argument between the Lady and herTempter, in Comus, we have an exquisite example of the sweet, grave refinement of virginal taste which shuns grossness as "a falsenote. " The doctrine of Comus--if so airy a thing can be supposed tohave a doctrine--is not very different from the doctrine of Marius theEpicurean. One were foolish to follow the bestial enchanter; not somuch because it is "wrong" to do so, as because, then, one wouldlose the finer edge of that heavenly music which turns the outwardshape "to the soul's essence. "

Milton's Sonnets occupy a place by themselves in English Literature, and they may well be pondered upon by those who think that therelinquishing of the "old forms" makes it easier to express one'spersonality. It makes it, as a matter of fact, much harder, just as thestripping from human beings of their characteristic "outer garments"makes them so dreadfully, so devastatingly, alike! Nothing could bemore personal than a Miltonic Sonnet. The rigid principles of form, adhered to so scrupulously in the medium used, intensify, ratherthan detract from, his individualistic character. That Miltonic wit, sogranite-like and mordant, how well it goes with the magicalwhispers that "syllable men's names"!

All Milton's personal prejudices may be found in the Sonnets, fromhis hatred of those frightful Scotch appellations that would "makeQuintlian gasp" to his longing for Classic companionship and "Atticwine" and "immortal notes" and "Tuscan airs"! As one reads on, laughing gently at the folly of those who have so misunderstood him, one is conscious more and more of that high, cold, clear, lonelytenderness, which found so little satisfaction in the sentiment of therabble and still less in the endearments of women! As in the case of"sad Electra's poet, " his own favorite, it is easy to grow angry abouthis "Misogyny" and take Christian exception to his preference formistresses over wives. It is true that Milton's view of marriage ismore than "heathen. " But one has to remember that in these mattersof purely personal taste no public opinion has right to intervene. When the well-married Brownings of our age succeed in writingpoetry in the "grand style, " it will be time--and, perhaps, not eventhen--to let the dogs of democratic domesticity loose upon thisaustere lover of the classic way. 

What a retort was "Paradise Lost" to the lewd revellers who wouldhave profaned his aristocratic isolation with howlings and brutalitiesand philistine uproar! Milton despised "priests and kings" from theheights of a pride loftier than their own--and he did not love thevulgar mob much better. In Paradise Lost he can "feel himself" intothe sublime tyranny of God, as well as into the sublime revolt ofLucifer. Neither the one or other stoops to solicit "popular voices. "The thing to avoid, as one reads this great poem, are the paraphrasesfrom the book of Genesis. Here some odd scrupulousness ofscholarly conscience seems to prevent him launching out into hisnative originality. But, putting this aside, what majesticPandemoniums of terrific Imagination he has the power to call up!The opening Books are as sublime as the book of Job, and morearresting than Aeschylus. The basic secrets of his blank verse cannever be revealed, but one is struck dumb with wonder in thepresence of this Eagle of Poetry as we attempt to follow him, flightbeyond flight, hovering beyond hovering, as he gets nearer andnearer to the Sun. 

It is by single paragraphs, all the same, and by single lines, that Iwould myself prefer to see him judged. Long poems have beenwritten before and will be written again, but no one will everwrite--no one but Dante has ever written--such single lines as one readsin Milton. Curiously enough, some of the most staggering of thesesuperb passages are interludes and allusions, rather than integralepisodes in the story, and not only interludes, but interludes in the"pagan manner. " Second only to those Luciferan defiances, whichseem able to inspire even us poor worms with the right attitudetowards Fate, I am tempted to place certain references to Astarte, Ashtoreth and Adonis. 

 "Astarte, queen of Heaven, with crescent horns, To whose bright Image nightly, by the moon, Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs. "

Or of Adonis:

 "Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a Summer's day--"

That single line, "Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured, " seemsto me better than any other that could be quoted, to evoke the aweand the thrill and the seduction of all true poetry. 

Then those great mysterious allusions to the planetary orbits and thefixed stars and the primeval spaces of land and sea; what a powerthey have of spreading wide before us the huge horizons of theworld's edge! Who can forget "the fleecy star that bears Andromedafar off Atlantic seas"? Or that phrase about the sailors "stemmingmightly to the pole"? Or the sudden terror of that guarded ParadisicGate--"with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms"? The sameextraordinary beauty of single passages may be found in "ParadiseRegained, " a poem which is much finer than many guess. Thedescriptions there of the world-cities, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, have the same classic thrill of reserved awe and infinite reverencethat some of Dante's lines possess--only, with Milton, the thing islonger drawn out and more grandiloquent. Satan's speech about hisown implacable fatality, "his harbour, and his ultimate repose, " andthat allusion to Our Lord's gentleness, like "the cool intermission ofa summer's cloud" are both in the manner we love. 

It is only, however, when one comes to Samson Agonistes that thefull power of Milton's genius is felt. Written in a style which thedevotees of "free verse" in our time would do well to analyse, it isthe most complete expression of his own individual character that heever attained. Here the Captain of Jehovah, here the champion ofLight against Darkness, of Pride against Humility, of Man againstWoman, finds his opportunity and his hour. Out of his blindness, outof his loneliness, out of the welter of hedonists and amorists andfeminists and fantasists who crowded upon him, the great, terribleegoist strikes his last blow! No one can read Samson Agonisteswithout being moved, and those who look deepest into our presentage may well be moved the most! One almost feels as if some greatoverpowering tide of all the brutalities and crudities and falsesentiments and cunning hypocrisies, and evil voluptuousness, of allthe Philistias that have ever been, is actually rushing to overwhelmus! Gath and Askalon in gross triumph--must this thing be? Will theLord of Hosts lift no finger to help his own? And then the endcomes; and the Euripidean "messenger" brings the great news! He isdead, our Champion; but in his death he slew more than in his life. "Nothing is here" for unworthy sorrow; "nothing" that need make us"knock the breast;"--"No weakness, no contempt, dispraise orblame--nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us in a deathso noble. "

And the end of Samson Agonistes is as the end of Milton's own life. Awaited in calm dignity, as a Roman soldier might wait for Caesar'sword, Death has claimed its own. But let not the "daughters of theuncircumsized" triumph! Grandeur and nobility, beauty and heroism, live still; and while these live, what matter though our bravest andour fairest perish? It only remains to let the thunderbolt, when itdoes fall, find us prepared; find us in calm of mind, "all passionspent. "

CHARLES LAMB

Charles Lamb occupies a very curious position in English literatureand a very enviable one. He is, perhaps, the most widely known, andwidely spoken of, of any stylist we possess, and the least understood. It was his humour, while living, to create misunderstanding, and hecreates it still. And yet he is recognized on all sides as a Classic ofthe unapproachable breed. Charles Lamb has among his admirersmore uninteresting people than any great artist has ever had exceptThackeray. He has more academic people in his train than anyonehas ever had except Shakespeare. And more severe, elderly, pedanticpersons profess to love him than love any other mortal writer. 

These people all read Lamb, talk Lamb, quote Lamb, but they do not_suggest_ Lamb; they do not "smack, " as our ancestors used to say, of the true Elia vein. 

But the immense humour of the situation does not stop here. Notonly has this evasive City Clerk succeeded in fooling the "goodpeople;" he has fooled the "wicked ones. " I have myself in the circleof my acquaintance more than half a dozen charming people, of thetype who enjoy Aubrey Beardsley, and have a mania for OscarWilde, and sometimes dip into Remy de Gourmont, and not one ofthem "can read" Charles Lamb. He has succeeded in fooling them;in making them suppose he is something quite different from whathe is. He used to tell his friends that every day he felt himselfgrowing more "official" and "moral. " He even swore he had beentaken for a Verger or a Church warden. Well, our friends of the"enclosed gardens" still take him for a Verger. But he is a moreremarkable Verger than they dream. As a matter of fact, there weresome extremely daring and modern spirits in Elia's "entourage, "spirits who went further in an antinomian direction than--I devoutlypray--my friends are ever likely to go, and these scandalous onesadored him. And for his part, he seems to have liked them--morethan he ought. 

It is, indeed, very curious and interesting, the literary fate of CharlesLamb. Jocular Bishops, archly toying Rural Deans, Rectors with a"penchant" for anecdote, scholarly Canons with a weakness for RumPunch, are all inclined to speak as if in some odd way he was oftheir own very tribe. He had absolutely nothing in common withthem, except a talent for giving false impressions! With regard to thedevotion to him which certain gentle and old-fashioned ladieshave--one's great-aunts, for instance--I am inclined to think that muchmore might be said. There is a quality, a super-refined, exquisitequality, and one with a pinch of true ironic salt in it, which the morethick-skinned among us sensationalists may easily miss. 

It is all very well for us to talk of "burning with a hard gem-likeflame, " when, as a matter of fact, we move along, dull as cave-men, to some of the finest aesthetic effects in the world. Not to appreciatethe humour of that rarest and sweetest of all human types, themischievous-tongued Great-Aunt, is to be nothing short of a profanefool. 

But Charles Lamb is a very different person from our Goldsmithsand Cowpers and Austens, and their modern representatives. Itneeds something else in a Great-Aunt than old-fashioned irony toappreciate _him. _ It needs an imagination that is very nearly"Shakespearean" and it needs a passion for beautiful style of which aFlaubert or an Anatole France might be proud. 

So here we have the old sly Elia, fooling people now as he fooledthem in his lifetime, and a riddle both to the godly and the ungodly. The great Goethe, whose Walpurgis Night "He-Apes" made Elia putout his tongue, read, we learn, with no little pleasure some fantasticskit of this incorrigible one. Did he discern--the sublime Olympian--whata cunning flute player lurked under the queer mask? "Somethingbetween a Jew, a Gentleman and an Angel" he liked to fancyhe looked; and one must confess that in the subtlest of allsenses of that word, a gentleman he was. 

Lamb's "essays" were written at off hours, when he could escapefrom his office. Once completely freed from the necessity of officework, his writing lost its magic. His genius was of that peculiarlydelicate texture which requires the stimulus of reaction. One cannotbe too grateful that the incomparable Pater, after Lamb himself, perhaps, the greatest master of English prose, found it necessary toutter his appreciation. Pater, as usual, hits the mark with an infalliblehand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy whichdarkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him. 

It is, of course, this, the sense of one living always on the edge of aprecipice, that gives such piquancy and charm to Elia's mania for"little things. " Well might he turn to "little things, " when greatthings--his Sun and his Moon--had been turned for him to Blood!But, as Pater suggests, there is "Philosophy" in all this, and morePhilosophy than many suppose. It is unfortunate that the unworldlyColeridge and the worldly Thackeray should have both pitched uponLamb's "saintliness" to make copy of. Nothing infuriated him morethan such a tone towards himself. And he was right to be infuriated. His "unselfishness, " his "sweetness, " of which these good men makeso much, were only one aspect of the Philosophy of his whole life. Lamb was, in his life, a great epicurean philosopher, as, in allprobability, many other "saints" have been. The things in him thatfretted Carlyle, his fits of intoxication, his outbursts of capriciousimpishness, his perversity and his irony, were just as much part ofthe whole scheme as were his celibacy and his relation to his sister. 

What one can really gather from Lamb is nothing less than a verywise and very subtle "way of life, " a way that, amid manyoutrageous experiences, will be found singularly lucky. 

In the first place, let it be noted, Lamb deliberately cultivates the artof "transforming the commonplace. " It is as absurd to deny theexistence of this element--from which we all suffer--as it is tomaintain that it cannot be changed. It _can_ be changed. That isprecisely what this kind of rare genius does. It is a miracle, of course, but everything in art is a miracle. 

Nature tosses out indiscriminately her motley productions, and ifyou are born for such "universalism, " you may swallow themwholesale. The danger of such a downright manner of going to workis that it blunts one's critical sense. If you swallow everything just asit is, you _taste_ very little. But Charles Lamb is nothing if not"critical, " nothing if not an Epicure, and his manner of dealing withthe "commonplace" sharpens rather than blunts the edge of one'staste. 

And what is this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribableblending of Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle's"blackguards, " achieves the same synthesis. It is this spiritualachievement--at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph--thatmakes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really great man. The Wordsworths and Coleridges who patronized him were tooself-opiniated and individualistic to be able to enter into eithertradition. 

Wordsworth is neither a Christian or a Pagan. He is a moralphilosopher. Elia is an artist, who understands the _importance ofritual_ in life--but of naturalness in ritual. 

How difficult, whether as a thinker or a man, is it to be natural inone's loves and hates! How many quite authoritative Philistinesnever really let the world know how Bohemian at heart they are!And how much of our modern "artistic feeling" is a pure affectation!Now, whatever Elia was not, he was wantonly, wickedly, whimsicallynatural. 

He never concealed his religious feelings, his superstitious feelings. He never concealed his fancies, his fads, his manias, his vices. Henever concealed his emotion when he felt a thrill of passionate faith. He never concealed it when he felt a thrill of blasphemous doubt. 

He accepted life's little pleasures as they appeared, and did nothesitate to make "cults" of the ones that appeared most appealing. Ifhe had Philistine feelings, he indulged them without shame. If hehad recondite and "artistic" feelings, he indulged them also withoutshame. He is one of the few great men not afraid to be un-original, and hence he is the most original of all. "I cannot, " says he, "sit andthink. Books think for me. " Well, books did "think for him, " for hemanaged to press the books of the great poets into his service, as nomortal writer has ever dared to do before. And he could do itwithout impairing his originality, because he was as original as thegreat poets he used. We say deliberately "poets, " for, as Pater pointsout, to find Lamb's rivals in sheer imaginative genius, we have toleave the company of those who write prose. 

Do the humorous ecclesiastics and scholarly tutors who profess tounderstand Elia ever peep into that Essay called "Witches, " or thatother Essay called "A Child-Angel"? There are things here that arewritten for a very different circle. Certain sentences in"Dream-children, " too, have a beauty that takes a natural man's breathcompletely away. Touches of far-off romance, terrible and wistful as"anonymous ballads, " alternate with gestures of Rabelaisian humour, such as generous souls love. Elia's style is the only thing in Englishprose that can be called absolutely perfect. Compared with the rich, capricious, wilful, lingering by the way of Lamb's manner, Pater's isprecise, demure and over-grave, Wilde's fantastic and over-provocative, Ruskin's intolerably rhetorical. 

Into what other prose style could the magic of Shakespeare's "littletouches" be drawn, or the high melancholy of Milton's imagery beled, without producing a frightful sense of the incongruous? He canquote them both--or any other great old master--and if it were notfor the "inverted commas" we should not be aware of the insertion. 

Elia cannot say anything, not the simplest thing, without giving it aturn, a twist, a lift, a lightness, a grace, that would redeem the verygrease-spots on a scullion's apron!

There is no style in the world like it. Germany, France, Italy, Russiahave no Charles Lamb. Their Flauberts and D'Annunzios belong to adifferent tribe. Even Turgenieff, just because he has to "get on withhis story" cannot do precisely this. 

Every single one of the "essays" and most of the "letters" can beread over and over again, and their cadences caressed as if they wereliving people's features. And they are living. They are as living asthose Japanese Prints so maddening to some among us, or as thedrawings of Lionardo. They also--in their place--are "pure line" touse the ardent modern slang, and unpolluted "imaginativesuggestion. "

The mistake our "aesthetes" made, these lovers of Egyptian dancersand Babylonian masks, is that they suppose the simplicity of Lamb'ssubjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! Hecan take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of deadComedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and theshadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreakingevasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things hecan make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is acurious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverishart-neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in Elia. One wonders if they have ever felt the remote translunar beauty thatcommon faces and old, dim, pitiful things can wear sometimes. Itwould seem not. Like Herod the Tetrarch, they must have "Peacockswhose crying calls the rain, and the spreading of their tails bringsdown the Moon;" they must have "opals that burn with flame as coldas ice" and onyxes and amber and the tapestries of Tyre, The pansiesthat "are for thoughts" touch them not and the voices of thestreet-singers leave them cold. 

It is precisely the lack of natural kindly humour in these people, whomust always be clutching "cameos from Syracuse" between theirfingers, which leads them, when the tension of the "gem-like flame"can be borne no more, into sheer garishness and brutality. Oneknows it so well, that particular tone; the tone of the jaded amorist, for whom "the unspeakable rural solitudes" and "the sweet securityof streets" mean, both of them, boredom and desolation. 

It is not their subtlety that makes them thus suffer; it is their lack ofit. What? Is the poignant world-old play of poor mortal men andwomen, with their absurdities and excesses, their grotesque reservesand fantastic confessions, their advances and withdrawals, not_interesting_ enough to serve? It serves sufficiently; it serves wellenough, when genius takes it in hand. Perhaps, after all, it is _that_which is lacking. 

Charles Lamb went through the world with many avoidances, butone thing he did not avoid--the innocence of unmitigated foolishness!He was able to give to the Simple Simons of this life thatRabelaisian touch of magnanimous understanding which makeseven the leanest wits among us glow. He went through the worldwith strange timidities and no daring stride. He loitered in itsby-alleys. He drifted through its Bazaars. He sat with the crowd in itsCircuses. He lingered outside its churches. He ate his "pot of honey"among its graves. And as he went his way, irritable and freakish, wayward and arbitrary, he came, by chance, upon just thoseside-lights and intimations, those rumours and whispers, those figurestraced on sand and dust and water, which, more than all the Law andthe Prophets, draw near to the unuttered word. 

DICKENS

It is absurd, of course, to think that it is necessary to "hold a brief"for Dickens. But sometimes, when one comes across charming andexquisite people who "cannot read him, " one is tempted to giveone's personal appreciation that kind of form. 

Dickens is one of the great artists of the world, and he is so, in spiteof the fact that in certain spheres, in the sphere of Sex, for instance, or the sphere of Philosophy, he is such a hopeless conventionalist. Itis because we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desireto readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that agreat artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with amixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worstfoolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal is seriouslyhandicapped. 

Yet, given this "lacuna, " this amazing "gap" in his work, adeprivation much more serious than his want of "philosophy, "Dickens is a writer of colossal genius, whose originality and visionputs all our modern "literateurs" to shame. One feels this directlyone opens any volume of his. Only a great creative genius could sodominate, for instance, his mere "illustrators, " as to mesmerize themcompletely into his manner. And certainly his illustrators are_drugged_ with the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovelypersons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible tosuppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leerand ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style of theirauthor?

Remembering my "brief" and the sort of jury, among my friends, Ihave to persuade, I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out intopanegyrics upon Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniffand Betsy Trotwood and Bill Sikes and Dick Swiveller and BobSawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge. Themere mention of these names, which, to some, would suggest themusic of the spheres, to others would suggest forced merriment, horrible Early Victorian sentiment, and that sort of hackneyed"unction" of sly moral elders, which is youth's especial Hell. Muchwiser were it, as it seems to me, to indicate what in Dickens--in hisstyle, his method, his vision, his art--actually appeals to oneparticular mind. I think it is to be found in his childlike Imagination. Now, the modern cult for children has reached such fantastic limitsthat one has to be very careful when one uses that word. ButDickens is childlike, not as Oscar Wilde--that Uranian Baby--or asPaul Verlaine--that little "pet lamb" of God--felt themselves to bechildlike, or as the artificial-minded Robert Louis Stevenson fooledhis followers into thinking him. He is really and truly childlike. Hisimagination and vision are literally the imagination and vision ofchildren. We have not all played at Pirates and Buccaneers. We havenot all dreamed of Treasure-Islands and Marooned sailors. We havenot all "believed in Fairies. " These rather tiresome and over-rung-uponaspects of children's fancies are, after all, very often nothingmore than middle-aged people's damned affectations. The children'scult at the present day plays strange tricks. 

But Dickens, from beginning to end, has the real touch, the authenticreaction. How should actual and living children, persecuted by"New Educational Methods, " glutted with toys, depraved by"understanding sympathy, " and worn out by performances of "PeterPan, " believe--really and truly--in fairies any more? But, in spite ofsentimental Child-worshippers, let us not hesitate to whisper: "Itdoesn't matter in the least if they don't!" The "enlightened" andcultivated mothers, who grow unhappy when they find their darlingscold to Titania and Oberon and to the more "poetic" modern fairies, with the funny names, may rest in peace. If the house they inhabitand the street they inhabit be not sanitarized and art-decoratedbeyond all human interest, they may let their little ones alone. Theywill dream their dreams. They will invent their games. They willtalk to their shadows. They will blow kisses to the Moon. And allwill go well with "the Child in the House, " even if he has not somuch as even heard of "the Blue Bird"!

If these uncomfortably "childlike" people read Dickens, they wouldknow how a child really does regard life, and perhaps they would bea little shocked. For it is by no means only the "romantic" and"aesthetic" side of things that appeals to children. They have theirnightmares, poor imps, and such devils follow them as older peoplenever dream of. Dickens knew all that, and in his books the thrill ofthe supernatural, as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots andpans, is never far away. It lurks, that repelling-alluring Terror, in athousand simple places. It moves in the darkness of very moderncupboards. It hides in the recesses of very modern cellars. It pouncesout from the eaves of quite modern attics. It is there, halfway up theStaircase. It is there, halfway down the Passage. And God knowswhither it comes or where it goes!

To endow the little every-day objects that surround us--a certainpicture in a certain light, a certain clock or stove in a certain shadow, a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it--with thefetish-magic of natural "animism"; that is the real childlike trick, andthat is what Dickens does. It is, of course, something not confined topeople who are children in years. It is the old, sweet Witch-Hag, Mystery, that, sooner or later, has us all by the throat!

And that is why, to me, Dickens is so great a writer. Since men havecome to live so much in cities; since houses and streets and roomsand passages and windows and basements have come to mean moreto them than fields and woods, it is essential that "the Old Mancovered with a Mantle, " the Ancient of Ancients, the Disturber ofRational Dreams, should move into the town, too, and mutter andmurmur in its shadows!

How hard a thing is it, to put into words the strange attraction andthe strange terror which the dwellings of mortal men have the powerof exciting! To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wanderthrough its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, emptychurches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by itsPrison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in sometall house--the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer--surelythere is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the thingsone sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors andshutter-chinks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of menupon earth are past finding out, and their madness beyondinterpretation!

It is not only children--and yet it is children most of all--who get thesense, in a weird, sudden flash, of the demonic life of inanimatethings. Why are our houses so full of things that one had better notlook at, things that, like the face of Salome, had better be seen inmirrors, and things that must be forbidden to look at us? The housesof mortal men are strange places. They are sepulchres andcemeteries. Dungeons are they, and prison cells. Not one of thembut have murderous feet going up and down. Not one of them buthave lavisher's hands, fumbling, back and forth, along the walls. Forthe secret wishes, and starved desires, and mad cravings, and furiousrevolts, of the hearts of men and women, living together decently intheir "homes, " grow by degrees palpable and real and gather tothemselves strange shapes. 

No writer who has ever lived can touch Dickens in indicating thissort of familiar sorcery and the secret of its terror. For it is children, more than any, who are conscious how "haunted" all manner ofplaces and things are. And people themselves! The searchingpsychologists are led singularly astray. They peer and pry and repine, and all the while the real essence of the figure lies in its momentaryexpression--in its most superficial gesture. 

Dickens' world is a world of gnomes and hob-goblins, of ghouls andof laughing angels. The realist of the Thackeray School findsnothing but monstrous exaggeration here--and fantastic mummery. If he were right, par-dieu! If his sleek "reality" were all that therewas--"alarum!" We were indeed "betrayed"! But no; the children areright. Dickens is right. Neither "realist" or "psychologist" hits themark, when it comes to the true diablerie of living people. There issomething more whimsical, more capricious, more _unreal, _ thanphilosophers suppose about this human pantomime. People areactually--as every child knows--much worse and much better thanthey "ought" to be. And, as every child knows, too, they tune theirsouls up to the pitch of their "masks. " The surface of things is theheart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head, the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of themad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. People _think_ with theirbodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments arewords, tones, whispers, in their general Confession. 

The world of Dickens' fantastic creations is all the nearer to the truthof our life because it is so arbitrary and "impossible. " He seems togo backwards and forwards with a torch, throwing knobs, jags, wrinkles, corrugations, protuberancies, cavities, horns, and snoutsinto terrifying illumination. But we are like that! That is what weactually are. That is how the Pillar of Fire sees us. Then, again, arewe to limit our interest, as these modern writers do, to the beautifulpeople or the interesting people or the gross, emphaticpeople. Dickens is never more childlike than when he draws us, wonderingly and confidingly, to the stark knees of a Mrs. Pipchin, or when he drives us away, in unaccountable panic-terror, from therattling jet-beads of a Miss Murdstone. 

Think of the vast, queer, dim-lighted world wherein live and moveall those funny, dusty, attenuated, heart-breaking figures, of such aswear the form of women--and yet may never know "love"! It iswonderful--when you think of it--how much of absorbing interest isleft in life, when you have eliminated "sex, " suppressed"psychology, " and left philosophy out! Then appear all those queerattractions and repulsions which are purely superficial, and evenmaterial, and yet which are so dominant. Mother of God! Howunnecessary to bring in Fairies and Blue Birds, when the solemnityof some little seamstress and her sorceress hands, and the quaintknotting of her poor wisp of hair, would be enough to keep a childstaring and dreaming for hours upon hours!

Life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest. One neverknows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hamadryad one mayencounter. And the little ways of all one's scrabbling and burrowingand chuckling and nodding and winking house-mates! To gothrough the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner orlater. But one need only cross one's threshold to find one adventure--theadventure of a new, unknown fellow-creature, full of suspicion, full of cloudy malice, full of secretive dreams, and yet ready torespond--poor devil--to a certain kind of signal!

Long reading of Dickens' books, like long living with children, givesone a wholesome dread of cynicism and flippancy. Children's gamesare more serious than young men's love-affairs, and they must betreated so. It is not exactly that life is to be "taken seriously. " It isto be taken for what it is--an extraordinary Pantomime. The peoplewho will not laugh with Pierrot because his jokes are so silly, andthe people who will not cry with Columbine because her legs are sothin, may be shrewd psychologists and fastidious artists--but, Godhelp them! they are not in the game. 

The romance of city-life is one thing. The romance of a particularcity leads us further. Dickens has managed to get the inner identityof London; what is permanent in it; what can be found nowhere else;as not even Balzac got hold of Paris. London is terrible and ghastly. One knows that; but the wretchedest of its "gamins" knows that it issomething else also. More than any place on earth it seems to havethat weight, that mass, that depth, that foursquare solidity, whichreassures and comforts, in the midst of the illusions of life. Itdescends so far, with its huge human foundations, that it gives onethe impression of a monstrous concrete Base, sunk into eternity, upon which, for all its accumulated litter and debris, man will beable to build, perhaps has begun already, to build, his Urbs Beata. And Dickens entered with dramatic clairvoyance into every secret ofthis Titanic mystery. He knew its wharfs, its bridges, its viaducts, itsalleys, its dens, its parks, its squares, its churches, its morgues, itscircuses, its prisons, its hospitals, and its mad-houses. And as thehuman atoms of that fantastic, gesticulating, weeping, grinningcrowd of his dance their crazy "Carmagnole, " we cannot but feelthat somehow we _must_ gather strength and friendliness enough toapplaud such a tremendous Performance. 

Dickens was too great a genius to confine his demonic touch to thetown alone. There are _suggestions_ of his, relating to country roadsand country Inns and country solitudes, like nothing else, except, perhaps, the Vignettes of Bewick. He carries the same "animism"into this also. And he notes and records sensations of the mostevasive kind. The peculiar terror we feel, for instance, mixed with asort of mad pity, when by chance we light upon some twistedroot-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. Thevague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of alonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, ortumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that insome weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy, are feelings that Dickens alone among writers seems to understand. A road with no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there;with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; a pool by the edge of a widemarsh-land--like the marsh-land in "Great Expectations"--with Iknow not what reflected in it, and waiting, always waiting, forsomething that does not come; a low, bent, knotted pine-tree, overwhich the ravens fly, one by one, shrieking; these are the things thatto some people--to children, for instance--remain in the mind whenall else of their country journey is forgotten. 

There is no one but Dickens who has a style that can drag thesethings into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging atthe roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. Atother times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like anold man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunderslike ten thousand drunken devils. At other times it breaks intowistful, tender, little-girl sobs--and catches the rhythm of poetry--asin the death of Nell. Sometimes a character in Dickens will saysomething so humorously pregnant, so directly from what we hear instreet and tavern, that art itself "gives up, " and applauds, speechless. 

After all, it is meet and right that there should be one great author, undistracted by psychology--unseduced by eroticism. There remaina few quite important things to deal with, when these are removed!Birth, for instance--the mystery of birth--and the mystery of death. One never forgets death in reading Dickens. He has a thought, a pity, for those things that once were men and women, lying, with their sixfeet of earth upon them, in our English Churchyards, so horribly still, while the mask of their sorrow yields to the yet more terrible grin ofour mortality's last jest. 

And to the last he is--like all children--the lover of Players. Everypoor dog of Public Entertainer, from the Barrel-Organ man to himwho pulls the ropes for Punch and Judy, has his unqualifieddevotion. The modern Stage may see strange revolutions, some ofthem by no means suitable to children--but we need not be alarmed. There will always remain the larger Stage, the stage of man's ownExits and Entrances; and there, at any rate, while Dickens is their"Manager, " Pierrot may weep and dance, and Pierrette dance andweep, knowing that they will not be long without their audience, orlong without their applause!

He was a vulgar writer. Why not? England would not be England--andwhat would London be?--if we didn't have a touch, a smack, asprinkling of that ingredient!

He was a shameless sentimentalist. Why not? It is better to cry thanto comb one's hair all day with an ivory comb. 

He was a monstrous melodramatist. Why not? To be born is amelodrama. To play "hide-and-seek" with Death is a melodrama. And some have found melodramatic satisfaction in lettingthemselves be caught. All the World's a Puppet-Show, and if the BigShowman jerks his wires so extravagantly, why should not the LittleShowman do the same?

GOETHE

As the enigmatic wisdom of Goethe been exhausted--after theseyears--and after the sudden transits across our sky of more flashingmeteors? Ah! I deem not yet. Still he holds the entrance to themysterious Gate, over the portals of which is written, not "Lasciateogni speranza!" but "Think of Living!" A thunder-rifted heart hebears, but victory, not defeat, looks forth from his wide, outward-gazingeyes! One hand holds the skull, engraved with all the secretsymbols of man's ascent out of the bosom of Nature; engraved, yes!--by all the cunningest tools of Science and her unwearied research;but the other, raised aloft, noble and welcoming, carries the laurelcrown of the triumph of Imagination!

So, between Truth and Poetry--"im ganzen guten, schonen, "--standsour Lord of Life!

Exhausted, the wisdom of Goethe? Ah, no!--hardly fathomed yet, inits uppermost levels! If it were really possible to put into words thewhole complex world of impressions and visions, of secrets andmethods, which that name suggests, one would be a wiser disciplethan Eckermann. Fragment by fragment, morsel by morsel, the greatFigure limns itself against the shadow of the years. 

Is it too presumptuous a task to seek to evoke--taking first oneimpression of him and then another, first one reaction and thenanother--what this mysterious Name has come to mean for us? Onehears the word "cosmic" whispered. It is whispered too often inthese days. But "cosmic, " with its Whitmanesque, modernconnotation, does not exactly fit Goethe. Goethe did not oftenabandon himself in Dionysian fury to the ultimate Elements. Whenhe did--in his earlier youth--before the hardening process of hisItalian Journey had sealed his protection from such romantic lapses--itwas not quite in the strained, desperate, modern manner. One feelscertain, thinking of what he was, at Frankfurt, at Leipsig, atStrassburg, at Weimar, that he always kept a clear, cool, Apollonianhead, mad and amorous though his escapades may seem!

I do not fancy that ever once did Goethe really "give himself away, "or lose the foursquare solidity of his balance in any wild staggeringto left or right. No; the Goethean temper, the Goethean attitude, cannot be described as "cosmic, " while that word implies a certaincomplete yielding to a vague earth-worship. There was nothingvague about Goethe's _intimacy, _ if I may put it so, with the Earth. He and It seemed destined to understand one another most_serenely, _ in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy!

The Goethean attitude to the Universe is too self-poised andself-centered to be adequately rendered by any word that suggestscomplete abandonment. It is too--what shall I say?--too sly and_demonic_--too much _inside_ the little secrets of the great Mother--tobe summed up in a word that suggests a sort of Titanic whirlwindof embraces. And yet, on the other hand, it is quite as easy toexaggerate the Olympian aspect of Goethe. When this is carried toofar, something in him, something extraordinarily characteristic, evaporates, like a thin stream of Parnassian smoke. 

How shall I express what this is? Perhaps it is the _German_ in him. For, in spite of all Nietzsche's Mediterraneanizing of this Superman, Goethe was profoundly and inveterately German. The Rhine-Maidensrocked him in his cradle and, though he might journey toRome or Troy or Carthage, it was to the Rhine-Maidens that hereturned. Yes, I do not think that those understand him best whokeep bowing to the ground and muttering "Olympian"!

Am I carrying this particular taper-light of discrimination too farwhen I say that there is, to the Celtic mind at least, somethinghumorously naive and childlike in Goethe, mixed in, queerly enough, with all his rich, mellow, and even worldly, wisdom? One overtakeshim, now and then, and catches him, as it were, off his guard, inlittle pathetic lapses into a curious simplicity--a simplicity grave-eyed, portentious and solemn--almost like that of some great Infant-Faun, trying very seriously to learn the difficult syllables of ourhuman "Categorical Imperative"! World-child, as he was, the magicof the universe pouring through him, one sometimes feels a strange, dim hope with regard to that dubious general Issue, when we findhim so confident about the presence of the mysterious Being heworshipped; and so transparently certain of his personal survivalafter Death!

There is no one, except Leonardo Da Vinci, in the whole history ofour Planet, who gives us quite that sense of a person possessed ofsome secret illumination not granted to the rest of the world. Thereis much reassurance in this. More than has been, perhaps, realized. For it is probable that "in his caves of ice, " Leonardo also felthimself indestructible by the Arch-Enemy. One thinks of thoseCabalistic words of old Glanville, "Man does not yield himself toDeath--save by the weakness of his mortal Will. "

Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock-strata;Goethe visiting Botanical Gardens and pondering on the Metamorphosisof Plants; Goethe climbing Strassburg Cathedral-Spire; Goethemeeting the Phantom of Himself as he returned from the armsof Frederika; Goethe "experiencing the sensation" of crossingthe "Firing-Line"; Goethe "announcing" to Eckermann thatthat worthy man had better avoid undertaking any "great" literarywork; Goethe sending Frau von Stein sausages from his breakfast-table;Goethe consoling himself in the Storm by observing his birth-starLucifer, and thinking of the Lake of Galilee, are pictures ofnoble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the Comedy ofLiving!

How vividly returns to me--your pardon, reader!--the first time Iread "The Sorrows of Werter" in that little "Three-penny" editionpublished by Messrs. Cassell! It was in a Barge, towed by threeHorses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in theCounty of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy aset of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in aramshackle tavern. But there was one of them--this is twenty-fiveyears ago, reader!--a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand--andteased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered--as thefriendly mists rose--under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern. Where is that girl now, I wonder? Is she alive? Will she ever blushwith anger at being thus gently lifted up, from beneath the kindSomersetshire mists, into an hour's publicity? Who can tell? We areall passing one another, in mist-darkened barges, swift or slow. Sheis a wraith, a shadow, a receding phantom; but I wave my hand toher over the years! I shall always associate her with Lotte; and Inever smell the peculiar smell of Tarpaulin without thinking of "theSorrows of Werter. "

"Werter" has certainly the very droop and bewilderment of youth'sfirst passion. It is good to plunge one's hands, when one has growncynical and old, into that innocent, if somewhat turbid, fountain. When we pass to "Wilhelm Meister, " we are in quite a differentworld. The earlier part of this book has the very stamp of theGoethean "truth and poetry. " One can read it side by side with thegreat "Autobiography" and find the shrewd insight and oracularwisdom quite equally convincing in the invention and the reality. What an unmistakable and unique character all these imaginarypersons of Goethe's stories have! They are so different from anyother persons in fiction! Wherein does the difference lie? It is hardto say. In a sense, they are more life-like and real. In another sense, they are more fantastic. Sometimes they seem mere dolls--like thefigures in his own puppet-show--and we can literally "see thepuppets dallying. "

Jarno is a queer companion for a man to have. And what of the ladywho, when she was asked whether she had ever loved, answered, "never or always"? Phillina is a very loving and an extremelyvivacious wench. Goethe's sublime unconsciousness of ordinarymoral qualms is never better observed than in the story of thisextravagant young minx. Then, in the midst of it all, the arresting, ambiguous little figure of poor Mignon! What does she do--a childof pure lyrical poetry--a thing out of the old ballads--in this queer, grave, indecent company? That elaborate description of Mignon'sfuneral so carefully arranged by the Aesthetic "Uncle, " has it not allthe curious qualities of the Goethean vein--its clairvoyant insightinto the under-truth of Nature--its cold-blooded pre-occupation with"Art"--its gentle irony--its mania for exact detail? The "gentle irony"of which I speak has its opportunity in the account of the "BeautifulSoul" or "Fair Saint. " It reads, in places, like the tender dissection ofa lovely corpse by a genial, elderly Doctor. 

But the passage which, for me, is most precious is that Apprentice's"Indenture. " I suppose in no other single paragraph of human proseis there so much concentrated wisdom. "To act is easy--to think ishard!" How extraordinarily true that is! But it is not the precise tuneof the strenuous preachers of our time! The whole idea of the"Pedagogic Province, " ruled over by that admirable Abbé, is soexquisitely in Goethe's most wise and yet most simple manner! Thepassage about the "Three Reverences" and the "Creed" is as good aninstance of that sublime Spinozistic way of dealing with the currentreligion as that amazing remark he made once to Eckerman abouthis own faith: "When I want scientific unity, I am a Pantheist. WhenI desire poetical multifariousness, I am a Polytheist. And when mymoral nature requires a Personal God--_there is room for Thatalso?"_

When one comes to speak of Faust, it is necessary for us toremember the words the great man himself used to his followerin speaking of this masterpiece. Eckermann teased him forinterpretations. "What, " said he to Goethe, "is the leading Idea in thePoem?" "Do you suppose, " answered the Sage, "that a thing intowhich I have put the Life-Blood of all my days is able to besummoned up in anything so narrow and limited as an Idea?"

Personally, I do not hesitate to say that I think Faust is the mostpermanently _interesting_ of all the works that have proceeded fromthe human brain. 

Its attitude to life is one which ultimately has more to strengthen andsustain and put courage--if not the Devil--into us than anything Iknow. When I meet a man who shall tell me that the Philosophy ofhis life is the Philosophy of Faust, I bow down humbly before him. Idid meet such a man once. I think he was a Commercial Travellerfrom Buffalo. 

How wisely Goethe deals in Faust with the problem--if it be aproblem--of Evil! His suggestion seems to be that the spirit of Evilin the world--"part of that Nothing out of which came the All"--playsan absolutely essential role. "By means of it God fulfils hismost cherished purposes. " Had Faust not seduced poor littleGretchen, he would never have passed as far as he did along theroad of Initiation, and the spirit of his Victim--in her translunarApotheosis--would not have been _there_ to lift him Heavenwardsat the last. And yet no one could say that Goethe disparages theenormity of Faust's crime. That ineffable retort of Mephistopheles, when, on those "black horses, " they are whirled through the night toher dungeon, "She is not the first, " has the essence of all pity andwrath in its cruel sting. Mephistopheles himself is the mostinteresting of all Devils. And he is so because, although he knowsperfectly well--queer Son of Chaos as he is--that he is bound to bedefeated, he yet goes on upon his evil way, and continues to resistthe great stream of Life which, according to his view, had betternever have broken loose from primeval Nothingness. 

That is ultimately Goethe's contribution to the disputes about whatwe call "God. " The name does not matter. "Feeling is all in all. Thename is sound and smoke. " "God, " or "the Good, " is to Goethesimply the eternal stream of life, working slowly upwards, onwards, to unknown goals. All that opposes itself to this Life-stream is evil. Morality, a man-made local convention, is our present blunderingmethod of assisting this great Force, and preventing its sterility, ordissipation. In his conception of the nature of this Life-streamGoethe is more Catholic and more subtle than Nietzsche. 

_Self-realization?_ Certainly! That is an aspect of it which was notlikely to be forgotten by the great Egoist whose sole object, as heconfessed, was to "build up the Pyramid of his Existence" from thebroadest possible base. But not only self-realization. The "dying tolive" of the Christian, as well as "the rising above one's body" of thePlatonist, have their part there. Ascetism itself, with all its degreesof passionate or philosophical purity, is as much an evocation of theworld-spirit--of the essential nature of the System of Things--as isthe other. 

It is, of course, ultimately, quite a mad hope to desire to _convert_"the Spirit that Denies. " He, too, under the Lord, is an accomplice ofthe Life-stream. He helps it forward, even while he opposes himselfto it, just as a bulwark of submerged rocks make the tide leaplandward with more foaming fury!

Goethe's idea of the "Eternal Feminine" leading us "upward and on"is not at all the sentimental nonsense which Nietzsche fancied it. In aprofound sense it is absolutely true. Nor need the more anti-feministamong us be troubled by such a Truth. We have just seen that theDevil himself is a means, and a very essential means, for leading us"upward and on. "

Goethe is perfectly right. The "love of women, " though a destructiveforce, and a frightful force as far as certain kinds of "art" and"philosophy" are concerned, cannot be looked upon as anything but"a provocation to creation, " when the whole large scheme ofexistence is taken into account. 

I think myself that it is easy to make too much of Goethe'sPantheism. The Being he worshipped was simply "WhateverMystery" lies behind the ocean of Life. And if no "mystery" liesbehind the ocean of life, --very well! A Goethean disciple is able, then, to worship Life, with no mystery behind it! It is rather thecustom among clever, tiresome people to disparage that _secondpart of Faust, _ with its world-panoramic procession of all the godsand demi-gods and angels and demons that have ever visited thisearth. I do not disparage it. I have never found it dull. Dull would hebe, as "the fat weed that rots itself in case on Lethe's wharf, " whofound nothing curious and provocative about these Sirens andCentaurs and Lemures and Larvae and Cabiri and Phorkyads! I canmyself endure very pleasantly even the society of those "BlessedBoys" which some have found so distressing. As for the Devil, inthe end, making "indecent overtures" to the little HeavenlyButterflies, who pelt him with roses--even that does not confuse mymind or distract my senses. It is the "other side of the Moon"--theunder-mask of the world-comedy, and the incidental "saving" of Dr. Faust is not more essential in the great mad game!

Read Faust, both portions of it, dear reader, and see if you do notfeel, with me, that, in the last resort, one leaves this rich, strangepoem with a nobler courage to endure life, and a larger view of itsamazing possibilities!

I wonder if that curious novel of Goethe's called the "ElectiveAffinities" is perused as widely as it deserves? That extraordinarycompany of people! And the patient, portentious interest Goethecompels us to take in the laying out of gardens and the beautifyingof church-yards! "The Captain, " "the Architect"--not to speak of thetwo bewildering women--do they not suggest fantastic figures out ofone's memories of remotest childhood? I suppose to a world-childlike Goethe, watching, with grave super-human interest, all our littlepre-occupations, we have all of us something of the sweet pedantryof these people--we are all of us "Captains" and "Architects" withsome odd twist in our quiet heads. 

The solemn immorality, amounting to outrageous indecency, ofthose scenes between the assorted lovers when they make "double"love, and behind the mask of their legitimate attachments followtheir "elective affinities, " is a thing that may well stagger the puritanreader. The puritan reader will, indeed, like old Carlyle, be temptedmore than once to fling these grave, unblushing chronicles, withtheir deep, oracular wisdom and their shameless details, into thedust-heap. But it were wiser to refrain. After all, one cannot concealfrom one's self that things are _like that_--and if the hyaena's howl, from the filthy marshes of earth's weird edge and the thick saliva onhis oozing jaws, nauseates our preciosity, and besmirches ourself-esteem, we must remember that this is the way the Lord of "thePrologue in Heaven" has willed that the scavengers of life'scesspools go about their work!

Probably it will not be the "indecency" of certain things in Goethethat will most offend our modern taste; it will be that curious, gravepre-occupation of his, so objective and stiff, with artistic details, andarchitectural details, and theatrical details!

One must remember his noble saying, "Earnestness alone makes lifeEternity" and that other "saying" about Art having, as its mainpurpose, the turning of the "Transitory" into the "Permanent"! If theTransitory is really to be turned into the Permanent, we must takeourselves and our work very seriously indeed!

And such "seriousness, " such high, patient, unwearied seriousness, is, after all, Goethe's bequest to our flippant and fanciful generation. He knows well enough our deepest doubt, our most harrowingscepticism. He has long ago "been through all that. " But he has"returned"--not exactly like Nietzsche, with a fierce, scornful, dramatic cry, to a contemptuous "superficiality"--he has returned tothe actual possibilities that the world offers, "superficial" andotherwise, of turning the whole strange business into a solid, four-square "work of art. " We must reject "evil, " quietly and ironically;not because it is condemned by human morality, but because "wehave our work to do"! We must live in "the good" and "the true, " notbecause it is our "duty" so to do, but because only along thisparticular line does the "energy without agitation" of the "abysmalmothers" communicate itself to our labour. 

And so we come back, like the grief-stricken children over Mignon'sgrave, to Life and Life's toil. There only, in the inflexibledevelopment of what taste, of what discernment, of what power, ofwhat method, of what demonic genius, we may have been grantedby the gods, lies "the cosmic secret. " That is all we have in ourhuman hands, that malleable stuff out of which Fate made us--andonly in the shrewd, unwearied use of that shall we prove our love tothe Being "who cannot love us in return" and make our illusion ofFree-Will part of his universal Purpose!

MATTHEW ARNOLD

It is easy to miss the especial grandeur of Matthew Arnold's work. The airy persiflage of his prose--its reiterated lucidities--pleasing tosome, irritating to others, will have a place, but not a very importantplace, in English Literature. Even those magical and penetrating"aphorisms" with which he has held the door open to so manyreligious and moral vistas tease us a little now, and--suggestiveenough in their hour--do not deepen and deepen upon the intellectwith the weight of "aphorisms" from Epictetus or Goethe. 

The "stream of tendency that makes for righteousness" runs a littleshallow, and it has so many pebbles under its clear wave! That wordof his, "the Secret of Jesus, " wears best of all. It was a happythought to use the word "secret"--a thought upon which those whosereligious creed binds them to "the method" rather than "the secret, "may well ponder!

As a critic, too, though illuminating and reassuring, he is far fromclairvoyant. A quaint vein of pure, good-tempered, ethical_Philistinism_ prevents his really entering the evasive souls ofShelley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he ismore at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in theirsimple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of criticalmetempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, wholoves his friend. " In fact, when one compares him, as a sheerilluminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizesat once how easily a quite great man may "render himself stupid" bysprinkling himself with the holy water of Fixed Principles!

No, it is neither of Arnold, the Theological Free-Lance, or of Arnold, the Critic of Literature, that I want to speak, but of Arnold, the Poet. 

Personally I hold the opinion that he was a greater poet than eitherTennyson or Browning. His philosophy is a far nobler, truer, andmore permanent thing than theirs, and there are passages and singlelines in his poetry which over-top, by enormous distances, anythingthat they achieved. 

You ask me what the Philosophy of Matthew Arnold was? It is easyto answer that. It was the philosophy of all the very greatest amongmortal men! In his poetry he passes completely out of the region ofTheological argument, and his attitude to life is the attitudeof Sophocles and Virgil and Montaigne and Cervantes andShakespeare and Goethe. Those who read Matthew Arnold, and lovehim, know that his intellectual tone is the tone of those greatclassical writers, and his conclusions their conclusions. 

He never mocks our pain with foolish, unfounded hopes and henever permits mad despair to paralyse him. He takes life as it is, and, as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here"as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle andflight, where ignorant armies clash by night, " we can at least be"true to one another. "

One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energeticteachers of youth that there is only one intellectual attitude towardslife, only one philosophy, only one ultimate mood. This is that moodof "resignation, " which, from Homer to Matthew Arnold, is aloneadapted, in the long run, to the taste of our days upon earth. 

The real elements of our situation have not altered in the remotestdegree since Achilles dragged Hector round the walls of Troy. 

Men and women still love and hate; still "enjoy the sun" and "livelight in the Spring"; still "advance true friends and beat backdangerous foes"--and upon them the same Constellations look down;and upon them the same winds blow; and upon them the sameSphinx glides through the obscurity, with the same insolubleQuestion. 

Nothing has really changed. The "river of time" may pass throughvarious landscapes, but it is the same river, and, at the last, it bringsto us, as "the banks fade dimmer away" and "the stars come out""murmurs and scents" of the same infinite Sea. Yes, there is onlyone Philosophy, as Disraeli said, jesting; and Matthew Arnold, among the moderns, is the one who has been allowed to put it intohis poetry. For though, before the "Flamantia Moenia" of the world'striple brass, we are fain to bow our heads inconsolably, there comethose moments when, a hand laid in ours, we think we know "thehills whence our life flows"!

The flowing of the river of life--the washing of the waves oflife--how well one recalls, from Arnold's broken and not always musicalstanzas, references to that sound--to the sound so like the sound ofthose real sea-tides that "Sophocles, long ago, heard in theAegaean, " and listened, thinking of many things, as we listen andthink of many things today!

 "For we are all like swimmers in the Sea, Poised on the top of a huge wave of Fate, And whether it will lift us to the land Or whether it will bear us out to Sea, Back out to Sea, to the dark gulfs of Death, We know not-- Only the event will teach us, in its hour. "

I sometimes think that a certain wonderful blending of realism andmagic in Matthew Arnold's poetry has received but scant justice. 

In "The Forsaken Merman" for instance, there are many stanzas thatmake you smell the salt-foam and imagine all that lies, hidden andstrange, down there upon the glittering sand. That line, "Where great whales go sailing by Round the world for ever and aye, "

has a liberating power that may often recur, when one is, God knows, far enough from the spouting of any whale! And the whole poemhas a wistful, haunting beauty that never grows tedious. 

Matthew Arnold is a true classical poet. It is strictly in accordancewith the authentic tradition to introduce those touches of light, quaint, playful, airy realism into the most solemn poetry. It is whatVirgil, Catullus, Theocritus, Milton, Landor, all did. Some personsgrow angry with him for a certain tone of half-gay, half-sad, allusivetenderness, when he speaks of Oxford and the country round Oxford. I do not think there is anything unpleasing in this. So did Catullustalk of Sirmio; Horace of his Farm; Milton of "Deva's wizard-stream";Landor of Sorrento and Amalfi. 

It is all of a piece with the "resignation" of a philosophy which doesnot expect that this or that change of dwelling will ease our pain; ofa philosophy that naturally loves to linger over familiar well-sidesand roadways and meadow-paths and hillsides, over the placeswhere we went together, when we "still had Thyrsis. "

The direct Nature-poetry of Matthew Arnold, touching us with thetrue classic touch, and yet with something, I know not what, of morewistful tenderness added, is a great refreshment after the pseudo-magic, so vague and unsatisfying, of so much modern verse. 

 "It matters not. Light-comer he has flown! But we shall have him in the sweet spring days, With whitening hedges and uncrumpling fern, And blue-bells trembling by the forest ways, And scent of hay new-mown--"

Or that description of the later season:

 "Too quick despairer! Wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon shall we have gold-dusted Snapdragon, Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, And Stocks, in fragrant blow. Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And open Jasmin-muffled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, And the pale Moon and the white Evening-Star. "

True to the "only philosophy, " Matthew Arnold is content toindicate how for each one of us the real drama of life goes on with acertain quite natural, quite homely, quite quiet background of thestrip of earth where we first loved and dreamed, and were happy, and were sad, and knew loss and regret, and the limits of man'spower to change his fate. 

There is a large and noble calm about the poetry of this writer whichhas the effect upon one of the falling of cool water into a dark, fern-fringed cave. He strips away lightly, delicately, gently, all thetrappings of our feverish worldliness, our vanity and ambition, andlifts open, at one touch, the great moon-bathed windows that lookout upon the line of white foam--and the patient sands. 

And never is this calm deeper than when he refers to Death. "Forthere" he says, speaking of that Cemetery at Firenze where hisThyrsis lies;

 "For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep The morningless and unawakening sleep, Under the flowery Oleanders pale--"

Sometimes, as in his "Tristram and Iseult, " he is permitted littletouches of a startling and penetrating beauty; such as, returning toone's memory and lips, in very dusty and arid places, bring all thetears of half-forgotten romance back again to us and restore to us thedespair that is dearer than hope!

Those lines, for instance, when Tristram, dying in his fire-lit, tapestried room, tended by the pale Iseult of Brittany, knows that hisdeath-longing is fulfilled, and that she, his "other" Iseult, has cometo him at last--have they not the very echo in them of what suchweariness feels when, only not too late, the impossible happens?Little he cares for the rain beating on the roof, or the moan of thewind in the chimney, or the shadows on that tapestried wall! Helistens--his heart almost stops. 

 "What voices are those in the still night air? What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"

One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves, that strangefragmentary unrhymed poem, called "the Strayed Reveller, " with itsvision of Circe and the sleeping boy-faun, and the wave-tossedWanderer, and its background of "fitful earth-murmurs" and"dreaming woods"--Strangely down, upon the weary child, smilesthe great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin, andthe berries in his hair. The thing is slight enough; but in its coolness, and calmness, and sad delicate beauty, it makes one pause and growsilent, as in the long hushed galleries of the Vatican one pauses andgrows silent before some little known, scarcely-catalogued GreekVase. The spirit of life and youth is there--immortal and tender--yetthere too is the shadow of that pitiful "in vain, " with which thebrevity of such beauty, arrested only in chilly marble, mocks us aswe pass!

It is life--but life at a distance--Life refined, winnowed, sifted, purged. "Yet, O Prince, what labour! O Prince, what pain!" Theworld is perhaps tired of hearing from the mouths of its great lonelyexiles the warning to youth "to sink unto its own soul, " and let themad throngs clamour by, with their beckoning idols, and treacherouspleading. But never has this unregarded hand been laid so gentlyupon us as in the poem called "Self-Dependence. "

Heaven forgive us--we cannot follow its high teaching--and yet wetoo, we all, have felt that sort of thing, when standing at the prow ofa great ship we have watched the reflection of the stars in thefast-divided water. 

 "Unaffrightened by the silence round them Undistracted by the sights they see These demand not that the world about them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy. But with joy the stars perform their shining And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll; For self-poised they live; nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul. "

The "one philosophy" is, as Matthew Arnold himself puts it, "utrumque paratus, " prepared for either event. Yet it leans, and howshould it not lean, in a world like this, to the sadder and the morefinal. That vision of a godless universe, "rocking its obscure body toand fro, " in ghastly space, is a vision that refuses to pass away. "Tothe children of chance, " as my Catholic philosopher says, "chancewould seem intelligible. "

But even if it be--if the whole confluent ocean of its experiencesbe--unintelligible and without meaning; it remains that mortal menmust endure it, and comfort themselves with their "little pleasures. "The immoral cruelty of Fate has been well expressed by MatthewArnold in that poem called "Mycerinus, " where the virtuous king_does not_ receive his reward. He, for his part will revel and carenot. There may be nobler, there may be happier, ways of awaitingthe end--but whether "revelling" or "refraining, " we are all waitingthe end. Waiting and listening, half-bitterly, half-eagerly, seems thelot of man upon earth! And meanwhile that

 --"Power, too great and strong Even for the gods to conquer or beguile, Sweeps earth and heaven and men and gods along Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile And the great powers we serve, themselves must be Slaves of a tyrannous Necessity--"

Matthew Arnold had--and it is a rare gift--in spite of his peacefuldomestic life and in spite of that "interlude" of the "Marguerite"poems--a noble and a chaste soul. "Give me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me!" prayed the Psalmist. Well! thisfriend of Thyrsis had "a clean heart" and "a right spirit"; and thesethings, in this turbulent age, have their appeal! It was the purging ofthis "hyssop" that made it possible for him even in the "Marguerite"poems, to write as only those can write whose passion is more thanthe craving of the flesh. 

 "Come to me in my dreams and then In sleep I shall be well again-- For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day!"

It was the same chastity of the senses that made it possible for himto write those verses upon a young girl's death, which are so muchmore beautiful--though _those_ are lovely too--than the ones OscarWilde wrote on the same subject. 

 "Strew on her, roses, roses, But never a spray of yew; For in silence she reposes-- Ah! would that I did too! Her cabined ample spirit It fluttered and failed for breath. Tonight it doth inherit The vasty halls of death. "

Matthew Arnold is one of the poets who have what might be called"the power of Liberation. " He liberates us from the hot fevers of ourlusts. He liberates us from our worldliness, our perversions, our madpreoccupations. He reduces things to their simple elements andgives us back air and water and land and sea. And he does thiswithout demanding from us any unusual strain. We have no need toplunge into Dionysian ecstacies, or cry aloud after "cosmicemotion. "

We have no need to relinquish our common sense; or to dress or eator talk or dream, in any strange manner. It is enough if we rememberthe fields where we were born. It is enough if we do not altogetherforget out of what quarter of the sky Orion rises; and where thelord-star Jupiter has his place. It is enough if we are not quiteoblivious of the return of the Spring and the sprouting of thefirst leaves. 

From the poetry of Matthew Arnold it is possible to derive an art oflife which carries us back to the beginnings of the world's history. He, the civilized Oxonian; he, domestic moralist; he, the airilyplayful scholar, has yet the power of giving that _Epic solemnity_ toour sleep and our waking; to our "going forth to our work arid ourlabour until the evening"; to the passing of the seasons over us;which is the ground and substance of all poetic imagination, andwhich no change or progress, or discovery, can invade or spoil. 

For it is the nature of poetry to heighten and to throw into reliefthose eternal things in our common destiny which too soon getoverlaid--And some things only poetry can reach--Religion mayhave small comfort for us when in the secret depths of our hearts weendure a craving of which we may not speak, a sickening achinglonging for "the lips so sweetly forsworn. " But poetry is waiting forus, there also, with her Rosemary and her Rue. Not one human heartbut has its hidden shrine before which the professional ministrantsare fain to hold their peace. But even there, under the veiled Figureitself, some poor poetic "Jongleur de Notre Dame" is permitted todrop his monk's robe, and dance the dance that makes time andspace nothing!

SHELLEY

One of the reasons why we find it hard to read the great poets is thatthey sadden us with their troubling beauty. Sadden us--and put us toshame! They compel us to remember the days of our youth; and thatis more than most of us are able to bear! What memories! Ye gods, what memories!

And this is true, above all, of Shelley. His verses, when we return tothem again, seem to have the very "perfume and suppliance" of theSpring; of the Spring of our frost-bitten age. Their sweetness has apoignancy and a pang; the sweetness of things too dear; of thingswhose beauty brings aching and a sense of bitter loss. It is thesudden uncovering of dead violets, with the memory of the soil theywere plucked from. It is the strain of music over wide waters--andover wider years. 

These verses always had something about them that went furtherthan their actual meaning. They were always a little like planetarymelodies, to which earthly words had been fitted. And now theycarry us, not only beyond words, but beyond thought, --"as dothEternity. " There is, indeed, a sadness such as one cannot bear long"and live" about Shelley's poetry. 

It troubles our peace. It passes over the sterility of our poor comfortlike a lost child's cry. It beats upon the door. It rattles the shutcasement. It sobs with the rain upon the roof. This is partly becauseShelley, more than any poet, has entered into the loneliness of theelements, and given up his heart to the wind, and his soul to theouter darkness. The other poets can _describe_ these things, but he_becomes_ what they are. Listening to him, we listen to them. Andwho can bear to listen to them? Who, in cold blood, can receive thesorrows of the "many waters"? Who can endure while the heavens, that are "themselves so old, " bend down with the burden of theirsecret?

Not to "describe, " but to share the life, or the death-in-life, of thething you write of, that is the true poetic way. The "arrowy odours"of those first white violets he makes us feel, darting forth fromamong the dead leaves, do they leave us content with the art of theirdescription? They provoke us with their fine essence. They troubleus with a fatality we have to share. The passing from its "caverns ofrain" of the newborn cloud--we do not only follow it, obedient to thespell of rhetoric; we are whirled forward with it, laughing at its"cenotaph" and our own, into unimagined aerial spaces. One feels allthis and more under Shelley's influence--but alas! as soon as one hasfelt it, the old cynical, realistic mood descends again, "heavy asfrost, " and the vision of ourselves, poor, straggling, forked animals, caught up into such regions, shows but as a pantomimic farce; andwe awake, shamed and clothed, and in our "right mind!"

With some poets, with Milton and Matthew Arnold, for example, there is always a kind of implicit sub-reference, accompanying theheroic gesture or the magical touch, to our poor normal humanity. With others, with Tennyson or Browning, for instance, one is oftenrather absurdly aware of the worthy Victorian Person, behind thepoetic mask, "singing" his ethical ditty--like a great, self-consciousspeckled thrush upon a prominent bough. 

But with Shelley everything is forgotten. It is the authentic fury, thedivine madness; and we pass out of ourselves, and "suffer asea-change into something rich and strange. " Into something "strange, "perhaps, rather than something "rich"; for the temperament ofShelley, like that of Corot, leads him to suppress the more glowingthreads of Nature's woof; leads him to dissolve everything in filmywhite light; in the light of an impossible dawn. Has it been noticedhow all material objects dissolve at his touch, and float away, asmists and vapours? He has, it seems, an almost insane predilectionfor _white_ things. White violets, white pansies, white wind-flowers, white ghosts, white daisies and white moons thrill us, as we read, with an almost unearthly awe. White Death, too; the shadow ofwhite Corruption, has her place there, and the appalling whiteness oflepers and corpses. The liturgy he chants is the liturgy of the WhiteMass, and the "white radiance" of Eternity is his Real Presence. 

Weird and fantastic though Shelley's dreams may appear, it is morethan likely that some of them will be realized before we expect it. His passionate advocacy of what now is called "Feminism, " hissublime revolutionary hopes for the proletariat, his denunciation ofwar, his arraignment of so-called "Law" and "Order, " his indictmentof conventional Morality, his onslaughts on outworn Institutions, hisinvectives against Hypocrisy and Stupidity, are not by any meansthe blind Utopian rhetoric that some have called them. That craftyslur upon brave new thought which we know so well--that"how-can-you-take-him-seriously" attitude of the "status-quo"rascals--must not mislead us with regard to Shelley's philosophy. 

He is a genuine philosopher, as well as a dreamer. Or shall we sayhe is the only kind of philosopher who _must_ be taken seriously--thephilosopher who creates the dreams of the young?

Shelley is, indeed, a most rare and invaluable thinker, as well as amost exquisite poet. His thought and his poetry can no more beseparated than could the thought and poetry of the Book of Job. Hispoetry is the embodiment of his thought, its swift and splendidincarnation. 

Strange though it may seem, there are not very many poets whohave the particular kind of _ice-cold intellect_ necessary if one is todetach one's self completely from the idols of the market-place. Indeed, the poetic temperament is only too apt, out of the verywarmth of its sensitive humanity, to idealize the old traditions andthrow a glamour around them. That is why, both in politics andreligion, there have been, ever since Aristophanes, so many greatreactionary poets. Their warmth of human sympathy, their "nihilalienum" attitude; nay! their very sense of humour, have made thisinevitable. There is so often, too, something chilly and "unhomely, "something pitiless and cruel, about quite rational reform, whichalienates the poetic mind. It must be remembered that the very thingthat makes so many objects poetical--I mean their _traditionalassociation_ with normal human life--is the thing that _has to bedestroyed_ if the new birth is to take place. The ice-cold austerity ofmind, indicated in the superb contempt of the Nietzschean phrase, "human, too human, " is a mood essential, if the world is to cast offits "weeds outworn. " Change and growth, when they are living andorganic, imply the element of destruction. It is easy enough to talksmoothly about natural "evolution. " What Nature herself does, as weare beginning to realize at last, is to advance by leaps and bounds. One of these mad leaps having produced the human brain, it is for usto follow her example and slough off another Past. Man is _thatwhich has to be left behind!_ We thus begin to see what I must beallowed to call the essential inhumanity of the true prophet. Thefalse prophet is known by nothing so easily as by his crying "peace"--hiscrying, "hands off! enough!"

It is tragic to think how little the world has changed since Shelley'stime, and how horribly relevant to the present hour are his outcriesagainst militarism, capitalism and privilege. If evidence werewanted of the profound moral value of Shelley's revolutionarythought, one has only to read the proclamations of any internationalschool of socialistic propaganda, and find how they are fighting nowwhat he fought then. His ideas have never been more necessary thanthey are today. Tolstoi has preached some of them, Bernard Shawothers, and Mr. Wells yet others. But none of our modern rebelshave managed to give to their new thought quite the comprehensivenessand daring which we find in him. 

And he has achieved this by the intensity of his devotion. Modernliterary anarchists are so inclined to fall into jocularity, and irony, and "human, too human" humour. Their Hamlet-like consciousnessof the "many mansions" of truth tends to paralyse the impetus oftheir challenge. They are so often, too, dramatists and novelistsrather than prophets, and their work, while it gains in sympathy andsubtlety, loses in directness. The immense encouragement given toreally drastic, original thought by Nietzsche's writings is an evidenceof the importance of what might be called _cruel positivity_ inhuman thinking. Shelley has, however, an advantage over Nietzschein his recognition of the transformative power of love. In this respect, iconoclast though he is, he is rather with the Buddha and the Christthan with the modern antinomians. 

His _mania_ for "love"--one can call it nothing else--frees hisrevolutionary thought from that arbitrary isolation, that savagesubjectivity, which one notes in many philosophical anarchists. HisPlatonic insistence, too, on the more spiritual aspects of loveseparates his anti-Christian "immorality" from the easy-going, pleasant hedonism of such a bold individualist as Remy deGourmont. 

Shelley's individualism is always a thing with open doors; a thingwith corridors into Eternity. It never conveys that sad, cynical, pessimistic sense of "eating and drinking" before we die, which oneis so familiar with just now. 

It is precisely this fact that those who reprobate Shelley's"immorality" should remember. With him "love" was truly amystical initiation, a religious sacrament, a means of getting intotouch with the cosmic secret, a path--and perhaps the only path--tothe Beatific Vision. 

It is not wise to turn away from Shelley because of his lack of"humour, " of his lack of a "sense of proportion. " The mystery of theworld, whatever it may be, shows itself sometimes quite asindifferent as Shelley to these little nuances. We hear it crying aloudin the night with no humorous cry; and it is too often to stop our earsto what we hear, that we jest so lightly! It is doubtful whetherNature cares greatly for our "sense of proportion. "

To return to his poetry, as poetry. The remarkable thing aboutShelley's verse is the manner in which his whole physical andpsychic temperament has passed into it. This is so in a measure withall poets, but it is so especially with him. His beautiful epicene face, his boyish figure, his unearthly sensitiveness, haunt us as we readhis lines. They allure and baffle us, as the smile on the lips of theMona Lisa. One has the impression of listening to a being who hasreally traversed the ways of the sea and returned with its secret. Howelse could those indescribable pearly shimmerings, those opal tintsand rosy shadows, be communicated to our poor language? The verypurity of his nature, that ethereal quality in it that strikes a chill intothe heart of "normal humanity, " lends a magic, like the reflection ofmoonlight upon ice, to these inter-lunar melodies. The same etherealtransparency of passion which excites, by reason of its sublime"immorality, " the gross fury of the cynical and the base, gives animmortal beauty, cold and distant and beyond "the shadow of ournight, " to his planetary melodies. It is, indeed, the old Pythagorean"music of the spheres" audible at last again. Such sounds has the_silence_ that descends upon us when we look up, above the roofsof the city, at Arcturus or Aldebaran! To return to Shelley from theturmoil of our gross excitements and cramped domesticities is tobathe our foreheads in the "dew of the morning" and cool our handsin the ultimate Sea. Whatever in us transcends the vicious circle ofpersonal desire; whatever in us belongs to that Life which lastswhile we and our individual cravings perish; whatever in usunderlies and overlooks this mad procession of "births andforgettings;" whatever in us "beacons from the abode where theEternal are" rises to meet this celestial harmony, and sloughs off the"muddy vesture" that would "grossly close it in. " What separatesShelley from all other poets is that with them "art" is the paramountconcern, and, after "art, " morality. 

With him one thinks little of art, little of the substance of anymaterial "teaching;" one is simply transported into the high, coldregions where the creative gods build, like children, domes of"many-coloured glass, " wherewith to "stain the white radiance ofeternity. " And after such a plunge into the antenatal reservoirs of life, we may, if we can, go on spitting venom and raking in the gutterwith the old too-human zest, and let the "ineffectual" madman passand be forgotten!

I said that the effect of his writing is to trouble and sadden us. It wasas a man I spoke. That in us which responds to Shelley's verse isprecisely what dreams of the transmutation of "man" into "beyond-man. "That which saddens humanity beyond words is the daily foodof the immortals. 

And yet, even in the circle of our natural moods, there is something, sometimes, that responds to such strains as "When the lamp isshattered" and "One word is too often profaned. " Perhaps only thosewho have known what it is to love as children love, and to lose hopewith the absoluteness wherewith children lose it, can entercompletely into this delicate despair. It is, indeed, the long, pitiful, sobbing cry of bewildered disenchantment that breaks the heart ofyouth when it first learns of what gross clay earth and men are made. 

And the artless simplicity of Shelley's technique--much more reallysimple than the conscious "childishness" exquisite though that is, ofa Blake or Verlaine--lends itself so wonderfully to the expression ofyouth's eternal sorrow. His best lyrics use words that fall into theirplaces with the "dying fall" of an actual fit of sobbing. And they areso naturally chosen, his images and metaphors! Even when theyseem most remote, they are such as frail young hearts cannot helphappening upon, as they soothe their "love-laden souls" in "secrethour. "

The infallible test of genuine poetry is that it forces us to recallemotions that we ourselves have had, with the very form andcircumstance of their passion. And who can read the verses ofShelley without recalling such? That peculiar poignancy of memory, like a sharp spear, which arrests us at the smell of certain plants ormosses, or nameless earth-mould, or "growths by the margins ofpond-waters;" that poignancy which brings back the indescribablebalm of Spring and the bitter-sweetness of irremediable loss; whocan communicate it like Shelley?

There are lovely touches of foreign scenery in his poems, particularly of the vineyards and olive gardens and clear-cut hilltowns of Italy; but for English readers it will always be the rosemary"that is for remembrance" and the pansies that "are for thoughts" thatgive their perfume to the feelings he excites. 

Other poets may be remembered at other times, but it is when thesun-warmed woods smell of the first primroses, and the daffodils, coming "before the swallow dares, " lift up their heads above thegrass, that the sting of this sweetness, too exquisite to last beyond amoment, brings its intolerable hope and its intolerable regret. 

KEATS

It is well that there should be at least one poet of Beauty--of Beautyalone--of Beauty and naught else. It is well that one should dare tofollow that terrible goddess even to the bitter end. That pitilessmarble altar has its victims, as the other Altars. The "whiteimplacable Aphrodite" cries aloud for blood--for the blood of ourdearest affections; for the blood of our most cherished hopes; for theblood of our integrity and faith; for the blood of our reason. Shedrugs us, blinds us, tortures us, maddens us, and slays us--yet wefollow her--to the bitter end!

Beauty hath her Martyrs, as the rest; and of these Keats is theProtagonist; the youngest and the fairest; the most enamoured victim. From those extraordinary letters of his, to his friends and to his love, we gather that this fierce amorist of Beauty was not without hisPhilosophy. The Philosophy of Keats, as we gather up the threads ofit, one by one, in those fleeting confessions, is nothing but the oldpolytheistic paganism, reduced to terms of modern life. He was aborn "Pluralist" to use the modern phrase; and for him, in thiscongeries of separate and unique miracles, which we call the World, there was neither Unity, nor Progress, nor Purpose, nor Over-soul--nothingbut the mystery of Beauty, and the Memory of great men!

His way of approaching Nature, his way of approaching every eventin life, was "pluralistic. " He did not ask that things should come inupon him in logical order or in rational coherence. He only askedthat each unique person who appeared; each unique hill-side ormeadow or hedgerow or vineyard or flower or tree; should be forhim a new incarnation of Beauty, a new avatar of the merciless Onehe followed. 

Never has there been a poet less _mystical_--never a poet less_moral. _ The ground and soil, and sub-soil, of his nature, wasSensuality--a rich, quivering, tormented Sensuality!

If you will, you may use, for what he was, the word "materialistic";but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression. The physicalnerves of his abnormally troubled senses, were too exquisitely, toopassionately stirred, to let their vibrations die away in materialbondage. They quiver off into remotest psychic waves, these shakenstrings; and a touch will send them shuddering into the high regionsof the Spirit. For a nature like this, with the fever of consumptionwasting his tissues, and the fever of his thirst for Beauty ravaginghis soul, it was nothing less than the cruellest tragedy that he shouldhave been driven by the phantom-flame of sex-illusion to find all themagic and wonder of the Mystery he worshiped, caught, imprisoned, enclosed, _blighted, _ in the poisonous loveliness of one capriciousgirl. An anarchist at heart--as so many great artists are--Keats hated, with a furious hatred, any bastard claims and privileges thatinsolently intruded themselves between the godlike senses of Manand the divine madness of their quest. Society? the Public? MoralOpinion? Intellectual Fashion? The manners and customs of theUpper Classes? What were all these but vain impertinences, interrupting his desperate Pursuit? "Every gentleman" he cried "ismy natural enemy!"

The feverish fanaticism of his devotion knew absolutely no limits. His cry day and night was for "new sensations"; and such"sensation, " a mere epicurean indulgence to others, was a lust, amadness, a frenzy, a fury, a rushing upon death, to him. 

How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born, jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled himbleeding to the ground!

But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it inthe world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening, drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe--the veryphiltre of Sun-poison. "A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever"! A Joy?Yes--but a Joy _drugged_ from its first pouring forth. We follow. We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way!

What an exultant hymn that is, --the one in honour of Pan, whichcomes so soon in Endymion! The dim rich depths of the dark forestsare stirred by it, and its murmurs die away, over the wailing spacesof the marshes. Obscure growths, and drowsy weeds overhangingmoon-lit paths, where fungoid things fumble for light and air, hearthat cry in their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily. The dumbvegetable _expectancy_ of young tree-trunks is roused by it intosensual terror. For this is the sound of the hoof of Pan, stamping onthe moist earth, as he rages for Syrinx. No one has ever understoodthe torment of the Wood-god and his mad joy, as the author ofEndymion understood them. The tumultuous ground-swell of thispoet's insane craving for Beauty must in the end have driven him onthe rocks; but there came sometimes softer, gentler, less"vermeil-tinctured" moods, which might have prolonged his days, had he never met "that girl. "

"The Pot of Basil" expresses one of these. Wistful and heart-breaking, it has a tender yearning _pity_ in it, a gentle melancholybrooding, over the irremediable pain of love-loss, which haunts onelike the sound of drowned Angelus-bells, under a hushed sea. Thedescription of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and hisvague troubled speech, is like nothing else that has ever been written. 

St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, hasa beauty so poignant, so _sensuously unearthly, _ that one dare notquote a line of it, in a mere "critical essay, " for fear of breaking sucha spell!

The long-drawn solemn harmonies of "Hyperion"--Miltonian, andyet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew--maddenthe reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which isonly increased when in that other "Version, " the influence of Dantebecomes evident. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!" Ah, there we findhim--there we await him--the poet of _the tragedy of bodilycraving, _ transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to thepsychic plane!

For "La Belle Dame" is the Litany of the Beauty-Maniac--hisdeath-in-life Requiem, his eternal Dirge! Those who have ever met Her, this "Lady in the mead, full-beautiful, a fairy-child, " whose foot"was light" and whose hair "was long" and whose eyes "were wild, "will know--and only they--the meaning of "the starved lips, throughthe gloom, with horrid warning, gaping wide"! And has the secret ofthe gasping pause of that broken half-line, "where no birds sing, "borrowed originally from poor Ophelia's despair, and echoedwonderfully by Mr. Hardy in certain of his incomparable lyrics, been conveyed to my reader?

But it is, of course, in his five great Odes, that Keats is mostsupreme, most entirely, without question, the unapproachable artist. Heaven forbid that I should shatter the sacred silence that suchthings produce, by any profane repetition! They leave behind them, every one of them, an echo, a vibration, a dying fall, leaving usenchanted and trembling; as when we have been touched, before thetwittering of the birds at dawn, by the very fingers of Our Lady ofsweet Pain!

Is it possible that words, mere words, can work such miracles? Orare they not words at all, but chalices and Holy graals, of humanpassion, full of the life-blood, staining the lips that approach themscarlet, of heart-drained pulse-wearied ravishment?

Certainly he has the touch, ineffable, final, absolute, of the supremeBeauty. And over it all, over the ardours and ecstasies, hangs theshadow of Death; and in the heart of it, an adder in the deep druggedcup, coiled and waiting, the poisonous bite of incurable anguish! Wemay stand mesmerized, spell-bound, amid "the hushed cool-rootedflowers, fragrant-eyed" watching Psyche sleep. We may open those"charmed magic casements" towards "the perilous foam. " We maylinger with Ruth "sick for home amid the alien corn. " We may gaze, awed and hushed, at the dead, cold, little, mountain-built town, "emptied of its folks"--We may "glut our sorrow on the morningrose, or on the wealth of globed Peonies. " We may "imprison ourmistress's soft hand, and gaze, deep, deep, within her peerless eyes. "We may brood, quieted and sweetly-sad, upon the last melancholy"oozings" of the rich year's vintage. But across all these things lies, like a streak of red, breath-catching, spilled heart's blood, theknowledge of _what it means_ to have been able to turn all this intopoetry!

It means Torment. It means Despair. It means _that cry, _ out of thedust of the cemetery at Rome, "O God! O God! has there ever beensuch pain as my pain?"

I suppose Keats suffered more in his brief life than any mortal childof the Muses. These ultimate creations of supreme Beauty areevoked in no other way. Everything has to be sacrificed--everything--ifwe are to be--like the gods, _creators of Life. _ For Life is a thingthat can only be born in _that soil_--only planted where the woundgoes deepest--only watered when we strike where that fountainflows! He wrote for himself. The crowd, the verdict of his friends--whatdid all that matter? He wrote for himself; and for those whodare to risk the taste of that wine, which turns the taste of all else toa weary irrelevance!

One is unwilling to leave our Adonais, whose "annual wound inLebanon allures" us thus fatally, with nothing but such a bitter cry. One has a pathetic human longing to think of him _as he was, _ inthose few moments of unalloyed pleasure the gods allowed himbefore "consumption, " and "that girl, " poisoned the springs of hislife! And those moments, how they have passed into his poetry likethe breath of the Spring!

When "the grand obsession" was not upon him, who, like Keats, canmake us feel the cool, sweet, wholesome touch of our great Mother, the Earth? That sleep, "full of sweet dreams and health and quietbreathing, " which the breast that suckled Persephone alone can givemay heal us also for a brief while. 

We, too, on this very morning--listen reader!--may wreath "aflowery band to bind us to the Earth, spite of despondence. " Some"shape of beauty may yet move away the pall from our dark spirits. "Even with old Saturn under his weight of grief, we may drink in theloveliness of those "green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars. " And in the worst of our moodswe can still call aloud to the things of beauty that pass not away. Wecan even call out to them from her very side who is "the cause, " "thecause, my soul, " of what we suffer. 

 "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art! Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient, sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores--"

This desperate, sensuous pain which makes us cry out to the"midnight" that we might "cease upon it, " need not harden our heartsbefore we pass hence. The "gathering swallows twittering in thesky" of our little interludes of peace may still attune us to somestrange, sad thankfulness that we have been born into life, eventhough life turned out to mean _this!_

And the vibrating, stricken nerves of our too great devotion mayhave at least the balm of feeling that they have not languisheduntouched by the fingers that thrill while they slay. After all, "wehave lived"; we also; and we would not "change places" with those"happy innocents" who have never known the madness of what itmay be to have been born a son of man!

But let none be deluded. The tragic life upon earth is not the life ofthe spirit, but the life of the senses. The senses are the aching doorsto the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of our tyranny over oneanother. Does anyone think that that love is greater, more real, morepoignant, which can stand over the dead body of its One-of-all, anddream of encounters and reconciliations, in other worlds? It is not so!What we have loved is cold, cold and dead, and has become _thatthing_ we scarcely recognise. Can any vague, spiritual reunion makeup for the loss of the little gestures, the little touches, _the littleways, _ we shall never through all eternity know again? Ah! thosereluctances and hesitations, over now, quite over now! Ah! thosefretful pleadings, those strange withdrawals, those unheeded protests;nothing, less than nothing, and mere memories! When the life of thesenses invades the affections of the heart--then, then, mon enfant, comes the pinch and the sting!

And this is what happens with such doomed sensualists as Keats was. What tortured him in death was the thought that he must leave hisdarling--and the actual look, touch, air, ways and presence of her, forever. "Vain, " as that inspired Lover, Emily Bronte, cries, "vain, unutterably vain, are 'all the creeds' that would console!" Tired ofhearing "simple truth miscalled simplicity"; tired of all the wearinessof life--from these we "would begone"--"save that to die we leaveour love alone"!

But it is not only in the fatal danger of eternal separation from theflesh that has become to us more necessary than sun or moon, that_the tragedy of the senses lies. _ It lies in the very intensity withwhich we have sifted, winnowed, tormented and refined thesepanthers of holy lust. Those who understand the poetry of Keatsrecognise that in the passion which burns him for the "heavenlyquintessence" as Marlowe calls it, there is also the ghastly danger ofreaction. The pitiless hands of Joy "are ever at his lips, biddingadieu" and "veiled melancholy has her 'sovran shrine' in the heart ofall delight. "

This is the curse upon those who follow the _supreme Beauty_--thatis to say, the Beauty that belongs, not to ideas and ideals, but toliving forms. They are driven by the gross pressure of circumstanceto forsake her, to leave her, to turn aside and eat husks with theswine!

It is the same with that supreme mystery of _words_ themselves, putof which such an artist as this one was creates his spells and hissorcery. How, after tasting, drop by drop, that draught of "lingeredsweetness long drawn-out" of his unequalled style, can we bear tofall back upon the jabbering and screeching, the howling and hissing, of the voices we have to listen to in common resort? Ah, child, child!Think carefully before you turn your candid-innocent eyes to thefatal entrance to these mysteries! It is better never to have knownwhat the high, terrible loveliness of Her of Melos is than, _havingseen her, _ to pass the rest of our days with these copies, andprostitutions, and profanations, and parodies, "which mimichumanity so abominably"!

That is the worst of it. That is the sting of it. All the _great quests_in this world tempt us and destroy us, for, though they may touchour famished lips once and again before we perish, one thing theycannot do--one thing Beauty herself, the most sacred of all suchquests, cannot do--and that is to make the arid intervals of ourordinary life tolerable, when we have to return to the common world, and the people and things that stand gaping in that world, like stupid, staring idols!

But what matter? Let us pay the penalty. Let us pay the price. _Is itnot worth it?_ Beauty! O divine, O cruel Mistress! Thee, thee wemust worship still, and with thee the acolytes who bear thy censers!For the secret of life is to take every risk without fear; even the riskof finding one's self an exile, with "no shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming" in the land withoutmemories, without altars, without Thee!

NIETZSCHE

It is not the hour in which to say much about Nietzsche. Thedissentient voices are silent. The crowd has stopped howling. But aworse thing is happening to him, the thing of all others he dreadedmost;--he is becoming "accepted"--The preachers are quoting himand the theologians are explaining him. 

What he would himself pray for now are Enemies--fierceirreconcilable Enemies--but our age cannot produce such. It canonly produce sneering disparagement; or frightened conventionalapprobation. 

What one would like to say, at this particular juncture, is that_here, _ or again _there, _ this deadly antagonist of God missed hisaim. But who can say that? He aimed too surely. No, he did not misshis aim. He smote whom he went out to smite. But one thing hecould not smite; he could neither smite it, or unmask it, or"transvalue" it. I mean the Earth itself--the great, shrewd, wise, all-enduring Mother of us all--who knows so much, and remains sosilent!

And sometimes one feels, walking some country road, with thesmell of upturned sods and heavy leaf-mould in one's nostrils, thateven Lucifer himself is not as deep or strong or wise as is patientfurrowed earth and her blundering children. A rough earth-hint, aRabelaisian ditty, a gross amazing jest, a chuckle of deep Satyrichumour;--and the monstrous "thickness" of Life, its friendly aplomband nonchalance, its grotesque irreverence, its shy shrewd common-sense, its tough fibres, and portentous indifference to "distinction";tumbles us over in the mud--for all our "aloofness"--and roars overus, like a romping bull-calf!

The antidote to Nietzsche is not to be found in the company of theSaints. He was too much of a Saint himself for that. It is to be foundin the company of Shakespearean clodhoppers, and Rabelaisiantopers, and Cervantian serving-wenches. In fact, it is to be found, aswith the antidotes for other noble excesses, in burying your face inrough moist earth; and grubbing for pig-nuts under the beech-trees. A summer's day in the woods with Audrey will put "Fatality" into itsplace and remove "the Recurrence of all things" to a very modestremoteness. And this is not a relinquishing of the secret of life. Thisis not a giving up of the supreme quest. It is an opening of anotherdoor; a letting in of a different air; a reversion to a more primitivelevel of the mystery. 

The way to reduce the tyranny of this proud spirit to its properproportion is not to talk about "Love" or "Morality" or "Orthodoxy, "or "the strength of the vulgar herd"--it is simply to call up in one'smind the motley procession of gross, simple, quaint, _bulbous, _irrepressible objects--human and otherwise--whose mere existencemakes it as impossible for Nietzsche to deal with the _massiveness_of Life, as it is impossible for anyone else to deal with it. 

No, we shall not free ourselves from his intellectual predominanceby taking refuge with the Saints. We shall not do this because hehimself was essentially a Saint. A Saint and a Martyr! Is it for menow to prove that?

It is realized, I suppose, what the history of his spiritual contestactually was? It was a deliberate self-inflicted Crucifixion of theChrist in him, as an offering to the Apollo in him. Nietzschewas--that cannot be denied--an Intellectual Sadist; and his IntellectualSadism took the form--as it can (he has himself taught us so) takemany curious forms--of deliberately outraging his own mostsensitive nerves. This is really what broke his reason, in the end. Bya process of spiritual vivisection--the suffering of which one darenot conceive--he took his natural "sanctity, " and carved it, as a dishfit for the gods, until it assumed an Apollonian shape. We mustvisualize Nietzsche not only as the Philosopher with the Hammer;but as the Philosopher with the Chisel. 

We must visualize him, with such a sculptor's tool, standing in thepresence of the crucified figure of himself; and altering one by one, its natural lineaments! Nietzsche's own lacerated "intellectualnerves" were the vantage-ground of his spiritual vision. He couldwrite "the Antichrist" because he had "killed. " in his own nature, "the thing he loved" It was for this reason that he had such asupernatural insight into the Christian temperament. It was for thisreason that he could pour vitriol upon its "little secrets"; and hunt itto its last retreats. 

Let none think he did not understand the grandeur, and the terribleintoxicating appeal, of the thing he fought. He understood these onlytoo well. What vibrating sympathy--as for a kindred spirit--may beread between the lines of his attack on Pascal--Pascal, the supremetype of the Christian Philosopher!

It must be further realized--for after all what are words andphrases?--that it was really nothing but the "Christian conscience" inhim that forced him on so desperately to kick against the pricks. Itwas the "Christian conscience" in him--has he not himself analysedthe voluptuous cruelty of that?--which drove him to seek something--ifpossible--nobler, austerer, gayer, more innocently wicked, thanChristianity!

It was not in the interests of Truth that he fought it. True Christian, as he was, at heart, he never cared greatly for Truth as Truth. It wasin the interest of a Higher Ideal, a more exacting, less human Ideal, that he crushed it down. The Christian spirit, in him set him uponstrangling the Christian spirit--and all in the interest of a madness ofnobility, itself perforated with Christian conscience!

Was Nietzsche really Greek, compared with--Goethe, let us say?Not for a moment. It was in the desperation of his attempt to be so, that he seized upon Greek tragedy and made it dance to Christiancymbals! This is, let it be clearly understood, the hidden secret of hismania for Dionysus--Dionysus gave him his opportunity. In theworship of this god--also a wounded god, be it remarked;--he wasable to satisfy his perverted craving for "ecstasy of laceration" underthe shadow of another Name. 

But after all--as Goethe says--"feeling is all in all; the name is soundand smoke. " What he felt were Christian feelings, the feelings of aMystic, a Visionary, a Flagellant. What matter by what name youcall them? Christ? Dionysus? It is the secret creative passion of thehuman heart that sends them Both forth upon their warfaring. 

Is any one simple enough to think that whatever Secret CosmicPower melts into human ecstasy, it waits to be summoned by certainparticular syllables? That this arbitrary strangling of the Christ inhim never altogether ended, is proved by the words of those tragicmessages he sent to Cosima Wagner from "the aristocratic city ofTurin" when his tormented brain broke like a taut bow-string. Thosemessages resembled arrows of fire, shot into space; and on one waswritten the words "The Crucified" and on the other the word"Dionysus. "

The grand and heart-breaking appeal of this lonely Victim of hisown merciless scourge, does not depend, for its effect upon us, uponany of the particular "ideas" he announced. The idea of the "EternalRecurrence of all things"--to take the most terrible--is clearly butanother instance of his intellectual Sadism. 

The worst thing that could happen to those innumerable Victims ofLife, for whom he sought to kill his Pity, was that they should haveto go through the same punishment again--not once or twice, but foran infinity of times--and it was just that that he, whose immense Pityfor them took so long a killing, suddenly felt must be what _had_ tohappen--had to happen for no other reason than that it was_intolerable_ that it should happen. Again, we may note, it was not"Truth" he sought, but ecstasy, and, in this case, the ecstasy of"accepting" the very worst kind of issue he could possibly imagine. 

The idea of the Superman, too, is an idea that could only haveentered the brain of one, pushed on to think, at the spear-head of hisown cruelty. It is a great and terrible idea, sublime and devastating, this idea of the human race yielding place to _another race, _stronger, wiser, fairer, sterner, gayer, and more godlike! Especiallynoble and compelling is Nietzsche's constant insistence that themoment has come for men to take their Destiny out of the blindpower of Evolution, and to guide it themselves, with a strong handand a clear will, towards a _definite goal. _

The fact that this driving force, of cruelty to himself and, throughhimself, to humanity, scourged him on to so formidable anillumination of our path, is a proof how unwise it is to suppress anygrand perversion. Such motive-forces should be used, as Nietzscheused his, for purposes of intellectual insight--not simply trampledupon as "evil. "

Whether our poor human race ever will surpass itself, as he demands, and rise to something psychologically different, "may admit a widesolution. " It is not an unscientific idea. It is not an irreligious idea. It has all the dreams of the Prophets behind it. But--who can tell? It isquite as possible that the spirit of destruction in us will wantonlyruin this great Chance as that we shall seize upon it. Man has manyother impulses besides the impulse of creation. Perhaps he willnever be seduced into even _desiring_ such a goal, far less "willing"it over long spaces of time. 

The curious "optimism" of Nietzsche, by means of which he soughtto force himself into a mood of such Dionysian ecstasy as to be ablenot only to endure Fate, but to "love" it, is yet another example ofthe subterranean "conscience" of Christianity working in him. In thepresence of such a mood, and, indeed, in the presence of nearly allhis great dramatic Passions, it is Nietzsche, and not his humorouscritic, who is "with Our Lord" in Gethsemane. One does not drink ofthe cup of Fate "lovingly"--without bloody sweat!

The interesting thing to observe about Nietzsche's ideas is that thewider they depart from what was essentially Christian in him, theless convincing they grow. One cannot help feeling he recognisedthis himself--and, infuriated by it, strode further and further into theJungle. 

For instance, one cannot suppose that the cult of "the Blonde Beast, "and the cult of Caesar Borgia, were anything but mad reprisals, directed towards himself, in savage revenge; blind blows struck atrandom against the lofty and penetrating spirituality in which he hadindulged when writing Zarathustra. 

But there is a point here of some curious psychological interest, towhich we are attracted by a certain treacherous red glow upon hiswords when he speaks of this sultry, crouching, spotted, tail-lashingmood. Why is it precisely this Borgian type, this Renaissance type, among the world's various Lust-Darlings that he chooses to select?

Why does he not oppose, to the Christian Ideal, _its true opposite_--thenaive, artless, faun-like, pagan "child of Nature, " who has neverknown "remorse"?

The answer is clear. He chooses the Borgian type--the type which is_not_ free from "superstition, " which is always wrestling with"superstition"--the type that sprinkles holy water upon itsdagger--because such a type is the inevitable _product_ of the presenceamong us of the Christian Ideal. The Christian Ideal has made acertain complication of "wickedness" possible, which wereimpossible without it. 

If Nietzsche had not been obsessed by Christianity he would haveselected as his "Ideal Blond Beast" that perfectly naive, "unfallen"man, of imperturbable nerves, of classic nerves, such as Lifeabounded in _before Christ came. _ He makes, indeed, a patheticstruggle to idealize this type, rather than the "conscience-stricken"Renaissance one. He lets his fingers stray more than once over thered-stained limbs of real sun-burnt "Pompeian" heathenism. Heturns feverishly the wanton pages of Petronius to reach thisunsullied, "imperial" Animal. But he cannot reach him. He nevercould reach him. The "consecrated" dagger of the Borgia gleams andscintillates between. Even, therefore, in the sort of "wickedness" heevokes, Nietzsche remains Christ-ridden and Christ-mastered. Thematter is made still more certain when one steals up silently, so tospeak, behind the passages where he speaks of Napoleon. 

If a reader has the remotest psychological clairvoyance, he will beaware of a certain strain and tug, a certain mental jerk and contortion, whenever Napoleon is introduced. 

Yes, he could engrave that fatal "N" over his mantlepiece atWeimar--to do so was the last solace of his wounded brain. But hewas never really at ease with the great Emperor. Never did he--inpure, direct, classic recognition--greet him as "the Demonic Masterof Destiny, " with the Goethean salutation! Had Goethe andNapoleon, in their notorious encounter, wherein they recognized oneanother as "Men, " been interrupted by the entrance of Nietzsche, doyou suppose they would not have both stiffened and recoiled, recognizing their natural Enemy, the Cross-bearer, the Christ-obsessedone, _"Il Santo"?_

The difference between the two types can best be felt by recallingthe way in which Napoleon and Goethe treated the Christ-Legend, compared with Nietzsche's desperate wrestling. 

Napoleon uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his HighPolicy and Worldly Statecraft. 

Goethe uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his aestheticculture and his mystic symbolism. Neither of them are, for onemoment, touched by it themselves. 

They are born Pagans; and when this noble, tortured soul flingshimself at their feet in feverish worship, one feels that, out of theirHomeric Hades, they look wonderingly, _unintelligently, _ at him. 

One of the most laughable things in the world is the attempt somesimple critics make to turn Nietzsche into an ordinary "HonestInfidel, " a kind of poetic Bradlaugh-Ingersoll, offering to humanitythe profound discovery that there is no God, and that when we die, we die! The absurdity is made complete when this naive, revivified"Pagan" is made to assure us--us, "the average sensual men"--thatthe path of wisdom lies, not in resisting, but in yielding to_temptation;_ not in spiritual wrestling to "transform" ourselves, butin the brute courage "to be ourselves, " and "live out our type"!

The good folk who play with such a childish illusion would do wellto scan over again their "pagan" hero's branding and flaying of thephilosopher Strauss. Strauss was precisely what they try to turnNietzsche into--a rancorous, insensitive, bullying, materialisticHeathen, making sport of "the Cross" and drinking Laager Beer. Nietzsche loathed Laager Beer, and "the Cross" _burnt_ day andnight in his tormented, Dionysian soul. 

It occurs to me sometimes that if there had been no "GermanReformation" and no overrunning of the world by vulgar evangelicalProtestantism, it would be still possible to bring into the circle of theChurch's development the lofty and desperate Passion of this"saintly" Antichrist. After all, why should we concede that thoseagitated, voluptuous, secret devices to get "saved, " those super-subtle, subliminal tricks of the weak and the perverted to be _revenged_on the beautiful and the brave, which Nietzsche lamentswere ever "bound up" in the same cover as the "Old Testament. "must remain forever the dominant "note" in the Faith ofChristendom? While the Successor of Caesar, while the PontifexMaximus of our "Spiritual Rome, " still represents the InfallibleElement in the world's nobler religious Taste, there is yet, perhaps, aremote chance that this vulgarizing of "the mountain summits" thisdegrading of our Planet's Passion-Play, may be cauterized andeliminated. 

And yet it is not likely! Much more likely is it that the real "secret"of Jesus, together with the real "secret" of Nietzsche--and they donot differ in essence, for all his Borgias!--will remain the sweet anddeadly "fatalities" they have always been--for the few, the few, thefew who understand them!

For the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, isthe impression of "distinction, " of remoteness from "vulgarbrutality, " from "sensual baseness, " from the clumsy compromisesof the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts withsome of us an hour; with some of us a day--with a few of us ahandful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience. As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmalgulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in theface. 

Liberated from our own lusts, or using them, contemptuously andindifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death ofworlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowningNothingness. 

We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing andreceding--and we see the _new race_--in the hours of the "GreatNoon-tide"--fulfilling its Prophet's hope--and we see _the end of thatalso!_ And seeing all this, because the air of our watch-tower is soice-cold and keen, we neither tremble or blench. The world is deep, and deep is pain, and deeper than pain is joy. We have seen Creation, and have exulted in it. We have seen Destruction, and have exultedin it. We have watched the long, quivering Shadow of Life shudderacross our glacial promontory, and we have watched that drowningtide receive it. It is enough. It is well. We have had our Vision. Weknow now what gives to the gods "that look" their faces wear. 

It now only remains for us to return to the familiar human Stage; tothe "Gala-Night, within the lonesome latter years, " and be gay, and"hard, " and "superficial"!

That ice-bound Promontory into the Truth of Things has only knownone Explorer whose "Eloi, Eloi Lama Sabachthani" was not thedeath-cry of his Pity. And that Explorer--did we only dream of hisReturn?

THOMAS HARDY

With a name suggestive of the purest English origin, Mr. Hardy hasbecome identified with that portion of England where the variousrace-deposits in our national "strata" are most dear and defined. InWessex, the traditions of Saxon and Celt, Norman and Dane, Romanand Iberian, have grown side by side into the soil, and all thevillages and towns, all the hills and streams, of this country havepreserved the rumour of what they have seen. 

In Celtic legend the country of the West Saxons is marvellously rich. Camelot and the Island of Avalon greet one another across theSomersetshire vale. And Dorsetshire, Hardy's immediate home, addsthe Roman traditions of Casterbridge to tragic memories of KingLear. Tribe by tribe, race by race, as they come and go, leaving theirmonuments and their names behind, Mr. Hardy broods over them, noting their survivals, their lingering footprints, their long decline. 

In his well-loved Dorchester we find him pondering, like one of hisown spirits of Pity and Irony, while the moonlight shines on thehaunted amphitheatre where the Romans held their games. Hedevotes much care to noting all those little "omens by the way" thatmake a journey along the great highways of Wessex so full ofimaginative suggestion. 

It is the history of the human race itself that holds him with amesmeric spell, as century after century it unrolls its acts and scenes, under the indifferent stars. The continuity of life! The long, piteous"ascent of man, " from those queer fossils in the Portland Quarries--towhat we see today, so palpable, so real! And yet for all his tragicpity, Mr. Hardy is a sly and whimsical chronicler. He does not allowone point of the little jest the gods play on us--the little long-drawn-outjest--to lose its sting. With something of a goblin-like alertnesshe skips here and there, watching those strange scene shifters at theirwork. The dual stops of Mr. Hardy's country pipe are cut from thesame reed. With the one he challenges the Immortals on behalf ofhumanity; with the other he plays such a shrewd Priapian tune thatall the Satyrs dance. 

I sometimes think that only those born and bred in the country cando justice to this great writer. That dual pipe of his is bewildering tocity people. They over emphasize the "magnanimity" of his art, orthey over emphasize its "miching-mallecho. " They do not catch thesecret of that mingled strain. The same type of cultured "foreigner"is puzzled by Mr. Hardy's self-possession. He ought to commithimself more completely, or he ought not to have committed himselfat all! There is something that looks to them--so they are tempted toexpress it--like the cloven hoof of a most Satyrish cunning, about hisattitude to certain things. That little caustic by-play, for instance, with which he girds at the established order, never denouncing itwholesale like Shelley, or accepting it wholesale like Wordsworth--andalways with a tang, a dash of gall and wormwood, an impish malice. 

The truth is, there are two spirits in Mr. Hardy, one infinitelysorrowful and tender, the other whimsical, elfish and malign. 

The first spirit rises up in stern Promethean revolt against thedecrees of Fate. The second spirit deliberately allies itself in wanton, bitter glee, with the humorous provocation of humanity, by the cruelPowers of the Air. The psychology of all this is not hard to unravel. The same abnormal sensitiveness that makes him pity the victims ofdestiny makes him also not unaware of what may be sweet to thepalate of the gods in such "merry jests. " These two tendencies seemto have grown upon him as years went on and to have become moreand more pronounced. Often, with artists, the reverse thing happens. Every human being has his own secretive reaction, his own furtiverecoil, from the queer trap we are all in, --his little private method ofretaliation. But many writers are most unscrupulously themselveswhen they are young. The changes and chances of this mortal lifemellow them into a more neutral tint. Their revenge upon life growsless personal and more objective as they get older. They becomebalanced and resigned. They attain "the wisdom of Sophocles. "

The opposite of this has been the history of Mr. Hardy's progression. He began with quite harmless rustic realism, fanciful and quaint. Then came his masterpieces wherein the power and grandeur of agreat artist's inspiration fused everything into harmony. At the last, in his third period, we have the exaggeration of all that is mostpersonal in his emotion intensified to the extreme limit. 

It is absurd to turn away from these books, books like Jude theObscure and the Well-Beloved. If Mr. Hardy had not had suchsardonic emotions, such desire to "hit back" at the great "opposelesswills, " and such Goblin-like glee at the tricks they play us, he wouldnever have been able to write "Tess. " Against the ways of God tothis sweet girl he raises a hand of terrible revolt, but it is with morethan human "pity" that he lays her down on the Altar of Sacrifice. 

But, after all, it is in the supreme passages of pure imaginativegrandeur that Mr. Hardy is greatest. Here he is "with Shakespeare"and we forget both Titan and Goblin. How hard it is exactly to putinto words what this "imaginative grandeur" consists of! It is, at anyrate, an intensification of our general consciousness of theLife-Drama as a whole, but this, under a poetic, rather than a scientific, light, and yet with the scientific facts, --they also not without theirdramatic significance--indicated and allowed for. It is a clarifying ofour mental vision and a heightening of our sensual apprehension. Itis a certain withdrawing from the mere personal pull of our own fateinto a more rarified air, where the tragic beauty of life falls intoperspective, and, beholding the world in a clear mirror, we escapefor a moment from "the will to live. "

At such times it is as though, "taken up upon a high mountain, wesee, without desire and without despair, the kingdoms of the worldand the glories of them. " Then it is that we feel the very wind of theearth's revolution, and the circling hours touch us with a palpablehand. 

And the turmoil of the world grown so distant, it is then that we feelat once the greatness of humanity and the littleness of what it strivesfor. We are seized with a shuddering tenderness for Man. Thisbewildered animal--wrestling in darkness with he knows not what. 

And gazing long and long into this mirror, the poignancy of what webehold is strangely softened. After all, it is something, whateverbecomes of us, to have been conscious of all this. It is something tohave outwatched Arcturus, and felt "the sweet influences" of thePleiades. Congruous with such a mood is the manner in which, while Mr. Hardy opposes himself to Christianity, he cannot forget it. He cannot "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff whichweighs upon the heart. " It troubles and vexes him. It haunts him. And his work both gains and suffers. He flings gibe after gibe at"God, " but across his anger falls the shadow of the Cross. Howshould it not be so? "All may be permitted, " but one must not add afeather's weight to the wheel that breaks our "little ones. "

It is this that separates Mr. Hardy's work from so much modernfiction that is clever and "philosophical" but does not satisfy one'simagination. All things with Mr. Hardy--even the facts of geologyand chemistry--are treated with that imaginative clairvoyance thatgives them their place in the human comedy. And is not Christianityitself one of these facts? How amazing that such a thing should haveappeared at all upon the earth! When one reads Meredith, with hisbrilliant intellectual cleverness, one finds Christianity "taken forgranted, " and dismissed as hardly relevant to modern topics. 

But Mr. Hardy is too pagan, in the true sense, too fascinated by thepoetry of life and the essential ritual of life, to dismiss any greatreligion in this way. The thing is always with him, just as the GothicTower of St. Peter's Church in Casterbridge is always with him. Hemay burst into impish fury with its doctrines, but, like one of thosequeer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet neverleave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the samereason, in spite of his intellectual realization of the mechanicalprocesses of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he isalways being driven to _personify_ these ultimate powers; topersonify them, or _it, _ as something that takes infernal satisfactionin fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourgingthem to madness. 

Mr. Hardy's ultimate thought is that the universe is blind andunconscious; that it knows not what it does. But, standing among thegraves of those Wessex churchyards, or watching the twisted threadsof perverse destiny that plague those hapless hearts under a thousandvillage roofs, it is impossible for him not to long to "strike back" atthis damned System of Things that alone is responsible. And howcan one "strike back" unless one converts unconscious machineryinto a wanton Providence? Where Mr. Hardy is so incomparablygreater than Meredith and all his modern followers is that in theseWessex novels there is none of that intolerable "ethical discussion"which obscures "the old essential candours" of the human situation. 

The reaction of men and women upon one another, in the presenceof the solemn and the mocking elements; this will outlast all socialreadjustments and all ethical reforms. 

While the sun shines and the moon draws the tides, men and womenwill ache from jealousy, and the lover will not be the beloved! Longafter a quite new set of "interesting modern ideas" have replaced thepresent, children will break the hearts of their parents, and parentswill break the hearts of their children. Mr. Hardy is indignantenough over the ridiculous conventions of Society, but he knowsthat, at the bottom, what we suffer from is "the dust out of which weare made;" the eternal illusion and disillusion which must drive uson and "take us off" until the planet's last hour. 

Mr. Hardy's style, at its best, has an imaginative suggestivenesswhich approaches, though it may not quite reach, the indescribabletouch of the Shakespearean tragedies. There is also a quality in itpeculiar to himself--threatening and silencing; a thunderoussuppression, a formidable reserve, an iron tenacity. Sometimes, again, one is reminded of the ancient Roman poets, and notunfrequently, too, of the rhythmic incantations of Sir ThomasBrowne, that majestic and perverted Latinist. 

The description, for instance, of Egdon Heath, at the beginning ofthe Return of the Native, has a dusky architectural grandeur that islike the Portico of an Egyptian Temple. The same thing may benoted of that sudden apparition of Stonehenge, as Tess and Angelstumble upon it in their flight through the darkness. 

One thinks of the words of William Blake: "He who does not loveForm more than Colour is a coward. " For it is, above all, Form thatappeals to Mr. Hardy. The iron plough of his implacable style drivespitilessly through the soft flesh of the earth until it reaches thearchitectural sub-structure. Whoever tries to visualize any scene outof the Wessex Novels will be forced to see the figures of the personsconcerned "silhouetted" against a formidable skyline. One sees them, these poor impassioned ones, moving in tragic procession along theedge of the world, and, when the procession is over, darknessre-establishes itself. The quality that makes Mr. Hardy's manner such arefuge from the levities and gravities of the "reforming writers" is aquality that springs from the soil. The soil has a gift of "proportion"like nothing else. Things fall into due perspective on Egdon Heath, and among the water-meadows of Blackmoor life is felt as the tribesof men have felt it since the beginning. 

The modern tendency is to mock at sexual passion and grow graveover social and artistic problems. Mr. Hardy eliminates social andartistic problems and "takes nothing seriously"--not even"God"--except the love and the hate of men and women, and the naturalelements that are their accomplices. It is for this lack in them, thisuneasy levity over the one thing that really counts, that it is so hardto read many humorous and arresting modern writers, except inrailway trains and cafes. They have thought it clever to dispossessthe passion of our poor heart of its essential poetry. They have notunderstood that man would sooner suffer the bitterness of death thanbe deprived of his _right_ to suffer the bitterness of love. 

It must be, I suppose, that these flippant triflers are so optimisticabout their reforms and their ethical ideals and their sanitary projectsthat to them such things as how the sun rises over Shaston and sinksover Budmouth; such things as what Eustacia felt when she walked, "talking to herself, " across the blasted heath; such things as themood of Henchard when he cursed the day of his birth, are mereaccidents and irrelevancies, by no means germane to the matter. 

Well, perhaps they are wise to be so hopeful. But for the rest of us, for whom the world does not seem likely to "improve" so fast, it isan unspeakable relief that there should be at least one writer leftinterested in the things that interested Sophocles and Shakespeare, and possessed of a style that does not, remembering the work ofsuch hands, put our generation altogether to shame. 

WALTER PATER

What are the qualities that make this shy and furtive Recluse, thisWanderer in the shadow, the greatest of critics? Imagination, in thefirst place, and then that rare, unusual, divine gift of limitlessReverence for the Human Senses. Imagination has a two-fold power. It visualizes and it creates. With clairvoyant ubiquity it floats andflows into the most recondite recesses, the most reluctant sanctuaries, of other men's souls. With clear-cut, architectural volition it buildsup its own Byzantium, out of the quarried debris of all the centuries. 

One loves to think of Pater leaving that Olney country, where he"hated" to hear anything more about "the Poet Cowper, " and nursinghis weird boy-fancies in the security of the Canterbury cloisters. Themost passionate and dedicated spirit he--to sulk, and dream, andhide, and love, and "watch the others playing, " in that quietretreat--since the great soul of Christopher Marlowe flamed up there intoconsciousness!

And then Oxford. And it is meet and right, at such a point as this, tolay our offering, modest, secret, shy--a shadow, a nothing--at thefeet of this gracious Alma Mater; "who needs not June for Beauty'sheightening!" One revolts against her sometimes. The charm is tooexclusive, too withdrawn. And something--what shall I say?--ofironic, supercilious disillusion makes her forehead weary, and hereyelids heavy. But after all, to what exquisite children, like rare, exotic flowers, she has the power to give birth! But did you know, you for whom the syllables "Oxford" are an Incantation, that to theyet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elaborate soul ofWalter Pater, Oxford Herself appeared, as time went on, a littlevulgar and silly?

Indeed, he fled from her, and took refuge-sometimes with his sisters, for, like Charles Lamb, Pater was "Conventual" in his taste--andsometimes with the "original" of Marius the Epicurean. But whatmatter where he fled--he who always followed the "shady side" ofthe road? He has not only managed to escape, himself, with all his"Boxes of Alabaster, " into the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower, thateven Oxford cannot reach, but he has carried us thither with him. 

And there, from the opal-clouded windows of that high place, heshows us still the secret kingdoms of art and philosophy and life, and the remotest glories of them. We see them all--from thosewindows--a little lovelier, a little rarer, a little more "selective, "than, perchance, they really are. But what matter? What does one expectwhen one looks through opal-clouded windows? And, after all, thoseare the kinds of windows from which it is best to look at thedazzling limbs of the immortal gods!

Not but what, sometimes, he permits us to throw those "magiccasements" wide open. And then, in how lucid an air, in how cleanand fresh a morning of reality, those pure forms and godlike figuresstand out, their naked feet in the cold, clear dew!

For one must note two things about Walter Pater. He is able to throwthe glimmering mantle of his own elaborate _sophistry of thesenses_ over comparatively fleeting, unarresting objects. And he isable to compel us to follow, line by line, curve by curve, contour bycontour, the very palpable body and presence of the Beauty thatpasseth not away. 

In plainer words, he is a great and exact scholar--laborious, patient, indefatigable, reserved; and, at the same time, a Protean Wizard, breathing forbidden life into the Tyrian-stained writhings of manyan enchanted Lamia! At a thousand points he is the only modernliterary figure who draws us towards him with the old Leonardian, Goethean spell. For, like Goethe and Da Vinci, he is never far fromthose eternal "Partings of the Ways. " which alone make lifeinteresting. 

He is, for instance, more profoundly drenched, dyed, and endued in"Christian Mythology" than any mortal writer, short of the Saintsthemselves. He is more native to the pure Hellenic air than any sinceWalter Savage Landor. And he is more subtle, in his understandingof "German Philosophy" as opposed to "Celtic Romance, " thanall--outside the most inner circles--since Hegel--or Heine! The greedy, capricious "Uranian Babyishness" of his pupil Oscar, with itspeevish clutching at all soft and provocative and glimmering things, is mere child's play, compared with the deep, dark Vampirism withwhich this furtive Hermit drains the scarlet blood of the Vestals ofevery Sanctuary. 

How little the conventional critics have understood this master oftheir own craft! What hopeless people have "rushed in" to interpretthis super-subtle Interpreter! Mr. Gosse has, however, done onething for us. Somewhere, somehow, he once drew a picture ofWalter Pater "gambolling, " in the moonlight, on the velvet lawn ofhis own secluded Oxford garden, like a satin-pawed Wombat! Ialways think of that picture. It is a pleasanter one than that of MarkPattison, running round his Gooseberry bushes, after greatscreaming girls. But they are both touching sketches, and, no doubt, very indicative of Life beneath the shadow of the Bodleian. 

Why have the professional philosophers--ever since that Master ofBaliol who used to spend his time boring holes in the Ship thatcarried him--"fought shy" of Pater's Philosophy? For a sufficientreason! Because, like Protagoras the Sophist, and like Aristippus theCyrenean, he has undermined Metaphysic, _by means of Metaphysic. _

For Walter Pater--is that clearly understood?--was an adept, longbefore Nietzsche's campaign began, at showing the human desire, the human craving, the human ferocity, the human spite, hiddenbehind the mask of "Pure Reason. "

He treats every great System of Metaphysic as a great work ofArt--with a very human, often a too human, artizan behind it--a work ofArt which we have a perfect right to appropriate, to enjoy, to look atthe world through, and then _to pass on!_

Every Philosophy has its "secret, " according to Pater, its "formula, "its lost Atlantis. Well! It is for us to search it out; to take colour fromits dim-lit under-world; to feed upon its wavering Sea-Lotus--andthen, returning to the surface, to swim away, in search of otherdiving-grounds!

No Philosopher except Pater has dared to carry Esoteric Eclecticismquite as far as this. And, be it understood, he is no frivolousDilettante. This draining the secret wine of the great embalmedSarcophagi of Thought is his Life-Lure, his secret madness, hisgrand obsession. Walter Pater approaches a System of MetaphysicalThought as a somewhat furtive amorist might approach a sleepingNymph. On light-stepping, crafty feet he approaches--and the handwith which he twitches the sleeve of the sleeper is as soft as theflutter of a moth's wing. "I do not like, " he said once, "to be called aHedonist. It gives such a queer impression to people who don't knowGreek. "

Ardent young people sometimes come to me, when in the wayfaringof my patient academic duties, I speak about Pater, and ask mepoint-blank to tell them what his "view-point"--so they are pleasedto express it--"really and truly" was. Sweet reader, do you know thepain of these "really and truly" questions? I try to answer in someblundering manner like this. I try to explain how, for him, nothing inthis world was certain or fixed; how everything "flowed away"; howall that we touch or taste or see, vanished, changed its nature, became something else, even as we vanish, as the years go on, andchange our nature and become something else. I try to explain how, for him, we are ourselves but the meeting-places of strange forces, journeying at large and by chance through a shifting world; how we, too, these very meeting-places of such forces, waver and flicker andshift and are transformed, like dreams within dreams!

I try to explain how, this being so, and nothing being "written in thesky" it is our right to test every single experience that life can offer, short of those which would make things bitterer, harder, narrower, less easy, for "the other person. "

And if my Innocents ask--as they do sometimes--Innocents are likethat!--"Why must we consider the other person?" I answer--for no_reason, _ and under no threat or danger or categorical imperative;but simply because we have grown to be the sort of animal, the sortof queer fish, who _cannot_ do the things "that he would"! It is not, Itry to indicate, a case of conscience; it is a matter of taste; and thereare certain things, when it comes to that point, which an animalpossessed of such taste _cannot do, _ even though he desire to dothem. And one of these things is to hurt the other trapped creatureswho happen to have been caught in the same "gin" as ourself. 

With regard to Art and Literature, Pater has the same method as withregard to Philosophy. Everything in a world so fluid is obviouslyrelative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolutestandard--even of beauty itself. Those high and immutable Principlesof The Good and True are as much an illusion as any other human dream. There are no such principles. Beauty is a Daughter of Life, and isforever changing as Life changes, and as we change who have tolive. The lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold"Mathematic" of the Universe, the rhythm of whose orderedHarmony is the Music of the Spheres, is a Faith that may wellinspire and solemnize us; it cannot persuade or convince us. 

Beauty is not Mathematical; it is--if one may say so--physiologicaland psychological, and though that austere severity of pure line andpure color, the impersonal technique of art, has a seeminglypre-ordained power of appeal, in reality it is far less immutable than itappears, and has far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growthand change than we sometimes would care to allow. 

Walter Pater's magnetic spell is never more wonder-working thanwhen he deals with the _materials_ which artists use. And most ofall, with _words, _ that material which is so stained and corruptedand outraged--and yet which is the richest of all. But how tenderlyhe always speaks of materials! What a limitless reverence he has forthe subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human sensesand what--so thrillingly, so dangerously, sometimes!--theyapprehend. Wood and clay and marble and bronze and gold andsilver; these--and the fabrics of cunning looms and deft, insatiablefingers--he handles with the reverence of a priest touchingconsecrated elements. 

Not only the great main rivers of art's tradition, but the little streamsand tributaries, he loves. Perhaps he loves some of these best of all, for the pathways to their exquisite margins are less trodden than theothers, and one is more apt to find one's self alone there. 

Perhaps of all his essays, three might be selected as mostcharacteristic of certain recurrent moods. That one on DenysL'Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled god--hashe really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorchedwhite Flesh?--leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, where his passion for things faded andwithdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one ofthose always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of theirown too vivid days, and seek a wistful escape in some fantasticvalley of dreams. Watteau's "happy valley" is, indeed, sadder thanour most crowded hours--how should it not be, when it is no"valley" at all, but the melancholy cypress-alleys of Versailles?--but, though sadder, it is so fine; so fine and rare and gay!

And along the borders of it and under its clipped trees, by itsfountains and ghostly lawns, still, still can one catch in the twilightthe shimmer of the dancing feet of the Phantom-Pierrot, and thedespair in his smile! For him, too--for Gilles the Mummer--as forAntoine Watteau and Walter Pater, the wistfulness of such places isnot inconsistent with their levity. Soon the music must stop. Soon itmust be only a garden, "only a garden of Lenotre, correct, ridiculousand charming. " For the lips of the Despair of Pierrot cannot alwaystouch the lips of the Mockery of Columbine; in the end, the UltimateFutility must turn them both to stone!

And, finally, that Essay upon Leonardo, with the lines "we say toour friend" about Her who is "older than the rocks on which shesits. "

What really makes Pater so great, so wise, so salutary a writer is hisperpetual insistence on the criminal, mad foolishness of letting slip, in silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturning days of ouryouth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens, " he seems to say. "Carrywith infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Lifeon Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let norain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, fall into it and spoilits taste. For it is all you have, and it cannot last long!"

He is a great writer, because from him we may learn the difficultand subtle art of drinking the cup of life _so as to taste every drop. _

One could expatiate long upon his attitude to Christianity--his finaldesire to be "ordained Priest"--his alternating pieties andincredulities. His deliberate clinging to what "experience" broughthim, as the final test of "truth, " made it quite easy for him to dip hisarms deep into the Holy Well. He might not find the Graal; he mightsee nothing there but his own shadow! What matter? The Well itselfwas so cool and chaste and dark and cavern-like, that it was worthlong summer days spent dreaming over it--dreaming over it in thecloistered garden, out of the dust and the folly and the grossness ofthe brutal World, that knows neither Apollo or Christ!

DOSTOIEVSKY

The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, sucha shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hitin the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat. Everything that has been _forbidden, _ by discretion, by caution, byself-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out ofthe darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses. 

All that one has _felt, _ but has not dared to think; all that one has_thought, _ but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers fromthe unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from theunsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us. 

There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot, _will_ not, say. There is so much that the normalself-preservative instincts in ourselves do not _want_ said. But thisRussian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace?What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Suchrevelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We _require_embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must haveno closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform itsmicrocosmic reflections, even _down there, _ where it has to bedriven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the greatwriters are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker'sbeak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted bythe Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal whatwill serve _their_ purpose! This applies as much to the Realists, with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with theirtraditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpretersof Sex, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in theirconventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!

The lucky-unlucky individual whose path this formidable writercrosses, quickly begins, as he reads page by page, to cry out instartled wonder, in terrified protest. This rending Night Hawkreveals just what one hugged most closely of all--just what one did_not_ confess! Such a person, reading this desperate "clairvoyant, "finds himself laughing and chuckling, under his breath, and _againsthis willy_ over the little things there betrayed. It is not any more acase of enjoying with distant aesthetic amusement the generalhuman spectacle. He himself is the one scratched and pricked. Hehimself is the one so abominably tickled. That is why women--whohave so mad a craving for the personal in everything--are especiallycaught by Dostoievsky. He knows them so fatally well. Thosestartling, contradictory feelings that make their capricious bosomsrise and fall, those feelings that they find so difficult themselves tounderstand, he drags them all into the light. The kind of delicatecruelty, that in others becomes something worse, refines itself in hismagnetic genius into a cruelty of insight that knows no scruple. Noris the reluctance of these gentle beings, so thrillingly betrayed, toyield their passionate secrets, unaccompanied by pleasure. Theysuffer to feel themselves so exposed, but it is an exquisite suffering. It may, indeed, be said that the strange throb of satisfaction withwhich we human beings feel ourselves _at the bottom, _ where wecannot fall lower, or be further unmasked, is never more frequentthan when we read Dostoievsky. And that is largely because healone understands _the depravity_ _of the spirit, _ as well as of theflesh, and the amazing wantonness, whereby the human will doesnot always seek its own realization and well-being, but quite asoften its own laceration and destruction. 

Dostoievsky has, indeed, a demonic power of revelation in regard tothat twilight of the human brain, where lurk the phantoms ofunsatisfied desire, and where unspoken lusts stretch forth pitiablehands. There are certain human experiences which the conventionalmachinery of ordinary novel-writing lacks all language to express. He expresses these, not in tedious analysis, but in the living cries, and gasps, and gestures, and fumblings and silences of his charactersthemselves. Who, like Dostoievsky, has shown the tragic associationof passionate love with passionate hate, which is so frequent ahuman experience?

This monstrous _hate-love, _ caressing the bruises itself has made, and shooting forth a forked viper-tongue of cruelty from betweenthe lips that kiss--has anyone but he held it fast, through all itsProtean changes? I suppose, when one really thinks of it, at thebottom of every one of us lurk two _primary emotions_--vanity andfear. It is in their knowledge of the aberrations of these, of the madcontortions that these lead to, that the other writers seem soespecially simple-minded. Over and over again, in readingDostoievsky, one is positively seized by the throat withastonishment at the man's insight into the labyrinthian retreats of oursecret pride--and of our secret fear. His characters, at certainmoments, seem actually to spit gall and wormwood, as they tug atthe quivering roots of one another's self-esteem. But this fermentingvenom, this seething scum, is only the expression of what goes onbelow the surface every day, in every country. 

Dostoievsky's Russians are cruelly voluble, but their volubility tapsthe evil humour of the universal human disease. Their thoughts are_our_ thoughts, their obsessions, _our_ obsessions. Let no one think, in his vain security, that he has a right to say: "I have no part in thismorbidity. I am different from these poor madmen. "

The curious nervous relief we experience as we read these books isalone a sufficient vindication. They relieve us, as well as trouble us, because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessedto anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strangeaccompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, aburden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in thissense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woventhe stuff whereof men are made. 

Certainly the Russian soul has its peculiarities, and thesepeculiarities we feel in Dostoievsky as nowhere else. He, not Tolstoior Turgenieff, is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity ofthe Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all menfeel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but auniversal writer. From the French point of view he may seemwanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view hemay seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantageover both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer, except, perhaps, Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever approached it. He writes with human nerves upon parchment made of human tissue, and "abyssum evocat abyssum, " from the darkness wherein hemoves. 

Among other things, Dostoievsky's insight is proved by theprofound separation he indicates between "morality" and "religion. "To many of us it comes with something of a shock to find harlotsand murderers and robbers and drunkards and seducers and idiotsexpressing genuine and passionate religious faith, and discussingwith desperate interest religious questions. But it is _our_psychology that is shallow and inhuman, not his, and the presence ofreal religious feeling in a nature obsessed with the maddest lusts is aphenomenon of universal experience. It may, indeed, be said thatwhat is most characteristically Russian in his point of view--he hastold us so himself--is the substitution of what might be called"sanctity" for what is usually termed "morality, " as an ideal of life. The "Christianity" of which Dostoievsky has the key is nothing ifnot an ecstatic invasion of regions where ordinary moral laws, basedupon prudence and self-preservation, disappear, and give place tosomething else. The secret of it, beyond repentance and remorse, liesin the transforming power of "love;" lies, in fact, in "vision" purgedby pity and terror; but its precise nature is rather to be felt thandescribed. 

It is in connection with this Christianity of his, a Christianitycompletely different from what we are accustomed to, that we findthe explanation of his extraordinary interest in the "weak" asopposed to the "strong. " The association between Christianity and acertain masterful, moral, self-assertive energy, such as we feel thepresence of in England and America, might well tend to make itdifficult for us to understand his meaning. It is precisely this sort ofthing that makes it difficult for us to understand Russia and theRussian religion. 

But as one reads Dostoievsky it is impossible to escape a suspicionthat we Western nations have as yet only touched the fringe of whatthe Christian Faith is capable of, whether considered as a cosmicsecret or as a Nepenthe for human suffering. 

He saw, with clairvoyant distinctness, how large a part of theimpetus of life's movement proceeds from the mad struggle, alwaysgoing on, between the strong and the weak. It was his emphasisupon this struggle that helped Nietzsche to those witheringexposures of "the tyranny of the weak" which cleared the path forhis terrific transvaluations. It was Dostoievsky's demonic insightinto the pathological sub-soil of the Religion of Pity which helpedNietzsche to forge his flashing counterblasts, but though their visionof the "general situation" thus coincided, their conclusions werediametrically different. For Nietzsche the hope of humanity is foundin the strong; for Dostoievsky it is found in the weak. Their onlyground of agreement is that they both refute the insolent claims ofmediocrity and normality. 

One of the most arresting "truths" that emerge, like silvery fish, atthe end of the line of this Fisher in the abysses is the "truth" that anykind of departure from the Normal may become a means of mysticillumination. The same perversion or contortion of mind which may, in one direction, lead to crime may, in another direction, lead toextraordinary spiritual clairvoyance. And this applies to _all_deviations from the normal type, and to all moods and inclinationsin normal persons under unusual excitement or strain. The theory is, as a matter of fact, as old as the oldest races. In Egypt and India, aswell as in Rome and Athens, the gods were always regarded as insome especial way manifesting their will, and revealing their secrets, to those thus stricken. The view that wisdom is attained along thepath of normal health and rational sanity has always been a"philosophical" and never a "religious" view. Dostoievsky'sdominant idea has, indeed, many affinities with the Pauline one, andis certainly a quite justifiable derivation from the Evangelicaldoctrine. It is, however, none the less startling to our Western mind. 

In Dostoievsky's books, madmen, idiots, drunkards, consumptives, degenerates, visionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, nympholepts, criminals and saints jostle one another in a sort of "Danse Macabre, "but not one of them but has his moment of ecstasy. The very worstof them, that little band of fantastic super-men of lust, whoseextravagant manias and excesses of remorse suggest attitudes andgestures that would need an Aubrey Beardsley for illustration, have, at moments, moods of divine sublimity. Nikolay VsyevolodovitchStavrogin, in "the Possessed;" Svridigilaiof Dounia's would-beseducer, in "Crime and Punishment, " and Ivan, in "the BrothersKaramazov, " though all inspired by ten thousand demons, cannot becalled devoid of a certain mysterious spiritual greatness. Perhaps theinteresting thing about them is that their elaborate wickedness isitself a _spiritual_ rather than a _sensual_ quality, or, to put it inanother way, there are abysmal depths of spiritual subtlety in theirmost sensual obsession. The only entirely _base_ criminal I canrecall in Dostoievsky is Stavrogin's admirer, Peter Stepanovitch, andhe is transformed and transfigured at times by the sheer intensity ofhis worship for his friend. It would be overpowering the reader withnames, themselves like ritualistic incantations, to enumerate all theperverts and abnormalists whose various lapses and diseases become, in these books, mediums of spiritual insight. Though dealingcontinually with every form of tragedy and misery, Dostoievskycannot be called a Pessimist. He is so profoundly affected by thespirit of the Evangelical "Beatitudes" that for him "poverty" and"meekness" and "hungering and thirsting" and "weeping andmourning" are always in the true sense "blessed"--that is to say, theyare the path of initiation, the sorrowful gates to the unspeakable joy. 

The most beautiful characters he has drawn are, perhaps, AlyoshaKaramazov and Prince Myshkin; both of these being young men, and both of them so Christ-like, that in reading about them one iscompelled to acknowledge that something in the temper of thatFigure, hitherto concealed from His followers, has beencommunicated to this Russian. The naive, and yet ironical, artlessness of their retorts to the aggressive Philistines who surroundthem remind one over and over again of those Divine "bon-mots"with which, to use Oscar Wilde's allusion, the Redeemer bewilderedHis assailants. Stephan Trophinovitch reading the Miracle of theSwine with his female Colporteur; Raskolnikoff reading the Miracleof the Raising of Lazarus with his prostitute Sonia, are scenes thatmight strike an English mind as mere melodramatic sentiment, butthose who have entered into the Dostoievsky secret know how muchmore than that there is in them, and how deep into the mystery ofthings and the irony of things they go. One is continually comingupon passages in Dostoievsky the strange and ambiguous nature ofwhich leads one's thought far enough from Evangelical simplicities;passages that are, indeed, at once so beautiful and so sinister thatthey make one think of certain demonic sayings of Goethe orSpinoza; and yet even these passages do no more than throw newand formidable light upon the "old situations, " the old "cross-roads. "Dostoievsky is not content with indicating how weakness anddisease and suffering can become organs of vision; he goes veryfar--further than anyone--in his recognition of the secret and pervertedcruelty that drives certain persons on to lacerate themselves with allmanner of spiritual flagellation. 

He understands, better than anyone else, how absurd thephilosophical utilitarians are with their axiom that everyonepursueshis own happiness. He exposes over and over again, withnerve-rending subtlety, how intoxicating to the human spirit is the madlust of self-immolation, of self-destruction. It is really from him thatNietzsche learnt that wanton Dionysic talisman which opens thedoor to such singular spiritual orgies. 

Nothing is more characteristic of Dostoievsky's method than hisperpetual insistence upon the mania which certain curious humantypes display for "making fools of themselves. " The more sacredaspects of this deliberate self-humiliation require no comment. It isobviously good for our spirit's salvation to be made Fools in Christ. What one has to observe further, under his guidance, is the strangepassion that certain derelicts in the human vortex have for beingtrampled upon and flouted. These queer people--but there are moreof them than one would suppose--derive an almost sensual pleasurefrom being abominably treated. They positively lick the dust beforetheir persecutors. They run to "kiss the rod. " It is this type of personwho, like the hero in that story in "L'Esprit Souterrain, " deliberatelyrushes into embarrassing situations; into situations and amongpeople where he will look a fool--in order to avenge himself uponthe spectators of his "folly" by going deeper and deeper into it. 

If Dostoievsky astounds us by his insight into the abnormalities of"normal" men, he is still more startling when he deals with women. There are certain scenes--the scene between Aglaia and Nastasya in"The Idiot;" the scene between Sonia and the mother and sister ofRaskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment;" the scene in "ThePossessed" where Liza leaves Stavrogin on the morning after the fire;and the scene where the woman, loved by the mad Karamazovbrothers, tears her nerves and theirs to pieces, in outrageousobliquity--which brand themselves upon the mind as reaching theuttermost limit of devasting vision. 

In reviewing the final impression left upon one by the reading ofDostoievsky one must confess to many curious reactions. Hecertainly has the power of making all other novelists seem dull incomparison; dull--or artistic and rhetorical. Perhaps the most markedeffect he has is to leave one with the feeling of a universe _withmany doors;_ with many doors, and not a few terrifyingly darkpassages; but a universe the opposite of "closed" or "explained. "Though not a single one of his books ends "happily, " the finalimpression is the reverse of hopeless. His very mania for tragedy, his Dionysic embracing of it, precludes any premature despair. Perhaps a profound deepening of one's sense of the mysterious_perversity_ of all human fate is the thing that lingers, a perversitywhich is itself a kind of redemption, for it implies arbitrariness andwaywardness, and these things mean power and pleasure, even inthe midst of suffering. 

He is the best possible antidote for the peculiar and paralysingfatalism of our time, a fatalism which makes so much of"environment" and so little of "character, " and which tends to endowmere worldly and material success with a sort of divine prerogative. A generation that allows itself to be even _interested_ in such typesas the "strong, " efficient craftsmen of modern industry and financeis a generation that can well afford a few moral shocks at the handsof Dostoievsky's "degenerates. " The world he reveals is, after all, inspite of the Russian names, the world of ordinary human obliquity. The thing for which we have to thank him is that it is made so richand deep, so full of fathomless pits and unending vistas. 

Every great writer brings his own gift, and if others satisfy ourcraving for destruction and beauty, and yet others our longing forsimplification and rational form, the suggestions he brings ofmystery and passion, of secret despairs and occult ecstasies, ofstrange renunciations and stranger triumphs, are such as mustquicken our sense of the whole weird game. Looking back overthese astonishing books, it is curious to note the impression left ofDostoievsky's feeling for "Nature. " No writer one has met with hasless of that tendency to "describe scenery, " which is so tedious anaspect of most modern work. And yet Russian scenery, and Russianweather, too, seem somehow, without our being aware of it, to havegot installed in our brains. Dostoievsky does it incidentally, byinnumerable little side-touches and passing allusions, but the generaleffect remains in one's mind with extraordinary intimacy. The greatRussian cities in Summer and Winter, their bridges, rivers, squares, and crowded tenements; the quaint Provincial towns and waysidevillages; the desolate outskirts of half-deserted suburbs; and, beyondthem all, the feeling of the vast, melancholy plains, crossed bylonely roads; such things, associated in detail after detail with thepassions or sorrows of the persons involved, recur as inveterately tothe memory as the scenes and weather of our own personaladventures. It is not the self-conscious _art_ of a Loti or aD'Annunzio; it is that much more penetrating and imaginative_suggestiveness_ which arrests us by its vague beauty and terror inLear or Macbeth. This subtle inter-penetration between humanityand the familiar Stage of its "exits and entrances" is only one portionof the weight of "cosmic" destiny--one can use no otherword--which bears so heavily upon us as we read these books. In otherwriters one feels that when one has gone "full circle" with theprincipal characters, and has noted the "descriptive setting" all hasbeen done. Here, as in Aeschylus and Euripides, as in Shakespeareand Goethe, one is left with an intimation of the clash of forcesbeyond and below humanity, beyond and below nature. One standsat the brink of things unspoken and unspeakable. One "sees thechildren sport upon the shore, and hears the mighty waters rollingevermore. "

In ordinary life we are led, and rightly led--what else can we do?--thisway and that by personal feeling and taste and experience. Wefight for Religion or fight against Religion. We fight for Morality orfight against Morality. We are Traditionalists or Rebels, Reactionaries or Revolutionaries. Only sometimes, in the fury of ourFaith and our Un-Faith, there come, blown across the world-margins, whispers and hints of undreamed of secrets, of unformulated hopes. Then it is that the faces of the people and things we know growstrange and distant, or yield their place to faces we know not andthings "lighter than air. " Then it is that the most real seems the mostdream-like, and the most impossible the most true, for the flowing ofthe waters of Life have fallen into a new rhythm, and even thechildren of Saturn may lift up their hearts!

It is too fatally easy, in these days, when machinery--that "Starcalled Wormwood"--dominates the world, to fall into a state of hardand flippant cynicism, or into a yet more hopeless and weary irony. The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; thedisingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with suchblank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only moodworthy of normal intelligence were the mood of callous indifferenceand universal mockery. 

All men are liars, and "the Ultimate Futility" grins horribly from itsmask. Well! It is precisely at these hours, at the hours when the littlepincers of the gods especially nip and squeeze, that it is good to turnthe pages of Fyodor Dostoievsky. He brings us his "Balm of Gilead"between the hands of strange people, but it is a true "alabaster box ofprecious ointment, " and though the flowers it contains are snatchedfrom the House of the Dead, one knows at whose feet it was oncepoured forth, and for whose sake it was broken!

The books that are the most valuable in this world are not the booksthat pretend to solve life's mystery with a system. They are thebooks which create a certain mood, a certain temper--the mood, infact, which is prepared for incredible surprises--the temper which nosurprise can overpower. These books of Dostoievsky must alwaystake their place in this great roll, because, though he arrives at noconclusion and utters no oracle, the atmosphere he throws round usis the atmosphere in which Life and Death are "equal;" the gestureshis people make, in their great darkness, are the gestures of _thatwhich goes upon its way, _ beyond Good and beyond Evil!

Dostoievsky is more than an artist. He is, perhaps--who can tell?--thefounder of a new religion. And yet the religion he "founds" is areligion which has been about us for more years than human historycan count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near--toopalpable--O Christ! The terror of it!--that shadowy, monstrousweight of oppressive darkness, through which we signal to eachother from our separate Hells. _It_ sways and wavers, it gathers andre-gathers, it thickens and deepens, it lifts and sinks, and we knowall the while that it is the Thing we ourselves have made, and theintolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our ownthoughts, of our lusts, of our fears, of our terrible creative dreams. 

Dostoievsky's books seem, as one handles them, to flowmysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of theLast Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full ofdesolate marshes, and forlorn spaces, and hemlock-roots, anddrowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards andunutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmostselves, and for which we are _answerable_ and none else. 

Across this Land we wander, feeling for some fingers, cold and deadas our own, to share that terror with, and, it may be, finding none, for as we have groped forward we have been pitiless in the darkness, and, half-dead ourselves, have trodden the dead down, and the deadare those who cannot forgive; for murdered "love" has no heartwherewith it should forgive:--_Will the Christ never come?_

EDGAR ALLEN POE

One does not feel, by any means, that the last word has been utteredupon this great artist. Has attention been called, for instance, to thesardonic cynicism which underlies his most thrilling effects? Poe'scynicism is itself a very fascinating pathological subject. It is anelaborate thing, compounded of many strange elements. There is acertain dark, wilful melancholy in it that turns with loathing from allhuman comfort. There is also contempt in it, and savage derision. There is also in it a quality of mood that I prefer to call_Saturnian_--the mood of those born under the planet Saturn. There iscruelty in it, too, and voluptuous cruelty, though cold, reserved, andevasive. It is this "cynicism" of his which makes it possible for himto introduce into his poetry--it is of his poetry that I wish to speak--acertain colloquial salt, pungent and acrid, and with the smell of thetomb about it. It is colloquialism; but it is such colloquialism asghosts or vampires would use. 

Poe remains--that has been already said, has it not?--absolutely coldwhile he produces his effects. There is a frozen contempt indicatedin every line he writes for the poor facile artists "who speak withtears. " Yet the moods through which his Annabels and Ligeias andUlalumes lead us are moods he must surely himself have known. Yes, he knew them; but they were, so to speak, so completely theatmosphere he lived in that there was no need for him to be carriedout of himself when he wrote of them; no need for anything but icy, pitiless transcription. Has it been noticed how inhumanly immoralthis great poet is? Not because he drank wine or took drugs. All thathas been exaggerated, and, anyway, what does it matter now? But ina much deeper and more deadly sense. It is strange! The worldmakes such odd blunders. It seems possessed of the idea that absurdamorous scamps like Casanova reach the bottom of wickedness. They do not even approach it. Intrinsically they are quite stupidly"good. " Then, again, Byron is supposed to have been a wicked man. He himself aspired to be nothing less. But he was everything less. He was a great, greedy, selfish, swaggering, magnanimous infant!Oscar Wilde is generally regarded as something short of "the justman made perfect, " but his simple, babyish passion for touchingpretty things, toying with pretty people, wearing pretty clothes, anddrinking absinthe, is far too naive a thing to be, at bottom, _evil. _No really wicked person could have written "The Importance ofBeing Earnest, " with those delicious, paradoxical children rallyingone another, and "Aunt Augusta" calling aloud for cucumber-sandwiches!Salome itself--that Scarlet Litany--which brings to us, asin a box of alabaster, all the perfumes and odours of amorous lust, is not really a "wicked" play; not wicked, that is to say, unless allmad passion is wicked. Certainly the lust in "Salome" smoulders andglows with a sort of under-furnace of concentration, but, after all, itis the old, universal obsession. Why is it more wicked to say, "Sufferme to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan!" than to say, "Her lips suck forthmy soul--see where it flies!"? Why is it more wicked to say, "Thineeyes are like black holes, burnt by torches in Tyrian tapestry!" thanto cry out, as Antony cries out, for the hot kisses of Egypt?Obviously the madness of physical desire is a thing that can hardlybe tempered down to the quiet stanzas of Gray's Elegy. But it is notin itself a wicked thing; or the world would never have consecratedit in the great Love-Legends. One may admit that the entrance of theNubian Executioner changes the situation; but, after all, the frenzyof the girl's request--the terror of that Head upon the silvercharger--were implicit in her passion from the beginning; and are, God knows! never very far from passion of that kind. 

But all this is changed when we come to Edgar Allen Poe. Here weare no longer in Troy or Antioch or Canopus or Rimini. Here it isnot any more a question of ungovernable passion carried to the limitof madness. Here it is no more the human, too human, tradition ofeach man "killing" the "thing he loves. " Here we are in a worldwhere the human element, in passion, has altogether departed, andleft something else in its place; something which is really, in the truesense, "inhumanly immoral. " In the first place, it is a thing devoid ofany physical emotion. It is sterile, immaterial, unearthly, ice-cold. Inthe second place, it is, in a ghastly sense, self-centered! It feeds uponitself. It subdues everything to itself. Finally, let it be said, it is athing with a mania for Corruption. The Charnel-House is its bridal-couch, and the midnight stars whisper to one another of its perversion. There is no need for it "to kill the thing it loves, " for itloves only what is already dead. _Favete linguis!_ There must be noprofane misinterpretation of this subtle and delicate difference. Inanalysing the evasive chemistry of a great poet's mood, one moveswarily, reverently, among a thousand betrayals. The mind of such abeing is as the sand-strewn floor of a deep sea. In this sea we poordivers for pearls, and _stranger things, _ must hold our breath longand long, as we watch the great glittering fish go sailing by, andtouch the trailing, rose-coloured weeds, and cross the buried coral. Itmay be that no one will believe us, when we return, about what wehave seen! About those carcanets of rubies round drowned throatsand those opals that shimmered and gleamed in dead men's skulls!

At any rate, the most superficial critic of Poe's poetry must admitthat every single one of his great verses, except the little one "toHelen, " is pre-occupied with Death. Even in that Helen one, perhapsthe loveliest, though, I do not think, the most _characteristic, _ of all, the poet's desire is to make of the girl he celebrates a sort of ClassicOdalisque, round whose palpable contours and lines he may hangthe solemn ornaments of the Dead--of the Dead to whom his soulturns, even while embracing the living! Far, far off, from where thereal Helen waits, so "statue-like"--the "agate lamp" in her hands--waversthe face of that other Helen, the face "that launched a thousandships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium. "

The longer poem under the same title, and apparently addressed tothe same sorceress, is more entirely "in his mood. " Those shadowy, moon-lit "parterres, " those living roses--Beardsley has planted themsince in another "enchanted garden"--and those "eyes, " that grow soluminously, so impossibly large, until it is almost pain to be "saved"by them--these things are in Poe's true manner; for it is not "Helen"that he has ever loved, but her body, her corpse, her ghost, hermemory, her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach! And these thingsnone can take from him. The maniacal egoism of a love of this kind--itsfrozen inhumanity--can be seen even in those poems whichstretch yearning hands towards Heaven. In "Annabel Lee, " forinstance, in that sea-kingdom where the maiden lived who had nothought--who _must_ have no thought--"but to love and be loved byme"--what madness of implacable possession, in that "so all thenight-tide I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my lifeand my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by thesounding sea!"

The same remorseless "laying on of hands" upon what God himselfcannot save from us may be discerned in that exquisite little poemwhich begins:

 "Thou wast all to me, love, For which my soul did pine; A green isle in the Sea, love, A Fountain and a Shrine All wreathed with Fairy fruits and flowers; And all the flowers were mine!"

That "dim-gulf" o'er which "the spirit lies, mute, motionless, aghast"--how well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in thosedays of his which are "trances, " and in those "nightly dreams" whichare all he lives for, he is with her; with her still, with her always;

 "In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams!"

The essence of "immorality" does not lie in mad Byronic passion, orin terrible Herodian lust. It lies in a certain deliberate "petrifaction"of the human soul in us; a certain glacial detachment from allinterests save one; a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with ourown emotion. And this emotion, for the sake of which every earthlyfeeling turns to ice, is our Death-hunger, our eternal craving to make_what has been_ be again, and again, forever!

The essence of immorality lies not in the hot flame of natural, oreven unnatural, desire. It lies in that inhuman and forbidden wish toarrest _the processes of life_--to lay a freezing hand--a dead hand--uponwhat we love, so that it _shall always be the same. _ The reallyimmoral thing is to isolate, from among the affections and passionsand attractions of this human world, one particular lure; and then, having endowed this with the living body of "eternal death, " to bendbefore it, like the satyr before the dead nymph in Aubrey's drawing, and murmur and mutter and shudder over it, through the eternalrecurrence of all things!

Is it any longer concealed from us wherein the "immorality" of thislies? It lies in the fact that what we worship, what we _will not, _through eternity, let go, is not a living person, but the "body" of aperson; a person who has so far been "drugged, " as not only to diefor us--that is nothing!--but to remain dead for us, through all theyears!

In his own life--with that lovely consumptive Child-bride dying byhis side--Edgar Allen Poe lived as "morally, " as rigidly, as anyMonk. The popular talk about his being a "Drug-Fiend" is ridiculousnonsense. He was a laborious artist, chiselling and refining his"artificial" poems, day in and day out. Where his "immorality" lies ismuch deeper. It is in the mind--the mind, Master Shallow!--for he isnothing if not an absolute "Cerebralist. " Certainly Poe's verses are"artificial. " They are the most artificial of all poems ever written. And this is natural, because they were the premeditated expressionof a premeditated cult. But to say they are artificial does notderogate from their genius. Would that there were more such"artificial" verses in the world!

One wonders if it is clearly understood how the "unearthly" elementin Poe differs from the "unearthly" element in Shelley. It differsfrom it precisely as Death differs from Life. 

Shelley's ethereal spiritualism--though, God knows, such grossanimals are we, it seems inhuman enough--is a passionate whiteflame. It is the thin, wavering fire-point of all our struggles afterpurity and eternity. It is a centrifugal emotion, not, as was the other's, a centripedal one. It is the noble Platonic rising from the love of onebeautiful person to the love of many beautiful persons; and from thatonward, through translunar gradations, to the love of the supremeBeauty itself. Shelley's "spirituality" is a living, growing, creativething. In its intrinsic nature it is not egoistic at all, but profoundlyaltruistic. It uses Sex to leave Sex behind. In its higher levels it isabsolutely Sexless. It may transcend humanity, but it springs fromhumanity. It is, in fact, humanity's dream of its own transmutation. For all its ethereality and remoteness, it yearns, "like a God in pain, "over the sorrows of the world. With infinite planetary pity, it wouldheal those sorrows. 

Edgar Allen's "spirituality" has not the least flicker of a longing to"leave Sex behind. " It is bound to Sex, as the insatiable Ghoul isbound to the Corpse he devours. It is not concerned with thephysical ecstasies of Sex. It has no interest in such human matters. But deprive it of the fact of Sex-difference, and it drifts awaywhimpering like a dead leaf, an empty husk, a wisp of chaff, askeleton gossamer. The poor, actual, warm lips, "so sweetlyforsworn, " may have had small interest for this "spiritual" lover, butnow that she is dead and buried, and a ghost, they must remain awoman's lips forever! Nor have Edgar Allen's "faithful ones" theremotest interest in what goes on around them. Occupied with theirDead, their feeling towards common flesh and blood is the feeling ofCaligula. "What have I done to thee?" that proud, reserved faceseems to say, as it looks out on us from its dusty title-page; "whathave I done to thee, that I should despise thee so?"

Shelley's clear, erotic passion is always a "cosmic" thing. It is therhythmic expression of the power that creates the world. But there isnothing "cosmic" about the enclosed gardens of Edgar Allen Poe;and the spirits that walk among those Moon-dials and dim Parterresare not of the kind who go streaming up, from land and ocean, shouting with joy that Prometheus has conquered! But what a masterhe is--what a master! In the suggestiveness of _names_--to mentiononly one thing--can anyone touch him? That word "Porphyrogene"--thename of the Ruler of, God knows what, Kingdom of the Dead--doesit not linger about one--and follow one--like the smell ofincense?

But the poem of all poems in which the very genius Edgar Allen isembodied is, of course, "Ulalume. " Like this, there is nothing; inLiterature--nothing in the whole field of human art. Here he is, frombeginning to end, a supreme artist; dealing with the subject forwhich he was born! That undertone of sardonic, cynical _humour_--forit can be called nothing else--which grins at us in the backgroundlike the grin of a Skull; how extraordinarily characteristic it is! Andthe touches of "infernal colloquialism, " so deliberately fitted in, andmaking us remember--many things!--is there anything in the worldlike them?

 "And now as the night was senescent, And the star-dials hinted of morn, At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent Arose with a duplicate horn-- Astarte's be-diamonded crescent, Distinct with its duplicate horn!"

"And I said"--but let us pass to his Companion. The cruelty of thisconversation with "Psyche" is a thing that may well make usshudder. The implication is, of course, double. Psyche is his ownsoul; the soul in him which would live, and grow, and change, andknow the "Vita Nuova. " She is also "the Companion, " to whom hehas turned for consolation. She is the Second One, the Other One, inwhose living caresses he would forget, if it might be, that which liesdown there in the darkness!

 "Then Psyche, uplifting her finger, Said, 'sadly this star I mistrust, Its pallor I strangely mistrust. O hasten! O let us not linger! O fly! Let us fly! for we must!'"

Thus the Companion; thus the Comrade; thus the "Vita Nuova"!

Now mark what follows:

 "Then I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom. And conquered her scruples and gloom. And we passed to the end of a Vista, But were stopped by the door of a Tomb. By the door of a Legended Tomb, And I said: 'What is written, sweet sister, On the door of this legended Tomb?' She replied, Ulalume--Ulalume-- Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

The end of the poem is like the beginning, and who can utter thefeelings it excites? That "dark tarn of Auber, " those "Ghoul-hauntedwoodlands of Weir" convey, more thrillingly than a thousand wordsof description, what we have actually felt, long ago, far off, in thatstrange country of our forbidden dreams. 

What a master he is! And if you ask about his "philosophy of life, "let the Conqueror Worm make answer:

 "Lo! Tis a Gala-Night Within the lonesome latter years--"

Is not that an arresting commencement? The word "Gala-Night"--hasit not the very malice of the truth of things?

Like Heine, it gave this poet pleasure not only to love the Dead, butto love feeling himself dead. That strange poem about "Annie. " withits sickeningly sentimental conclusion, where the poet lies prostrate, drugged with all the drowsy syrops in the world, and celebrates hiseuthanasia, has a quality of its own. It is the "inverse" of life's"Danse Macabre. " It is the way we poor dancers long to sleep. "Forto sleep you must slumber in just such a bed!" The old madness isover now; the old thirst quenched. It was quenched in a water that"does not flow so far underground. " And luxuriously, peacefully, wecan rest at last, with the odour of "puritan pansies" about us, andsomewhere, not far off, rosemary and rue!

Edgar Allen Poe's philosophy of Life? It may be summed up in thelines from that little poem, where he leaves her side who has, for amoment, turned his heart from the Tomb. The reader will rememberthe way it begins: "Take this kiss upon thy brow. " And theconclusion is the confusion of the whole matter:

 "All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. "

Strangely--in forlorn silence--passes before us, as we close his pages, that procession of "dead, cold Maids. " Ligeia follows Ulalume; andLenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and themoaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning ofeternity. I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion, in thereader, to know the shudder of the loss, more dear than life, of suchas these! The more normal memory of man will still continuerepeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem:

 "O daughters of dreams and of stories, That Life is not wearied of yet-- Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, Felise, and Yolande and Julette!"

Yes, Life and the Life-Lovers are enamoured still of these exquisitewitches, these philtre-bearers, these Sirens, these children of Circe. But a few among us--those who understand the poetry of EdgarAllen--turn away from them, to that rarer, colder, more virginalFigure; to Her who has been born and has died, so many times; toHer who was Ligeia and Ulalume and Helen and Lenore--for are notall these One?--to Her we have loved in vain and shall love in vainuntil the end--to Her who wears, even in the triumph of herImmortality, the close-clinging, heavily-scented cerements of theDead!

 "The old bards shall cease and their memory that lingers Of frail brides and faithless shall be shrivelled as with fire, For they loved us not nor knew us and our lips were dumb, our fingers Could wake not the secret of the lyre. Else, else, O God, the Singer, I had sung, amid their rages, The long tale of Man, And his deeds for good and ill. But the Old World knoweth--'tis the speech of all his ages-- Man's wrong and ours; he knoweth and is still. "

WALT WHITMAN

I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of allprofaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry. We all know what a splendid heroic Anarchist he was. We all knowwith what rude zest he gave himself up to that "Cosmic Emotion, " towhich in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence. We know his mania for the word "en masse, " for the words"ensemble, " "democracy" and "libertad. " We know his defiantcelebrations of Sex, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love ofComrades which "passeth the love of women. " We know the world-shakingeffort he made--and to have made it at all, quite apart fromits success, marks him a unique genius!--to write poetry about everymortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpableworld into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble atthese Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move toDorian flutes, but they form a background--like the lists of the Kingsin the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer--against which, asagainst the great blank spaces of Life itself, "the writing upon thewall" may make itself visible. 

What seems much less universally realized is the extraordinarygenius for sheer "poetry" which this Prophet of Optimism possessed. I agree that Walt Whitman's Optimism is the only kind, of that sortof thing, that one can submit to without a blush. At least it is notindecent, bourgeois, and ill-bred, like the fourth-hand Protestantismthat Browning dishes up, for the delectation of Ethical Societies. It isthe optimism of a person who has seen the American Civil War. It isthe optimism of a man who knows "the Bowery" and "the road, " andhas had queer friends in his mortal pilgrimage. 

It is an interesting psychological point, this difference between the"marching breast-forward" of Mrs. Browning's energetic husband, and the "taking to the open road" of Whitman. In some curious waythe former gets upon one's nerves where the latter does not. Perhapsit is that the boisterous animal-spirits which one appreciates in theopen air become vulgar and irritating when they are practised withinthe walls of a house. A Satyr who stretches his hairy shanks in theopen forest is a pleasant thing to see; but a gentleman, withlavender-colored gloves, putting his feet on the chimney-piece is notso appealing. No doubt it is precisely for these Domestic Exercisesthat Mr. Chesterton, let us say, would have us love Browning. Well!It is a matter of taste. 

But it is not of Walt Whitman's Optimism that I want to speak; it isof his poetry. 

To grasp the full importance of what this great man did in thissphere one has only to read modern "libre vers. " After WaltWhitman, Paul Fort, for instance, seems simply an eloquent prosewriter. And none of them can get the trick of it. None of them!Somewhere, once, I heard a voice that approached it; a voicemurmuring of

 "Those that sleep upon the wind, And those that lie along in the rain, Cursing Egypt--"

But that voice went its way; and for the rest--what banalities! Whatineptitudes! They make the mistake, our modern free-versifiers, ofthinking that Art can be founded on the Negation of Form. Art canbe founded on every other Negation. But not on that one--never onthat one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent--if theycan--new forms. But they must invent them. They must not justarrange their lines _to look like poetry, _ and leave it at that. 

Walt Whitman's New Form of Verse was, as all such things must be, as Mr. Hardy's strange poetry, for instance, is, a deliberate andlaborious struggle--ending in what is a struggle no more--to expresshis own personality in a unique and recognisable manner. This is thesecret of all "style" in poetry. And it is the absence of this labour, ofthis premeditated concentration, which leads to the curious result wesee on all sides of us, the fact, namely, that all young modern poets_write alike. _ They write alike, and they _are_ alike--just as all menare like all other men, and all women like all other women, when, without the "art" of clothing, or the "art" of flesh and blood, they liedown side by side in the free cemetery. The old poetic forms willalways have their place. They can never grow old-fashioned; anymore than Pisanello, or El Greco, or Botticelli, or Scopas, or anyancient Chinese Painter, can grow old-fashioned. But when amodern artist or poet sets to work to create a new form, let himremember what he is doing! It is not the pastime of an hour, this. Itis not the casual gesture of a mad iconoclast breaking ClassicStatues into mud, out of which to make goblins. It is the fierce, tenacious, patient, constructive work of a lifetime, based upona tremendous and overpowering Vision! Such a vision WaltWhitman had, and to such constant inspired labour he gave hislife--notwithstanding his talk about "loafing and inviting his soul"!

The "free" poetry of Walt Whitman obeys inflexible, occult laws, the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct. We need, as Nietzsche says, to learn the art of "commands" of this kind!Transvaluers of old values do not spend all their time sippingabsinthe. Is it a secret still, then, the magical unity of rhythm, whichWalt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses? Those long, plangent, wailing lines, broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs;those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions; those far-drawnflute-notes; those resounding sea-trumpets; all such effects havetheir place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts!

Take that little poem--quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bitof democratic vulgarity--which begins:

 "Come, I will build a Continent indissoluble; I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon--"

Is it possible to miss the hidden spheric law which governs such achallenge? Take the poem which begins:

 "In the growths, by the margins of pond-waters--"

Do you not divine, delicate reader, the peculiar subtlety of thatreference to the rank, rain-drenched _anonymous weeds, _ whichevery day we pass in our walks inland? A botanical name wouldhave driven the magic of it quite away. 

Walt Whitman, more than anyone, is able to convey to us that senseof the unclassified pell-mell, of weeds and stones and rubble andwreckage, of vast, desolate spaces, and spaces full of debris andlitter, which is most of all characteristic of your melancholyAmerican landscape, but which those who love England knowwhere to find, even among our trim gardens! No one like WaltWhitman can convey to us the magical _ugliness_ of certain aspectsof Nature--the bleak, stunted, God-forsaken things; the murky poolswhere the grey leaves fall; the dead reeds where the wind whistlesno sweet fairy tunes; the unspeakable margins of murderous floods;the tangled sea-drift, scurfed with scum; the black sea-winrow ofbroken shells and dead fishes' scales; the roots of willow trees inmoonlit places crying out for demon-lovers; the long, moaning grassthat grows outside the walls of prisons; the leprous mosses thatcover paupers' graves; the mountainous wastes and blightedmarshlands which only unknown wild-birds ever touch with theirflying wings, and of which madmen dream--these are the things, theugly, terrible things, that this great optimist turns into poetry. "Yohonk!" cries the wild goose, as it crosses the midnight sky. Othersmay miss that mad-tossed shadow, that heartbreaking defiance--butfrom amid the drift of leaves by the roadside, this bearded Fakir ofOutcasts has caught its meaning; has heard, and given it its answer. 

Ah, gentle and tender reader; thou whose heart, it may be has nevercried all night for what it must not name, did you think Swinburneor Byron were the poets of "love"? Perhaps you do not know that theonly "short story" on the title-page of which Guy de Maupassantfound it in him to write _that word_ is a story about the wild thingswe go out to kill?

Walt Whitman, too, does not confine his notions of love to normalhuman coquetries. The most devastating love-cry ever uttered, except that of King David over his friend, is the cry this Americanpoet dares to put into the heart of "a wild-bird from Alabama" thathas lost its mate. I wonder if critics have done justice to theincredible genius of this man who can find words for that aching ofthe soul we do not confess even to our dearest? The sudden wordshe makes use of, in certain connections, awe us, hush us, confoundus, take our breath, --as some of Shakespeare's do--with theirmysterious congruity. Has my reader ever read the little poem called"Tears"? And what _purity_ in the truest, deepest sense, lies behindhis pity for such tragic craving; his understanding of whatlove-stricken, banished ones feel. I do not speak now of his happilyamorous verses. They have their place. I speak of those desperatelines that come, here and there, throughout his work, where, with hishuge, Titanic back set against the world-wall, and his wild-tossedbeard streaming in the wind, he seems _to hold open_ by main, gigantic force that door of hope which Fate and God and Man andthe Laws of Nature are all endeavoring to close! _And he holds itopen!_ And it is open still. It is for this reason--let the profane holdtheir peace!--that I do not hesitate to understand very clearly why headdresses a certain poem to the Lord Christ! Whether it be true ornot that the Pure in Heart see God, it is certainly true that they havea power of saving us from God's Law of Cause and Effect!According to this Law, we all "have our reward" and reap what wehave sown. But sometimes, like a deep-sea murmur, there rises fromthe poetry of Walt Whitman a Protest that _must_ be heard! Then itis that the Tetrarchs of Science forbid in vain "that one should raisethe Dead. " For the Dead are raised up, and come forth, even in thelikeness wherein we loved them! If words, my friends; if the use ofwords in poetry can convey such intimations as these to such ageneration as ours, can anyone deny that Walt Whitman is a greatpoet?

Deny it, who may or will. There will always gather round him--as hepredicted--out of City-Tenements and Artist-Studios and Factory-Shopsand Ware-Houses and Bordelloes--aye! and, it may be, out ofthe purlieus of Palaces themselves--a strange, mad, heart-brokencompany of life-defeated derelicts, who come, not for CosmicEmotion or Democracy or Anarchy or Amorousness, or even"Comradeship, " but for that touch, that whisper, that word, that handoutstretched in the darkness, which makes them _know_--againstreason and argument and all evidence--that they may hope still--_forthe Impossible is true!_

CONCLUSION

We have been together, you who read this--and to you, whoever youare, whether pleased or angry, I make a comrade's signal. Whoknows? We might be the very ones to understand each other, if wemet! We have been together, in the shadow of the presences thatmake life tolerable; and now we must draw our conclusion and goour way. 

Our conclusion? Ah! that is a hard matter. The world we live inlends itself better to beginnings than conclusions. Or does anything, in this terrible flowing tide, even _begin_? End or beginning, wefind ourselves floating upon it--this great tide--and we must do whatwe can to get a clear glimpse of the high stars before we sink. Iwonder if, in the midst of the stammered and blurted incoherences, the lapses and levities, of this quaint book, a sort of "orientation, " asthe theologians say now, has emerged at all? I feel, myself, asthough it had, though it is hard enough to put it into words. I seem tofeel that a point of view, not altogether irrelevant in our time, hasprojected a certain light upon us, as we advanced together. 

Let me try to catch some few filmy threads of this before it vanishes, even though, like a dream in the waking, its outlines waver andrecede and fade, until it is lost in space. We gather, then, I fancy, from this kind of hurried passing through enchanted gardens, a sortof curious unwillingness to let our "fixed convictions" deprive usany more of the spiritual adventures to which we have a right. Webegin to understand the danger of such convictions, of such opinions, of such "constructive consistency. " We grow prepared to "giveourselves up" to "yield ourselves willingly, " to whatever newRevelation of the Evasive One chance may throw in our way. It is insuch yieldings, such surprises by the road, such new vistas andperspectives, that life loves to embody itself. To refuse them is toturn away from Life and dwell in the kingdom of the shadow. 

"Why not?" the Demon who has presided over our wanderingstogether seems to whisper--"why not for a little while try theexperiment of having no 'fixed ideas, ' no 'inflexible principles, ' no'concentrated aim'? Why not simply react to one mysterious visitorafter another, as they approach us, and caress or hurt us, and go theirway? Why not, for an interlude, be Life's children, instead of herslaves or her masters, and let Her lead us, the great crafty Mother, whither she will?"

There will be much less harm done by such an embracing of Fate, and such a cessation of foolish agitations, than many might suppose. And more than anything else, this is what our generation requires!We are over-ridden by theorists and preachers and ethicalwater-carriers; we need a little rest--a little yawning and stretching and"being ourselves"; a little quiet sitting at the feet of the ImmortalGods. We need to forget to be troubled, for a brief interval, if theImmortal Gods speak in strange and variable tongues, and offer usdiverse-shaped chalices. Let us drink, dear friends, let us drink, asthe most noble prophetess Bacbuc used to say! There are manyvintages in the kingdom of Beauty; and yet others--God knows!even outside that. Let us drink, and ask no troublesome questions. The modern puritan seeks to change the nature of our naturallonging. He tells us that what we need is not less labor but morelabor, not less "concentrated effort, " but more "concentrated effort";not "Heaven, " in fact, but "Hell. "

I do not know. There is much affectation abroad, and somehypocrisy. Puritans were ever addicted to hypocrisy. But because ofthese "virtuous" prophets of "action, " are we to give up our BeatificVision? Why not be honest for once, and confess that what Man, born of Woman, craves for in his heart is a little joy, a littlehappiness, a little pleasure, before "he goes hence and is no moreseen"? We know that we know nothing. Why, then, pretend that weknow the importance of being "up and doing"? There may be nosuch importance. The common burden of life we have, indeed, all tobear--and they are not very gracious or lovely souls who seek to putit off on others--but for this additional burden, this burden of "beingconsistent" and having a "strong character, " does it seem very wise, in so brief an interval, to put the stress just there?

Somehow I think a constant dwelling in the company of the "greatmasters" leads us to take with a certain "pinch of salt" the strenuous"duties" which the World's voices make so clamorous! It may bethat our sense of their greatness and remoteness produces a certain"humility" in us, and a certain mood of "waiting on the Spirit, " notaltogether encouraging to what this age, in its fussy worship ofenergy, calls "our creative work. " Well! There is a place doubtlessfor these energetic people, and their strenuous characters, and their"creative work. " But I think there is a place also for those whocannot rush about the market-place, or climb high Alps, or makeengines spin, or race, with girded loins, after "Truth. " I think there isa place still left for harmless spectators in this Little Theatre of theUniverse, And such spectators will do well if they see to it thatnothing of the fine or the rare or the exquisite escapes them. Somebody must have the discrimination and the detachmentnecessary to do justice to our "creative minds. " The worst of it is, everybody in these days rushes off to "create, " and pauses not amoment to look round to see whether what is being created is worthcreating!

We must return to the great masters; we must return to the things inlife that really matter; and then we shall acquire, perhaps, in ourlittle way the art of keeping the creators of ugliness at a distance!

Let us at least be honest. The world is a grim game, and we needsometimes the very courage of Lucifer to hold our enemies back. But in the chaos of it all, and the madness and frenzy, let usat least hold fast to that noble daughter of the gods men name_Imagination. _ With that to aid us, we can console ourselves formany losses, for many defeats. For the life of the Imagination flowsdeep and swift, and in its flowing it can bear us to undreamed-ofcoasts, where the children of fantasy and the children of irony danceon--heedless of theory and argument. 

The world is deep, as Zarathustra says, and deep is pain; and deeperthan pain is joy. I do not think that they have reached the final clue, even with their talk of "experience" and "struggle" and the "stormingof the heights. " Sometimes it is not from "experience, " but frombeyond experience, that the rumour comes. Sometimes it is not fromthe "struggle, " but from the "rest" after the struggle, that the whisperis given. Sometimes the voice comes to us, not from the "heights, "but from the depths. 

The truth seems to be that if the clue is to be caught at all, it will becaught where we least expect it; and, for the catching of it, what wehave to do is not to let our theories, our principles, our convictions, our opinions, impede our vision--but now and then to lay them aside;but whether with them or without them, to be _prepared_--for theSpirit bloweth where it listeth and we cannot tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth!

ERRATA

For Edgar Allen Poe read Edgar Allan Poe. 

Page 33, line 1, for "and goose-girls. These are the things" read "andgoose-girls--these are the things. "

Page 33, line 19, for "Penetre" read "Peut-etre. "

Page 50, line 10, for "iron" read "urn. "

Page 59, line 16, for "De Vinci" read "Da Vinci. "

Page 129, line 8, for "Berwick" read "Bewick. "

Page 138, line 25, for "Cabbalistic" read "Cabalistic. "

Page 268/269, line 30, and line 1, for "dim-gulf, " etc, read "Thatdim-gulf o'er which The spirit lies, mute, motionless, aghast--howwell, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those days, " etc. 

Page 270, line 20, for Celebralist read Cerebralist. 

Page 285, line 12, for "long-drawn" read "far-drawn. "