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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14637 ***
+
+ASPECTS OF
+LITERATURE
+
+J. MIDDLETON MURRY
+
+
+NEW YORK:
+ALFRED A. KNOPF
+MCMXX
+
+
+Copyright, 1920
+
+_Printed in Great Britain_
+
+
+
+TO
+BRUCE RICHMOND
+TO WHOSE GENEROUS ENCOURAGEMENT
+I OWE SO MUCH
+
+
+
+
+_Preface_
+
+
+Two of these essays, 'The Function of Criticism' and 'The Religion of
+Rousseau,' were contributed to the _Times Literary Supplement_; that on
+'The Poetry of Edward Thomas' in the _Nation_; all the rest save one
+have appeared in the _Athenæum_.
+
+The essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, with
+two exceptions. The second part of the essay on Tchehov has been placed
+with the first for convenience, although in order of thought it should
+follow the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness.' More important, I have
+placed 'The Function of Criticism' first although it was written last,
+because it treats of the broad problem of literary criticism, suggests a
+standard of values implicit elsewhere in the book, and thus to some
+degree affords an introduction to the remaining essays.
+
+But the degree is not great, as the critical reader will quickly
+discover for himself. I ask him not to indulge the temptation of
+convicting me out of my own mouth. I am aware that my practice is often
+inconsistent with my professions; and I ask the reader to remember that
+the professions were made after the practice and to a considerable
+extent as the result of it. The practice came first, and if I could
+reasonably expect so much of the reader I would ask him to read 'The
+Function of Criticism' once more when he has reached the end of the
+book.
+
+I make no apology for not having rewritten the essays. As a critic I
+enjoy nothing more than to trace the development of a writer's attitude
+through its various phases; I could do no less than afford my readers
+the opportunity of a similar enjoyment in my own case. They may be
+assured that none of the essays have suffered any substantial
+alteration, even where, for instance in the case of the incidental and
+(I am now persuaded) quite inadequate estimate of Chaucer in 'The
+Nostalgia of Mr Masefield,' my view has since completely changed. Here
+and there I have recast expressions which, though not sufficiently
+conveying my meaning, had been passed in the haste of journalistic
+production. But I have nowhere tried to adjust earlier to later points
+of view. I am aware that these points of view are often difficult to
+reconcile; that, for instance, 'æsthetic' in the essay on Tchehov has a
+much narrower meaning than it bears in 'The Function of Criticism'; that
+the essay on 'The Religion of Rousseau' is criticism of a kind which I
+deprecate as insufficient in the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness,'
+because it lacks that reference to life as a whole which I have come to
+regard as essential to criticism; and that in this latter essay I use
+the word 'moral' (for instance in the phrase 'The values of literature
+are in the last resort moral') in a sense which is never exactly
+defined. The key to most of these discrepancies will, I hope, be found
+in the introductory essay on 'The Function of Criticism.'
+
+_May_, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Contents_
+
+
+THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM                    1
+
+THE RELIGION OF ROUSSEAU                    15
+
+THE POETRY OF EDWARD THOMAS                 29
+
+MR YEATS'S SWAN SONG                        39
+
+THE WISDOM OF ANATOLE FRANCE                46
+
+GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS                       52
+
+THE PROBLEM OF KEATS                        62
+
+THOUGHTS ON TCHEHOV                         76
+
+AMERICAN POETRY                             91
+
+RONSARD                                     99
+
+SAMUEL BUTLER                              107
+
+THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY                 121
+
+THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ENGLISH POETRY    139
+
+THE NOSTALGIA OF MR MASEFIELD              150
+
+THE LOST LEGIONS                           157
+
+THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS                  167
+
+POETRY AND CRITICISM                       176
+
+COLERIDGE'S CRITICISM                      184
+
+SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM                      194
+
+
+
+
+_The Function of Criticism_
+
+
+It is curious and interesting to find our younger men of letters
+actively concerned with the present condition of literary criticism.
+This is a novel preoccupation for them and one which is, we believe,
+symptomatic of a general hesitancy and expectation. In the world of
+letters everything is a little up in the air, volatile and
+uncrystallised. It is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite of
+outward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half a
+dozen years ago. Then one had a tolerable certainty that the new star,
+if the new star was to appear, would burst upon our vision in the shape
+of a novel. To-day we feel it might be anything. The cloud no bigger
+than a man's hand might even be, like Trigorin's in 'The Sea-gull,' like
+a piano; it has no predetermined form.
+
+This sense of incalculability, which has been aroused by the prodigious
+literary efflorescence of late years, reacts upon its cause; and the
+reaction tends by many different paths to express itself finally in the
+ventilation of problems that hinge about criticism. There is a general
+feeling that the growth of the young plant has been too luxuriant; a
+desire to have it vigorously pruned by a capable gardener, in order that
+its strength may be gathered together to produce a more perfect fruit.
+There is also a sense that if the _lusus naturæ_, the writer of genius,
+were to appear, there ought to be a person or an organisation capable of
+recognising him, however unexpected his scent or the shape of his
+leaves. Both these tasks fall upon criticism. The younger generation
+looks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a gardener whom
+it can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that there is
+none.
+
+There is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we have
+learned to respect. There are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but no
+critics, says another disrespectful young man. Oh, for some more Scotch
+Reviewers to settle the hash of our English bards, sighs a third. And
+the _London Mercury_, after whetting our appetite by announcing that it
+proposed to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, still
+leaves us a little in the dark as to what these standards are. Mr T.S.
+Eliot deals more kindly, if more frigidly, with us in the _Monthly
+Chapbook_. There are, he says, three kinds of criticism--the historical,
+the philosophic, and the purely literary.
+
+    'Every form of genuine criticism is directed towards creation. The
+    historical or philosophic critic of poetry is criticising poetry in
+    order to create a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is
+    criticising poetry in order to create poetry.'
+
+These separate and distinct kinds, he considers, are but rarely found
+to-day, even in a fragmentary form; where they do exist, they are almost
+invariably mingled in an inextricable confusion.
+
+Whether we agree or not with the general condemnation of reviewing
+implicit in this survey of the situation, or with the division of
+criticism itself, we have every reason to be grateful to Mr Eliot for
+disentangling the problem for us. The question of criticism has become
+rather like Glaucus the sea-god, encrusted with shells and hung with
+weed till his lineaments are hardly discernible. We have at least clear
+sight of him now, and we are able to decide whether we will accept Mr
+Eliot's description of him. Let us see.
+
+We have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism of
+literature is a kind apart. The historical critic approaches literature
+as the manifestation of an evolutionary process in which all the phases
+are of equal value. Essentially, he has no concern with the greater or
+less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces--their
+existence is alone sufficient for him; a bad book is as important as a
+good one, and much more important than a good one if it exercised, as
+bad books have a way of doing, a real influence on the course of
+literature. In practice, it is true, the historical critic generally
+fails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity. He either begins by
+making judgments of value for himself, or accepts those judgments which
+have been endorsed by tradition. He fastens upon a number of outstanding
+figures and more or less deliberately represents the process as from
+culmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitrary
+foreshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phases
+which he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of the
+group of writers which it includes. The individuality, the quintessence,
+of a writer lies completely outside his view.
+
+We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in
+theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the
+author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we
+isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? And what exactly _is_ a
+philosophic critic? Is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in which
+art and literature have their places, a critic who therefore approaches
+literature with a definite conception of it as one among many parallel
+manifestations of the human spirit, and with a system of values derived
+from his metaphysical scheme? Hegel and Croce are philosophical critics
+in this sense, and Aristotle is not, as far as we can judge from the
+Poetics, wherein he considers the literary work of Greece as an isolated
+phenomenon, and examines it in and for itself. But for the moment, and
+with the uneasy sense that we have not thoroughly laid the ghost of
+philosophic criticism, we will assume that we have isolated him, and
+pass to the consideration of the pure literary critic, if indeed we can
+find him.
+
+What does he do? How shall we recognise him? Mr Eliot puts before us
+Coleridge and Aristotle and Dryden as literary critics _par excellence_
+arranged in an ascending scale of purity. The concatenation is curious,
+for these were men possessed of very different interests and faculties
+of mind; and it would occur to few to place Dryden, as a critic, at
+their head. The living centre of Aristotle's criticism is a conception
+of art as a means to a good life. As an activity, poetry 'is more
+philosophic than history,' a nearer approach to the universal truth in
+appearances; and as a more active influence, drama refines our spiritual
+being by a purgation of pity and terror. Indeed, it would not be an
+exaggeration to say that the very pith and marrow of Aristotle's
+literary criticism is a system of moral values derived from his
+contemplation of life. It was necessary that this relation should exist,
+because for Aristotle literature was, essentially, an imitation of life
+though we must remember to understand imitation according to our final
+sense of the theme which is the golden, persistent thread throughout the
+Poetics. The imitation of life in literature was for Aristotle, the
+creative revelation of the ideal actively at work in human life. The
+tragic hero failed because his composition was less than ideal; but he
+could only be a tragic hero if the ideal was implicit in him and he
+visibly approximated to it. It is this constant reference to the ideal
+which makes of 'imitation' a truly creative principle and the one which,
+properly understood, is the most permanently valid and pregnant of all;
+it is also one which has been constantly misunderstood. Its importance
+is, nevertheless, so central that adequate recognition of it might
+conceivably be taken as the distinguishing mark of all fruitful
+criticism.
+
+To his sympathetic understanding of this principle Coleridge owed a
+great debt. It is true that his efforts to refine upon it were not only
+unsuccessful, but a trifle ludicrous; his effort to graft the vague
+transcendentalism of Germany on to the rigour and clarity of Aristotle
+was, from the outset, unfortunately conceived. But the root of the
+matter was there, and in Coleridge's fertile mind the Aristotelian
+theory of imitation flowered into a magnificent conception of the
+validity and process of the poetic imagination. And partly because the
+foundation was truly Aristotelian, partly because Coleridge had known
+what it was to be a great poet, the reference to life pervades the
+whole of what is permanently valuable in Coleridge's criticism. In him,
+too, there is a strict and mutually fertilising relation between the
+moral and the æsthetic values. This is the firm ground beneath his feet
+when he--too seldom--proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisite
+æsthetic discrimination.
+
+In Dryden, however, there was no such organic interpenetration. Dryden,
+too, had a fine sensibility, though less exquisite, by far, than that of
+Coleridge; but his theoretical system was not merely alien to him--it
+was in itself false and mistaken. _Corruptio optimi pessima_. He took
+over from France the sterilised and lifeless Aristotelianism which has
+been the plague of criticism for centuries; he used it no worse than his
+French exemplars, but he used it very little better than they. It was in
+his hands, as in theirs, a dead mechanical framework of rules about the
+unities. Dryden, we can see in his critical writing, was constantly
+chafed by it. He behaves like a fine horse with a bearing rein: he is
+continually tossing his head after a minute or two of 'good manners and
+action,' and saying, 'Shakespeare was the best of them, anyhow';
+'Chaucer beats Ovid to a standstill.' It is a gesture with which all
+decent people sympathise and when it is made in language so supple as
+Dryden's prose it has a lasting charm. Dryden's heart was in the right
+place, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him a
+critic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company of
+Aristotle and Coleridge.
+
+Our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous. We have
+seen that there is a sense in which Dryden is a purer literary critic
+than either Coleridge or Aristotle; but we have also seen that it is
+precisely by reason of the 'pureness' in him that he is to be relegated
+into a rank inferior to theirs. It looks as though we might have to
+pronounce that the true literary critic is the philosophic critic. Yet
+the pronouncement must not be prematurely made; for there is a real and
+vital difference between those for whom we have accepted the designation
+of philosophic critics, Hegel or Croce, and Aristotle or Coleridge. Yet
+three of these (and it might be wise to include Coleridge as a fourth)
+were professional philosophers. It is evidently not the philosophy as
+such that makes the difference.
+
+The difference depends, we believe, upon the nature of the philosophy.
+The secret lies in Aristotle. The true literary critic must have a
+humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, subject to an
+intimate, organic governance, by an ideal of the good life. He is not
+the mere investigator of facts; existence is never for him synonymous
+with value, and it is of the utmost importance that he should never be
+deluded into believing that it is. He will not accept from Hegel the
+thesis that all the events of human history, all man's spiritual
+activities, are equally authentic manifestations of Spirit; he will not
+even recognise the existence of Spirit. He may accept from Croce the
+thesis that art is the expression of intuitions, but he will not be
+extravagantly grateful, because his duty as a critic is to distinguish
+between intuitions and to decide that one is more significant than
+another. A philosophy of art that lends him no aid in this and affords
+no indication why the expression of one intuition should be preferred to
+the expression of another is of little value to him. He will incline to
+say that Hegel and Croce are the scientists of art rather than its
+philosophers.
+
+Here, then, is the opposition: between the philosophy that borrows its
+values from science and the philosophy which shares its values with art.
+We may put it with more cogency and truth: the opposition lies between a
+philosophy without values and a philosophy based upon them. For values
+are human, anthropocentric. Shut them out once and you shut them out for
+ever. You do not get them back, as some believe, by declaring that such
+and such a thing is true. Nothing is precious because it is true save to
+a mind which has, consciously or unconsciously, decided that it is good
+to know the truth. And the making of that single decision is a most
+momentous judgment of value. If the scientist appeals to it, as indeed
+he invariably does, he too is at bottom, though he may deny it, a
+humanist. He would do better to confess it, and to confess that he too
+is in search of the good life. Then he might become aware that to search
+for the good life is in fact impossible, unless he has an ideal of it
+before his mind's eye.
+
+An ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and
+the organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably be æsthetic_. There
+is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or
+conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms. We say, for
+instance, the good life is that in which man has achieved a harmony of
+the diverse elements in his soul. For the good life, we know
+instinctively, is one of our human absolutes. It is not good with
+reference to any end outside itself. A man does not live the good life
+because he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen because he lives
+the good life. And here we touch the secret of the most magnificently
+human of all books that has ever been written--Plato's _Republic_. In
+the _Republic_ the good life and the life of the good citizen are
+identified; but the citizenship is not of an earthly but of an ideal
+city, whose proportions, like the duties of its citizens, are determined
+by the æsthetic intuition. Plato's philosophy is æsthetic through and
+through, and because it is æsthetic it is the most human, the most
+permanently pregnant of all philosophies. Much labour has been spent on
+the examination of the identity which Plato established between the good
+and the beautiful. It is labour lost, for that identity is axiomatic,
+absolute, irreducible. The Greeks knew by instinct that it is so, and in
+their common speech the word for a gentleman was the _kalos kagathos_,
+the beautiful-good.
+
+This is why we have to go back to the Greeks for the principles of art
+and criticism, and why only those critics who have returned to bathe
+themselves in the life-giving source have made enduring contributions to
+criticism. They alone are--let us not say philosophic critics
+but--critics indeed. Their approach to life and their approach to art
+are the same; to them, and to them alone, life and art are one. The
+interpenetration is complete; the standards by which life and art are
+judged the same. If we may use a metaphor, in the Greek view art is the
+consciousness of life. Poetry is more philosophic and more highly
+serious than history, just as the mind of a man is more significant than
+his outward gestures. To make those gestures significant the art of the
+actor must be called into play. So to make the outward event of history
+significant the poet's art is needed. Therefore a criticism which is
+based on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place
+of sovereignty in its scheme of values. That Plato himself did not do
+this was due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of
+'imitation' in which art consists; but only the superficial readers of
+Plato--and a good many readers deserve no better name--will conclude
+from the fact that he rejected art that his attitude was not
+fundamentally æsthetic. Not only is the _Republic_ itself one of the
+greatest 'imitations,' one of the most subtle and profound works of art
+ever created, but it would also be true to say that Plato cleared the
+way for a true conception of art. In reality he rejected not art, but
+false art; and it only remained for Aristotle to discern the nature of
+the relation between artistic 'imitation' and the ideal for the Platonic
+system to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and an
+everlasting foundation for art and the criticism of art.
+
+Art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life. As the ideal is
+active and organic so must art itself be. The ideal is never achieved,
+therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense of
+the word. More than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can man
+appreciate or imagine the ideal at all. To discern it is essentially the
+work of divination or intuition. The artist divines the end at which
+human life is aiming; he makes men who are his characters completely
+expressive of themselves, which no actual man ever has been. If he works
+on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of
+himself. That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses
+himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation.
+He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be
+tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which
+are so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ of
+himself would inevitably end in confusion. That is why the great poetic
+genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often
+as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.
+
+Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in
+the world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to
+the absolute ideal. In subordinating its particular intuitions to the
+absolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign
+autonomy. True criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activity
+of art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and not
+the imposition of an alien. To use our previous metaphor, as art is the
+consciousness of life, criticism is the consciousness of art. The
+essential activity of true criticism is the harmonious control of art by
+art. This is at the root of a confusion in the thought of Mr. Eliot,
+who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of art, pronounces
+that the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle the
+anomalous Aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that 'he wrote
+well about everything,' and has, moreover, to elevate Dryden to a purple
+which he is quite unfitted to wear. No, what distinguishes the true
+critic of poetry is a truly æsthetic philosophy. In the present state
+of society it is extremely probable that only the poet or the artist
+will possess this, for art and poetry were never more profoundly
+divorced from the ordinary life of society than they are at the present
+day. But the poet who would be a critic has to make his æsthetic
+philosophy conscious to himself; to him as a poet it may be unconscious.
+This necessary change from unconsciousness to consciousness is by no
+means easy, and we should do well to insist upon its difficulty, for
+quite as much nonsense is talked about poetry by poets and by artists
+about art as by the profane about either. Moreover, it is important to
+remember that in proportion as society approaches the ideal--there is no
+continual progress towards the ideal; at present society is as far
+removed from it as it has ever been--the chance of the philosopher, of
+the scientist even, becoming a true critic of art grows greater. When
+the æsthetic basis of all humane activity is familiarly recognised, the
+values of the philosopher, the scientist, and the artist become
+consciously the same, and therefore interchangeable.
+
+Still, the ideal society is sufficiently remote for us to disregard it,
+and we shall say that the principle of art for art's sake contains an
+element of truth when it is opposed to those who would inflict upon art
+the values of science, of metaphysics, or of a morality of mere
+convention. We shall also say that the principle of art for art's sake
+needs to be understood and interpreted very differently. Its
+implications are tremendous. Art is autonomous, and to be pursued for
+its own sake, precisely because it comprehends the whole of human life;
+because it has reference to a more perfectly human morality than other
+activity of man; because, in so far as it is truly art, it is indicative
+of a more comprehensive and unchallengeable harmony in the spirit of
+man. It does not demand impossibilities, that man should be at one with
+the universe or in tune with the infinite; but it does envisage the
+highest of all attainable ideals, that man should be at one with
+himself, obedient to his own most musical law.
+
+Thus art reveals to us the principle of its own governance. The function
+of criticism is to apply it. Obviously it can be applied only by him who
+has achieved, if not the actual æsthetic ideal in life, at least a
+vision and a sense of it. He alone will know that the principle he has
+to elucidate and apply is living, organic. It is indeed the very
+principle of artistic creation itself. Therefore he will approach what
+claims to be a work of art first as a thing in itself, and seek with it
+the most intimate and immediate contact in order that he may decide
+whether it too is organic and living. He will be untiring in his effort
+to refine his power of discrimination by the frequentation of the finest
+work of the past, so that he may be sure of himself when he decides, as
+he must, whether the object before him is the expression of an æsthetic
+intuition at all. At the best he is likely to find that it is mixed and
+various; that fragments of æsthetic vision jostle with unsubordinated
+intellectual judgments.
+
+But, in regarding the work of art as a thing in itself, he will never
+forget the hierarchy of comprehension, that the active ideal of art is
+indeed to see life steadily and see it whole, and that only he has a
+claim to the title of a great artist whose work manifests an incessant
+growth from a merely personal immediacy to a coherent and
+all-comprehending attitude to life. The great artist's work is in all
+its parts a revelation of the ideal as a principle of activity in human
+life. As the apprehension of the ideal is more or less perfect, the
+artist's comprehension will be greater or less. The critic has not
+merely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and Shakespeare,
+between Dante and Milton, between Cezanne and Michelangelo, Beethoven
+and Mozart. If the foundations of his criticism are truly æsthetic, he
+is compelled to believe and to show that among would-be artists some are
+true artists and some are not, and that among true artists some are
+greater than others. That what has generally passed under the name of
+æsthetic criticism assumes as an axiom that every true work of art is
+unique and incomparable is merely the paradox which betrays the
+unworthiness of such criticism to bear the name it has arrogated to
+itself. The function of true criticism is to establish a definite
+hierarchy among the great artists of the past, as well as to test the
+production of the present; by the combination of these activities it
+asserts the organic unity of all art. It cannot honestly be said that
+our present criticism is adequate to either task.
+
+[APRIL, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Religion of Rousseau_
+
+
+These are times when men have need of the great solitaries; for each man
+now in his moment is a prey to the conviction that the world and his
+deepest aspirations are incommensurable. He is shaken by a presentiment
+that the lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human minds
+put out in a conflict for something which never can be won in the clash
+of material arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as a
+child pitifully wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoes
+the strange word 'Peace.' Therefore he too wanders pitifully like that
+child, seeking peace, and men are become the symbols of mankind. The
+tragic paradox of human life which slumbers in the soul in years of
+peace is awakened again. When we would be solitary and cannot, we are
+made sensible of the depth and validity of the impulse which moved the
+solitaries of the past.
+
+The paradox is apparent now on every hand. It appears in the death of
+the author of _La Formation Réligieuse de J.J. Rousseau_.[1] One of the
+most distinguished of the younger generation of French scholar-critics,
+M. Masson met a soldier's death before the book to which he had devoted
+ten years of his life was published. He had prepared it for the press in
+the leisure hours of the trenches. There he had communed with the
+unquiet spirit of the man who once thrilled the heart of Europe by
+stammering forgotten secrets, and whispered to an age flushed and
+confident with material triumphs that the battle had been won in vain.
+Rousseau, rightly understood is no consoling companion for a soldier.
+What if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenary
+beatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the Lake of
+Bienne? What if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free but
+is everywhere in chains? Let us hope that the dead author was not too
+keenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice. His
+death would have been bitter.
+
+   [Footnote 1: _La Formation Réligieuse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau_. Par
+   Pierre Maurice Masson. (Paris: Hachette. Three volumes.)]
+
+From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. His method would speak
+against it. Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of
+the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate
+to the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made.
+He had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no
+real history can be written. Chronology was meaningless to him because
+he could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. With him ends
+were beginnings. In the third _Dialogue_ he tell us--and it is nothing
+less than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well--that his
+works must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who
+would understand him. Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than
+is imagined by those who take the parable called the _Contrat Social_
+for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie to
+history. In himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grew
+younger with years. He might be known as the man of the second childhood
+_par excellence_. To the eye of history the effort of his soul was an
+effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a
+perspective of progress. On his after-dinner journey to Diderot at
+Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that
+progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so
+long was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld the soul of man _sub
+specie æternitatis_. In his vision history and institutions dissolved
+away. His second childhood had begun.
+
+On such a man the historical method can have no grip. There is, as the
+French say, no _engrenage_. It points to a certain lack of the subtler
+kind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly,
+perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years been
+imported into French criticism from Germany. The Sorbonne has not, we
+know, gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation's
+sake. M. Masson's three volumes leave us with the sense that their
+author had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of
+the momentous question whether Jean-Jacques was a person to whom it
+might be applied with a prospect of discovery. No one who read Rousseau
+with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter.
+Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point. The Savoyard Vicar was
+speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession of
+faith with the words:--
+
+    'Je ne veux argumenter avec vous, ni même de tenter vous convaincre;
+    il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicité de
+    mon coeur. Consultez le vôtre pendant mon discours; c'est tout ce
+    que je vous demande.'
+
+To the extent, therefore, that M. Masson did not respond to this appeal
+and filled his volumes with information concerning the books
+Jean-Jacques might have read and a hundred other interesting but only
+partly relevant things, he did the citizen of Geneva a wrong. The
+ulterior motive is there, and the faint taste of a thesis in the most
+modern manner. But the method is saved by the perception which, though
+it sometimes lacks the perfect keenness of complete understanding, is
+exquisite enough to suggest the answer to the questions it does not
+satisfy. Though the environment is lavish the man is not lost.
+
+It is but common piety to seek to understand Jean-Jacques in the way in
+which he pleaded so hard to be understood. Yet it is now over forty
+years since a voice of authority told England how it was to regard him.
+Lord Morley was magisterial and severe, and England obeyed. One feels
+almost that Jean-Jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive.
+He would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was 'a rag
+of metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism,' and he would
+have whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his
+_Dialogues_ described as the outpourings of a man with persecution
+mania, he might have rebelled and muttered silently an _Eppur si muove_.
+We see now that it was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, and
+that precisely those _Dialogues_ which the then Mr Morley so powerfully
+dismissed contain his plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction. To
+his contention that he wrote his books to ease his own soul it might be
+replied that their publication was a social act which had vast social
+consequences. But Jean-Jacques might well retort that the fact that his
+contemporaries and the generation which followed read and judged him in
+the letter and not in the spirit is no reason why we, at nearly two
+centuries remove, should do the same.
+
+A great man may justly claim our deference, if Jean-Jacques asks that
+his last work shall be read first we are bound, even if we consider it
+only a quixotic humour, to indulge it. But to those who read the
+neglected _Dialogues_ it will appear a humour no longer. Here is a man
+who at the end of his days is filled to overflowing with bitterness at
+the thought that he has been misread and misunderstood. He says to
+himself: Either he is at bottom of the same nature as other men or he is
+different. If he is of the same nature, then there must be a malignant
+plot at work. He has revealed his heart with labour and good faith; not
+to hear him his fellow-men must have stopped their ears. If he is of
+another kind than his fellows, then--but he cannot bear the thought.
+Indeed it is a thought that no man can bear. They are blind because they
+will not see. He has not asked them to believe that what he says is
+true; he asks only that they shall believe that he is sincere, sincere
+in what he says, sincere, above all, when he implores that they should
+listen to the undertone. He has been 'the painter of nature and the
+historian of the human heart.'
+
+His critics might have paused to consider why Jean-Jacques, certainly
+not niggard of self-praise in the _Dialogues_, should have claimed no
+more for himself than this. He might have claimed, with what in their
+eyes at least must be good right, to have been pre-eminent in his
+century as a political philosopher, a novelist, and a theorist of
+education. Yet to himself he is no more than 'the painter of nature and
+the historian of the human heart.' Those who would make him more make
+him less, because they make him other than he declares himself to be.
+His whole life has been an attempt to be himself and nothing else
+besides; and all his works have been nothing more and nothing less than
+his attempt to make his own nature plain to men. Now at the end of his
+life he has to swallow the bitterness of failure. He has been acclaimed
+the genius of his age; kings have delighted to honour him, but they have
+honoured another man. They have not known the true Jean-Jacques. They
+have taken his parables for literal truth, and he knows why.
+
+    'Des êtres si singulièrement constitués doivent nécessairement
+    s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. Il est impossible
+    qu'avec des âmes si différemment modifiés ils ne portent pas dans
+    l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idées l'empreinte de
+    ces modifications. Si cette empreinte échappe à ceux qui n'ont
+    aucune notion de cette manière d'être, elle ne peut échapper à ceux
+    qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectés eux-mêmes. C'est une
+    signe caracteristique auquel les initiés se reconnoissent entre eux;
+    et ce qui donne un grand prix à ce signe, c'est qu'il ne peut se
+    contrefaire, que jamais il n'agit qu'au niveau de sa source, et que,
+    quand il ne part pas du coeur de ceux qui l'imitent, il n'arrive
+    pas non plus aux coeurs faits pour le distinguer; mais sitôt qu'il y
+    parvient, on ne sauroit s'y méprendre; il est vrai dès qu'il est
+    senti.'
+
+At the end of his days he felt that the great labour of his life which
+had been to express an intuitive certainty in words which would carry
+intellectual conviction, had been in vain, and his last words are: 'It
+is true so soon as it is felt.'
+
+Three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his 'religious
+formation' as three volumes. At Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens, as a
+boy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul. In Paris, amid the
+intellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the Encyclopædists, the
+memory of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience. His
+boyish unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticism
+of the great pioneers of enlightenment and progress. Yet when all had
+been destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied. Underneath
+his passionate admiration for Diderot smouldered a spark of resentment
+that he was not understood. They had torn down the fabric of expression
+into which he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty as a
+boy; sometimes with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart he
+surveyed the ruins. But the certainty that he had once been certain, the
+memory and the desire of the past peace--this they could not destroy.
+They could hardly even weaken this element within him, for they did not
+know that it existed, they were unable to conceive that it could exist.
+Jean-Jacques himself could give them no clue to its existence; he had
+no words, and he was still under the spell of the intellectual dogma of
+his age that words must express definite things. In common with his age
+he had lost the secret of the infinite persuasion of poetry. So the
+consciousness that he was different from those who surrounded him, and
+from those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. He was afraid of
+his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge of
+their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. The
+pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is
+apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' In the
+note which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses to
+this ideal. If only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable
+without and within, he might be delivered from that disquieting sense of
+tongue-tied queerness in a normal world.
+
+If he cheated himself at all, the deception was brief. The poignant
+memory of Les Charmettes whispered to him that there was a state of
+grace in which the hard things were made clear. But he had not yet the
+courage of his destiny. His consciousness of his separation from his
+fellows had still to harden into a consciousness of superiority before
+that courage would come. On the road to Vincennes on an October evening
+in 1749--M. Masson has fixed the date for us--he read in a news-sheet
+the question of the Dijon Academy: 'Si le rétablissement des arts et des
+sciences a contribué à épurer les moeurs?' The scales dropped from his
+eyes and the weight was removed from his tongue. There is no mystery
+about this 'revelation.' For the first time the question had been put
+in terms which struck him squarely in the heart. Jean-Jacques made his
+reply with the stammering honesty of a man of genius wandering in age of
+talent.
+
+The First Discourse seems to many rhetorical and extravagant. In after
+days it appeared so to Rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for it
+than that he had tried to tell the truth. Before he learned that he had
+won the Dijon prize and that his work had taken Paris by storm, he was
+surely a prey to terrors lest his Vincennes vision of the non-existence
+of progress should have been mere madness. The success reassured him.
+'Cette faveur du public, nullement brigué, et pour un auteur inconnu, me
+donna la première assurance véritable de mon talent.' He was, in fact,
+not 'queer,' but right; and he had seemed to be queer precisely because
+he was right. Now he had the courage. 'Je suis grossier,' he wrote in
+the preface to _Narcisse_, 'maussade, impoli par principes; je me fous
+de tous vous autres gens de cour; je suis un barbare.' There is a touch
+of exaggeration and bravado in it all. He was still something of the
+child hallooing in the dark to give himself heart. He clutched hold of
+material symbols of the freedom he had won, round wig, black stockings,
+and a living gained by copying music at so much a line. But he did not
+break with his friends; the 'bear' suffered himself to be made a lion.
+He had still a foot in either camp, for though he had the conviction
+that he was right, he was still fumbling for his words. The memoirs of
+Madame d'Epinay tell us how in 1754, at dinner at Mlle Quinault's,
+impotent to reply to the polite atheistical persiflage of the company,
+he broke out: 'Et moi, messieurs, je crois en Dieu. Je sors si vous
+dites un mot de plus.' That was not what he meant; neither was the First
+Discourse what he meant. He had still to find his language, and to find
+his language he had to find his peace. He was like a twig whirled about
+in an eddy of a stream. Suddenly the stream bore him to Geneva, where he
+returned to the church which he had left at Confignon. That, too, was
+not what he meant. When he returned from Geneva, Madame d'Epinay had
+built him the Ermitage.
+
+In the _Rêveries_, which are mellow with the golden calm of his
+discovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he
+had set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitage
+to inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for
+all his opinions and his principles. In the exquisite third _Rêverie_
+two phrases occur continually. His purpose was 'to find firm
+ground'--'prendre une assiette,'--and his means to this discovery was
+'spiritual honesty'--'bonne foi.' Rousseau's deep concern was to
+elucidate the anatomy of his own soul, but, since he was sincere, he
+regarded it as a type of the soul of man. Looking into himself, he saw
+that, in spite of all his follies, his weaknesses, his faintings by the
+way, his blasphemies against the spirit, he was good. Therefore he
+declared: Man is born good. Looking into himself he saw that he was free
+to work out his own salvation, and to find that solid foundation of
+peace which he so fervently desired. Therefore he declared: Man is born
+free. To the whisper of les Charmettes that there was a condition of
+grace had been added the sterner voice of remorse for his abandoned
+children, telling him that he had fallen from his high estate.
+
+  'J'ai fui en vain; partout j'ai retrouvé la Loi.
+  Il faut céder enfin! ô porte, il faut admettre
+  L'hôte; coeur frémissant, il faut subir le maître,
+  Quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-même que moi.'
+
+The noble verse of M. Claudel contains the final secret of Jean-Jacques.
+He found in himself something more him than himself. Therefore he
+declared: There is a God. But he sought to work out a logical foundation
+for these pinnacles of truth. He must translate these luminous
+convictions of his soul into arguments and conclusions. He could not,
+even to himself, admit that they were only intuitions; and in the
+_Contrat Social_ he turned the reason to the service of a certainty not
+her own.
+
+This unremitting endeavour to express an intuitive certainty in
+intellectual terms lies at the root of the many superficial
+contradictions in his work, and of the deeper contradiction which forms,
+as it were, the inward rhythm of his three great books. He seems to
+surge upwards on a passionate wave of revolutionary ideas, only to sink
+back into the calm of conservative or quietist conclusions. M. Masson
+has certainly observed it well.
+
+    'Le premier _Discours_ anathématise les sciences et les arts, et ne
+    voit le salut que dans les académies; le _Discours sur l'Inégalité_
+    paraît détruire tout autorité, et recommande pourtant "l'obéissance
+    scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs": la
+    _Nouvelle Héloïse_ prêche d'abord l'émancipation sentimentale, et
+    proclame la suprématie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit à
+    exalter la fidelité conjugale, à consolider les grands devoirs
+    familiaux et sociaux. Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la même
+    surprise.'
+
+To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary;
+to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only a
+man stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured
+by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in
+his similitude to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tièdes,' he wrote
+to Madame Latour in 1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est
+pas digne de moi.' There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more
+plainly still in the _Dialogues_. He, too, was persecuted for
+righteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of
+heaven was within men.
+
+And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and
+the peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preserving
+conclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to
+record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the
+market-place. The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man
+so that he writes believing that all men will understand. He wakes in
+the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he
+does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. They
+will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will
+see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. The
+_mystique_ as Péguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_.
+To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseau
+turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard
+saying, that the things which are Cæsar's shall be rendered unto Cæsar.
+
+In the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which have
+been discovered in Rousseau's work fade away. That famous confusion
+concerning 'the natural man,' whom he presents to us now as a historic
+fact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques,
+but in the minds of his critics. The _Contrat Social_ is a parable of
+the soul of man, like the _Republic_ of Plato. The truth of the human
+soul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history is
+irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal. And as for the
+nature of this truth, 'it is true so soon as it is felt.' When the
+Savoyard Vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism of
+religious dogma, turned to the Gospel story with the immortal 'Ce n'est
+pas ainsi qu'on invente,' he was only anticipating what Jean-Jacques was
+to say of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his work
+which could not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of its
+source. We may call Jean-Jacques religious because we have no other
+word; but the word would be more truly applied to the reverence felt
+towards such a man than to his own emotion. He was driven to speak of
+God by the habit of his childhood and the deficiency of a language
+shaped by the intellect and not by the soul. But his deity was one whom
+neither the Catholic nor the Reformed Church could accept, for He was
+truly a God who does not dwell in temples made with hands. The respect
+he owed to God, said the Vicar, was such that he could affirm nothing of
+Him. And, again, still more profoundly, he said, 'He is to our souls
+what our soul is to our body.' That is the mystical utterance of a man
+who was no mystic, but of one who found his full communion in the
+beatific _dolce far niente_ of the Lake of Bienne. Jean-Jacques was set
+apart from his generation, because, like Malvolio, he thought highly of
+the soul and in nowise approved the conclusions of his fellows; and he
+was fortunate to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call his
+madness (which was indeed only his flaming and uncomprehending
+indignation at the persecution inevitably meted out by those who have
+only a half truth to one who has the whole), because he enjoyed the
+certainty that his high appraisement of the soul was justified.
+
+[MARCH, 1918.
+
+
+
+
+_The Poetry of Edward Thomas_
+
+
+We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruins
+with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which
+disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of Edward
+Thomas.[2] They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a
+palimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more
+resonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be like
+a phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city. There
+will be the triumphal arch standing proudly; the very tombs of the dead
+will seem to share its monumental magnificence. Yet we will turn from
+them all, from the victory and sorrow alike, to this faintly gleaming
+bubble of glass that will hold captive the phantasm of a fragrance of
+the soul. By it some dumb and doubtful knowledge will be evoked to
+tremble on the edge of our minds. We shall reach back, under its spell,
+beyond the larger impulses of a resolution and a resignation which will
+have become a part of history, to something less solid and more
+permanent over which they passed and which they could not disturb.
+
+   [Footnote 2: _Last Poems_. By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount.)]
+
+Our consciousness will have its record. The tradition of England in
+battle has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will be
+compassed about by a crowd of witnesses. But it might so nearly have
+been in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at the
+conclusions of our consciousness. The subtler faiths might so easily
+have fled through our harsh fingers. When the sound of the bugles died,
+having crowned reveillé with the equal challenge of the last post, how
+easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there
+had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds
+and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us
+first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of
+which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses
+and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of
+speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself
+crumbles into dust--this very texture of the life of the soul might have
+been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding
+had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it
+appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more
+gorgeous woof.
+
+The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away. To exacter knowledge less
+charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we
+cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery
+over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but
+only humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard;
+beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our
+souls. So the sedge-warbler's
+
+  'Song that lacks all words, all melody,
+  All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
+  Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.'
+
+Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead
+poet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been,
+both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. Because
+he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They made
+the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind's
+ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to
+something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or
+by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns.
+But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly
+into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal
+present on whose pinnacle we stand.
+
+  'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
+  And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
+  Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
+  For what I should, yet never can, remember.
+  No garden appears, no path, no child beside,
+  Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
+  Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.'
+
+So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. We come no longer
+trailing clouds of glory. We are that which we are, less and more than
+our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend from
+on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. Yet our chosen spirit
+is not wholly secure in his courage. He longs not merely to know in what
+undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it
+beautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the
+truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour.
+
+  'This heart, some fraction of me, happily
+  Floats through the window even now to a tree
+  Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
+  Not like a peewit that returns to wail
+  For something it has lost, but like a dove
+  That slants unswerving to its home and love.
+  There I find my rest, and through the dark air
+  Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.'
+
+Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with
+the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far
+than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of
+man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay.
+Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home
+indeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. That
+which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude
+ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more
+than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other
+stars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of the
+universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.'
+
+And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common property
+of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from
+what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and
+that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this
+knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his
+contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the
+hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the
+line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious
+subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and
+familiar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most
+apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his
+home no home at all.
+
+  'This is my grief. That land,
+  My home, I have never seen.
+  No traveller tells of it,
+  However far he has been.
+
+  'And could I discover it
+  I fear my happiness there,
+  Or my pain, might be dreams of return
+  To the things that were.'
+
+Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his
+destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of
+necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men may
+know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the
+magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known
+truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the
+truth stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universe
+grows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little
+lamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark
+forest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all.
+Yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he must
+at each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise
+what is and celebrate it as what must be. Thus he regains, by another
+path, the supremacy which he has forsaken.
+
+Edward Thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. It may be
+said that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe of
+the past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. It is, even
+in material fact, but half true. None more closely than he regarded the
+living things of earth in all their quarters. 'After Rain' is, for
+instance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment,
+freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves
+
+            '... thinly spread
+  In the road, like little black fish, inlaid
+            As if they played.'
+
+But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the
+more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he
+discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy
+in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious
+of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which
+only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking
+mind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes
+in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and
+irrecoverable.
+
+  'The simple lack
+  Of her is more to me
+  Than other's presence,
+  Whether life splendid be
+  Or utter black.
+
+  'I have not seen,
+  I have no news of her;
+  I can tell only
+  She is not here, but there
+  She might have been.
+
+  'She is to be kissed
+  Only perhaps by me;
+  She may be seeking
+  Me and no other; she
+  May not exist.'
+
+That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register its
+wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on.
+If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas's poetical quest,
+he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches
+further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he
+passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience
+of the soul fronting its own infinity:--
+
+           'So memory made
+  Parting to-day a double pain:
+  First because it was parting; next
+  Because the ill it ended vexed
+  And mocked me from the past again.
+  Not as what had been remedied
+  Had I gone on,--not that, ah no!
+  But as itself no longer woe.'
+
+There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who
+have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant
+not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the
+movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it was
+that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of
+becoming haunted and held him most.
+
+  'Often I had gone this way before,
+  But now it seemed I never could be
+  And never had been anywhere else.'
+
+To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive
+to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that
+was not instantly engulfed--
+
+         'In the undefined
+  Abyss of what can never be again.'
+
+Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt
+as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none
+of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped
+at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated
+every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old
+when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A
+New House.'
+
+  'All was foretold me; naught
+    Could I foresee;
+  But I learned how the wind would sound
+    After these things should be.'
+
+But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in the
+enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul
+itself. The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book
+is that entitled 'The Other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal,
+shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create
+the myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the
+unknown of his emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of
+this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other'
+tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul.
+
+  'And now I dare not follow after
+  Too close. I try to keep in sight,
+  Dreading his frown and worse his laughter,
+  I steal out of the wood to light;
+  I see the swift shoot from the rafter
+  By the window: ere I alight
+  I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
+  And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.
+  He goes: I follow: no release
+  Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.'
+
+No; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest is
+read with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one who
+had many (and among them the chief) of the qualities of a great poet.
+Edward Thomas was like a musician who noted down themes that summon up
+forgotten expectations. Whether the genius to work them out to the
+limits of their scope and implication was in him we do not know. The
+life of literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunity
+he would eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. But, if
+his compositions do not, his themes will never fail--of so much we are
+sure--to awaken unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds.
+
+[JANUARY 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Mr Yeats's Swan Song_
+
+
+In the preface to _The Wild Swans at Coole_,[3] Mr W.B. Yeats speaks of
+'the phantasmagoria through which alone I can express my convictions
+about the world.' The challenge could hardly be more direct. At the
+threshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which gives
+us the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enter
+in. There are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verses
+written in the seeming-strong vernacular of literary Dublin, as it were
+a hospitable bench placed outside the door. They are indeed inside the
+house, but by accident or for temporary shelter. They do not, as the
+phrase goes, belong to the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions of
+the common reality, whether found in the sensible world or the emotion
+of the mind. They are, from Mr Yeats's angle of vision (as indeed from
+our own), essentially _vers d'occasion._
+
+   [Footnote 3: _The Wild Swans at Coole_. By W.B. Yeats.(Macmillan.)]
+
+The poet's high and passionate argument must be sought elsewhere, and
+precisely in his expression of his convictions about the world. And
+here, on the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall find
+phantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwise
+conveyed, at least by Mr Yeats. To this, in itself, we make no demur.
+The poet, if he is a true poet, is driven to approach the highest
+reality he can apprehend. He cannot transcribe it simply because he does
+not possess the necessary apparatus of knowledge, and because if he did
+possess it his passion would flag. It is not often that Spinoza can
+disengage himself to write as he does at the beginning of the third book
+of the Ethics, nor could Lucretius often kindle so great a fire in his
+soul as that which made his material incandescent in _Æneadum genetrix_.
+Therefore the poet turns to myth as a foundation upon which he can
+explicate his imagination. He may take his myth from legend or familiar
+history, or he may create one for himself anew, but the function it
+fulfils is always the same. It supplies the elements with which he can
+build the structure of his parable, upon which he can make it elaborate
+enough to convey the multitudinous reactions of his soul to the world.
+
+But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The
+structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility.
+The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will
+rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience....'
+And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own
+myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be
+condemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic
+shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect
+embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. The phantoms of the
+individual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity and
+become like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms they
+should be. For the poet himself must move securely among his visions;
+they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are. To anchor
+them he needs intelligible myth. Nothing less than a supremely great
+genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark
+visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great genius
+and was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his passion gave
+stability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes because
+they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite work
+there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise
+the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria of the
+dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. Like
+Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and
+would not let him go.
+
+The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman;
+yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a
+poet may plunge into the world of phantasms. Mr Yeats has too little of
+the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. He
+knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. But the very
+terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of
+impotence:--
+
+  Hands, do what you're bid;
+  Bring the balloon of the mind
+  That bellies and drags in the wind
+  Into its narrow shed.
+
+The languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poet
+has failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression of
+an ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness to
+the poet's minor probity. He remains an artist by determination, even
+though he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry.
+We were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majestic
+isolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit.
+Subsequently they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty. Although it
+has little mysterious and haunting beauty, _The Wild Swans at Coole_ is
+indeed a swan song. It is eloquent of final defeat; the following of a
+lonely path has ended in the poet's sinking exhausted in a wilderness of
+gray. Not even the regret is passionate; it is pitiful.
+
+  'I am worn out with dreams,
+  A weather-worn, marble triton
+  Among the streams;
+  And all day long I look
+  Upon this lady's beauty
+  As though I had found in book
+  A pictured beauty,
+  Pleased to have filled the eyes
+  Or the discerning ears,
+  Delighted to be but wise,
+  For men improve with the years;
+  And yet, and yet
+  Is this my dream, or the truth?
+  O would that we had met
+  When I had my burning youth;
+  But I grow old among dreams,
+  A weather-worn, marble triton
+  Among the streams.'
+
+It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poet
+mistakes the cause of his sorrow. He is worn out not with dreams, but
+with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative
+energy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has
+merely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew.
+Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that
+vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is
+no way back to the past.
+
+  'My country is Kiltartan Cross,
+  My countrymen Kiltartan's poor;
+  No likely end could bring them loss
+  Or leave them happier than before.'
+
+It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We do
+not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in
+and for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose
+creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands
+upon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching
+his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverishment, as
+of all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware.
+
+  'I would find by the edge of that water
+  The collar-bone of a hare,
+  Worn thin by the lapping of the water,
+  And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
+  At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
+  And laugh over the untroubled water
+  At all who marry in churches,
+  Through the white thin bone of a hare.'
+
+Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its
+bitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world
+of imagination. Mr Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to
+contemplate it was sufficient. Had he been a great poet he would have
+made it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech. By
+re-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have built
+landmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his last
+discovery had ended. But now there remains nothing but a handful of the
+symbols with which he was content:--
+
+  'A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
+  A Buddha, hand at rest,
+  Hand lifted up that blest;
+  And right between these two a girl at play.'
+
+These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and,
+alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live.
+
+Whether Mr Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for
+the product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we prefer to
+believe) he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and
+failed, we cannot certainly say. Of this, however, we are certain, that
+somehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He has
+the apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forced
+to fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him.
+That it is an insufficient reserve let this passage show:--
+
+  'For those that love the world serve it in action,
+  Grow rich, popular, and full of influence,
+  And should they paint or write still it is action:
+  The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
+  The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
+  The sentimentalist himself; while art
+  Is but a vision of reality....'
+
+Mr Yeats is neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist. He is by structure
+and impulse an artist. But structure and impulse are not enough.
+Passionate apprehension must be added to them. Because this is lacking
+in Mr Yeats those lines, concerned though they are with things he holds
+most dear, are prose and not poetry.
+
+[APRIL, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Wisdom of Anatole France_
+
+
+How few are the wise writers who remain to us? They are so few that it
+seems, at moments, that wisdom, like justice of old, is withdrawing from
+the world, and that when their fullness of years is accomplished, as,
+alas! it soon must be, the wise men who will leave us will have been the
+last of their kind. It is true that something akin to wisdom, or rather
+a quality whose outward resemblance to wisdom can deceive all but the
+elect, will emerge from the ruins of war; but true wisdom is not created
+out of the catastrophic shock of disillusionment. An unexpected disaster
+is always held to be in some sort undeserved. Yet the impulse to rail at
+destiny, be it never so human, is not wise. Wisdom is not bitter; at
+worst it is bitter-sweet, and bitter-sweet is the most subtle and
+lingering savour of all.
+
+Let us not say in our haste, that without wisdom we are lost. Wisdom is,
+after all, but one attitude to life among many. It happens to be the one
+which will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for all
+ill-usage. But hard wear is not the only purpose which an attitude may
+serve. We may demand of an attitude that it should enable us to exact
+the utmost from ourselves. To refuse to accommodate oneself to the
+angularities of life or to make provision beforehand for its
+catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly. It is, at
+all events, a folly to which poets incline. But poets are not wise;
+indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best,
+be but dimly imagined. Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largest
+inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an
+aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of no
+account. To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to
+have acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with an
+imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no
+ecstasy remains, one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublime
+self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of
+destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which
+have overwhelmed us.
+
+Whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do not
+know. We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. It is
+too conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. Some may seek
+that ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others,
+who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may
+try to shake the dust of life from off their feet. Neither will be wise.
+But precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company of
+wise men. Their own attitude will not wear. The ecstasy will fail, the
+will to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one to
+escape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and the
+cell. Then they will turn to the wise men. They will find comfort in the
+smile to which they could not frame their own lips, and discover in it
+more sympathy than they could hope for.
+
+Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be Anatole
+France. His company is constant; his attitude durable. There is no
+undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and
+haunting beauty to Tchehov. He has never suffered himself to be so
+involved in life as to be maimed by it. But the price he has paid for
+his safety has been a renunciation of experience. Only by being involved
+in life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that
+bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. Not that Anatole
+France made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would of
+his own will turn aside. It was instinct which guided him into a
+sequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate
+exaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel.
+Therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but
+never face to face. Their runnings, their stumblings and their
+gesticulations are a tumultuous portion of the landscape rather than
+symbols of an intimate and personal possibility. They lend a baroque
+enchantment to the scene.
+
+So it is that in all the characters of Anatole France's work which are
+not closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of the
+marionette. They are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack a
+certain logic, but it is not the logic of personality. They are embodied
+comments upon life, but they do not live. And there is for Anatole
+France, while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, no
+reason why they should live. For living, in the accepted sense, is an
+activity impossible without indulging many illusions; and fervently to
+sympathise with characters engaged in the activity demands that their
+author should participate in the illusions. He, too, must be surprised
+at the disaster which he himself has proved inevitable. It is not enough
+that he should pity them; he must share in their effort, and be
+discomfited at their discomfiture.
+
+Such exercises of the soul are impossible to a real acquiescence, which
+cannot even permit itself the inspiration of the final illusion that the
+wreck of human hopes, being ordained, is beautiful. The man who
+acquiesces is condemned to stand apart and contemplate a puppet-show
+with which he can never really sympathise.
+
+    'De toutes les définitions de l'homme la plus mauvaise me paraît
+    celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable. Je ne me vante pas
+    excessivement en me donnant pour doué de plus de raison que la
+    plupart de ceux de mes semblables que j'ai vus de près ou dont j'ai
+    connu l'histoire. La raison habite rarement les âmes communes, et
+    bien plus rarement encore les grands esprits.... J'appelle
+    raisonnable celui qui accorde sa raison particulière avec la raison
+    universelle, de manière à n'être jamais trop surpris de ce qui
+    arrive et à s'y accommoder tant bien que mal; j'appelle raisonnable
+    celui qui, observant le désordre de la nature et la folie humaine,
+    ne s'obstine point à y voir de l'ordre et de la sagesse; j'appelle
+    raisonnable enfin celui qui ne s'efforce pas de l'être.'
+
+The chasm between living and being wise (which is to be _raisonnable_)
+is manifest. The condition of living is to be perpetually surprised,
+incessantly indignant or exultant, at what happens. To bridge the chasm
+there is for the wise man only one way. He must cast back in his memory
+to the time when he, too, was surprised and indignant. No man is, after
+all, born wise, though he may be born with an instinct for wisdom. Thus
+Anatole France touches us most nearly when he describes his childhood.
+The innocent, wayward, positive, romantic little Pierre Nozière[4] is a
+human being to a degree to which no other figures in the master's comedy
+of unreason are. And it is evident that Anatole France himself finds him
+by far the most attractive of them all. He can almost persuade himself,
+at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite story
+of how, when he had been to a truly royal chocolate shop, he attempted
+to reproduce its splendours in play. At one point his invention and his
+memory failed him, and he turned to his mother to ask: 'Est-ce celui qui
+vend ou celui qui achète qui donne de l'argent?'
+
+    'Je ne devais jamais connaître le prix de l'argent. Tel j'étais à
+    trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapissé de boutons de
+    roses, tel je restai jusqu'à la vieillesse, qui m'est légère, comme
+    elle l'est à toutes les âmes exemptes d'avarice et d'orgueil. Non,
+    maman, je n'ai jamais connu le prix de l'argent. Je ne le connais
+    pas encore, ou plutôt je le connais trop bien.'
+
+   [Footnote 4: _Le Petit Pierre_. Par Anatole France. (Paris:
+   Calmann-Lévy.)]
+
+To know a thing too well is by worlds removed from not to know it at
+all, and Anatole France does not elsewhere similarly attempt to indulge
+the illusion of unbroken innocence. He who refused to put a mark of
+interrogation after 'What is God,' in defiance of his mother, because he
+knew, now has to restrain himself from putting one after everything he
+writes or thinks. 'Ma pauvre mère, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-être
+que maintenant j'en mets trop.' Yes, Anatole France is wise, and far
+removed from childish follies. And, perhaps, it is precisely because of
+his wisdom that he can so exactly discern the enchantment of his
+childhood. So few men grow up. The majority remain hobbledehoys
+throughout life; all the disabilities and none of the unique capacities
+of childhood remain. There are a few who, in spite of all experience,
+retain both; they are the poets and the _grands esprits_. There are
+fewer still who learn utterly to renounce childish things; and they are
+the wise men.
+
+   'Je suis une autre personne que l'enfant dont je parle. Nous n'avons
+    plus en commun, lui et moi, un atome de substance ni de pensée.
+    Maintenant qu'il m'est devenu tout à fait étranger, je puis en sa
+    compagnie me distraire de la mienne. Je l'aime, moi qui ne m'aime ni
+    ne me haïs. Il m'est doux de vivre en pensée les jours qu'il vivait
+    et je souffre de respirer l'air du temps où nous sommes.'
+
+Not otherwise is it with us and Anatole France. We may have little in
+common with his thought--the community we often imagine comes of
+self-deception--but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while.
+His touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers.
+
+[APRIL, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Gerard Manley Hopkins_
+
+
+Modern poetry, like the modern consciousness of which it is the epitome,
+seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. It is hardly
+conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself
+by insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. The
+value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives
+and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of
+the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be
+epic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few
+conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet
+may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a
+hundred influences, or he may work a single sham personality threadbare
+or render piecemeal an undigested influence. What he may not do, or do
+only at the risk of being unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call,
+for the lack of a better word, the logical progression of an _oeuvre_.
+One has no sense of the rhythm of an achievement. There is an output of
+scraps, which are scraps, not because they are small, but because one
+scrap stands in no organic relation to another in the poet's work.
+Instead of lending each other strength, they betray each other's
+weakness.
+
+Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not
+peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. If it were, we might be
+accused of mere querulousness. The rhythm of personality is hard,
+indeed, to achieve. The simple mind and the single outlook are now too
+rare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering
+a mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy
+one. The desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were
+probably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is a
+little preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see
+life steadily and see it whole. We happen to have been born into an age
+without perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet and
+prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age.
+But another rhythm is possible. No doubt it would be mistaken to
+consider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm of
+personality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personal
+coherence in its possessor. For critical purposes, however, they are
+distinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technical
+progression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate artistic
+intention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. When
+Verlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose,' we know where we
+are. And we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse to
+be predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring to
+take a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose.'
+
+It is the 'avant toute chose' that matters, not as a profession of
+faith--we do not greatly like professions of faith--but as the guarantee
+of the universal in the particular, of the _dianoia_ in the episode. It
+is the 'avant toute chose' that we chiefly miss in modern poetry and
+modern society and in their quaint concatenations. It is the 'avant
+toute chose' that leads us to respect both Mr Hardy and Mr Bridges,
+though we give all our affection to one of them. It is the 'avant toute
+chose' that compels us to admire the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins[5];
+it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, would
+have condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not (after many years)
+had Mr Bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the Oxford
+University Press to stand the racket. Apparently Mr Bridges himself is
+something of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on a
+disdainful note:--
+
+  'Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
+  Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!'
+
+   [Footnote 5: _Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins_. Edited with notes by
+   Robert Bridges. (Oxford: University Press.)]
+
+It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take the
+most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet's
+explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a
+technical language peculiar to himself. Moreover, its scope is small;
+the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages.
+
+  'O then if in my lagging lines you miss
+  The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation....'
+
+There is his 'avant toute chose.' Perhaps it seems very like 'de la
+musique.' But it tells us more about Hopkins's music than Verlaine's
+line told us about his. This music is of a particular kind, not the
+'sanglots du violon,' but pre-eminently the music of song, the music
+most proper to lyrical verse. If one were to seek in English the lyrical
+poem to which Hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, one
+would find Shelley's 'Skylark.' A technical progression onwards from the
+'Skylark' is accordingly the main line of Hopkins's poetical evolution.
+There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief.
+Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered,
+appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was his
+contemporary. There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echo
+in 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charmèd'; there is an aspiration after
+Milton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the
+most lucid of the fragments,'Epithalamion.' But the central point of
+departure is the 'Skylark.' The 'May Magnificat' is evidence of
+Hopkins's achievement in the direct line:--
+
+  'Ask of her, the mighty mother:
+  Her reply puts this other
+  Question: What is Spring?--
+  Growth in everything--
+
+  Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
+  Grass and greenworld all together;
+  Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
+  Throstle above her nested
+  Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
+  Forms and warms the life within....
+
+  ... When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
+  Bloom lights the orchard-apple,
+  And thicket and thorp are merry
+  With silver-surfèd cherry,
+
+  And azuring-over graybell makes
+  Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes,
+  And magic cuckoo-call
+  Caps, clears, and clinches all....'
+
+That is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, most
+recognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms. But a melody so
+simple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the English language
+is capable without the obscurity which comes of the drowning of sense in
+sound, did not satisfy Hopkins. He aimed at complex internal harmonies,
+at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined an
+expressive word of his own:--
+
+    'But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and
+    design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of
+    calling _inscape_ is what I above all aim at in poetry.'
+
+Here, then, in so many words, is Hopkins's 'avant toute chose' at a
+higher level of elaboration. 'Inscape' is still, in spite of the
+apparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems to
+have entered with the specific designation. With formalism comes
+rigidity; and in this case the rigidity is bound to overwhelm the sense.
+For the relative constant in the composition of poetry is the law of
+language which admits only a certain amount of adaptation. Musical
+design must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be aware that even
+in speaking of musical design he is indulging a metaphor. Hopkins
+admitted this, if we may judge by his practice, only towards the end of
+his life. There is no escape by sound from the meaning of the posthumous
+sonnets, though we may hesitate to pronounce whether this directness was
+due to a modification of his poetical principles or to the urgency of
+the content of the sonnets, which, concerned with a matter of life and
+death, would permit no obscuring of their sense for musical reasons.
+
+  'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
+  What hours, O what black hours we have spent
+  This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
+  And more must in yet longer light's delay.
+    With witness I speak this. But where I say
+  Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
+  Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
+  To dearest him that lives, alas! away.'
+
+There is compression, but not beyond immediate comprehension; music, but
+a music of overtones; rhythm, but a rhythm which explicates meaning and
+makes it more intense.
+
+Between the 'May Magnificat' and these sonnets is the bulk of Hopkins's
+poetical work and his peculiar achievement. Perhaps it could be regarded
+as a phase in his evolution towards the 'more balanced and Miltonic
+style' which he hoped for, and of which the posthumous sonnets are
+precursors; but the attempt to see him from this angle would be
+perverse. Hopkins was not the man to feel, save on exceptional
+occasions, that urgency of content of which we have spoken. The
+communication of thought was seldom the dominant impulse of his creative
+moment, and it is curious how simple his thought often proves to be when
+the obscurity of his language has been penetrated. Musical elaboration
+is the chief characteristic of his work, and for this reason what seem
+to be the strangest of his experiments are his most essential
+achievement So, for instance, 'The Golden Echo':--
+
+        'Spare!
+  There is one, yes, I have one (Hush there!);
+  Only not within seeing of sun,
+  Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
+  Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air,
+  Somewhere else where there is, ah, well, where! one,
+  One. Yes, I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
+  Where, whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and
+                    fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and
+                    swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
+  Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet clearly and dangerously sweet
+  Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
+  The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
+  Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
+  To its own best being and its loveliness of youth....'
+
+Than this, Hopkins truly wrote, 'I never did anything more musical.' By
+his own verdict and his own standards it is therefore the finest thing
+that Hopkins did. Yet even here, where the general beauty is undoubted,
+is not the music too obvious? Is it not always on the point of
+degenerating into a jingle--as much an exhibition of the limitations of
+a poetical theory as of its capabilities? The tyranny of the 'avant
+toute chose' upon a mind in which the other things were not stubborn and
+self-assertive is apparent. Hopkins's mind was irresolute concerning the
+quality of his own poetical ideal. A coarse and clumsy assonance seldom
+spread its snare in vain. Exquisite openings are involved in disaster:--
+
+  'When will you ever, Peace, wild wood dove, shy wings shut,
+  Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
+  When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
+  To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
+  That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace....'
+
+And the more wonderful opening of 'Windhover' likewise sinks, far less
+disastrously, but still perceptibly:--
+
+  'I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
+                            dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
+    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
+  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
+  In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
+    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding
+    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
+  Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'
+
+We have no doubt that 'stirred for a bird' was an added excellence to
+the poet's ear; to our sense it is a serious blemish on lines which have
+'the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.'
+
+There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of
+the poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. The
+obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear;
+and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who
+push on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether
+the failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation of
+experience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice
+in his poetical endeavour. For ourselves we believe that the former was
+the true cause. His 'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritual
+vacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, and
+strengthen it. Hopkins told the truth of himself--the reason why he
+must remain a poets' poet:--
+
+  I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
+  O then if in my lagging lines you miss
+  The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
+  My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss
+  Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.'
+
+[JUNE, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Problem of Keats_
+
+
+It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney
+Colvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first,
+because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all
+evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so
+greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassioned
+and intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by a
+portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the
+consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is with
+us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin's
+mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an
+older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of
+at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger
+race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets.
+Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciate
+Keats, Sir Sidney writes:--
+
+    'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But
+    of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his
+    indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of
+    his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a
+    disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one
+    great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of
+    ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less
+    tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history
+    to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race,
+    he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and
+    acutely sensitive.'
+
+   [Footnote 6: _John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics,
+   and After-fame_. By Sidney Colvin. Second edition. (Macmillan.)]
+
+We believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindication
+might be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimely
+dead; but we desire, not to enlist Sir Sidney in a cause, but only to
+make apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitable
+differences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring. It may be
+that we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with Keats that we
+feel to Sir Sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunch
+friend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so.
+We are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and for
+itself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow only
+when the critical honesty, the determination to let Keats be valid as
+Keats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costs
+Sir Sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us.
+
+It is rather by this than by Sir Sidney's particular contributions to
+our knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. This assured, we
+accept his patient exposition of the theme of 'Endymion' with a friendly
+interest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim
+upon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute
+investigation of the pictorial and plastic material of Keats's
+imagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the former
+mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir
+Sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellers
+who at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantry
+are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find
+themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant
+and unknown to them--the price of land, and the points of a pedigree
+bull--so we follow with an intense and intelligent absorption a subtle
+argument in 'Endymion' in which at no moment we really believe. On the
+contrary, we are convinced (when we are free from our author's friendly
+spell) that Keats wrote 'Endymion' at all adventure. The words of the
+cancelled preface: 'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to
+finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain,' were, we are
+sure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of his
+lack of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapable
+of or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'--he had an understanding more
+robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon
+experience, than any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth not
+excepted--but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned
+with understanding. 'Endymion' is not a record or sublimation of
+experience; it is itself an experience. It was the liberation of a
+verbal inhibition, and the magic word of freedom was Beauty. The story
+of Endymion was to Keats a road to the unknown, in her course along
+which his imagination might 'paw up against the sky.'
+
+A refusal to admit that Keats built 'Endymion' upon any structure of
+argument, however obscure--even Sir Sidney would acknowledge that the
+argument he discovers is _very_ obscure--is so far from being a
+derogation from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a full
+appreciation of his idiosyncrasy. It is customary to regard the Odes as
+the pinnacle of his achievement and to trace a poetical progression to
+that point and a subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of this
+decline in the revised Induction to 'Hyperion.' As far as an absolute
+poetical perfection is concerned there can be no serious objection to
+the view. But the case of Keats is eminently one to be considered in
+itself as well as objectively. There is no danger that Keats's poetry
+will not be appreciated; the danger is that Keats may not be understood.
+And precisely this moment is opportune for understanding him. As Mr T.S.
+Eliot has lately pointed out, the development of English poetry since
+the early nineteenth century was largely based on the achievement of two
+poets of genius, Keats and Shelley, who never reached maturity. They
+were made gods; and rightly, had not poets themselves bowed down to
+them. That was ridiculous; there is something even pitiful in the
+spectacle of Rossetti and Morris finding the culmination of poetry, the
+one in 'The Eve of St Agnes,' the other in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'
+And this undiscriminating submission of a century to the influence of
+hypostatised phases in the development of a poet of sanity and genius is
+perhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious, and for the most
+part far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at work in
+modern poetry.
+
+A sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, that
+what has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundred
+years is only a _cul de sac_. Somewhere there has been a substitution.
+In the resulting chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, and
+the critically minded have the grim amusement of watching verse-writers
+gain eminence by imitating Coventry Patmore! The bolder spirits declare
+that there never was such a thing as a tradition, that it is no use
+learning, because there is nothing to learn. But they are a little
+nervous for all their boldness, and they prefer to hunt in packs, of
+which the only condition of membership is that no one should ask what it
+is.
+
+At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less
+importance to understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. The
+culmination of the achievement of the Keats to be understood is not the
+Odes, perfect as they are, nor the tales--a heresy even for objective
+criticism--nor 'Hyperion'; but precisely that revised Induction to
+'Hyperion' which on the other argument is held to indicate how the
+poet's powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfied
+love. On the technical side alone the Induction is of extraordinary
+interest. Keats's natural and proper revulsion from the Miltonic style,
+the deliberate art of which he had handled like an almost master, is
+evident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge that the virus
+is in his blood. The creative effort of the Induction was infinitely
+greater than is immediately apparent. Keats is engaged in a war on two
+fronts: he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and struggling
+also to deal with an unfamiliar content. The whole direction of his
+poetic purpose had shifted since he wrote 'Hyperion.' 'Hyperion,' though
+far finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same
+as 'Endymion'; it was an exercise in a manner. Keats desired to prove to
+himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that
+he was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur. It was, most
+strictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. He had
+drunk, as deeply as any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he
+needed to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he could
+employ a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of the
+past, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at the
+point where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them.
+These necessities were not present in this form to Keats's mind when he
+began 'Hyperion'; most probably he began merely with the idea of holding
+his own with Milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme.
+Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed are
+incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not by
+the intellect, but by the being.
+
+He dropped 'Hyperion' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. He
+was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him
+and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself.
+
+    'I have given up "Hyperion"--there were too many Miltonic inversions
+    in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather
+    artist's, humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations.
+    English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick
+    out some lines from "Hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty
+    proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of
+    feeling....'--(Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819.)
+
+That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications.
+'English ought to be kept up' meant, on Keats's lips, a very great deal.
+But there is other and more definite authority for the positive
+direction in which he was turning. To his brother George he wrote, at
+the same time:--
+
+    'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him
+    would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the
+    verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.'
+
+More definite still is the letter of November 17, 1819, to his friend
+and publisher, John Taylor:--
+
+    'I have come to a determination not to publish anything I have now
+    ready written; but for all that to publish a poem before long and
+    that I hope to make a fine one. As the marvellous is the most
+    enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have been
+    endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let her
+    manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all.
+    Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and
+    Women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic
+    skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a Drama,
+    would, I think, be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the
+    colouring of St Agnes Eve throughout a poem in which Character and
+    Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such
+    poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six
+    years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they
+    would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest
+    ambition--when I do feel ambitious....'
+
+No letter could be saner, nor more indicative of calm resolve. Yet the
+precise determination is that nothing that went to make the 1820 volume
+should be published, neither Odes, nor Tales, nor 'Hyperion.' This is
+that mood of Keats which Sir Sidney Colvin, in his comment upon a
+passage in the revised Induction, calls one of 'fierce injustice to his
+own achievements and their value.' But a poet, if he is a real one,
+judges his own achievements not by those of his contemporaries, but by
+the standard of his own intention.
+
+The evidence that Keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which it
+could be satisfied by the poems of the 1820 volume is overwhelming. His
+letters to George of April, 1819, show that he was naturally evolving
+towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than
+could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration
+and emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had
+invaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to the
+new poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find the
+method. The letters we have quoted to show his reaction from the
+Miltonic influence display the more narrowly 'artistic' aspect of the
+same evolution. A technique more responsive to the felt reality of
+experience must be found--'English ought to be kept up'--the apparatus
+of Romantic story must be abandoned--'Wonders are no wonders to me'--yet
+the Romantic colour must be kept to restore to a realistic psychology
+the vividness and richly various quality that are too often lost by
+analysis We do not believe that we have in any respect forced the
+interpretation of the letters; the terminology of that age needs to be
+translated to be understood 'Men and Women ... Characters and
+Sentiments' are called, for better or worse, 'psychology' nowadays. And
+our translation has this merit, that some of our ultra-moderns will
+listen to the word 'psychology,' where they would be bat-blind to
+'Characters' and stone-deaf to 'Sentiments.'
+
+Modern poetry is still faced with the same problem; but very few of its
+adepts have reached so far as to be able to formulate it even with the
+precision of Keats's scattered allusions. Keats himself was struck down
+at the moment when he was striving (against disease and against a
+devouring, hopeless love-passion) to face it squarely. The revised
+Induction reveals him in the effort to shape the traditional (and
+perhaps still necessary) apparatus of myth to an instrument of his
+attitude. The meaning of the Induction is not difficult to discover; but
+current criticism has the habit of regarding it dubiously. Therefore we
+may be forgiven for attempting, with the brevity imposed upon us, to
+make its elements clear. The first eighteen lines, which Sir Sidney
+Colvin on objective grounds regrets are, we think, vital.
+
+  'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
+  A paradise for a sect; the savage, too,
+  From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
+  Guesses at heaven; pity these have not
+  Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
+  The shadows of melodious utterance,
+  But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
+  For poesy alone can tell her dreams,--
+  With the fine spell of words alone can save
+  Imagination from the sable chain
+  And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
+  'Thou art no poet--mays't not tell thy dreams'?
+  Since every man whose soul is not a clod
+  Hath visions and would speak, if he had loved,
+  And been well-nurtured in his mother-tongue.
+  Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
+  Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
+  When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.'
+
+We may admit that the form of these lines is unfortunate; but we cannot
+wish them away. They bear most closely upon the innermost argument of
+the poem as Keats endeavoured to reshape it. All men, says Keats, have
+their visions of reality; but the poet alone can express his, and the
+poet himself may at the last prove to have been a fanatic, one who has
+imagined 'a paradise for a sect' instead of a heaven for all humanity.
+
+This discovery marks the point of crisis in Keats's development. He is
+no longer content to be the singer; his poetry must be adequate to all
+experience. No wonder then that the whole of the new Induction centres
+about this thought. He describes his effort to fight against an invading
+death and to reach the altar in the mighty dream palace. As his foot
+touches the altar-step life returns, and the prophetic voice of the
+veiled goddess reveals to him that he has been saved by his power 'to
+die and live again before Thy fated hour.'
+
+  '"None can usurp this height," return'd that shade.
+  "But those to whom the miseries of the world
+  Are misery and will not let them rest.
+  All else who find a haven in the world
+  Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
+  If by a chance into this fane they come,
+  Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half."'
+
+Because he has been mindful of the pain in the world, the poet has been
+saved. But the true lovers of humanity,--
+
+  'Who love their fellows even to the death,
+  Who feel the giant agony of the world,'
+
+are greater than the poets; 'they are no dreamers weak.'
+
+  'They come not here, they have no thought to come,
+  And thou art here for thou are less than they.'
+
+It is a higher thing to mitigate the pain of the world than to brood
+upon the problem of it. And not only the lover of mankind, but man the
+animal is pre-eminent above the poet-dreamer. His joy is joy; his pain,
+pain. 'Only the dreamer venoms _all_ his days.' Yet the poet has his
+reward; it is given to him to partake of the vision of the veiled
+Goddess--memory, Moneta, Mnemosyne, the spirit of the eternal reality
+made visible.
+
+  'Then saw I a wan face
+  Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd
+  By an immortal sickness which kills not;
+  It works a constant change, which happy death
+  Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
+  To no death was that visage; it had past
+  The lily and the snow; and beyond these
+  I must not think now, though I saw that face.
+  But for her eyes I should have fled away;
+  They held me back with a benignant light
+  Soft, mitigated by divinest lids
+  Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed
+  Of all external things; they saw me not,
+  But in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon
+  Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
+  What eyes are upward cast....'
+
+This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It
+stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded
+as obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered
+spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In
+her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision
+and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea
+if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poet
+is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but
+below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the
+prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his
+victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.
+
+Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to
+express, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him;
+few have been so far. Of the poetry that might have been constructed on
+the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture,
+each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse'
+of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it
+would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united
+contraries.
+
+We fear that Sir Sidney Colvin will not agree with our view. The angles
+of observation are different. The angle at which we have placed
+ourselves is not wholly advantageous--from it Sir Sidney's book could
+not have been written--but it has this advantage, that from it we can
+read his book with a heightened interest. As we look out from it, some
+things are increased and some diminished with the change of
+perspective; and among those which are increased is our gratitude to Sir
+Sidney. In the clear mirror of his sympathy and sanity nothing is
+obscured. We are shown the Keats who wrote the perfect poems that will
+last with the English language, and in the few places where Sir Sidney
+falls short of the spirit of complete acceptance, we discern behind the
+words of rebuke and regret only the idealisation of a love which we are
+proud to share.
+
+[JULY, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Thoughts on Tchehov_
+
+
+We do not know if the stories collected in this volume[7] stand together
+in the Russian edition of Tchehov's works, or if the selection is due to
+Mrs Constance Garnett. It is also possible that the juxtaposition is
+fortuitous. But the stories are united by a similarity of material.
+Whereas in the former volumes of this admirable series Tchehov is shown
+as preoccupied chiefly with the life of the _intelligentsia_, here he
+finds his subjects in priests and peasants, or (in the story _Uprooted_)
+in the half-educated.
+
+   [Footnote 7: _The Bishop; and Other Stories_. By Anton Tchehov.
+   Translated by Constance Garnett. (Chatto & Windus.)]
+
+Such a distinction is, indeed, irrelevant. As Tchehov presents them to
+our minds, the life of the country and the life of the town produce the
+same final impression, arouse in us an awareness of an identical
+quality; and thus, the distinction, by its very irrelevance, points us
+the more quickly to what is essential in Tchehov. It is that his
+attitude, to which he persuades us, is complete, not partial. His
+comprehension radiates from a steady centre, and is not capriciously
+kindled by a thousand accidental contacts. In other words, Tchehov is
+not what he is so often assumed to be, an impressionist. Consciously or
+unconsciously he had taken the step--the veritable _salto mortale_--by
+which the great literary artist moves out of the ranks of the minor
+writers. He had slowly shifted his angle of vision until he could
+discern a unity in multiplicity. Unity of this rare kind cannot be
+imposed as, for instance, Zola attempted to impose it. It is an
+emanation from life which can be distinguished only by the most
+sensitive contemplation.
+
+The problem is to define this unity in the case of each great writer in
+whom it appears. To apprehend it is not so difficult. The mere sense of
+unity is so singular and compelling that it leaves room for few
+hesitations. The majority of writers, however excellent in their
+peculiar virtues, are not concerned with it: at one moment they
+represent, at another they may philosophise, but the two activities have
+no organic connection, and their work, if it displays any evolution at
+all, displays it only in the minor accidents of the craft, such as style
+in the narrower and technical sense, or the obvious economy of
+construction. There is no danger of mistaking these for great writers.
+Nor, in the more peculiar case of writers who attempt to impose the
+illusion of unity, is the danger serious. The apparatus is always
+visible; they cannot afford to do without the paraphernalia of argument
+which supplies the place of what is lacking in their presentation. The
+obvious instance of this legerdemain is Zola; a less obvious, and
+therefore more interesting example is Balzac.
+
+To attempt the more difficult problem. What is most peculiar to
+Tchehov's unity is that it is far more nakedly æsthetic than that of
+most of the great writers before him. Other writers of a rank equal to
+his--and there are not so very many--have felt the need to shift their
+angle of vision until they could perceive an all-embracing unity; but
+they were not satisfied with this. They felt, and obeyed, the further
+need of taking an attitude towards the unity they saw They approved or
+disapproved, accepted or rejected it. It would be perhaps more accurate
+to say that they gave or refused their endorsement. They appealed to
+some other element than their own sense of beauty for the final verdict
+on their discovery; they asked whether it was just or good.
+
+The distinguishing mark of Tchehov is that he is satisfied with the
+unity he discovers. Its uniqueness is sufficient for him. It does not
+occur to him to demand that it should be otherwise or better. The act of
+comprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance. He
+is like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work of
+creation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment of
+his vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and the
+arbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural,
+and beautiful than the flowering of a plant. Not that Tchehov is a
+greater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely more
+wholly an artist, which is a very different thing. There is in him less
+admixture of preoccupations that are not purely æsthetic, and probably
+for this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist of
+equal rank. It seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees,
+need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in order
+to be very vigorous and very fruitful. Tchehov has the virtues and the
+shortcomings of the pure case.
+
+I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestation
+of _l'art pour l'art_, because in any commonly accepted sense of that
+phrase, he is not. Still, he might be considered as an exemplification
+of what the phrase might be made to mean. But instead of being diverted
+into a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring
+into prominence an aspect of Tchehov which has an immediate
+interest--his modernity. Again, the word is awkward. It suggests that he
+is fashionable, or up to date. Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases
+in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art of
+literature. The artistic problem which he faced and solved is one that
+is, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modern
+writer--to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with the
+greatest possible unity of æsthetic impression. Diversity of content we
+are beginning to find in profusion--Miss May Sinclair's latest
+experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a
+settled manner and a fixed reputation--but how rarely do we see even a
+glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified æsthetic
+impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has
+been, present to consciousness is _ipso facto_ unified æsthetically. The
+result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of
+language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical
+method.
+
+The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving æsthetic unity
+by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an
+arbitrary (because non-æsthetic) argument. This argument was let down
+like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a
+unified crystalline structure congregated about it. Of all great artists
+of the past Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this
+method. How much deliberate artistic purpose there was in his
+employment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally
+different from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big
+for a parenthesis. But he, too, is at bottom a classic artist. The
+modern problem--it has not yet been sufficiently solved for us to speak
+of a modern method--arises from a sense that the classical method
+produces over-simplification. It does not permit of a sufficient sense
+of multiplicity. One can think of a dozen semi-treatments of the problem
+from Balzac to Dostoevsky, but they were all on the old lines. They
+might be called Shakespearean modifications of the classical method.
+
+Tchehov, we believe, attempted a treatment radically new. To make use
+again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different
+string to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. In a
+sense he began at the other end. He had decided on the quality of
+æsthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision,
+but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of life
+which he had achieved. The essential quality he discerned and desired to
+represent was his argument, his string. Everything that heightened and
+completed this quality accumulated about it, quite independently of
+whether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot and
+argument. There is a magnificent example of his method in the longest
+story in this volume, 'The Steppe.' The quality is dominant throughout,
+and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is
+reinforced by the incident. Tiny events--the peasant who eats minnows
+alive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousand
+roubles--take on a character of portent, except that the word is too
+harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a
+sense of incalculability that haunts us. The emphases have all been
+slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. It is not
+while we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much
+significance could attach to a little boy's questions in a remote
+village shop:--
+
+    '"How much are these cakes?'
+
+    '"Two for a farthing.'
+
+    'Yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before
+    by the Jewess and asked him:--
+
+    '"And how much do you charge for cakes like this?'
+
+    'The shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all
+    sides, and raised one eyebrow.
+
+    '"Like that?' he asked.
+
+    'Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:--
+
+    '"Two for three farthings...."'
+
+It is foolish to quote it. It is like a golden pebble from the bed of a
+stream. The stream that flows over Tchehov's innumerable pebbles,
+infinitely diverse and heterogeneous, is the stream of a deliberately
+sublimated quality. The figure is inexact, as figures are. Not every
+pebble could be thus transmuted. But how they are chosen, what is the
+real nature of the relation which unites them, as we feel it does, is a
+secret which modern English writers need to explore. Till they have
+explored and mastered it Tchehov will remain a master in advance of
+them.
+
+[AUGUST, 1919.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of Tchehov is one to be investigated again and again because he
+is the only great modern artist in prose. Tolstoy was living throughout
+Tchehov's life, as Hardy has lived throughout our own, and these are
+great among the greatest. But they are not modern. It is an essential
+part of their greatness that they could not be; they have a simplicity
+and scope that manifestly belongs to all time rather than to this.
+Tchehov looked towards Tolstoy as we to Hardy. He saw in him a Colossus,
+one whose achievement was of another and a greater kind than his own.
+
+    'I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. If he were to die there would be a
+    big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never
+    loved any man as much as him.... Secondly, while Tolstoy is in
+    literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even
+    recognising that one has done nothing and never will do anything is
+    not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is
+    the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon
+    literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand; he has an immense
+    authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature,
+    vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling,
+    exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the
+    shade....'--(January, 1900.)
+
+Tchehov was aware of the gulf that separated him from the great men
+before him, and he knew that it yawned so deep that it could not be
+crossed. He belonged to a new generation, and he alone perhaps was fully
+conscious of it. 'We are lemonade,' he wrote in 1892.
+
+    'Tell me honestly who of my contemporaries--that is, men between
+    thirty and forty-five--have given the world one single drop of
+    alcohol?... Science and technical knowledge are passing through a
+    great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull
+    time.... The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity,
+    our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the
+    artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack
+    "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our
+    muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that
+    the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who
+    intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic:
+    they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it,
+    too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being,
+    that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father,
+    who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.... And we?
+    We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that--nothing at all.... Flog
+    us and we can do more! We have neither immediate nor remote aims,
+    and in our soul there is a great empty space. We have no politics,
+    we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid
+    of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and
+    blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears
+    nothing cannot be an artist....
+
+    '... You think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not
+    to conceal from myself my disease and not to deceive myself, and not
+    to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the
+    ideas of the 'sixties and so on.'
+
+That was written in 1892. When we remember all the strange literary
+effort gathered round about that year in the West--Symbolism, the
+_Yellow Book_, Art for Art's sake--and the limbo into which it has been
+thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own
+despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was
+plunging with enthusiasm into one _cul de sac_ after another, incapable
+of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West,
+had achieved a clear vision and a sense of perspective.
+
+To-day we begin to feel how intimately Tchehov belongs to us; to-morrow
+we may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. A genius will
+always be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned with
+the genius of Tchehov we must accept the inevitable. We must analyse and
+seek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that since
+Tchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, a
+vast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable.
+Writers who would be modern and ignore Tchehov's achievement are,
+however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists,
+merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of a
+profession like any other; for Tchehov is a standard by which modern
+literary effort must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry who
+is not sufficiently single-minded to apply the standard to himself is of
+no particular account.
+
+Though Tchehov's genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves a
+much exacter study than it has yet received. The publication of this
+volume of his letters[8] hardly affords the occasion for that; but it
+does afford an opportunity for the examination of some of the chief
+constituents of his perfect art. These touch us nearly because--we
+insist again--the supreme interest of Tchehov is that he is the only
+great modern artist in prose. He belongs, as we have said, to us. If he
+is great, then he is great not least in virtue of qualities which we may
+aspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an ideal to which we can
+refer ourselves, He had been saturated in all the disillusions which we
+regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive of
+the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected in
+him--and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. He did not rub
+his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess
+beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for
+universal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a
+millennium which he alone had the ability to control. He was and wanted
+to be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his,
+we feel gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was a
+hero--more than that, _the_ hero of our time.
+
+   [Footnote 8: _Letters of Anton Tchehov_. Translated by Constance
+   Garnett (Chatto & Windus).]
+
+It is significant that, in reading Tchehov's letters, we do not
+consider him under the aspect of an artist. We are inevitably fascinated
+by his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have most
+frequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on the
+infinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it in
+himself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing. He did not throw
+in his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly for
+refuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he risked
+everything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in revolution and
+saying so. In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in his
+letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great
+exemplar, by us. He refused to march under any political banner--a
+thing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his
+country; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political
+indifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing active
+good to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalism
+and social reform. He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin
+in 1890 to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 he
+spent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measures
+against the cholera in the country district where he lived, and,
+although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he
+refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of
+action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising
+practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod. From his
+childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family.
+Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly a
+saint. His self-devotion was boundless.
+
+Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when
+he wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent.' Tchehov was indifferent;
+but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies
+will show, was of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, an
+axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. Since life is what it is and
+men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon
+the individual. The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is
+within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. In one of
+his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his
+brother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he said, respect
+human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only;
+they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they
+are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves
+to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent
+they respect it; they develop the æsthetic feeling in themselves ...
+they seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual
+instinct. The letter from which these chief points are taken is
+tremulous with sympathy and wit. Tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote
+it. He concludes with the words: 'What is needed is constant work day
+and night, constant reading, study, will. Every hour is precious for
+it.'
+
+In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man. He set
+himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. The indifference
+upon which Tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moral
+indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the
+fact that life itself is indifferent. To that he held fast to the end.
+But the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no
+particular difference what any one did, but that the attitude and
+character of the individual were all-important. There was, indeed, no
+panacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but there
+could be a mitigation in men's souls. But the new asceticism must not be
+negative. It must not cast away the goods of civilisation because
+civilisation is largely a sham.
+
+    'Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above
+    all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in
+    carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make
+    haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!'
+
+Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarily
+endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service
+to his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned with
+pluses alone.' Since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly
+precious. Only they must be amenities without humbug.
+
+    'Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses
+    and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the
+    younger generation.... That is why I have no preference either for
+    gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or
+    for the younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a
+    superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health,
+    intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute
+    freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make
+    take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great
+    artist.'
+
+What 'the most absolute freedom' meant to Tchehov his whole life is
+witness. It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is,
+achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and
+self-refinement. In one letter he says he is going to write a story
+about the son of a serf--Tchehov was the son of a serf--who 'squeezed
+the slave out of himself.' Whether the story was ever written we do not
+know, but the process is one to which Tchehov applied himself all his
+life long. He waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soul
+in himself, and by necessary implication in others also.
+
+He was, thus, in all things a humanist. He faced the universe, but he
+did not deny his own soul. There could be for him no antagonism between
+science and literature, or science and humanity. They were all pluses;
+it was men who quarrelled among themselves. If men would only develop a
+little more loving-kindness, things would be better. The first duty of
+the artist was to be a decent man.
+
+    'Solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary.... We
+    cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we
+    have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and
+    so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely
+    hooked.... And is there any need for it? No, in order to help a
+    colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from
+    gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being
+    hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as
+    simply a man.... Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody
+    alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up
+    solidarity.'
+
+It seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty of
+Tchehov's, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strike
+us as more than strange. One predominant impression remains: it is that
+of Tchehov's candour of soul. Somehow he has achieved with open eyes the
+mystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse it
+further, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his present
+importance to ourselves.
+
+[MARCH, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_American Poetry_
+
+
+We are not yet immune from the weakness of looking into the back pages
+to see what the other men have said; and on this occasion we received a
+salutary shock from the critic of the _Detroit News_, who informs us
+that Mr Aiken, 'despite the fact that he is one of the youngest and the
+newest, having made his debut less than four years ago, ... demonstrates
+... that he is eminently capable of taking a solo part with Edgar Lee
+Masters, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim, Vachel Lindsay, and Edwin
+Arlington Robinson.' The shock is two-fold. In a single sentence we are
+in danger of being convicted of ignorance, and, where we can claim a
+little knowledge, we plead guilty; we know nothing of either Mr
+Oppenheim or Mr Robinson. This very ignorance makes us cautious where we
+have a little knowledge We know something of Mr Lindsay, something of Mr
+Masters, and a good deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiar
+figure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on what
+principle they are assembled together. Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded,
+a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which
+she teases out into stupid 'originalities.' Of the other two gentlemen
+we have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but also
+nothing which convinces us that they may not be.
+
+Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them. All
+three have in common what we may call creative energy. They are all
+facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all
+obvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that
+whatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways. Not one of them
+produces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or that
+he has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom 'thus
+and not otherwise' engraved upon their substance; not one has proved
+that he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem of
+poetry, no matter what technique be employed--how to achieve a
+concentrated unity of æsthetic impression. They are all diffuse; they
+seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at
+once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue;
+they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod--and they are all
+interesting.
+
+They are extremely interesting. For one thing, they have all achieved
+what is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success.
+Very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened Mr Lindsay's
+'Congo' or Mr Masters's 'Spoon River Anthology' or Mr Aiken's 'Jig of
+Forslin' without being impelled to read on to the end. That does not
+very often happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetry
+save in the case of the thronging admirers of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
+and their similars. There is, however, another case more exactly in
+point, namely, that of Mr Kipling. With Mr Kipling our three American
+poets have much in common, though the community must not be unduly
+pressed. Their most obvious similarity is the prominence into which
+they throw the novel interest in their verse. They are, or at moments
+they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories. We will not dogmatise and
+say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell a
+story in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task. It would indeed
+be doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell very
+different stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotional
+subtleties which Mr Aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable of
+being exactly expressed in prose.
+
+Since Mr Aiken is the _corpus vile_ before us we will henceforward
+confine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his very
+sufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worth
+attention in modern American poetry. Proceeding then, we find another
+point of contact between him and Mr Kipling, more important perhaps than
+the former, and certainly more dangerous. Both find it apparently
+impossible to stem the uprush of rhetoric. Perhaps they do not try to;
+but we will be charitable--after all, there is enough good in either of
+them to justify charity--and assume that the willingness of the spirit
+gives way to the weakness of the flesh. Of course we all know about Mr
+Kipling's rhetoric; it is a kind of emanation of the spatial immensities
+with which he deals--Empires, the Seven Seas, from Dublin to Diarbekir.
+Mr Aiken has taken quite another province for his own; he is an
+introspective psychologist. But like Mr Kipling he prefers big business.
+His inward eye roves over immensities at least as vast as Mr Kipling's
+outward. In 'The Charnel Rose and Other Poems' this appetite for the
+illimitable inane of introspection seems to have gained upon him. There
+is much writing of this kind:--
+
+  'Dusk, withdrawing to a single lamplight
+  At the end of an infinite street--
+  He saw his ghost walk down that street for ever,
+  And heard the eternal rhythm of his feet.
+  And if he should reach at last that final gutter,
+  To-day, or to-morrow,
+  Or, maybe, after the death of himself and time;
+  And stand at the ultimate curbstone by the stars,
+  Above dead matches, and smears of paper, and slime;
+  Would the secret of his desire
+  Blossom out of the dark with a burst of fire?
+  Or would he hear the eternal arc-lamps sputter,
+  Only that; and see old shadows crawl;
+  And find the stars were street lamps after all?
+
+  Music, quivering to a point of silence,
+  Drew his heart down over the edge of the world....'
+
+It is dangerous for a poet to conjure up infinities unless he has made
+adequate preparation for keeping them in control when they appear. We
+are afraid that Mr Aiken is almost a slave of the spirits he has evoked.
+Dostoevsky's devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probably
+managing-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week. Mr
+Aiken's incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is protean
+and unsatisfactory.
+
+  'I am confused in webs and knots of scarlet
+  Spun from the darkness;
+  Or shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders.
+
+  Madness for red! I devour the leaves of autumn.
+  I tire of the green of the world.
+  I am myself a mouth for blood....'
+
+Perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar things
+mean, exactly, anything? Mr Aiken warns us that his intention has been
+to use the idea--'the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal to
+another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some new
+and subtler fiction'--'as a theme upon which one might wilfully build a
+kind of absolute music.' But having given us so much instruction, he
+should have given more; he should have told us in what province of music
+he has been working. Are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or for
+a musical elaboration of an intellectual theme? We infer, partly from
+the assurance that 'the analogy to a musical symphony is close,' more
+from the absence of verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaboration
+of a theme. In that case the fact that we have a more definite grasp of
+the theme in the programme-introduction than anywhere in the poem itself
+points to failure. In the poem 'stars rush up and whirl and set,'
+'skeletons whizz before and whistle behind,' 'sands bubble and roses
+shoot soft fire,' and we wonder what all the commotion is about. When
+there is a lull in the pandemonium we have a glimpse, not of eternity,
+but precisely of 1890:--
+
+  'And he saw red roses drop apart,
+  Each to disclose a charnel heart....
+
+We are far from saying that Mr Aiken's poetry is merely a chemical
+compound of the 'nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but we
+do think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into
+those elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency
+in the poem called 'The Charnel Rose.' 'Senlin' resists disruption
+longer. But the same elements are there. They are better but not
+sufficiently fused. The rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in
+rhetoric. We have the sense that Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to his
+own idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by a
+violent clashing of the cymbals where a quiet recitative was what the
+theme demanded and his art could not ensure.
+
+  'Death himself in the rain ... death himself ...
+  Death in the savage sunlight ... skeletal death ...
+  I hear the clack of his feet,
+  Clearly on stones, softly in dust,
+  Speeding among the trees with whistling breath,
+  Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves ...
+  Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!...'
+
+We are persuaded that Mr Aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted to
+say something much subtler. But to find exactly what he wanted might
+have taken him many months. He could not wait. Up rushed the rhetoric;
+bang went the cymbals: another page, another book. And we, who have seen
+great promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequate
+fragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poor
+expedients of the moment. For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate. He
+feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:--
+
+  'Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
+  When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone,
+  Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?'
+
+So he descends to a poetaster's padding. He does not stop to consider
+whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or,
+if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference
+occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric
+and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the
+thematic outline itself emerges.
+
+In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.
+We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the
+whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more
+irrevocably itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses at
+the swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us in
+poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he
+has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must
+perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist
+in verse. It is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote the
+labour. His fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of its
+quality. We can only express our hope that he will, and our conviction
+that if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would be
+well requited.
+
+[SEPTEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Ronsard_
+
+
+Ronsard is _rangé_ now; but he has not been in that position for so very
+long, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of the
+Elizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us. Sainte-Beuve was very
+tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious,
+half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm. And, even now, it
+can hardly be said that French critical opinion about him has
+crystallised; the late George Wyndham's essay shows a more convinced and
+better documented appreciation than any that we have read in French,
+based as it is on the instinctive sympathy which one landed gentleman
+who dabbles in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself to
+them--an admiration which does not exclude familiarity.
+
+Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an
+amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him
+more closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. There is
+something churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard
+against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving
+like the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large. One must
+regard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great
+historical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet; and
+the third aspect has a chance of being the most important.
+
+Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. There is nothing
+mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible
+thread of development in either. They are equable, constant
+imperturbable, like the bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of a
+safe batsman. The accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment. The
+nerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are
+steady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a less
+well-appointed spectator. He will never let himself down, or give
+himself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent sure
+restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain.
+All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it.
+
+Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for
+Ronsard a game. There was plenty of game in it; _l'art de bien
+pétrarquiser_ was all he claimed for himself. But the game would have
+wearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied
+and expressed by it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire
+of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by
+some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No one
+reading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hard
+to find in the whole of M. van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'Les
+Amours'[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto.
+When you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particular
+kind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon too closely
+the chances of a shock of surprise.
+
+   [Footnote 9: _Les Amours_. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte établi par
+   Ad. van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Crès.)]
+
+With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard
+is generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal
+tenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly
+capable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own
+delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he
+disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are
+moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive
+wonder that words exist and are manipulable.
+
+  'Dous fut le trait, qu'Amour hors de sa trousse
+  Pour me tuer, me tira doucement,
+  Quand je fus pris au dous commencement
+  D'une douceur si doucettement douce....'
+
+Ronsard is here a boy playing knucklebones with language; and some of
+his characteristic excellences are little more than a development of
+this aptitude, with its more striking incongruities abated. A modern ear
+can be intoxicated by the charming jingle of
+
+  'Petite Nimfe folastre,
+  Nimfette que j'idolastre....'
+
+One does not pause to think how incredibly naive it is compared with
+Villon, who had not a fraction of Ronsard's scholarship, or even with
+Clement Marot; naive both in thought and art. As for the stature of the
+artist, we are back with Charles of Orleans. It would be idle to
+speculate what exactly Villon would have made of the atomic theory had
+he read Lucretius; but we are certain that he would have done something
+very different from Ronsard's
+
+  'Les petits cors, culbutant de travers,
+  Parmi leur cheute en biais vagabonde,
+  Heurtés ensemble ont composé le monde,
+  S'entr'acrochant d'acrochemens divers....'
+
+For this is not grown-up; the cut to simplicity has been too short. So
+many of Ronsard's verses flow over the mind, without disturbing it; fall
+charmingly on the ear, and leave no echoes. But for the moment we share
+his enjoyment.
+
+The second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtless
+allied to the first; it is a _naïveté_ of a particular kind, which
+differs from the profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by the
+fact that it is employed deliberately. Conscious simplicity is art, and
+if it is successful art of no mean order, Ronsard's method of admitting
+us, as it were, to his conversation with himself is definitely his own.
+His interruptions of a verse with 'Hà' or 'Hé'; his 'Mon Dieu, que
+j'aime!' or 'Hé, que ne suis-je puce?' (the difference between Ronsard's
+flea and Donne's would be worth examination) have in them an element of
+irresistible _bonhomie_. We feel that he is making us his confidant. He
+does not have to tear agonies out of himself, so that what he confides
+has no chance of making explicit any secrets of our own. There is
+nothing dangerous about him; we know that he is as safe as we are. We
+are in conversation, not communion. But how effective and engaging it
+is!
+
+  'Vous ne le voulez pas? Eh bien, je suis contant ...'
+
+  'Hé, Dieu du ciel, je n'eusse pas pensé
+  Qu'un seul départ eust causé tant de peine!...'
+
+or the still more casual
+
+  'Un joïeus deplaisir qui douteus l'épointelle,
+  Quoi l'épointelle! ainçois le genne et le martelle ...'
+
+Of this device of style our own Elizabethans were to make more
+profitable use than Ronsard. At their best they packed an intensity of
+dramatic significance into conversational language, of which Ronsard had
+no inkling; and even a strict contemporary of his, like Wyatt, could
+touch cords more intimate by the same means. But, on the other hand,
+Ronsard never fails of his own effect, which is not to convince us
+emotionally, but to compel us to listen. His unexpected address to
+himself or to us is a new ornament for us to admire, not a new method
+for him to express a new thing; and the suggestion of new rhythms that
+might thus be attained is never fully worked out.
+
+  'Mais tu ne seras plus? Et puis?... quand la paleur
+  Qui blemist nôtre corps sans chaleur ne lumière
+  Nous perd le sentiment?...
+
+The ampleness of that reverberance is almost isolated.
+
+Ronsard's resources are indeed few. But he needed few. His simple mind
+was at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasant
+impression of one to whom commonplaces are real. He felt them all over
+again. One imagines him reading the classics--the Iliad in three days,
+or his beloved companion 'sous le bois amoureux,' Tibullus--with an
+unfailing delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted
+on to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus. One might almost
+say that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it
+not that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and that
+the artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with the
+honesty of such a natural man. But apart from a few particulars that
+would find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it to
+distinguish Cassandre from Hélène. What charming things Ronsard has to
+say of either might be said of any charming woman--'le mignard
+embonpoint de ce sein,'--
+
+  'Petit nombril, que mon penser adore,
+  Non pas mon oeil, qui n'eut oncques ce bien ...'
+
+And though he assures Hélène that she has turned him from his grave
+early style, 'qui pour chanter si bas n'est point ordonné,' the
+difference is too hard to detect; one is forced to conclude that it is
+precisely the difference between a court lady and an inn-keeper's
+daughter. As far as art is concerned the most definite and distinctive
+thing that Ronsard had to say of any of his ladies is said of one to
+whom he put forward none of his usually engrossing pretensions. It was
+the complexion of Marguerite of Navarre of which he wrote:--
+
+  'De vif cinabre estoit faicte sa joue,
+  Pareille au teint d'un rougissant oeillet,
+  Ou d'une fraize, alors que dans de laict
+  Dessus le hault de la cresme se joue.'
+
+That is, whether it belonged to Marguerite or not, a divine complexion.
+It is the kind of thing that cannot be said about two ladies; the image
+is too precise to be interchangeable. This may be a reason why it was
+applied to a lady _hors concours_ for Ronsard.
+
+But we need, in fact, seek no reason other than the circumscription of
+Ronsard's poetical gifts. They reduce to only two--the gift of convinced
+commonplace, and the gift of simple melody. His commonplace is genuine
+commonplace, quite distinct from the tense and pregnant condensation of
+a lifetime of impassioned experience in Dante or Shakespeare; things
+that would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinner
+conversation, the sentiments that such a rare and amiable person would
+underscore in his Horace. (From a not unimportant angle Ronsard is a
+minor Horace.) These things are the warp of his poetry; they range from
+the familiar 'Le temps s'en va' to the masterly straightforwardness of
+
+        'plus heureus celui qui la fera
+  Et femme et mère, en lieu d'une pucelle.'
+
+His melody, likewise, is genuine melody; it is irrepressible. It led him
+to belie his own professed seriousness. He could not stop his sonnets
+from rippling even when he pretended to passionate argument. Life came
+easily to him; he was never weary of it, at the most he acknowledged
+that he was 'saoûl de la vie.' It is not surprising, therefore, that his
+remonstrances as the tortured lover have a trick of opening to a
+delightful tune:--
+
+  'Rens-moi mon coeur, rens-moi mon coeur pillarde....'
+
+In another form this melody more closely recalls Thomas Campion:--
+
+  'Seule je l'ai veue, aussi je meurs pour elle....'
+
+But to compare Ronsard's sonnet with 'Follow your saint' is to see how
+infinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music was the Elizabethan
+than the great French lyrist of the Renaissance. From first to last
+Ronsard was an amateur.
+
+[SEPTEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Samuel Butler_
+
+
+The appearance of a new impression of _The Way of all Flesh_[10] in Mr
+Fifield's edition of Samuel Butler's works gives us an occasion to
+consider more calmly the merits and the failings of that entertaining
+story. Like all unique works of authors who stand, even to the most
+obvious apprehension, aside from the general path, it has been
+overwhelmed with superlatives. The case is familiar enough and the
+explanation is simple and brutal. It is hardly worth while to give it.
+The truth is that although there is no inherent reason why the isolated
+novel of an author who devotes himself to other forms should not be 'one
+of the great novels of the world,' the probabilities tell heavily
+against it. On the other hand, an isolated novel makes a good stick to
+beat the age. It is fairly certain to have something sufficiently unique
+about it to be useful for the purpose. Even its blemishes have a knack
+of being _sui generis_. To elevate it is, therefore, bound to imply the
+diminution of its contemporaries.
+
+   [Footnote 10: _The Way of all Flesh_. By Samuel Butler, 11th
+   impression of 2nd edition. (Fifield.)]
+
+Yet, apart from the general argument, there are particular reasons why
+the praise of _The Way of all Flesh_ should be circumspect. Samuel
+Butler knew extraordinarily well what he was about. His novel was
+written intermittently between 1872 and 1884 when he abandoned it. In
+the twenty remaining years of his life he did nothing to it, and we have
+Mr Streatfeild's word for it that 'he professed himself dissatisfied
+with it as a whole, and always intended to rewrite, or at any rate, to
+revise it.' We could have deduced as much from his refusal to publish
+the book. The certainty of commercial failure never deterred Butler from
+publication; he was in the happy situation of being able to publish at
+his own expense a book of whose merit he was himself satisfied. His only
+reason for abandoning _The Way of all Flesh_ was his own dissatisfaction
+with it. His instruction that it should be published in its present form
+after his death proves nothing against his own estimate. Butler knew, at
+least as well as we, that the good things in his book were legion. He
+did not wish the world or his own reputation to lose the benefit of
+them.
+
+But there are differences between a novel which contains innumerable
+good things and a great novel. The most important is that a great novel
+does not contain innumerable good things. You may not pick out the
+plums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do. In _The Way of all
+Flesh_, however, a _compère_ is always present whose business it is to
+say good things. His perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because the
+asides are piquant and, in their way, to the point. Butler's mind, being
+a good mind, had a predilection for the object, and his detestation of
+the rotunder platitudes of a Greek chorus, if nothing else, had taught
+him that a corner-man should have something to say on the subject in
+hand. His arguments are designed to assist his narrative; moreover, they
+are sympathetic to the modern mind. An enlightened hedonism is about all
+that is left to us, and Butler's hatred of humbug is, though a little
+more placid, like our own. We share his ethical likes and dislikes. As
+an audience we are ready to laugh at his asides, and, on the first night
+at least, to laugh at them even when they interrupt the play.
+
+But our liking for the theses cannot alter the fact that _The Way of all
+Flesh_ is a _roman à thèses_. Not that there is anything wrong with the
+_roman à thèses_, if the theses emerge from the narrative without its
+having to be obviously doctored. Nor does it matter very much that a
+_compère_ should be present all the while, provided that he does not
+take upon himself to replace the demonstration the narrative must
+afford, by arguments outside it. But what happens in _The Way of all
+Flesh_? We may leave aside the minor thesis of heredity, for it emerges,
+gently enough, from the story; besides, we are not quite sure what it
+is. We have no doubt, on the other hand, about the major thesis; it is
+blazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious quotation from St
+Paul to the Romans. 'We know that all things work together for good to
+them that love God.' The necessary gloss on this text is given in
+Chapter LXVIII, where Ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:--
+
+    'He had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were
+    gone for a very long time, if not for ever; but there was something
+    else also that had taken its flight along with these. I mean the
+    fear of that which man could do unto him. _Cantabit vacuus_. Who
+    could hurt him more than he had been hurt already? Let him but be
+    able to earn his bread, and he knew of nothing which he dared not
+    venture if it would make the world a happier place for those who
+    were young and lovable. Herein he found so much comfort that he
+    almost wished he had lost his reputation even more completely--for
+    he saw that it was like a man's life which may be found of them that
+    lose it and lost of them that would find it. He should not have had
+    the courage to give up all for Christ's sake, but now Christ had
+    mercifully taken all, and lo! it seemed as though all were found.
+
+    'As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the
+    denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes
+    do; it was a fight about names--not about things; practically the
+    Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the
+    same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most
+    perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman....'
+
+With this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'All
+experience does a gentleman good.' It is the kind of thing we should
+like very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held with
+passion and vehemence by Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word
+'gentleman' was for him very different from the connotation it had for
+Butler. (Butler's gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very much
+the ideal of a period, and not at all _quod semper, quod ubique_; a very
+Victorian anti-Victorianism.) Dostoevsky worked his thesis out with a
+ruthless devotion to realistic probability. He emptied the cornucopia of
+misery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; and
+then had the audacity to challenge the world to say that they were not
+better, more human, and more lovable for the disaster in which they were
+inevitably overwhelmed. And, though it is hard to say 'Yes' to his
+challenge, it is harder still to say 'No.'
+
+In the case of Ernest Pontifex, however, we do not care to respond to
+the challenge at all. The experiment is faked and proves nothing. It is
+mere humbug to declare that a man has been thrown into the waters of
+life to sink or swim, when there is an anxious but cool-headed friend on
+the bank with a £70,000 life-belt to throw after him the moment his head
+goes under. That is neither danger nor experience. Even if Ernest
+Pontifex knew nothing of the future awaiting him (as we are assured he
+did not) it makes no difference. _We_ know he cannot sink; he is a lay
+figure with a pneumatic body. Whether he became a lay figure for Butler
+also we cannot say; we can merely register the fact that the book breaks
+down after Ernest's misadventure with Miss Maitland, a deplorably
+unsubstantial episode to be the crisis of a piece of writing so firm in
+texture and solid in values as the preceding chapters. Ernest as a man
+has an intense non-existence.
+
+After all, as far as the positive side of _The Way of all Flesh_' is
+concerned, Butler's eggs are all in one basket. If the adult Ernest does
+not materialise, the book hangs in empty air. Whatever it may be instead
+it is not a great novel, nor even a good one. So much established, we
+may begin to collect the good things. Christina is the best of them. She
+is, by any standard, a remarkable creation. Butler was 'all round'
+Christina. Both by analysis and synthesis she is wholly his. He can
+produce her in either way. She lives as flesh and blood and has not a
+little of our affection; she is also constructed by definition, 'If it
+were not too awful a thing to say of anybody, she meant well'--the whole
+phrase gives exactly Christina's stature. Alethea Pontifex is really a
+bluff; but the bluff succeeds, largely because, having experience of
+Christina, we dare not call it. Mrs Jupp is triumphantly complete; there
+are even moments when she seems as great as Mrs Quickly. The novels that
+contain three such women (or two if we reckon the uncertain Alethea, who
+is really only a vehicle for Butler's very best sayings, as cancelled by
+the non-existent Ellen) can be counted, we suppose, on our ten fingers.
+
+Of the men, Theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word).
+But we know little of what went on inside him. We can fill out Christina
+with her inimitable day-dreams; Theobald remains something of a
+skeleton, whereas we have no difficulty at all with Dr Skinner, of
+Roughborough. We have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling the
+shelves with volumes of Skinner, and we know how it was done. When he
+reappears we assume the continuity of his existence without demur. The
+glimpse of George Pontifex is also satisfying; after the christening
+party we know him for a solid reality. Pryer was half-created when his
+name was chosen. Butler did the rest in a single paragraph which
+contains a perfect delineation of 'the Oxford manner' twenty years
+before it had become a disease known to ordinary diagnosis. The curious
+may find this towards the beginning of Chapter LI. But Ernest, upon whom
+so much depends, is a phantom--a dream-child waiting the incarnation
+which Butler refused him for twenty years. Was it laziness, was it a
+felt incapacity? We do not know; but in the case of a novelist it is our
+duty to believe the worst. The particularity of our attitude to Butler
+appears in the fact that we are disappointed, not with him, but with
+Ernest. We are even angry with that young man. If it had not been for
+him, we believe, _The Way of all Flesh_ might have appeared in 1882; it
+might have short-circuited _Robert Elsmere_.
+
+[JUNE, 1919.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We approach the biography of an author whom we respect, and therefore
+have thought about, with contradictory feelings. We are excited at the
+thought of finding our conclusions reinforced, and apprehensive less the
+compact and definite figure which our imaginations have gradually shaped
+should become vague and incoherent and dull. It is a pity to purchase
+enlightenment at the cost of definition; and it is more important that
+we should have a clear notion of the final shape of a man in whom we are
+interested than an exact record of his phases.
+
+The essential quality of great artists is incommensurable with
+biography; they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasion
+of the event. All that piety can do for them is beside the mark. Their
+wilful spirit is fled before the last stone of the mausoleum can be got
+in place, and as it flies it jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and his
+libation is spilt idly upon the ground. Although it would be too much
+and too ungrateful to say that the monumental piety of Mr Festing Jones
+has been similarly turned to derision--after all, Butler was not a
+great man--we feel that something analogous has happened. This laborious
+building is a great deal too large for him to dwell in. He had made
+himself a cosy habitation in the _Note-Books_, with the fire in the
+right place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of criticism.
+In a two-volume memoir[11] he shivers perceptibly, and at moments he
+looks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic.
+
+   [Footnote 11: _Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon'_ (1835-1902): _a
+   Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. 2 vols. (Macmillan.)]
+
+And if it be said that a biography should make no difference to our
+estimate of the man who lives and has his being in his published works,
+we reply that it shifts the emphasis. An amusingly wrong-headed book
+about Homer is a peccadillo; ten years of life lavished upon it is
+something a good deal more serious. And even _The Way of all Flesh_,
+which as an experimental novel is a very considerable achievement,
+becomes something different when we have to regard it as a laborious and
+infinitely careful record of experienced fact. Further still, even the
+edge of the perfected inconsequence of certain of the 'Notes' is
+somewhat dulled when we see the trick of it being exercised. The origin
+of the amusing remark on Blake, who 'was no good because he learnt
+Italian at over 60 in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good
+because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because
+Tennyson ran him--well, Tennyson goes without saying,' is to be found in
+'No, I don't like Lamb. You see, Canon Ainger writes about him, and
+Canon Ainger goes to tea with my aunts.' Repeated, it becomes merely a
+clever way of being stupid, as we should be if we were tempted to say
+we couldn't bear Handel, because Butler was mad on him, and Butler was
+no good because he was run by Mr Jones, and, well, Mr Jones goes without
+saying.
+
+Nevertheless, though Butler lives with much discomfort and some danger
+in Mr Jones's tabernacle, he does continue to live. What his head loses
+by the inquisition of a biography his heart gains, though we wonder
+whether Butler himself would have smiled upon the exchange. Butler loses
+almost the last vestige of a title to be considered a creative artist
+when the incredible fact is revealed that the letters of Theobald and
+Christina in _The Way of all Flesh_ are merely reproduced from those
+which his father and mother sent him. Nor was Butler, even as a copyist,
+always adequate to his originals. The brilliantly witty letters of Miss
+Savage, by which the first volume is made precious, seem to us to
+indicate a real woman upon whom something more substantial might have
+been modelled than the delightful but evanescent picture of Alethea
+Pontifex. Here, at least, is a picture of Miss Savage and Butler
+together which, to our sense, gives some common element in both which
+escaped the expression of the author of _The Way of all Flesh_:--
+
+    'I like the cherry-eating scene, too [Miss Savage wrote after
+    reading the MS. of _Alps and Sanctuaries_], because it reminded me
+    of your eating cherries when I first knew you. One day when I was
+    going to the gallery, a very hot day I remember, I met you on the
+    shady side of Berners Street, eating cherries out of a basket. Like
+    your Italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and
+    you handed the basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word.
+    I pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying
+    a word either. I had not before perceived you to be different from
+    any one else. I was like Peter Bell and the primrose with the yellow
+    brim. As I went away to France a day or two after that and did not
+    see you again for months, the recollection of you as you were eating
+    cherries in Berners Street abode with me and pleased me greatly.'
+
+Again, we feel that the unsubstantial Towneley of the novel should have
+been more like flesh and blood when we learn that he too was drawn from
+the life, and from a life which was intimately connected with Butler's.
+Here, most evidently, the heart gains what the head loses, for the story
+of Butler's long-suffering generosity to Charles Paine Pauli is almost
+beyond belief and comprehension. Butler had met Pauli, who was two years
+his junior, in New Zealand, and had conceived a passionate admiration
+for him. Learning that he desired to read for the bar, Butler, who had
+made an unexpected success of his sheep-farming, offered to lend him
+£100 to get to England and £200 a year until he was called. Very shortly
+after they both arrived in England, Pauli separated from Butler,
+refusing even to let him know his address, and thenceforward paid him
+one brief visit every day. He continued, however, to draw his allowance
+regularly until his death all through the period when, owing to the
+failure of Butler's investments, £200 seems to have been a good deal
+more than one-half Butler's income. At Pauli's death in 1897 Butler
+discovered what he must surely at moments have suspected, that Pauli had
+been making between £500 and £800 at the bar, and had left about
+£9000--not to Butler. Butler wrote an account of the affair after
+Pauli's death which is strangely self-revealing:--
+
+    '... Everything that he had was good, and he was such a fine
+    handsome fellow, with such an attractive manner that to me he seemed
+    everything I should like myself to be, but knew very well that I was
+    not....
+
+    'I had felt from the very beginning that my intimacy with Pauli was
+    only superficial, and I also perceived more and more that I bored
+    him.... He liked society and I hated it. Moreover, he was at times
+    very irritable and would find continual fault with me; often, I have
+    no doubt, justly, but often, as it seemed to me, unreasonably.
+    Devoted to him as I continued to be for many years, those years were
+    very unhappy as well as very happy ones.
+
+    'I set down a great deal to his ill-health, no doubt truly; a great
+    deal more, I was sure, was my own fault--and I am so still; I
+    excused much on the score of his poverty and his dependence on
+    myself--for his father and mother, when it came to the point, could
+    do nothing for him; I was his host and was bound to forbear on that
+    ground if on no other. I always hoped that, as time went on, and he
+    saw how absolutely devoted to him I was, and what unbounded
+    confidence I had in him, and how I forgave him over and over again
+    for treatment which I would not have stood for a moment from any
+    one else--I always hoped that he would soften and deal as frankly
+    and unreservedly with me as I with him; but, though for some fifteen
+    years I hoped this, in the end I gave it up, and settled down into a
+    resolve from which I never departed--to do all I could for him, to
+    avoid friction of every kind, and to make the best of things for him
+    and myself that circumstances would allow.'
+
+In love such as this there is a feminine tenderness and devotion which
+positively illuminates what otherwise appears to be a streak of
+perversity in Butler; and the illumination becomes still more certain
+when we read Butler's letters to the young Swiss, Hans Faesch, to whom
+_Out into the Night_ was written. Faesch had departed for Singapore.
+
+    'The sooner we all of us,' wrote Butler, 'as men of sense and sober
+    reason, get through the very acute, poignant sorrow which we now
+    feel, the better for us all. There is no fear of any of us
+    forgetting when the acute stage is passed. I should be ashamed of
+    myself for having felt as keenly and spoken with as little reserve
+    as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any
+    length to which grief can take me when it is about you. I can call
+    to mind no word which ever passed between us three which had been
+    better unspoken: no syllable of irritation or unkindness; nothing
+    but goodness and kindness ever came out of you, and such as our best
+    was we gave it to you as you gave yours to us. Who may not well be
+    plunged up to the lips in sorrow at parting from one of whom he can
+    say this in all soberness and truth? I feel as though I had lost an
+    only son with no hope of another....'
+
+The love is almost pathetically lavish. Letters like these reveal to us
+a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier
+and defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was _rentrée_,
+probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication
+helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which
+he behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured
+weapon. The most threatening danger for such a man is to take the
+professions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himself
+only by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger
+to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler it
+reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of
+the world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the _Note-Books_ in
+_The Athenæum_ recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositions
+on their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely to
+scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the
+converse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast majority who
+meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority who
+were sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland cases
+escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regard
+all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like and
+admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and
+wrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle
+the curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnett
+of the British Museum are of uncommon interest. They afford a strange
+example of mutual mystification.
+
+Thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does not
+greatly matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as with
+the whole) but of thought, was closed to him. Most of the poetry, the
+music, and the art of the world was humbug to him, and it was only by
+insisting that Homer and Shakespeare were exactly like himself that he
+managed to except them from his natural aversion. So, in the last
+resort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined the
+majority of men were engaged in humbugging him. If his standard of truth
+was higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few.
+There is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats is
+merely clumsy and inopportune. In the slow meanderings of this _Memoir_
+we too often catch a glimpse of Butler measuring giants with the
+impertinent foot-rule of his common sense. One does not like him the
+less for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting jokes with
+which it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation.
+Persistently there emerges from the record the impression of something
+childish, whether in petulance or _gaminerie_, a crudeness as well as a
+shrewdness of judgment and ideal. Where Butler thought himself complete,
+he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he was
+complete. To himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of Pauli; to
+us he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of Miss Savage.
+
+[OCTOBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Poetry of Mr Hardy_
+
+
+One meets fairly often with the critical opinion that Mr Hardy's poetry
+is incidental. It is admitted on all sides that his poetry has curious
+merits of its own, but it is held to be completely subordinate to his
+novels, and those who maintain that it must be considered as having
+equal standing with his prose, are not seldom treated as guilty of
+paradox and preciousness.
+
+We are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those of
+the contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressed
+primarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man's chief work must
+necessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some such
+supposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visible
+reluctance to allow Mr Hardy's poetry a clean impact upon the critical
+consciousness. It is true that we have ranged against us critics of
+distinction, such as Mr Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr Robert Lynd, and
+that it may savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could have
+been unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressed
+themselves to Mr Hardy's poetry. Nevertheless, we find some significance
+in the fact that both these critics are of such an age that when they
+came to years of discretion the Wessex Novels were in existence as a
+_corpus_. There, before their eyes, was a monument of literary work
+having a unity unlike that of any contemporary author. The poems became
+public only after they had laid the foundations of their judgment. For
+them Mr Hardy's work was done. Whatever he might subsequently produce
+was an interesting, but to their criticism an otiose appendix to his
+prose achievement.
+
+It happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspective
+may be different. By the accident of years it would appear to him that
+Mr Hardy's poetry was no less a _corpus_ than his prose. They would be
+extended equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embark
+upon voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and he
+might find, in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that the
+poetry would yield up to him a quality of perfume not less essential
+than any that he could extract from the prose.
+
+This is, as we see it, the case with ourselves. We discover all that our
+elders discover in Mr Hardy's novels; we see more than they in his
+poetry. To our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is not
+lifted into significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels.
+They also are complete in themselves. We recognise the relation between
+the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind;
+but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. The
+one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline,
+therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us
+the most important sentence in _Who's Who?_--namely, that in which Mr
+Hardy confesses that in 1868 he was compelled--that is his own word--to
+give up writing poetry for prose.
+
+For Mr Hardy's poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. In the
+volume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with the
+exception of 'The Dynasts,'[12] are pieces bearing the date 1866 which
+display an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of the
+essential content of great poetry. Nor are such pieces exceptional.
+Granted that Mr Hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry,
+still there are a dozen poems of 1866-7 which belong either entirely or
+in part to the category of major poetry. Take, for instance, 'Neutral
+Tones':--
+
+  'We stood by a pond that winter day,
+  And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
+  And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
+    --They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
+
+  'Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
+  Over tedious riddles long ago;
+  And some winds played between us to and fro
+    On which lost the more by our love.
+
+  'The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
+  Alive enough to have strength to die;
+  And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
+    Like an ominous bird a-wing....
+
+  'Since then keen lessons that love deceives
+  And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
+  Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree
+    And a pond edged with grayish leaves.'
+
+   [Footnote 12: _Collected. Poems of Thomas Hardy_. Vol. I.
+   (Macmillan.)]
+
+That was written in 1867. The date of _Desperate Remedies_, Mr Hardy's
+first novel, was 1871. _Desperate Remedies_ may have been written some
+years before. It makes no difference to the astonishing contrast between
+the immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. It is surely
+impossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that Mr
+Hardy's poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curious
+simulacrum of his prose.
+
+These early poems have other points of deep interest, of which one of
+the chief is in a sense technical. One can trace a quite definite
+influence of Shakespeare's sonnets in his language and imagery. The four
+sonnets, 'She to Him' (1866), are full of echoes, as:--
+
+  'Numb as a vane that cankers on its point
+  True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.'
+
+or this from another sonnet of the same year:--
+
+  'As common chests encasing wares of price
+  Are borne with tenderness through halls of state.'
+
+Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the
+impress of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curious
+and impressive in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringing
+some physical compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to say
+something that he does not want to say. Of course, it is merely a
+curious tweak of the fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as the
+following an insistent vision of two youths of an age the one
+masterful, the other indulgent, and carrying out his companion's firm
+suggestion:--
+
+  'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame
+  That Sportsman Time rears but his brood to kill,
+  Knowing me in my soul the very same--
+  One who would die to spare you touch of ill!--
+  Will you not grant to old affection's claim
+  The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?'
+
+But, fancies aside, the effect of these early poems is twofold. Their
+attitude is definite:--
+
+  'Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain
+  And dicing time for gladness calls a moan ...
+  These purblind Doomsters had as readily thrown
+  Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.'
+
+and the technique has the mark of mastery, a complete economy of
+statement which produces the conviction that the words are saying only
+what poet ordained they should say, neither less nor more.
+
+The early years were followed by the long period of the novels, in
+which, we are prepared to admit, poetry was actually if not in intention
+incidental. It is the grim truth that poetry cannot be written in
+between times; and, though we have hardly any dates on which to rely, we
+are willing to believe that few of Mr Hardy's characteristic poems were
+written between the appearance of _Desperate Remedies_ and his farewell
+to the activity of novel-writing with _The Well-Beloved_ (1897). But the
+few dates which we have tell us that 'Thoughts of Phena,' the beautiful
+poem beginning:--
+
+  'Not a line of her writing have I,
+  Not a thread of her hair....'
+
+which reaches forward to the love poems of 1912-13, was written in 1890.
+
+Whether the development of Mr Hardy's poetry was concealed or visible
+during the period of the novels, development there was into a maturity
+so overwhelming that by its touchstone the poetical work of his famous
+contemporaries appears singularly jejune and false. But, though by the
+accident of social conditions--for that Mr Hardy waited till 1898 to
+publish his first volume of poems is more a social than an artistic
+fact--it is impossible to follow out the phases of his poetical progress
+in the detail we would desire, it is impossible not to recognise that
+the mature poet, Mr Hardy, is of the same poetical substance as the
+young poet of the 'sixties. The attitude is unchanged; the modifications
+of the theme of 'crass casualty' leave its central asseveration
+unchanged. There are restatements, enlargements of perspective, a slow
+and forceful expansion of the personal into the universal, but the truth
+once recognised is never suffered for a moment to be hidden or
+mollified. Only a superficial logic would point, for instance, to his
+
+  'Wonder if Man's consciousness
+  Was a mistake of God's,'
+
+as a denial of 'casualty.' To envisage an accepted truth from a new
+angle, to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope of
+finding some aspect which might accord with a large and general view is
+the inevitable movement of any mind that is alive and not dead. To say
+that Mr Hardy has finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it is
+true. The harmony of the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher or
+the philosopher. Neither would grant, neither would understand the
+profound acquiescence that lies behind 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to the
+Grecian Urn.' Such acquiescence has no moral quality, as morality is
+even now understood, nor any logical compulsion. It does not stifle
+anger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling face upon unsmiling things;
+it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile heroics. It accepts the
+things that are as the necessary basis of artistic creation. This unity
+which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to deny
+experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which is
+not denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy's mature poetry.
+It gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is
+called the impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense of
+background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the
+culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the
+culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems
+to record.
+
+At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy
+to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or
+dismay. Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famous
+lines: 'There is some corner of a foreign field ...' and Mr Hardy's
+'Drummer Hodge':--
+
+  'Yet portion of that unknown plain
+    Will Hodge for ever be;
+  His homely Northern heart and brain
+    Grow to some Southern tree,
+  And strange-eyed constellations reign
+    His stars eternally.'
+
+We know which is the truer. Which is the more beautiful? Is it not Mr
+Hardy? And which (strange question) is the more consoling, the more
+satisfying, the more acceptable? Is it not Mr Hardy? There is sorrow,
+but it is the sorrow of the spheres. And this, not the apparent anger
+and dismay of a self's discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in Mr
+Hardy's poetry. The Mr Hardy of the love poems of 1912-13 is not a man
+giving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry of
+the universe. A vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weight
+each syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into a
+moment of time with a vista of years:--
+
+  'Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
+    The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
+  Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
+    For the stars close their shutters and the
+        Dawn whitens hazily.
+  Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours
+    The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
+      I am just the same as when
+  Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.'
+
+[NOVEMBER, 1919.
+
+We have read these poems of Thomas Hardy, read them not once, but many
+times. Many of them have already become part of our being; their
+indelible impress has given shape to dumb and striving elements in our
+soul; they have set free and purged mute, heart-devouring regrets. And
+yet, though this is so, the reading of them in a single volume, the
+submission to their movement with a like unbroken motion of the mind,
+gathers their greatness, their poignancy and passion, into one stream,
+submerging us and leaving us patient and purified.
+
+There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of
+sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this
+compulsive power. The secret is not hard to find. Not one of them is
+adequate to what we know and have suffered. We have in our own hearts a
+new touchstone of poetic greatness. We have learned too much to be
+wholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and a
+complete acknowledgment of experience. 'Give us the whole,' we cry,
+'give us the truth.' Unless we can catch the undertone of this
+acknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding
+brass or a tinkling cymbal.
+
+Therefore we turn--some by instinct and some by deliberate choice--to
+the greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these. What
+they have, he has, and has in their degree--a plenary vision of life. He
+is the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in,
+modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual
+poems of which they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment of
+a whole--not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity
+which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and
+completely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind and
+within it a reaction to the universe. An overwhelming endorsement
+descends upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, and
+straightway they are graven in stone.
+
+Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in
+kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries. These may be
+perfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by Mr Hardy is often
+perfect in a higher sense. As the lines of a diagram may be produced in
+imagination to contain within themselves all space, one of Mr Hardy's
+most characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience.
+In it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself--the
+dominant theme that gives individuation to the ripple of fragmentary
+joys and sorrows. Take 'The Broken Appointment':--
+
+      'You did not come,
+  And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.--
+  Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
+  Than that I thus found lacking in your make
+  That high compassion which can overbear
+  Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
+  Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
+      You did not come.
+
+  'You love not me,
+  And love alone can lend you loyalty
+  --I know and knew it. But, unto the store
+  Of human deeds divine in all but name,
+  Was it not worth a little hour or more
+  To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
+  To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
+      You love not me?'
+
+On such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visible
+endorsement of the universe. The hopes not of a lover but of humanity
+are crushed beneath its rhythm. The ruthlessness of the event is
+intensified in the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad of
+destiny, and a moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain of
+intense attention it seems to have been written by the destiny it
+records.
+
+What is the secret of poetic power like this? We do not look for it in
+technique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. But the
+technique of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind that
+we know as we read that it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. For a
+moment it startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words is
+reverberant with accumulated purpose. They are pitiless as the poem; the
+sign of an ultimate obedience is upon them. Whence came the power that
+compelled it? Can the source be defined or indicated? We believe it can
+be indicated, though not defined. We can show where to look for the
+mystery, that in spite of our regard remains a mystery still. We are
+persuaded that almost on the instant that it was felt the original
+emotion of the poem was endorsed Perhaps it came to the poet as the pain
+of a particular and personal experience; but in a little or a long
+while--creative time is not measured by days or years--it became, for
+him, a part of the texture of the general life. It became a
+manifestation of life, almost, nay wholly, in the sacramental sense, a
+veritable epiphany. The manifold and inexhaustible quality of life was
+focused into a single revelation. A critic's words do not lend
+themselves to the necessary precision. We should need to write with
+exactly the same power as Mr Hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour stroked
+its sum,' to make our meaning likewise inevitable. The word 'revelation'
+is fertile in false suggestion; the creative act of power which we seek
+to elucidate is an act of plenary apprehension, by which one
+manifestation, one form of life, one experience is seen in its rigorous
+relation to all other and to all possible manifestations, forms, and
+experiences. It is, we believe, the act which Mr Hardy himself has tried
+to formulate in the phrase which is the title of one of his books of
+poems--_Moments of Vision_.
+
+Only those who do not read Mr Hardy could make the mistake of supposing
+that on his lips such a phrase had a mystical implication. Between
+belief and logic lies a third kingdom, which the mystics and the
+philosophers alike are too eager to forget--the kingdom of art, no less
+the residence of truth than the two other realms, and to some, perhaps,
+more authentic even than they. Therefore when we expand the word
+'vision' in the phrase to 'æsthetic vision' we mean, not the perception
+of beauty, at least in the ordinary sense of that ill-used word, but the
+apprehension of truth, the recognition of a complete system of valid
+relations incapable of logical statement. Such are the acts of unique
+apprehension which Mr Hardy, we believe, implied by his title. In a
+'moment of vision' the poet recognises in a single separate incident of
+life, life's essential quality. The uniqueness of the whole, the
+infinite multiplicity and variety of its elements, are manifested and
+apprehended in a part. Since we are here at work on the confines of
+intelligible statement, it is better, even at the cost of brutalising a
+poem, to choose an example from the book that bears the mysterious name.
+The verses that follow come from 'Near Lanivet, 1872.' We choose them as
+an example of Mr Hardy's method at less than its best, at a point at
+which the scaffolding of his process is just visible.
+
+  'There was a stunted hand-post just on the crest.
+    Only a few feet high:
+  She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
+    At the crossways close thereby.
+
+  'She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
+    And laid her arms on its own,
+  Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
+    Her sad face sideways thrown.
+
+  'Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
+    Made her look as one crucified
+  In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
+    And hurriedly "Don't," I cried.
+
+  'I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
+    As she stepped forth ready to go,
+  "I am rested now.--Something strange came into my head;
+    I wish I had not leant so!'...
+
+  'And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
+    In the running of Time's far glass
+  Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
+    Some day.--Alas, alas!'
+
+Superstition and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert the
+order of the creative process. The poet's act of apprehension is wholly
+different from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension the
+chance-shaped crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. The
+concentration of life's vicissitude upon that white-clothed form was
+first recognised by a sovereign act of æsthetic understanding or
+intuition; the seeming crucifix supplied a scaffolding for its
+expression; it afforded a clue to the method of transposition into words
+which might convey the truth thus apprehended; it suggested an
+equivalence. The distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but we believe
+that it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to an
+understanding of Mr Hardy's poetry in particular. Indeed, in it must be
+sought the meaning of another of his titles, 'Satires of Circumstance,'
+where the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, but
+a symbol necessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality in
+life more largely and variously apprehended by the poet. At the risk of
+appearing fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate our
+meaning. The poetic process is, we believe, twofold. The one part, the
+discovery of the symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what we
+may call poetic method. It is concerned with the transposition and
+communication of emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for to
+poetic method the emotional material is, strictly, indifferent. The
+other part is an esthetic apprehension of significance, the recognition
+of the all in the one. This is a specifically poetic act, or rather the
+supreme poetic act. Yet it may be absent from poetry. For there is no
+necessary connection between poetic apprehension and poetic method.
+Poetic method frequently exists without poetic apprehension; and there
+is no reason to suppose that the reverse is not also true, for the
+recognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the peculiar
+privilege of great poets. We have here, at least a principle of division
+between major and minor poetry.
+
+Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and ask
+what it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act of
+apprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality of
+the one. We believe that the answer is simple. The great poet knows what
+he is looking for. Once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely,
+being compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describe
+what is being done in the kingdom of art. The poet, we say, knows the
+quality for which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a condition
+than a possession of soul. It is a state of responsiveness rather than a
+knowledge of that to which he will respond. But it is knowledge inasmuch
+as the choice of that to which he will respond is determined by the
+condition of his soul. On the purity of that condition depends his
+greatness as a poet, and that purity in its turn depends upon his
+denying no element of his profound experience. If he denies or forgets,
+the synthesis--again the word is a metaphor--which must establish itself
+within him is fragmentary and false. The new event can wake but partial
+echoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received into, nor
+can it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable from
+limbo into forgetfulness.
+
+Mr Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate
+purity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the world's slow stain
+has not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general
+conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professional
+optimists take a part. Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence and
+strangeness of their own:--
+
+      'It will have been:
+  Nor God nor Demon can undo the done,
+      Unsight the seen
+  Make muted music be as unbegun
+      Though things terrene
+  Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.'
+
+What neither God nor Demon can do, men are incessantly at work to
+accomplish. Life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for she
+scatters her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns.
+But the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond his
+power to remember them otherwise than together.
+
+It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardy
+should have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of
+love poems that are unique for power and passion in even the English
+language. This late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; it
+has sprung straight from the main stem of Mr Hardy's poetic growth. Into
+'Veteris Vestigia Flammas' is distilled the quintessence of the power
+that created the Wessex Novels and 'The Dynasts'; all that Mr Hardy has
+to tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, is
+in these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or told
+us more. _Sunt lacrimæ rerum_.
+
+[NOVEMBER, 1919.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+POSTSCRIPT
+
+Three months after this essay was written the first volume of the long
+awaited definitive edition of Mr Hardy's works (the Mellstock Edition)
+appeared. It was with no common thrill that we read in the precious
+pages of introduction the following words confirming the theory upon
+which the first part of the essay is largely based.
+
+    'Turning now to my verse--to myself the more individual part of my
+    literary fruitage--I would say that, unlike some of the fiction,
+    nothing interfered with the writer's freedom in respect of its form
+    or content. Several of the poems--indeed many--were produced before
+    novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the
+    light till all the novels had been published....
+
+    'The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of
+    some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more
+    volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty
+    years. One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how
+    much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given
+    in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.'
+
+
+
+
+_Present Condition of English Poetry_
+
+
+Shall we, or shall we not, be serious? To be serious nowadays is to be
+ill-mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter? We have our
+opinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in the
+Georgian book, a little in _Wheels_.[13] We know that there is much bad
+poetry in the Georgian book, and less in _Wheels_. We know that there is
+one poem in _Wheels_ beside the intense and sombre imagination of which
+even the good poetry of the Georgian book pales for a moment. We think
+we know more than this. What does it matter? Pick out the good things,
+and let the rest go.
+
+   [Footnote 13: _Georgian Poetry_, 1918-1919. Edited by E.M. (The
+   Poetry Bookshop.)
+
+   _Wheels_. Fourth Cycle. (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell.)]
+
+And yet, somehow, this question of modern English poetry has become
+important for us, as important as the war, important in the same way as
+the war. We can even analogise. _Georgian Poetry_ is like the Coalition
+Government; _Wheels_ is like the Radical opposition. Out of the one
+there issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous
+redolence of _union sacrée_; out of the other, some acidulation of
+perversity. In the coalition poets we find the larger number of good
+men, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find
+no bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition
+goodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent,
+passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life.
+
+On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both
+sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost
+wholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we
+find intensely disagreeable. In the coalition we find it noxious, in the
+opposition no worse than irritating. No doubt this is because we
+recognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while the
+opposition is held to be ridiculous. But both the coalition and the
+opposition--we use both terms in their corporate sense--are unmistakably
+the product of the present age. In that sense they are truly
+representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair
+sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we
+live; they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete
+confusion of æsthetic values that prevails to-day.
+
+The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. Of the
+nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we
+except absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, and
+Mr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, Mr
+Abercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the rest
+there are varying degrees of saturation. This false simplicity can be
+quite subtle. It is compounded of worship of trees and birds and
+contemporary poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over at
+times with a quite perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other times
+with what looks to be technical skill, but generally proves to be a
+fairly clumsy reminiscence of somebody else's technical skill. The
+negative qualities of this _simplesse_ are, however, the most obvious;
+the poems imbued with it are devoid of any emotional significance
+whatever. If they have an idea it leaves you with the queer feeling that
+it is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn smooth by the
+rippling of innumerable minds. Then, spread in a luminous haze over
+these compounded elements, is a fundamental right-mindedness; you feel,
+somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are very
+good. There is nothing disturbing about them; _ils peuvent être mis dans
+toutes les mains_; they are kind, generous, even noble. They sympathise
+with animate and inanimate nature. They have shining foreheads with big
+bumps of benevolence, like Flora Casby's father, and one inclines to
+believe that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear,
+if only because their vision is blurred. They are fond of lists of names
+which never suggest things; they are sparing of similes. If they use
+them they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definite
+simile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certain
+test of reality.
+
+But it is impossible to be serious about them. The more stupid of them
+supply the matter for a good laugh; the more clever the stuff of a more
+recondite amazement. What _is_ one to do when Mr Monro apostrophises the
+force of Gravity in such words as these?--
+
+  'By leave of you man places stone on stone;
+  He scatters seed: you are at once the prop
+  Among the long roots of his fragile crop
+  You manufacture for him, and insure
+  House, harvest, implement, and furniture,
+  And hold them all secure.'
+
+We are not surprised to learn further that
+
+  'I rest my body on your grass,
+  And let my brain repose in you.'
+
+All that remains to be said is that Mr Monro is fond of dogs ('Can you
+smell the rose?' he says to Dog: 'ah, no!') and inclined to fish--both
+of which are Georgian inclinations.
+
+Then there is Mr Drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man for
+moonlit apples--'moon-washed apples of wonder'--and the righteous man's
+sense of robust rhythm in this chorus from 'Lincoln':--
+
+    'You who know the tenderness
+  Of old men at eve-tide,
+    Coming from the hedgerows,
+  Coming from the plough,
+    And the wandering caress
+  Of winds upon the woodside,
+    When the crying yaffle goes
+  Underneath the bough.'
+
+Mr Drinkwater, though he cannot write good doggerel, is a very good man.
+In this poem he refers to the Sermon on the Mount as 'the words of light
+From the mountain-way.'
+
+Mr Squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make an
+excellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity. He
+would repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in the
+same way as, we suppose, he deceives himself. His poem 'Rivers' seems to
+us a very curious example of the _faux bon_. Not only is the idea
+derivative, but the rhythmical treatment also. Here is Mr de la Mare:--
+
+  'Sweet is the music of Arabia
+  In my heart, when out of dreams
+  I still in the thin clear murk of dawn
+  Descry her gliding streams;
+  Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
+  Ring loud with the grief and delight
+  Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians
+  In the brooding silence of night.
+  They haunt me--her lutes and her forests;
+  No beauty on earth I see
+  But shadowed with that dream recalls
+  Her loveliness to me:
+  Still eyes look coldly upon me,
+  Cold voices whisper and say--
+  "He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
+  They have stolen his wits away."'
+
+And here is a verse from Mr Squire:--
+
+  'For whatever stream I stand by,
+  And whatever river I dream of,
+  There is something still in the back of my mind
+    From very far away;
+  There is something I saw and see not,
+  A country full of rivers
+  That stirs in my heart and speaks to me
+    More sure, more dear than they.
+
+  'And always I ask and wonder
+  (Though often I do not know it)
+  Why does this water not smell like water?...'
+
+To leave the question of reminiscence aside, how the delicate vision of
+Mr de la Mare has been coarsened, how commonplace his exquisite
+technique has become in the hands of even a first-rate ability! It
+remains to be added that Mr Squire is an amateur of nature,--
+
+  'And skimming, fork-tailed in the evening air,
+  When man first was were not the martens there?'--
+
+and a lover of dogs.
+
+Mr Shanks, Mr W.J. Turner, and Mr Freeman belong to the same order. They
+have considerable technical accomplishment of the straightforward
+kind--and no emotional content. One can find examples of the disastrous
+simile in them all. They are all in their degree pseudo-naïves. Mr
+Turner wonders in this way:--
+
+  'It is strange that a little mud
+  Should echo with sounds, syllables, and letters,
+  Should rise up and call a mountain Popocatapetl,
+  And a green-leafed wood Oleander.'
+
+Of course Mr Turner does not really wonder; those four lines are proof
+positive of that. But what matters is not so much the intrinsic value of
+the gift as the kindly thought which prompted the giver. Mr Shanks's
+speciality is beauty. He also is an amateur of nature. He bids us: 'Hear
+the loud night-jar spin his pleasant note.' Of course, Mr Shanks cannot
+have heard a real night-jar. His description is proof of that. But
+again, it was a kindly thought. Mr Freeman is, like Mr Squire, a more
+interesting case, deserving detailed analysis. For the moment we can
+only recommend a comparison of his first and second poems in this book
+with 'Sabrina Fair' and 'Love in a Valley' respectively.
+
+It is only when we are confronted with the strange blend of technical
+skill and an emotional void that we begin to hunt for reminiscences.
+Reminiscences are no danger to the real poet. He is the splendid
+borrower who lends a new significance to that which he takes. He
+incorporates his borrowing in the new thing which he creates; it has its
+being there and there alone. One can see the process in the one fine
+poem in _Wheels_, Mr Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting':--
+
+  'It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
+  Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
+  Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
+  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
+  Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
+  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
+  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
+  Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
+  And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
+  With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
+  Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
+  And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
+  "Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
+  "None," said the other, "save the undone years,
+  The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
+  Was my life also..."'
+
+The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in
+these two books, both in intention and achievement. Yet no one can
+mistake its source. It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Induction
+to 'Hyperion.' The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the
+dying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats.
+
+  'None can usurp this height, return'd that shade,
+  But those to whom the miseries of the world
+  Are misery, and will not let them rest.'
+
+That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen's 'Strange
+Meeting.' It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its
+technique there is the hand of the master to be. Those monosyllabic
+assonances are the discovery of genius. We are persuaded that this poem
+by a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in
+his heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotional
+significance of the war that has yet been achieved by English poetry. By
+including it in his book, the editor of _Wheels_ has done a great
+service to English letters.
+
+Extravagant words, it may be thought. We appeal to the documents. Read
+_Georgian Poetry_ and read 'Strange Meeting.' Compare Wilfred Owen's
+poem with the very finest things in the Georgian book--Mr Davies's
+'Lovely Dames,' or Mr de la Mare's 'The Tryst,' or 'Fare Well,' or the
+twenty opening lines of Mr Abercrombie's disappointing poem. You will
+not find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you
+will find in 'Strange Meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that
+which has been most profound in the experience of a generation. You
+will, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of
+which makes the confusion of a book like _Georgian Poetry_ possible,
+restored to you. You will remember three forgotten things--that poetry
+is rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and
+that its significance finally depends upon the quality and
+comprehensiveness of the emotion. You will recognise that the tricks of
+the trade have never been and never will be discovered by which ability
+can conjure emptiness into meaning.
+
+It seems hardly worth while to return to _Wheels_. Once the argument has
+been pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting,' the rest of the
+contents of the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry we
+will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false
+sophistication. There are the same contemporary reminiscences. Compare
+Mr Osbert Sitwell's _English Gothic_ with Mr T.S. Eliot's _Sweeney_; and
+you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with
+the emotions of a complex one. The spectacle is almost as amusing as
+that of the similar process in the Georgian book. Nevertheless, in
+general, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merely
+irritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positively
+noxious. Miss Edith Sitwell's deliberate painted toys are a great deal
+better than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones.
+In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a perplexed emotion manages to make its
+way through a chaotic technique. She represents the solid impulse which
+lies behind the opposition in general. This impulse she describes,
+though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these not
+uninteresting verses:--
+
+  'But since we are mere children of this age,
+  And must in curious ways discover salvation
+  I will not quit my muddled generation,
+  But ever plead for Beauty in this rage.
+
+  'Although I know that Nature's bounty yields
+  Unto simplicity a beautiful content,
+  Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent
+  Will I give back my body to the fields.'
+
+There is the opposition. Against the righteous man, the _mauvais
+sujet_. We sympathise with the _mauvais sujet_. If he is persistent and
+laborious enough, he may achieve poetry. But he must travel alone. In
+order to be loyal to your age you must make up your mind what your age
+is. To be muddled yourself is not loyalty, but treachery, even to a
+muddled generation.
+
+[DECEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield_
+
+
+Mr Masefiled is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end,
+which is the glorification of England in narrative verse. _Reynard the
+Fox_ marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal.
+He has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so subdued that
+they no longer sensibly impede the movement of his verse, a point at
+which we may begin to speak (though not too loud) of mastery. We feel
+that he now approaches what he desires to do with some certainty of
+doing it, so that we in our turn can approach some other questions with
+some hope of answering them.
+
+The questions are various; but they radiate from and enter again into
+the old question whether what he is doing, and beginning to do well, is
+worth while doing, or rather whether it will have been worth while doing
+fifty years hence. For we have no doubt at all in our mind that, in
+comparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as _Reynard
+the Fox_ is valuable. We may use the old rough distinction and ask first
+whether _Reynard the Fox_ is durable in virtue of its substance, and
+second, whether it is durable in virtue of its form.
+
+The glorification of England! There are some who would give their souls
+to be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by Shakespeare, by
+Milton, by Wordsworth, and by Hardy. For an Englishman there is no
+richer inspiration, no finer theme; to have one's speech and thought
+saturated by the fragrance of this lovely and pleasant land was once
+the birthright of English poets and novelists. But something has crept
+between us and it, dividing. Instead of an instinctive love, there is a
+conscious desire of England; instead of slow saturation, a desperate
+plunge into its mystery. The fragrance does not come at its own sweet
+will; we clutch at it. It does not enfold and pervade our most arduous
+speculations; no involuntary sweetness comes flooding in upon our
+confrontation of human destinies. Hardy is the last of that great line.
+If we long for sweetness--as we do long for it, and with how poignant a
+pain!--we must seek it out, like men who rush dusty and irritable from
+the babble and fever of the town. The rhythm of the earth never enters
+into their gait; they are like spies among the birds and flowers, like
+collectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. The Georgians
+snatch at nature; they are never part of it. And there is some element
+of this desperation in Mr Masefield. We feel in him an anxiety to load
+every rift with ore of this particular kind, a deliberate intention to
+emphasise that which is most English in the English country-side.
+
+How shall we say it? It is not that he makes a parade of arcane
+knowledge. The word 'parade' does injustice to his indubitable
+integrity. But we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical,
+and at times archaic phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himself
+that he is saturated in essential Englishness, and we incline to think
+that even his choice of an actual subject was less inevitable than
+self-imposed. He would isolate the quality he would capture, have it
+more wholly within his grasp; yet, in some subtle way, it finally
+eludes him. The intention is in excess, and in the manner of its
+execution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess also. The
+music of English place-names, for instance is too insistent; no one into
+whom they had entered with the English air itself would use them with so
+manifest an admiration.
+
+Perhaps a comparison may bring definition nearer. The first part of Mr
+Masefield's poem, which describes the meet and the assembled persons one
+by one, recalls, not merely by the general cast of the subject, but by
+many actual turns of phrase, Chaucer's _Prologue_. Mr Masefield's parson
+has more than one point of resemblance to Chaucer's Monk:--
+
+  'An out-ryder, that loved venerye;
+  A manly man to ben an abbot able....'
+
+But it would take too long to quote both pictures. We may choose for our
+juxtaposition the Prioress and one of Mr Masefield's young ladies:--
+
+  'Behind them rode her daughter Belle,
+  A strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face
+  Was sweet with thought and proud with race,
+  And bright with joy at riding there.
+  She was as good as blowing air,
+  But shy and difficult to know.
+  The kittens in the barley-mow,
+  The setter's toothless puppies sprawling,
+  The blackbird in the apple calling,
+  All knew her spirit more than we.
+  So delicate these maidens be
+  In loving lovely helpless things.'
+
+And here is the Prioress:--
+
+  'But for to speken of hir conscience,
+  She was so charitable and so pitous,
+  She wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous
+  Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
+  Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed
+  With rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread,
+  But sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded
+  Or if men smote it with a yerde smerte:
+  And all was conscience and tendere herte.'
+  Ful semely hir wympel pynched was;
+  His nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
+  Hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red,
+  But sikerly she hadde a fair forhed.'
+
+There is in the Chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidence
+that the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside which
+Mr Masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost _malsain_. How
+far outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the apple
+calling,' and how tainted by the desperate _bergerie_ of the Georgian
+era!
+
+It is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set Mr Masefield's
+prologue beside Chaucer's. But not only is it a tribute to Mr Masefield
+that he brought us to reading Chaucer over again, but the comparison is
+at bottom just. Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he
+has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that
+belong to one: but he has perdurable qualities. He is at home with his
+speech and at home with his world; by his side Mr Masefield seems
+nervous and uncertain about both. He belongs, in fact, to a race (or a
+generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading
+every rift with ore. The question is whether such a man can hope to
+express the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side.
+
+Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate
+impulse is a _nostalgie de la boue_ that betrays itself in line after
+line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that
+any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield,
+in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to
+him, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and
+rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there
+otherwise. For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself.
+Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:--
+
+  'His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
+  He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
+  Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
+  Where scent would hang like breath on glass).
+  He loved the English country-side;
+  The wine-leaved bramble in the ride,
+  The lichen on the apple-trees,
+  The poultry ranging on the lees,
+  The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover,
+  His wife's green grave at Mitcheldover,
+  Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw.
+  Under his hide his heart was raw
+  With joy and pity of these things...'
+
+That 'raw heart' marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia. Apart from
+the fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to the
+first whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it would
+be a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come to the
+question of Mr Masefield's style in general.
+
+As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted
+distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already
+been discussing Mr Masefield's style under a specific aspect. But the
+particular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield's
+general condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not find
+it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself
+of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very
+vitals of his artistic effort. He is seeking always to be that which he
+is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows
+he can never wholly possess.
+
+  'From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse
+  There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops,
+  All wet red clay, where a horse's foot
+  Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root.
+  The fox raced on, on the headlands firm,
+  Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm;
+  The rooks rose raving to curse him raw,
+  He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw.
+  Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field
+  Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled,
+  With a bay horse near and a white horse leading,
+  And a man saying "Zook," and the red earth bleeding.'
+
+The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. It comes, we believe,
+from a consciousness of anæmia, a frenetic reaction towards what used,
+some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.'
+
+And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our
+sympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness and
+right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for
+this 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country
+house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time. Its
+colour is hectic; its tempo feverish. He has sought the healing virtue
+where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whose
+magic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose
+strong rhythm is in Hardy. But the virtue eludes all conscious
+inquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is
+peace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would have
+done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel,
+but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master
+it, in his consciousness? We will not presume to answer, mindful that Mr
+Masefield may not recognise himself in our mirror, but we will content
+ourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of the almost
+heroic effort that has gone to its composition _Reynard the Fox_ lacks
+all the qualities essential to durability.
+
+[JANUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Lost Legions_
+
+
+One day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by the
+breath which moves the Spirits of Pity in Mr Hardy's _Dynasts_. It will
+be a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of the
+generation that perished in the war. It will be a work of genius, for
+the essence that must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief,
+almost beyond imagination. We know of its existence by signs hardly more
+material than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet all
+but inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead.
+The autobiographer-novelists have been legion, yet we turn from them all
+with a slow shake of the head. 'No, it was not that. Had we lost only
+that we could have forgotten. It was not that.'
+
+No, it was the spirit that troubled, as in dream, the waters of the
+pool, some influence which trembled between silence and a sound, a
+precarious confidence, an unavowed quest, a wisdom that came not of
+years or experience, a dissatisfaction, a doubt, a devotion, some
+strange presentiment, it may have been, of the bitter years in store, in
+memory an ineffable, irrevocable beauty, a visible seal on the forehead
+of a generation.
+
+    'When the lamp is shattered.
+  The light in the dust lies dead--
+    When the cloud is scattered
+  The rainbow's glory is shed.
+    When the lute is broken,
+  Sweet tones are remembered not...'
+
+Yet out of a thousand fragments this memory must be created anew in a
+form that will outlast the years, for it was precious. It was something
+that would vindicate an epoch against the sickening adulation of the
+hero-makers and against the charge of spiritual sterility; a light in
+whose gleam the bewildering non-achievements of the present age, the art
+which seems not even to desire to be art, the faith which seems not to
+desire to be faith, have substance and meaning. It was shot through and
+through by an impulse of paradox, an unconscious straining after the
+impossible, gathered into two or three tremulous years which passed too
+swiftly to achieve their own expression. Now, what remains of youth is
+cynical, is successful, publicly exploits itself. It was not cynical
+then.
+
+Elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lasted
+long enough to receive a name. There was Unanimism. The name is
+remembered; perhaps the books are read. But it will not be found in the
+books. They are childish, just as the English novels which endeavoured
+to portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited. Behind
+all the conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay a
+fundamental candour of which only a flickering gleam can now be
+recaptured. It glints on a page of M. Romains's _Europe_; the memory of
+it haunts Wilfred Owen's poems; it touches Keeling's letters; it hovers
+over these letters of Charles Sorley.[14] From a hundred strange
+lurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers and
+withdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for if
+it wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever.
+
+   [Footnote 14: _The Letters of Charles Sorley_. (Cambridge University
+   Press.)]
+
+Charles Sorley was the youngest fringe of the strange unity that
+included him and men by ten years his senior. He had not, as they had,
+plunged with fantastic hopes and unspoken fears into the world. He had
+not learned the slogans of the day. But, seeing that the slogans were
+only a disguise for the undefined desires which inspired them he lost
+little and gained much thereby. The years at Oxford in which he would
+have taken a temporary sameness, a sameness in the long run protective
+and strengthening, were spared him. In his letters we have him
+unspoiled, as the sentimentalists would say--not yet with the
+distraction of protective colouring.
+
+One who knew him better than the mere reader of his letters can pretend
+to know him declares that, in spite of his poems, which are among the
+most remarkable of those of the boy-poets killed in the war, Sorley
+would not have been a man of letters. The evidence of the letters
+themselves is heavy against the view; they insist upon being regarded as
+the letters of a potential writer. But a passionate interest in
+literature is not the inevitable prelude to a life as a writer, and
+although it is impossible to consider any thread in Sorley's letters as
+of importance comparable to that which joins the enthronement and
+dethronement of his literary idols, we shall regard it as the record of
+a movement of soul which might as easily find expression (as did
+Keeling's) in other than literary activities. It takes more than
+literary men to make a generation, after all.
+
+And Sorley was typical above all in this, that, passionate and
+penetrating as was his devotion to literature, he never looked upon it
+as a thing existing in and for itself. It was, to him and his kind, the
+satisfaction of an impulse other and more complex than the æsthetic. Art
+was a means and not an end to him, and it is perhaps the apprehension of
+this that has led one who endeavoured in vain to reconcile Sorley to
+Pater into rash prognostication. Sorley would never have been an artist
+in Pater's way; he belonged to his own generation, to which _l'art pour
+l'art_ had ceased to have meaning. There had come a pause, a throbbing
+silence, from which art might have emerged, may even now after the
+appointed time arise, with strange validities undreamed of or forgotten.
+Let us not prophesy; let us be content with the recognition that
+Sorley's generation was too keenly, perhaps too disastrously aware of
+destinies, of
+
+    'the beating of the wings of Love
+  Shut out from his creation,'
+
+to seek the comfort of the ivory tower.
+
+Sorley first appears before us radiant with the white-heat of a
+schoolboy enthusiasm for Masefield. Masefield is--how we remember the
+feeling!--the poet who has lived; his naked reality tears through 'the
+lace of putrid sentimentalism (educing the effeminate in man) which
+rotters like Tennyson and Swinburne have taught his (the superficial
+man's) soul to love.' It tears through more than Tennyson and Swinburne.
+The greatest go down before him.
+
+    'So you see what I think of John Masefield. When I say that he has
+    the rapidity, simplicity, nobility of Homer, with the power of
+    drawing character, the dramatic truth to life of Shakespeare, along
+    with a moral and emotional strength and elevation which is all his
+    own, and therefore I am prepared to put him above the level of these
+    two great men--I do not expect you to agree with me.'--(From a paper
+    read at Marlborough, November, 1912.)
+
+That was Sorley at seventeen, and that, it seems to us, is the quality
+of enthusiasm which should be felt by a boy of seventeen if he is to
+make his mark. It is infinitely more important to have felt that flaming
+enthusiasm for an idol who will be cast down than to have felt what we
+ought to feel for Shakespeare and Homer. The gates of heaven are opened
+by strange keys, but they must be our own.
+
+Within six months Masefield had gone the way of all flesh. In a paper on
+_The Shropshire Lad_ (May, 1913), curious both for critical subtlety and
+the faint taste of disillusion, Sorley was saying: 'His (Masefield's)
+return (to the earth) was purely emotional, and probably less
+interesting than the purely intellectual return of Meredith.' At the
+beginning of 1914, having gained a Scholarship at University College,
+Oxford, he went to Germany. Just before going he wrote:--
+
+    'I am just discovering Thomas Hardy. There are two methods of
+    discovery. One is when Columbus discovers America. The other is when
+    some one begins to read a famous author who has already run into
+    seventy editions, and refuses to speak about anything else, and
+    considers every one else who reads the author's works his own
+    special converts. Mine is the second method. I am more or less
+    Hardy-drunk.'
+
+The humorous exactness and detachment of the description are remarkable,
+and we feel that there was more than the supersession of a small by a
+great idol in this second phase. By April he is at Jena, 'only 15 miles
+from Goethe's grave, whose inhabitant has taken the place of Thomas
+Hardy (successor to Masefield) as my favourite prophet.'
+
+    'I hope (if nothing else) before I leave Germany to get a thorough
+    hang of _Faust_.... The worst of a piece like _Faust_ is that it
+    completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself.
+    There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not
+    somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it.'
+
+He had a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. He
+lumped together 'nasty old Lyttons, Carlyles, and Dickenses.' And the
+intoxication itself was swift and fleeting. There was something wrong
+with Goethe by July; it is his 'entirely intellectual' life.
+
+    'If Goethe really died saying "more light," it was very silly of
+    him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth.'
+
+And he writes home for Richard Jefferies, the man of his own county--for
+through Marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the Wiltshire
+Downs.
+
+    'In the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities--Masefield,
+    Hardy, Goethe--I always fall back on Richard Jefferies wandering
+    about in the background. I have at least the tie of locality with
+    him.'
+
+A day or two after we incidentally discover that Meredith is up (though
+not on Olympus) from a denunciation of Browning on the queer non- (or
+super-) æsthetic grounds of which we have spoken:--
+
+    'There is much in B. I like. But my feeling towards him has (ever
+    since I read his life) been that of his to the "Lost Leader." I
+    cannot understand him consenting to live a purely literary life in
+    Italy, or (worse still) consenting to be lionised by fashionable
+    London society. And then I always feel that if less people read
+    Browning, more would read Meredith (his poetry, I mean.)'
+
+Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He had
+loved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from
+illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are made
+of. The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while
+training at Shorncliffe:--
+
+    'For the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope
+    Germany will win. It would do the world good, and show that real
+    faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just,"
+    but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard
+    defeat."'...
+
+    'England--I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight
+    for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy,
+    that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling
+    "imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to
+    generation.... And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany
+    (who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "Huns," because
+    they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making
+    experiments in morality. Not that I approve of the experiment in
+    this particular case. Indeed I think that after the war all brave
+    men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers
+    and pilgrims on the earth. "For they that say such things declare
+    plainly that they seek a country." But all these convictions are
+    useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them.
+    What a worm one is under the cart-wheels--big, clumsy, careless,
+    lumbering cart-wheels--of public opinion. I might have been giving
+    my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity: instead, I am giving
+    my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most
+    enterprising nation in the world.'
+
+The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more
+wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders
+written throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said;
+he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in
+complete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to
+suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of
+1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last
+always the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken.
+
+His intellectual evolution went on to the end. No wonder that he found
+Rupert Brooke's sonnets overpraised:--
+
+    'He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice.... It was not that
+    "they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but
+    that the essence of these things had been endangered by
+    circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to
+    recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he
+    has taken the sentimental attitude.'
+
+Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this
+criticism of Brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one
+who has given up the search. 'There is no such thing as a just war,'
+writes this boy. 'What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.' From
+this position Sorley never flinched. Never for a moment was he renegade
+to his generation by taking 'the sentimental attitude.' Neither had he
+in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect.
+
+Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We do
+not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those
+lost legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it to
+the end. In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems.
+After rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circumstance"' as bad poetry,
+and passing an incisive criticism on 'Men who March away,' he
+continues:--
+
+    'I cannot help thinking that Hardy is the greatest artist of the
+    English character since Shakespeare; and much of _The Dynasts_
+    (except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare. But I value
+    his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into
+    the comprehensiveness of his novels and _The Dynasts_) as truly, and
+    with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in
+    his novels. His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare's or
+    Shelley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but I like them and they
+    stick.'
+
+A little later, having finished _The Egoist_,--
+
+    'I see now that Meredith belongs to that class of novelists with
+    whom I do not usually get on so well (_e.g._ Dickens), who create
+    and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters
+    with amusement, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as
+    with Hardy's people, into whom the author does not inject his own
+    exaggerated characteristics.'
+
+The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died. What would he
+not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone stands
+equal? But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange
+company, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in his
+heart, for other reasons than that the love of the Wessex hills had
+crept into his blood. He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in the
+head by a sniper as he led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench near
+Hulluch.
+
+[JANUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Cry in the Wilderness_
+
+
+We have in Mr Irving Babbitt's _Rousseau and Romanticism_ to deal with a
+closely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind.
+We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the
+author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that
+the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever
+may be our final attitude towards the author's conclusions, we cannot
+but regard _Rousseau and Romanticism_ as masterly. Its style is, we
+admit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which
+animates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare
+that it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared for
+clarity and depth of thought with Mr Santayana's _Three Philosophical
+Poets_.
+
+By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more
+easily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt's
+achievement. We think that it would be easy to show that in the last
+generation--we will go no further back for the moment, though our
+author's arraignment reaches at least a century earlier--criticism has
+imperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may call
+appreciation. The emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the
+individual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern 'critic' has
+been to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the last
+resort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminated
+in the artistic creation of the author examined. And there modern
+criticism has stopped. There has been no indication that it was aware of
+the necessity of going further. Many influences went to shape the
+general conviction that mere presentation was the final function of
+criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of a
+scientific terminology. The word 'objectivity' had a great vogue; it was
+felt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the critic
+was faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard, irreducible
+facts, and his function was, like the scientist's, that of recording
+them as compendiously as possible and without prejudice. The unconscious
+programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. All facts may be of
+equal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary
+critic. He chose those which interested him most for the exercise of his
+talent for demonstration. But that choice was, as a general rule, the
+only specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it was
+usually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a
+'scientific' importance. Reasoned judgments of value were rigorously
+eschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is at
+times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is better
+than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist's
+intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of his
+appreciation. Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which
+all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. What
+every artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. As
+between things unique there is no possibility of subordination or
+comparison.
+
+That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism,
+although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the
+impulse towards the penetration of an artist's consciousness is in
+itself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism,
+provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final critical
+judgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea. Such a
+diagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an older
+generation than that to which it is applied. But they should not rejoice
+prematurely. We require of them an answer to the question whether they
+were really in better case--whether they were not the fathers whose sins
+are visited upon the children. Professor Babbitt, at least, has no doubt
+of their responsibility. From his angle of approach we might rake their
+ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: When you invoked the
+sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When you
+riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget
+that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical
+facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name of
+truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those
+creations of men's minds were _capax imperii_ in man's universe? What
+right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger
+for his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that same
+truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to
+bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why did
+you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the
+most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the
+greatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one
+moment pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe
+your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the
+world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who
+guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why
+did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's
+responsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you
+clothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you had
+not the time (or was it the courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce us
+because our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?
+
+But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with
+morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is
+conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital
+centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism
+inevitably involves an æsthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only
+temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a
+supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an
+adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is
+no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two.
+The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised,
+and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last
+resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality
+affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literature
+should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty
+prevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of
+the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a
+deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as
+he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was an
+age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than
+this. Its philosophy has played it false. It has passed from the
+nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would
+have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of
+Aristotle's _Poetics_, the mere title, _The Philosophy of History_ would
+have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of
+instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man _is_ a beast'; from the
+other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment of reason is
+to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the
+imagination, the vital principle of control.
+
+Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our
+senses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain
+that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a
+remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the
+world. It is the confusion between existence and value. That strange
+malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress
+was supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, and
+which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a
+literature of objective realism. One of the most admired of
+contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of a
+mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of
+almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such
+reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled
+her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers
+who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when
+they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older
+generation. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical
+outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously
+cherished? They may not like the bastard progeny of the various
+mistresses they adored--of a Science which they enthroned above instead
+of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the
+so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane
+devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which
+appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute
+indolence--but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it.
+Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the æsthetic and
+moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt's indictment
+of themselves and decide whether they have no sin:--
+
+    '"If I am to judge by myself," said an eighteenth-century Frenchman,
+    "man is a stupid animal." Man is not only a stupid animal, in spite
+    of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source
+    of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that Buddha,
+    with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. In spite of
+    the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material
+    success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this
+    effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance.
+    An energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the
+    failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. Just
+    this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the
+    ages--the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been
+    witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a
+    vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for
+    one another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a
+    world which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in
+    spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be
+    caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution
+    of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse
+    in some respects than that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success
+    that has been obtained in 'perfecting the mystery of murder.'
+    Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up
+    the beast in man. Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the
+    leadership of the Occident is no longer here. The leaders have
+    succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been
+    tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks
+    no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this
+    law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with
+    brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own
+    soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way,
+    for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with
+    the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding
+    of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a
+    necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of
+    wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he
+    wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the
+    facts. But the veto power is itself a fact--the weightiest with
+    which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off
+    traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet
+    without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both
+    Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority
+    that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the
+    veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on
+    hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be
+    proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their
+    wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.'
+
+We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this
+indictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the
+universe in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller and
+larger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger
+in spiritual possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of science
+seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an
+invitation to disaster. Humanism must reassert itself, for even we can
+see that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets. The reassertion of
+humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and
+conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual
+to this ideal. There must now be a period of critical and humanistic
+positivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say frankly that it is
+not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. We regard
+them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, It
+is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new
+traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are more
+keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are
+trembling.
+
+[FEBRUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Poetry and Criticism_
+
+
+Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways
+peculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning
+was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently
+more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in a
+curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled
+by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of
+extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come
+out of it. Having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry
+is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds
+for some fuller justification of the poetic activity. A presentiment
+that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable
+with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard
+should be once more created and applied.
+
+What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a
+world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a
+glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom? All these things--all
+different, yet not all contradictory--have been required of poetry. What
+shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as
+vague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded
+of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be
+adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a
+culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete
+universality.
+
+Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand
+these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is a
+lyrical age.' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that
+poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always
+been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all
+experience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there
+have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately
+made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching
+experience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great
+lyrical poetry. Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental
+achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always
+been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel
+of the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable.
+
+Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and
+not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the
+condition of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_ or Milton's
+_Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the
+colloquial prose of Tchehov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good a claim to be
+called poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ as _The
+Ring and the Book_, _The Possessed_ as _Phèdre_? Where are we to call a
+halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge
+into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in
+danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon
+what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference.
+The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.
+
+The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt's _New Study of English
+Poetry_ is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage,
+sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highest
+spiritual activity of man. It has seldom been our good fortune to read a
+book of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call
+a purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim is
+single, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on a
+matter of infinite moment. Perhaps better, because subtler, books of
+literary criticism have appeared in England during the last ten
+years--if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more truly
+tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product of
+a soul in which no lie remains. Whether it is that Sir Henry has like
+Plato's Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know,
+but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus's
+peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods and
+left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate.
+
+Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newbolt
+should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to
+the same kind. It is important not because there is anything very novel
+in the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune
+because at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital
+element that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. The
+general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it
+loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact
+that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are
+legion. An age of fiddlesticks! Whatever the present age is--and it is
+an age of many interesting characteristics--it is not an age of poetry.
+It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of
+five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the
+impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. The differentia
+of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or
+literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. Where you
+have the evidence of that act, the sovereign æsthetic process, there you
+have poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or
+both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which
+those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does not
+suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be
+content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each
+single act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is the
+comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is not
+sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's _Arabia_ or Mr
+Davies's _Lovely Dames_ or Miss Katherine Mansfield's _Prelude_ or Mr
+Eliot's _Portrait of a Lady_, in each of which the vital act of
+intuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish a
+hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly
+comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must be
+prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its
+kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been
+created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.
+
+That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one
+which is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type of
+criticism which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation and
+appreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitive
+comprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. Where
+there are real poets--and only a bigot will deny that there are real
+poets among us now: we have just named four--there will always be true
+criticism of poetic method, though it may seldom find utterance in the
+printed word. But criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, no
+perspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing under
+the aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily most often does,
+assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life of
+man; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the standards
+that are implicit in such an assumption. That is the function of
+philosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined with
+criticism of method--and there is no reason why they should not coexist
+in a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenth
+century, Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind--so much the better;
+but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need
+at this moment.
+
+A good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets we
+possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the
+kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to
+point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must
+inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if
+a non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not
+to urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their
+work. Who but a fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or Miss
+Mansfield to give us a novel? But he might be a wise man who called upon
+Mr Eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and
+without a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who should
+summon the popular imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot to
+begin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired
+to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of
+unprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have so
+far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid
+imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the
+attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus. There is something
+heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an altitude.
+
+Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a
+continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately
+in every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on
+to the horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplines
+sensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the
+counterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of
+one's own or the nation's affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held
+up to ridicule. Opportunism in politics has its complement in
+opportunism in poetry. Mr Lloyd George's moods are reflected in Mr
+----'s. And, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of a
+whole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poetic
+intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at any
+disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. Perhaps they
+will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of
+literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction
+they will have. They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the
+acid of philosophical criticism. If a reaction to life has in itself the
+seeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. If a
+young poet's nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant of
+anything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of being
+refined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of the
+appropriate mechanism or myth. But to register the mere facts of
+consciousness, undigested by the being, without assessment or
+reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry,
+no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets.
+
+We do not wish to suggest that Sir Henry Newbolt would regard this
+lengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction. He, we think, is a
+good deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate to
+work out the consequences of the principles which he enunciates and
+apply them vigorously to the present time. But as a vindication of the
+supreme place of poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus to
+critical thought and a guide to exquisite appreciation of which his
+essay on Chaucer is an honourable example--_A New Study of English
+Poetry_ deserves all the praise that lies in our power to give.
+
+[MARCH, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Coleridge's Criticism_
+
+
+It is probably true that _Biographia Literaria_ is the best book of
+criticism in the English language; nevertheless, it is rash to assume
+that it is a book of criticism of the highest excellence, even when it
+has passed through the salutary process of drastic editing, such as that
+to which, in the present case,[15] the competent hands of Mr George
+Sampson have submitted it. Its garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage,
+the marks which even the finest portions show of submersion in the tepid
+transcendentalism that wrought such havoc upon Coleridge's mind--these
+are its familiar disfigurements. They are not easily removed; for they
+enter fairly deeply even in the texture of those portions of the book in
+which Coleridge devotes himself, as severely as he can, to the proper
+business of literary criticism.
+
+   [Footnote 15: _Coleridge: Biographia Literaria_, Chapters I.-IV.,
+   XIV.-XXII.--_Wordsworth: Prefaces and Essays on Poetry_, 1800-1815.
+   Edited by George Sampson, with an Introductory Essay by Sir Arthur
+   Quiller-Couch. (Cambridge University Press.)]
+
+It may be that the prolixity with which he discusses and refutes the
+poetical principles expounded by Wordsworth in the preface of _Lyrical
+Ballads_ was due to the tenderness of his consideration for Wordsworth's
+feelings, an influence to which Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch directs our
+attention in his introduction. That is honourable to Coleridge as a man;
+but it cannot exculpate him as a critic. For the points he had to make
+for and against Wordsworth were few and simple. First, he had to show
+that the theory of a poetic diction drawn exclusively from the language
+of 'real life' was based upon an equivocation, and therefore was
+useless. This Coleridge had to show to clear himself of the common
+condemnation in which he had been involved, as one wrongly assumed to
+endorse Wordsworth's theory. He had an equally important point to make
+for Wordsworth. He wished to prove to him that the finest part of his
+poetic achievement was based upon a complete neglect of this theory, and
+that the weakest portions of his work were those in which he most
+closely followed it. In this demonstration he was moved by the desire to
+set his friend on the road that would lead to the most triumphant
+exercise of his own powers.
+
+There is no doubt that Coleridge made both his points; but he made them,
+in particular the former, at exceeding length, and at the cost of a good
+deal of internal contradiction. He sets out, in the former case, to
+maintain that the language of poetry is essentially different from the
+language of prose. This he professes to deduce from a number of
+principles. His axiom--and it is possibly a sound one--is that metre
+originated in a spontaneous effort of the mind to hold in check the
+workings of emotion. From this, he argues, it follows that to justify
+the existence of metre, the language of a poem must show evidence of
+emotion, by being different from the language of prose. Further, he
+says, metre in itself stimulates the emotions, and for this condition of
+emotional excitement 'correspondent food' must be provided. Thirdly, the
+emotion of poetical composition itself demands this same 'correspondent
+food.' The final argument, if we omit one drawn from an obscure theory
+of imitation very characteristic of Coleridge, is the incontrovertible
+appeal to the authority of the poets.
+
+Unfortunately, the elaborate exposition of the first three arguments is
+not only unnecessary but confusing, for Coleridge goes on to
+distinguish, interestingly enough, between a language proper to poetry,
+a language proper to prose, and a neutral language which may be used
+indifferently in prose and poetry, and later still he quotes a beautiful
+passage from Chaucer's _Troilus and Cressida_ as an example of this
+neutral language, forgetting that, if his principles are correct,
+Chaucer was guilty of a sin against art in writing _Troilus and
+Cressida_ in metre. The truth, of course, is that the paraphernalia of
+principles goes by the board. In order to refute the Wordsworthian
+theory of a language of real life supremely fitted for poetry you have
+only to point to the great poets, and to judge the fitness of the
+language of poetry you can only examine the particular poem. Wordsworth
+was wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but Coleridge was
+equally wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre
+_necessitated_ a language essentially different from that of prose.
+
+So it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literary
+criticism of the _Biographia_ takes us nowhere in particular. The
+valuable part is contained in his critical appreciation of Wordsworth's
+poetry and that amazing chapter--a little forlorn, as most of
+Coleridge's fine chapters are--on 'the specific symptoms of poetic power
+elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_.
+In these few pages Coleridge is at the summit of his powers as a critic.
+So long as his attention could be fixed on a particular object, so long
+as he was engaged in deducing his general principles immediately from
+particular instances of the highest kind of poetic excellence, he was a
+critic indeed. Every one of the four points characteristic of early
+poetic genius which he formulates deserves to be called back to the mind
+again and again:--
+
+    'The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty
+    excess, if it be evidently original and not the result of an easily
+    imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the
+    compositions of a young man....
+
+    'A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote
+    from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself.
+    At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately
+    from the author's personal sensations and experiences the excellence
+    of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a
+    fallacious pledge, of genuine poetical power....
+
+    'Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature,
+    and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves
+    characterise the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as
+    far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated
+    thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the
+    effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant;
+    or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them
+    from the poet's own spirit....
+
+    'The last character ... which would prove indeed but little, except
+    as taken conjointly with the former--yet without which the former
+    could scarce exist in a high degree ... is _depth_ and _energy_ of
+    _thought_. No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the
+    same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the
+    fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions,
+    emotions, language.'
+
+In the context the most striking peculiarity of this enunciation of the
+distinguishing marks of poetic power, apart from the conviction which it
+brings, is that they are not in the least concerned with the actual
+language of poetry. The whole subject of poetic diction is dropped when
+Coleridge's critical, as opposed to his logical, faculty is at work;
+and, although this Chapter XV is followed by many pages devoted to the
+analysis and refutation of the Wordsworthian theory and to the
+establishment of those principles of poetic diction to which we have
+referred, when Coleridge comes once more to engage his pure critical
+faculty, in the appreciation of Wordsworth's actual poetry in Chapter
+XXII, we again find him ignoring his own principles precisely on those
+occasions when we might have thought them applicable.
+
+Coleridge enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, he
+says, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke his
+principles: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style
+which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it
+into the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry;
+_second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutral
+or common to both.' But in the very first instance which Coleridge
+gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair,
+and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. He
+gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind Highland
+Boy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting,
+had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of
+probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):--
+
+  'And one, the rarest, was a shell
+  Which he, poor child, had studied well:
+  The Shell of a green Turtle, thin
+  And hollow;--you might sit therein,
+      It was so wide, and deep.
+
+  'Our Highland Boy oft visited
+  The house which held this prize; and led
+  By choice or chance, did thither come
+  One day, when no one was at home,
+      And found the door unbarred.'
+
+The discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it
+does not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworth
+has used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus
+of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the
+detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of
+the poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, however,
+indubitable:--
+
+  'Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest.
+  And though little troubled with sloth,
+  Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth
+  To be such a traveller as I.
+      Happy, happy liver!
+  _With a soul as strong as a mountain River
+  Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver_,
+  Joy and jollity be with us both,
+  Hearing thee or else some other
+      As merry as a Brother
+  I on the earth will go plodding on,
+  By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.'
+
+The two lines in italics are discordant. But again it is no question of
+language in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of a
+whole already debilitated by metrical insecurity.
+
+Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a _matter-of-factness_
+in certain poems.' Once more there is no question of language. Coleridge
+takes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth's
+obsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential
+catholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested in
+laboriously exact description both of places and persons. The poet
+sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for no
+reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediate
+object a moral end instead of the giving of æsthetic pleasure. His
+prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable
+that they should be of this condition--it is on the contrary highly
+improbable--but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral
+lesson. The question of language in itself, if it enters at all here,
+enters only as the indifferent means by which a non-poetic end is
+sought. The accidentality lies not in the words, but in the poet's
+intention.
+
+Coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for the
+dramatic form,' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought,'
+may be passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case they
+could only be the cause of a jejuneness of language. The fifth, more
+interesting, is the appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for the
+subject ... an approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast.'
+Coleridge brings forward as his first instance of this four lines which
+have taken a deep hold on the affections of later generations:--
+
+  'They flash upon the inward eye
+  Which is the bliss of solitude!
+  And then my heart with pleasure fills
+  And dances with the daffodils.'
+
+Coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet after
+the first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that
+verdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a
+description of physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting to
+note that the objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner which
+confirms Coleridge's criticism. The 'inward eye' is almost universally
+remembered apart from its context, and interpreted as a description of
+the purely spiritual process to which alone, in Coleridge's opinion, it
+was truly apt.
+
+The enumeration of Wordsworth's excellences which follows is masterly;
+and the exhilaration with which one rises through the crescendo to the
+famous: 'Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
+_Imagination_ in the highest and strictest sense of the word ...' is
+itself a pleasure to be derived only from the gift of criticism of the
+highest and strictest kind.
+
+The object of this examination has been to show, not that the
+_Biographia Literaria_ is undeserving of the high praise which has been
+bestowed upon it, but that the praise has been to some extent
+undiscriminating. It has now become almost a tradition to hold up to our
+admiration Coleridge's chapter on poetic diction, and Sir Arthur
+Quiller-Couch, in a preface that is as unconventional in manner as it is
+stimulating in most of its substance, maintains the tradition. As a
+matter of fact, what Coleridge has to say on poetic diction is prolix
+and perilously near commonplace. Instead of making to Wordsworth the
+wholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest kind employs a
+language that by no perversion can be called essentially the same as the
+language of prose, he allows himself to be led by his German metaphysic
+into considering poetry as a _Ding an sich_ and deducing therefrom the
+proposition that poetry _must_ employ a language different from that of
+prose. That proposition is false, as Coleridge himself quite adequately
+shows from his remarks upon what he called the 'neutral' language of
+Chaucer and Herbert. But instead of following up the clue and beginning
+to inquire whether or not narrative poetry by nature demands a language
+approximating to that of prose, and whether Wordsworth, in so far as he
+aimed at being a narrative poet, was not working on a correct but
+exaggerated principle, he leaves the bald contradiction and swerves off
+to the analysis of the defects and excellences of Wordsworth's actual
+achievement. Precisely because we consider it of the greatest importance
+that the best of Coleridge's criticism should be studied and studied
+again, we think it unfortunate that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should
+recommend the apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart.
+He will be condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubious
+logic and a false conclusion. What is worth while learning from
+Coleridge is something different; it is not his behaviour with 'a
+principle,' but his conduct when confronted with poetry in the concrete,
+his magisterial ordonnance (to use his own word) and explication of his
+own æsthetic intuitions, and his manner of employing in this, the
+essential task of poetic criticism, the results of his own deep study of
+all the great poetry that he knew.
+
+[APRIL, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Shakespeare Criticism_
+
+
+It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the
+great modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover. One derives from
+the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which
+cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his
+merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to
+have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to
+admire the amazing erudition of Steevens. One sees the phases of the
+curious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of
+the nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal man of genius could
+breathe. For a dizzy moment every line that he wrote bore the authentic
+impress of the divine. _Efflavit deus_. In a century, from being largely
+beneath criticism Shakespeare had passed to a condition where he was
+almost completely beyond it.
+
+_King John_ affords an amusing instance of this reverential attitude.
+The play, as is generally known, was based upon a slightly earlier and
+utterly un-Shakespearean production entitled _The Troublesome Raigne of
+King John_. The only character Shakespeare added to those he found ready
+to his hand was that of James Gurney, who enters with Lady Falconbridge
+after the scene between the Bastard and his brother, says four words,
+and departs for ever.
+
+  '_Bast_.--James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?
+
+  _Gur_.--Good leave, good Philip.
+
+  _Bast_.--Philip! Sparrow! James.'
+
+It is obvious that Shakespeare's sole motive in introducing Gurney is to
+provide an occasion for the Bastard's characteristic, though not to a
+modern mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that Philip was at
+the time a common name for a sparrow. The Bastard, just dubbed Sir
+Richard Plantagenet by the King, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at his
+former name, Philip, to which he had just shown such breezy
+indifference. The jest could not have been made to Lady Falconbridge
+without a direct insult to her, which would have been alien to the
+natural, blunt, and easygoing fondness of the relation which Shakespeare
+establishes between the Bastard and his mother. So Gurney is quite
+casually brought in to receive it. But this is not enough for the
+Shakespeare-drunken Coleridge.
+
+    'For an instance of Shakespeare's power _in minimis_, I generally
+    quote James Gurney's character in _King John_. How individual and
+    comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!'
+
+Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge's title
+as a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. He is the
+greatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is
+displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play.
+In Act III, scene ii., Warburton's emendation of 'airy' to 'fiery' had
+in Coleridge's day been received into the text of the Bastard's lines:--
+
+  'Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
+  Some airy devil hovers in the sky.'
+
+On which Coleridge writes:--
+
+    'I prefer the old text: the word 'devil' implies 'fiery.' You need
+    only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil,'
+    to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's
+    alteration.'
+
+The test is absolutely convincing--a poet's criticism of poetry. But
+that Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence
+of his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that
+is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume
+of the modern _Variorum_. There has been much editing, much comment, but
+singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread
+to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from
+niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing
+exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a
+typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon
+the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, _King John_ is an
+intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate
+the idea of treachery.' We remember that Mr Masefield has much better
+than this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon
+this sentence because it is set before us in the _Variorum_, and because
+it too 'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions
+illustrates his idea of criticism.' Genetically, it is a continuation of
+the shoddy element in Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism, a continual
+bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take the
+origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the
+feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object)
+after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer
+part of Coleridge's brain.
+
+_King John_ is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerous
+influence, has persuaded himself it is. It is simply the effort of a
+young man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. The
+effort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a
+good one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising. The miracle is
+that anything should have been made of _The Troublesome Raigne_ at all.
+The _Variorum_ extracts show that, of the many commentators who studied
+the old play with Shakespeare's version, only Swinburne saw, or had the
+courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. To have made
+Shakespeare's Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created
+the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that
+decrepit skeleton--that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on
+the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no
+doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination.
+
+But 'ideas of treachery'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been
+beguiled by Coleridge's laudanum trances? A limbo--of this we are
+confident--where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life,
+and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We
+must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our
+eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good)
+play. Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the
+influence and ravages of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, but
+merely a Shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic genius
+which can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist every
+attempt at invasion by the 'idea'-bacillus.
+
+In considering a Shakespeare play the word 'idea' had best be kept out
+of the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it might
+be intelligibly used. You might call the dramatic skeleton Shakespeare's
+idea of the play. It is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in the
+work of poetic creation--the necessary means by which a poet can
+conveniently explicate and express his manifold æsthetic intuitions.
+This dramatic skeleton is governed by laws of its own, which were first
+and most brilliantly formulated by Aristotle in terms that, in
+essentials, hold good for all time. You may investigate this skeleton,
+seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by which it is differentiated
+from all other skeletons; you may say, for instance, that _Othello_ is a
+tragedy of jealousy, or _Hamlet_ of the inhibition of self-consciousness.
+But if your 'idea' is to have any substance it must be moulded very
+closely upon the particular object with which you are dealing; and in
+the end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individual
+characters.
+
+On the other hand, the word 'idea' might be intelligibly used of
+Shakespeare's whole attitude to the material of his contemplation, the
+centre of comprehension from which he worked, the aspect under which he
+viewed the universe of his interest. There is no reason to rest content
+with Coleridge's application of the epithet 'myriad-minded,' which is,
+at the best, an evasion of a vital question. The problem is to see
+Shakespeare's mind _sub specie unitatis_. It can be done; there never
+has been and never will be a human mind which can resist such an inquiry
+if it is pursued with sufficient perseverance and understanding. What
+chiefly stands in the way is that tradition of Shakespeariolatry which
+Coleridge so powerfully inaugurated, not least by the epithet
+'myriad-minded.'
+
+But of 'ideas' in any other senses than these--and in neither of these
+cases is 'idea' the best word for the object of search--let us beware as
+we would of the plague, in criticism of Shakespeare or any other great
+poet. Poets do not have 'ideas'; they have perceptions. They do not have
+an 'idea'; they have comprehension. Their creation is æsthetic, and the
+working of their mind proceeds from the realisation of one æsthetic
+perception to that of another, more comprehensive if they are to be
+great poets having within them the principle of poetic growth. There is
+undoubtedly an organic process in the evolution of a great poet, which
+you may, for convenience of expression, call logical; but the moment you
+forget that the use of the word 'logic,' in this context, is
+metaphorical, you are in peril. You can follow out this 'logical
+process' in a poet only by a kindred creative process of æsthetic
+perception passing into æsthetic comprehension. The hunt for 'ideas'
+will only make that process impossible; it prevents the object from ever
+making its own impression upon the mind. It has to speak with the
+language of logic, whereas its use and function in the world is to speak
+with a language not of logic, but of a process of mind which is at least
+as sovereign in its own right as the discursive reason.
+
+Let us away then with 'logic' and away with 'ideas' from the art of
+literary criticism; but not, in a foolish and impercipient reaction, to
+revive the impressionistic criticism which has sapped the English brain
+for a generation past. The art of criticism is rigorous; impressions are
+merely its raw material; the life-blood of its activity is in the
+process of ordonnance of æsthetic impressions.
+
+It is time, however, to return for a moment to Shakespeare, and to
+observe in one crucial instance the effect of the quest for logic in a
+single line. In the fine scene where John hints to Hubert at Arthur's
+murder, he speaks these lines (in the First Folio text):--
+
+  'I had a thing to say, but let it goe:
+  The Sunne is in the heauen, and the proud day,
+  Attended with the pleasure of the world,
+  Is all too wanton, and too full of gawdes
+  To giue me audience: If the midnight bell
+  Did with his yron tongue, and brazen mouth
+  Sound on into the drowzie race of night,
+  If this same were a Churchyard where we stand,
+  And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs:
+  ... Then, in despight of brooded watchfull day,
+  I would into thy bosome poure my thoughts....'
+
+If one had to choose the finest line in this passage, the choice would
+fall upon
+
+  'Sound on into the drowsy race of night.'
+
+Yet you will have to look hard for it in the modern editions of
+Shakespeare. At the best you will find it with the mark of corruption:--
+
+  +'Sound on into the drowsy race of night ('Globe');
+
+and you run quite a risk of finding
+
+  'Sound one into the drowsy race of night' ('Oxford').
+
+There are six pages of close-printed comment upon the line in the
+_Variorum_. The only reason, we can see, why it should be the most
+commented line in _King John_ is that it is one of the most beautiful.
+No one could stand it. Of all the commentators, only one, Miss Porter,
+whom we name _honoris causa_, stands by the line with any conviction of
+its beauty. Every other person either alters it or regrets his inability
+to alter it.
+
+'How can a bell sound on into a race?' pipe the little editors. What is
+'the race of night?' What _can_ it mean? How _could_ a race be drowsy?
+What an _awful_ contradiction in terms! And so while you and I, and all
+the other ordinary lovers of Shakespeare are peacefully sleeping in our
+beds, they come along with their little chisels, and chop out the
+horribly illogical word and pop in a horribly logical one, and we
+(unless we can afford the _Variorum_, which we can't) know nothing
+whatever about it. We have no redress. If we get out of our beds and
+creep upon them while they are asleep--they never are--and take out our
+little chisels and chop off their horribly stupid little heads, we shall
+be put in prison and Mr Justice Darling will make a horribly stupid
+little joke about us. There is only one thing to do. We must make up our
+minds that we have to combine in our single person the scholar and the
+amateur; we cannot trust these gentlemen.
+
+And, indeed, they have been up to their little games elsewhere in _King
+John_. They do not like the reply of the citizens of Angiers to the
+summons of the rival kings:--
+
+  'A greater powre than We denies all this,
+  And till it be undoubted, we do locke
+  Our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates;
+  Kings of our feare, untill our feares resolu'd
+  Be by some certaine king, purg'd and depos'd.'
+
+Admirable sense, excellent poetry. But no! We must not have it. Instead
+we are given 'King'd of our fears' ('Globe') or 'Kings of ourselves'
+('Oxford'). Bad sense, bad poetry.
+
+They do not like Pandulph's speech to France:--
+
+  'France, thou maist hold a serpent by the tongue,
+  A cased lion by the mortall paw,
+  A fasting tiger safer by the tooth
+  Than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold.'
+
+'Cased,' caged, is too much for them. We must have 'chafed,' in spite of
+
+  'If thou would'st not entomb thyself alive
+  And case thy reputation in thy tent.'
+
+Again, the Folio text of the meeting between the Bastard and Hubert in
+Act V., when Hubert fails to recognise the Bastard's voice, runs thus:--
+
+  'Unkinde remembrance: thou and endles night,
+  Have done me shame: Brave Soldier, pardon me
+  That any accent breaking from thy tongue
+  Should scape the true acquaintaince of mine eare.'
+
+This time 'endless' is not poetical enough for the editors. Theobald's
+emendation 'eyeless' is received into the text. One has only to read the
+brief scene through to realise that Hubert is wearied and obsessed by
+the night that will never end. He is overwrought by his knowledge of
+
+             'news fitting to the night,
+  Black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible,'
+
+and by his long wandering in search of the Bastard:--
+
+  'Why, here I walk in the black brow of night
+  To find you out.'
+
+Yet the dramatically perfect 'endless' has had to make way for the
+dramatically stupid 'eyeless.' Is it surprising that we do not trust
+these gentlemen?
+
+[APRIL, 1920
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Aspects of Literature, by J. Middleton Murry
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14637 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aspects of Literature, by J. Middleton Murry
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+
+Title: Aspects of Literature
+
+Author: J. Middleton Murry
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2005 [EBook #14637]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPECTS OF LITERATURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Amy Cunningham and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ASPECTS OF
+LITERATURE
+
+J. MIDDLETON MURRY
+
+
+NEW YORK:
+ALFRED A. KNOPF
+MCMXX
+
+
+Copyright, 1920
+
+_Printed in Great Britain_
+
+
+
+TO
+BRUCE RICHMOND
+TO WHOSE GENEROUS ENCOURAGEMENT
+I OWE SO MUCH
+
+
+
+
+_Preface_
+
+
+Two of these essays, 'The Function of Criticism' and 'The Religion of
+Rousseau,' were contributed to the _Times Literary Supplement_; that on
+'The Poetry of Edward Thomas' in the _Nation_; all the rest save one
+have appeared in the _Athenæum_.
+
+The essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, with
+two exceptions. The second part of the essay on Tchehov has been placed
+with the first for convenience, although in order of thought it should
+follow the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness.' More important, I have
+placed 'The Function of Criticism' first although it was written last,
+because it treats of the broad problem of literary criticism, suggests a
+standard of values implicit elsewhere in the book, and thus to some
+degree affords an introduction to the remaining essays.
+
+But the degree is not great, as the critical reader will quickly
+discover for himself. I ask him not to indulge the temptation of
+convicting me out of my own mouth. I am aware that my practice is often
+inconsistent with my professions; and I ask the reader to remember that
+the professions were made after the practice and to a considerable
+extent as the result of it. The practice came first, and if I could
+reasonably expect so much of the reader I would ask him to read 'The
+Function of Criticism' once more when he has reached the end of the
+book.
+
+I make no apology for not having rewritten the essays. As a critic I
+enjoy nothing more than to trace the development of a writer's attitude
+through its various phases; I could do no less than afford my readers
+the opportunity of a similar enjoyment in my own case. They may be
+assured that none of the essays have suffered any substantial
+alteration, even where, for instance in the case of the incidental and
+(I am now persuaded) quite inadequate estimate of Chaucer in 'The
+Nostalgia of Mr Masefield,' my view has since completely changed. Here
+and there I have recast expressions which, though not sufficiently
+conveying my meaning, had been passed in the haste of journalistic
+production. But I have nowhere tried to adjust earlier to later points
+of view. I am aware that these points of view are often difficult to
+reconcile; that, for instance, 'æsthetic' in the essay on Tchehov has a
+much narrower meaning than it bears in 'The Function of Criticism'; that
+the essay on 'The Religion of Rousseau' is criticism of a kind which I
+deprecate as insufficient in the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness,'
+because it lacks that reference to life as a whole which I have come to
+regard as essential to criticism; and that in this latter essay I use
+the word 'moral' (for instance in the phrase 'The values of literature
+are in the last resort moral') in a sense which is never exactly
+defined. The key to most of these discrepancies will, I hope, be found
+in the introductory essay on 'The Function of Criticism.'
+
+_May_, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Contents_
+
+
+THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM                    1
+
+THE RELIGION OF ROUSSEAU                    15
+
+THE POETRY OF EDWARD THOMAS                 29
+
+MR YEATS'S SWAN SONG                        39
+
+THE WISDOM OF ANATOLE FRANCE                46
+
+GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS                       52
+
+THE PROBLEM OF KEATS                        62
+
+THOUGHTS ON TCHEHOV                         76
+
+AMERICAN POETRY                             91
+
+RONSARD                                     99
+
+SAMUEL BUTLER                              107
+
+THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY                 121
+
+THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ENGLISH POETRY    139
+
+THE NOSTALGIA OF MR MASEFIELD              150
+
+THE LOST LEGIONS                           157
+
+THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS                  167
+
+POETRY AND CRITICISM                       176
+
+COLERIDGE'S CRITICISM                      184
+
+SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM                      194
+
+
+
+
+_The Function of Criticism_
+
+
+It is curious and interesting to find our younger men of letters
+actively concerned with the present condition of literary criticism.
+This is a novel preoccupation for them and one which is, we believe,
+symptomatic of a general hesitancy and expectation. In the world of
+letters everything is a little up in the air, volatile and
+uncrystallised. It is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite of
+outward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half a
+dozen years ago. Then one had a tolerable certainty that the new star,
+if the new star was to appear, would burst upon our vision in the shape
+of a novel. To-day we feel it might be anything. The cloud no bigger
+than a man's hand might even be, like Trigorin's in 'The Sea-gull,' like
+a piano; it has no predetermined form.
+
+This sense of incalculability, which has been aroused by the prodigious
+literary efflorescence of late years, reacts upon its cause; and the
+reaction tends by many different paths to express itself finally in the
+ventilation of problems that hinge about criticism. There is a general
+feeling that the growth of the young plant has been too luxuriant; a
+desire to have it vigorously pruned by a capable gardener, in order that
+its strength may be gathered together to produce a more perfect fruit.
+There is also a sense that if the _lusus naturæ_, the writer of genius,
+were to appear, there ought to be a person or an organisation capable of
+recognising him, however unexpected his scent or the shape of his
+leaves. Both these tasks fall upon criticism. The younger generation
+looks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a gardener whom
+it can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that there is
+none.
+
+There is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we have
+learned to respect. There are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but no
+critics, says another disrespectful young man. Oh, for some more Scotch
+Reviewers to settle the hash of our English bards, sighs a third. And
+the _London Mercury_, after whetting our appetite by announcing that it
+proposed to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, still
+leaves us a little in the dark as to what these standards are. Mr T.S.
+Eliot deals more kindly, if more frigidly, with us in the _Monthly
+Chapbook_. There are, he says, three kinds of criticism--the historical,
+the philosophic, and the purely literary.
+
+    'Every form of genuine criticism is directed towards creation. The
+    historical or philosophic critic of poetry is criticising poetry in
+    order to create a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is
+    criticising poetry in order to create poetry.'
+
+These separate and distinct kinds, he considers, are but rarely found
+to-day, even in a fragmentary form; where they do exist, they are almost
+invariably mingled in an inextricable confusion.
+
+Whether we agree or not with the general condemnation of reviewing
+implicit in this survey of the situation, or with the division of
+criticism itself, we have every reason to be grateful to Mr Eliot for
+disentangling the problem for us. The question of criticism has become
+rather like Glaucus the sea-god, encrusted with shells and hung with
+weed till his lineaments are hardly discernible. We have at least clear
+sight of him now, and we are able to decide whether we will accept Mr
+Eliot's description of him. Let us see.
+
+We have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism of
+literature is a kind apart. The historical critic approaches literature
+as the manifestation of an evolutionary process in which all the phases
+are of equal value. Essentially, he has no concern with the greater or
+less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces--their
+existence is alone sufficient for him; a bad book is as important as a
+good one, and much more important than a good one if it exercised, as
+bad books have a way of doing, a real influence on the course of
+literature. In practice, it is true, the historical critic generally
+fails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity. He either begins by
+making judgments of value for himself, or accepts those judgments which
+have been endorsed by tradition. He fastens upon a number of outstanding
+figures and more or less deliberately represents the process as from
+culmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitrary
+foreshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phases
+which he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of the
+group of writers which it includes. The individuality, the quintessence,
+of a writer lies completely outside his view.
+
+We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in
+theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the
+author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we
+isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? And what exactly _is_ a
+philosophic critic? Is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in which
+art and literature have their places, a critic who therefore approaches
+literature with a definite conception of it as one among many parallel
+manifestations of the human spirit, and with a system of values derived
+from his metaphysical scheme? Hegel and Croce are philosophical critics
+in this sense, and Aristotle is not, as far as we can judge from the
+Poetics, wherein he considers the literary work of Greece as an isolated
+phenomenon, and examines it in and for itself. But for the moment, and
+with the uneasy sense that we have not thoroughly laid the ghost of
+philosophic criticism, we will assume that we have isolated him, and
+pass to the consideration of the pure literary critic, if indeed we can
+find him.
+
+What does he do? How shall we recognise him? Mr Eliot puts before us
+Coleridge and Aristotle and Dryden as literary critics _par excellence_
+arranged in an ascending scale of purity. The concatenation is curious,
+for these were men possessed of very different interests and faculties
+of mind; and it would occur to few to place Dryden, as a critic, at
+their head. The living centre of Aristotle's criticism is a conception
+of art as a means to a good life. As an activity, poetry 'is more
+philosophic than history,' a nearer approach to the universal truth in
+appearances; and as a more active influence, drama refines our spiritual
+being by a purgation of pity and terror. Indeed, it would not be an
+exaggeration to say that the very pith and marrow of Aristotle's
+literary criticism is a system of moral values derived from his
+contemplation of life. It was necessary that this relation should exist,
+because for Aristotle literature was, essentially, an imitation of life
+though we must remember to understand imitation according to our final
+sense of the theme which is the golden, persistent thread throughout the
+Poetics. The imitation of life in literature was for Aristotle, the
+creative revelation of the ideal actively at work in human life. The
+tragic hero failed because his composition was less than ideal; but he
+could only be a tragic hero if the ideal was implicit in him and he
+visibly approximated to it. It is this constant reference to the ideal
+which makes of 'imitation' a truly creative principle and the one which,
+properly understood, is the most permanently valid and pregnant of all;
+it is also one which has been constantly misunderstood. Its importance
+is, nevertheless, so central that adequate recognition of it might
+conceivably be taken as the distinguishing mark of all fruitful
+criticism.
+
+To his sympathetic understanding of this principle Coleridge owed a
+great debt. It is true that his efforts to refine upon it were not only
+unsuccessful, but a trifle ludicrous; his effort to graft the vague
+transcendentalism of Germany on to the rigour and clarity of Aristotle
+was, from the outset, unfortunately conceived. But the root of the
+matter was there, and in Coleridge's fertile mind the Aristotelian
+theory of imitation flowered into a magnificent conception of the
+validity and process of the poetic imagination. And partly because the
+foundation was truly Aristotelian, partly because Coleridge had known
+what it was to be a great poet, the reference to life pervades the
+whole of what is permanently valuable in Coleridge's criticism. In him,
+too, there is a strict and mutually fertilising relation between the
+moral and the æsthetic values. This is the firm ground beneath his feet
+when he--too seldom--proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisite
+æsthetic discrimination.
+
+In Dryden, however, there was no such organic interpenetration. Dryden,
+too, had a fine sensibility, though less exquisite, by far, than that of
+Coleridge; but his theoretical system was not merely alien to him--it
+was in itself false and mistaken. _Corruptio optimi pessima_. He took
+over from France the sterilised and lifeless Aristotelianism which has
+been the plague of criticism for centuries; he used it no worse than his
+French exemplars, but he used it very little better than they. It was in
+his hands, as in theirs, a dead mechanical framework of rules about the
+unities. Dryden, we can see in his critical writing, was constantly
+chafed by it. He behaves like a fine horse with a bearing rein: he is
+continually tossing his head after a minute or two of 'good manners and
+action,' and saying, 'Shakespeare was the best of them, anyhow';
+'Chaucer beats Ovid to a standstill.' It is a gesture with which all
+decent people sympathise and when it is made in language so supple as
+Dryden's prose it has a lasting charm. Dryden's heart was in the right
+place, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him a
+critic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company of
+Aristotle and Coleridge.
+
+Our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous. We have
+seen that there is a sense in which Dryden is a purer literary critic
+than either Coleridge or Aristotle; but we have also seen that it is
+precisely by reason of the 'pureness' in him that he is to be relegated
+into a rank inferior to theirs. It looks as though we might have to
+pronounce that the true literary critic is the philosophic critic. Yet
+the pronouncement must not be prematurely made; for there is a real and
+vital difference between those for whom we have accepted the designation
+of philosophic critics, Hegel or Croce, and Aristotle or Coleridge. Yet
+three of these (and it might be wise to include Coleridge as a fourth)
+were professional philosophers. It is evidently not the philosophy as
+such that makes the difference.
+
+The difference depends, we believe, upon the nature of the philosophy.
+The secret lies in Aristotle. The true literary critic must have a
+humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, subject to an
+intimate, organic governance, by an ideal of the good life. He is not
+the mere investigator of facts; existence is never for him synonymous
+with value, and it is of the utmost importance that he should never be
+deluded into believing that it is. He will not accept from Hegel the
+thesis that all the events of human history, all man's spiritual
+activities, are equally authentic manifestations of Spirit; he will not
+even recognise the existence of Spirit. He may accept from Croce the
+thesis that art is the expression of intuitions, but he will not be
+extravagantly grateful, because his duty as a critic is to distinguish
+between intuitions and to decide that one is more significant than
+another. A philosophy of art that lends him no aid in this and affords
+no indication why the expression of one intuition should be preferred to
+the expression of another is of little value to him. He will incline to
+say that Hegel and Croce are the scientists of art rather than its
+philosophers.
+
+Here, then, is the opposition: between the philosophy that borrows its
+values from science and the philosophy which shares its values with art.
+We may put it with more cogency and truth: the opposition lies between a
+philosophy without values and a philosophy based upon them. For values
+are human, anthropocentric. Shut them out once and you shut them out for
+ever. You do not get them back, as some believe, by declaring that such
+and such a thing is true. Nothing is precious because it is true save to
+a mind which has, consciously or unconsciously, decided that it is good
+to know the truth. And the making of that single decision is a most
+momentous judgment of value. If the scientist appeals to it, as indeed
+he invariably does, he too is at bottom, though he may deny it, a
+humanist. He would do better to confess it, and to confess that he too
+is in search of the good life. Then he might become aware that to search
+for the good life is in fact impossible, unless he has an ideal of it
+before his mind's eye.
+
+An ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and
+the organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably be æsthetic_. There
+is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or
+conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms. We say, for
+instance, the good life is that in which man has achieved a harmony of
+the diverse elements in his soul. For the good life, we know
+instinctively, is one of our human absolutes. It is not good with
+reference to any end outside itself. A man does not live the good life
+because he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen because he lives
+the good life. And here we touch the secret of the most magnificently
+human of all books that has ever been written--Plato's _Republic_. In
+the _Republic_ the good life and the life of the good citizen are
+identified; but the citizenship is not of an earthly but of an ideal
+city, whose proportions, like the duties of its citizens, are determined
+by the æsthetic intuition. Plato's philosophy is æsthetic through and
+through, and because it is æsthetic it is the most human, the most
+permanently pregnant of all philosophies. Much labour has been spent on
+the examination of the identity which Plato established between the good
+and the beautiful. It is labour lost, for that identity is axiomatic,
+absolute, irreducible. The Greeks knew by instinct that it is so, and in
+their common speech the word for a gentleman was the _kalos kagathos_,
+the beautiful-good.
+
+This is why we have to go back to the Greeks for the principles of art
+and criticism, and why only those critics who have returned to bathe
+themselves in the life-giving source have made enduring contributions to
+criticism. They alone are--let us not say philosophic critics
+but--critics indeed. Their approach to life and their approach to art
+are the same; to them, and to them alone, life and art are one. The
+interpenetration is complete; the standards by which life and art are
+judged the same. If we may use a metaphor, in the Greek view art is the
+consciousness of life. Poetry is more philosophic and more highly
+serious than history, just as the mind of a man is more significant than
+his outward gestures. To make those gestures significant the art of the
+actor must be called into play. So to make the outward event of history
+significant the poet's art is needed. Therefore a criticism which is
+based on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place
+of sovereignty in its scheme of values. That Plato himself did not do
+this was due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of
+'imitation' in which art consists; but only the superficial readers of
+Plato--and a good many readers deserve no better name--will conclude
+from the fact that he rejected art that his attitude was not
+fundamentally æsthetic. Not only is the _Republic_ itself one of the
+greatest 'imitations,' one of the most subtle and profound works of art
+ever created, but it would also be true to say that Plato cleared the
+way for a true conception of art. In reality he rejected not art, but
+false art; and it only remained for Aristotle to discern the nature of
+the relation between artistic 'imitation' and the ideal for the Platonic
+system to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and an
+everlasting foundation for art and the criticism of art.
+
+Art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life. As the ideal is
+active and organic so must art itself be. The ideal is never achieved,
+therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense of
+the word. More than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can man
+appreciate or imagine the ideal at all. To discern it is essentially the
+work of divination or intuition. The artist divines the end at which
+human life is aiming; he makes men who are his characters completely
+expressive of themselves, which no actual man ever has been. If he works
+on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of
+himself. That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses
+himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation.
+He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be
+tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which
+are so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ of
+himself would inevitably end in confusion. That is why the great poetic
+genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often
+as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.
+
+Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in
+the world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to
+the absolute ideal. In subordinating its particular intuitions to the
+absolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign
+autonomy. True criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activity
+of art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and not
+the imposition of an alien. To use our previous metaphor, as art is the
+consciousness of life, criticism is the consciousness of art. The
+essential activity of true criticism is the harmonious control of art by
+art. This is at the root of a confusion in the thought of Mr. Eliot,
+who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of art, pronounces
+that the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle the
+anomalous Aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that 'he wrote
+well about everything,' and has, moreover, to elevate Dryden to a purple
+which he is quite unfitted to wear. No, what distinguishes the true
+critic of poetry is a truly æsthetic philosophy. In the present state
+of society it is extremely probable that only the poet or the artist
+will possess this, for art and poetry were never more profoundly
+divorced from the ordinary life of society than they are at the present
+day. But the poet who would be a critic has to make his æsthetic
+philosophy conscious to himself; to him as a poet it may be unconscious.
+This necessary change from unconsciousness to consciousness is by no
+means easy, and we should do well to insist upon its difficulty, for
+quite as much nonsense is talked about poetry by poets and by artists
+about art as by the profane about either. Moreover, it is important to
+remember that in proportion as society approaches the ideal--there is no
+continual progress towards the ideal; at present society is as far
+removed from it as it has ever been--the chance of the philosopher, of
+the scientist even, becoming a true critic of art grows greater. When
+the æsthetic basis of all humane activity is familiarly recognised, the
+values of the philosopher, the scientist, and the artist become
+consciously the same, and therefore interchangeable.
+
+Still, the ideal society is sufficiently remote for us to disregard it,
+and we shall say that the principle of art for art's sake contains an
+element of truth when it is opposed to those who would inflict upon art
+the values of science, of metaphysics, or of a morality of mere
+convention. We shall also say that the principle of art for art's sake
+needs to be understood and interpreted very differently. Its
+implications are tremendous. Art is autonomous, and to be pursued for
+its own sake, precisely because it comprehends the whole of human life;
+because it has reference to a more perfectly human morality than other
+activity of man; because, in so far as it is truly art, it is indicative
+of a more comprehensive and unchallengeable harmony in the spirit of
+man. It does not demand impossibilities, that man should be at one with
+the universe or in tune with the infinite; but it does envisage the
+highest of all attainable ideals, that man should be at one with
+himself, obedient to his own most musical law.
+
+Thus art reveals to us the principle of its own governance. The function
+of criticism is to apply it. Obviously it can be applied only by him who
+has achieved, if not the actual æsthetic ideal in life, at least a
+vision and a sense of it. He alone will know that the principle he has
+to elucidate and apply is living, organic. It is indeed the very
+principle of artistic creation itself. Therefore he will approach what
+claims to be a work of art first as a thing in itself, and seek with it
+the most intimate and immediate contact in order that he may decide
+whether it too is organic and living. He will be untiring in his effort
+to refine his power of discrimination by the frequentation of the finest
+work of the past, so that he may be sure of himself when he decides, as
+he must, whether the object before him is the expression of an æsthetic
+intuition at all. At the best he is likely to find that it is mixed and
+various; that fragments of æsthetic vision jostle with unsubordinated
+intellectual judgments.
+
+But, in regarding the work of art as a thing in itself, he will never
+forget the hierarchy of comprehension, that the active ideal of art is
+indeed to see life steadily and see it whole, and that only he has a
+claim to the title of a great artist whose work manifests an incessant
+growth from a merely personal immediacy to a coherent and
+all-comprehending attitude to life. The great artist's work is in all
+its parts a revelation of the ideal as a principle of activity in human
+life. As the apprehension of the ideal is more or less perfect, the
+artist's comprehension will be greater or less. The critic has not
+merely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and Shakespeare,
+between Dante and Milton, between Cezanne and Michelangelo, Beethoven
+and Mozart. If the foundations of his criticism are truly æsthetic, he
+is compelled to believe and to show that among would-be artists some are
+true artists and some are not, and that among true artists some are
+greater than others. That what has generally passed under the name of
+æsthetic criticism assumes as an axiom that every true work of art is
+unique and incomparable is merely the paradox which betrays the
+unworthiness of such criticism to bear the name it has arrogated to
+itself. The function of true criticism is to establish a definite
+hierarchy among the great artists of the past, as well as to test the
+production of the present; by the combination of these activities it
+asserts the organic unity of all art. It cannot honestly be said that
+our present criticism is adequate to either task.
+
+[APRIL, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Religion of Rousseau_
+
+
+These are times when men have need of the great solitaries; for each man
+now in his moment is a prey to the conviction that the world and his
+deepest aspirations are incommensurable. He is shaken by a presentiment
+that the lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human minds
+put out in a conflict for something which never can be won in the clash
+of material arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as a
+child pitifully wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoes
+the strange word 'Peace.' Therefore he too wanders pitifully like that
+child, seeking peace, and men are become the symbols of mankind. The
+tragic paradox of human life which slumbers in the soul in years of
+peace is awakened again. When we would be solitary and cannot, we are
+made sensible of the depth and validity of the impulse which moved the
+solitaries of the past.
+
+The paradox is apparent now on every hand. It appears in the death of
+the author of _La Formation Réligieuse de J.J. Rousseau_.[1] One of the
+most distinguished of the younger generation of French scholar-critics,
+M. Masson met a soldier's death before the book to which he had devoted
+ten years of his life was published. He had prepared it for the press in
+the leisure hours of the trenches. There he had communed with the
+unquiet spirit of the man who once thrilled the heart of Europe by
+stammering forgotten secrets, and whispered to an age flushed and
+confident with material triumphs that the battle had been won in vain.
+Rousseau, rightly understood is no consoling companion for a soldier.
+What if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenary
+beatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the Lake of
+Bienne? What if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free but
+is everywhere in chains? Let us hope that the dead author was not too
+keenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice. His
+death would have been bitter.
+
+   [Footnote 1: _La Formation Réligieuse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau_. Par
+   Pierre Maurice Masson. (Paris: Hachette. Three volumes.)]
+
+From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. His method would speak
+against it. Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of
+the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate
+to the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made.
+He had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no
+real history can be written. Chronology was meaningless to him because
+he could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. With him ends
+were beginnings. In the third _Dialogue_ he tell us--and it is nothing
+less than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well--that his
+works must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who
+would understand him. Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than
+is imagined by those who take the parable called the _Contrat Social_
+for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie to
+history. In himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grew
+younger with years. He might be known as the man of the second childhood
+_par excellence_. To the eye of history the effort of his soul was an
+effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a
+perspective of progress. On his after-dinner journey to Diderot at
+Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that
+progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so
+long was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld the soul of man _sub
+specie æternitatis_. In his vision history and institutions dissolved
+away. His second childhood had begun.
+
+On such a man the historical method can have no grip. There is, as the
+French say, no _engrenage_. It points to a certain lack of the subtler
+kind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly,
+perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years been
+imported into French criticism from Germany. The Sorbonne has not, we
+know, gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation's
+sake. M. Masson's three volumes leave us with the sense that their
+author had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of
+the momentous question whether Jean-Jacques was a person to whom it
+might be applied with a prospect of discovery. No one who read Rousseau
+with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter.
+Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point. The Savoyard Vicar was
+speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession of
+faith with the words:--
+
+    'Je ne veux argumenter avec vous, ni même de tenter vous convaincre;
+    il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicité de
+    mon coeur. Consultez le vôtre pendant mon discours; c'est tout ce
+    que je vous demande.'
+
+To the extent, therefore, that M. Masson did not respond to this appeal
+and filled his volumes with information concerning the books
+Jean-Jacques might have read and a hundred other interesting but only
+partly relevant things, he did the citizen of Geneva a wrong. The
+ulterior motive is there, and the faint taste of a thesis in the most
+modern manner. But the method is saved by the perception which, though
+it sometimes lacks the perfect keenness of complete understanding, is
+exquisite enough to suggest the answer to the questions it does not
+satisfy. Though the environment is lavish the man is not lost.
+
+It is but common piety to seek to understand Jean-Jacques in the way in
+which he pleaded so hard to be understood. Yet it is now over forty
+years since a voice of authority told England how it was to regard him.
+Lord Morley was magisterial and severe, and England obeyed. One feels
+almost that Jean-Jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive.
+He would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was 'a rag
+of metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism,' and he would
+have whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his
+_Dialogues_ described as the outpourings of a man with persecution
+mania, he might have rebelled and muttered silently an _Eppur si muove_.
+We see now that it was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, and
+that precisely those _Dialogues_ which the then Mr Morley so powerfully
+dismissed contain his plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction. To
+his contention that he wrote his books to ease his own soul it might be
+replied that their publication was a social act which had vast social
+consequences. But Jean-Jacques might well retort that the fact that his
+contemporaries and the generation which followed read and judged him in
+the letter and not in the spirit is no reason why we, at nearly two
+centuries remove, should do the same.
+
+A great man may justly claim our deference, if Jean-Jacques asks that
+his last work shall be read first we are bound, even if we consider it
+only a quixotic humour, to indulge it. But to those who read the
+neglected _Dialogues_ it will appear a humour no longer. Here is a man
+who at the end of his days is filled to overflowing with bitterness at
+the thought that he has been misread and misunderstood. He says to
+himself: Either he is at bottom of the same nature as other men or he is
+different. If he is of the same nature, then there must be a malignant
+plot at work. He has revealed his heart with labour and good faith; not
+to hear him his fellow-men must have stopped their ears. If he is of
+another kind than his fellows, then--but he cannot bear the thought.
+Indeed it is a thought that no man can bear. They are blind because they
+will not see. He has not asked them to believe that what he says is
+true; he asks only that they shall believe that he is sincere, sincere
+in what he says, sincere, above all, when he implores that they should
+listen to the undertone. He has been 'the painter of nature and the
+historian of the human heart.'
+
+His critics might have paused to consider why Jean-Jacques, certainly
+not niggard of self-praise in the _Dialogues_, should have claimed no
+more for himself than this. He might have claimed, with what in their
+eyes at least must be good right, to have been pre-eminent in his
+century as a political philosopher, a novelist, and a theorist of
+education. Yet to himself he is no more than 'the painter of nature and
+the historian of the human heart.' Those who would make him more make
+him less, because they make him other than he declares himself to be.
+His whole life has been an attempt to be himself and nothing else
+besides; and all his works have been nothing more and nothing less than
+his attempt to make his own nature plain to men. Now at the end of his
+life he has to swallow the bitterness of failure. He has been acclaimed
+the genius of his age; kings have delighted to honour him, but they have
+honoured another man. They have not known the true Jean-Jacques. They
+have taken his parables for literal truth, and he knows why.
+
+    'Des êtres si singulièrement constitués doivent nécessairement
+    s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. Il est impossible
+    qu'avec des âmes si différemment modifiés ils ne portent pas dans
+    l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idées l'empreinte de
+    ces modifications. Si cette empreinte échappe à ceux qui n'ont
+    aucune notion de cette manière d'être, elle ne peut échapper à ceux
+    qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectés eux-mêmes. C'est une
+    signe caracteristique auquel les initiés se reconnoissent entre eux;
+    et ce qui donne un grand prix à ce signe, c'est qu'il ne peut se
+    contrefaire, que jamais il n'agit qu'au niveau de sa source, et que,
+    quand il ne part pas du coeur de ceux qui l'imitent, il n'arrive
+    pas non plus aux coeurs faits pour le distinguer; mais sitôt qu'il y
+    parvient, on ne sauroit s'y méprendre; il est vrai dès qu'il est
+    senti.'
+
+At the end of his days he felt that the great labour of his life which
+had been to express an intuitive certainty in words which would carry
+intellectual conviction, had been in vain, and his last words are: 'It
+is true so soon as it is felt.'
+
+Three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his 'religious
+formation' as three volumes. At Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens, as a
+boy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul. In Paris, amid the
+intellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the Encyclopædists, the
+memory of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience. His
+boyish unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticism
+of the great pioneers of enlightenment and progress. Yet when all had
+been destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied. Underneath
+his passionate admiration for Diderot smouldered a spark of resentment
+that he was not understood. They had torn down the fabric of expression
+into which he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty as a
+boy; sometimes with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart he
+surveyed the ruins. But the certainty that he had once been certain, the
+memory and the desire of the past peace--this they could not destroy.
+They could hardly even weaken this element within him, for they did not
+know that it existed, they were unable to conceive that it could exist.
+Jean-Jacques himself could give them no clue to its existence; he had
+no words, and he was still under the spell of the intellectual dogma of
+his age that words must express definite things. In common with his age
+he had lost the secret of the infinite persuasion of poetry. So the
+consciousness that he was different from those who surrounded him, and
+from those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. He was afraid of
+his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge of
+their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. The
+pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is
+apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' In the
+note which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses to
+this ideal. If only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable
+without and within, he might be delivered from that disquieting sense of
+tongue-tied queerness in a normal world.
+
+If he cheated himself at all, the deception was brief. The poignant
+memory of Les Charmettes whispered to him that there was a state of
+grace in which the hard things were made clear. But he had not yet the
+courage of his destiny. His consciousness of his separation from his
+fellows had still to harden into a consciousness of superiority before
+that courage would come. On the road to Vincennes on an October evening
+in 1749--M. Masson has fixed the date for us--he read in a news-sheet
+the question of the Dijon Academy: 'Si le rétablissement des arts et des
+sciences a contribué à épurer les moeurs?' The scales dropped from his
+eyes and the weight was removed from his tongue. There is no mystery
+about this 'revelation.' For the first time the question had been put
+in terms which struck him squarely in the heart. Jean-Jacques made his
+reply with the stammering honesty of a man of genius wandering in age of
+talent.
+
+The First Discourse seems to many rhetorical and extravagant. In after
+days it appeared so to Rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for it
+than that he had tried to tell the truth. Before he learned that he had
+won the Dijon prize and that his work had taken Paris by storm, he was
+surely a prey to terrors lest his Vincennes vision of the non-existence
+of progress should have been mere madness. The success reassured him.
+'Cette faveur du public, nullement brigué, et pour un auteur inconnu, me
+donna la première assurance véritable de mon talent.' He was, in fact,
+not 'queer,' but right; and he had seemed to be queer precisely because
+he was right. Now he had the courage. 'Je suis grossier,' he wrote in
+the preface to _Narcisse_, 'maussade, impoli par principes; je me fous
+de tous vous autres gens de cour; je suis un barbare.' There is a touch
+of exaggeration and bravado in it all. He was still something of the
+child hallooing in the dark to give himself heart. He clutched hold of
+material symbols of the freedom he had won, round wig, black stockings,
+and a living gained by copying music at so much a line. But he did not
+break with his friends; the 'bear' suffered himself to be made a lion.
+He had still a foot in either camp, for though he had the conviction
+that he was right, he was still fumbling for his words. The memoirs of
+Madame d'Epinay tell us how in 1754, at dinner at Mlle Quinault's,
+impotent to reply to the polite atheistical persiflage of the company,
+he broke out: 'Et moi, messieurs, je crois en Dieu. Je sors si vous
+dites un mot de plus.' That was not what he meant; neither was the First
+Discourse what he meant. He had still to find his language, and to find
+his language he had to find his peace. He was like a twig whirled about
+in an eddy of a stream. Suddenly the stream bore him to Geneva, where he
+returned to the church which he had left at Confignon. That, too, was
+not what he meant. When he returned from Geneva, Madame d'Epinay had
+built him the Ermitage.
+
+In the _Rêveries_, which are mellow with the golden calm of his
+discovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he
+had set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitage
+to inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for
+all his opinions and his principles. In the exquisite third _Rêverie_
+two phrases occur continually. His purpose was 'to find firm
+ground'--'prendre une assiette,'--and his means to this discovery was
+'spiritual honesty'--'bonne foi.' Rousseau's deep concern was to
+elucidate the anatomy of his own soul, but, since he was sincere, he
+regarded it as a type of the soul of man. Looking into himself, he saw
+that, in spite of all his follies, his weaknesses, his faintings by the
+way, his blasphemies against the spirit, he was good. Therefore he
+declared: Man is born good. Looking into himself he saw that he was free
+to work out his own salvation, and to find that solid foundation of
+peace which he so fervently desired. Therefore he declared: Man is born
+free. To the whisper of les Charmettes that there was a condition of
+grace had been added the sterner voice of remorse for his abandoned
+children, telling him that he had fallen from his high estate.
+
+  'J'ai fui en vain; partout j'ai retrouvé la Loi.
+  Il faut céder enfin! ô porte, il faut admettre
+  L'hôte; coeur frémissant, il faut subir le maître,
+  Quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-même que moi.'
+
+The noble verse of M. Claudel contains the final secret of Jean-Jacques.
+He found in himself something more him than himself. Therefore he
+declared: There is a God. But he sought to work out a logical foundation
+for these pinnacles of truth. He must translate these luminous
+convictions of his soul into arguments and conclusions. He could not,
+even to himself, admit that they were only intuitions; and in the
+_Contrat Social_ he turned the reason to the service of a certainty not
+her own.
+
+This unremitting endeavour to express an intuitive certainty in
+intellectual terms lies at the root of the many superficial
+contradictions in his work, and of the deeper contradiction which forms,
+as it were, the inward rhythm of his three great books. He seems to
+surge upwards on a passionate wave of revolutionary ideas, only to sink
+back into the calm of conservative or quietist conclusions. M. Masson
+has certainly observed it well.
+
+    'Le premier _Discours_ anathématise les sciences et les arts, et ne
+    voit le salut que dans les académies; le _Discours sur l'Inégalité_
+    paraît détruire tout autorité, et recommande pourtant "l'obéissance
+    scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs": la
+    _Nouvelle Héloïse_ prêche d'abord l'émancipation sentimentale, et
+    proclame la suprématie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit à
+    exalter la fidelité conjugale, à consolider les grands devoirs
+    familiaux et sociaux. Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la même
+    surprise.'
+
+To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary;
+to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only a
+man stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured
+by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in
+his similitude to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tièdes,' he wrote
+to Madame Latour in 1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est
+pas digne de moi.' There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more
+plainly still in the _Dialogues_. He, too, was persecuted for
+righteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of
+heaven was within men.
+
+And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and
+the peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preserving
+conclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to
+record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the
+market-place. The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man
+so that he writes believing that all men will understand. He wakes in
+the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he
+does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. They
+will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will
+see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. The
+_mystique_ as Péguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_.
+To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseau
+turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard
+saying, that the things which are Cæsar's shall be rendered unto Cæsar.
+
+In the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which have
+been discovered in Rousseau's work fade away. That famous confusion
+concerning 'the natural man,' whom he presents to us now as a historic
+fact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques,
+but in the minds of his critics. The _Contrat Social_ is a parable of
+the soul of man, like the _Republic_ of Plato. The truth of the human
+soul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history is
+irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal. And as for the
+nature of this truth, 'it is true so soon as it is felt.' When the
+Savoyard Vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism of
+religious dogma, turned to the Gospel story with the immortal 'Ce n'est
+pas ainsi qu'on invente,' he was only anticipating what Jean-Jacques was
+to say of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his work
+which could not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of its
+source. We may call Jean-Jacques religious because we have no other
+word; but the word would be more truly applied to the reverence felt
+towards such a man than to his own emotion. He was driven to speak of
+God by the habit of his childhood and the deficiency of a language
+shaped by the intellect and not by the soul. But his deity was one whom
+neither the Catholic nor the Reformed Church could accept, for He was
+truly a God who does not dwell in temples made with hands. The respect
+he owed to God, said the Vicar, was such that he could affirm nothing of
+Him. And, again, still more profoundly, he said, 'He is to our souls
+what our soul is to our body.' That is the mystical utterance of a man
+who was no mystic, but of one who found his full communion in the
+beatific _dolce far niente_ of the Lake of Bienne. Jean-Jacques was set
+apart from his generation, because, like Malvolio, he thought highly of
+the soul and in nowise approved the conclusions of his fellows; and he
+was fortunate to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call his
+madness (which was indeed only his flaming and uncomprehending
+indignation at the persecution inevitably meted out by those who have
+only a half truth to one who has the whole), because he enjoyed the
+certainty that his high appraisement of the soul was justified.
+
+[MARCH, 1918.
+
+
+
+
+_The Poetry of Edward Thomas_
+
+
+We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruins
+with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which
+disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of Edward
+Thomas.[2] They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a
+palimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more
+resonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be like
+a phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city. There
+will be the triumphal arch standing proudly; the very tombs of the dead
+will seem to share its monumental magnificence. Yet we will turn from
+them all, from the victory and sorrow alike, to this faintly gleaming
+bubble of glass that will hold captive the phantasm of a fragrance of
+the soul. By it some dumb and doubtful knowledge will be evoked to
+tremble on the edge of our minds. We shall reach back, under its spell,
+beyond the larger impulses of a resolution and a resignation which will
+have become a part of history, to something less solid and more
+permanent over which they passed and which they could not disturb.
+
+   [Footnote 2: _Last Poems_. By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount.)]
+
+Our consciousness will have its record. The tradition of England in
+battle has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will be
+compassed about by a crowd of witnesses. But it might so nearly have
+been in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at the
+conclusions of our consciousness. The subtler faiths might so easily
+have fled through our harsh fingers. When the sound of the bugles died,
+having crowned reveillé with the equal challenge of the last post, how
+easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there
+had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds
+and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us
+first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of
+which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses
+and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of
+speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself
+crumbles into dust--this very texture of the life of the soul might have
+been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding
+had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it
+appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more
+gorgeous woof.
+
+The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away. To exacter knowledge less
+charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we
+cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery
+over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but
+only humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard;
+beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our
+souls. So the sedge-warbler's
+
+  'Song that lacks all words, all melody,
+  All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
+  Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.'
+
+Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead
+poet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been,
+both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. Because
+he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They made
+the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind's
+ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to
+something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or
+by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns.
+But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly
+into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal
+present on whose pinnacle we stand.
+
+  'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
+  And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
+  Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
+  For what I should, yet never can, remember.
+  No garden appears, no path, no child beside,
+  Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
+  Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.'
+
+So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. We come no longer
+trailing clouds of glory. We are that which we are, less and more than
+our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend from
+on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. Yet our chosen spirit
+is not wholly secure in his courage. He longs not merely to know in what
+undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it
+beautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the
+truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour.
+
+  'This heart, some fraction of me, happily
+  Floats through the window even now to a tree
+  Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
+  Not like a peewit that returns to wail
+  For something it has lost, but like a dove
+  That slants unswerving to its home and love.
+  There I find my rest, and through the dark air
+  Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.'
+
+Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with
+the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far
+than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of
+man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay.
+Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home
+indeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. That
+which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude
+ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more
+than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other
+stars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of the
+universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.'
+
+And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common property
+of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from
+what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and
+that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this
+knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his
+contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the
+hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the
+line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious
+subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and
+familiar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most
+apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his
+home no home at all.
+
+  'This is my grief. That land,
+  My home, I have never seen.
+  No traveller tells of it,
+  However far he has been.
+
+  'And could I discover it
+  I fear my happiness there,
+  Or my pain, might be dreams of return
+  To the things that were.'
+
+Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his
+destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of
+necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men may
+know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the
+magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known
+truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the
+truth stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universe
+grows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little
+lamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark
+forest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all.
+Yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he must
+at each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise
+what is and celebrate it as what must be. Thus he regains, by another
+path, the supremacy which he has forsaken.
+
+Edward Thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. It may be
+said that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe of
+the past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. It is, even
+in material fact, but half true. None more closely than he regarded the
+living things of earth in all their quarters. 'After Rain' is, for
+instance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment,
+freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves
+
+            '... thinly spread
+  In the road, like little black fish, inlaid
+            As if they played.'
+
+But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the
+more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he
+discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy
+in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious
+of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which
+only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking
+mind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes
+in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and
+irrecoverable.
+
+  'The simple lack
+  Of her is more to me
+  Than other's presence,
+  Whether life splendid be
+  Or utter black.
+
+  'I have not seen,
+  I have no news of her;
+  I can tell only
+  She is not here, but there
+  She might have been.
+
+  'She is to be kissed
+  Only perhaps by me;
+  She may be seeking
+  Me and no other; she
+  May not exist.'
+
+That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register its
+wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on.
+If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas's poetical quest,
+he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches
+further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he
+passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience
+of the soul fronting its own infinity:--
+
+           'So memory made
+  Parting to-day a double pain:
+  First because it was parting; next
+  Because the ill it ended vexed
+  And mocked me from the past again.
+  Not as what had been remedied
+  Had I gone on,--not that, ah no!
+  But as itself no longer woe.'
+
+There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who
+have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant
+not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the
+movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it was
+that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of
+becoming haunted and held him most.
+
+  'Often I had gone this way before,
+  But now it seemed I never could be
+  And never had been anywhere else.'
+
+To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive
+to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that
+was not instantly engulfed--
+
+         'In the undefined
+  Abyss of what can never be again.'
+
+Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt
+as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none
+of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped
+at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated
+every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old
+when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A
+New House.'
+
+  'All was foretold me; naught
+    Could I foresee;
+  But I learned how the wind would sound
+    After these things should be.'
+
+But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in the
+enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul
+itself. The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book
+is that entitled 'The Other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal,
+shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create
+the myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the
+unknown of his emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of
+this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other'
+tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul.
+
+  'And now I dare not follow after
+  Too close. I try to keep in sight,
+  Dreading his frown and worse his laughter,
+  I steal out of the wood to light;
+  I see the swift shoot from the rafter
+  By the window: ere I alight
+  I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
+  And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.
+  He goes: I follow: no release
+  Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.'
+
+No; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest is
+read with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one who
+had many (and among them the chief) of the qualities of a great poet.
+Edward Thomas was like a musician who noted down themes that summon up
+forgotten expectations. Whether the genius to work them out to the
+limits of their scope and implication was in him we do not know. The
+life of literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunity
+he would eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. But, if
+his compositions do not, his themes will never fail--of so much we are
+sure--to awaken unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds.
+
+[JANUARY 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Mr Yeats's Swan Song_
+
+
+In the preface to _The Wild Swans at Coole_,[3] Mr W.B. Yeats speaks of
+'the phantasmagoria through which alone I can express my convictions
+about the world.' The challenge could hardly be more direct. At the
+threshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which gives
+us the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enter
+in. There are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verses
+written in the seeming-strong vernacular of literary Dublin, as it were
+a hospitable bench placed outside the door. They are indeed inside the
+house, but by accident or for temporary shelter. They do not, as the
+phrase goes, belong to the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions of
+the common reality, whether found in the sensible world or the emotion
+of the mind. They are, from Mr Yeats's angle of vision (as indeed from
+our own), essentially _vers d'occasion._
+
+   [Footnote 3: _The Wild Swans at Coole_. By W.B. Yeats.(Macmillan.)]
+
+The poet's high and passionate argument must be sought elsewhere, and
+precisely in his expression of his convictions about the world. And
+here, on the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall find
+phantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwise
+conveyed, at least by Mr Yeats. To this, in itself, we make no demur.
+The poet, if he is a true poet, is driven to approach the highest
+reality he can apprehend. He cannot transcribe it simply because he does
+not possess the necessary apparatus of knowledge, and because if he did
+possess it his passion would flag. It is not often that Spinoza can
+disengage himself to write as he does at the beginning of the third book
+of the Ethics, nor could Lucretius often kindle so great a fire in his
+soul as that which made his material incandescent in _Æneadum genetrix_.
+Therefore the poet turns to myth as a foundation upon which he can
+explicate his imagination. He may take his myth from legend or familiar
+history, or he may create one for himself anew, but the function it
+fulfils is always the same. It supplies the elements with which he can
+build the structure of his parable, upon which he can make it elaborate
+enough to convey the multitudinous reactions of his soul to the world.
+
+But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The
+structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility.
+The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will
+rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience....'
+And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own
+myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be
+condemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic
+shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect
+embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. The phantoms of the
+individual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity and
+become like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms they
+should be. For the poet himself must move securely among his visions;
+they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are. To anchor
+them he needs intelligible myth. Nothing less than a supremely great
+genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark
+visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great genius
+and was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his passion gave
+stability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes because
+they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite work
+there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise
+the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria of the
+dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. Like
+Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and
+would not let him go.
+
+The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman;
+yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a
+poet may plunge into the world of phantasms. Mr Yeats has too little of
+the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. He
+knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. But the very
+terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of
+impotence:--
+
+  Hands, do what you're bid;
+  Bring the balloon of the mind
+  That bellies and drags in the wind
+  Into its narrow shed.
+
+The languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poet
+has failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression of
+an ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness to
+the poet's minor probity. He remains an artist by determination, even
+though he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry.
+We were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majestic
+isolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit.
+Subsequently they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty. Although it
+has little mysterious and haunting beauty, _The Wild Swans at Coole_ is
+indeed a swan song. It is eloquent of final defeat; the following of a
+lonely path has ended in the poet's sinking exhausted in a wilderness of
+gray. Not even the regret is passionate; it is pitiful.
+
+  'I am worn out with dreams,
+  A weather-worn, marble triton
+  Among the streams;
+  And all day long I look
+  Upon this lady's beauty
+  As though I had found in book
+  A pictured beauty,
+  Pleased to have filled the eyes
+  Or the discerning ears,
+  Delighted to be but wise,
+  For men improve with the years;
+  And yet, and yet
+  Is this my dream, or the truth?
+  O would that we had met
+  When I had my burning youth;
+  But I grow old among dreams,
+  A weather-worn, marble triton
+  Among the streams.'
+
+It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poet
+mistakes the cause of his sorrow. He is worn out not with dreams, but
+with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative
+energy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has
+merely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew.
+Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that
+vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is
+no way back to the past.
+
+  'My country is Kiltartan Cross,
+  My countrymen Kiltartan's poor;
+  No likely end could bring them loss
+  Or leave them happier than before.'
+
+It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We do
+not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in
+and for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose
+creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands
+upon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching
+his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverishment, as
+of all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware.
+
+  'I would find by the edge of that water
+  The collar-bone of a hare,
+  Worn thin by the lapping of the water,
+  And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
+  At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
+  And laugh over the untroubled water
+  At all who marry in churches,
+  Through the white thin bone of a hare.'
+
+Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its
+bitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world
+of imagination. Mr Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to
+contemplate it was sufficient. Had he been a great poet he would have
+made it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech. By
+re-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have built
+landmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his last
+discovery had ended. But now there remains nothing but a handful of the
+symbols with which he was content:--
+
+  'A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
+  A Buddha, hand at rest,
+  Hand lifted up that blest;
+  And right between these two a girl at play.'
+
+These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and,
+alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live.
+
+Whether Mr Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for
+the product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we prefer to
+believe) he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and
+failed, we cannot certainly say. Of this, however, we are certain, that
+somehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He has
+the apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forced
+to fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him.
+That it is an insufficient reserve let this passage show:--
+
+  'For those that love the world serve it in action,
+  Grow rich, popular, and full of influence,
+  And should they paint or write still it is action:
+  The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
+  The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
+  The sentimentalist himself; while art
+  Is but a vision of reality....'
+
+Mr Yeats is neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist. He is by structure
+and impulse an artist. But structure and impulse are not enough.
+Passionate apprehension must be added to them. Because this is lacking
+in Mr Yeats those lines, concerned though they are with things he holds
+most dear, are prose and not poetry.
+
+[APRIL, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Wisdom of Anatole France_
+
+
+How few are the wise writers who remain to us? They are so few that it
+seems, at moments, that wisdom, like justice of old, is withdrawing from
+the world, and that when their fullness of years is accomplished, as,
+alas! it soon must be, the wise men who will leave us will have been the
+last of their kind. It is true that something akin to wisdom, or rather
+a quality whose outward resemblance to wisdom can deceive all but the
+elect, will emerge from the ruins of war; but true wisdom is not created
+out of the catastrophic shock of disillusionment. An unexpected disaster
+is always held to be in some sort undeserved. Yet the impulse to rail at
+destiny, be it never so human, is not wise. Wisdom is not bitter; at
+worst it is bitter-sweet, and bitter-sweet is the most subtle and
+lingering savour of all.
+
+Let us not say in our haste, that without wisdom we are lost. Wisdom is,
+after all, but one attitude to life among many. It happens to be the one
+which will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for all
+ill-usage. But hard wear is not the only purpose which an attitude may
+serve. We may demand of an attitude that it should enable us to exact
+the utmost from ourselves. To refuse to accommodate oneself to the
+angularities of life or to make provision beforehand for its
+catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly. It is, at
+all events, a folly to which poets incline. But poets are not wise;
+indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best,
+be but dimly imagined. Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largest
+inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an
+aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of no
+account. To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to
+have acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with an
+imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no
+ecstasy remains, one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublime
+self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of
+destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which
+have overwhelmed us.
+
+Whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do not
+know. We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. It is
+too conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. Some may seek
+that ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others,
+who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may
+try to shake the dust of life from off their feet. Neither will be wise.
+But precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company of
+wise men. Their own attitude will not wear. The ecstasy will fail, the
+will to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one to
+escape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and the
+cell. Then they will turn to the wise men. They will find comfort in the
+smile to which they could not frame their own lips, and discover in it
+more sympathy than they could hope for.
+
+Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be Anatole
+France. His company is constant; his attitude durable. There is no
+undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and
+haunting beauty to Tchehov. He has never suffered himself to be so
+involved in life as to be maimed by it. But the price he has paid for
+his safety has been a renunciation of experience. Only by being involved
+in life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that
+bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. Not that Anatole
+France made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would of
+his own will turn aside. It was instinct which guided him into a
+sequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate
+exaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel.
+Therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but
+never face to face. Their runnings, their stumblings and their
+gesticulations are a tumultuous portion of the landscape rather than
+symbols of an intimate and personal possibility. They lend a baroque
+enchantment to the scene.
+
+So it is that in all the characters of Anatole France's work which are
+not closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of the
+marionette. They are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack a
+certain logic, but it is not the logic of personality. They are embodied
+comments upon life, but they do not live. And there is for Anatole
+France, while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, no
+reason why they should live. For living, in the accepted sense, is an
+activity impossible without indulging many illusions; and fervently to
+sympathise with characters engaged in the activity demands that their
+author should participate in the illusions. He, too, must be surprised
+at the disaster which he himself has proved inevitable. It is not enough
+that he should pity them; he must share in their effort, and be
+discomfited at their discomfiture.
+
+Such exercises of the soul are impossible to a real acquiescence, which
+cannot even permit itself the inspiration of the final illusion that the
+wreck of human hopes, being ordained, is beautiful. The man who
+acquiesces is condemned to stand apart and contemplate a puppet-show
+with which he can never really sympathise.
+
+    'De toutes les définitions de l'homme la plus mauvaise me paraît
+    celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable. Je ne me vante pas
+    excessivement en me donnant pour doué de plus de raison que la
+    plupart de ceux de mes semblables que j'ai vus de près ou dont j'ai
+    connu l'histoire. La raison habite rarement les âmes communes, et
+    bien plus rarement encore les grands esprits.... J'appelle
+    raisonnable celui qui accorde sa raison particulière avec la raison
+    universelle, de manière à n'être jamais trop surpris de ce qui
+    arrive et à s'y accommoder tant bien que mal; j'appelle raisonnable
+    celui qui, observant le désordre de la nature et la folie humaine,
+    ne s'obstine point à y voir de l'ordre et de la sagesse; j'appelle
+    raisonnable enfin celui qui ne s'efforce pas de l'être.'
+
+The chasm between living and being wise (which is to be _raisonnable_)
+is manifest. The condition of living is to be perpetually surprised,
+incessantly indignant or exultant, at what happens. To bridge the chasm
+there is for the wise man only one way. He must cast back in his memory
+to the time when he, too, was surprised and indignant. No man is, after
+all, born wise, though he may be born with an instinct for wisdom. Thus
+Anatole France touches us most nearly when he describes his childhood.
+The innocent, wayward, positive, romantic little Pierre Nozière[4] is a
+human being to a degree to which no other figures in the master's comedy
+of unreason are. And it is evident that Anatole France himself finds him
+by far the most attractive of them all. He can almost persuade himself,
+at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite story
+of how, when he had been to a truly royal chocolate shop, he attempted
+to reproduce its splendours in play. At one point his invention and his
+memory failed him, and he turned to his mother to ask: 'Est-ce celui qui
+vend ou celui qui achète qui donne de l'argent?'
+
+    'Je ne devais jamais connaître le prix de l'argent. Tel j'étais à
+    trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapissé de boutons de
+    roses, tel je restai jusqu'à la vieillesse, qui m'est légère, comme
+    elle l'est à toutes les âmes exemptes d'avarice et d'orgueil. Non,
+    maman, je n'ai jamais connu le prix de l'argent. Je ne le connais
+    pas encore, ou plutôt je le connais trop bien.'
+
+   [Footnote 4: _Le Petit Pierre_. Par Anatole France. (Paris:
+   Calmann-Lévy.)]
+
+To know a thing too well is by worlds removed from not to know it at
+all, and Anatole France does not elsewhere similarly attempt to indulge
+the illusion of unbroken innocence. He who refused to put a mark of
+interrogation after 'What is God,' in defiance of his mother, because he
+knew, now has to restrain himself from putting one after everything he
+writes or thinks. 'Ma pauvre mère, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-être
+que maintenant j'en mets trop.' Yes, Anatole France is wise, and far
+removed from childish follies. And, perhaps, it is precisely because of
+his wisdom that he can so exactly discern the enchantment of his
+childhood. So few men grow up. The majority remain hobbledehoys
+throughout life; all the disabilities and none of the unique capacities
+of childhood remain. There are a few who, in spite of all experience,
+retain both; they are the poets and the _grands esprits_. There are
+fewer still who learn utterly to renounce childish things; and they are
+the wise men.
+
+   'Je suis une autre personne que l'enfant dont je parle. Nous n'avons
+    plus en commun, lui et moi, un atome de substance ni de pensée.
+    Maintenant qu'il m'est devenu tout à fait étranger, je puis en sa
+    compagnie me distraire de la mienne. Je l'aime, moi qui ne m'aime ni
+    ne me haïs. Il m'est doux de vivre en pensée les jours qu'il vivait
+    et je souffre de respirer l'air du temps où nous sommes.'
+
+Not otherwise is it with us and Anatole France. We may have little in
+common with his thought--the community we often imagine comes of
+self-deception--but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while.
+His touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers.
+
+[APRIL, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Gerard Manley Hopkins_
+
+
+Modern poetry, like the modern consciousness of which it is the epitome,
+seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. It is hardly
+conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself
+by insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. The
+value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives
+and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of
+the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be
+epic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few
+conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet
+may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a
+hundred influences, or he may work a single sham personality threadbare
+or render piecemeal an undigested influence. What he may not do, or do
+only at the risk of being unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call,
+for the lack of a better word, the logical progression of an _oeuvre_.
+One has no sense of the rhythm of an achievement. There is an output of
+scraps, which are scraps, not because they are small, but because one
+scrap stands in no organic relation to another in the poet's work.
+Instead of lending each other strength, they betray each other's
+weakness.
+
+Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not
+peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. If it were, we might be
+accused of mere querulousness. The rhythm of personality is hard,
+indeed, to achieve. The simple mind and the single outlook are now too
+rare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering
+a mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy
+one. The desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were
+probably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is a
+little preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see
+life steadily and see it whole. We happen to have been born into an age
+without perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet and
+prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age.
+But another rhythm is possible. No doubt it would be mistaken to
+consider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm of
+personality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personal
+coherence in its possessor. For critical purposes, however, they are
+distinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technical
+progression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate artistic
+intention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. When
+Verlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose,' we know where we
+are. And we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse to
+be predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring to
+take a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose.'
+
+It is the 'avant toute chose' that matters, not as a profession of
+faith--we do not greatly like professions of faith--but as the guarantee
+of the universal in the particular, of the _dianoia_ in the episode. It
+is the 'avant toute chose' that we chiefly miss in modern poetry and
+modern society and in their quaint concatenations. It is the 'avant
+toute chose' that leads us to respect both Mr Hardy and Mr Bridges,
+though we give all our affection to one of them. It is the 'avant toute
+chose' that compels us to admire the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins[5];
+it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, would
+have condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not (after many years)
+had Mr Bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the Oxford
+University Press to stand the racket. Apparently Mr Bridges himself is
+something of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on a
+disdainful note:--
+
+  'Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
+  Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!'
+
+   [Footnote 5: _Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins_. Edited with notes by
+   Robert Bridges. (Oxford: University Press.)]
+
+It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take the
+most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet's
+explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a
+technical language peculiar to himself. Moreover, its scope is small;
+the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages.
+
+  'O then if in my lagging lines you miss
+  The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation....'
+
+There is his 'avant toute chose.' Perhaps it seems very like 'de la
+musique.' But it tells us more about Hopkins's music than Verlaine's
+line told us about his. This music is of a particular kind, not the
+'sanglots du violon,' but pre-eminently the music of song, the music
+most proper to lyrical verse. If one were to seek in English the lyrical
+poem to which Hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, one
+would find Shelley's 'Skylark.' A technical progression onwards from the
+'Skylark' is accordingly the main line of Hopkins's poetical evolution.
+There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief.
+Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered,
+appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was his
+contemporary. There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echo
+in 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charmèd'; there is an aspiration after
+Milton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the
+most lucid of the fragments,'Epithalamion.' But the central point of
+departure is the 'Skylark.' The 'May Magnificat' is evidence of
+Hopkins's achievement in the direct line:--
+
+  'Ask of her, the mighty mother:
+  Her reply puts this other
+  Question: What is Spring?--
+  Growth in everything--
+
+  Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
+  Grass and greenworld all together;
+  Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
+  Throstle above her nested
+  Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
+  Forms and warms the life within....
+
+  ... When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
+  Bloom lights the orchard-apple,
+  And thicket and thorp are merry
+  With silver-surfèd cherry,
+
+  And azuring-over graybell makes
+  Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes,
+  And magic cuckoo-call
+  Caps, clears, and clinches all....'
+
+That is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, most
+recognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms. But a melody so
+simple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the English language
+is capable without the obscurity which comes of the drowning of sense in
+sound, did not satisfy Hopkins. He aimed at complex internal harmonies,
+at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined an
+expressive word of his own:--
+
+    'But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and
+    design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of
+    calling _inscape_ is what I above all aim at in poetry.'
+
+Here, then, in so many words, is Hopkins's 'avant toute chose' at a
+higher level of elaboration. 'Inscape' is still, in spite of the
+apparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems to
+have entered with the specific designation. With formalism comes
+rigidity; and in this case the rigidity is bound to overwhelm the sense.
+For the relative constant in the composition of poetry is the law of
+language which admits only a certain amount of adaptation. Musical
+design must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be aware that even
+in speaking of musical design he is indulging a metaphor. Hopkins
+admitted this, if we may judge by his practice, only towards the end of
+his life. There is no escape by sound from the meaning of the posthumous
+sonnets, though we may hesitate to pronounce whether this directness was
+due to a modification of his poetical principles or to the urgency of
+the content of the sonnets, which, concerned with a matter of life and
+death, would permit no obscuring of their sense for musical reasons.
+
+  'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
+  What hours, O what black hours we have spent
+  This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
+  And more must in yet longer light's delay.
+    With witness I speak this. But where I say
+  Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
+  Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
+  To dearest him that lives, alas! away.'
+
+There is compression, but not beyond immediate comprehension; music, but
+a music of overtones; rhythm, but a rhythm which explicates meaning and
+makes it more intense.
+
+Between the 'May Magnificat' and these sonnets is the bulk of Hopkins's
+poetical work and his peculiar achievement. Perhaps it could be regarded
+as a phase in his evolution towards the 'more balanced and Miltonic
+style' which he hoped for, and of which the posthumous sonnets are
+precursors; but the attempt to see him from this angle would be
+perverse. Hopkins was not the man to feel, save on exceptional
+occasions, that urgency of content of which we have spoken. The
+communication of thought was seldom the dominant impulse of his creative
+moment, and it is curious how simple his thought often proves to be when
+the obscurity of his language has been penetrated. Musical elaboration
+is the chief characteristic of his work, and for this reason what seem
+to be the strangest of his experiments are his most essential
+achievement So, for instance, 'The Golden Echo':--
+
+        'Spare!
+  There is one, yes, I have one (Hush there!);
+  Only not within seeing of sun,
+  Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
+  Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air,
+  Somewhere else where there is, ah, well, where! one,
+  One. Yes, I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
+  Where, whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and
+                    fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and
+                    swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
+  Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet clearly and dangerously sweet
+  Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
+  The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
+  Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
+  To its own best being and its loveliness of youth....'
+
+Than this, Hopkins truly wrote, 'I never did anything more musical.' By
+his own verdict and his own standards it is therefore the finest thing
+that Hopkins did. Yet even here, where the general beauty is undoubted,
+is not the music too obvious? Is it not always on the point of
+degenerating into a jingle--as much an exhibition of the limitations of
+a poetical theory as of its capabilities? The tyranny of the 'avant
+toute chose' upon a mind in which the other things were not stubborn and
+self-assertive is apparent. Hopkins's mind was irresolute concerning the
+quality of his own poetical ideal. A coarse and clumsy assonance seldom
+spread its snare in vain. Exquisite openings are involved in disaster:--
+
+  'When will you ever, Peace, wild wood dove, shy wings shut,
+  Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
+  When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
+  To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
+  That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace....'
+
+And the more wonderful opening of 'Windhover' likewise sinks, far less
+disastrously, but still perceptibly:--
+
+  'I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
+                            dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
+    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
+  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
+  In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
+    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding
+    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
+  Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'
+
+We have no doubt that 'stirred for a bird' was an added excellence to
+the poet's ear; to our sense it is a serious blemish on lines which have
+'the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.'
+
+There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of
+the poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. The
+obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear;
+and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who
+push on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether
+the failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation of
+experience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice
+in his poetical endeavour. For ourselves we believe that the former was
+the true cause. His 'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritual
+vacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, and
+strengthen it. Hopkins told the truth of himself--the reason why he
+must remain a poets' poet:--
+
+  I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
+  O then if in my lagging lines you miss
+  The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
+  My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss
+  Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.'
+
+[JUNE, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Problem of Keats_
+
+
+It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney
+Colvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first,
+because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all
+evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so
+greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassioned
+and intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by a
+portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the
+consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is with
+us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin's
+mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an
+older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of
+at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger
+race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets.
+Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciate
+Keats, Sir Sidney writes:--
+
+    'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But
+    of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his
+    indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of
+    his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a
+    disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one
+    great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of
+    ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less
+    tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history
+    to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race,
+    he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and
+    acutely sensitive.'
+
+   [Footnote 6: _John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics,
+   and After-fame_. By Sidney Colvin. Second edition. (Macmillan.)]
+
+We believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindication
+might be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimely
+dead; but we desire, not to enlist Sir Sidney in a cause, but only to
+make apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitable
+differences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring. It may be
+that we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with Keats that we
+feel to Sir Sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunch
+friend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so.
+We are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and for
+itself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow only
+when the critical honesty, the determination to let Keats be valid as
+Keats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costs
+Sir Sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us.
+
+It is rather by this than by Sir Sidney's particular contributions to
+our knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. This assured, we
+accept his patient exposition of the theme of 'Endymion' with a friendly
+interest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim
+upon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute
+investigation of the pictorial and plastic material of Keats's
+imagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the former
+mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir
+Sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellers
+who at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantry
+are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find
+themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant
+and unknown to them--the price of land, and the points of a pedigree
+bull--so we follow with an intense and intelligent absorption a subtle
+argument in 'Endymion' in which at no moment we really believe. On the
+contrary, we are convinced (when we are free from our author's friendly
+spell) that Keats wrote 'Endymion' at all adventure. The words of the
+cancelled preface: 'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to
+finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain,' were, we are
+sure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of his
+lack of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapable
+of or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'--he had an understanding more
+robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon
+experience, than any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth not
+excepted--but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned
+with understanding. 'Endymion' is not a record or sublimation of
+experience; it is itself an experience. It was the liberation of a
+verbal inhibition, and the magic word of freedom was Beauty. The story
+of Endymion was to Keats a road to the unknown, in her course along
+which his imagination might 'paw up against the sky.'
+
+A refusal to admit that Keats built 'Endymion' upon any structure of
+argument, however obscure--even Sir Sidney would acknowledge that the
+argument he discovers is _very_ obscure--is so far from being a
+derogation from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a full
+appreciation of his idiosyncrasy. It is customary to regard the Odes as
+the pinnacle of his achievement and to trace a poetical progression to
+that point and a subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of this
+decline in the revised Induction to 'Hyperion.' As far as an absolute
+poetical perfection is concerned there can be no serious objection to
+the view. But the case of Keats is eminently one to be considered in
+itself as well as objectively. There is no danger that Keats's poetry
+will not be appreciated; the danger is that Keats may not be understood.
+And precisely this moment is opportune for understanding him. As Mr T.S.
+Eliot has lately pointed out, the development of English poetry since
+the early nineteenth century was largely based on the achievement of two
+poets of genius, Keats and Shelley, who never reached maturity. They
+were made gods; and rightly, had not poets themselves bowed down to
+them. That was ridiculous; there is something even pitiful in the
+spectacle of Rossetti and Morris finding the culmination of poetry, the
+one in 'The Eve of St Agnes,' the other in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'
+And this undiscriminating submission of a century to the influence of
+hypostatised phases in the development of a poet of sanity and genius is
+perhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious, and for the most
+part far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at work in
+modern poetry.
+
+A sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, that
+what has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundred
+years is only a _cul de sac_. Somewhere there has been a substitution.
+In the resulting chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, and
+the critically minded have the grim amusement of watching verse-writers
+gain eminence by imitating Coventry Patmore! The bolder spirits declare
+that there never was such a thing as a tradition, that it is no use
+learning, because there is nothing to learn. But they are a little
+nervous for all their boldness, and they prefer to hunt in packs, of
+which the only condition of membership is that no one should ask what it
+is.
+
+At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less
+importance to understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. The
+culmination of the achievement of the Keats to be understood is not the
+Odes, perfect as they are, nor the tales--a heresy even for objective
+criticism--nor 'Hyperion'; but precisely that revised Induction to
+'Hyperion' which on the other argument is held to indicate how the
+poet's powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfied
+love. On the technical side alone the Induction is of extraordinary
+interest. Keats's natural and proper revulsion from the Miltonic style,
+the deliberate art of which he had handled like an almost master, is
+evident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge that the virus
+is in his blood. The creative effort of the Induction was infinitely
+greater than is immediately apparent. Keats is engaged in a war on two
+fronts: he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and struggling
+also to deal with an unfamiliar content. The whole direction of his
+poetic purpose had shifted since he wrote 'Hyperion.' 'Hyperion,' though
+far finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same
+as 'Endymion'; it was an exercise in a manner. Keats desired to prove to
+himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that
+he was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur. It was, most
+strictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. He had
+drunk, as deeply as any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he
+needed to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he could
+employ a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of the
+past, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at the
+point where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them.
+These necessities were not present in this form to Keats's mind when he
+began 'Hyperion'; most probably he began merely with the idea of holding
+his own with Milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme.
+Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed are
+incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not by
+the intellect, but by the being.
+
+He dropped 'Hyperion' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. He
+was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him
+and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself.
+
+    'I have given up "Hyperion"--there were too many Miltonic inversions
+    in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather
+    artist's, humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations.
+    English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick
+    out some lines from "Hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty
+    proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of
+    feeling....'--(Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819.)
+
+That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications.
+'English ought to be kept up' meant, on Keats's lips, a very great deal.
+But there is other and more definite authority for the positive
+direction in which he was turning. To his brother George he wrote, at
+the same time:--
+
+    'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him
+    would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the
+    verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.'
+
+More definite still is the letter of November 17, 1819, to his friend
+and publisher, John Taylor:--
+
+    'I have come to a determination not to publish anything I have now
+    ready written; but for all that to publish a poem before long and
+    that I hope to make a fine one. As the marvellous is the most
+    enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have been
+    endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let her
+    manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all.
+    Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and
+    Women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic
+    skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a Drama,
+    would, I think, be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the
+    colouring of St Agnes Eve throughout a poem in which Character and
+    Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such
+    poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six
+    years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they
+    would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest
+    ambition--when I do feel ambitious....'
+
+No letter could be saner, nor more indicative of calm resolve. Yet the
+precise determination is that nothing that went to make the 1820 volume
+should be published, neither Odes, nor Tales, nor 'Hyperion.' This is
+that mood of Keats which Sir Sidney Colvin, in his comment upon a
+passage in the revised Induction, calls one of 'fierce injustice to his
+own achievements and their value.' But a poet, if he is a real one,
+judges his own achievements not by those of his contemporaries, but by
+the standard of his own intention.
+
+The evidence that Keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which it
+could be satisfied by the poems of the 1820 volume is overwhelming. His
+letters to George of April, 1819, show that he was naturally evolving
+towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than
+could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration
+and emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had
+invaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to the
+new poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find the
+method. The letters we have quoted to show his reaction from the
+Miltonic influence display the more narrowly 'artistic' aspect of the
+same evolution. A technique more responsive to the felt reality of
+experience must be found--'English ought to be kept up'--the apparatus
+of Romantic story must be abandoned--'Wonders are no wonders to me'--yet
+the Romantic colour must be kept to restore to a realistic psychology
+the vividness and richly various quality that are too often lost by
+analysis We do not believe that we have in any respect forced the
+interpretation of the letters; the terminology of that age needs to be
+translated to be understood 'Men and Women ... Characters and
+Sentiments' are called, for better or worse, 'psychology' nowadays. And
+our translation has this merit, that some of our ultra-moderns will
+listen to the word 'psychology,' where they would be bat-blind to
+'Characters' and stone-deaf to 'Sentiments.'
+
+Modern poetry is still faced with the same problem; but very few of its
+adepts have reached so far as to be able to formulate it even with the
+precision of Keats's scattered allusions. Keats himself was struck down
+at the moment when he was striving (against disease and against a
+devouring, hopeless love-passion) to face it squarely. The revised
+Induction reveals him in the effort to shape the traditional (and
+perhaps still necessary) apparatus of myth to an instrument of his
+attitude. The meaning of the Induction is not difficult to discover; but
+current criticism has the habit of regarding it dubiously. Therefore we
+may be forgiven for attempting, with the brevity imposed upon us, to
+make its elements clear. The first eighteen lines, which Sir Sidney
+Colvin on objective grounds regrets are, we think, vital.
+
+  'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
+  A paradise for a sect; the savage, too,
+  From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
+  Guesses at heaven; pity these have not
+  Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
+  The shadows of melodious utterance,
+  But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
+  For poesy alone can tell her dreams,--
+  With the fine spell of words alone can save
+  Imagination from the sable chain
+  And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
+  'Thou art no poet--mays't not tell thy dreams'?
+  Since every man whose soul is not a clod
+  Hath visions and would speak, if he had loved,
+  And been well-nurtured in his mother-tongue.
+  Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
+  Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
+  When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.'
+
+We may admit that the form of these lines is unfortunate; but we cannot
+wish them away. They bear most closely upon the innermost argument of
+the poem as Keats endeavoured to reshape it. All men, says Keats, have
+their visions of reality; but the poet alone can express his, and the
+poet himself may at the last prove to have been a fanatic, one who has
+imagined 'a paradise for a sect' instead of a heaven for all humanity.
+
+This discovery marks the point of crisis in Keats's development. He is
+no longer content to be the singer; his poetry must be adequate to all
+experience. No wonder then that the whole of the new Induction centres
+about this thought. He describes his effort to fight against an invading
+death and to reach the altar in the mighty dream palace. As his foot
+touches the altar-step life returns, and the prophetic voice of the
+veiled goddess reveals to him that he has been saved by his power 'to
+die and live again before Thy fated hour.'
+
+  '"None can usurp this height," return'd that shade.
+  "But those to whom the miseries of the world
+  Are misery and will not let them rest.
+  All else who find a haven in the world
+  Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
+  If by a chance into this fane they come,
+  Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half."'
+
+Because he has been mindful of the pain in the world, the poet has been
+saved. But the true lovers of humanity,--
+
+  'Who love their fellows even to the death,
+  Who feel the giant agony of the world,'
+
+are greater than the poets; 'they are no dreamers weak.'
+
+  'They come not here, they have no thought to come,
+  And thou art here for thou are less than they.'
+
+It is a higher thing to mitigate the pain of the world than to brood
+upon the problem of it. And not only the lover of mankind, but man the
+animal is pre-eminent above the poet-dreamer. His joy is joy; his pain,
+pain. 'Only the dreamer venoms _all_ his days.' Yet the poet has his
+reward; it is given to him to partake of the vision of the veiled
+Goddess--memory, Moneta, Mnemosyne, the spirit of the eternal reality
+made visible.
+
+  'Then saw I a wan face
+  Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd
+  By an immortal sickness which kills not;
+  It works a constant change, which happy death
+  Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
+  To no death was that visage; it had past
+  The lily and the snow; and beyond these
+  I must not think now, though I saw that face.
+  But for her eyes I should have fled away;
+  They held me back with a benignant light
+  Soft, mitigated by divinest lids
+  Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed
+  Of all external things; they saw me not,
+  But in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon
+  Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
+  What eyes are upward cast....'
+
+This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It
+stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded
+as obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered
+spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In
+her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision
+and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea
+if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poet
+is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but
+below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the
+prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his
+victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.
+
+Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to
+express, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him;
+few have been so far. Of the poetry that might have been constructed on
+the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture,
+each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse'
+of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it
+would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united
+contraries.
+
+We fear that Sir Sidney Colvin will not agree with our view. The angles
+of observation are different. The angle at which we have placed
+ourselves is not wholly advantageous--from it Sir Sidney's book could
+not have been written--but it has this advantage, that from it we can
+read his book with a heightened interest. As we look out from it, some
+things are increased and some diminished with the change of
+perspective; and among those which are increased is our gratitude to Sir
+Sidney. In the clear mirror of his sympathy and sanity nothing is
+obscured. We are shown the Keats who wrote the perfect poems that will
+last with the English language, and in the few places where Sir Sidney
+falls short of the spirit of complete acceptance, we discern behind the
+words of rebuke and regret only the idealisation of a love which we are
+proud to share.
+
+[JULY, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Thoughts on Tchehov_
+
+
+We do not know if the stories collected in this volume[7] stand together
+in the Russian edition of Tchehov's works, or if the selection is due to
+Mrs Constance Garnett. It is also possible that the juxtaposition is
+fortuitous. But the stories are united by a similarity of material.
+Whereas in the former volumes of this admirable series Tchehov is shown
+as preoccupied chiefly with the life of the _intelligentsia_, here he
+finds his subjects in priests and peasants, or (in the story _Uprooted_)
+in the half-educated.
+
+   [Footnote 7: _The Bishop; and Other Stories_. By Anton Tchehov.
+   Translated by Constance Garnett. (Chatto & Windus.)]
+
+Such a distinction is, indeed, irrelevant. As Tchehov presents them to
+our minds, the life of the country and the life of the town produce the
+same final impression, arouse in us an awareness of an identical
+quality; and thus, the distinction, by its very irrelevance, points us
+the more quickly to what is essential in Tchehov. It is that his
+attitude, to which he persuades us, is complete, not partial. His
+comprehension radiates from a steady centre, and is not capriciously
+kindled by a thousand accidental contacts. In other words, Tchehov is
+not what he is so often assumed to be, an impressionist. Consciously or
+unconsciously he had taken the step--the veritable _salto mortale_--by
+which the great literary artist moves out of the ranks of the minor
+writers. He had slowly shifted his angle of vision until he could
+discern a unity in multiplicity. Unity of this rare kind cannot be
+imposed as, for instance, Zola attempted to impose it. It is an
+emanation from life which can be distinguished only by the most
+sensitive contemplation.
+
+The problem is to define this unity in the case of each great writer in
+whom it appears. To apprehend it is not so difficult. The mere sense of
+unity is so singular and compelling that it leaves room for few
+hesitations. The majority of writers, however excellent in their
+peculiar virtues, are not concerned with it: at one moment they
+represent, at another they may philosophise, but the two activities have
+no organic connection, and their work, if it displays any evolution at
+all, displays it only in the minor accidents of the craft, such as style
+in the narrower and technical sense, or the obvious economy of
+construction. There is no danger of mistaking these for great writers.
+Nor, in the more peculiar case of writers who attempt to impose the
+illusion of unity, is the danger serious. The apparatus is always
+visible; they cannot afford to do without the paraphernalia of argument
+which supplies the place of what is lacking in their presentation. The
+obvious instance of this legerdemain is Zola; a less obvious, and
+therefore more interesting example is Balzac.
+
+To attempt the more difficult problem. What is most peculiar to
+Tchehov's unity is that it is far more nakedly æsthetic than that of
+most of the great writers before him. Other writers of a rank equal to
+his--and there are not so very many--have felt the need to shift their
+angle of vision until they could perceive an all-embracing unity; but
+they were not satisfied with this. They felt, and obeyed, the further
+need of taking an attitude towards the unity they saw They approved or
+disapproved, accepted or rejected it. It would be perhaps more accurate
+to say that they gave or refused their endorsement. They appealed to
+some other element than their own sense of beauty for the final verdict
+on their discovery; they asked whether it was just or good.
+
+The distinguishing mark of Tchehov is that he is satisfied with the
+unity he discovers. Its uniqueness is sufficient for him. It does not
+occur to him to demand that it should be otherwise or better. The act of
+comprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance. He
+is like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work of
+creation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment of
+his vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and the
+arbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural,
+and beautiful than the flowering of a plant. Not that Tchehov is a
+greater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely more
+wholly an artist, which is a very different thing. There is in him less
+admixture of preoccupations that are not purely æsthetic, and probably
+for this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist of
+equal rank. It seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees,
+need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in order
+to be very vigorous and very fruitful. Tchehov has the virtues and the
+shortcomings of the pure case.
+
+I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestation
+of _l'art pour l'art_, because in any commonly accepted sense of that
+phrase, he is not. Still, he might be considered as an exemplification
+of what the phrase might be made to mean. But instead of being diverted
+into a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring
+into prominence an aspect of Tchehov which has an immediate
+interest--his modernity. Again, the word is awkward. It suggests that he
+is fashionable, or up to date. Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases
+in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art of
+literature. The artistic problem which he faced and solved is one that
+is, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modern
+writer--to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with the
+greatest possible unity of æsthetic impression. Diversity of content we
+are beginning to find in profusion--Miss May Sinclair's latest
+experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a
+settled manner and a fixed reputation--but how rarely do we see even a
+glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified æsthetic
+impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has
+been, present to consciousness is _ipso facto_ unified æsthetically. The
+result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of
+language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical
+method.
+
+The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving æsthetic unity
+by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an
+arbitrary (because non-æsthetic) argument. This argument was let down
+like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a
+unified crystalline structure congregated about it. Of all great artists
+of the past Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this
+method. How much deliberate artistic purpose there was in his
+employment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally
+different from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big
+for a parenthesis. But he, too, is at bottom a classic artist. The
+modern problem--it has not yet been sufficiently solved for us to speak
+of a modern method--arises from a sense that the classical method
+produces over-simplification. It does not permit of a sufficient sense
+of multiplicity. One can think of a dozen semi-treatments of the problem
+from Balzac to Dostoevsky, but they were all on the old lines. They
+might be called Shakespearean modifications of the classical method.
+
+Tchehov, we believe, attempted a treatment radically new. To make use
+again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different
+string to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. In a
+sense he began at the other end. He had decided on the quality of
+æsthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision,
+but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of life
+which he had achieved. The essential quality he discerned and desired to
+represent was his argument, his string. Everything that heightened and
+completed this quality accumulated about it, quite independently of
+whether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot and
+argument. There is a magnificent example of his method in the longest
+story in this volume, 'The Steppe.' The quality is dominant throughout,
+and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is
+reinforced by the incident. Tiny events--the peasant who eats minnows
+alive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousand
+roubles--take on a character of portent, except that the word is too
+harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a
+sense of incalculability that haunts us. The emphases have all been
+slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. It is not
+while we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much
+significance could attach to a little boy's questions in a remote
+village shop:--
+
+    '"How much are these cakes?'
+
+    '"Two for a farthing.'
+
+    'Yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before
+    by the Jewess and asked him:--
+
+    '"And how much do you charge for cakes like this?'
+
+    'The shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all
+    sides, and raised one eyebrow.
+
+    '"Like that?' he asked.
+
+    'Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:--
+
+    '"Two for three farthings...."'
+
+It is foolish to quote it. It is like a golden pebble from the bed of a
+stream. The stream that flows over Tchehov's innumerable pebbles,
+infinitely diverse and heterogeneous, is the stream of a deliberately
+sublimated quality. The figure is inexact, as figures are. Not every
+pebble could be thus transmuted. But how they are chosen, what is the
+real nature of the relation which unites them, as we feel it does, is a
+secret which modern English writers need to explore. Till they have
+explored and mastered it Tchehov will remain a master in advance of
+them.
+
+[AUGUST, 1919.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of Tchehov is one to be investigated again and again because he
+is the only great modern artist in prose. Tolstoy was living throughout
+Tchehov's life, as Hardy has lived throughout our own, and these are
+great among the greatest. But they are not modern. It is an essential
+part of their greatness that they could not be; they have a simplicity
+and scope that manifestly belongs to all time rather than to this.
+Tchehov looked towards Tolstoy as we to Hardy. He saw in him a Colossus,
+one whose achievement was of another and a greater kind than his own.
+
+    'I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. If he were to die there would be a
+    big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never
+    loved any man as much as him.... Secondly, while Tolstoy is in
+    literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even
+    recognising that one has done nothing and never will do anything is
+    not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is
+    the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon
+    literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand; he has an immense
+    authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature,
+    vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling,
+    exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the
+    shade....'--(January, 1900.)
+
+Tchehov was aware of the gulf that separated him from the great men
+before him, and he knew that it yawned so deep that it could not be
+crossed. He belonged to a new generation, and he alone perhaps was fully
+conscious of it. 'We are lemonade,' he wrote in 1892.
+
+    'Tell me honestly who of my contemporaries--that is, men between
+    thirty and forty-five--have given the world one single drop of
+    alcohol?... Science and technical knowledge are passing through a
+    great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull
+    time.... The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity,
+    our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the
+    artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack
+    "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our
+    muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that
+    the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who
+    intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic:
+    they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it,
+    too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being,
+    that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father,
+    who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.... And we?
+    We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that--nothing at all.... Flog
+    us and we can do more! We have neither immediate nor remote aims,
+    and in our soul there is a great empty space. We have no politics,
+    we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid
+    of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and
+    blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears
+    nothing cannot be an artist....
+
+    '... You think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not
+    to conceal from myself my disease and not to deceive myself, and not
+    to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the
+    ideas of the 'sixties and so on.'
+
+That was written in 1892. When we remember all the strange literary
+effort gathered round about that year in the West--Symbolism, the
+_Yellow Book_, Art for Art's sake--and the limbo into which it has been
+thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own
+despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was
+plunging with enthusiasm into one _cul de sac_ after another, incapable
+of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West,
+had achieved a clear vision and a sense of perspective.
+
+To-day we begin to feel how intimately Tchehov belongs to us; to-morrow
+we may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. A genius will
+always be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned with
+the genius of Tchehov we must accept the inevitable. We must analyse and
+seek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that since
+Tchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, a
+vast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable.
+Writers who would be modern and ignore Tchehov's achievement are,
+however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists,
+merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of a
+profession like any other; for Tchehov is a standard by which modern
+literary effort must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry who
+is not sufficiently single-minded to apply the standard to himself is of
+no particular account.
+
+Though Tchehov's genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves a
+much exacter study than it has yet received. The publication of this
+volume of his letters[8] hardly affords the occasion for that; but it
+does afford an opportunity for the examination of some of the chief
+constituents of his perfect art. These touch us nearly because--we
+insist again--the supreme interest of Tchehov is that he is the only
+great modern artist in prose. He belongs, as we have said, to us. If he
+is great, then he is great not least in virtue of qualities which we may
+aspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an ideal to which we can
+refer ourselves, He had been saturated in all the disillusions which we
+regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive of
+the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected in
+him--and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. He did not rub
+his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess
+beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for
+universal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a
+millennium which he alone had the ability to control. He was and wanted
+to be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his,
+we feel gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was a
+hero--more than that, _the_ hero of our time.
+
+   [Footnote 8: _Letters of Anton Tchehov_. Translated by Constance
+   Garnett (Chatto & Windus).]
+
+It is significant that, in reading Tchehov's letters, we do not
+consider him under the aspect of an artist. We are inevitably fascinated
+by his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have most
+frequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on the
+infinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it in
+himself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing. He did not throw
+in his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly for
+refuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he risked
+everything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in revolution and
+saying so. In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in his
+letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great
+exemplar, by us. He refused to march under any political banner--a
+thing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his
+country; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political
+indifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing active
+good to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalism
+and social reform. He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin
+in 1890 to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 he
+spent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measures
+against the cholera in the country district where he lived, and,
+although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he
+refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of
+action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising
+practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod. From his
+childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family.
+Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly a
+saint. His self-devotion was boundless.
+
+Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when
+he wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent.' Tchehov was indifferent;
+but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies
+will show, was of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, an
+axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. Since life is what it is and
+men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon
+the individual. The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is
+within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. In one of
+his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his
+brother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he said, respect
+human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only;
+they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they
+are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves
+to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent
+they respect it; they develop the æsthetic feeling in themselves ...
+they seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual
+instinct. The letter from which these chief points are taken is
+tremulous with sympathy and wit. Tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote
+it. He concludes with the words: 'What is needed is constant work day
+and night, constant reading, study, will. Every hour is precious for
+it.'
+
+In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man. He set
+himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. The indifference
+upon which Tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moral
+indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the
+fact that life itself is indifferent. To that he held fast to the end.
+But the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no
+particular difference what any one did, but that the attitude and
+character of the individual were all-important. There was, indeed, no
+panacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but there
+could be a mitigation in men's souls. But the new asceticism must not be
+negative. It must not cast away the goods of civilisation because
+civilisation is largely a sham.
+
+    'Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above
+    all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in
+    carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make
+    haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!'
+
+Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarily
+endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service
+to his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned with
+pluses alone.' Since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly
+precious. Only they must be amenities without humbug.
+
+    'Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses
+    and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the
+    younger generation.... That is why I have no preference either for
+    gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or
+    for the younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a
+    superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health,
+    intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute
+    freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make
+    take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great
+    artist.'
+
+What 'the most absolute freedom' meant to Tchehov his whole life is
+witness. It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is,
+achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and
+self-refinement. In one letter he says he is going to write a story
+about the son of a serf--Tchehov was the son of a serf--who 'squeezed
+the slave out of himself.' Whether the story was ever written we do not
+know, but the process is one to which Tchehov applied himself all his
+life long. He waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soul
+in himself, and by necessary implication in others also.
+
+He was, thus, in all things a humanist. He faced the universe, but he
+did not deny his own soul. There could be for him no antagonism between
+science and literature, or science and humanity. They were all pluses;
+it was men who quarrelled among themselves. If men would only develop a
+little more loving-kindness, things would be better. The first duty of
+the artist was to be a decent man.
+
+    'Solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary.... We
+    cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we
+    have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and
+    so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely
+    hooked.... And is there any need for it? No, in order to help a
+    colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from
+    gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being
+    hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as
+    simply a man.... Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody
+    alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up
+    solidarity.'
+
+It seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty of
+Tchehov's, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strike
+us as more than strange. One predominant impression remains: it is that
+of Tchehov's candour of soul. Somehow he has achieved with open eyes the
+mystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse it
+further, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his present
+importance to ourselves.
+
+[MARCH, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_American Poetry_
+
+
+We are not yet immune from the weakness of looking into the back pages
+to see what the other men have said; and on this occasion we received a
+salutary shock from the critic of the _Detroit News_, who informs us
+that Mr Aiken, 'despite the fact that he is one of the youngest and the
+newest, having made his debut less than four years ago, ... demonstrates
+... that he is eminently capable of taking a solo part with Edgar Lee
+Masters, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim, Vachel Lindsay, and Edwin
+Arlington Robinson.' The shock is two-fold. In a single sentence we are
+in danger of being convicted of ignorance, and, where we can claim a
+little knowledge, we plead guilty; we know nothing of either Mr
+Oppenheim or Mr Robinson. This very ignorance makes us cautious where we
+have a little knowledge We know something of Mr Lindsay, something of Mr
+Masters, and a good deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiar
+figure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on what
+principle they are assembled together. Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded,
+a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which
+she teases out into stupid 'originalities.' Of the other two gentlemen
+we have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but also
+nothing which convinces us that they may not be.
+
+Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them. All
+three have in common what we may call creative energy. They are all
+facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all
+obvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that
+whatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways. Not one of them
+produces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or that
+he has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom 'thus
+and not otherwise' engraved upon their substance; not one has proved
+that he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem of
+poetry, no matter what technique be employed--how to achieve a
+concentrated unity of æsthetic impression. They are all diffuse; they
+seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at
+once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue;
+they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod--and they are all
+interesting.
+
+They are extremely interesting. For one thing, they have all achieved
+what is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success.
+Very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened Mr Lindsay's
+'Congo' or Mr Masters's 'Spoon River Anthology' or Mr Aiken's 'Jig of
+Forslin' without being impelled to read on to the end. That does not
+very often happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetry
+save in the case of the thronging admirers of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
+and their similars. There is, however, another case more exactly in
+point, namely, that of Mr Kipling. With Mr Kipling our three American
+poets have much in common, though the community must not be unduly
+pressed. Their most obvious similarity is the prominence into which
+they throw the novel interest in their verse. They are, or at moments
+they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories. We will not dogmatise and
+say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell a
+story in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task. It would indeed
+be doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell very
+different stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotional
+subtleties which Mr Aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable of
+being exactly expressed in prose.
+
+Since Mr Aiken is the _corpus vile_ before us we will henceforward
+confine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his very
+sufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worth
+attention in modern American poetry. Proceeding then, we find another
+point of contact between him and Mr Kipling, more important perhaps than
+the former, and certainly more dangerous. Both find it apparently
+impossible to stem the uprush of rhetoric. Perhaps they do not try to;
+but we will be charitable--after all, there is enough good in either of
+them to justify charity--and assume that the willingness of the spirit
+gives way to the weakness of the flesh. Of course we all know about Mr
+Kipling's rhetoric; it is a kind of emanation of the spatial immensities
+with which he deals--Empires, the Seven Seas, from Dublin to Diarbekir.
+Mr Aiken has taken quite another province for his own; he is an
+introspective psychologist. But like Mr Kipling he prefers big business.
+His inward eye roves over immensities at least as vast as Mr Kipling's
+outward. In 'The Charnel Rose and Other Poems' this appetite for the
+illimitable inane of introspection seems to have gained upon him. There
+is much writing of this kind:--
+
+  'Dusk, withdrawing to a single lamplight
+  At the end of an infinite street--
+  He saw his ghost walk down that street for ever,
+  And heard the eternal rhythm of his feet.
+  And if he should reach at last that final gutter,
+  To-day, or to-morrow,
+  Or, maybe, after the death of himself and time;
+  And stand at the ultimate curbstone by the stars,
+  Above dead matches, and smears of paper, and slime;
+  Would the secret of his desire
+  Blossom out of the dark with a burst of fire?
+  Or would he hear the eternal arc-lamps sputter,
+  Only that; and see old shadows crawl;
+  And find the stars were street lamps after all?
+
+  Music, quivering to a point of silence,
+  Drew his heart down over the edge of the world....'
+
+It is dangerous for a poet to conjure up infinities unless he has made
+adequate preparation for keeping them in control when they appear. We
+are afraid that Mr Aiken is almost a slave of the spirits he has evoked.
+Dostoevsky's devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probably
+managing-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week. Mr
+Aiken's incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is protean
+and unsatisfactory.
+
+  'I am confused in webs and knots of scarlet
+  Spun from the darkness;
+  Or shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders.
+
+  Madness for red! I devour the leaves of autumn.
+  I tire of the green of the world.
+  I am myself a mouth for blood....'
+
+Perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar things
+mean, exactly, anything? Mr Aiken warns us that his intention has been
+to use the idea--'the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal to
+another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some new
+and subtler fiction'--'as a theme upon which one might wilfully build a
+kind of absolute music.' But having given us so much instruction, he
+should have given more; he should have told us in what province of music
+he has been working. Are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or for
+a musical elaboration of an intellectual theme? We infer, partly from
+the assurance that 'the analogy to a musical symphony is close,' more
+from the absence of verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaboration
+of a theme. In that case the fact that we have a more definite grasp of
+the theme in the programme-introduction than anywhere in the poem itself
+points to failure. In the poem 'stars rush up and whirl and set,'
+'skeletons whizz before and whistle behind,' 'sands bubble and roses
+shoot soft fire,' and we wonder what all the commotion is about. When
+there is a lull in the pandemonium we have a glimpse, not of eternity,
+but precisely of 1890:--
+
+  'And he saw red roses drop apart,
+  Each to disclose a charnel heart....
+
+We are far from saying that Mr Aiken's poetry is merely a chemical
+compound of the 'nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but we
+do think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into
+those elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency
+in the poem called 'The Charnel Rose.' 'Senlin' resists disruption
+longer. But the same elements are there. They are better but not
+sufficiently fused. The rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in
+rhetoric. We have the sense that Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to his
+own idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by a
+violent clashing of the cymbals where a quiet recitative was what the
+theme demanded and his art could not ensure.
+
+  'Death himself in the rain ... death himself ...
+  Death in the savage sunlight ... skeletal death ...
+  I hear the clack of his feet,
+  Clearly on stones, softly in dust,
+  Speeding among the trees with whistling breath,
+  Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves ...
+  Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!...'
+
+We are persuaded that Mr Aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted to
+say something much subtler. But to find exactly what he wanted might
+have taken him many months. He could not wait. Up rushed the rhetoric;
+bang went the cymbals: another page, another book. And we, who have seen
+great promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequate
+fragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poor
+expedients of the moment. For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate. He
+feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:--
+
+  'Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
+  When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone,
+  Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?'
+
+So he descends to a poetaster's padding. He does not stop to consider
+whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or,
+if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference
+occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric
+and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the
+thematic outline itself emerges.
+
+In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.
+We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the
+whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more
+irrevocably itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses at
+the swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us in
+poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he
+has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must
+perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist
+in verse. It is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote the
+labour. His fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of its
+quality. We can only express our hope that he will, and our conviction
+that if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would be
+well requited.
+
+[SEPTEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Ronsard_
+
+
+Ronsard is _rangé_ now; but he has not been in that position for so very
+long, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of the
+Elizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us. Sainte-Beuve was very
+tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious,
+half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm. And, even now, it
+can hardly be said that French critical opinion about him has
+crystallised; the late George Wyndham's essay shows a more convinced and
+better documented appreciation than any that we have read in French,
+based as it is on the instinctive sympathy which one landed gentleman
+who dabbles in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself to
+them--an admiration which does not exclude familiarity.
+
+Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an
+amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him
+more closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. There is
+something churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard
+against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving
+like the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large. One must
+regard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great
+historical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet; and
+the third aspect has a chance of being the most important.
+
+Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. There is nothing
+mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible
+thread of development in either. They are equable, constant
+imperturbable, like the bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of a
+safe batsman. The accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment. The
+nerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are
+steady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a less
+well-appointed spectator. He will never let himself down, or give
+himself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent sure
+restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain.
+All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it.
+
+Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for
+Ronsard a game. There was plenty of game in it; _l'art de bien
+pétrarquiser_ was all he claimed for himself. But the game would have
+wearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied
+and expressed by it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire
+of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by
+some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No one
+reading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hard
+to find in the whole of M. van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'Les
+Amours'[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto.
+When you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particular
+kind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon too closely
+the chances of a shock of surprise.
+
+   [Footnote 9: _Les Amours_. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte établi par
+   Ad. van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Crès.)]
+
+With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard
+is generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal
+tenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly
+capable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own
+delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he
+disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are
+moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive
+wonder that words exist and are manipulable.
+
+  'Dous fut le trait, qu'Amour hors de sa trousse
+  Pour me tuer, me tira doucement,
+  Quand je fus pris au dous commencement
+  D'une douceur si doucettement douce....'
+
+Ronsard is here a boy playing knucklebones with language; and some of
+his characteristic excellences are little more than a development of
+this aptitude, with its more striking incongruities abated. A modern ear
+can be intoxicated by the charming jingle of
+
+  'Petite Nimfe folastre,
+  Nimfette que j'idolastre....'
+
+One does not pause to think how incredibly naive it is compared with
+Villon, who had not a fraction of Ronsard's scholarship, or even with
+Clement Marot; naive both in thought and art. As for the stature of the
+artist, we are back with Charles of Orleans. It would be idle to
+speculate what exactly Villon would have made of the atomic theory had
+he read Lucretius; but we are certain that he would have done something
+very different from Ronsard's
+
+  'Les petits cors, culbutant de travers,
+  Parmi leur cheute en biais vagabonde,
+  Heurtés ensemble ont composé le monde,
+  S'entr'acrochant d'acrochemens divers....'
+
+For this is not grown-up; the cut to simplicity has been too short. So
+many of Ronsard's verses flow over the mind, without disturbing it; fall
+charmingly on the ear, and leave no echoes. But for the moment we share
+his enjoyment.
+
+The second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtless
+allied to the first; it is a _naïveté_ of a particular kind, which
+differs from the profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by the
+fact that it is employed deliberately. Conscious simplicity is art, and
+if it is successful art of no mean order, Ronsard's method of admitting
+us, as it were, to his conversation with himself is definitely his own.
+His interruptions of a verse with 'Hà' or 'Hé'; his 'Mon Dieu, que
+j'aime!' or 'Hé, que ne suis-je puce?' (the difference between Ronsard's
+flea and Donne's would be worth examination) have in them an element of
+irresistible _bonhomie_. We feel that he is making us his confidant. He
+does not have to tear agonies out of himself, so that what he confides
+has no chance of making explicit any secrets of our own. There is
+nothing dangerous about him; we know that he is as safe as we are. We
+are in conversation, not communion. But how effective and engaging it
+is!
+
+  'Vous ne le voulez pas? Eh bien, je suis contant ...'
+
+  'Hé, Dieu du ciel, je n'eusse pas pensé
+  Qu'un seul départ eust causé tant de peine!...'
+
+or the still more casual
+
+  'Un joïeus deplaisir qui douteus l'épointelle,
+  Quoi l'épointelle! ainçois le genne et le martelle ...'
+
+Of this device of style our own Elizabethans were to make more
+profitable use than Ronsard. At their best they packed an intensity of
+dramatic significance into conversational language, of which Ronsard had
+no inkling; and even a strict contemporary of his, like Wyatt, could
+touch cords more intimate by the same means. But, on the other hand,
+Ronsard never fails of his own effect, which is not to convince us
+emotionally, but to compel us to listen. His unexpected address to
+himself or to us is a new ornament for us to admire, not a new method
+for him to express a new thing; and the suggestion of new rhythms that
+might thus be attained is never fully worked out.
+
+  'Mais tu ne seras plus? Et puis?... quand la paleur
+  Qui blemist nôtre corps sans chaleur ne lumière
+  Nous perd le sentiment?...
+
+The ampleness of that reverberance is almost isolated.
+
+Ronsard's resources are indeed few. But he needed few. His simple mind
+was at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasant
+impression of one to whom commonplaces are real. He felt them all over
+again. One imagines him reading the classics--the Iliad in three days,
+or his beloved companion 'sous le bois amoureux,' Tibullus--with an
+unfailing delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted
+on to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus. One might almost
+say that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it
+not that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and that
+the artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with the
+honesty of such a natural man. But apart from a few particulars that
+would find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it to
+distinguish Cassandre from Hélène. What charming things Ronsard has to
+say of either might be said of any charming woman--'le mignard
+embonpoint de ce sein,'--
+
+  'Petit nombril, que mon penser adore,
+  Non pas mon oeil, qui n'eut oncques ce bien ...'
+
+And though he assures Hélène that she has turned him from his grave
+early style, 'qui pour chanter si bas n'est point ordonné,' the
+difference is too hard to detect; one is forced to conclude that it is
+precisely the difference between a court lady and an inn-keeper's
+daughter. As far as art is concerned the most definite and distinctive
+thing that Ronsard had to say of any of his ladies is said of one to
+whom he put forward none of his usually engrossing pretensions. It was
+the complexion of Marguerite of Navarre of which he wrote:--
+
+  'De vif cinabre estoit faicte sa joue,
+  Pareille au teint d'un rougissant oeillet,
+  Ou d'une fraize, alors que dans de laict
+  Dessus le hault de la cresme se joue.'
+
+That is, whether it belonged to Marguerite or not, a divine complexion.
+It is the kind of thing that cannot be said about two ladies; the image
+is too precise to be interchangeable. This may be a reason why it was
+applied to a lady _hors concours_ for Ronsard.
+
+But we need, in fact, seek no reason other than the circumscription of
+Ronsard's poetical gifts. They reduce to only two--the gift of convinced
+commonplace, and the gift of simple melody. His commonplace is genuine
+commonplace, quite distinct from the tense and pregnant condensation of
+a lifetime of impassioned experience in Dante or Shakespeare; things
+that would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinner
+conversation, the sentiments that such a rare and amiable person would
+underscore in his Horace. (From a not unimportant angle Ronsard is a
+minor Horace.) These things are the warp of his poetry; they range from
+the familiar 'Le temps s'en va' to the masterly straightforwardness of
+
+        'plus heureus celui qui la fera
+  Et femme et mère, en lieu d'une pucelle.'
+
+His melody, likewise, is genuine melody; it is irrepressible. It led him
+to belie his own professed seriousness. He could not stop his sonnets
+from rippling even when he pretended to passionate argument. Life came
+easily to him; he was never weary of it, at the most he acknowledged
+that he was 'saoûl de la vie.' It is not surprising, therefore, that his
+remonstrances as the tortured lover have a trick of opening to a
+delightful tune:--
+
+  'Rens-moi mon coeur, rens-moi mon coeur pillarde....'
+
+In another form this melody more closely recalls Thomas Campion:--
+
+  'Seule je l'ai veue, aussi je meurs pour elle....'
+
+But to compare Ronsard's sonnet with 'Follow your saint' is to see how
+infinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music was the Elizabethan
+than the great French lyrist of the Renaissance. From first to last
+Ronsard was an amateur.
+
+[SEPTEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Samuel Butler_
+
+
+The appearance of a new impression of _The Way of all Flesh_[10] in Mr
+Fifield's edition of Samuel Butler's works gives us an occasion to
+consider more calmly the merits and the failings of that entertaining
+story. Like all unique works of authors who stand, even to the most
+obvious apprehension, aside from the general path, it has been
+overwhelmed with superlatives. The case is familiar enough and the
+explanation is simple and brutal. It is hardly worth while to give it.
+The truth is that although there is no inherent reason why the isolated
+novel of an author who devotes himself to other forms should not be 'one
+of the great novels of the world,' the probabilities tell heavily
+against it. On the other hand, an isolated novel makes a good stick to
+beat the age. It is fairly certain to have something sufficiently unique
+about it to be useful for the purpose. Even its blemishes have a knack
+of being _sui generis_. To elevate it is, therefore, bound to imply the
+diminution of its contemporaries.
+
+   [Footnote 10: _The Way of all Flesh_. By Samuel Butler, 11th
+   impression of 2nd edition. (Fifield.)]
+
+Yet, apart from the general argument, there are particular reasons why
+the praise of _The Way of all Flesh_ should be circumspect. Samuel
+Butler knew extraordinarily well what he was about. His novel was
+written intermittently between 1872 and 1884 when he abandoned it. In
+the twenty remaining years of his life he did nothing to it, and we have
+Mr Streatfeild's word for it that 'he professed himself dissatisfied
+with it as a whole, and always intended to rewrite, or at any rate, to
+revise it.' We could have deduced as much from his refusal to publish
+the book. The certainty of commercial failure never deterred Butler from
+publication; he was in the happy situation of being able to publish at
+his own expense a book of whose merit he was himself satisfied. His only
+reason for abandoning _The Way of all Flesh_ was his own dissatisfaction
+with it. His instruction that it should be published in its present form
+after his death proves nothing against his own estimate. Butler knew, at
+least as well as we, that the good things in his book were legion. He
+did not wish the world or his own reputation to lose the benefit of
+them.
+
+But there are differences between a novel which contains innumerable
+good things and a great novel. The most important is that a great novel
+does not contain innumerable good things. You may not pick out the
+plums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do. In _The Way of all
+Flesh_, however, a _compère_ is always present whose business it is to
+say good things. His perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because the
+asides are piquant and, in their way, to the point. Butler's mind, being
+a good mind, had a predilection for the object, and his detestation of
+the rotunder platitudes of a Greek chorus, if nothing else, had taught
+him that a corner-man should have something to say on the subject in
+hand. His arguments are designed to assist his narrative; moreover, they
+are sympathetic to the modern mind. An enlightened hedonism is about all
+that is left to us, and Butler's hatred of humbug is, though a little
+more placid, like our own. We share his ethical likes and dislikes. As
+an audience we are ready to laugh at his asides, and, on the first night
+at least, to laugh at them even when they interrupt the play.
+
+But our liking for the theses cannot alter the fact that _The Way of all
+Flesh_ is a _roman à thèses_. Not that there is anything wrong with the
+_roman à thèses_, if the theses emerge from the narrative without its
+having to be obviously doctored. Nor does it matter very much that a
+_compère_ should be present all the while, provided that he does not
+take upon himself to replace the demonstration the narrative must
+afford, by arguments outside it. But what happens in _The Way of all
+Flesh_? We may leave aside the minor thesis of heredity, for it emerges,
+gently enough, from the story; besides, we are not quite sure what it
+is. We have no doubt, on the other hand, about the major thesis; it is
+blazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious quotation from St
+Paul to the Romans. 'We know that all things work together for good to
+them that love God.' The necessary gloss on this text is given in
+Chapter LXVIII, where Ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:--
+
+    'He had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were
+    gone for a very long time, if not for ever; but there was something
+    else also that had taken its flight along with these. I mean the
+    fear of that which man could do unto him. _Cantabit vacuus_. Who
+    could hurt him more than he had been hurt already? Let him but be
+    able to earn his bread, and he knew of nothing which he dared not
+    venture if it would make the world a happier place for those who
+    were young and lovable. Herein he found so much comfort that he
+    almost wished he had lost his reputation even more completely--for
+    he saw that it was like a man's life which may be found of them that
+    lose it and lost of them that would find it. He should not have had
+    the courage to give up all for Christ's sake, but now Christ had
+    mercifully taken all, and lo! it seemed as though all were found.
+
+    'As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the
+    denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes
+    do; it was a fight about names--not about things; practically the
+    Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the
+    same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most
+    perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman....'
+
+With this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'All
+experience does a gentleman good.' It is the kind of thing we should
+like very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held with
+passion and vehemence by Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word
+'gentleman' was for him very different from the connotation it had for
+Butler. (Butler's gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very much
+the ideal of a period, and not at all _quod semper, quod ubique_; a very
+Victorian anti-Victorianism.) Dostoevsky worked his thesis out with a
+ruthless devotion to realistic probability. He emptied the cornucopia of
+misery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; and
+then had the audacity to challenge the world to say that they were not
+better, more human, and more lovable for the disaster in which they were
+inevitably overwhelmed. And, though it is hard to say 'Yes' to his
+challenge, it is harder still to say 'No.'
+
+In the case of Ernest Pontifex, however, we do not care to respond to
+the challenge at all. The experiment is faked and proves nothing. It is
+mere humbug to declare that a man has been thrown into the waters of
+life to sink or swim, when there is an anxious but cool-headed friend on
+the bank with a £70,000 life-belt to throw after him the moment his head
+goes under. That is neither danger nor experience. Even if Ernest
+Pontifex knew nothing of the future awaiting him (as we are assured he
+did not) it makes no difference. _We_ know he cannot sink; he is a lay
+figure with a pneumatic body. Whether he became a lay figure for Butler
+also we cannot say; we can merely register the fact that the book breaks
+down after Ernest's misadventure with Miss Maitland, a deplorably
+unsubstantial episode to be the crisis of a piece of writing so firm in
+texture and solid in values as the preceding chapters. Ernest as a man
+has an intense non-existence.
+
+After all, as far as the positive side of _The Way of all Flesh_' is
+concerned, Butler's eggs are all in one basket. If the adult Ernest does
+not materialise, the book hangs in empty air. Whatever it may be instead
+it is not a great novel, nor even a good one. So much established, we
+may begin to collect the good things. Christina is the best of them. She
+is, by any standard, a remarkable creation. Butler was 'all round'
+Christina. Both by analysis and synthesis she is wholly his. He can
+produce her in either way. She lives as flesh and blood and has not a
+little of our affection; she is also constructed by definition, 'If it
+were not too awful a thing to say of anybody, she meant well'--the whole
+phrase gives exactly Christina's stature. Alethea Pontifex is really a
+bluff; but the bluff succeeds, largely because, having experience of
+Christina, we dare not call it. Mrs Jupp is triumphantly complete; there
+are even moments when she seems as great as Mrs Quickly. The novels that
+contain three such women (or two if we reckon the uncertain Alethea, who
+is really only a vehicle for Butler's very best sayings, as cancelled by
+the non-existent Ellen) can be counted, we suppose, on our ten fingers.
+
+Of the men, Theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word).
+But we know little of what went on inside him. We can fill out Christina
+with her inimitable day-dreams; Theobald remains something of a
+skeleton, whereas we have no difficulty at all with Dr Skinner, of
+Roughborough. We have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling the
+shelves with volumes of Skinner, and we know how it was done. When he
+reappears we assume the continuity of his existence without demur. The
+glimpse of George Pontifex is also satisfying; after the christening
+party we know him for a solid reality. Pryer was half-created when his
+name was chosen. Butler did the rest in a single paragraph which
+contains a perfect delineation of 'the Oxford manner' twenty years
+before it had become a disease known to ordinary diagnosis. The curious
+may find this towards the beginning of Chapter LI. But Ernest, upon whom
+so much depends, is a phantom--a dream-child waiting the incarnation
+which Butler refused him for twenty years. Was it laziness, was it a
+felt incapacity? We do not know; but in the case of a novelist it is our
+duty to believe the worst. The particularity of our attitude to Butler
+appears in the fact that we are disappointed, not with him, but with
+Ernest. We are even angry with that young man. If it had not been for
+him, we believe, _The Way of all Flesh_ might have appeared in 1882; it
+might have short-circuited _Robert Elsmere_.
+
+[JUNE, 1919.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We approach the biography of an author whom we respect, and therefore
+have thought about, with contradictory feelings. We are excited at the
+thought of finding our conclusions reinforced, and apprehensive less the
+compact and definite figure which our imaginations have gradually shaped
+should become vague and incoherent and dull. It is a pity to purchase
+enlightenment at the cost of definition; and it is more important that
+we should have a clear notion of the final shape of a man in whom we are
+interested than an exact record of his phases.
+
+The essential quality of great artists is incommensurable with
+biography; they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasion
+of the event. All that piety can do for them is beside the mark. Their
+wilful spirit is fled before the last stone of the mausoleum can be got
+in place, and as it flies it jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and his
+libation is spilt idly upon the ground. Although it would be too much
+and too ungrateful to say that the monumental piety of Mr Festing Jones
+has been similarly turned to derision--after all, Butler was not a
+great man--we feel that something analogous has happened. This laborious
+building is a great deal too large for him to dwell in. He had made
+himself a cosy habitation in the _Note-Books_, with the fire in the
+right place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of criticism.
+In a two-volume memoir[11] he shivers perceptibly, and at moments he
+looks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic.
+
+   [Footnote 11: _Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon'_ (1835-1902): _a
+   Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. 2 vols. (Macmillan.)]
+
+And if it be said that a biography should make no difference to our
+estimate of the man who lives and has his being in his published works,
+we reply that it shifts the emphasis. An amusingly wrong-headed book
+about Homer is a peccadillo; ten years of life lavished upon it is
+something a good deal more serious. And even _The Way of all Flesh_,
+which as an experimental novel is a very considerable achievement,
+becomes something different when we have to regard it as a laborious and
+infinitely careful record of experienced fact. Further still, even the
+edge of the perfected inconsequence of certain of the 'Notes' is
+somewhat dulled when we see the trick of it being exercised. The origin
+of the amusing remark on Blake, who 'was no good because he learnt
+Italian at over 60 in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good
+because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because
+Tennyson ran him--well, Tennyson goes without saying,' is to be found in
+'No, I don't like Lamb. You see, Canon Ainger writes about him, and
+Canon Ainger goes to tea with my aunts.' Repeated, it becomes merely a
+clever way of being stupid, as we should be if we were tempted to say
+we couldn't bear Handel, because Butler was mad on him, and Butler was
+no good because he was run by Mr Jones, and, well, Mr Jones goes without
+saying.
+
+Nevertheless, though Butler lives with much discomfort and some danger
+in Mr Jones's tabernacle, he does continue to live. What his head loses
+by the inquisition of a biography his heart gains, though we wonder
+whether Butler himself would have smiled upon the exchange. Butler loses
+almost the last vestige of a title to be considered a creative artist
+when the incredible fact is revealed that the letters of Theobald and
+Christina in _The Way of all Flesh_ are merely reproduced from those
+which his father and mother sent him. Nor was Butler, even as a copyist,
+always adequate to his originals. The brilliantly witty letters of Miss
+Savage, by which the first volume is made precious, seem to us to
+indicate a real woman upon whom something more substantial might have
+been modelled than the delightful but evanescent picture of Alethea
+Pontifex. Here, at least, is a picture of Miss Savage and Butler
+together which, to our sense, gives some common element in both which
+escaped the expression of the author of _The Way of all Flesh_:--
+
+    'I like the cherry-eating scene, too [Miss Savage wrote after
+    reading the MS. of _Alps and Sanctuaries_], because it reminded me
+    of your eating cherries when I first knew you. One day when I was
+    going to the gallery, a very hot day I remember, I met you on the
+    shady side of Berners Street, eating cherries out of a basket. Like
+    your Italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and
+    you handed the basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word.
+    I pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying
+    a word either. I had not before perceived you to be different from
+    any one else. I was like Peter Bell and the primrose with the yellow
+    brim. As I went away to France a day or two after that and did not
+    see you again for months, the recollection of you as you were eating
+    cherries in Berners Street abode with me and pleased me greatly.'
+
+Again, we feel that the unsubstantial Towneley of the novel should have
+been more like flesh and blood when we learn that he too was drawn from
+the life, and from a life which was intimately connected with Butler's.
+Here, most evidently, the heart gains what the head loses, for the story
+of Butler's long-suffering generosity to Charles Paine Pauli is almost
+beyond belief and comprehension. Butler had met Pauli, who was two years
+his junior, in New Zealand, and had conceived a passionate admiration
+for him. Learning that he desired to read for the bar, Butler, who had
+made an unexpected success of his sheep-farming, offered to lend him
+£100 to get to England and £200 a year until he was called. Very shortly
+after they both arrived in England, Pauli separated from Butler,
+refusing even to let him know his address, and thenceforward paid him
+one brief visit every day. He continued, however, to draw his allowance
+regularly until his death all through the period when, owing to the
+failure of Butler's investments, £200 seems to have been a good deal
+more than one-half Butler's income. At Pauli's death in 1897 Butler
+discovered what he must surely at moments have suspected, that Pauli had
+been making between £500 and £800 at the bar, and had left about
+£9000--not to Butler. Butler wrote an account of the affair after
+Pauli's death which is strangely self-revealing:--
+
+    '... Everything that he had was good, and he was such a fine
+    handsome fellow, with such an attractive manner that to me he seemed
+    everything I should like myself to be, but knew very well that I was
+    not....
+
+    'I had felt from the very beginning that my intimacy with Pauli was
+    only superficial, and I also perceived more and more that I bored
+    him.... He liked society and I hated it. Moreover, he was at times
+    very irritable and would find continual fault with me; often, I have
+    no doubt, justly, but often, as it seemed to me, unreasonably.
+    Devoted to him as I continued to be for many years, those years were
+    very unhappy as well as very happy ones.
+
+    'I set down a great deal to his ill-health, no doubt truly; a great
+    deal more, I was sure, was my own fault--and I am so still; I
+    excused much on the score of his poverty and his dependence on
+    myself--for his father and mother, when it came to the point, could
+    do nothing for him; I was his host and was bound to forbear on that
+    ground if on no other. I always hoped that, as time went on, and he
+    saw how absolutely devoted to him I was, and what unbounded
+    confidence I had in him, and how I forgave him over and over again
+    for treatment which I would not have stood for a moment from any
+    one else--I always hoped that he would soften and deal as frankly
+    and unreservedly with me as I with him; but, though for some fifteen
+    years I hoped this, in the end I gave it up, and settled down into a
+    resolve from which I never departed--to do all I could for him, to
+    avoid friction of every kind, and to make the best of things for him
+    and myself that circumstances would allow.'
+
+In love such as this there is a feminine tenderness and devotion which
+positively illuminates what otherwise appears to be a streak of
+perversity in Butler; and the illumination becomes still more certain
+when we read Butler's letters to the young Swiss, Hans Faesch, to whom
+_Out into the Night_ was written. Faesch had departed for Singapore.
+
+    'The sooner we all of us,' wrote Butler, 'as men of sense and sober
+    reason, get through the very acute, poignant sorrow which we now
+    feel, the better for us all. There is no fear of any of us
+    forgetting when the acute stage is passed. I should be ashamed of
+    myself for having felt as keenly and spoken with as little reserve
+    as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any
+    length to which grief can take me when it is about you. I can call
+    to mind no word which ever passed between us three which had been
+    better unspoken: no syllable of irritation or unkindness; nothing
+    but goodness and kindness ever came out of you, and such as our best
+    was we gave it to you as you gave yours to us. Who may not well be
+    plunged up to the lips in sorrow at parting from one of whom he can
+    say this in all soberness and truth? I feel as though I had lost an
+    only son with no hope of another....'
+
+The love is almost pathetically lavish. Letters like these reveal to us
+a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier
+and defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was _rentrée_,
+probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication
+helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which
+he behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured
+weapon. The most threatening danger for such a man is to take the
+professions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himself
+only by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger
+to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler it
+reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of
+the world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the _Note-Books_ in
+_The Athenæum_ recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositions
+on their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely to
+scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the
+converse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast majority who
+meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority who
+were sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland cases
+escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regard
+all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like and
+admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and
+wrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle
+the curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnett
+of the British Museum are of uncommon interest. They afford a strange
+example of mutual mystification.
+
+Thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does not
+greatly matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as with
+the whole) but of thought, was closed to him. Most of the poetry, the
+music, and the art of the world was humbug to him, and it was only by
+insisting that Homer and Shakespeare were exactly like himself that he
+managed to except them from his natural aversion. So, in the last
+resort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined the
+majority of men were engaged in humbugging him. If his standard of truth
+was higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few.
+There is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats is
+merely clumsy and inopportune. In the slow meanderings of this _Memoir_
+we too often catch a glimpse of Butler measuring giants with the
+impertinent foot-rule of his common sense. One does not like him the
+less for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting jokes with
+which it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation.
+Persistently there emerges from the record the impression of something
+childish, whether in petulance or _gaminerie_, a crudeness as well as a
+shrewdness of judgment and ideal. Where Butler thought himself complete,
+he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he was
+complete. To himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of Pauli; to
+us he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of Miss Savage.
+
+[OCTOBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Poetry of Mr Hardy_
+
+
+One meets fairly often with the critical opinion that Mr Hardy's poetry
+is incidental. It is admitted on all sides that his poetry has curious
+merits of its own, but it is held to be completely subordinate to his
+novels, and those who maintain that it must be considered as having
+equal standing with his prose, are not seldom treated as guilty of
+paradox and preciousness.
+
+We are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those of
+the contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressed
+primarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man's chief work must
+necessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some such
+supposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visible
+reluctance to allow Mr Hardy's poetry a clean impact upon the critical
+consciousness. It is true that we have ranged against us critics of
+distinction, such as Mr Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr Robert Lynd, and
+that it may savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could have
+been unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressed
+themselves to Mr Hardy's poetry. Nevertheless, we find some significance
+in the fact that both these critics are of such an age that when they
+came to years of discretion the Wessex Novels were in existence as a
+_corpus_. There, before their eyes, was a monument of literary work
+having a unity unlike that of any contemporary author. The poems became
+public only after they had laid the foundations of their judgment. For
+them Mr Hardy's work was done. Whatever he might subsequently produce
+was an interesting, but to their criticism an otiose appendix to his
+prose achievement.
+
+It happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspective
+may be different. By the accident of years it would appear to him that
+Mr Hardy's poetry was no less a _corpus_ than his prose. They would be
+extended equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embark
+upon voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and he
+might find, in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that the
+poetry would yield up to him a quality of perfume not less essential
+than any that he could extract from the prose.
+
+This is, as we see it, the case with ourselves. We discover all that our
+elders discover in Mr Hardy's novels; we see more than they in his
+poetry. To our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is not
+lifted into significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels.
+They also are complete in themselves. We recognise the relation between
+the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind;
+but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. The
+one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline,
+therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us
+the most important sentence in _Who's Who?_--namely, that in which Mr
+Hardy confesses that in 1868 he was compelled--that is his own word--to
+give up writing poetry for prose.
+
+For Mr Hardy's poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. In the
+volume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with the
+exception of 'The Dynasts,'[12] are pieces bearing the date 1866 which
+display an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of the
+essential content of great poetry. Nor are such pieces exceptional.
+Granted that Mr Hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry,
+still there are a dozen poems of 1866-7 which belong either entirely or
+in part to the category of major poetry. Take, for instance, 'Neutral
+Tones':--
+
+  'We stood by a pond that winter day,
+  And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
+  And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
+    --They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
+
+  'Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
+  Over tedious riddles long ago;
+  And some winds played between us to and fro
+    On which lost the more by our love.
+
+  'The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
+  Alive enough to have strength to die;
+  And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
+    Like an ominous bird a-wing....
+
+  'Since then keen lessons that love deceives
+  And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
+  Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree
+    And a pond edged with grayish leaves.'
+
+   [Footnote 12: _Collected. Poems of Thomas Hardy_. Vol. I.
+   (Macmillan.)]
+
+That was written in 1867. The date of _Desperate Remedies_, Mr Hardy's
+first novel, was 1871. _Desperate Remedies_ may have been written some
+years before. It makes no difference to the astonishing contrast between
+the immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. It is surely
+impossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that Mr
+Hardy's poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curious
+simulacrum of his prose.
+
+These early poems have other points of deep interest, of which one of
+the chief is in a sense technical. One can trace a quite definite
+influence of Shakespeare's sonnets in his language and imagery. The four
+sonnets, 'She to Him' (1866), are full of echoes, as:--
+
+  'Numb as a vane that cankers on its point
+  True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.'
+
+or this from another sonnet of the same year:--
+
+  'As common chests encasing wares of price
+  Are borne with tenderness through halls of state.'
+
+Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the
+impress of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curious
+and impressive in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringing
+some physical compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to say
+something that he does not want to say. Of course, it is merely a
+curious tweak of the fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as the
+following an insistent vision of two youths of an age the one
+masterful, the other indulgent, and carrying out his companion's firm
+suggestion:--
+
+  'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame
+  That Sportsman Time rears but his brood to kill,
+  Knowing me in my soul the very same--
+  One who would die to spare you touch of ill!--
+  Will you not grant to old affection's claim
+  The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?'
+
+But, fancies aside, the effect of these early poems is twofold. Their
+attitude is definite:--
+
+  'Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain
+  And dicing time for gladness calls a moan ...
+  These purblind Doomsters had as readily thrown
+  Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.'
+
+and the technique has the mark of mastery, a complete economy of
+statement which produces the conviction that the words are saying only
+what poet ordained they should say, neither less nor more.
+
+The early years were followed by the long period of the novels, in
+which, we are prepared to admit, poetry was actually if not in intention
+incidental. It is the grim truth that poetry cannot be written in
+between times; and, though we have hardly any dates on which to rely, we
+are willing to believe that few of Mr Hardy's characteristic poems were
+written between the appearance of _Desperate Remedies_ and his farewell
+to the activity of novel-writing with _The Well-Beloved_ (1897). But the
+few dates which we have tell us that 'Thoughts of Phena,' the beautiful
+poem beginning:--
+
+  'Not a line of her writing have I,
+  Not a thread of her hair....'
+
+which reaches forward to the love poems of 1912-13, was written in 1890.
+
+Whether the development of Mr Hardy's poetry was concealed or visible
+during the period of the novels, development there was into a maturity
+so overwhelming that by its touchstone the poetical work of his famous
+contemporaries appears singularly jejune and false. But, though by the
+accident of social conditions--for that Mr Hardy waited till 1898 to
+publish his first volume of poems is more a social than an artistic
+fact--it is impossible to follow out the phases of his poetical progress
+in the detail we would desire, it is impossible not to recognise that
+the mature poet, Mr Hardy, is of the same poetical substance as the
+young poet of the 'sixties. The attitude is unchanged; the modifications
+of the theme of 'crass casualty' leave its central asseveration
+unchanged. There are restatements, enlargements of perspective, a slow
+and forceful expansion of the personal into the universal, but the truth
+once recognised is never suffered for a moment to be hidden or
+mollified. Only a superficial logic would point, for instance, to his
+
+  'Wonder if Man's consciousness
+  Was a mistake of God's,'
+
+as a denial of 'casualty.' To envisage an accepted truth from a new
+angle, to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope of
+finding some aspect which might accord with a large and general view is
+the inevitable movement of any mind that is alive and not dead. To say
+that Mr Hardy has finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it is
+true. The harmony of the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher or
+the philosopher. Neither would grant, neither would understand the
+profound acquiescence that lies behind 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to the
+Grecian Urn.' Such acquiescence has no moral quality, as morality is
+even now understood, nor any logical compulsion. It does not stifle
+anger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling face upon unsmiling things;
+it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile heroics. It accepts the
+things that are as the necessary basis of artistic creation. This unity
+which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to deny
+experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which is
+not denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy's mature poetry.
+It gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is
+called the impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense of
+background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the
+culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the
+culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems
+to record.
+
+At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy
+to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or
+dismay. Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famous
+lines: 'There is some corner of a foreign field ...' and Mr Hardy's
+'Drummer Hodge':--
+
+  'Yet portion of that unknown plain
+    Will Hodge for ever be;
+  His homely Northern heart and brain
+    Grow to some Southern tree,
+  And strange-eyed constellations reign
+    His stars eternally.'
+
+We know which is the truer. Which is the more beautiful? Is it not Mr
+Hardy? And which (strange question) is the more consoling, the more
+satisfying, the more acceptable? Is it not Mr Hardy? There is sorrow,
+but it is the sorrow of the spheres. And this, not the apparent anger
+and dismay of a self's discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in Mr
+Hardy's poetry. The Mr Hardy of the love poems of 1912-13 is not a man
+giving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry of
+the universe. A vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weight
+each syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into a
+moment of time with a vista of years:--
+
+  'Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
+    The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
+  Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
+    For the stars close their shutters and the
+        Dawn whitens hazily.
+  Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours
+    The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
+      I am just the same as when
+  Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.'
+
+[NOVEMBER, 1919.
+
+We have read these poems of Thomas Hardy, read them not once, but many
+times. Many of them have already become part of our being; their
+indelible impress has given shape to dumb and striving elements in our
+soul; they have set free and purged mute, heart-devouring regrets. And
+yet, though this is so, the reading of them in a single volume, the
+submission to their movement with a like unbroken motion of the mind,
+gathers their greatness, their poignancy and passion, into one stream,
+submerging us and leaving us patient and purified.
+
+There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of
+sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this
+compulsive power. The secret is not hard to find. Not one of them is
+adequate to what we know and have suffered. We have in our own hearts a
+new touchstone of poetic greatness. We have learned too much to be
+wholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and a
+complete acknowledgment of experience. 'Give us the whole,' we cry,
+'give us the truth.' Unless we can catch the undertone of this
+acknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding
+brass or a tinkling cymbal.
+
+Therefore we turn--some by instinct and some by deliberate choice--to
+the greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these. What
+they have, he has, and has in their degree--a plenary vision of life. He
+is the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in,
+modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual
+poems of which they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment of
+a whole--not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity
+which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and
+completely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind and
+within it a reaction to the universe. An overwhelming endorsement
+descends upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, and
+straightway they are graven in stone.
+
+Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in
+kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries. These may be
+perfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by Mr Hardy is often
+perfect in a higher sense. As the lines of a diagram may be produced in
+imagination to contain within themselves all space, one of Mr Hardy's
+most characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience.
+In it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself--the
+dominant theme that gives individuation to the ripple of fragmentary
+joys and sorrows. Take 'The Broken Appointment':--
+
+      'You did not come,
+  And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.--
+  Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
+  Than that I thus found lacking in your make
+  That high compassion which can overbear
+  Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
+  Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
+      You did not come.
+
+  'You love not me,
+  And love alone can lend you loyalty
+  --I know and knew it. But, unto the store
+  Of human deeds divine in all but name,
+  Was it not worth a little hour or more
+  To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
+  To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
+      You love not me?'
+
+On such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visible
+endorsement of the universe. The hopes not of a lover but of humanity
+are crushed beneath its rhythm. The ruthlessness of the event is
+intensified in the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad of
+destiny, and a moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain of
+intense attention it seems to have been written by the destiny it
+records.
+
+What is the secret of poetic power like this? We do not look for it in
+technique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. But the
+technique of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind that
+we know as we read that it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. For a
+moment it startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words is
+reverberant with accumulated purpose. They are pitiless as the poem; the
+sign of an ultimate obedience is upon them. Whence came the power that
+compelled it? Can the source be defined or indicated? We believe it can
+be indicated, though not defined. We can show where to look for the
+mystery, that in spite of our regard remains a mystery still. We are
+persuaded that almost on the instant that it was felt the original
+emotion of the poem was endorsed Perhaps it came to the poet as the pain
+of a particular and personal experience; but in a little or a long
+while--creative time is not measured by days or years--it became, for
+him, a part of the texture of the general life. It became a
+manifestation of life, almost, nay wholly, in the sacramental sense, a
+veritable epiphany. The manifold and inexhaustible quality of life was
+focused into a single revelation. A critic's words do not lend
+themselves to the necessary precision. We should need to write with
+exactly the same power as Mr Hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour stroked
+its sum,' to make our meaning likewise inevitable. The word 'revelation'
+is fertile in false suggestion; the creative act of power which we seek
+to elucidate is an act of plenary apprehension, by which one
+manifestation, one form of life, one experience is seen in its rigorous
+relation to all other and to all possible manifestations, forms, and
+experiences. It is, we believe, the act which Mr Hardy himself has tried
+to formulate in the phrase which is the title of one of his books of
+poems--_Moments of Vision_.
+
+Only those who do not read Mr Hardy could make the mistake of supposing
+that on his lips such a phrase had a mystical implication. Between
+belief and logic lies a third kingdom, which the mystics and the
+philosophers alike are too eager to forget--the kingdom of art, no less
+the residence of truth than the two other realms, and to some, perhaps,
+more authentic even than they. Therefore when we expand the word
+'vision' in the phrase to 'æsthetic vision' we mean, not the perception
+of beauty, at least in the ordinary sense of that ill-used word, but the
+apprehension of truth, the recognition of a complete system of valid
+relations incapable of logical statement. Such are the acts of unique
+apprehension which Mr Hardy, we believe, implied by his title. In a
+'moment of vision' the poet recognises in a single separate incident of
+life, life's essential quality. The uniqueness of the whole, the
+infinite multiplicity and variety of its elements, are manifested and
+apprehended in a part. Since we are here at work on the confines of
+intelligible statement, it is better, even at the cost of brutalising a
+poem, to choose an example from the book that bears the mysterious name.
+The verses that follow come from 'Near Lanivet, 1872.' We choose them as
+an example of Mr Hardy's method at less than its best, at a point at
+which the scaffolding of his process is just visible.
+
+  'There was a stunted hand-post just on the crest.
+    Only a few feet high:
+  She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
+    At the crossways close thereby.
+
+  'She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
+    And laid her arms on its own,
+  Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
+    Her sad face sideways thrown.
+
+  'Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
+    Made her look as one crucified
+  In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
+    And hurriedly "Don't," I cried.
+
+  'I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
+    As she stepped forth ready to go,
+  "I am rested now.--Something strange came into my head;
+    I wish I had not leant so!'...
+
+  'And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
+    In the running of Time's far glass
+  Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
+    Some day.--Alas, alas!'
+
+Superstition and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert the
+order of the creative process. The poet's act of apprehension is wholly
+different from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension the
+chance-shaped crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. The
+concentration of life's vicissitude upon that white-clothed form was
+first recognised by a sovereign act of æsthetic understanding or
+intuition; the seeming crucifix supplied a scaffolding for its
+expression; it afforded a clue to the method of transposition into words
+which might convey the truth thus apprehended; it suggested an
+equivalence. The distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but we believe
+that it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to an
+understanding of Mr Hardy's poetry in particular. Indeed, in it must be
+sought the meaning of another of his titles, 'Satires of Circumstance,'
+where the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, but
+a symbol necessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality in
+life more largely and variously apprehended by the poet. At the risk of
+appearing fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate our
+meaning. The poetic process is, we believe, twofold. The one part, the
+discovery of the symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what we
+may call poetic method. It is concerned with the transposition and
+communication of emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for to
+poetic method the emotional material is, strictly, indifferent. The
+other part is an esthetic apprehension of significance, the recognition
+of the all in the one. This is a specifically poetic act, or rather the
+supreme poetic act. Yet it may be absent from poetry. For there is no
+necessary connection between poetic apprehension and poetic method.
+Poetic method frequently exists without poetic apprehension; and there
+is no reason to suppose that the reverse is not also true, for the
+recognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the peculiar
+privilege of great poets. We have here, at least a principle of division
+between major and minor poetry.
+
+Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and ask
+what it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act of
+apprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality of
+the one. We believe that the answer is simple. The great poet knows what
+he is looking for. Once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely,
+being compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describe
+what is being done in the kingdom of art. The poet, we say, knows the
+quality for which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a condition
+than a possession of soul. It is a state of responsiveness rather than a
+knowledge of that to which he will respond. But it is knowledge inasmuch
+as the choice of that to which he will respond is determined by the
+condition of his soul. On the purity of that condition depends his
+greatness as a poet, and that purity in its turn depends upon his
+denying no element of his profound experience. If he denies or forgets,
+the synthesis--again the word is a metaphor--which must establish itself
+within him is fragmentary and false. The new event can wake but partial
+echoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received into, nor
+can it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable from
+limbo into forgetfulness.
+
+Mr Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate
+purity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the world's slow stain
+has not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general
+conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professional
+optimists take a part. Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence and
+strangeness of their own:--
+
+      'It will have been:
+  Nor God nor Demon can undo the done,
+      Unsight the seen
+  Make muted music be as unbegun
+      Though things terrene
+  Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.'
+
+What neither God nor Demon can do, men are incessantly at work to
+accomplish. Life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for she
+scatters her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns.
+But the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond his
+power to remember them otherwise than together.
+
+It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardy
+should have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of
+love poems that are unique for power and passion in even the English
+language. This late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; it
+has sprung straight from the main stem of Mr Hardy's poetic growth. Into
+'Veteris Vestigia Flammas' is distilled the quintessence of the power
+that created the Wessex Novels and 'The Dynasts'; all that Mr Hardy has
+to tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, is
+in these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or told
+us more. _Sunt lacrimæ rerum_.
+
+[NOVEMBER, 1919.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+POSTSCRIPT
+
+Three months after this essay was written the first volume of the long
+awaited definitive edition of Mr Hardy's works (the Mellstock Edition)
+appeared. It was with no common thrill that we read in the precious
+pages of introduction the following words confirming the theory upon
+which the first part of the essay is largely based.
+
+    'Turning now to my verse--to myself the more individual part of my
+    literary fruitage--I would say that, unlike some of the fiction,
+    nothing interfered with the writer's freedom in respect of its form
+    or content. Several of the poems--indeed many--were produced before
+    novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the
+    light till all the novels had been published....
+
+    'The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of
+    some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more
+    volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty
+    years. One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how
+    much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given
+    in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.'
+
+
+
+
+_Present Condition of English Poetry_
+
+
+Shall we, or shall we not, be serious? To be serious nowadays is to be
+ill-mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter? We have our
+opinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in the
+Georgian book, a little in _Wheels_.[13] We know that there is much bad
+poetry in the Georgian book, and less in _Wheels_. We know that there is
+one poem in _Wheels_ beside the intense and sombre imagination of which
+even the good poetry of the Georgian book pales for a moment. We think
+we know more than this. What does it matter? Pick out the good things,
+and let the rest go.
+
+   [Footnote 13: _Georgian Poetry_, 1918-1919. Edited by E.M. (The
+   Poetry Bookshop.)
+
+   _Wheels_. Fourth Cycle. (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell.)]
+
+And yet, somehow, this question of modern English poetry has become
+important for us, as important as the war, important in the same way as
+the war. We can even analogise. _Georgian Poetry_ is like the Coalition
+Government; _Wheels_ is like the Radical opposition. Out of the one
+there issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous
+redolence of _union sacrée_; out of the other, some acidulation of
+perversity. In the coalition poets we find the larger number of good
+men, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find
+no bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition
+goodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent,
+passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life.
+
+On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both
+sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost
+wholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we
+find intensely disagreeable. In the coalition we find it noxious, in the
+opposition no worse than irritating. No doubt this is because we
+recognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while the
+opposition is held to be ridiculous. But both the coalition and the
+opposition--we use both terms in their corporate sense--are unmistakably
+the product of the present age. In that sense they are truly
+representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair
+sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we
+live; they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete
+confusion of æsthetic values that prevails to-day.
+
+The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. Of the
+nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we
+except absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, and
+Mr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, Mr
+Abercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the rest
+there are varying degrees of saturation. This false simplicity can be
+quite subtle. It is compounded of worship of trees and birds and
+contemporary poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over at
+times with a quite perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other times
+with what looks to be technical skill, but generally proves to be a
+fairly clumsy reminiscence of somebody else's technical skill. The
+negative qualities of this _simplesse_ are, however, the most obvious;
+the poems imbued with it are devoid of any emotional significance
+whatever. If they have an idea it leaves you with the queer feeling that
+it is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn smooth by the
+rippling of innumerable minds. Then, spread in a luminous haze over
+these compounded elements, is a fundamental right-mindedness; you feel,
+somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are very
+good. There is nothing disturbing about them; _ils peuvent être mis dans
+toutes les mains_; they are kind, generous, even noble. They sympathise
+with animate and inanimate nature. They have shining foreheads with big
+bumps of benevolence, like Flora Casby's father, and one inclines to
+believe that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear,
+if only because their vision is blurred. They are fond of lists of names
+which never suggest things; they are sparing of similes. If they use
+them they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definite
+simile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certain
+test of reality.
+
+But it is impossible to be serious about them. The more stupid of them
+supply the matter for a good laugh; the more clever the stuff of a more
+recondite amazement. What _is_ one to do when Mr Monro apostrophises the
+force of Gravity in such words as these?--
+
+  'By leave of you man places stone on stone;
+  He scatters seed: you are at once the prop
+  Among the long roots of his fragile crop
+  You manufacture for him, and insure
+  House, harvest, implement, and furniture,
+  And hold them all secure.'
+
+We are not surprised to learn further that
+
+  'I rest my body on your grass,
+  And let my brain repose in you.'
+
+All that remains to be said is that Mr Monro is fond of dogs ('Can you
+smell the rose?' he says to Dog: 'ah, no!') and inclined to fish--both
+of which are Georgian inclinations.
+
+Then there is Mr Drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man for
+moonlit apples--'moon-washed apples of wonder'--and the righteous man's
+sense of robust rhythm in this chorus from 'Lincoln':--
+
+    'You who know the tenderness
+  Of old men at eve-tide,
+    Coming from the hedgerows,
+  Coming from the plough,
+    And the wandering caress
+  Of winds upon the woodside,
+    When the crying yaffle goes
+  Underneath the bough.'
+
+Mr Drinkwater, though he cannot write good doggerel, is a very good man.
+In this poem he refers to the Sermon on the Mount as 'the words of light
+From the mountain-way.'
+
+Mr Squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make an
+excellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity. He
+would repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in the
+same way as, we suppose, he deceives himself. His poem 'Rivers' seems to
+us a very curious example of the _faux bon_. Not only is the idea
+derivative, but the rhythmical treatment also. Here is Mr de la Mare:--
+
+  'Sweet is the music of Arabia
+  In my heart, when out of dreams
+  I still in the thin clear murk of dawn
+  Descry her gliding streams;
+  Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
+  Ring loud with the grief and delight
+  Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians
+  In the brooding silence of night.
+  They haunt me--her lutes and her forests;
+  No beauty on earth I see
+  But shadowed with that dream recalls
+  Her loveliness to me:
+  Still eyes look coldly upon me,
+  Cold voices whisper and say--
+  "He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
+  They have stolen his wits away."'
+
+And here is a verse from Mr Squire:--
+
+  'For whatever stream I stand by,
+  And whatever river I dream of,
+  There is something still in the back of my mind
+    From very far away;
+  There is something I saw and see not,
+  A country full of rivers
+  That stirs in my heart and speaks to me
+    More sure, more dear than they.
+
+  'And always I ask and wonder
+  (Though often I do not know it)
+  Why does this water not smell like water?...'
+
+To leave the question of reminiscence aside, how the delicate vision of
+Mr de la Mare has been coarsened, how commonplace his exquisite
+technique has become in the hands of even a first-rate ability! It
+remains to be added that Mr Squire is an amateur of nature,--
+
+  'And skimming, fork-tailed in the evening air,
+  When man first was were not the martens there?'--
+
+and a lover of dogs.
+
+Mr Shanks, Mr W.J. Turner, and Mr Freeman belong to the same order. They
+have considerable technical accomplishment of the straightforward
+kind--and no emotional content. One can find examples of the disastrous
+simile in them all. They are all in their degree pseudo-naïves. Mr
+Turner wonders in this way:--
+
+  'It is strange that a little mud
+  Should echo with sounds, syllables, and letters,
+  Should rise up and call a mountain Popocatapetl,
+  And a green-leafed wood Oleander.'
+
+Of course Mr Turner does not really wonder; those four lines are proof
+positive of that. But what matters is not so much the intrinsic value of
+the gift as the kindly thought which prompted the giver. Mr Shanks's
+speciality is beauty. He also is an amateur of nature. He bids us: 'Hear
+the loud night-jar spin his pleasant note.' Of course, Mr Shanks cannot
+have heard a real night-jar. His description is proof of that. But
+again, it was a kindly thought. Mr Freeman is, like Mr Squire, a more
+interesting case, deserving detailed analysis. For the moment we can
+only recommend a comparison of his first and second poems in this book
+with 'Sabrina Fair' and 'Love in a Valley' respectively.
+
+It is only when we are confronted with the strange blend of technical
+skill and an emotional void that we begin to hunt for reminiscences.
+Reminiscences are no danger to the real poet. He is the splendid
+borrower who lends a new significance to that which he takes. He
+incorporates his borrowing in the new thing which he creates; it has its
+being there and there alone. One can see the process in the one fine
+poem in _Wheels_, Mr Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting':--
+
+  'It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
+  Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
+  Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
+  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
+  Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
+  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
+  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
+  Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
+  And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
+  With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
+  Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
+  And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
+  "Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
+  "None," said the other, "save the undone years,
+  The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
+  Was my life also..."'
+
+The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in
+these two books, both in intention and achievement. Yet no one can
+mistake its source. It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Induction
+to 'Hyperion.' The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the
+dying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats.
+
+  'None can usurp this height, return'd that shade,
+  But those to whom the miseries of the world
+  Are misery, and will not let them rest.'
+
+That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen's 'Strange
+Meeting.' It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its
+technique there is the hand of the master to be. Those monosyllabic
+assonances are the discovery of genius. We are persuaded that this poem
+by a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in
+his heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotional
+significance of the war that has yet been achieved by English poetry. By
+including it in his book, the editor of _Wheels_ has done a great
+service to English letters.
+
+Extravagant words, it may be thought. We appeal to the documents. Read
+_Georgian Poetry_ and read 'Strange Meeting.' Compare Wilfred Owen's
+poem with the very finest things in the Georgian book--Mr Davies's
+'Lovely Dames,' or Mr de la Mare's 'The Tryst,' or 'Fare Well,' or the
+twenty opening lines of Mr Abercrombie's disappointing poem. You will
+not find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you
+will find in 'Strange Meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that
+which has been most profound in the experience of a generation. You
+will, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of
+which makes the confusion of a book like _Georgian Poetry_ possible,
+restored to you. You will remember three forgotten things--that poetry
+is rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and
+that its significance finally depends upon the quality and
+comprehensiveness of the emotion. You will recognise that the tricks of
+the trade have never been and never will be discovered by which ability
+can conjure emptiness into meaning.
+
+It seems hardly worth while to return to _Wheels_. Once the argument has
+been pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting,' the rest of the
+contents of the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry we
+will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false
+sophistication. There are the same contemporary reminiscences. Compare
+Mr Osbert Sitwell's _English Gothic_ with Mr T.S. Eliot's _Sweeney_; and
+you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with
+the emotions of a complex one. The spectacle is almost as amusing as
+that of the similar process in the Georgian book. Nevertheless, in
+general, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merely
+irritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positively
+noxious. Miss Edith Sitwell's deliberate painted toys are a great deal
+better than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones.
+In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a perplexed emotion manages to make its
+way through a chaotic technique. She represents the solid impulse which
+lies behind the opposition in general. This impulse she describes,
+though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these not
+uninteresting verses:--
+
+  'But since we are mere children of this age,
+  And must in curious ways discover salvation
+  I will not quit my muddled generation,
+  But ever plead for Beauty in this rage.
+
+  'Although I know that Nature's bounty yields
+  Unto simplicity a beautiful content,
+  Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent
+  Will I give back my body to the fields.'
+
+There is the opposition. Against the righteous man, the _mauvais
+sujet_. We sympathise with the _mauvais sujet_. If he is persistent and
+laborious enough, he may achieve poetry. But he must travel alone. In
+order to be loyal to your age you must make up your mind what your age
+is. To be muddled yourself is not loyalty, but treachery, even to a
+muddled generation.
+
+[DECEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield_
+
+
+Mr Masefiled is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end,
+which is the glorification of England in narrative verse. _Reynard the
+Fox_ marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal.
+He has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so subdued that
+they no longer sensibly impede the movement of his verse, a point at
+which we may begin to speak (though not too loud) of mastery. We feel
+that he now approaches what he desires to do with some certainty of
+doing it, so that we in our turn can approach some other questions with
+some hope of answering them.
+
+The questions are various; but they radiate from and enter again into
+the old question whether what he is doing, and beginning to do well, is
+worth while doing, or rather whether it will have been worth while doing
+fifty years hence. For we have no doubt at all in our mind that, in
+comparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as _Reynard
+the Fox_ is valuable. We may use the old rough distinction and ask first
+whether _Reynard the Fox_ is durable in virtue of its substance, and
+second, whether it is durable in virtue of its form.
+
+The glorification of England! There are some who would give their souls
+to be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by Shakespeare, by
+Milton, by Wordsworth, and by Hardy. For an Englishman there is no
+richer inspiration, no finer theme; to have one's speech and thought
+saturated by the fragrance of this lovely and pleasant land was once
+the birthright of English poets and novelists. But something has crept
+between us and it, dividing. Instead of an instinctive love, there is a
+conscious desire of England; instead of slow saturation, a desperate
+plunge into its mystery. The fragrance does not come at its own sweet
+will; we clutch at it. It does not enfold and pervade our most arduous
+speculations; no involuntary sweetness comes flooding in upon our
+confrontation of human destinies. Hardy is the last of that great line.
+If we long for sweetness--as we do long for it, and with how poignant a
+pain!--we must seek it out, like men who rush dusty and irritable from
+the babble and fever of the town. The rhythm of the earth never enters
+into their gait; they are like spies among the birds and flowers, like
+collectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. The Georgians
+snatch at nature; they are never part of it. And there is some element
+of this desperation in Mr Masefield. We feel in him an anxiety to load
+every rift with ore of this particular kind, a deliberate intention to
+emphasise that which is most English in the English country-side.
+
+How shall we say it? It is not that he makes a parade of arcane
+knowledge. The word 'parade' does injustice to his indubitable
+integrity. But we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical,
+and at times archaic phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himself
+that he is saturated in essential Englishness, and we incline to think
+that even his choice of an actual subject was less inevitable than
+self-imposed. He would isolate the quality he would capture, have it
+more wholly within his grasp; yet, in some subtle way, it finally
+eludes him. The intention is in excess, and in the manner of its
+execution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess also. The
+music of English place-names, for instance is too insistent; no one into
+whom they had entered with the English air itself would use them with so
+manifest an admiration.
+
+Perhaps a comparison may bring definition nearer. The first part of Mr
+Masefield's poem, which describes the meet and the assembled persons one
+by one, recalls, not merely by the general cast of the subject, but by
+many actual turns of phrase, Chaucer's _Prologue_. Mr Masefield's parson
+has more than one point of resemblance to Chaucer's Monk:--
+
+  'An out-ryder, that loved venerye;
+  A manly man to ben an abbot able....'
+
+But it would take too long to quote both pictures. We may choose for our
+juxtaposition the Prioress and one of Mr Masefield's young ladies:--
+
+  'Behind them rode her daughter Belle,
+  A strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face
+  Was sweet with thought and proud with race,
+  And bright with joy at riding there.
+  She was as good as blowing air,
+  But shy and difficult to know.
+  The kittens in the barley-mow,
+  The setter's toothless puppies sprawling,
+  The blackbird in the apple calling,
+  All knew her spirit more than we.
+  So delicate these maidens be
+  In loving lovely helpless things.'
+
+And here is the Prioress:--
+
+  'But for to speken of hir conscience,
+  She was so charitable and so pitous,
+  She wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous
+  Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
+  Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed
+  With rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread,
+  But sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded
+  Or if men smote it with a yerde smerte:
+  And all was conscience and tendere herte.'
+  Ful semely hir wympel pynched was;
+  His nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
+  Hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red,
+  But sikerly she hadde a fair forhed.'
+
+There is in the Chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidence
+that the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside which
+Mr Masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost _malsain_. How
+far outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the apple
+calling,' and how tainted by the desperate _bergerie_ of the Georgian
+era!
+
+It is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set Mr Masefield's
+prologue beside Chaucer's. But not only is it a tribute to Mr Masefield
+that he brought us to reading Chaucer over again, but the comparison is
+at bottom just. Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he
+has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that
+belong to one: but he has perdurable qualities. He is at home with his
+speech and at home with his world; by his side Mr Masefield seems
+nervous and uncertain about both. He belongs, in fact, to a race (or a
+generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading
+every rift with ore. The question is whether such a man can hope to
+express the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side.
+
+Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate
+impulse is a _nostalgie de la boue_ that betrays itself in line after
+line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that
+any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield,
+in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to
+him, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and
+rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there
+otherwise. For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself.
+Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:--
+
+  'His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
+  He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
+  Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
+  Where scent would hang like breath on glass).
+  He loved the English country-side;
+  The wine-leaved bramble in the ride,
+  The lichen on the apple-trees,
+  The poultry ranging on the lees,
+  The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover,
+  His wife's green grave at Mitcheldover,
+  Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw.
+  Under his hide his heart was raw
+  With joy and pity of these things...'
+
+That 'raw heart' marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia. Apart from
+the fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to the
+first whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it would
+be a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come to the
+question of Mr Masefield's style in general.
+
+As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted
+distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already
+been discussing Mr Masefield's style under a specific aspect. But the
+particular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield's
+general condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not find
+it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself
+of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very
+vitals of his artistic effort. He is seeking always to be that which he
+is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows
+he can never wholly possess.
+
+  'From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse
+  There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops,
+  All wet red clay, where a horse's foot
+  Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root.
+  The fox raced on, on the headlands firm,
+  Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm;
+  The rooks rose raving to curse him raw,
+  He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw.
+  Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field
+  Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled,
+  With a bay horse near and a white horse leading,
+  And a man saying "Zook," and the red earth bleeding.'
+
+The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. It comes, we believe,
+from a consciousness of anæmia, a frenetic reaction towards what used,
+some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.'
+
+And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our
+sympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness and
+right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for
+this 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country
+house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time. Its
+colour is hectic; its tempo feverish. He has sought the healing virtue
+where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whose
+magic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose
+strong rhythm is in Hardy. But the virtue eludes all conscious
+inquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is
+peace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would have
+done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel,
+but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master
+it, in his consciousness? We will not presume to answer, mindful that Mr
+Masefield may not recognise himself in our mirror, but we will content
+ourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of the almost
+heroic effort that has gone to its composition _Reynard the Fox_ lacks
+all the qualities essential to durability.
+
+[JANUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Lost Legions_
+
+
+One day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by the
+breath which moves the Spirits of Pity in Mr Hardy's _Dynasts_. It will
+be a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of the
+generation that perished in the war. It will be a work of genius, for
+the essence that must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief,
+almost beyond imagination. We know of its existence by signs hardly more
+material than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet all
+but inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead.
+The autobiographer-novelists have been legion, yet we turn from them all
+with a slow shake of the head. 'No, it was not that. Had we lost only
+that we could have forgotten. It was not that.'
+
+No, it was the spirit that troubled, as in dream, the waters of the
+pool, some influence which trembled between silence and a sound, a
+precarious confidence, an unavowed quest, a wisdom that came not of
+years or experience, a dissatisfaction, a doubt, a devotion, some
+strange presentiment, it may have been, of the bitter years in store, in
+memory an ineffable, irrevocable beauty, a visible seal on the forehead
+of a generation.
+
+    'When the lamp is shattered.
+  The light in the dust lies dead--
+    When the cloud is scattered
+  The rainbow's glory is shed.
+    When the lute is broken,
+  Sweet tones are remembered not...'
+
+Yet out of a thousand fragments this memory must be created anew in a
+form that will outlast the years, for it was precious. It was something
+that would vindicate an epoch against the sickening adulation of the
+hero-makers and against the charge of spiritual sterility; a light in
+whose gleam the bewildering non-achievements of the present age, the art
+which seems not even to desire to be art, the faith which seems not to
+desire to be faith, have substance and meaning. It was shot through and
+through by an impulse of paradox, an unconscious straining after the
+impossible, gathered into two or three tremulous years which passed too
+swiftly to achieve their own expression. Now, what remains of youth is
+cynical, is successful, publicly exploits itself. It was not cynical
+then.
+
+Elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lasted
+long enough to receive a name. There was Unanimism. The name is
+remembered; perhaps the books are read. But it will not be found in the
+books. They are childish, just as the English novels which endeavoured
+to portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited. Behind
+all the conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay a
+fundamental candour of which only a flickering gleam can now be
+recaptured. It glints on a page of M. Romains's _Europe_; the memory of
+it haunts Wilfred Owen's poems; it touches Keeling's letters; it hovers
+over these letters of Charles Sorley.[14] From a hundred strange
+lurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers and
+withdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for if
+it wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever.
+
+   [Footnote 14: _The Letters of Charles Sorley_. (Cambridge University
+   Press.)]
+
+Charles Sorley was the youngest fringe of the strange unity that
+included him and men by ten years his senior. He had not, as they had,
+plunged with fantastic hopes and unspoken fears into the world. He had
+not learned the slogans of the day. But, seeing that the slogans were
+only a disguise for the undefined desires which inspired them he lost
+little and gained much thereby. The years at Oxford in which he would
+have taken a temporary sameness, a sameness in the long run protective
+and strengthening, were spared him. In his letters we have him
+unspoiled, as the sentimentalists would say--not yet with the
+distraction of protective colouring.
+
+One who knew him better than the mere reader of his letters can pretend
+to know him declares that, in spite of his poems, which are among the
+most remarkable of those of the boy-poets killed in the war, Sorley
+would not have been a man of letters. The evidence of the letters
+themselves is heavy against the view; they insist upon being regarded as
+the letters of a potential writer. But a passionate interest in
+literature is not the inevitable prelude to a life as a writer, and
+although it is impossible to consider any thread in Sorley's letters as
+of importance comparable to that which joins the enthronement and
+dethronement of his literary idols, we shall regard it as the record of
+a movement of soul which might as easily find expression (as did
+Keeling's) in other than literary activities. It takes more than
+literary men to make a generation, after all.
+
+And Sorley was typical above all in this, that, passionate and
+penetrating as was his devotion to literature, he never looked upon it
+as a thing existing in and for itself. It was, to him and his kind, the
+satisfaction of an impulse other and more complex than the æsthetic. Art
+was a means and not an end to him, and it is perhaps the apprehension of
+this that has led one who endeavoured in vain to reconcile Sorley to
+Pater into rash prognostication. Sorley would never have been an artist
+in Pater's way; he belonged to his own generation, to which _l'art pour
+l'art_ had ceased to have meaning. There had come a pause, a throbbing
+silence, from which art might have emerged, may even now after the
+appointed time arise, with strange validities undreamed of or forgotten.
+Let us not prophesy; let us be content with the recognition that
+Sorley's generation was too keenly, perhaps too disastrously aware of
+destinies, of
+
+    'the beating of the wings of Love
+  Shut out from his creation,'
+
+to seek the comfort of the ivory tower.
+
+Sorley first appears before us radiant with the white-heat of a
+schoolboy enthusiasm for Masefield. Masefield is--how we remember the
+feeling!--the poet who has lived; his naked reality tears through 'the
+lace of putrid sentimentalism (educing the effeminate in man) which
+rotters like Tennyson and Swinburne have taught his (the superficial
+man's) soul to love.' It tears through more than Tennyson and Swinburne.
+The greatest go down before him.
+
+    'So you see what I think of John Masefield. When I say that he has
+    the rapidity, simplicity, nobility of Homer, with the power of
+    drawing character, the dramatic truth to life of Shakespeare, along
+    with a moral and emotional strength and elevation which is all his
+    own, and therefore I am prepared to put him above the level of these
+    two great men--I do not expect you to agree with me.'--(From a paper
+    read at Marlborough, November, 1912.)
+
+That was Sorley at seventeen, and that, it seems to us, is the quality
+of enthusiasm which should be felt by a boy of seventeen if he is to
+make his mark. It is infinitely more important to have felt that flaming
+enthusiasm for an idol who will be cast down than to have felt what we
+ought to feel for Shakespeare and Homer. The gates of heaven are opened
+by strange keys, but they must be our own.
+
+Within six months Masefield had gone the way of all flesh. In a paper on
+_The Shropshire Lad_ (May, 1913), curious both for critical subtlety and
+the faint taste of disillusion, Sorley was saying: 'His (Masefield's)
+return (to the earth) was purely emotional, and probably less
+interesting than the purely intellectual return of Meredith.' At the
+beginning of 1914, having gained a Scholarship at University College,
+Oxford, he went to Germany. Just before going he wrote:--
+
+    'I am just discovering Thomas Hardy. There are two methods of
+    discovery. One is when Columbus discovers America. The other is when
+    some one begins to read a famous author who has already run into
+    seventy editions, and refuses to speak about anything else, and
+    considers every one else who reads the author's works his own
+    special converts. Mine is the second method. I am more or less
+    Hardy-drunk.'
+
+The humorous exactness and detachment of the description are remarkable,
+and we feel that there was more than the supersession of a small by a
+great idol in this second phase. By April he is at Jena, 'only 15 miles
+from Goethe's grave, whose inhabitant has taken the place of Thomas
+Hardy (successor to Masefield) as my favourite prophet.'
+
+    'I hope (if nothing else) before I leave Germany to get a thorough
+    hang of _Faust_.... The worst of a piece like _Faust_ is that it
+    completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself.
+    There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not
+    somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it.'
+
+He had a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. He
+lumped together 'nasty old Lyttons, Carlyles, and Dickenses.' And the
+intoxication itself was swift and fleeting. There was something wrong
+with Goethe by July; it is his 'entirely intellectual' life.
+
+    'If Goethe really died saying "more light," it was very silly of
+    him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth.'
+
+And he writes home for Richard Jefferies, the man of his own county--for
+through Marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the Wiltshire
+Downs.
+
+    'In the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities--Masefield,
+    Hardy, Goethe--I always fall back on Richard Jefferies wandering
+    about in the background. I have at least the tie of locality with
+    him.'
+
+A day or two after we incidentally discover that Meredith is up (though
+not on Olympus) from a denunciation of Browning on the queer non- (or
+super-) æsthetic grounds of which we have spoken:--
+
+    'There is much in B. I like. But my feeling towards him has (ever
+    since I read his life) been that of his to the "Lost Leader." I
+    cannot understand him consenting to live a purely literary life in
+    Italy, or (worse still) consenting to be lionised by fashionable
+    London society. And then I always feel that if less people read
+    Browning, more would read Meredith (his poetry, I mean.)'
+
+Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He had
+loved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from
+illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are made
+of. The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while
+training at Shorncliffe:--
+
+    'For the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope
+    Germany will win. It would do the world good, and show that real
+    faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just,"
+    but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard
+    defeat."'...
+
+    'England--I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight
+    for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy,
+    that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling
+    "imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to
+    generation.... And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany
+    (who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "Huns," because
+    they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making
+    experiments in morality. Not that I approve of the experiment in
+    this particular case. Indeed I think that after the war all brave
+    men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers
+    and pilgrims on the earth. "For they that say such things declare
+    plainly that they seek a country." But all these convictions are
+    useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them.
+    What a worm one is under the cart-wheels--big, clumsy, careless,
+    lumbering cart-wheels--of public opinion. I might have been giving
+    my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity: instead, I am giving
+    my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most
+    enterprising nation in the world.'
+
+The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more
+wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders
+written throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said;
+he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in
+complete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to
+suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of
+1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last
+always the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken.
+
+His intellectual evolution went on to the end. No wonder that he found
+Rupert Brooke's sonnets overpraised:--
+
+    'He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice.... It was not that
+    "they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but
+    that the essence of these things had been endangered by
+    circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to
+    recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he
+    has taken the sentimental attitude.'
+
+Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this
+criticism of Brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one
+who has given up the search. 'There is no such thing as a just war,'
+writes this boy. 'What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.' From
+this position Sorley never flinched. Never for a moment was he renegade
+to his generation by taking 'the sentimental attitude.' Neither had he
+in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect.
+
+Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We do
+not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those
+lost legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it to
+the end. In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems.
+After rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circumstance"' as bad poetry,
+and passing an incisive criticism on 'Men who March away,' he
+continues:--
+
+    'I cannot help thinking that Hardy is the greatest artist of the
+    English character since Shakespeare; and much of _The Dynasts_
+    (except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare. But I value
+    his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into
+    the comprehensiveness of his novels and _The Dynasts_) as truly, and
+    with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in
+    his novels. His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare's or
+    Shelley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but I like them and they
+    stick.'
+
+A little later, having finished _The Egoist_,--
+
+    'I see now that Meredith belongs to that class of novelists with
+    whom I do not usually get on so well (_e.g._ Dickens), who create
+    and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters
+    with amusement, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as
+    with Hardy's people, into whom the author does not inject his own
+    exaggerated characteristics.'
+
+The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died. What would he
+not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone stands
+equal? But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange
+company, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in his
+heart, for other reasons than that the love of the Wessex hills had
+crept into his blood. He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in the
+head by a sniper as he led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench near
+Hulluch.
+
+[JANUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Cry in the Wilderness_
+
+
+We have in Mr Irving Babbitt's _Rousseau and Romanticism_ to deal with a
+closely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind.
+We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the
+author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that
+the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever
+may be our final attitude towards the author's conclusions, we cannot
+but regard _Rousseau and Romanticism_ as masterly. Its style is, we
+admit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which
+animates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare
+that it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared for
+clarity and depth of thought with Mr Santayana's _Three Philosophical
+Poets_.
+
+By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more
+easily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt's
+achievement. We think that it would be easy to show that in the last
+generation--we will go no further back for the moment, though our
+author's arraignment reaches at least a century earlier--criticism has
+imperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may call
+appreciation. The emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the
+individual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern 'critic' has
+been to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the last
+resort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminated
+in the artistic creation of the author examined. And there modern
+criticism has stopped. There has been no indication that it was aware of
+the necessity of going further. Many influences went to shape the
+general conviction that mere presentation was the final function of
+criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of a
+scientific terminology. The word 'objectivity' had a great vogue; it was
+felt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the critic
+was faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard, irreducible
+facts, and his function was, like the scientist's, that of recording
+them as compendiously as possible and without prejudice. The unconscious
+programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. All facts may be of
+equal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary
+critic. He chose those which interested him most for the exercise of his
+talent for demonstration. But that choice was, as a general rule, the
+only specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it was
+usually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a
+'scientific' importance. Reasoned judgments of value were rigorously
+eschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is at
+times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is better
+than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist's
+intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of his
+appreciation. Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which
+all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. What
+every artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. As
+between things unique there is no possibility of subordination or
+comparison.
+
+That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism,
+although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the
+impulse towards the penetration of an artist's consciousness is in
+itself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism,
+provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final critical
+judgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea. Such a
+diagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an older
+generation than that to which it is applied. But they should not rejoice
+prematurely. We require of them an answer to the question whether they
+were really in better case--whether they were not the fathers whose sins
+are visited upon the children. Professor Babbitt, at least, has no doubt
+of their responsibility. From his angle of approach we might rake their
+ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: When you invoked the
+sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When you
+riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget
+that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical
+facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name of
+truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those
+creations of men's minds were _capax imperii_ in man's universe? What
+right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger
+for his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that same
+truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to
+bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why did
+you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the
+most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the
+greatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one
+moment pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe
+your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the
+world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who
+guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why
+did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's
+responsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you
+clothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you had
+not the time (or was it the courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce us
+because our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?
+
+But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with
+morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is
+conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital
+centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism
+inevitably involves an æsthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only
+temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a
+supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an
+adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is
+no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two.
+The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised,
+and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last
+resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality
+affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literature
+should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty
+prevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of
+the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a
+deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as
+he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was an
+age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than
+this. Its philosophy has played it false. It has passed from the
+nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would
+have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of
+Aristotle's _Poetics_, the mere title, _The Philosophy of History_ would
+have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of
+instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man _is_ a beast'; from the
+other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment of reason is
+to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the
+imagination, the vital principle of control.
+
+Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our
+senses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain
+that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a
+remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the
+world. It is the confusion between existence and value. That strange
+malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress
+was supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, and
+which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a
+literature of objective realism. One of the most admired of
+contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of a
+mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of
+almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such
+reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled
+her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers
+who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when
+they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older
+generation. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical
+outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously
+cherished? They may not like the bastard progeny of the various
+mistresses they adored--of a Science which they enthroned above instead
+of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the
+so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane
+devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which
+appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute
+indolence--but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it.
+Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the æsthetic and
+moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt's indictment
+of themselves and decide whether they have no sin:--
+
+    '"If I am to judge by myself," said an eighteenth-century Frenchman,
+    "man is a stupid animal." Man is not only a stupid animal, in spite
+    of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source
+    of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that Buddha,
+    with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. In spite of
+    the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material
+    success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this
+    effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance.
+    An energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the
+    failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. Just
+    this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the
+    ages--the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been
+    witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a
+    vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for
+    one another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a
+    world which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in
+    spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be
+    caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution
+    of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse
+    in some respects than that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success
+    that has been obtained in 'perfecting the mystery of murder.'
+    Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up
+    the beast in man. Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the
+    leadership of the Occident is no longer here. The leaders have
+    succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been
+    tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks
+    no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this
+    law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with
+    brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own
+    soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way,
+    for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with
+    the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding
+    of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a
+    necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of
+    wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he
+    wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the
+    facts. But the veto power is itself a fact--the weightiest with
+    which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off
+    traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet
+    without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both
+    Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority
+    that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the
+    veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on
+    hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be
+    proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their
+    wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.'
+
+We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this
+indictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the
+universe in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller and
+larger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger
+in spiritual possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of science
+seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an
+invitation to disaster. Humanism must reassert itself, for even we can
+see that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets. The reassertion of
+humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and
+conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual
+to this ideal. There must now be a period of critical and humanistic
+positivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say frankly that it is
+not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. We regard
+them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, It
+is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new
+traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are more
+keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are
+trembling.
+
+[FEBRUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Poetry and Criticism_
+
+
+Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways
+peculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning
+was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently
+more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in a
+curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled
+by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of
+extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come
+out of it. Having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry
+is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds
+for some fuller justification of the poetic activity. A presentiment
+that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable
+with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard
+should be once more created and applied.
+
+What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a
+world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a
+glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom? All these things--all
+different, yet not all contradictory--have been required of poetry. What
+shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as
+vague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded
+of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be
+adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a
+culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete
+universality.
+
+Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand
+these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is a
+lyrical age.' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that
+poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always
+been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all
+experience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there
+have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately
+made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching
+experience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great
+lyrical poetry. Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental
+achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always
+been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel
+of the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable.
+
+Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and
+not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the
+condition of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_ or Milton's
+_Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the
+colloquial prose of Tchehov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good a claim to be
+called poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ as _The
+Ring and the Book_, _The Possessed_ as _Phèdre_? Where are we to call a
+halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge
+into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in
+danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon
+what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference.
+The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.
+
+The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt's _New Study of English
+Poetry_ is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage,
+sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highest
+spiritual activity of man. It has seldom been our good fortune to read a
+book of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call
+a purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim is
+single, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on a
+matter of infinite moment. Perhaps better, because subtler, books of
+literary criticism have appeared in England during the last ten
+years--if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more truly
+tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product of
+a soul in which no lie remains. Whether it is that Sir Henry has like
+Plato's Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know,
+but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus's
+peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods and
+left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate.
+
+Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newbolt
+should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to
+the same kind. It is important not because there is anything very novel
+in the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune
+because at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital
+element that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. The
+general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it
+loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact
+that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are
+legion. An age of fiddlesticks! Whatever the present age is--and it is
+an age of many interesting characteristics--it is not an age of poetry.
+It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of
+five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the
+impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. The differentia
+of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or
+literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. Where you
+have the evidence of that act, the sovereign æsthetic process, there you
+have poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or
+both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which
+those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does not
+suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be
+content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each
+single act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is the
+comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is not
+sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's _Arabia_ or Mr
+Davies's _Lovely Dames_ or Miss Katherine Mansfield's _Prelude_ or Mr
+Eliot's _Portrait of a Lady_, in each of which the vital act of
+intuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish a
+hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly
+comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must be
+prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its
+kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been
+created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.
+
+That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one
+which is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type of
+criticism which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation and
+appreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitive
+comprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. Where
+there are real poets--and only a bigot will deny that there are real
+poets among us now: we have just named four--there will always be true
+criticism of poetic method, though it may seldom find utterance in the
+printed word. But criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, no
+perspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing under
+the aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily most often does,
+assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life of
+man; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the standards
+that are implicit in such an assumption. That is the function of
+philosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined with
+criticism of method--and there is no reason why they should not coexist
+in a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenth
+century, Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind--so much the better;
+but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need
+at this moment.
+
+A good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets we
+possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the
+kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to
+point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must
+inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if
+a non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not
+to urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their
+work. Who but a fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or Miss
+Mansfield to give us a novel? But he might be a wise man who called upon
+Mr Eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and
+without a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who should
+summon the popular imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot to
+begin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired
+to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of
+unprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have so
+far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid
+imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the
+attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus. There is something
+heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an altitude.
+
+Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a
+continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately
+in every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on
+to the horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplines
+sensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the
+counterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of
+one's own or the nation's affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held
+up to ridicule. Opportunism in politics has its complement in
+opportunism in poetry. Mr Lloyd George's moods are reflected in Mr
+----'s. And, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of a
+whole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poetic
+intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at any
+disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. Perhaps they
+will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of
+literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction
+they will have. They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the
+acid of philosophical criticism. If a reaction to life has in itself the
+seeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. If a
+young poet's nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant of
+anything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of being
+refined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of the
+appropriate mechanism or myth. But to register the mere facts of
+consciousness, undigested by the being, without assessment or
+reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry,
+no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets.
+
+We do not wish to suggest that Sir Henry Newbolt would regard this
+lengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction. He, we think, is a
+good deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate to
+work out the consequences of the principles which he enunciates and
+apply them vigorously to the present time. But as a vindication of the
+supreme place of poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus to
+critical thought and a guide to exquisite appreciation of which his
+essay on Chaucer is an honourable example--_A New Study of English
+Poetry_ deserves all the praise that lies in our power to give.
+
+[MARCH, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Coleridge's Criticism_
+
+
+It is probably true that _Biographia Literaria_ is the best book of
+criticism in the English language; nevertheless, it is rash to assume
+that it is a book of criticism of the highest excellence, even when it
+has passed through the salutary process of drastic editing, such as that
+to which, in the present case,[15] the competent hands of Mr George
+Sampson have submitted it. Its garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage,
+the marks which even the finest portions show of submersion in the tepid
+transcendentalism that wrought such havoc upon Coleridge's mind--these
+are its familiar disfigurements. They are not easily removed; for they
+enter fairly deeply even in the texture of those portions of the book in
+which Coleridge devotes himself, as severely as he can, to the proper
+business of literary criticism.
+
+   [Footnote 15: _Coleridge: Biographia Literaria_, Chapters I.-IV.,
+   XIV.-XXII.--_Wordsworth: Prefaces and Essays on Poetry_, 1800-1815.
+   Edited by George Sampson, with an Introductory Essay by Sir Arthur
+   Quiller-Couch. (Cambridge University Press.)]
+
+It may be that the prolixity with which he discusses and refutes the
+poetical principles expounded by Wordsworth in the preface of _Lyrical
+Ballads_ was due to the tenderness of his consideration for Wordsworth's
+feelings, an influence to which Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch directs our
+attention in his introduction. That is honourable to Coleridge as a man;
+but it cannot exculpate him as a critic. For the points he had to make
+for and against Wordsworth were few and simple. First, he had to show
+that the theory of a poetic diction drawn exclusively from the language
+of 'real life' was based upon an equivocation, and therefore was
+useless. This Coleridge had to show to clear himself of the common
+condemnation in which he had been involved, as one wrongly assumed to
+endorse Wordsworth's theory. He had an equally important point to make
+for Wordsworth. He wished to prove to him that the finest part of his
+poetic achievement was based upon a complete neglect of this theory, and
+that the weakest portions of his work were those in which he most
+closely followed it. In this demonstration he was moved by the desire to
+set his friend on the road that would lead to the most triumphant
+exercise of his own powers.
+
+There is no doubt that Coleridge made both his points; but he made them,
+in particular the former, at exceeding length, and at the cost of a good
+deal of internal contradiction. He sets out, in the former case, to
+maintain that the language of poetry is essentially different from the
+language of prose. This he professes to deduce from a number of
+principles. His axiom--and it is possibly a sound one--is that metre
+originated in a spontaneous effort of the mind to hold in check the
+workings of emotion. From this, he argues, it follows that to justify
+the existence of metre, the language of a poem must show evidence of
+emotion, by being different from the language of prose. Further, he
+says, metre in itself stimulates the emotions, and for this condition of
+emotional excitement 'correspondent food' must be provided. Thirdly, the
+emotion of poetical composition itself demands this same 'correspondent
+food.' The final argument, if we omit one drawn from an obscure theory
+of imitation very characteristic of Coleridge, is the incontrovertible
+appeal to the authority of the poets.
+
+Unfortunately, the elaborate exposition of the first three arguments is
+not only unnecessary but confusing, for Coleridge goes on to
+distinguish, interestingly enough, between a language proper to poetry,
+a language proper to prose, and a neutral language which may be used
+indifferently in prose and poetry, and later still he quotes a beautiful
+passage from Chaucer's _Troilus and Cressida_ as an example of this
+neutral language, forgetting that, if his principles are correct,
+Chaucer was guilty of a sin against art in writing _Troilus and
+Cressida_ in metre. The truth, of course, is that the paraphernalia of
+principles goes by the board. In order to refute the Wordsworthian
+theory of a language of real life supremely fitted for poetry you have
+only to point to the great poets, and to judge the fitness of the
+language of poetry you can only examine the particular poem. Wordsworth
+was wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but Coleridge was
+equally wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre
+_necessitated_ a language essentially different from that of prose.
+
+So it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literary
+criticism of the _Biographia_ takes us nowhere in particular. The
+valuable part is contained in his critical appreciation of Wordsworth's
+poetry and that amazing chapter--a little forlorn, as most of
+Coleridge's fine chapters are--on 'the specific symptoms of poetic power
+elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_.
+In these few pages Coleridge is at the summit of his powers as a critic.
+So long as his attention could be fixed on a particular object, so long
+as he was engaged in deducing his general principles immediately from
+particular instances of the highest kind of poetic excellence, he was a
+critic indeed. Every one of the four points characteristic of early
+poetic genius which he formulates deserves to be called back to the mind
+again and again:--
+
+    'The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty
+    excess, if it be evidently original and not the result of an easily
+    imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the
+    compositions of a young man....
+
+    'A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote
+    from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself.
+    At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately
+    from the author's personal sensations and experiences the excellence
+    of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a
+    fallacious pledge, of genuine poetical power....
+
+    'Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature,
+    and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves
+    characterise the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as
+    far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated
+    thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the
+    effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant;
+    or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them
+    from the poet's own spirit....
+
+    'The last character ... which would prove indeed but little, except
+    as taken conjointly with the former--yet without which the former
+    could scarce exist in a high degree ... is _depth_ and _energy_ of
+    _thought_. No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the
+    same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the
+    fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions,
+    emotions, language.'
+
+In the context the most striking peculiarity of this enunciation of the
+distinguishing marks of poetic power, apart from the conviction which it
+brings, is that they are not in the least concerned with the actual
+language of poetry. The whole subject of poetic diction is dropped when
+Coleridge's critical, as opposed to his logical, faculty is at work;
+and, although this Chapter XV is followed by many pages devoted to the
+analysis and refutation of the Wordsworthian theory and to the
+establishment of those principles of poetic diction to which we have
+referred, when Coleridge comes once more to engage his pure critical
+faculty, in the appreciation of Wordsworth's actual poetry in Chapter
+XXII, we again find him ignoring his own principles precisely on those
+occasions when we might have thought them applicable.
+
+Coleridge enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, he
+says, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke his
+principles: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style
+which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it
+into the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry;
+_second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutral
+or common to both.' But in the very first instance which Coleridge
+gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair,
+and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. He
+gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind Highland
+Boy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting,
+had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of
+probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):--
+
+  'And one, the rarest, was a shell
+  Which he, poor child, had studied well:
+  The Shell of a green Turtle, thin
+  And hollow;--you might sit therein,
+      It was so wide, and deep.
+
+  'Our Highland Boy oft visited
+  The house which held this prize; and led
+  By choice or chance, did thither come
+  One day, when no one was at home,
+      And found the door unbarred.'
+
+The discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it
+does not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworth
+has used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus
+of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the
+detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of
+the poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, however,
+indubitable:--
+
+  'Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest.
+  And though little troubled with sloth,
+  Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth
+  To be such a traveller as I.
+      Happy, happy liver!
+  _With a soul as strong as a mountain River
+  Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver_,
+  Joy and jollity be with us both,
+  Hearing thee or else some other
+      As merry as a Brother
+  I on the earth will go plodding on,
+  By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.'
+
+The two lines in italics are discordant. But again it is no question of
+language in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of a
+whole already debilitated by metrical insecurity.
+
+Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a _matter-of-factness_
+in certain poems.' Once more there is no question of language. Coleridge
+takes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth's
+obsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential
+catholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested in
+laboriously exact description both of places and persons. The poet
+sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for no
+reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediate
+object a moral end instead of the giving of æsthetic pleasure. His
+prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable
+that they should be of this condition--it is on the contrary highly
+improbable--but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral
+lesson. The question of language in itself, if it enters at all here,
+enters only as the indifferent means by which a non-poetic end is
+sought. The accidentality lies not in the words, but in the poet's
+intention.
+
+Coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for the
+dramatic form,' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought,'
+may be passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case they
+could only be the cause of a jejuneness of language. The fifth, more
+interesting, is the appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for the
+subject ... an approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast.'
+Coleridge brings forward as his first instance of this four lines which
+have taken a deep hold on the affections of later generations:--
+
+  'They flash upon the inward eye
+  Which is the bliss of solitude!
+  And then my heart with pleasure fills
+  And dances with the daffodils.'
+
+Coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet after
+the first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that
+verdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a
+description of physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting to
+note that the objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner which
+confirms Coleridge's criticism. The 'inward eye' is almost universally
+remembered apart from its context, and interpreted as a description of
+the purely spiritual process to which alone, in Coleridge's opinion, it
+was truly apt.
+
+The enumeration of Wordsworth's excellences which follows is masterly;
+and the exhilaration with which one rises through the crescendo to the
+famous: 'Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
+_Imagination_ in the highest and strictest sense of the word ...' is
+itself a pleasure to be derived only from the gift of criticism of the
+highest and strictest kind.
+
+The object of this examination has been to show, not that the
+_Biographia Literaria_ is undeserving of the high praise which has been
+bestowed upon it, but that the praise has been to some extent
+undiscriminating. It has now become almost a tradition to hold up to our
+admiration Coleridge's chapter on poetic diction, and Sir Arthur
+Quiller-Couch, in a preface that is as unconventional in manner as it is
+stimulating in most of its substance, maintains the tradition. As a
+matter of fact, what Coleridge has to say on poetic diction is prolix
+and perilously near commonplace. Instead of making to Wordsworth the
+wholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest kind employs a
+language that by no perversion can be called essentially the same as the
+language of prose, he allows himself to be led by his German metaphysic
+into considering poetry as a _Ding an sich_ and deducing therefrom the
+proposition that poetry _must_ employ a language different from that of
+prose. That proposition is false, as Coleridge himself quite adequately
+shows from his remarks upon what he called the 'neutral' language of
+Chaucer and Herbert. But instead of following up the clue and beginning
+to inquire whether or not narrative poetry by nature demands a language
+approximating to that of prose, and whether Wordsworth, in so far as he
+aimed at being a narrative poet, was not working on a correct but
+exaggerated principle, he leaves the bald contradiction and swerves off
+to the analysis of the defects and excellences of Wordsworth's actual
+achievement. Precisely because we consider it of the greatest importance
+that the best of Coleridge's criticism should be studied and studied
+again, we think it unfortunate that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should
+recommend the apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart.
+He will be condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubious
+logic and a false conclusion. What is worth while learning from
+Coleridge is something different; it is not his behaviour with 'a
+principle,' but his conduct when confronted with poetry in the concrete,
+his magisterial ordonnance (to use his own word) and explication of his
+own æsthetic intuitions, and his manner of employing in this, the
+essential task of poetic criticism, the results of his own deep study of
+all the great poetry that he knew.
+
+[APRIL, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Shakespeare Criticism_
+
+
+It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the
+great modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover. One derives from
+the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which
+cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his
+merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to
+have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to
+admire the amazing erudition of Steevens. One sees the phases of the
+curious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of
+the nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal man of genius could
+breathe. For a dizzy moment every line that he wrote bore the authentic
+impress of the divine. _Efflavit deus_. In a century, from being largely
+beneath criticism Shakespeare had passed to a condition where he was
+almost completely beyond it.
+
+_King John_ affords an amusing instance of this reverential attitude.
+The play, as is generally known, was based upon a slightly earlier and
+utterly un-Shakespearean production entitled _The Troublesome Raigne of
+King John_. The only character Shakespeare added to those he found ready
+to his hand was that of James Gurney, who enters with Lady Falconbridge
+after the scene between the Bastard and his brother, says four words,
+and departs for ever.
+
+  '_Bast_.--James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?
+
+  _Gur_.--Good leave, good Philip.
+
+  _Bast_.--Philip! Sparrow! James.'
+
+It is obvious that Shakespeare's sole motive in introducing Gurney is to
+provide an occasion for the Bastard's characteristic, though not to a
+modern mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that Philip was at
+the time a common name for a sparrow. The Bastard, just dubbed Sir
+Richard Plantagenet by the King, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at his
+former name, Philip, to which he had just shown such breezy
+indifference. The jest could not have been made to Lady Falconbridge
+without a direct insult to her, which would have been alien to the
+natural, blunt, and easygoing fondness of the relation which Shakespeare
+establishes between the Bastard and his mother. So Gurney is quite
+casually brought in to receive it. But this is not enough for the
+Shakespeare-drunken Coleridge.
+
+    'For an instance of Shakespeare's power _in minimis_, I generally
+    quote James Gurney's character in _King John_. How individual and
+    comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!'
+
+Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge's title
+as a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. He is the
+greatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is
+displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play.
+In Act III, scene ii., Warburton's emendation of 'airy' to 'fiery' had
+in Coleridge's day been received into the text of the Bastard's lines:--
+
+  'Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
+  Some airy devil hovers in the sky.'
+
+On which Coleridge writes:--
+
+    'I prefer the old text: the word 'devil' implies 'fiery.' You need
+    only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil,'
+    to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's
+    alteration.'
+
+The test is absolutely convincing--a poet's criticism of poetry. But
+that Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence
+of his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that
+is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume
+of the modern _Variorum_. There has been much editing, much comment, but
+singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread
+to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from
+niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing
+exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a
+typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon
+the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, _King John_ is an
+intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate
+the idea of treachery.' We remember that Mr Masefield has much better
+than this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon
+this sentence because it is set before us in the _Variorum_, and because
+it too 'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions
+illustrates his idea of criticism.' Genetically, it is a continuation of
+the shoddy element in Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism, a continual
+bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take the
+origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the
+feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object)
+after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer
+part of Coleridge's brain.
+
+_King John_ is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerous
+influence, has persuaded himself it is. It is simply the effort of a
+young man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. The
+effort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a
+good one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising. The miracle is
+that anything should have been made of _The Troublesome Raigne_ at all.
+The _Variorum_ extracts show that, of the many commentators who studied
+the old play with Shakespeare's version, only Swinburne saw, or had the
+courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. To have made
+Shakespeare's Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created
+the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that
+decrepit skeleton--that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on
+the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no
+doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination.
+
+But 'ideas of treachery'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been
+beguiled by Coleridge's laudanum trances? A limbo--of this we are
+confident--where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life,
+and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We
+must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our
+eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good)
+play. Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the
+influence and ravages of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, but
+merely a Shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic genius
+which can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist every
+attempt at invasion by the 'idea'-bacillus.
+
+In considering a Shakespeare play the word 'idea' had best be kept out
+of the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it might
+be intelligibly used. You might call the dramatic skeleton Shakespeare's
+idea of the play. It is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in the
+work of poetic creation--the necessary means by which a poet can
+conveniently explicate and express his manifold æsthetic intuitions.
+This dramatic skeleton is governed by laws of its own, which were first
+and most brilliantly formulated by Aristotle in terms that, in
+essentials, hold good for all time. You may investigate this skeleton,
+seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by which it is differentiated
+from all other skeletons; you may say, for instance, that _Othello_ is a
+tragedy of jealousy, or _Hamlet_ of the inhibition of self-consciousness.
+But if your 'idea' is to have any substance it must be moulded very
+closely upon the particular object with which you are dealing; and in
+the end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individual
+characters.
+
+On the other hand, the word 'idea' might be intelligibly used of
+Shakespeare's whole attitude to the material of his contemplation, the
+centre of comprehension from which he worked, the aspect under which he
+viewed the universe of his interest. There is no reason to rest content
+with Coleridge's application of the epithet 'myriad-minded,' which is,
+at the best, an evasion of a vital question. The problem is to see
+Shakespeare's mind _sub specie unitatis_. It can be done; there never
+has been and never will be a human mind which can resist such an inquiry
+if it is pursued with sufficient perseverance and understanding. What
+chiefly stands in the way is that tradition of Shakespeariolatry which
+Coleridge so powerfully inaugurated, not least by the epithet
+'myriad-minded.'
+
+But of 'ideas' in any other senses than these--and in neither of these
+cases is 'idea' the best word for the object of search--let us beware as
+we would of the plague, in criticism of Shakespeare or any other great
+poet. Poets do not have 'ideas'; they have perceptions. They do not have
+an 'idea'; they have comprehension. Their creation is æsthetic, and the
+working of their mind proceeds from the realisation of one æsthetic
+perception to that of another, more comprehensive if they are to be
+great poets having within them the principle of poetic growth. There is
+undoubtedly an organic process in the evolution of a great poet, which
+you may, for convenience of expression, call logical; but the moment you
+forget that the use of the word 'logic,' in this context, is
+metaphorical, you are in peril. You can follow out this 'logical
+process' in a poet only by a kindred creative process of æsthetic
+perception passing into æsthetic comprehension. The hunt for 'ideas'
+will only make that process impossible; it prevents the object from ever
+making its own impression upon the mind. It has to speak with the
+language of logic, whereas its use and function in the world is to speak
+with a language not of logic, but of a process of mind which is at least
+as sovereign in its own right as the discursive reason.
+
+Let us away then with 'logic' and away with 'ideas' from the art of
+literary criticism; but not, in a foolish and impercipient reaction, to
+revive the impressionistic criticism which has sapped the English brain
+for a generation past. The art of criticism is rigorous; impressions are
+merely its raw material; the life-blood of its activity is in the
+process of ordonnance of æsthetic impressions.
+
+It is time, however, to return for a moment to Shakespeare, and to
+observe in one crucial instance the effect of the quest for logic in a
+single line. In the fine scene where John hints to Hubert at Arthur's
+murder, he speaks these lines (in the First Folio text):--
+
+  'I had a thing to say, but let it goe:
+  The Sunne is in the heauen, and the proud day,
+  Attended with the pleasure of the world,
+  Is all too wanton, and too full of gawdes
+  To giue me audience: If the midnight bell
+  Did with his yron tongue, and brazen mouth
+  Sound on into the drowzie race of night,
+  If this same were a Churchyard where we stand,
+  And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs:
+  ... Then, in despight of brooded watchfull day,
+  I would into thy bosome poure my thoughts....'
+
+If one had to choose the finest line in this passage, the choice would
+fall upon
+
+  'Sound on into the drowsy race of night.'
+
+Yet you will have to look hard for it in the modern editions of
+Shakespeare. At the best you will find it with the mark of corruption:--
+
+  +'Sound on into the drowsy race of night ('Globe');
+
+and you run quite a risk of finding
+
+  'Sound one into the drowsy race of night' ('Oxford').
+
+There are six pages of close-printed comment upon the line in the
+_Variorum_. The only reason, we can see, why it should be the most
+commented line in _King John_ is that it is one of the most beautiful.
+No one could stand it. Of all the commentators, only one, Miss Porter,
+whom we name _honoris causa_, stands by the line with any conviction of
+its beauty. Every other person either alters it or regrets his inability
+to alter it.
+
+'How can a bell sound on into a race?' pipe the little editors. What is
+'the race of night?' What _can_ it mean? How _could_ a race be drowsy?
+What an _awful_ contradiction in terms! And so while you and I, and all
+the other ordinary lovers of Shakespeare are peacefully sleeping in our
+beds, they come along with their little chisels, and chop out the
+horribly illogical word and pop in a horribly logical one, and we
+(unless we can afford the _Variorum_, which we can't) know nothing
+whatever about it. We have no redress. If we get out of our beds and
+creep upon them while they are asleep--they never are--and take out our
+little chisels and chop off their horribly stupid little heads, we shall
+be put in prison and Mr Justice Darling will make a horribly stupid
+little joke about us. There is only one thing to do. We must make up our
+minds that we have to combine in our single person the scholar and the
+amateur; we cannot trust these gentlemen.
+
+And, indeed, they have been up to their little games elsewhere in _King
+John_. They do not like the reply of the citizens of Angiers to the
+summons of the rival kings:--
+
+  'A greater powre than We denies all this,
+  And till it be undoubted, we do locke
+  Our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates;
+  Kings of our feare, untill our feares resolu'd
+  Be by some certaine king, purg'd and depos'd.'
+
+Admirable sense, excellent poetry. But no! We must not have it. Instead
+we are given 'King'd of our fears' ('Globe') or 'Kings of ourselves'
+('Oxford'). Bad sense, bad poetry.
+
+They do not like Pandulph's speech to France:--
+
+  'France, thou maist hold a serpent by the tongue,
+  A cased lion by the mortall paw,
+  A fasting tiger safer by the tooth
+  Than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold.'
+
+'Cased,' caged, is too much for them. We must have 'chafed,' in spite of
+
+  'If thou would'st not entomb thyself alive
+  And case thy reputation in thy tent.'
+
+Again, the Folio text of the meeting between the Bastard and Hubert in
+Act V., when Hubert fails to recognise the Bastard's voice, runs thus:--
+
+  'Unkinde remembrance: thou and endles night,
+  Have done me shame: Brave Soldier, pardon me
+  That any accent breaking from thy tongue
+  Should scape the true acquaintaince of mine eare.'
+
+This time 'endless' is not poetical enough for the editors. Theobald's
+emendation 'eyeless' is received into the text. One has only to read the
+brief scene through to realise that Hubert is wearied and obsessed by
+the night that will never end. He is overwrought by his knowledge of
+
+             'news fitting to the night,
+  Black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible,'
+
+and by his long wandering in search of the Bastard:--
+
+  'Why, here I walk in the black brow of night
+  To find you out.'
+
+Yet the dramatically perfect 'endless' has had to make way for the
+dramatically stupid 'eyeless.' Is it surprising that we do not trust
+these gentlemen?
+
+[APRIL, 1920
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Aspects of Literature, by J. Middleton Murry
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aspects of Literature, by J. Middleton Murry
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Aspects of Literature
+
+Author: J. Middleton Murry
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2005 [EBook #14637]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPECTS OF LITERATURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Amy Cunningham and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ASPECTS OF
+LITERATURE
+
+J. MIDDLETON MURRY
+
+
+NEW YORK:
+ALFRED A. KNOPF
+MCMXX
+
+
+Copyright, 1920
+
+_Printed in Great Britain_
+
+
+
+TO
+BRUCE RICHMOND
+TO WHOSE GENEROUS ENCOURAGEMENT
+I OWE SO MUCH
+
+
+
+
+_Preface_
+
+
+Two of these essays, 'The Function of Criticism' and 'The Religion of
+Rousseau,' were contributed to the _Times Literary Supplement_; that on
+'The Poetry of Edward Thomas' in the _Nation_; all the rest save one
+have appeared in the _Athenaeum_.
+
+The essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, with
+two exceptions. The second part of the essay on Tchehov has been placed
+with the first for convenience, although in order of thought it should
+follow the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness.' More important, I have
+placed 'The Function of Criticism' first although it was written last,
+because it treats of the broad problem of literary criticism, suggests a
+standard of values implicit elsewhere in the book, and thus to some
+degree affords an introduction to the remaining essays.
+
+But the degree is not great, as the critical reader will quickly
+discover for himself. I ask him not to indulge the temptation of
+convicting me out of my own mouth. I am aware that my practice is often
+inconsistent with my professions; and I ask the reader to remember that
+the professions were made after the practice and to a considerable
+extent as the result of it. The practice came first, and if I could
+reasonably expect so much of the reader I would ask him to read 'The
+Function of Criticism' once more when he has reached the end of the
+book.
+
+I make no apology for not having rewritten the essays. As a critic I
+enjoy nothing more than to trace the development of a writer's attitude
+through its various phases; I could do no less than afford my readers
+the opportunity of a similar enjoyment in my own case. They may be
+assured that none of the essays have suffered any substantial
+alteration, even where, for instance in the case of the incidental and
+(I am now persuaded) quite inadequate estimate of Chaucer in 'The
+Nostalgia of Mr Masefield,' my view has since completely changed. Here
+and there I have recast expressions which, though not sufficiently
+conveying my meaning, had been passed in the haste of journalistic
+production. But I have nowhere tried to adjust earlier to later points
+of view. I am aware that these points of view are often difficult to
+reconcile; that, for instance, 'aesthetic' in the essay on Tchehov has a
+much narrower meaning than it bears in 'The Function of Criticism'; that
+the essay on 'The Religion of Rousseau' is criticism of a kind which I
+deprecate as insufficient in the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness,'
+because it lacks that reference to life as a whole which I have come to
+regard as essential to criticism; and that in this latter essay I use
+the word 'moral' (for instance in the phrase 'The values of literature
+are in the last resort moral') in a sense which is never exactly
+defined. The key to most of these discrepancies will, I hope, be found
+in the introductory essay on 'The Function of Criticism.'
+
+_May_, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Contents_
+
+
+THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM                    1
+
+THE RELIGION OF ROUSSEAU                    15
+
+THE POETRY OF EDWARD THOMAS                 29
+
+MR YEATS'S SWAN SONG                        39
+
+THE WISDOM OF ANATOLE FRANCE                46
+
+GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS                       52
+
+THE PROBLEM OF KEATS                        62
+
+THOUGHTS ON TCHEHOV                         76
+
+AMERICAN POETRY                             91
+
+RONSARD                                     99
+
+SAMUEL BUTLER                              107
+
+THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY                 121
+
+THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ENGLISH POETRY    139
+
+THE NOSTALGIA OF MR MASEFIELD              150
+
+THE LOST LEGIONS                           157
+
+THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS                  167
+
+POETRY AND CRITICISM                       176
+
+COLERIDGE'S CRITICISM                      184
+
+SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM                      194
+
+
+
+
+_The Function of Criticism_
+
+
+It is curious and interesting to find our younger men of letters
+actively concerned with the present condition of literary criticism.
+This is a novel preoccupation for them and one which is, we believe,
+symptomatic of a general hesitancy and expectation. In the world of
+letters everything is a little up in the air, volatile and
+uncrystallised. It is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite of
+outward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half a
+dozen years ago. Then one had a tolerable certainty that the new star,
+if the new star was to appear, would burst upon our vision in the shape
+of a novel. To-day we feel it might be anything. The cloud no bigger
+than a man's hand might even be, like Trigorin's in 'The Sea-gull,' like
+a piano; it has no predetermined form.
+
+This sense of incalculability, which has been aroused by the prodigious
+literary efflorescence of late years, reacts upon its cause; and the
+reaction tends by many different paths to express itself finally in the
+ventilation of problems that hinge about criticism. There is a general
+feeling that the growth of the young plant has been too luxuriant; a
+desire to have it vigorously pruned by a capable gardener, in order that
+its strength may be gathered together to produce a more perfect fruit.
+There is also a sense that if the _lusus naturae_, the writer of genius,
+were to appear, there ought to be a person or an organisation capable of
+recognising him, however unexpected his scent or the shape of his
+leaves. Both these tasks fall upon criticism. The younger generation
+looks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a gardener whom
+it can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that there is
+none.
+
+There is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we have
+learned to respect. There are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but no
+critics, says another disrespectful young man. Oh, for some more Scotch
+Reviewers to settle the hash of our English bards, sighs a third. And
+the _London Mercury_, after whetting our appetite by announcing that it
+proposed to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, still
+leaves us a little in the dark as to what these standards are. Mr T.S.
+Eliot deals more kindly, if more frigidly, with us in the _Monthly
+Chapbook_. There are, he says, three kinds of criticism--the historical,
+the philosophic, and the purely literary.
+
+    'Every form of genuine criticism is directed towards creation. The
+    historical or philosophic critic of poetry is criticising poetry in
+    order to create a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is
+    criticising poetry in order to create poetry.'
+
+These separate and distinct kinds, he considers, are but rarely found
+to-day, even in a fragmentary form; where they do exist, they are almost
+invariably mingled in an inextricable confusion.
+
+Whether we agree or not with the general condemnation of reviewing
+implicit in this survey of the situation, or with the division of
+criticism itself, we have every reason to be grateful to Mr Eliot for
+disentangling the problem for us. The question of criticism has become
+rather like Glaucus the sea-god, encrusted with shells and hung with
+weed till his lineaments are hardly discernible. We have at least clear
+sight of him now, and we are able to decide whether we will accept Mr
+Eliot's description of him. Let us see.
+
+We have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism of
+literature is a kind apart. The historical critic approaches literature
+as the manifestation of an evolutionary process in which all the phases
+are of equal value. Essentially, he has no concern with the greater or
+less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces--their
+existence is alone sufficient for him; a bad book is as important as a
+good one, and much more important than a good one if it exercised, as
+bad books have a way of doing, a real influence on the course of
+literature. In practice, it is true, the historical critic generally
+fails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity. He either begins by
+making judgments of value for himself, or accepts those judgments which
+have been endorsed by tradition. He fastens upon a number of outstanding
+figures and more or less deliberately represents the process as from
+culmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitrary
+foreshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phases
+which he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of the
+group of writers which it includes. The individuality, the quintessence,
+of a writer lies completely outside his view.
+
+We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in
+theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the
+author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we
+isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? And what exactly _is_ a
+philosophic critic? Is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in which
+art and literature have their places, a critic who therefore approaches
+literature with a definite conception of it as one among many parallel
+manifestations of the human spirit, and with a system of values derived
+from his metaphysical scheme? Hegel and Croce are philosophical critics
+in this sense, and Aristotle is not, as far as we can judge from the
+Poetics, wherein he considers the literary work of Greece as an isolated
+phenomenon, and examines it in and for itself. But for the moment, and
+with the uneasy sense that we have not thoroughly laid the ghost of
+philosophic criticism, we will assume that we have isolated him, and
+pass to the consideration of the pure literary critic, if indeed we can
+find him.
+
+What does he do? How shall we recognise him? Mr Eliot puts before us
+Coleridge and Aristotle and Dryden as literary critics _par excellence_
+arranged in an ascending scale of purity. The concatenation is curious,
+for these were men possessed of very different interests and faculties
+of mind; and it would occur to few to place Dryden, as a critic, at
+their head. The living centre of Aristotle's criticism is a conception
+of art as a means to a good life. As an activity, poetry 'is more
+philosophic than history,' a nearer approach to the universal truth in
+appearances; and as a more active influence, drama refines our spiritual
+being by a purgation of pity and terror. Indeed, it would not be an
+exaggeration to say that the very pith and marrow of Aristotle's
+literary criticism is a system of moral values derived from his
+contemplation of life. It was necessary that this relation should exist,
+because for Aristotle literature was, essentially, an imitation of life
+though we must remember to understand imitation according to our final
+sense of the theme which is the golden, persistent thread throughout the
+Poetics. The imitation of life in literature was for Aristotle, the
+creative revelation of the ideal actively at work in human life. The
+tragic hero failed because his composition was less than ideal; but he
+could only be a tragic hero if the ideal was implicit in him and he
+visibly approximated to it. It is this constant reference to the ideal
+which makes of 'imitation' a truly creative principle and the one which,
+properly understood, is the most permanently valid and pregnant of all;
+it is also one which has been constantly misunderstood. Its importance
+is, nevertheless, so central that adequate recognition of it might
+conceivably be taken as the distinguishing mark of all fruitful
+criticism.
+
+To his sympathetic understanding of this principle Coleridge owed a
+great debt. It is true that his efforts to refine upon it were not only
+unsuccessful, but a trifle ludicrous; his effort to graft the vague
+transcendentalism of Germany on to the rigour and clarity of Aristotle
+was, from the outset, unfortunately conceived. But the root of the
+matter was there, and in Coleridge's fertile mind the Aristotelian
+theory of imitation flowered into a magnificent conception of the
+validity and process of the poetic imagination. And partly because the
+foundation was truly Aristotelian, partly because Coleridge had known
+what it was to be a great poet, the reference to life pervades the
+whole of what is permanently valuable in Coleridge's criticism. In him,
+too, there is a strict and mutually fertilising relation between the
+moral and the aesthetic values. This is the firm ground beneath his feet
+when he--too seldom--proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisite
+aesthetic discrimination.
+
+In Dryden, however, there was no such organic interpenetration. Dryden,
+too, had a fine sensibility, though less exquisite, by far, than that of
+Coleridge; but his theoretical system was not merely alien to him--it
+was in itself false and mistaken. _Corruptio optimi pessima_. He took
+over from France the sterilised and lifeless Aristotelianism which has
+been the plague of criticism for centuries; he used it no worse than his
+French exemplars, but he used it very little better than they. It was in
+his hands, as in theirs, a dead mechanical framework of rules about the
+unities. Dryden, we can see in his critical writing, was constantly
+chafed by it. He behaves like a fine horse with a bearing rein: he is
+continually tossing his head after a minute or two of 'good manners and
+action,' and saying, 'Shakespeare was the best of them, anyhow';
+'Chaucer beats Ovid to a standstill.' It is a gesture with which all
+decent people sympathise and when it is made in language so supple as
+Dryden's prose it has a lasting charm. Dryden's heart was in the right
+place, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him a
+critic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company of
+Aristotle and Coleridge.
+
+Our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous. We have
+seen that there is a sense in which Dryden is a purer literary critic
+than either Coleridge or Aristotle; but we have also seen that it is
+precisely by reason of the 'pureness' in him that he is to be relegated
+into a rank inferior to theirs. It looks as though we might have to
+pronounce that the true literary critic is the philosophic critic. Yet
+the pronouncement must not be prematurely made; for there is a real and
+vital difference between those for whom we have accepted the designation
+of philosophic critics, Hegel or Croce, and Aristotle or Coleridge. Yet
+three of these (and it might be wise to include Coleridge as a fourth)
+were professional philosophers. It is evidently not the philosophy as
+such that makes the difference.
+
+The difference depends, we believe, upon the nature of the philosophy.
+The secret lies in Aristotle. The true literary critic must have a
+humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, subject to an
+intimate, organic governance, by an ideal of the good life. He is not
+the mere investigator of facts; existence is never for him synonymous
+with value, and it is of the utmost importance that he should never be
+deluded into believing that it is. He will not accept from Hegel the
+thesis that all the events of human history, all man's spiritual
+activities, are equally authentic manifestations of Spirit; he will not
+even recognise the existence of Spirit. He may accept from Croce the
+thesis that art is the expression of intuitions, but he will not be
+extravagantly grateful, because his duty as a critic is to distinguish
+between intuitions and to decide that one is more significant than
+another. A philosophy of art that lends him no aid in this and affords
+no indication why the expression of one intuition should be preferred to
+the expression of another is of little value to him. He will incline to
+say that Hegel and Croce are the scientists of art rather than its
+philosophers.
+
+Here, then, is the opposition: between the philosophy that borrows its
+values from science and the philosophy which shares its values with art.
+We may put it with more cogency and truth: the opposition lies between a
+philosophy without values and a philosophy based upon them. For values
+are human, anthropocentric. Shut them out once and you shut them out for
+ever. You do not get them back, as some believe, by declaring that such
+and such a thing is true. Nothing is precious because it is true save to
+a mind which has, consciously or unconsciously, decided that it is good
+to know the truth. And the making of that single decision is a most
+momentous judgment of value. If the scientist appeals to it, as indeed
+he invariably does, he too is at bottom, though he may deny it, a
+humanist. He would do better to confess it, and to confess that he too
+is in search of the good life. Then he might become aware that to search
+for the good life is in fact impossible, unless he has an ideal of it
+before his mind's eye.
+
+An ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and
+the organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably be aesthetic_. There
+is no other power than our aesthetic intuition by which we can imagine or
+conceive it; we can express it only in aesthetic terms. We say, for
+instance, the good life is that in which man has achieved a harmony of
+the diverse elements in his soul. For the good life, we know
+instinctively, is one of our human absolutes. It is not good with
+reference to any end outside itself. A man does not live the good life
+because he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen because he lives
+the good life. And here we touch the secret of the most magnificently
+human of all books that has ever been written--Plato's _Republic_. In
+the _Republic_ the good life and the life of the good citizen are
+identified; but the citizenship is not of an earthly but of an ideal
+city, whose proportions, like the duties of its citizens, are determined
+by the aesthetic intuition. Plato's philosophy is aesthetic through and
+through, and because it is aesthetic it is the most human, the most
+permanently pregnant of all philosophies. Much labour has been spent on
+the examination of the identity which Plato established between the good
+and the beautiful. It is labour lost, for that identity is axiomatic,
+absolute, irreducible. The Greeks knew by instinct that it is so, and in
+their common speech the word for a gentleman was the _kalos kagathos_,
+the beautiful-good.
+
+This is why we have to go back to the Greeks for the principles of art
+and criticism, and why only those critics who have returned to bathe
+themselves in the life-giving source have made enduring contributions to
+criticism. They alone are--let us not say philosophic critics
+but--critics indeed. Their approach to life and their approach to art
+are the same; to them, and to them alone, life and art are one. The
+interpenetration is complete; the standards by which life and art are
+judged the same. If we may use a metaphor, in the Greek view art is the
+consciousness of life. Poetry is more philosophic and more highly
+serious than history, just as the mind of a man is more significant than
+his outward gestures. To make those gestures significant the art of the
+actor must be called into play. So to make the outward event of history
+significant the poet's art is needed. Therefore a criticism which is
+based on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place
+of sovereignty in its scheme of values. That Plato himself did not do
+this was due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of
+'imitation' in which art consists; but only the superficial readers of
+Plato--and a good many readers deserve no better name--will conclude
+from the fact that he rejected art that his attitude was not
+fundamentally aesthetic. Not only is the _Republic_ itself one of the
+greatest 'imitations,' one of the most subtle and profound works of art
+ever created, but it would also be true to say that Plato cleared the
+way for a true conception of art. In reality he rejected not art, but
+false art; and it only remained for Aristotle to discern the nature of
+the relation between artistic 'imitation' and the ideal for the Platonic
+system to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and an
+everlasting foundation for art and the criticism of art.
+
+Art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life. As the ideal is
+active and organic so must art itself be. The ideal is never achieved,
+therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense of
+the word. More than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can man
+appreciate or imagine the ideal at all. To discern it is essentially the
+work of divination or intuition. The artist divines the end at which
+human life is aiming; he makes men who are his characters completely
+expressive of themselves, which no actual man ever has been. If he works
+on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of
+himself. That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses
+himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation.
+He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be
+tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which
+are so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ of
+himself would inevitably end in confusion. That is why the great poetic
+genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often
+as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.
+
+Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in
+the world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to
+the absolute ideal. In subordinating its particular intuitions to the
+absolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign
+autonomy. True criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activity
+of art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and not
+the imposition of an alien. To use our previous metaphor, as art is the
+consciousness of life, criticism is the consciousness of art. The
+essential activity of true criticism is the harmonious control of art by
+art. This is at the root of a confusion in the thought of Mr. Eliot,
+who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of art, pronounces
+that the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle the
+anomalous Aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that 'he wrote
+well about everything,' and has, moreover, to elevate Dryden to a purple
+which he is quite unfitted to wear. No, what distinguishes the true
+critic of poetry is a truly aesthetic philosophy. In the present state
+of society it is extremely probable that only the poet or the artist
+will possess this, for art and poetry were never more profoundly
+divorced from the ordinary life of society than they are at the present
+day. But the poet who would be a critic has to make his aesthetic
+philosophy conscious to himself; to him as a poet it may be unconscious.
+This necessary change from unconsciousness to consciousness is by no
+means easy, and we should do well to insist upon its difficulty, for
+quite as much nonsense is talked about poetry by poets and by artists
+about art as by the profane about either. Moreover, it is important to
+remember that in proportion as society approaches the ideal--there is no
+continual progress towards the ideal; at present society is as far
+removed from it as it has ever been--the chance of the philosopher, of
+the scientist even, becoming a true critic of art grows greater. When
+the aesthetic basis of all humane activity is familiarly recognised, the
+values of the philosopher, the scientist, and the artist become
+consciously the same, and therefore interchangeable.
+
+Still, the ideal society is sufficiently remote for us to disregard it,
+and we shall say that the principle of art for art's sake contains an
+element of truth when it is opposed to those who would inflict upon art
+the values of science, of metaphysics, or of a morality of mere
+convention. We shall also say that the principle of art for art's sake
+needs to be understood and interpreted very differently. Its
+implications are tremendous. Art is autonomous, and to be pursued for
+its own sake, precisely because it comprehends the whole of human life;
+because it has reference to a more perfectly human morality than other
+activity of man; because, in so far as it is truly art, it is indicative
+of a more comprehensive and unchallengeable harmony in the spirit of
+man. It does not demand impossibilities, that man should be at one with
+the universe or in tune with the infinite; but it does envisage the
+highest of all attainable ideals, that man should be at one with
+himself, obedient to his own most musical law.
+
+Thus art reveals to us the principle of its own governance. The function
+of criticism is to apply it. Obviously it can be applied only by him who
+has achieved, if not the actual aesthetic ideal in life, at least a
+vision and a sense of it. He alone will know that the principle he has
+to elucidate and apply is living, organic. It is indeed the very
+principle of artistic creation itself. Therefore he will approach what
+claims to be a work of art first as a thing in itself, and seek with it
+the most intimate and immediate contact in order that he may decide
+whether it too is organic and living. He will be untiring in his effort
+to refine his power of discrimination by the frequentation of the finest
+work of the past, so that he may be sure of himself when he decides, as
+he must, whether the object before him is the expression of an aesthetic
+intuition at all. At the best he is likely to find that it is mixed and
+various; that fragments of aesthetic vision jostle with unsubordinated
+intellectual judgments.
+
+But, in regarding the work of art as a thing in itself, he will never
+forget the hierarchy of comprehension, that the active ideal of art is
+indeed to see life steadily and see it whole, and that only he has a
+claim to the title of a great artist whose work manifests an incessant
+growth from a merely personal immediacy to a coherent and
+all-comprehending attitude to life. The great artist's work is in all
+its parts a revelation of the ideal as a principle of activity in human
+life. As the apprehension of the ideal is more or less perfect, the
+artist's comprehension will be greater or less. The critic has not
+merely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and Shakespeare,
+between Dante and Milton, between Cezanne and Michelangelo, Beethoven
+and Mozart. If the foundations of his criticism are truly aesthetic, he
+is compelled to believe and to show that among would-be artists some are
+true artists and some are not, and that among true artists some are
+greater than others. That what has generally passed under the name of
+aesthetic criticism assumes as an axiom that every true work of art is
+unique and incomparable is merely the paradox which betrays the
+unworthiness of such criticism to bear the name it has arrogated to
+itself. The function of true criticism is to establish a definite
+hierarchy among the great artists of the past, as well as to test the
+production of the present; by the combination of these activities it
+asserts the organic unity of all art. It cannot honestly be said that
+our present criticism is adequate to either task.
+
+[APRIL, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Religion of Rousseau_
+
+
+These are times when men have need of the great solitaries; for each man
+now in his moment is a prey to the conviction that the world and his
+deepest aspirations are incommensurable. He is shaken by a presentiment
+that the lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human minds
+put out in a conflict for something which never can be won in the clash
+of material arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as a
+child pitifully wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoes
+the strange word 'Peace.' Therefore he too wanders pitifully like that
+child, seeking peace, and men are become the symbols of mankind. The
+tragic paradox of human life which slumbers in the soul in years of
+peace is awakened again. When we would be solitary and cannot, we are
+made sensible of the depth and validity of the impulse which moved the
+solitaries of the past.
+
+The paradox is apparent now on every hand. It appears in the death of
+the author of _La Formation Religieuse de J.J. Rousseau_.[1] One of the
+most distinguished of the younger generation of French scholar-critics,
+M. Masson met a soldier's death before the book to which he had devoted
+ten years of his life was published. He had prepared it for the press in
+the leisure hours of the trenches. There he had communed with the
+unquiet spirit of the man who once thrilled the heart of Europe by
+stammering forgotten secrets, and whispered to an age flushed and
+confident with material triumphs that the battle had been won in vain.
+Rousseau, rightly understood is no consoling companion for a soldier.
+What if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenary
+beatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the Lake of
+Bienne? What if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free but
+is everywhere in chains? Let us hope that the dead author was not too
+keenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice. His
+death would have been bitter.
+
+   [Footnote 1: _La Formation Religieuse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau_. Par
+   Pierre Maurice Masson. (Paris: Hachette. Three volumes.)]
+
+From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. His method would speak
+against it. Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of
+the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate
+to the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made.
+He had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no
+real history can be written. Chronology was meaningless to him because
+he could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. With him ends
+were beginnings. In the third _Dialogue_ he tell us--and it is nothing
+less than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well--that his
+works must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who
+would understand him. Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than
+is imagined by those who take the parable called the _Contrat Social_
+for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie to
+history. In himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grew
+younger with years. He might be known as the man of the second childhood
+_par excellence_. To the eye of history the effort of his soul was an
+effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a
+perspective of progress. On his after-dinner journey to Diderot at
+Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that
+progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so
+long was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld the soul of man _sub
+specie aeternitatis_. In his vision history and institutions dissolved
+away. His second childhood had begun.
+
+On such a man the historical method can have no grip. There is, as the
+French say, no _engrenage_. It points to a certain lack of the subtler
+kind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly,
+perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years been
+imported into French criticism from Germany. The Sorbonne has not, we
+know, gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation's
+sake. M. Masson's three volumes leave us with the sense that their
+author had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of
+the momentous question whether Jean-Jacques was a person to whom it
+might be applied with a prospect of discovery. No one who read Rousseau
+with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter.
+Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point. The Savoyard Vicar was
+speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession of
+faith with the words:--
+
+    'Je ne veux argumenter avec vous, ni meme de tenter vous convaincre;
+    il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicite de
+    mon coeur. Consultez le votre pendant mon discours; c'est tout ce
+    que je vous demande.'
+
+To the extent, therefore, that M. Masson did not respond to this appeal
+and filled his volumes with information concerning the books
+Jean-Jacques might have read and a hundred other interesting but only
+partly relevant things, he did the citizen of Geneva a wrong. The
+ulterior motive is there, and the faint taste of a thesis in the most
+modern manner. But the method is saved by the perception which, though
+it sometimes lacks the perfect keenness of complete understanding, is
+exquisite enough to suggest the answer to the questions it does not
+satisfy. Though the environment is lavish the man is not lost.
+
+It is but common piety to seek to understand Jean-Jacques in the way in
+which he pleaded so hard to be understood. Yet it is now over forty
+years since a voice of authority told England how it was to regard him.
+Lord Morley was magisterial and severe, and England obeyed. One feels
+almost that Jean-Jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive.
+He would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was 'a rag
+of metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism,' and he would
+have whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his
+_Dialogues_ described as the outpourings of a man with persecution
+mania, he might have rebelled and muttered silently an _Eppur si muove_.
+We see now that it was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, and
+that precisely those _Dialogues_ which the then Mr Morley so powerfully
+dismissed contain his plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction. To
+his contention that he wrote his books to ease his own soul it might be
+replied that their publication was a social act which had vast social
+consequences. But Jean-Jacques might well retort that the fact that his
+contemporaries and the generation which followed read and judged him in
+the letter and not in the spirit is no reason why we, at nearly two
+centuries remove, should do the same.
+
+A great man may justly claim our deference, if Jean-Jacques asks that
+his last work shall be read first we are bound, even if we consider it
+only a quixotic humour, to indulge it. But to those who read the
+neglected _Dialogues_ it will appear a humour no longer. Here is a man
+who at the end of his days is filled to overflowing with bitterness at
+the thought that he has been misread and misunderstood. He says to
+himself: Either he is at bottom of the same nature as other men or he is
+different. If he is of the same nature, then there must be a malignant
+plot at work. He has revealed his heart with labour and good faith; not
+to hear him his fellow-men must have stopped their ears. If he is of
+another kind than his fellows, then--but he cannot bear the thought.
+Indeed it is a thought that no man can bear. They are blind because they
+will not see. He has not asked them to believe that what he says is
+true; he asks only that they shall believe that he is sincere, sincere
+in what he says, sincere, above all, when he implores that they should
+listen to the undertone. He has been 'the painter of nature and the
+historian of the human heart.'
+
+His critics might have paused to consider why Jean-Jacques, certainly
+not niggard of self-praise in the _Dialogues_, should have claimed no
+more for himself than this. He might have claimed, with what in their
+eyes at least must be good right, to have been pre-eminent in his
+century as a political philosopher, a novelist, and a theorist of
+education. Yet to himself he is no more than 'the painter of nature and
+the historian of the human heart.' Those who would make him more make
+him less, because they make him other than he declares himself to be.
+His whole life has been an attempt to be himself and nothing else
+besides; and all his works have been nothing more and nothing less than
+his attempt to make his own nature plain to men. Now at the end of his
+life he has to swallow the bitterness of failure. He has been acclaimed
+the genius of his age; kings have delighted to honour him, but they have
+honoured another man. They have not known the true Jean-Jacques. They
+have taken his parables for literal truth, and he knows why.
+
+    'Des etres si singulierement constitues doivent necessairement
+    s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. Il est impossible
+    qu'avec des ames si differemment modifies ils ne portent pas dans
+    l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idees l'empreinte de
+    ces modifications. Si cette empreinte echappe a ceux qui n'ont
+    aucune notion de cette maniere d'etre, elle ne peut echapper a ceux
+    qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectes eux-memes. C'est une
+    signe caracteristique auquel les inities se reconnoissent entre eux;
+    et ce qui donne un grand prix a ce signe, c'est qu'il ne peut se
+    contrefaire, que jamais il n'agit qu'au niveau de sa source, et que,
+    quand il ne part pas du coeur de ceux qui l'imitent, il n'arrive
+    pas non plus aux coeurs faits pour le distinguer; mais sitot qu'il y
+    parvient, on ne sauroit s'y meprendre; il est vrai des qu'il est
+    senti.'
+
+At the end of his days he felt that the great labour of his life which
+had been to express an intuitive certainty in words which would carry
+intellectual conviction, had been in vain, and his last words are: 'It
+is true so soon as it is felt.'
+
+Three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his 'religious
+formation' as three volumes. At Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens, as a
+boy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul. In Paris, amid the
+intellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the Encyclopaedists, the
+memory of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience. His
+boyish unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticism
+of the great pioneers of enlightenment and progress. Yet when all had
+been destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied. Underneath
+his passionate admiration for Diderot smouldered a spark of resentment
+that he was not understood. They had torn down the fabric of expression
+into which he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty as a
+boy; sometimes with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart he
+surveyed the ruins. But the certainty that he had once been certain, the
+memory and the desire of the past peace--this they could not destroy.
+They could hardly even weaken this element within him, for they did not
+know that it existed, they were unable to conceive that it could exist.
+Jean-Jacques himself could give them no clue to its existence; he had
+no words, and he was still under the spell of the intellectual dogma of
+his age that words must express definite things. In common with his age
+he had lost the secret of the infinite persuasion of poetry. So the
+consciousness that he was different from those who surrounded him, and
+from those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. He was afraid of
+his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge of
+their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. The
+pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is
+apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' In the
+note which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses to
+this ideal. If only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable
+without and within, he might be delivered from that disquieting sense of
+tongue-tied queerness in a normal world.
+
+If he cheated himself at all, the deception was brief. The poignant
+memory of Les Charmettes whispered to him that there was a state of
+grace in which the hard things were made clear. But he had not yet the
+courage of his destiny. His consciousness of his separation from his
+fellows had still to harden into a consciousness of superiority before
+that courage would come. On the road to Vincennes on an October evening
+in 1749--M. Masson has fixed the date for us--he read in a news-sheet
+the question of the Dijon Academy: 'Si le retablissement des arts et des
+sciences a contribue a epurer les moeurs?' The scales dropped from his
+eyes and the weight was removed from his tongue. There is no mystery
+about this 'revelation.' For the first time the question had been put
+in terms which struck him squarely in the heart. Jean-Jacques made his
+reply with the stammering honesty of a man of genius wandering in age of
+talent.
+
+The First Discourse seems to many rhetorical and extravagant. In after
+days it appeared so to Rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for it
+than that he had tried to tell the truth. Before he learned that he had
+won the Dijon prize and that his work had taken Paris by storm, he was
+surely a prey to terrors lest his Vincennes vision of the non-existence
+of progress should have been mere madness. The success reassured him.
+'Cette faveur du public, nullement brigue, et pour un auteur inconnu, me
+donna la premiere assurance veritable de mon talent.' He was, in fact,
+not 'queer,' but right; and he had seemed to be queer precisely because
+he was right. Now he had the courage. 'Je suis grossier,' he wrote in
+the preface to _Narcisse_, 'maussade, impoli par principes; je me fous
+de tous vous autres gens de cour; je suis un barbare.' There is a touch
+of exaggeration and bravado in it all. He was still something of the
+child hallooing in the dark to give himself heart. He clutched hold of
+material symbols of the freedom he had won, round wig, black stockings,
+and a living gained by copying music at so much a line. But he did not
+break with his friends; the 'bear' suffered himself to be made a lion.
+He had still a foot in either camp, for though he had the conviction
+that he was right, he was still fumbling for his words. The memoirs of
+Madame d'Epinay tell us how in 1754, at dinner at Mlle Quinault's,
+impotent to reply to the polite atheistical persiflage of the company,
+he broke out: 'Et moi, messieurs, je crois en Dieu. Je sors si vous
+dites un mot de plus.' That was not what he meant; neither was the First
+Discourse what he meant. He had still to find his language, and to find
+his language he had to find his peace. He was like a twig whirled about
+in an eddy of a stream. Suddenly the stream bore him to Geneva, where he
+returned to the church which he had left at Confignon. That, too, was
+not what he meant. When he returned from Geneva, Madame d'Epinay had
+built him the Ermitage.
+
+In the _Reveries_, which are mellow with the golden calm of his
+discovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he
+had set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitage
+to inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for
+all his opinions and his principles. In the exquisite third _Reverie_
+two phrases occur continually. His purpose was 'to find firm
+ground'--'prendre une assiette,'--and his means to this discovery was
+'spiritual honesty'--'bonne foi.' Rousseau's deep concern was to
+elucidate the anatomy of his own soul, but, since he was sincere, he
+regarded it as a type of the soul of man. Looking into himself, he saw
+that, in spite of all his follies, his weaknesses, his faintings by the
+way, his blasphemies against the spirit, he was good. Therefore he
+declared: Man is born good. Looking into himself he saw that he was free
+to work out his own salvation, and to find that solid foundation of
+peace which he so fervently desired. Therefore he declared: Man is born
+free. To the whisper of les Charmettes that there was a condition of
+grace had been added the sterner voice of remorse for his abandoned
+children, telling him that he had fallen from his high estate.
+
+  'J'ai fui en vain; partout j'ai retrouve la Loi.
+  Il faut ceder enfin! o porte, il faut admettre
+  L'hote; coeur fremissant, il faut subir le maitre,
+  Quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-meme que moi.'
+
+The noble verse of M. Claudel contains the final secret of Jean-Jacques.
+He found in himself something more him than himself. Therefore he
+declared: There is a God. But he sought to work out a logical foundation
+for these pinnacles of truth. He must translate these luminous
+convictions of his soul into arguments and conclusions. He could not,
+even to himself, admit that they were only intuitions; and in the
+_Contrat Social_ he turned the reason to the service of a certainty not
+her own.
+
+This unremitting endeavour to express an intuitive certainty in
+intellectual terms lies at the root of the many superficial
+contradictions in his work, and of the deeper contradiction which forms,
+as it were, the inward rhythm of his three great books. He seems to
+surge upwards on a passionate wave of revolutionary ideas, only to sink
+back into the calm of conservative or quietist conclusions. M. Masson
+has certainly observed it well.
+
+    'Le premier _Discours_ anathematise les sciences et les arts, et ne
+    voit le salut que dans les academies; le _Discours sur l'Inegalite_
+    parait detruire tout autorite, et recommande pourtant "l'obeissance
+    scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs": la
+    _Nouvelle Heloise_ preche d'abord l'emancipation sentimentale, et
+    proclame la suprematie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit a
+    exalter la fidelite conjugale, a consolider les grands devoirs
+    familiaux et sociaux. Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la meme
+    surprise.'
+
+To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary;
+to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only a
+man stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured
+by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in
+his similitude to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tiedes,' he wrote
+to Madame Latour in 1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est
+pas digne de moi.' There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more
+plainly still in the _Dialogues_. He, too, was persecuted for
+righteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of
+heaven was within men.
+
+And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and
+the peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preserving
+conclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to
+record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the
+market-place. The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man
+so that he writes believing that all men will understand. He wakes in
+the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he
+does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. They
+will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will
+see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. The
+_mystique_ as Peguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_.
+To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseau
+turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard
+saying, that the things which are Caesar's shall be rendered unto Caesar.
+
+In the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which have
+been discovered in Rousseau's work fade away. That famous confusion
+concerning 'the natural man,' whom he presents to us now as a historic
+fact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques,
+but in the minds of his critics. The _Contrat Social_ is a parable of
+the soul of man, like the _Republic_ of Plato. The truth of the human
+soul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history is
+irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal. And as for the
+nature of this truth, 'it is true so soon as it is felt.' When the
+Savoyard Vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism of
+religious dogma, turned to the Gospel story with the immortal 'Ce n'est
+pas ainsi qu'on invente,' he was only anticipating what Jean-Jacques was
+to say of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his work
+which could not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of its
+source. We may call Jean-Jacques religious because we have no other
+word; but the word would be more truly applied to the reverence felt
+towards such a man than to his own emotion. He was driven to speak of
+God by the habit of his childhood and the deficiency of a language
+shaped by the intellect and not by the soul. But his deity was one whom
+neither the Catholic nor the Reformed Church could accept, for He was
+truly a God who does not dwell in temples made with hands. The respect
+he owed to God, said the Vicar, was such that he could affirm nothing of
+Him. And, again, still more profoundly, he said, 'He is to our souls
+what our soul is to our body.' That is the mystical utterance of a man
+who was no mystic, but of one who found his full communion in the
+beatific _dolce far niente_ of the Lake of Bienne. Jean-Jacques was set
+apart from his generation, because, like Malvolio, he thought highly of
+the soul and in nowise approved the conclusions of his fellows; and he
+was fortunate to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call his
+madness (which was indeed only his flaming and uncomprehending
+indignation at the persecution inevitably meted out by those who have
+only a half truth to one who has the whole), because he enjoyed the
+certainty that his high appraisement of the soul was justified.
+
+[MARCH, 1918.
+
+
+
+
+_The Poetry of Edward Thomas_
+
+
+We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruins
+with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which
+disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of Edward
+Thomas.[2] They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a
+palimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more
+resonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be like
+a phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city. There
+will be the triumphal arch standing proudly; the very tombs of the dead
+will seem to share its monumental magnificence. Yet we will turn from
+them all, from the victory and sorrow alike, to this faintly gleaming
+bubble of glass that will hold captive the phantasm of a fragrance of
+the soul. By it some dumb and doubtful knowledge will be evoked to
+tremble on the edge of our minds. We shall reach back, under its spell,
+beyond the larger impulses of a resolution and a resignation which will
+have become a part of history, to something less solid and more
+permanent over which they passed and which they could not disturb.
+
+   [Footnote 2: _Last Poems_. By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount.)]
+
+Our consciousness will have its record. The tradition of England in
+battle has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will be
+compassed about by a crowd of witnesses. But it might so nearly have
+been in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at the
+conclusions of our consciousness. The subtler faiths might so easily
+have fled through our harsh fingers. When the sound of the bugles died,
+having crowned reveille with the equal challenge of the last post, how
+easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there
+had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds
+and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us
+first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of
+which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses
+and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of
+speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself
+crumbles into dust--this very texture of the life of the soul might have
+been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding
+had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it
+appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more
+gorgeous woof.
+
+The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away. To exacter knowledge less
+charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we
+cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery
+over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but
+only humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard;
+beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our
+souls. So the sedge-warbler's
+
+  'Song that lacks all words, all melody,
+  All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
+  Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.'
+
+Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead
+poet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been,
+both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. Because
+he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They made
+the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind's
+ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to
+something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or
+by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns.
+But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly
+into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal
+present on whose pinnacle we stand.
+
+  'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
+  And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
+  Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
+  For what I should, yet never can, remember.
+  No garden appears, no path, no child beside,
+  Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
+  Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.'
+
+So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. We come no longer
+trailing clouds of glory. We are that which we are, less and more than
+our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend from
+on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. Yet our chosen spirit
+is not wholly secure in his courage. He longs not merely to know in what
+undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it
+beautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the
+truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour.
+
+  'This heart, some fraction of me, happily
+  Floats through the window even now to a tree
+  Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
+  Not like a peewit that returns to wail
+  For something it has lost, but like a dove
+  That slants unswerving to its home and love.
+  There I find my rest, and through the dark air
+  Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.'
+
+Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with
+the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far
+than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of
+man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay.
+Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home
+indeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. That
+which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude
+ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more
+than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other
+stars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of the
+universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.'
+
+And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common property
+of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from
+what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and
+that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this
+knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his
+contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the
+hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the
+line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious
+subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and
+familiar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most
+apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his
+home no home at all.
+
+  'This is my grief. That land,
+  My home, I have never seen.
+  No traveller tells of it,
+  However far he has been.
+
+  'And could I discover it
+  I fear my happiness there,
+  Or my pain, might be dreams of return
+  To the things that were.'
+
+Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his
+destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of
+necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men may
+know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the
+magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known
+truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the
+truth stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universe
+grows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little
+lamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark
+forest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all.
+Yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he must
+at each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise
+what is and celebrate it as what must be. Thus he regains, by another
+path, the supremacy which he has forsaken.
+
+Edward Thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. It may be
+said that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe of
+the past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. It is, even
+in material fact, but half true. None more closely than he regarded the
+living things of earth in all their quarters. 'After Rain' is, for
+instance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment,
+freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves
+
+            '... thinly spread
+  In the road, like little black fish, inlaid
+            As if they played.'
+
+But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the
+more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he
+discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy
+in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious
+of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which
+only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking
+mind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes
+in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and
+irrecoverable.
+
+  'The simple lack
+  Of her is more to me
+  Than other's presence,
+  Whether life splendid be
+  Or utter black.
+
+  'I have not seen,
+  I have no news of her;
+  I can tell only
+  She is not here, but there
+  She might have been.
+
+  'She is to be kissed
+  Only perhaps by me;
+  She may be seeking
+  Me and no other; she
+  May not exist.'
+
+That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register its
+wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on.
+If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas's poetical quest,
+he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches
+further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he
+passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience
+of the soul fronting its own infinity:--
+
+           'So memory made
+  Parting to-day a double pain:
+  First because it was parting; next
+  Because the ill it ended vexed
+  And mocked me from the past again.
+  Not as what had been remedied
+  Had I gone on,--not that, ah no!
+  But as itself no longer woe.'
+
+There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who
+have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant
+not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the
+movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it was
+that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of
+becoming haunted and held him most.
+
+  'Often I had gone this way before,
+  But now it seemed I never could be
+  And never had been anywhere else.'
+
+To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive
+to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that
+was not instantly engulfed--
+
+         'In the undefined
+  Abyss of what can never be again.'
+
+Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt
+as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none
+of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped
+at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated
+every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old
+when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A
+New House.'
+
+  'All was foretold me; naught
+    Could I foresee;
+  But I learned how the wind would sound
+    After these things should be.'
+
+But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in the
+enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul
+itself. The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book
+is that entitled 'The Other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal,
+shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create
+the myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the
+unknown of his emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of
+this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other'
+tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul.
+
+  'And now I dare not follow after
+  Too close. I try to keep in sight,
+  Dreading his frown and worse his laughter,
+  I steal out of the wood to light;
+  I see the swift shoot from the rafter
+  By the window: ere I alight
+  I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
+  And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.
+  He goes: I follow: no release
+  Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.'
+
+No; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest is
+read with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one who
+had many (and among them the chief) of the qualities of a great poet.
+Edward Thomas was like a musician who noted down themes that summon up
+forgotten expectations. Whether the genius to work them out to the
+limits of their scope and implication was in him we do not know. The
+life of literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunity
+he would eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. But, if
+his compositions do not, his themes will never fail--of so much we are
+sure--to awaken unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds.
+
+[JANUARY 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Mr Yeats's Swan Song_
+
+
+In the preface to _The Wild Swans at Coole_,[3] Mr W.B. Yeats speaks of
+'the phantasmagoria through which alone I can express my convictions
+about the world.' The challenge could hardly be more direct. At the
+threshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which gives
+us the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enter
+in. There are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verses
+written in the seeming-strong vernacular of literary Dublin, as it were
+a hospitable bench placed outside the door. They are indeed inside the
+house, but by accident or for temporary shelter. They do not, as the
+phrase goes, belong to the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions of
+the common reality, whether found in the sensible world or the emotion
+of the mind. They are, from Mr Yeats's angle of vision (as indeed from
+our own), essentially _vers d'occasion._
+
+   [Footnote 3: _The Wild Swans at Coole_. By W.B. Yeats.(Macmillan.)]
+
+The poet's high and passionate argument must be sought elsewhere, and
+precisely in his expression of his convictions about the world. And
+here, on the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall find
+phantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwise
+conveyed, at least by Mr Yeats. To this, in itself, we make no demur.
+The poet, if he is a true poet, is driven to approach the highest
+reality he can apprehend. He cannot transcribe it simply because he does
+not possess the necessary apparatus of knowledge, and because if he did
+possess it his passion would flag. It is not often that Spinoza can
+disengage himself to write as he does at the beginning of the third book
+of the Ethics, nor could Lucretius often kindle so great a fire in his
+soul as that which made his material incandescent in _AEneadum genetrix_.
+Therefore the poet turns to myth as a foundation upon which he can
+explicate his imagination. He may take his myth from legend or familiar
+history, or he may create one for himself anew, but the function it
+fulfils is always the same. It supplies the elements with which he can
+build the structure of his parable, upon which he can make it elaborate
+enough to convey the multitudinous reactions of his soul to the world.
+
+But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The
+structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility.
+The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will
+rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience....'
+And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own
+myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be
+condemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic
+shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect
+embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. The phantoms of the
+individual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity and
+become like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms they
+should be. For the poet himself must move securely among his visions;
+they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are. To anchor
+them he needs intelligible myth. Nothing less than a supremely great
+genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark
+visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great genius
+and was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his passion gave
+stability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes because
+they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite work
+there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise
+the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria of the
+dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. Like
+Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and
+would not let him go.
+
+The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman;
+yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a
+poet may plunge into the world of phantasms. Mr Yeats has too little of
+the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. He
+knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. But the very
+terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of
+impotence:--
+
+  Hands, do what you're bid;
+  Bring the balloon of the mind
+  That bellies and drags in the wind
+  Into its narrow shed.
+
+The languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poet
+has failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression of
+an ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness to
+the poet's minor probity. He remains an artist by determination, even
+though he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry.
+We were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majestic
+isolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit.
+Subsequently they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty. Although it
+has little mysterious and haunting beauty, _The Wild Swans at Coole_ is
+indeed a swan song. It is eloquent of final defeat; the following of a
+lonely path has ended in the poet's sinking exhausted in a wilderness of
+gray. Not even the regret is passionate; it is pitiful.
+
+  'I am worn out with dreams,
+  A weather-worn, marble triton
+  Among the streams;
+  And all day long I look
+  Upon this lady's beauty
+  As though I had found in book
+  A pictured beauty,
+  Pleased to have filled the eyes
+  Or the discerning ears,
+  Delighted to be but wise,
+  For men improve with the years;
+  And yet, and yet
+  Is this my dream, or the truth?
+  O would that we had met
+  When I had my burning youth;
+  But I grow old among dreams,
+  A weather-worn, marble triton
+  Among the streams.'
+
+It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poet
+mistakes the cause of his sorrow. He is worn out not with dreams, but
+with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative
+energy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has
+merely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew.
+Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that
+vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is
+no way back to the past.
+
+  'My country is Kiltartan Cross,
+  My countrymen Kiltartan's poor;
+  No likely end could bring them loss
+  Or leave them happier than before.'
+
+It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We do
+not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in
+and for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose
+creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands
+upon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching
+his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverishment, as
+of all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware.
+
+  'I would find by the edge of that water
+  The collar-bone of a hare,
+  Worn thin by the lapping of the water,
+  And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
+  At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
+  And laugh over the untroubled water
+  At all who marry in churches,
+  Through the white thin bone of a hare.'
+
+Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its
+bitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world
+of imagination. Mr Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to
+contemplate it was sufficient. Had he been a great poet he would have
+made it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech. By
+re-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have built
+landmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his last
+discovery had ended. But now there remains nothing but a handful of the
+symbols with which he was content:--
+
+  'A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
+  A Buddha, hand at rest,
+  Hand lifted up that blest;
+  And right between these two a girl at play.'
+
+These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and,
+alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live.
+
+Whether Mr Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for
+the product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we prefer to
+believe) he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and
+failed, we cannot certainly say. Of this, however, we are certain, that
+somehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He has
+the apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forced
+to fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him.
+That it is an insufficient reserve let this passage show:--
+
+  'For those that love the world serve it in action,
+  Grow rich, popular, and full of influence,
+  And should they paint or write still it is action:
+  The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
+  The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
+  The sentimentalist himself; while art
+  Is but a vision of reality....'
+
+Mr Yeats is neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist. He is by structure
+and impulse an artist. But structure and impulse are not enough.
+Passionate apprehension must be added to them. Because this is lacking
+in Mr Yeats those lines, concerned though they are with things he holds
+most dear, are prose and not poetry.
+
+[APRIL, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Wisdom of Anatole France_
+
+
+How few are the wise writers who remain to us? They are so few that it
+seems, at moments, that wisdom, like justice of old, is withdrawing from
+the world, and that when their fullness of years is accomplished, as,
+alas! it soon must be, the wise men who will leave us will have been the
+last of their kind. It is true that something akin to wisdom, or rather
+a quality whose outward resemblance to wisdom can deceive all but the
+elect, will emerge from the ruins of war; but true wisdom is not created
+out of the catastrophic shock of disillusionment. An unexpected disaster
+is always held to be in some sort undeserved. Yet the impulse to rail at
+destiny, be it never so human, is not wise. Wisdom is not bitter; at
+worst it is bitter-sweet, and bitter-sweet is the most subtle and
+lingering savour of all.
+
+Let us not say in our haste, that without wisdom we are lost. Wisdom is,
+after all, but one attitude to life among many. It happens to be the one
+which will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for all
+ill-usage. But hard wear is not the only purpose which an attitude may
+serve. We may demand of an attitude that it should enable us to exact
+the utmost from ourselves. To refuse to accommodate oneself to the
+angularities of life or to make provision beforehand for its
+catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly. It is, at
+all events, a folly to which poets incline. But poets are not wise;
+indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best,
+be but dimly imagined. Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largest
+inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an
+aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of no
+account. To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to
+have acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with an
+imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no
+ecstasy remains, one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublime
+self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of
+destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which
+have overwhelmed us.
+
+Whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do not
+know. We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. It is
+too conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. Some may seek
+that ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others,
+who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may
+try to shake the dust of life from off their feet. Neither will be wise.
+But precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company of
+wise men. Their own attitude will not wear. The ecstasy will fail, the
+will to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one to
+escape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and the
+cell. Then they will turn to the wise men. They will find comfort in the
+smile to which they could not frame their own lips, and discover in it
+more sympathy than they could hope for.
+
+Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be Anatole
+France. His company is constant; his attitude durable. There is no
+undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and
+haunting beauty to Tchehov. He has never suffered himself to be so
+involved in life as to be maimed by it. But the price he has paid for
+his safety has been a renunciation of experience. Only by being involved
+in life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that
+bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. Not that Anatole
+France made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would of
+his own will turn aside. It was instinct which guided him into a
+sequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate
+exaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel.
+Therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but
+never face to face. Their runnings, their stumblings and their
+gesticulations are a tumultuous portion of the landscape rather than
+symbols of an intimate and personal possibility. They lend a baroque
+enchantment to the scene.
+
+So it is that in all the characters of Anatole France's work which are
+not closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of the
+marionette. They are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack a
+certain logic, but it is not the logic of personality. They are embodied
+comments upon life, but they do not live. And there is for Anatole
+France, while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, no
+reason why they should live. For living, in the accepted sense, is an
+activity impossible without indulging many illusions; and fervently to
+sympathise with characters engaged in the activity demands that their
+author should participate in the illusions. He, too, must be surprised
+at the disaster which he himself has proved inevitable. It is not enough
+that he should pity them; he must share in their effort, and be
+discomfited at their discomfiture.
+
+Such exercises of the soul are impossible to a real acquiescence, which
+cannot even permit itself the inspiration of the final illusion that the
+wreck of human hopes, being ordained, is beautiful. The man who
+acquiesces is condemned to stand apart and contemplate a puppet-show
+with which he can never really sympathise.
+
+    'De toutes les definitions de l'homme la plus mauvaise me parait
+    celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable. Je ne me vante pas
+    excessivement en me donnant pour doue de plus de raison que la
+    plupart de ceux de mes semblables que j'ai vus de pres ou dont j'ai
+    connu l'histoire. La raison habite rarement les ames communes, et
+    bien plus rarement encore les grands esprits.... J'appelle
+    raisonnable celui qui accorde sa raison particuliere avec la raison
+    universelle, de maniere a n'etre jamais trop surpris de ce qui
+    arrive et a s'y accommoder tant bien que mal; j'appelle raisonnable
+    celui qui, observant le desordre de la nature et la folie humaine,
+    ne s'obstine point a y voir de l'ordre et de la sagesse; j'appelle
+    raisonnable enfin celui qui ne s'efforce pas de l'etre.'
+
+The chasm between living and being wise (which is to be _raisonnable_)
+is manifest. The condition of living is to be perpetually surprised,
+incessantly indignant or exultant, at what happens. To bridge the chasm
+there is for the wise man only one way. He must cast back in his memory
+to the time when he, too, was surprised and indignant. No man is, after
+all, born wise, though he may be born with an instinct for wisdom. Thus
+Anatole France touches us most nearly when he describes his childhood.
+The innocent, wayward, positive, romantic little Pierre Noziere[4] is a
+human being to a degree to which no other figures in the master's comedy
+of unreason are. And it is evident that Anatole France himself finds him
+by far the most attractive of them all. He can almost persuade himself,
+at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite story
+of how, when he had been to a truly royal chocolate shop, he attempted
+to reproduce its splendours in play. At one point his invention and his
+memory failed him, and he turned to his mother to ask: 'Est-ce celui qui
+vend ou celui qui achete qui donne de l'argent?'
+
+    'Je ne devais jamais connaitre le prix de l'argent. Tel j'etais a
+    trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapisse de boutons de
+    roses, tel je restai jusqu'a la vieillesse, qui m'est legere, comme
+    elle l'est a toutes les ames exemptes d'avarice et d'orgueil. Non,
+    maman, je n'ai jamais connu le prix de l'argent. Je ne le connais
+    pas encore, ou plutot je le connais trop bien.'
+
+   [Footnote 4: _Le Petit Pierre_. Par Anatole France. (Paris:
+   Calmann-Levy.)]
+
+To know a thing too well is by worlds removed from not to know it at
+all, and Anatole France does not elsewhere similarly attempt to indulge
+the illusion of unbroken innocence. He who refused to put a mark of
+interrogation after 'What is God,' in defiance of his mother, because he
+knew, now has to restrain himself from putting one after everything he
+writes or thinks. 'Ma pauvre mere, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-etre
+que maintenant j'en mets trop.' Yes, Anatole France is wise, and far
+removed from childish follies. And, perhaps, it is precisely because of
+his wisdom that he can so exactly discern the enchantment of his
+childhood. So few men grow up. The majority remain hobbledehoys
+throughout life; all the disabilities and none of the unique capacities
+of childhood remain. There are a few who, in spite of all experience,
+retain both; they are the poets and the _grands esprits_. There are
+fewer still who learn utterly to renounce childish things; and they are
+the wise men.
+
+   'Je suis une autre personne que l'enfant dont je parle. Nous n'avons
+    plus en commun, lui et moi, un atome de substance ni de pensee.
+    Maintenant qu'il m'est devenu tout a fait etranger, je puis en sa
+    compagnie me distraire de la mienne. Je l'aime, moi qui ne m'aime ni
+    ne me hais. Il m'est doux de vivre en pensee les jours qu'il vivait
+    et je souffre de respirer l'air du temps ou nous sommes.'
+
+Not otherwise is it with us and Anatole France. We may have little in
+common with his thought--the community we often imagine comes of
+self-deception--but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while.
+His touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers.
+
+[APRIL, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Gerard Manley Hopkins_
+
+
+Modern poetry, like the modern consciousness of which it is the epitome,
+seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. It is hardly
+conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself
+by insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. The
+value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives
+and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of
+the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be
+epic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few
+conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet
+may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a
+hundred influences, or he may work a single sham personality threadbare
+or render piecemeal an undigested influence. What he may not do, or do
+only at the risk of being unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call,
+for the lack of a better word, the logical progression of an _oeuvre_.
+One has no sense of the rhythm of an achievement. There is an output of
+scraps, which are scraps, not because they are small, but because one
+scrap stands in no organic relation to another in the poet's work.
+Instead of lending each other strength, they betray each other's
+weakness.
+
+Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not
+peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. If it were, we might be
+accused of mere querulousness. The rhythm of personality is hard,
+indeed, to achieve. The simple mind and the single outlook are now too
+rare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering
+a mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy
+one. The desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were
+probably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is a
+little preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see
+life steadily and see it whole. We happen to have been born into an age
+without perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet and
+prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age.
+But another rhythm is possible. No doubt it would be mistaken to
+consider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm of
+personality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personal
+coherence in its possessor. For critical purposes, however, they are
+distinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technical
+progression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate artistic
+intention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. When
+Verlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose,' we know where we
+are. And we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse to
+be predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring to
+take a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose.'
+
+It is the 'avant toute chose' that matters, not as a profession of
+faith--we do not greatly like professions of faith--but as the guarantee
+of the universal in the particular, of the _dianoia_ in the episode. It
+is the 'avant toute chose' that we chiefly miss in modern poetry and
+modern society and in their quaint concatenations. It is the 'avant
+toute chose' that leads us to respect both Mr Hardy and Mr Bridges,
+though we give all our affection to one of them. It is the 'avant toute
+chose' that compels us to admire the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins[5];
+it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, would
+have condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not (after many years)
+had Mr Bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the Oxford
+University Press to stand the racket. Apparently Mr Bridges himself is
+something of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on a
+disdainful note:--
+
+  'Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
+  Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!'
+
+   [Footnote 5: _Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins_. Edited with notes by
+   Robert Bridges. (Oxford: University Press.)]
+
+It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take the
+most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet's
+explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a
+technical language peculiar to himself. Moreover, its scope is small;
+the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages.
+
+  'O then if in my lagging lines you miss
+  The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation....'
+
+There is his 'avant toute chose.' Perhaps it seems very like 'de la
+musique.' But it tells us more about Hopkins's music than Verlaine's
+line told us about his. This music is of a particular kind, not the
+'sanglots du violon,' but pre-eminently the music of song, the music
+most proper to lyrical verse. If one were to seek in English the lyrical
+poem to which Hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, one
+would find Shelley's 'Skylark.' A technical progression onwards from the
+'Skylark' is accordingly the main line of Hopkins's poetical evolution.
+There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief.
+Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered,
+appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was his
+contemporary. There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echo
+in 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charmed'; there is an aspiration after
+Milton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the
+most lucid of the fragments,'Epithalamion.' But the central point of
+departure is the 'Skylark.' The 'May Magnificat' is evidence of
+Hopkins's achievement in the direct line:--
+
+  'Ask of her, the mighty mother:
+  Her reply puts this other
+  Question: What is Spring?--
+  Growth in everything--
+
+  Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
+  Grass and greenworld all together;
+  Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
+  Throstle above her nested
+  Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
+  Forms and warms the life within....
+
+  ... When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
+  Bloom lights the orchard-apple,
+  And thicket and thorp are merry
+  With silver-surfed cherry,
+
+  And azuring-over graybell makes
+  Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes,
+  And magic cuckoo-call
+  Caps, clears, and clinches all....'
+
+That is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, most
+recognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms. But a melody so
+simple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the English language
+is capable without the obscurity which comes of the drowning of sense in
+sound, did not satisfy Hopkins. He aimed at complex internal harmonies,
+at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined an
+expressive word of his own:--
+
+    'But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and
+    design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of
+    calling _inscape_ is what I above all aim at in poetry.'
+
+Here, then, in so many words, is Hopkins's 'avant toute chose' at a
+higher level of elaboration. 'Inscape' is still, in spite of the
+apparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems to
+have entered with the specific designation. With formalism comes
+rigidity; and in this case the rigidity is bound to overwhelm the sense.
+For the relative constant in the composition of poetry is the law of
+language which admits only a certain amount of adaptation. Musical
+design must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be aware that even
+in speaking of musical design he is indulging a metaphor. Hopkins
+admitted this, if we may judge by his practice, only towards the end of
+his life. There is no escape by sound from the meaning of the posthumous
+sonnets, though we may hesitate to pronounce whether this directness was
+due to a modification of his poetical principles or to the urgency of
+the content of the sonnets, which, concerned with a matter of life and
+death, would permit no obscuring of their sense for musical reasons.
+
+  'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
+  What hours, O what black hours we have spent
+  This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
+  And more must in yet longer light's delay.
+    With witness I speak this. But where I say
+  Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
+  Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
+  To dearest him that lives, alas! away.'
+
+There is compression, but not beyond immediate comprehension; music, but
+a music of overtones; rhythm, but a rhythm which explicates meaning and
+makes it more intense.
+
+Between the 'May Magnificat' and these sonnets is the bulk of Hopkins's
+poetical work and his peculiar achievement. Perhaps it could be regarded
+as a phase in his evolution towards the 'more balanced and Miltonic
+style' which he hoped for, and of which the posthumous sonnets are
+precursors; but the attempt to see him from this angle would be
+perverse. Hopkins was not the man to feel, save on exceptional
+occasions, that urgency of content of which we have spoken. The
+communication of thought was seldom the dominant impulse of his creative
+moment, and it is curious how simple his thought often proves to be when
+the obscurity of his language has been penetrated. Musical elaboration
+is the chief characteristic of his work, and for this reason what seem
+to be the strangest of his experiments are his most essential
+achievement So, for instance, 'The Golden Echo':--
+
+        'Spare!
+  There is one, yes, I have one (Hush there!);
+  Only not within seeing of sun,
+  Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
+  Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air,
+  Somewhere else where there is, ah, well, where! one,
+  One. Yes, I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
+  Where, whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and
+                    fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and
+                    swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
+  Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet clearly and dangerously sweet
+  Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
+  The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
+  Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
+  To its own best being and its loveliness of youth....'
+
+Than this, Hopkins truly wrote, 'I never did anything more musical.' By
+his own verdict and his own standards it is therefore the finest thing
+that Hopkins did. Yet even here, where the general beauty is undoubted,
+is not the music too obvious? Is it not always on the point of
+degenerating into a jingle--as much an exhibition of the limitations of
+a poetical theory as of its capabilities? The tyranny of the 'avant
+toute chose' upon a mind in which the other things were not stubborn and
+self-assertive is apparent. Hopkins's mind was irresolute concerning the
+quality of his own poetical ideal. A coarse and clumsy assonance seldom
+spread its snare in vain. Exquisite openings are involved in disaster:--
+
+  'When will you ever, Peace, wild wood dove, shy wings shut,
+  Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
+  When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
+  To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
+  That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace....'
+
+And the more wonderful opening of 'Windhover' likewise sinks, far less
+disastrously, but still perceptibly:--
+
+  'I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
+                            dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
+    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
+  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
+  In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
+    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding
+    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
+  Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'
+
+We have no doubt that 'stirred for a bird' was an added excellence to
+the poet's ear; to our sense it is a serious blemish on lines which have
+'the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.'
+
+There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of
+the poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. The
+obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear;
+and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who
+push on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether
+the failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation of
+experience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice
+in his poetical endeavour. For ourselves we believe that the former was
+the true cause. His 'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritual
+vacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, and
+strengthen it. Hopkins told the truth of himself--the reason why he
+must remain a poets' poet:--
+
+  I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
+  O then if in my lagging lines you miss
+  The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
+  My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss
+  Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.'
+
+[JUNE, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Problem of Keats_
+
+
+It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney
+Colvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first,
+because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all
+evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so
+greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassioned
+and intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by a
+portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the
+consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is with
+us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin's
+mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an
+older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of
+at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger
+race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets.
+Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciate
+Keats, Sir Sidney writes:--
+
+    'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But
+    of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his
+    indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of
+    his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a
+    disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one
+    great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of
+    ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less
+    tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history
+    to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race,
+    he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and
+    acutely sensitive.'
+
+   [Footnote 6: _John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics,
+   and After-fame_. By Sidney Colvin. Second edition. (Macmillan.)]
+
+We believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindication
+might be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimely
+dead; but we desire, not to enlist Sir Sidney in a cause, but only to
+make apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitable
+differences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring. It may be
+that we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with Keats that we
+feel to Sir Sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunch
+friend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so.
+We are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and for
+itself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow only
+when the critical honesty, the determination to let Keats be valid as
+Keats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costs
+Sir Sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us.
+
+It is rather by this than by Sir Sidney's particular contributions to
+our knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. This assured, we
+accept his patient exposition of the theme of 'Endymion' with a friendly
+interest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim
+upon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute
+investigation of the pictorial and plastic material of Keats's
+imagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the former
+mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir
+Sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellers
+who at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantry
+are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find
+themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant
+and unknown to them--the price of land, and the points of a pedigree
+bull--so we follow with an intense and intelligent absorption a subtle
+argument in 'Endymion' in which at no moment we really believe. On the
+contrary, we are convinced (when we are free from our author's friendly
+spell) that Keats wrote 'Endymion' at all adventure. The words of the
+cancelled preface: 'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to
+finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain,' were, we are
+sure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of his
+lack of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapable
+of or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'--he had an understanding more
+robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon
+experience, than any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth not
+excepted--but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned
+with understanding. 'Endymion' is not a record or sublimation of
+experience; it is itself an experience. It was the liberation of a
+verbal inhibition, and the magic word of freedom was Beauty. The story
+of Endymion was to Keats a road to the unknown, in her course along
+which his imagination might 'paw up against the sky.'
+
+A refusal to admit that Keats built 'Endymion' upon any structure of
+argument, however obscure--even Sir Sidney would acknowledge that the
+argument he discovers is _very_ obscure--is so far from being a
+derogation from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a full
+appreciation of his idiosyncrasy. It is customary to regard the Odes as
+the pinnacle of his achievement and to trace a poetical progression to
+that point and a subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of this
+decline in the revised Induction to 'Hyperion.' As far as an absolute
+poetical perfection is concerned there can be no serious objection to
+the view. But the case of Keats is eminently one to be considered in
+itself as well as objectively. There is no danger that Keats's poetry
+will not be appreciated; the danger is that Keats may not be understood.
+And precisely this moment is opportune for understanding him. As Mr T.S.
+Eliot has lately pointed out, the development of English poetry since
+the early nineteenth century was largely based on the achievement of two
+poets of genius, Keats and Shelley, who never reached maturity. They
+were made gods; and rightly, had not poets themselves bowed down to
+them. That was ridiculous; there is something even pitiful in the
+spectacle of Rossetti and Morris finding the culmination of poetry, the
+one in 'The Eve of St Agnes,' the other in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'
+And this undiscriminating submission of a century to the influence of
+hypostatised phases in the development of a poet of sanity and genius is
+perhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious, and for the most
+part far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at work in
+modern poetry.
+
+A sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, that
+what has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundred
+years is only a _cul de sac_. Somewhere there has been a substitution.
+In the resulting chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, and
+the critically minded have the grim amusement of watching verse-writers
+gain eminence by imitating Coventry Patmore! The bolder spirits declare
+that there never was such a thing as a tradition, that it is no use
+learning, because there is nothing to learn. But they are a little
+nervous for all their boldness, and they prefer to hunt in packs, of
+which the only condition of membership is that no one should ask what it
+is.
+
+At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less
+importance to understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. The
+culmination of the achievement of the Keats to be understood is not the
+Odes, perfect as they are, nor the tales--a heresy even for objective
+criticism--nor 'Hyperion'; but precisely that revised Induction to
+'Hyperion' which on the other argument is held to indicate how the
+poet's powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfied
+love. On the technical side alone the Induction is of extraordinary
+interest. Keats's natural and proper revulsion from the Miltonic style,
+the deliberate art of which he had handled like an almost master, is
+evident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge that the virus
+is in his blood. The creative effort of the Induction was infinitely
+greater than is immediately apparent. Keats is engaged in a war on two
+fronts: he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and struggling
+also to deal with an unfamiliar content. The whole direction of his
+poetic purpose had shifted since he wrote 'Hyperion.' 'Hyperion,' though
+far finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same
+as 'Endymion'; it was an exercise in a manner. Keats desired to prove to
+himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that
+he was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur. It was, most
+strictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. He had
+drunk, as deeply as any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he
+needed to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he could
+employ a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of the
+past, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at the
+point where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them.
+These necessities were not present in this form to Keats's mind when he
+began 'Hyperion'; most probably he began merely with the idea of holding
+his own with Milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme.
+Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed are
+incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not by
+the intellect, but by the being.
+
+He dropped 'Hyperion' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. He
+was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him
+and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself.
+
+    'I have given up "Hyperion"--there were too many Miltonic inversions
+    in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather
+    artist's, humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations.
+    English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick
+    out some lines from "Hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty
+    proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of
+    feeling....'--(Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819.)
+
+That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications.
+'English ought to be kept up' meant, on Keats's lips, a very great deal.
+But there is other and more definite authority for the positive
+direction in which he was turning. To his brother George he wrote, at
+the same time:--
+
+    'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him
+    would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the
+    verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.'
+
+More definite still is the letter of November 17, 1819, to his friend
+and publisher, John Taylor:--
+
+    'I have come to a determination not to publish anything I have now
+    ready written; but for all that to publish a poem before long and
+    that I hope to make a fine one. As the marvellous is the most
+    enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have been
+    endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let her
+    manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all.
+    Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and
+    Women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic
+    skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a Drama,
+    would, I think, be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the
+    colouring of St Agnes Eve throughout a poem in which Character and
+    Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such
+    poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six
+    years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they
+    would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest
+    ambition--when I do feel ambitious....'
+
+No letter could be saner, nor more indicative of calm resolve. Yet the
+precise determination is that nothing that went to make the 1820 volume
+should be published, neither Odes, nor Tales, nor 'Hyperion.' This is
+that mood of Keats which Sir Sidney Colvin, in his comment upon a
+passage in the revised Induction, calls one of 'fierce injustice to his
+own achievements and their value.' But a poet, if he is a real one,
+judges his own achievements not by those of his contemporaries, but by
+the standard of his own intention.
+
+The evidence that Keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which it
+could be satisfied by the poems of the 1820 volume is overwhelming. His
+letters to George of April, 1819, show that he was naturally evolving
+towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than
+could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration
+and emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had
+invaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to the
+new poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find the
+method. The letters we have quoted to show his reaction from the
+Miltonic influence display the more narrowly 'artistic' aspect of the
+same evolution. A technique more responsive to the felt reality of
+experience must be found--'English ought to be kept up'--the apparatus
+of Romantic story must be abandoned--'Wonders are no wonders to me'--yet
+the Romantic colour must be kept to restore to a realistic psychology
+the vividness and richly various quality that are too often lost by
+analysis We do not believe that we have in any respect forced the
+interpretation of the letters; the terminology of that age needs to be
+translated to be understood 'Men and Women ... Characters and
+Sentiments' are called, for better or worse, 'psychology' nowadays. And
+our translation has this merit, that some of our ultra-moderns will
+listen to the word 'psychology,' where they would be bat-blind to
+'Characters' and stone-deaf to 'Sentiments.'
+
+Modern poetry is still faced with the same problem; but very few of its
+adepts have reached so far as to be able to formulate it even with the
+precision of Keats's scattered allusions. Keats himself was struck down
+at the moment when he was striving (against disease and against a
+devouring, hopeless love-passion) to face it squarely. The revised
+Induction reveals him in the effort to shape the traditional (and
+perhaps still necessary) apparatus of myth to an instrument of his
+attitude. The meaning of the Induction is not difficult to discover; but
+current criticism has the habit of regarding it dubiously. Therefore we
+may be forgiven for attempting, with the brevity imposed upon us, to
+make its elements clear. The first eighteen lines, which Sir Sidney
+Colvin on objective grounds regrets are, we think, vital.
+
+  'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
+  A paradise for a sect; the savage, too,
+  From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
+  Guesses at heaven; pity these have not
+  Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
+  The shadows of melodious utterance,
+  But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
+  For poesy alone can tell her dreams,--
+  With the fine spell of words alone can save
+  Imagination from the sable chain
+  And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
+  'Thou art no poet--mays't not tell thy dreams'?
+  Since every man whose soul is not a clod
+  Hath visions and would speak, if he had loved,
+  And been well-nurtured in his mother-tongue.
+  Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
+  Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
+  When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.'
+
+We may admit that the form of these lines is unfortunate; but we cannot
+wish them away. They bear most closely upon the innermost argument of
+the poem as Keats endeavoured to reshape it. All men, says Keats, have
+their visions of reality; but the poet alone can express his, and the
+poet himself may at the last prove to have been a fanatic, one who has
+imagined 'a paradise for a sect' instead of a heaven for all humanity.
+
+This discovery marks the point of crisis in Keats's development. He is
+no longer content to be the singer; his poetry must be adequate to all
+experience. No wonder then that the whole of the new Induction centres
+about this thought. He describes his effort to fight against an invading
+death and to reach the altar in the mighty dream palace. As his foot
+touches the altar-step life returns, and the prophetic voice of the
+veiled goddess reveals to him that he has been saved by his power 'to
+die and live again before Thy fated hour.'
+
+  '"None can usurp this height," return'd that shade.
+  "But those to whom the miseries of the world
+  Are misery and will not let them rest.
+  All else who find a haven in the world
+  Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
+  If by a chance into this fane they come,
+  Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half."'
+
+Because he has been mindful of the pain in the world, the poet has been
+saved. But the true lovers of humanity,--
+
+  'Who love their fellows even to the death,
+  Who feel the giant agony of the world,'
+
+are greater than the poets; 'they are no dreamers weak.'
+
+  'They come not here, they have no thought to come,
+  And thou art here for thou are less than they.'
+
+It is a higher thing to mitigate the pain of the world than to brood
+upon the problem of it. And not only the lover of mankind, but man the
+animal is pre-eminent above the poet-dreamer. His joy is joy; his pain,
+pain. 'Only the dreamer venoms _all_ his days.' Yet the poet has his
+reward; it is given to him to partake of the vision of the veiled
+Goddess--memory, Moneta, Mnemosyne, the spirit of the eternal reality
+made visible.
+
+  'Then saw I a wan face
+  Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd
+  By an immortal sickness which kills not;
+  It works a constant change, which happy death
+  Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
+  To no death was that visage; it had past
+  The lily and the snow; and beyond these
+  I must not think now, though I saw that face.
+  But for her eyes I should have fled away;
+  They held me back with a benignant light
+  Soft, mitigated by divinest lids
+  Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed
+  Of all external things; they saw me not,
+  But in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon
+  Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
+  What eyes are upward cast....'
+
+This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It
+stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded
+as obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered
+spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In
+her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision
+and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea
+if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poet
+is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but
+below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the
+prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his
+victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.
+
+Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to
+express, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him;
+few have been so far. Of the poetry that might have been constructed on
+the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture,
+each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse'
+of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it
+would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united
+contraries.
+
+We fear that Sir Sidney Colvin will not agree with our view. The angles
+of observation are different. The angle at which we have placed
+ourselves is not wholly advantageous--from it Sir Sidney's book could
+not have been written--but it has this advantage, that from it we can
+read his book with a heightened interest. As we look out from it, some
+things are increased and some diminished with the change of
+perspective; and among those which are increased is our gratitude to Sir
+Sidney. In the clear mirror of his sympathy and sanity nothing is
+obscured. We are shown the Keats who wrote the perfect poems that will
+last with the English language, and in the few places where Sir Sidney
+falls short of the spirit of complete acceptance, we discern behind the
+words of rebuke and regret only the idealisation of a love which we are
+proud to share.
+
+[JULY, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Thoughts on Tchehov_
+
+
+We do not know if the stories collected in this volume[7] stand together
+in the Russian edition of Tchehov's works, or if the selection is due to
+Mrs Constance Garnett. It is also possible that the juxtaposition is
+fortuitous. But the stories are united by a similarity of material.
+Whereas in the former volumes of this admirable series Tchehov is shown
+as preoccupied chiefly with the life of the _intelligentsia_, here he
+finds his subjects in priests and peasants, or (in the story _Uprooted_)
+in the half-educated.
+
+   [Footnote 7: _The Bishop; and Other Stories_. By Anton Tchehov.
+   Translated by Constance Garnett. (Chatto & Windus.)]
+
+Such a distinction is, indeed, irrelevant. As Tchehov presents them to
+our minds, the life of the country and the life of the town produce the
+same final impression, arouse in us an awareness of an identical
+quality; and thus, the distinction, by its very irrelevance, points us
+the more quickly to what is essential in Tchehov. It is that his
+attitude, to which he persuades us, is complete, not partial. His
+comprehension radiates from a steady centre, and is not capriciously
+kindled by a thousand accidental contacts. In other words, Tchehov is
+not what he is so often assumed to be, an impressionist. Consciously or
+unconsciously he had taken the step--the veritable _salto mortale_--by
+which the great literary artist moves out of the ranks of the minor
+writers. He had slowly shifted his angle of vision until he could
+discern a unity in multiplicity. Unity of this rare kind cannot be
+imposed as, for instance, Zola attempted to impose it. It is an
+emanation from life which can be distinguished only by the most
+sensitive contemplation.
+
+The problem is to define this unity in the case of each great writer in
+whom it appears. To apprehend it is not so difficult. The mere sense of
+unity is so singular and compelling that it leaves room for few
+hesitations. The majority of writers, however excellent in their
+peculiar virtues, are not concerned with it: at one moment they
+represent, at another they may philosophise, but the two activities have
+no organic connection, and their work, if it displays any evolution at
+all, displays it only in the minor accidents of the craft, such as style
+in the narrower and technical sense, or the obvious economy of
+construction. There is no danger of mistaking these for great writers.
+Nor, in the more peculiar case of writers who attempt to impose the
+illusion of unity, is the danger serious. The apparatus is always
+visible; they cannot afford to do without the paraphernalia of argument
+which supplies the place of what is lacking in their presentation. The
+obvious instance of this legerdemain is Zola; a less obvious, and
+therefore more interesting example is Balzac.
+
+To attempt the more difficult problem. What is most peculiar to
+Tchehov's unity is that it is far more nakedly aesthetic than that of
+most of the great writers before him. Other writers of a rank equal to
+his--and there are not so very many--have felt the need to shift their
+angle of vision until they could perceive an all-embracing unity; but
+they were not satisfied with this. They felt, and obeyed, the further
+need of taking an attitude towards the unity they saw They approved or
+disapproved, accepted or rejected it. It would be perhaps more accurate
+to say that they gave or refused their endorsement. They appealed to
+some other element than their own sense of beauty for the final verdict
+on their discovery; they asked whether it was just or good.
+
+The distinguishing mark of Tchehov is that he is satisfied with the
+unity he discovers. Its uniqueness is sufficient for him. It does not
+occur to him to demand that it should be otherwise or better. The act of
+comprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance. He
+is like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work of
+creation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment of
+his vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and the
+arbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural,
+and beautiful than the flowering of a plant. Not that Tchehov is a
+greater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely more
+wholly an artist, which is a very different thing. There is in him less
+admixture of preoccupations that are not purely aesthetic, and probably
+for this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist of
+equal rank. It seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees,
+need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in order
+to be very vigorous and very fruitful. Tchehov has the virtues and the
+shortcomings of the pure case.
+
+I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestation
+of _l'art pour l'art_, because in any commonly accepted sense of that
+phrase, he is not. Still, he might be considered as an exemplification
+of what the phrase might be made to mean. But instead of being diverted
+into a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring
+into prominence an aspect of Tchehov which has an immediate
+interest--his modernity. Again, the word is awkward. It suggests that he
+is fashionable, or up to date. Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases
+in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art of
+literature. The artistic problem which he faced and solved is one that
+is, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modern
+writer--to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with the
+greatest possible unity of aesthetic impression. Diversity of content we
+are beginning to find in profusion--Miss May Sinclair's latest
+experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a
+settled manner and a fixed reputation--but how rarely do we see even a
+glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified aesthetic
+impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has
+been, present to consciousness is _ipso facto_ unified aesthetically. The
+result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of
+language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical
+method.
+
+The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving aesthetic unity
+by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an
+arbitrary (because non-aesthetic) argument. This argument was let down
+like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a
+unified crystalline structure congregated about it. Of all great artists
+of the past Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this
+method. How much deliberate artistic purpose there was in his
+employment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally
+different from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big
+for a parenthesis. But he, too, is at bottom a classic artist. The
+modern problem--it has not yet been sufficiently solved for us to speak
+of a modern method--arises from a sense that the classical method
+produces over-simplification. It does not permit of a sufficient sense
+of multiplicity. One can think of a dozen semi-treatments of the problem
+from Balzac to Dostoevsky, but they were all on the old lines. They
+might be called Shakespearean modifications of the classical method.
+
+Tchehov, we believe, attempted a treatment radically new. To make use
+again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different
+string to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. In a
+sense he began at the other end. He had decided on the quality of
+aesthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision,
+but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of life
+which he had achieved. The essential quality he discerned and desired to
+represent was his argument, his string. Everything that heightened and
+completed this quality accumulated about it, quite independently of
+whether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot and
+argument. There is a magnificent example of his method in the longest
+story in this volume, 'The Steppe.' The quality is dominant throughout,
+and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is
+reinforced by the incident. Tiny events--the peasant who eats minnows
+alive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousand
+roubles--take on a character of portent, except that the word is too
+harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a
+sense of incalculability that haunts us. The emphases have all been
+slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. It is not
+while we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much
+significance could attach to a little boy's questions in a remote
+village shop:--
+
+    '"How much are these cakes?'
+
+    '"Two for a farthing.'
+
+    'Yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before
+    by the Jewess and asked him:--
+
+    '"And how much do you charge for cakes like this?'
+
+    'The shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all
+    sides, and raised one eyebrow.
+
+    '"Like that?' he asked.
+
+    'Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:--
+
+    '"Two for three farthings...."'
+
+It is foolish to quote it. It is like a golden pebble from the bed of a
+stream. The stream that flows over Tchehov's innumerable pebbles,
+infinitely diverse and heterogeneous, is the stream of a deliberately
+sublimated quality. The figure is inexact, as figures are. Not every
+pebble could be thus transmuted. But how they are chosen, what is the
+real nature of the relation which unites them, as we feel it does, is a
+secret which modern English writers need to explore. Till they have
+explored and mastered it Tchehov will remain a master in advance of
+them.
+
+[AUGUST, 1919.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of Tchehov is one to be investigated again and again because he
+is the only great modern artist in prose. Tolstoy was living throughout
+Tchehov's life, as Hardy has lived throughout our own, and these are
+great among the greatest. But they are not modern. It is an essential
+part of their greatness that they could not be; they have a simplicity
+and scope that manifestly belongs to all time rather than to this.
+Tchehov looked towards Tolstoy as we to Hardy. He saw in him a Colossus,
+one whose achievement was of another and a greater kind than his own.
+
+    'I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. If he were to die there would be a
+    big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never
+    loved any man as much as him.... Secondly, while Tolstoy is in
+    literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even
+    recognising that one has done nothing and never will do anything is
+    not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is
+    the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon
+    literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand; he has an immense
+    authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature,
+    vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling,
+    exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the
+    shade....'--(January, 1900.)
+
+Tchehov was aware of the gulf that separated him from the great men
+before him, and he knew that it yawned so deep that it could not be
+crossed. He belonged to a new generation, and he alone perhaps was fully
+conscious of it. 'We are lemonade,' he wrote in 1892.
+
+    'Tell me honestly who of my contemporaries--that is, men between
+    thirty and forty-five--have given the world one single drop of
+    alcohol?... Science and technical knowledge are passing through a
+    great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull
+    time.... The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity,
+    our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the
+    artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack
+    "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our
+    muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that
+    the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who
+    intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic:
+    they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it,
+    too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being,
+    that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father,
+    who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.... And we?
+    We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that--nothing at all.... Flog
+    us and we can do more! We have neither immediate nor remote aims,
+    and in our soul there is a great empty space. We have no politics,
+    we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid
+    of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and
+    blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears
+    nothing cannot be an artist....
+
+    '... You think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not
+    to conceal from myself my disease and not to deceive myself, and not
+    to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the
+    ideas of the 'sixties and so on.'
+
+That was written in 1892. When we remember all the strange literary
+effort gathered round about that year in the West--Symbolism, the
+_Yellow Book_, Art for Art's sake--and the limbo into which it has been
+thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own
+despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was
+plunging with enthusiasm into one _cul de sac_ after another, incapable
+of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West,
+had achieved a clear vision and a sense of perspective.
+
+To-day we begin to feel how intimately Tchehov belongs to us; to-morrow
+we may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. A genius will
+always be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned with
+the genius of Tchehov we must accept the inevitable. We must analyse and
+seek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that since
+Tchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, a
+vast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable.
+Writers who would be modern and ignore Tchehov's achievement are,
+however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists,
+merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of a
+profession like any other; for Tchehov is a standard by which modern
+literary effort must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry who
+is not sufficiently single-minded to apply the standard to himself is of
+no particular account.
+
+Though Tchehov's genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves a
+much exacter study than it has yet received. The publication of this
+volume of his letters[8] hardly affords the occasion for that; but it
+does afford an opportunity for the examination of some of the chief
+constituents of his perfect art. These touch us nearly because--we
+insist again--the supreme interest of Tchehov is that he is the only
+great modern artist in prose. He belongs, as we have said, to us. If he
+is great, then he is great not least in virtue of qualities which we may
+aspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an ideal to which we can
+refer ourselves, He had been saturated in all the disillusions which we
+regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive of
+the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected in
+him--and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. He did not rub
+his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess
+beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for
+universal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a
+millennium which he alone had the ability to control. He was and wanted
+to be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his,
+we feel gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was a
+hero--more than that, _the_ hero of our time.
+
+   [Footnote 8: _Letters of Anton Tchehov_. Translated by Constance
+   Garnett (Chatto & Windus).]
+
+It is significant that, in reading Tchehov's letters, we do not
+consider him under the aspect of an artist. We are inevitably fascinated
+by his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have most
+frequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on the
+infinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it in
+himself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing. He did not throw
+in his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly for
+refuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he risked
+everything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in revolution and
+saying so. In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in his
+letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great
+exemplar, by us. He refused to march under any political banner--a
+thing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his
+country; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political
+indifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing active
+good to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalism
+and social reform. He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin
+in 1890 to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 he
+spent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measures
+against the cholera in the country district where he lived, and,
+although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he
+refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of
+action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising
+practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod. From his
+childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family.
+Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly a
+saint. His self-devotion was boundless.
+
+Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when
+he wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent.' Tchehov was indifferent;
+but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies
+will show, was of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, an
+axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. Since life is what it is and
+men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon
+the individual. The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is
+within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. In one of
+his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his
+brother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he said, respect
+human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only;
+they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they
+are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves
+to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent
+they respect it; they develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves ...
+they seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual
+instinct. The letter from which these chief points are taken is
+tremulous with sympathy and wit. Tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote
+it. He concludes with the words: 'What is needed is constant work day
+and night, constant reading, study, will. Every hour is precious for
+it.'
+
+In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man. He set
+himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. The indifference
+upon which Tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moral
+indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the
+fact that life itself is indifferent. To that he held fast to the end.
+But the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no
+particular difference what any one did, but that the attitude and
+character of the individual were all-important. There was, indeed, no
+panacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but there
+could be a mitigation in men's souls. But the new asceticism must not be
+negative. It must not cast away the goods of civilisation because
+civilisation is largely a sham.
+
+    'Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above
+    all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in
+    carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make
+    haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!'
+
+Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarily
+endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service
+to his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned with
+pluses alone.' Since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly
+precious. Only they must be amenities without humbug.
+
+    'Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses
+    and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the
+    younger generation.... That is why I have no preference either for
+    gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or
+    for the younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a
+    superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health,
+    intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute
+    freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make
+    take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great
+    artist.'
+
+What 'the most absolute freedom' meant to Tchehov his whole life is
+witness. It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is,
+achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and
+self-refinement. In one letter he says he is going to write a story
+about the son of a serf--Tchehov was the son of a serf--who 'squeezed
+the slave out of himself.' Whether the story was ever written we do not
+know, but the process is one to which Tchehov applied himself all his
+life long. He waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soul
+in himself, and by necessary implication in others also.
+
+He was, thus, in all things a humanist. He faced the universe, but he
+did not deny his own soul. There could be for him no antagonism between
+science and literature, or science and humanity. They were all pluses;
+it was men who quarrelled among themselves. If men would only develop a
+little more loving-kindness, things would be better. The first duty of
+the artist was to be a decent man.
+
+    'Solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary.... We
+    cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we
+    have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and
+    so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely
+    hooked.... And is there any need for it? No, in order to help a
+    colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from
+    gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being
+    hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as
+    simply a man.... Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody
+    alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up
+    solidarity.'
+
+It seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty of
+Tchehov's, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strike
+us as more than strange. One predominant impression remains: it is that
+of Tchehov's candour of soul. Somehow he has achieved with open eyes the
+mystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse it
+further, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his present
+importance to ourselves.
+
+[MARCH, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_American Poetry_
+
+
+We are not yet immune from the weakness of looking into the back pages
+to see what the other men have said; and on this occasion we received a
+salutary shock from the critic of the _Detroit News_, who informs us
+that Mr Aiken, 'despite the fact that he is one of the youngest and the
+newest, having made his debut less than four years ago, ... demonstrates
+... that he is eminently capable of taking a solo part with Edgar Lee
+Masters, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim, Vachel Lindsay, and Edwin
+Arlington Robinson.' The shock is two-fold. In a single sentence we are
+in danger of being convicted of ignorance, and, where we can claim a
+little knowledge, we plead guilty; we know nothing of either Mr
+Oppenheim or Mr Robinson. This very ignorance makes us cautious where we
+have a little knowledge We know something of Mr Lindsay, something of Mr
+Masters, and a good deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiar
+figure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on what
+principle they are assembled together. Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded,
+a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which
+she teases out into stupid 'originalities.' Of the other two gentlemen
+we have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but also
+nothing which convinces us that they may not be.
+
+Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them. All
+three have in common what we may call creative energy. They are all
+facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all
+obvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that
+whatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways. Not one of them
+produces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or that
+he has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom 'thus
+and not otherwise' engraved upon their substance; not one has proved
+that he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem of
+poetry, no matter what technique be employed--how to achieve a
+concentrated unity of aesthetic impression. They are all diffuse; they
+seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at
+once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue;
+they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod--and they are all
+interesting.
+
+They are extremely interesting. For one thing, they have all achieved
+what is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success.
+Very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened Mr Lindsay's
+'Congo' or Mr Masters's 'Spoon River Anthology' or Mr Aiken's 'Jig of
+Forslin' without being impelled to read on to the end. That does not
+very often happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetry
+save in the case of the thronging admirers of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
+and their similars. There is, however, another case more exactly in
+point, namely, that of Mr Kipling. With Mr Kipling our three American
+poets have much in common, though the community must not be unduly
+pressed. Their most obvious similarity is the prominence into which
+they throw the novel interest in their verse. They are, or at moments
+they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories. We will not dogmatise and
+say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell a
+story in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task. It would indeed
+be doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell very
+different stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotional
+subtleties which Mr Aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable of
+being exactly expressed in prose.
+
+Since Mr Aiken is the _corpus vile_ before us we will henceforward
+confine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his very
+sufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worth
+attention in modern American poetry. Proceeding then, we find another
+point of contact between him and Mr Kipling, more important perhaps than
+the former, and certainly more dangerous. Both find it apparently
+impossible to stem the uprush of rhetoric. Perhaps they do not try to;
+but we will be charitable--after all, there is enough good in either of
+them to justify charity--and assume that the willingness of the spirit
+gives way to the weakness of the flesh. Of course we all know about Mr
+Kipling's rhetoric; it is a kind of emanation of the spatial immensities
+with which he deals--Empires, the Seven Seas, from Dublin to Diarbekir.
+Mr Aiken has taken quite another province for his own; he is an
+introspective psychologist. But like Mr Kipling he prefers big business.
+His inward eye roves over immensities at least as vast as Mr Kipling's
+outward. In 'The Charnel Rose and Other Poems' this appetite for the
+illimitable inane of introspection seems to have gained upon him. There
+is much writing of this kind:--
+
+  'Dusk, withdrawing to a single lamplight
+  At the end of an infinite street--
+  He saw his ghost walk down that street for ever,
+  And heard the eternal rhythm of his feet.
+  And if he should reach at last that final gutter,
+  To-day, or to-morrow,
+  Or, maybe, after the death of himself and time;
+  And stand at the ultimate curbstone by the stars,
+  Above dead matches, and smears of paper, and slime;
+  Would the secret of his desire
+  Blossom out of the dark with a burst of fire?
+  Or would he hear the eternal arc-lamps sputter,
+  Only that; and see old shadows crawl;
+  And find the stars were street lamps after all?
+
+  Music, quivering to a point of silence,
+  Drew his heart down over the edge of the world....'
+
+It is dangerous for a poet to conjure up infinities unless he has made
+adequate preparation for keeping them in control when they appear. We
+are afraid that Mr Aiken is almost a slave of the spirits he has evoked.
+Dostoevsky's devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probably
+managing-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week. Mr
+Aiken's incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is protean
+and unsatisfactory.
+
+  'I am confused in webs and knots of scarlet
+  Spun from the darkness;
+  Or shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders.
+
+  Madness for red! I devour the leaves of autumn.
+  I tire of the green of the world.
+  I am myself a mouth for blood....'
+
+Perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar things
+mean, exactly, anything? Mr Aiken warns us that his intention has been
+to use the idea--'the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal to
+another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some new
+and subtler fiction'--'as a theme upon which one might wilfully build a
+kind of absolute music.' But having given us so much instruction, he
+should have given more; he should have told us in what province of music
+he has been working. Are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or for
+a musical elaboration of an intellectual theme? We infer, partly from
+the assurance that 'the analogy to a musical symphony is close,' more
+from the absence of verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaboration
+of a theme. In that case the fact that we have a more definite grasp of
+the theme in the programme-introduction than anywhere in the poem itself
+points to failure. In the poem 'stars rush up and whirl and set,'
+'skeletons whizz before and whistle behind,' 'sands bubble and roses
+shoot soft fire,' and we wonder what all the commotion is about. When
+there is a lull in the pandemonium we have a glimpse, not of eternity,
+but precisely of 1890:--
+
+  'And he saw red roses drop apart,
+  Each to disclose a charnel heart....
+
+We are far from saying that Mr Aiken's poetry is merely a chemical
+compound of the 'nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but we
+do think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into
+those elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency
+in the poem called 'The Charnel Rose.' 'Senlin' resists disruption
+longer. But the same elements are there. They are better but not
+sufficiently fused. The rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in
+rhetoric. We have the sense that Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to his
+own idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by a
+violent clashing of the cymbals where a quiet recitative was what the
+theme demanded and his art could not ensure.
+
+  'Death himself in the rain ... death himself ...
+  Death in the savage sunlight ... skeletal death ...
+  I hear the clack of his feet,
+  Clearly on stones, softly in dust,
+  Speeding among the trees with whistling breath,
+  Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves ...
+  Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!...'
+
+We are persuaded that Mr Aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted to
+say something much subtler. But to find exactly what he wanted might
+have taken him many months. He could not wait. Up rushed the rhetoric;
+bang went the cymbals: another page, another book. And we, who have seen
+great promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequate
+fragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poor
+expedients of the moment. For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate. He
+feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:--
+
+  'Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
+  When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone,
+  Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?'
+
+So he descends to a poetaster's padding. He does not stop to consider
+whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or,
+if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference
+occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric
+and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the
+thematic outline itself emerges.
+
+In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.
+We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the
+whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more
+irrevocably itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses at
+the swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us in
+poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he
+has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must
+perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist
+in verse. It is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote the
+labour. His fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of its
+quality. We can only express our hope that he will, and our conviction
+that if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would be
+well requited.
+
+[SEPTEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Ronsard_
+
+
+Ronsard is _range_ now; but he has not been in that position for so very
+long, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of the
+Elizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us. Sainte-Beuve was very
+tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious,
+half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm. And, even now, it
+can hardly be said that French critical opinion about him has
+crystallised; the late George Wyndham's essay shows a more convinced and
+better documented appreciation than any that we have read in French,
+based as it is on the instinctive sympathy which one landed gentleman
+who dabbles in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself to
+them--an admiration which does not exclude familiarity.
+
+Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an
+amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him
+more closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. There is
+something churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard
+against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving
+like the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large. One must
+regard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great
+historical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet; and
+the third aspect has a chance of being the most important.
+
+Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. There is nothing
+mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible
+thread of development in either. They are equable, constant
+imperturbable, like the bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of a
+safe batsman. The accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment. The
+nerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are
+steady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a less
+well-appointed spectator. He will never let himself down, or give
+himself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent sure
+restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain.
+All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it.
+
+Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for
+Ronsard a game. There was plenty of game in it; _l'art de bien
+petrarquiser_ was all he claimed for himself. But the game would have
+wearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied
+and expressed by it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire
+of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by
+some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No one
+reading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hard
+to find in the whole of M. van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'Les
+Amours'[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto.
+When you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particular
+kind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon too closely
+the chances of a shock of surprise.
+
+   [Footnote 9: _Les Amours_. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte etabli par
+   Ad. van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Cres.)]
+
+With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard
+is generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal
+tenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly
+capable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own
+delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he
+disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are
+moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive
+wonder that words exist and are manipulable.
+
+  'Dous fut le trait, qu'Amour hors de sa trousse
+  Pour me tuer, me tira doucement,
+  Quand je fus pris au dous commencement
+  D'une douceur si doucettement douce....'
+
+Ronsard is here a boy playing knucklebones with language; and some of
+his characteristic excellences are little more than a development of
+this aptitude, with its more striking incongruities abated. A modern ear
+can be intoxicated by the charming jingle of
+
+  'Petite Nimfe folastre,
+  Nimfette que j'idolastre....'
+
+One does not pause to think how incredibly naive it is compared with
+Villon, who had not a fraction of Ronsard's scholarship, or even with
+Clement Marot; naive both in thought and art. As for the stature of the
+artist, we are back with Charles of Orleans. It would be idle to
+speculate what exactly Villon would have made of the atomic theory had
+he read Lucretius; but we are certain that he would have done something
+very different from Ronsard's
+
+  'Les petits cors, culbutant de travers,
+  Parmi leur cheute en biais vagabonde,
+  Heurtes ensemble ont compose le monde,
+  S'entr'acrochant d'acrochemens divers....'
+
+For this is not grown-up; the cut to simplicity has been too short. So
+many of Ronsard's verses flow over the mind, without disturbing it; fall
+charmingly on the ear, and leave no echoes. But for the moment we share
+his enjoyment.
+
+The second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtless
+allied to the first; it is a _naivete_ of a particular kind, which
+differs from the profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by the
+fact that it is employed deliberately. Conscious simplicity is art, and
+if it is successful art of no mean order, Ronsard's method of admitting
+us, as it were, to his conversation with himself is definitely his own.
+His interruptions of a verse with 'Ha' or 'He'; his 'Mon Dieu, que
+j'aime!' or 'He, que ne suis-je puce?' (the difference between Ronsard's
+flea and Donne's would be worth examination) have in them an element of
+irresistible _bonhomie_. We feel that he is making us his confidant. He
+does not have to tear agonies out of himself, so that what he confides
+has no chance of making explicit any secrets of our own. There is
+nothing dangerous about him; we know that he is as safe as we are. We
+are in conversation, not communion. But how effective and engaging it
+is!
+
+  'Vous ne le voulez pas? Eh bien, je suis contant ...'
+
+  'He, Dieu du ciel, je n'eusse pas pense
+  Qu'un seul depart eust cause tant de peine!...'
+
+or the still more casual
+
+  'Un joieus deplaisir qui douteus l'epointelle,
+  Quoi l'epointelle! aincois le genne et le martelle ...'
+
+Of this device of style our own Elizabethans were to make more
+profitable use than Ronsard. At their best they packed an intensity of
+dramatic significance into conversational language, of which Ronsard had
+no inkling; and even a strict contemporary of his, like Wyatt, could
+touch cords more intimate by the same means. But, on the other hand,
+Ronsard never fails of his own effect, which is not to convince us
+emotionally, but to compel us to listen. His unexpected address to
+himself or to us is a new ornament for us to admire, not a new method
+for him to express a new thing; and the suggestion of new rhythms that
+might thus be attained is never fully worked out.
+
+  'Mais tu ne seras plus? Et puis?... quand la paleur
+  Qui blemist notre corps sans chaleur ne lumiere
+  Nous perd le sentiment?...
+
+The ampleness of that reverberance is almost isolated.
+
+Ronsard's resources are indeed few. But he needed few. His simple mind
+was at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasant
+impression of one to whom commonplaces are real. He felt them all over
+again. One imagines him reading the classics--the Iliad in three days,
+or his beloved companion 'sous le bois amoureux,' Tibullus--with an
+unfailing delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted
+on to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus. One might almost
+say that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it
+not that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and that
+the artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with the
+honesty of such a natural man. But apart from a few particulars that
+would find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it to
+distinguish Cassandre from Helene. What charming things Ronsard has to
+say of either might be said of any charming woman--'le mignard
+embonpoint de ce sein,'--
+
+  'Petit nombril, que mon penser adore,
+  Non pas mon oeil, qui n'eut oncques ce bien ...'
+
+And though he assures Helene that she has turned him from his grave
+early style, 'qui pour chanter si bas n'est point ordonne,' the
+difference is too hard to detect; one is forced to conclude that it is
+precisely the difference between a court lady and an inn-keeper's
+daughter. As far as art is concerned the most definite and distinctive
+thing that Ronsard had to say of any of his ladies is said of one to
+whom he put forward none of his usually engrossing pretensions. It was
+the complexion of Marguerite of Navarre of which he wrote:--
+
+  'De vif cinabre estoit faicte sa joue,
+  Pareille au teint d'un rougissant oeillet,
+  Ou d'une fraize, alors que dans de laict
+  Dessus le hault de la cresme se joue.'
+
+That is, whether it belonged to Marguerite or not, a divine complexion.
+It is the kind of thing that cannot be said about two ladies; the image
+is too precise to be interchangeable. This may be a reason why it was
+applied to a lady _hors concours_ for Ronsard.
+
+But we need, in fact, seek no reason other than the circumscription of
+Ronsard's poetical gifts. They reduce to only two--the gift of convinced
+commonplace, and the gift of simple melody. His commonplace is genuine
+commonplace, quite distinct from the tense and pregnant condensation of
+a lifetime of impassioned experience in Dante or Shakespeare; things
+that would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinner
+conversation, the sentiments that such a rare and amiable person would
+underscore in his Horace. (From a not unimportant angle Ronsard is a
+minor Horace.) These things are the warp of his poetry; they range from
+the familiar 'Le temps s'en va' to the masterly straightforwardness of
+
+        'plus heureus celui qui la fera
+  Et femme et mere, en lieu d'une pucelle.'
+
+His melody, likewise, is genuine melody; it is irrepressible. It led him
+to belie his own professed seriousness. He could not stop his sonnets
+from rippling even when he pretended to passionate argument. Life came
+easily to him; he was never weary of it, at the most he acknowledged
+that he was 'saoul de la vie.' It is not surprising, therefore, that his
+remonstrances as the tortured lover have a trick of opening to a
+delightful tune:--
+
+  'Rens-moi mon coeur, rens-moi mon coeur pillarde....'
+
+In another form this melody more closely recalls Thomas Campion:--
+
+  'Seule je l'ai veue, aussi je meurs pour elle....'
+
+But to compare Ronsard's sonnet with 'Follow your saint' is to see how
+infinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music was the Elizabethan
+than the great French lyrist of the Renaissance. From first to last
+Ronsard was an amateur.
+
+[SEPTEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_Samuel Butler_
+
+
+The appearance of a new impression of _The Way of all Flesh_[10] in Mr
+Fifield's edition of Samuel Butler's works gives us an occasion to
+consider more calmly the merits and the failings of that entertaining
+story. Like all unique works of authors who stand, even to the most
+obvious apprehension, aside from the general path, it has been
+overwhelmed with superlatives. The case is familiar enough and the
+explanation is simple and brutal. It is hardly worth while to give it.
+The truth is that although there is no inherent reason why the isolated
+novel of an author who devotes himself to other forms should not be 'one
+of the great novels of the world,' the probabilities tell heavily
+against it. On the other hand, an isolated novel makes a good stick to
+beat the age. It is fairly certain to have something sufficiently unique
+about it to be useful for the purpose. Even its blemishes have a knack
+of being _sui generis_. To elevate it is, therefore, bound to imply the
+diminution of its contemporaries.
+
+   [Footnote 10: _The Way of all Flesh_. By Samuel Butler, 11th
+   impression of 2nd edition. (Fifield.)]
+
+Yet, apart from the general argument, there are particular reasons why
+the praise of _The Way of all Flesh_ should be circumspect. Samuel
+Butler knew extraordinarily well what he was about. His novel was
+written intermittently between 1872 and 1884 when he abandoned it. In
+the twenty remaining years of his life he did nothing to it, and we have
+Mr Streatfeild's word for it that 'he professed himself dissatisfied
+with it as a whole, and always intended to rewrite, or at any rate, to
+revise it.' We could have deduced as much from his refusal to publish
+the book. The certainty of commercial failure never deterred Butler from
+publication; he was in the happy situation of being able to publish at
+his own expense a book of whose merit he was himself satisfied. His only
+reason for abandoning _The Way of all Flesh_ was his own dissatisfaction
+with it. His instruction that it should be published in its present form
+after his death proves nothing against his own estimate. Butler knew, at
+least as well as we, that the good things in his book were legion. He
+did not wish the world or his own reputation to lose the benefit of
+them.
+
+But there are differences between a novel which contains innumerable
+good things and a great novel. The most important is that a great novel
+does not contain innumerable good things. You may not pick out the
+plums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do. In _The Way of all
+Flesh_, however, a _compere_ is always present whose business it is to
+say good things. His perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because the
+asides are piquant and, in their way, to the point. Butler's mind, being
+a good mind, had a predilection for the object, and his detestation of
+the rotunder platitudes of a Greek chorus, if nothing else, had taught
+him that a corner-man should have something to say on the subject in
+hand. His arguments are designed to assist his narrative; moreover, they
+are sympathetic to the modern mind. An enlightened hedonism is about all
+that is left to us, and Butler's hatred of humbug is, though a little
+more placid, like our own. We share his ethical likes and dislikes. As
+an audience we are ready to laugh at his asides, and, on the first night
+at least, to laugh at them even when they interrupt the play.
+
+But our liking for the theses cannot alter the fact that _The Way of all
+Flesh_ is a _roman a theses_. Not that there is anything wrong with the
+_roman a theses_, if the theses emerge from the narrative without its
+having to be obviously doctored. Nor does it matter very much that a
+_compere_ should be present all the while, provided that he does not
+take upon himself to replace the demonstration the narrative must
+afford, by arguments outside it. But what happens in _The Way of all
+Flesh_? We may leave aside the minor thesis of heredity, for it emerges,
+gently enough, from the story; besides, we are not quite sure what it
+is. We have no doubt, on the other hand, about the major thesis; it is
+blazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious quotation from St
+Paul to the Romans. 'We know that all things work together for good to
+them that love God.' The necessary gloss on this text is given in
+Chapter LXVIII, where Ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:--
+
+    'He had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were
+    gone for a very long time, if not for ever; but there was something
+    else also that had taken its flight along with these. I mean the
+    fear of that which man could do unto him. _Cantabit vacuus_. Who
+    could hurt him more than he had been hurt already? Let him but be
+    able to earn his bread, and he knew of nothing which he dared not
+    venture if it would make the world a happier place for those who
+    were young and lovable. Herein he found so much comfort that he
+    almost wished he had lost his reputation even more completely--for
+    he saw that it was like a man's life which may be found of them that
+    lose it and lost of them that would find it. He should not have had
+    the courage to give up all for Christ's sake, but now Christ had
+    mercifully taken all, and lo! it seemed as though all were found.
+
+    'As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the
+    denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes
+    do; it was a fight about names--not about things; practically the
+    Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the
+    same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most
+    perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman....'
+
+With this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'All
+experience does a gentleman good.' It is the kind of thing we should
+like very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held with
+passion and vehemence by Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word
+'gentleman' was for him very different from the connotation it had for
+Butler. (Butler's gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very much
+the ideal of a period, and not at all _quod semper, quod ubique_; a very
+Victorian anti-Victorianism.) Dostoevsky worked his thesis out with a
+ruthless devotion to realistic probability. He emptied the cornucopia of
+misery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; and
+then had the audacity to challenge the world to say that they were not
+better, more human, and more lovable for the disaster in which they were
+inevitably overwhelmed. And, though it is hard to say 'Yes' to his
+challenge, it is harder still to say 'No.'
+
+In the case of Ernest Pontifex, however, we do not care to respond to
+the challenge at all. The experiment is faked and proves nothing. It is
+mere humbug to declare that a man has been thrown into the waters of
+life to sink or swim, when there is an anxious but cool-headed friend on
+the bank with a L70,000 life-belt to throw after him the moment his head
+goes under. That is neither danger nor experience. Even if Ernest
+Pontifex knew nothing of the future awaiting him (as we are assured he
+did not) it makes no difference. _We_ know he cannot sink; he is a lay
+figure with a pneumatic body. Whether he became a lay figure for Butler
+also we cannot say; we can merely register the fact that the book breaks
+down after Ernest's misadventure with Miss Maitland, a deplorably
+unsubstantial episode to be the crisis of a piece of writing so firm in
+texture and solid in values as the preceding chapters. Ernest as a man
+has an intense non-existence.
+
+After all, as far as the positive side of _The Way of all Flesh_' is
+concerned, Butler's eggs are all in one basket. If the adult Ernest does
+not materialise, the book hangs in empty air. Whatever it may be instead
+it is not a great novel, nor even a good one. So much established, we
+may begin to collect the good things. Christina is the best of them. She
+is, by any standard, a remarkable creation. Butler was 'all round'
+Christina. Both by analysis and synthesis she is wholly his. He can
+produce her in either way. She lives as flesh and blood and has not a
+little of our affection; she is also constructed by definition, 'If it
+were not too awful a thing to say of anybody, she meant well'--the whole
+phrase gives exactly Christina's stature. Alethea Pontifex is really a
+bluff; but the bluff succeeds, largely because, having experience of
+Christina, we dare not call it. Mrs Jupp is triumphantly complete; there
+are even moments when she seems as great as Mrs Quickly. The novels that
+contain three such women (or two if we reckon the uncertain Alethea, who
+is really only a vehicle for Butler's very best sayings, as cancelled by
+the non-existent Ellen) can be counted, we suppose, on our ten fingers.
+
+Of the men, Theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word).
+But we know little of what went on inside him. We can fill out Christina
+with her inimitable day-dreams; Theobald remains something of a
+skeleton, whereas we have no difficulty at all with Dr Skinner, of
+Roughborough. We have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling the
+shelves with volumes of Skinner, and we know how it was done. When he
+reappears we assume the continuity of his existence without demur. The
+glimpse of George Pontifex is also satisfying; after the christening
+party we know him for a solid reality. Pryer was half-created when his
+name was chosen. Butler did the rest in a single paragraph which
+contains a perfect delineation of 'the Oxford manner' twenty years
+before it had become a disease known to ordinary diagnosis. The curious
+may find this towards the beginning of Chapter LI. But Ernest, upon whom
+so much depends, is a phantom--a dream-child waiting the incarnation
+which Butler refused him for twenty years. Was it laziness, was it a
+felt incapacity? We do not know; but in the case of a novelist it is our
+duty to believe the worst. The particularity of our attitude to Butler
+appears in the fact that we are disappointed, not with him, but with
+Ernest. We are even angry with that young man. If it had not been for
+him, we believe, _The Way of all Flesh_ might have appeared in 1882; it
+might have short-circuited _Robert Elsmere_.
+
+[JUNE, 1919.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We approach the biography of an author whom we respect, and therefore
+have thought about, with contradictory feelings. We are excited at the
+thought of finding our conclusions reinforced, and apprehensive less the
+compact and definite figure which our imaginations have gradually shaped
+should become vague and incoherent and dull. It is a pity to purchase
+enlightenment at the cost of definition; and it is more important that
+we should have a clear notion of the final shape of a man in whom we are
+interested than an exact record of his phases.
+
+The essential quality of great artists is incommensurable with
+biography; they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasion
+of the event. All that piety can do for them is beside the mark. Their
+wilful spirit is fled before the last stone of the mausoleum can be got
+in place, and as it flies it jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and his
+libation is spilt idly upon the ground. Although it would be too much
+and too ungrateful to say that the monumental piety of Mr Festing Jones
+has been similarly turned to derision--after all, Butler was not a
+great man--we feel that something analogous has happened. This laborious
+building is a great deal too large for him to dwell in. He had made
+himself a cosy habitation in the _Note-Books_, with the fire in the
+right place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of criticism.
+In a two-volume memoir[11] he shivers perceptibly, and at moments he
+looks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic.
+
+   [Footnote 11: _Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon'_ (1835-1902): _a
+   Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. 2 vols. (Macmillan.)]
+
+And if it be said that a biography should make no difference to our
+estimate of the man who lives and has his being in his published works,
+we reply that it shifts the emphasis. An amusingly wrong-headed book
+about Homer is a peccadillo; ten years of life lavished upon it is
+something a good deal more serious. And even _The Way of all Flesh_,
+which as an experimental novel is a very considerable achievement,
+becomes something different when we have to regard it as a laborious and
+infinitely careful record of experienced fact. Further still, even the
+edge of the perfected inconsequence of certain of the 'Notes' is
+somewhat dulled when we see the trick of it being exercised. The origin
+of the amusing remark on Blake, who 'was no good because he learnt
+Italian at over 60 in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good
+because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because
+Tennyson ran him--well, Tennyson goes without saying,' is to be found in
+'No, I don't like Lamb. You see, Canon Ainger writes about him, and
+Canon Ainger goes to tea with my aunts.' Repeated, it becomes merely a
+clever way of being stupid, as we should be if we were tempted to say
+we couldn't bear Handel, because Butler was mad on him, and Butler was
+no good because he was run by Mr Jones, and, well, Mr Jones goes without
+saying.
+
+Nevertheless, though Butler lives with much discomfort and some danger
+in Mr Jones's tabernacle, he does continue to live. What his head loses
+by the inquisition of a biography his heart gains, though we wonder
+whether Butler himself would have smiled upon the exchange. Butler loses
+almost the last vestige of a title to be considered a creative artist
+when the incredible fact is revealed that the letters of Theobald and
+Christina in _The Way of all Flesh_ are merely reproduced from those
+which his father and mother sent him. Nor was Butler, even as a copyist,
+always adequate to his originals. The brilliantly witty letters of Miss
+Savage, by which the first volume is made precious, seem to us to
+indicate a real woman upon whom something more substantial might have
+been modelled than the delightful but evanescent picture of Alethea
+Pontifex. Here, at least, is a picture of Miss Savage and Butler
+together which, to our sense, gives some common element in both which
+escaped the expression of the author of _The Way of all Flesh_:--
+
+    'I like the cherry-eating scene, too [Miss Savage wrote after
+    reading the MS. of _Alps and Sanctuaries_], because it reminded me
+    of your eating cherries when I first knew you. One day when I was
+    going to the gallery, a very hot day I remember, I met you on the
+    shady side of Berners Street, eating cherries out of a basket. Like
+    your Italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and
+    you handed the basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word.
+    I pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying
+    a word either. I had not before perceived you to be different from
+    any one else. I was like Peter Bell and the primrose with the yellow
+    brim. As I went away to France a day or two after that and did not
+    see you again for months, the recollection of you as you were eating
+    cherries in Berners Street abode with me and pleased me greatly.'
+
+Again, we feel that the unsubstantial Towneley of the novel should have
+been more like flesh and blood when we learn that he too was drawn from
+the life, and from a life which was intimately connected with Butler's.
+Here, most evidently, the heart gains what the head loses, for the story
+of Butler's long-suffering generosity to Charles Paine Pauli is almost
+beyond belief and comprehension. Butler had met Pauli, who was two years
+his junior, in New Zealand, and had conceived a passionate admiration
+for him. Learning that he desired to read for the bar, Butler, who had
+made an unexpected success of his sheep-farming, offered to lend him
+L100 to get to England and L200 a year until he was called. Very shortly
+after they both arrived in England, Pauli separated from Butler,
+refusing even to let him know his address, and thenceforward paid him
+one brief visit every day. He continued, however, to draw his allowance
+regularly until his death all through the period when, owing to the
+failure of Butler's investments, L200 seems to have been a good deal
+more than one-half Butler's income. At Pauli's death in 1897 Butler
+discovered what he must surely at moments have suspected, that Pauli had
+been making between L500 and L800 at the bar, and had left about
+L9000--not to Butler. Butler wrote an account of the affair after
+Pauli's death which is strangely self-revealing:--
+
+    '... Everything that he had was good, and he was such a fine
+    handsome fellow, with such an attractive manner that to me he seemed
+    everything I should like myself to be, but knew very well that I was
+    not....
+
+    'I had felt from the very beginning that my intimacy with Pauli was
+    only superficial, and I also perceived more and more that I bored
+    him.... He liked society and I hated it. Moreover, he was at times
+    very irritable and would find continual fault with me; often, I have
+    no doubt, justly, but often, as it seemed to me, unreasonably.
+    Devoted to him as I continued to be for many years, those years were
+    very unhappy as well as very happy ones.
+
+    'I set down a great deal to his ill-health, no doubt truly; a great
+    deal more, I was sure, was my own fault--and I am so still; I
+    excused much on the score of his poverty and his dependence on
+    myself--for his father and mother, when it came to the point, could
+    do nothing for him; I was his host and was bound to forbear on that
+    ground if on no other. I always hoped that, as time went on, and he
+    saw how absolutely devoted to him I was, and what unbounded
+    confidence I had in him, and how I forgave him over and over again
+    for treatment which I would not have stood for a moment from any
+    one else--I always hoped that he would soften and deal as frankly
+    and unreservedly with me as I with him; but, though for some fifteen
+    years I hoped this, in the end I gave it up, and settled down into a
+    resolve from which I never departed--to do all I could for him, to
+    avoid friction of every kind, and to make the best of things for him
+    and myself that circumstances would allow.'
+
+In love such as this there is a feminine tenderness and devotion which
+positively illuminates what otherwise appears to be a streak of
+perversity in Butler; and the illumination becomes still more certain
+when we read Butler's letters to the young Swiss, Hans Faesch, to whom
+_Out into the Night_ was written. Faesch had departed for Singapore.
+
+    'The sooner we all of us,' wrote Butler, 'as men of sense and sober
+    reason, get through the very acute, poignant sorrow which we now
+    feel, the better for us all. There is no fear of any of us
+    forgetting when the acute stage is passed. I should be ashamed of
+    myself for having felt as keenly and spoken with as little reserve
+    as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any
+    length to which grief can take me when it is about you. I can call
+    to mind no word which ever passed between us three which had been
+    better unspoken: no syllable of irritation or unkindness; nothing
+    but goodness and kindness ever came out of you, and such as our best
+    was we gave it to you as you gave yours to us. Who may not well be
+    plunged up to the lips in sorrow at parting from one of whom he can
+    say this in all soberness and truth? I feel as though I had lost an
+    only son with no hope of another....'
+
+The love is almost pathetically lavish. Letters like these reveal to us
+a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier
+and defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was _rentree_,
+probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication
+helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which
+he behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured
+weapon. The most threatening danger for such a man is to take the
+professions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himself
+only by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger
+to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler it
+reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of
+the world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the _Note-Books_ in
+_The Athenaeum_ recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositions
+on their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely to
+scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the
+converse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast majority who
+meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority who
+were sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland cases
+escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regard
+all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like and
+admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and
+wrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle
+the curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnett
+of the British Museum are of uncommon interest. They afford a strange
+example of mutual mystification.
+
+Thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does not
+greatly matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as with
+the whole) but of thought, was closed to him. Most of the poetry, the
+music, and the art of the world was humbug to him, and it was only by
+insisting that Homer and Shakespeare were exactly like himself that he
+managed to except them from his natural aversion. So, in the last
+resort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined the
+majority of men were engaged in humbugging him. If his standard of truth
+was higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few.
+There is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats is
+merely clumsy and inopportune. In the slow meanderings of this _Memoir_
+we too often catch a glimpse of Butler measuring giants with the
+impertinent foot-rule of his common sense. One does not like him the
+less for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting jokes with
+which it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation.
+Persistently there emerges from the record the impression of something
+childish, whether in petulance or _gaminerie_, a crudeness as well as a
+shrewdness of judgment and ideal. Where Butler thought himself complete,
+he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he was
+complete. To himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of Pauli; to
+us he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of Miss Savage.
+
+[OCTOBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Poetry of Mr Hardy_
+
+
+One meets fairly often with the critical opinion that Mr Hardy's poetry
+is incidental. It is admitted on all sides that his poetry has curious
+merits of its own, but it is held to be completely subordinate to his
+novels, and those who maintain that it must be considered as having
+equal standing with his prose, are not seldom treated as guilty of
+paradox and preciousness.
+
+We are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those of
+the contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressed
+primarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man's chief work must
+necessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some such
+supposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visible
+reluctance to allow Mr Hardy's poetry a clean impact upon the critical
+consciousness. It is true that we have ranged against us critics of
+distinction, such as Mr Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr Robert Lynd, and
+that it may savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could have
+been unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressed
+themselves to Mr Hardy's poetry. Nevertheless, we find some significance
+in the fact that both these critics are of such an age that when they
+came to years of discretion the Wessex Novels were in existence as a
+_corpus_. There, before their eyes, was a monument of literary work
+having a unity unlike that of any contemporary author. The poems became
+public only after they had laid the foundations of their judgment. For
+them Mr Hardy's work was done. Whatever he might subsequently produce
+was an interesting, but to their criticism an otiose appendix to his
+prose achievement.
+
+It happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspective
+may be different. By the accident of years it would appear to him that
+Mr Hardy's poetry was no less a _corpus_ than his prose. They would be
+extended equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embark
+upon voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and he
+might find, in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that the
+poetry would yield up to him a quality of perfume not less essential
+than any that he could extract from the prose.
+
+This is, as we see it, the case with ourselves. We discover all that our
+elders discover in Mr Hardy's novels; we see more than they in his
+poetry. To our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is not
+lifted into significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels.
+They also are complete in themselves. We recognise the relation between
+the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind;
+but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. The
+one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline,
+therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us
+the most important sentence in _Who's Who?_--namely, that in which Mr
+Hardy confesses that in 1868 he was compelled--that is his own word--to
+give up writing poetry for prose.
+
+For Mr Hardy's poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. In the
+volume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with the
+exception of 'The Dynasts,'[12] are pieces bearing the date 1866 which
+display an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of the
+essential content of great poetry. Nor are such pieces exceptional.
+Granted that Mr Hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry,
+still there are a dozen poems of 1866-7 which belong either entirely or
+in part to the category of major poetry. Take, for instance, 'Neutral
+Tones':--
+
+  'We stood by a pond that winter day,
+  And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
+  And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
+    --They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
+
+  'Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
+  Over tedious riddles long ago;
+  And some winds played between us to and fro
+    On which lost the more by our love.
+
+  'The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
+  Alive enough to have strength to die;
+  And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
+    Like an ominous bird a-wing....
+
+  'Since then keen lessons that love deceives
+  And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
+  Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree
+    And a pond edged with grayish leaves.'
+
+   [Footnote 12: _Collected. Poems of Thomas Hardy_. Vol. I.
+   (Macmillan.)]
+
+That was written in 1867. The date of _Desperate Remedies_, Mr Hardy's
+first novel, was 1871. _Desperate Remedies_ may have been written some
+years before. It makes no difference to the astonishing contrast between
+the immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. It is surely
+impossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that Mr
+Hardy's poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curious
+simulacrum of his prose.
+
+These early poems have other points of deep interest, of which one of
+the chief is in a sense technical. One can trace a quite definite
+influence of Shakespeare's sonnets in his language and imagery. The four
+sonnets, 'She to Him' (1866), are full of echoes, as:--
+
+  'Numb as a vane that cankers on its point
+  True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.'
+
+or this from another sonnet of the same year:--
+
+  'As common chests encasing wares of price
+  Are borne with tenderness through halls of state.'
+
+Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the
+impress of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curious
+and impressive in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringing
+some physical compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to say
+something that he does not want to say. Of course, it is merely a
+curious tweak of the fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as the
+following an insistent vision of two youths of an age the one
+masterful, the other indulgent, and carrying out his companion's firm
+suggestion:--
+
+  'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame
+  That Sportsman Time rears but his brood to kill,
+  Knowing me in my soul the very same--
+  One who would die to spare you touch of ill!--
+  Will you not grant to old affection's claim
+  The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?'
+
+But, fancies aside, the effect of these early poems is twofold. Their
+attitude is definite:--
+
+  'Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain
+  And dicing time for gladness calls a moan ...
+  These purblind Doomsters had as readily thrown
+  Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.'
+
+and the technique has the mark of mastery, a complete economy of
+statement which produces the conviction that the words are saying only
+what poet ordained they should say, neither less nor more.
+
+The early years were followed by the long period of the novels, in
+which, we are prepared to admit, poetry was actually if not in intention
+incidental. It is the grim truth that poetry cannot be written in
+between times; and, though we have hardly any dates on which to rely, we
+are willing to believe that few of Mr Hardy's characteristic poems were
+written between the appearance of _Desperate Remedies_ and his farewell
+to the activity of novel-writing with _The Well-Beloved_ (1897). But the
+few dates which we have tell us that 'Thoughts of Phena,' the beautiful
+poem beginning:--
+
+  'Not a line of her writing have I,
+  Not a thread of her hair....'
+
+which reaches forward to the love poems of 1912-13, was written in 1890.
+
+Whether the development of Mr Hardy's poetry was concealed or visible
+during the period of the novels, development there was into a maturity
+so overwhelming that by its touchstone the poetical work of his famous
+contemporaries appears singularly jejune and false. But, though by the
+accident of social conditions--for that Mr Hardy waited till 1898 to
+publish his first volume of poems is more a social than an artistic
+fact--it is impossible to follow out the phases of his poetical progress
+in the detail we would desire, it is impossible not to recognise that
+the mature poet, Mr Hardy, is of the same poetical substance as the
+young poet of the 'sixties. The attitude is unchanged; the modifications
+of the theme of 'crass casualty' leave its central asseveration
+unchanged. There are restatements, enlargements of perspective, a slow
+and forceful expansion of the personal into the universal, but the truth
+once recognised is never suffered for a moment to be hidden or
+mollified. Only a superficial logic would point, for instance, to his
+
+  'Wonder if Man's consciousness
+  Was a mistake of God's,'
+
+as a denial of 'casualty.' To envisage an accepted truth from a new
+angle, to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope of
+finding some aspect which might accord with a large and general view is
+the inevitable movement of any mind that is alive and not dead. To say
+that Mr Hardy has finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it is
+true. The harmony of the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher or
+the philosopher. Neither would grant, neither would understand the
+profound acquiescence that lies behind 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to the
+Grecian Urn.' Such acquiescence has no moral quality, as morality is
+even now understood, nor any logical compulsion. It does not stifle
+anger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling face upon unsmiling things;
+it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile heroics. It accepts the
+things that are as the necessary basis of artistic creation. This unity
+which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to deny
+experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which is
+not denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy's mature poetry.
+It gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is
+called the impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense of
+background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the
+culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the
+culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems
+to record.
+
+At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy
+to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or
+dismay. Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famous
+lines: 'There is some corner of a foreign field ...' and Mr Hardy's
+'Drummer Hodge':--
+
+  'Yet portion of that unknown plain
+    Will Hodge for ever be;
+  His homely Northern heart and brain
+    Grow to some Southern tree,
+  And strange-eyed constellations reign
+    His stars eternally.'
+
+We know which is the truer. Which is the more beautiful? Is it not Mr
+Hardy? And which (strange question) is the more consoling, the more
+satisfying, the more acceptable? Is it not Mr Hardy? There is sorrow,
+but it is the sorrow of the spheres. And this, not the apparent anger
+and dismay of a self's discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in Mr
+Hardy's poetry. The Mr Hardy of the love poems of 1912-13 is not a man
+giving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry of
+the universe. A vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weight
+each syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into a
+moment of time with a vista of years:--
+
+  'Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
+    The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
+  Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
+    For the stars close their shutters and the
+        Dawn whitens hazily.
+  Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours
+    The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
+      I am just the same as when
+  Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.'
+
+[NOVEMBER, 1919.
+
+We have read these poems of Thomas Hardy, read them not once, but many
+times. Many of them have already become part of our being; their
+indelible impress has given shape to dumb and striving elements in our
+soul; they have set free and purged mute, heart-devouring regrets. And
+yet, though this is so, the reading of them in a single volume, the
+submission to their movement with a like unbroken motion of the mind,
+gathers their greatness, their poignancy and passion, into one stream,
+submerging us and leaving us patient and purified.
+
+There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of
+sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this
+compulsive power. The secret is not hard to find. Not one of them is
+adequate to what we know and have suffered. We have in our own hearts a
+new touchstone of poetic greatness. We have learned too much to be
+wholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and a
+complete acknowledgment of experience. 'Give us the whole,' we cry,
+'give us the truth.' Unless we can catch the undertone of this
+acknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding
+brass or a tinkling cymbal.
+
+Therefore we turn--some by instinct and some by deliberate choice--to
+the greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these. What
+they have, he has, and has in their degree--a plenary vision of life. He
+is the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in,
+modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual
+poems of which they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment of
+a whole--not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity
+which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and
+completely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind and
+within it a reaction to the universe. An overwhelming endorsement
+descends upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, and
+straightway they are graven in stone.
+
+Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in
+kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries. These may be
+perfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by Mr Hardy is often
+perfect in a higher sense. As the lines of a diagram may be produced in
+imagination to contain within themselves all space, one of Mr Hardy's
+most characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience.
+In it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself--the
+dominant theme that gives individuation to the ripple of fragmentary
+joys and sorrows. Take 'The Broken Appointment':--
+
+      'You did not come,
+  And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.--
+  Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
+  Than that I thus found lacking in your make
+  That high compassion which can overbear
+  Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
+  Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
+      You did not come.
+
+  'You love not me,
+  And love alone can lend you loyalty
+  --I know and knew it. But, unto the store
+  Of human deeds divine in all but name,
+  Was it not worth a little hour or more
+  To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
+  To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
+      You love not me?'
+
+On such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visible
+endorsement of the universe. The hopes not of a lover but of humanity
+are crushed beneath its rhythm. The ruthlessness of the event is
+intensified in the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad of
+destiny, and a moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain of
+intense attention it seems to have been written by the destiny it
+records.
+
+What is the secret of poetic power like this? We do not look for it in
+technique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. But the
+technique of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind that
+we know as we read that it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. For a
+moment it startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words is
+reverberant with accumulated purpose. They are pitiless as the poem; the
+sign of an ultimate obedience is upon them. Whence came the power that
+compelled it? Can the source be defined or indicated? We believe it can
+be indicated, though not defined. We can show where to look for the
+mystery, that in spite of our regard remains a mystery still. We are
+persuaded that almost on the instant that it was felt the original
+emotion of the poem was endorsed Perhaps it came to the poet as the pain
+of a particular and personal experience; but in a little or a long
+while--creative time is not measured by days or years--it became, for
+him, a part of the texture of the general life. It became a
+manifestation of life, almost, nay wholly, in the sacramental sense, a
+veritable epiphany. The manifold and inexhaustible quality of life was
+focused into a single revelation. A critic's words do not lend
+themselves to the necessary precision. We should need to write with
+exactly the same power as Mr Hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour stroked
+its sum,' to make our meaning likewise inevitable. The word 'revelation'
+is fertile in false suggestion; the creative act of power which we seek
+to elucidate is an act of plenary apprehension, by which one
+manifestation, one form of life, one experience is seen in its rigorous
+relation to all other and to all possible manifestations, forms, and
+experiences. It is, we believe, the act which Mr Hardy himself has tried
+to formulate in the phrase which is the title of one of his books of
+poems--_Moments of Vision_.
+
+Only those who do not read Mr Hardy could make the mistake of supposing
+that on his lips such a phrase had a mystical implication. Between
+belief and logic lies a third kingdom, which the mystics and the
+philosophers alike are too eager to forget--the kingdom of art, no less
+the residence of truth than the two other realms, and to some, perhaps,
+more authentic even than they. Therefore when we expand the word
+'vision' in the phrase to 'aesthetic vision' we mean, not the perception
+of beauty, at least in the ordinary sense of that ill-used word, but the
+apprehension of truth, the recognition of a complete system of valid
+relations incapable of logical statement. Such are the acts of unique
+apprehension which Mr Hardy, we believe, implied by his title. In a
+'moment of vision' the poet recognises in a single separate incident of
+life, life's essential quality. The uniqueness of the whole, the
+infinite multiplicity and variety of its elements, are manifested and
+apprehended in a part. Since we are here at work on the confines of
+intelligible statement, it is better, even at the cost of brutalising a
+poem, to choose an example from the book that bears the mysterious name.
+The verses that follow come from 'Near Lanivet, 1872.' We choose them as
+an example of Mr Hardy's method at less than its best, at a point at
+which the scaffolding of his process is just visible.
+
+  'There was a stunted hand-post just on the crest.
+    Only a few feet high:
+  She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
+    At the crossways close thereby.
+
+  'She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
+    And laid her arms on its own,
+  Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
+    Her sad face sideways thrown.
+
+  'Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
+    Made her look as one crucified
+  In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
+    And hurriedly "Don't," I cried.
+
+  'I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
+    As she stepped forth ready to go,
+  "I am rested now.--Something strange came into my head;
+    I wish I had not leant so!'...
+
+  'And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
+    In the running of Time's far glass
+  Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
+    Some day.--Alas, alas!'
+
+Superstition and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert the
+order of the creative process. The poet's act of apprehension is wholly
+different from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension the
+chance-shaped crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. The
+concentration of life's vicissitude upon that white-clothed form was
+first recognised by a sovereign act of aesthetic understanding or
+intuition; the seeming crucifix supplied a scaffolding for its
+expression; it afforded a clue to the method of transposition into words
+which might convey the truth thus apprehended; it suggested an
+equivalence. The distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but we believe
+that it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to an
+understanding of Mr Hardy's poetry in particular. Indeed, in it must be
+sought the meaning of another of his titles, 'Satires of Circumstance,'
+where the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, but
+a symbol necessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality in
+life more largely and variously apprehended by the poet. At the risk of
+appearing fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate our
+meaning. The poetic process is, we believe, twofold. The one part, the
+discovery of the symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what we
+may call poetic method. It is concerned with the transposition and
+communication of emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for to
+poetic method the emotional material is, strictly, indifferent. The
+other part is an esthetic apprehension of significance, the recognition
+of the all in the one. This is a specifically poetic act, or rather the
+supreme poetic act. Yet it may be absent from poetry. For there is no
+necessary connection between poetic apprehension and poetic method.
+Poetic method frequently exists without poetic apprehension; and there
+is no reason to suppose that the reverse is not also true, for the
+recognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the peculiar
+privilege of great poets. We have here, at least a principle of division
+between major and minor poetry.
+
+Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and ask
+what it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act of
+apprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality of
+the one. We believe that the answer is simple. The great poet knows what
+he is looking for. Once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely,
+being compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describe
+what is being done in the kingdom of art. The poet, we say, knows the
+quality for which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a condition
+than a possession of soul. It is a state of responsiveness rather than a
+knowledge of that to which he will respond. But it is knowledge inasmuch
+as the choice of that to which he will respond is determined by the
+condition of his soul. On the purity of that condition depends his
+greatness as a poet, and that purity in its turn depends upon his
+denying no element of his profound experience. If he denies or forgets,
+the synthesis--again the word is a metaphor--which must establish itself
+within him is fragmentary and false. The new event can wake but partial
+echoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received into, nor
+can it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable from
+limbo into forgetfulness.
+
+Mr Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate
+purity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the world's slow stain
+has not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general
+conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professional
+optimists take a part. Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence and
+strangeness of their own:--
+
+      'It will have been:
+  Nor God nor Demon can undo the done,
+      Unsight the seen
+  Make muted music be as unbegun
+      Though things terrene
+  Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.'
+
+What neither God nor Demon can do, men are incessantly at work to
+accomplish. Life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for she
+scatters her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns.
+But the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond his
+power to remember them otherwise than together.
+
+It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardy
+should have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of
+love poems that are unique for power and passion in even the English
+language. This late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; it
+has sprung straight from the main stem of Mr Hardy's poetic growth. Into
+'Veteris Vestigia Flammas' is distilled the quintessence of the power
+that created the Wessex Novels and 'The Dynasts'; all that Mr Hardy has
+to tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, is
+in these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or told
+us more. _Sunt lacrimae rerum_.
+
+[NOVEMBER, 1919.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+POSTSCRIPT
+
+Three months after this essay was written the first volume of the long
+awaited definitive edition of Mr Hardy's works (the Mellstock Edition)
+appeared. It was with no common thrill that we read in the precious
+pages of introduction the following words confirming the theory upon
+which the first part of the essay is largely based.
+
+    'Turning now to my verse--to myself the more individual part of my
+    literary fruitage--I would say that, unlike some of the fiction,
+    nothing interfered with the writer's freedom in respect of its form
+    or content. Several of the poems--indeed many--were produced before
+    novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the
+    light till all the novels had been published....
+
+    'The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of
+    some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more
+    volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty
+    years. One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how
+    much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given
+    in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.'
+
+
+
+
+_Present Condition of English Poetry_
+
+
+Shall we, or shall we not, be serious? To be serious nowadays is to be
+ill-mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter? We have our
+opinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in the
+Georgian book, a little in _Wheels_.[13] We know that there is much bad
+poetry in the Georgian book, and less in _Wheels_. We know that there is
+one poem in _Wheels_ beside the intense and sombre imagination of which
+even the good poetry of the Georgian book pales for a moment. We think
+we know more than this. What does it matter? Pick out the good things,
+and let the rest go.
+
+   [Footnote 13: _Georgian Poetry_, 1918-1919. Edited by E.M. (The
+   Poetry Bookshop.)
+
+   _Wheels_. Fourth Cycle. (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell.)]
+
+And yet, somehow, this question of modern English poetry has become
+important for us, as important as the war, important in the same way as
+the war. We can even analogise. _Georgian Poetry_ is like the Coalition
+Government; _Wheels_ is like the Radical opposition. Out of the one
+there issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous
+redolence of _union sacree_; out of the other, some acidulation of
+perversity. In the coalition poets we find the larger number of good
+men, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find
+no bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition
+goodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent,
+passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life.
+
+On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both
+sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost
+wholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we
+find intensely disagreeable. In the coalition we find it noxious, in the
+opposition no worse than irritating. No doubt this is because we
+recognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while the
+opposition is held to be ridiculous. But both the coalition and the
+opposition--we use both terms in their corporate sense--are unmistakably
+the product of the present age. In that sense they are truly
+representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair
+sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we
+live; they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete
+confusion of aesthetic values that prevails to-day.
+
+The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. Of the
+nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we
+except absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, and
+Mr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, Mr
+Abercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the rest
+there are varying degrees of saturation. This false simplicity can be
+quite subtle. It is compounded of worship of trees and birds and
+contemporary poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over at
+times with a quite perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other times
+with what looks to be technical skill, but generally proves to be a
+fairly clumsy reminiscence of somebody else's technical skill. The
+negative qualities of this _simplesse_ are, however, the most obvious;
+the poems imbued with it are devoid of any emotional significance
+whatever. If they have an idea it leaves you with the queer feeling that
+it is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn smooth by the
+rippling of innumerable minds. Then, spread in a luminous haze over
+these compounded elements, is a fundamental right-mindedness; you feel,
+somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are very
+good. There is nothing disturbing about them; _ils peuvent etre mis dans
+toutes les mains_; they are kind, generous, even noble. They sympathise
+with animate and inanimate nature. They have shining foreheads with big
+bumps of benevolence, like Flora Casby's father, and one inclines to
+believe that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear,
+if only because their vision is blurred. They are fond of lists of names
+which never suggest things; they are sparing of similes. If they use
+them they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definite
+simile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certain
+test of reality.
+
+But it is impossible to be serious about them. The more stupid of them
+supply the matter for a good laugh; the more clever the stuff of a more
+recondite amazement. What _is_ one to do when Mr Monro apostrophises the
+force of Gravity in such words as these?--
+
+  'By leave of you man places stone on stone;
+  He scatters seed: you are at once the prop
+  Among the long roots of his fragile crop
+  You manufacture for him, and insure
+  House, harvest, implement, and furniture,
+  And hold them all secure.'
+
+We are not surprised to learn further that
+
+  'I rest my body on your grass,
+  And let my brain repose in you.'
+
+All that remains to be said is that Mr Monro is fond of dogs ('Can you
+smell the rose?' he says to Dog: 'ah, no!') and inclined to fish--both
+of which are Georgian inclinations.
+
+Then there is Mr Drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man for
+moonlit apples--'moon-washed apples of wonder'--and the righteous man's
+sense of robust rhythm in this chorus from 'Lincoln':--
+
+    'You who know the tenderness
+  Of old men at eve-tide,
+    Coming from the hedgerows,
+  Coming from the plough,
+    And the wandering caress
+  Of winds upon the woodside,
+    When the crying yaffle goes
+  Underneath the bough.'
+
+Mr Drinkwater, though he cannot write good doggerel, is a very good man.
+In this poem he refers to the Sermon on the Mount as 'the words of light
+From the mountain-way.'
+
+Mr Squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make an
+excellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity. He
+would repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in the
+same way as, we suppose, he deceives himself. His poem 'Rivers' seems to
+us a very curious example of the _faux bon_. Not only is the idea
+derivative, but the rhythmical treatment also. Here is Mr de la Mare:--
+
+  'Sweet is the music of Arabia
+  In my heart, when out of dreams
+  I still in the thin clear murk of dawn
+  Descry her gliding streams;
+  Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
+  Ring loud with the grief and delight
+  Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians
+  In the brooding silence of night.
+  They haunt me--her lutes and her forests;
+  No beauty on earth I see
+  But shadowed with that dream recalls
+  Her loveliness to me:
+  Still eyes look coldly upon me,
+  Cold voices whisper and say--
+  "He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
+  They have stolen his wits away."'
+
+And here is a verse from Mr Squire:--
+
+  'For whatever stream I stand by,
+  And whatever river I dream of,
+  There is something still in the back of my mind
+    From very far away;
+  There is something I saw and see not,
+  A country full of rivers
+  That stirs in my heart and speaks to me
+    More sure, more dear than they.
+
+  'And always I ask and wonder
+  (Though often I do not know it)
+  Why does this water not smell like water?...'
+
+To leave the question of reminiscence aside, how the delicate vision of
+Mr de la Mare has been coarsened, how commonplace his exquisite
+technique has become in the hands of even a first-rate ability! It
+remains to be added that Mr Squire is an amateur of nature,--
+
+  'And skimming, fork-tailed in the evening air,
+  When man first was were not the martens there?'--
+
+and a lover of dogs.
+
+Mr Shanks, Mr W.J. Turner, and Mr Freeman belong to the same order. They
+have considerable technical accomplishment of the straightforward
+kind--and no emotional content. One can find examples of the disastrous
+simile in them all. They are all in their degree pseudo-naives. Mr
+Turner wonders in this way:--
+
+  'It is strange that a little mud
+  Should echo with sounds, syllables, and letters,
+  Should rise up and call a mountain Popocatapetl,
+  And a green-leafed wood Oleander.'
+
+Of course Mr Turner does not really wonder; those four lines are proof
+positive of that. But what matters is not so much the intrinsic value of
+the gift as the kindly thought which prompted the giver. Mr Shanks's
+speciality is beauty. He also is an amateur of nature. He bids us: 'Hear
+the loud night-jar spin his pleasant note.' Of course, Mr Shanks cannot
+have heard a real night-jar. His description is proof of that. But
+again, it was a kindly thought. Mr Freeman is, like Mr Squire, a more
+interesting case, deserving detailed analysis. For the moment we can
+only recommend a comparison of his first and second poems in this book
+with 'Sabrina Fair' and 'Love in a Valley' respectively.
+
+It is only when we are confronted with the strange blend of technical
+skill and an emotional void that we begin to hunt for reminiscences.
+Reminiscences are no danger to the real poet. He is the splendid
+borrower who lends a new significance to that which he takes. He
+incorporates his borrowing in the new thing which he creates; it has its
+being there and there alone. One can see the process in the one fine
+poem in _Wheels_, Mr Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting':--
+
+  'It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
+  Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
+  Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
+  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
+  Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
+  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
+  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
+  Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
+  And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
+  With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
+  Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
+  And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
+  "Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
+  "None," said the other, "save the undone years,
+  The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
+  Was my life also..."'
+
+The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in
+these two books, both in intention and achievement. Yet no one can
+mistake its source. It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Induction
+to 'Hyperion.' The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the
+dying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats.
+
+  'None can usurp this height, return'd that shade,
+  But those to whom the miseries of the world
+  Are misery, and will not let them rest.'
+
+That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen's 'Strange
+Meeting.' It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its
+technique there is the hand of the master to be. Those monosyllabic
+assonances are the discovery of genius. We are persuaded that this poem
+by a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in
+his heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotional
+significance of the war that has yet been achieved by English poetry. By
+including it in his book, the editor of _Wheels_ has done a great
+service to English letters.
+
+Extravagant words, it may be thought. We appeal to the documents. Read
+_Georgian Poetry_ and read 'Strange Meeting.' Compare Wilfred Owen's
+poem with the very finest things in the Georgian book--Mr Davies's
+'Lovely Dames,' or Mr de la Mare's 'The Tryst,' or 'Fare Well,' or the
+twenty opening lines of Mr Abercrombie's disappointing poem. You will
+not find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you
+will find in 'Strange Meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that
+which has been most profound in the experience of a generation. You
+will, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of
+which makes the confusion of a book like _Georgian Poetry_ possible,
+restored to you. You will remember three forgotten things--that poetry
+is rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and
+that its significance finally depends upon the quality and
+comprehensiveness of the emotion. You will recognise that the tricks of
+the trade have never been and never will be discovered by which ability
+can conjure emptiness into meaning.
+
+It seems hardly worth while to return to _Wheels_. Once the argument has
+been pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting,' the rest of the
+contents of the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry we
+will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false
+sophistication. There are the same contemporary reminiscences. Compare
+Mr Osbert Sitwell's _English Gothic_ with Mr T.S. Eliot's _Sweeney_; and
+you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with
+the emotions of a complex one. The spectacle is almost as amusing as
+that of the similar process in the Georgian book. Nevertheless, in
+general, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merely
+irritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positively
+noxious. Miss Edith Sitwell's deliberate painted toys are a great deal
+better than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones.
+In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a perplexed emotion manages to make its
+way through a chaotic technique. She represents the solid impulse which
+lies behind the opposition in general. This impulse she describes,
+though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these not
+uninteresting verses:--
+
+  'But since we are mere children of this age,
+  And must in curious ways discover salvation
+  I will not quit my muddled generation,
+  But ever plead for Beauty in this rage.
+
+  'Although I know that Nature's bounty yields
+  Unto simplicity a beautiful content,
+  Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent
+  Will I give back my body to the fields.'
+
+There is the opposition. Against the righteous man, the _mauvais
+sujet_. We sympathise with the _mauvais sujet_. If he is persistent and
+laborious enough, he may achieve poetry. But he must travel alone. In
+order to be loyal to your age you must make up your mind what your age
+is. To be muddled yourself is not loyalty, but treachery, even to a
+muddled generation.
+
+[DECEMBER, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+_The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield_
+
+
+Mr Masefiled is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end,
+which is the glorification of England in narrative verse. _Reynard the
+Fox_ marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal.
+He has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so subdued that
+they no longer sensibly impede the movement of his verse, a point at
+which we may begin to speak (though not too loud) of mastery. We feel
+that he now approaches what he desires to do with some certainty of
+doing it, so that we in our turn can approach some other questions with
+some hope of answering them.
+
+The questions are various; but they radiate from and enter again into
+the old question whether what he is doing, and beginning to do well, is
+worth while doing, or rather whether it will have been worth while doing
+fifty years hence. For we have no doubt at all in our mind that, in
+comparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as _Reynard
+the Fox_ is valuable. We may use the old rough distinction and ask first
+whether _Reynard the Fox_ is durable in virtue of its substance, and
+second, whether it is durable in virtue of its form.
+
+The glorification of England! There are some who would give their souls
+to be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by Shakespeare, by
+Milton, by Wordsworth, and by Hardy. For an Englishman there is no
+richer inspiration, no finer theme; to have one's speech and thought
+saturated by the fragrance of this lovely and pleasant land was once
+the birthright of English poets and novelists. But something has crept
+between us and it, dividing. Instead of an instinctive love, there is a
+conscious desire of England; instead of slow saturation, a desperate
+plunge into its mystery. The fragrance does not come at its own sweet
+will; we clutch at it. It does not enfold and pervade our most arduous
+speculations; no involuntary sweetness comes flooding in upon our
+confrontation of human destinies. Hardy is the last of that great line.
+If we long for sweetness--as we do long for it, and with how poignant a
+pain!--we must seek it out, like men who rush dusty and irritable from
+the babble and fever of the town. The rhythm of the earth never enters
+into their gait; they are like spies among the birds and flowers, like
+collectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. The Georgians
+snatch at nature; they are never part of it. And there is some element
+of this desperation in Mr Masefield. We feel in him an anxiety to load
+every rift with ore of this particular kind, a deliberate intention to
+emphasise that which is most English in the English country-side.
+
+How shall we say it? It is not that he makes a parade of arcane
+knowledge. The word 'parade' does injustice to his indubitable
+integrity. But we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical,
+and at times archaic phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himself
+that he is saturated in essential Englishness, and we incline to think
+that even his choice of an actual subject was less inevitable than
+self-imposed. He would isolate the quality he would capture, have it
+more wholly within his grasp; yet, in some subtle way, it finally
+eludes him. The intention is in excess, and in the manner of its
+execution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess also. The
+music of English place-names, for instance is too insistent; no one into
+whom they had entered with the English air itself would use them with so
+manifest an admiration.
+
+Perhaps a comparison may bring definition nearer. The first part of Mr
+Masefield's poem, which describes the meet and the assembled persons one
+by one, recalls, not merely by the general cast of the subject, but by
+many actual turns of phrase, Chaucer's _Prologue_. Mr Masefield's parson
+has more than one point of resemblance to Chaucer's Monk:--
+
+  'An out-ryder, that loved venerye;
+  A manly man to ben an abbot able....'
+
+But it would take too long to quote both pictures. We may choose for our
+juxtaposition the Prioress and one of Mr Masefield's young ladies:--
+
+  'Behind them rode her daughter Belle,
+  A strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face
+  Was sweet with thought and proud with race,
+  And bright with joy at riding there.
+  She was as good as blowing air,
+  But shy and difficult to know.
+  The kittens in the barley-mow,
+  The setter's toothless puppies sprawling,
+  The blackbird in the apple calling,
+  All knew her spirit more than we.
+  So delicate these maidens be
+  In loving lovely helpless things.'
+
+And here is the Prioress:--
+
+  'But for to speken of hir conscience,
+  She was so charitable and so pitous,
+  She wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous
+  Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
+  Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed
+  With rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread,
+  But sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded
+  Or if men smote it with a yerde smerte:
+  And all was conscience and tendere herte.'
+  Ful semely hir wympel pynched was;
+  His nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
+  Hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red,
+  But sikerly she hadde a fair forhed.'
+
+There is in the Chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidence
+that the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside which
+Mr Masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost _malsain_. How
+far outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the apple
+calling,' and how tainted by the desperate _bergerie_ of the Georgian
+era!
+
+It is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set Mr Masefield's
+prologue beside Chaucer's. But not only is it a tribute to Mr Masefield
+that he brought us to reading Chaucer over again, but the comparison is
+at bottom just. Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he
+has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that
+belong to one: but he has perdurable qualities. He is at home with his
+speech and at home with his world; by his side Mr Masefield seems
+nervous and uncertain about both. He belongs, in fact, to a race (or a
+generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading
+every rift with ore. The question is whether such a man can hope to
+express the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side.
+
+Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate
+impulse is a _nostalgie de la boue_ that betrays itself in line after
+line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that
+any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield,
+in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to
+him, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and
+rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there
+otherwise. For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself.
+Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:--
+
+  'His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
+  He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
+  Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
+  Where scent would hang like breath on glass).
+  He loved the English country-side;
+  The wine-leaved bramble in the ride,
+  The lichen on the apple-trees,
+  The poultry ranging on the lees,
+  The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover,
+  His wife's green grave at Mitcheldover,
+  Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw.
+  Under his hide his heart was raw
+  With joy and pity of these things...'
+
+That 'raw heart' marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia. Apart from
+the fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to the
+first whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it would
+be a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come to the
+question of Mr Masefield's style in general.
+
+As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted
+distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already
+been discussing Mr Masefield's style under a specific aspect. But the
+particular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield's
+general condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not find
+it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself
+of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very
+vitals of his artistic effort. He is seeking always to be that which he
+is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows
+he can never wholly possess.
+
+  'From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse
+  There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops,
+  All wet red clay, where a horse's foot
+  Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root.
+  The fox raced on, on the headlands firm,
+  Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm;
+  The rooks rose raving to curse him raw,
+  He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw.
+  Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field
+  Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled,
+  With a bay horse near and a white horse leading,
+  And a man saying "Zook," and the red earth bleeding.'
+
+The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. It comes, we believe,
+from a consciousness of anaemia, a frenetic reaction towards what used,
+some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.'
+
+And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our
+sympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness and
+right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for
+this 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country
+house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time. Its
+colour is hectic; its tempo feverish. He has sought the healing virtue
+where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whose
+magic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose
+strong rhythm is in Hardy. But the virtue eludes all conscious
+inquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is
+peace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would have
+done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel,
+but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master
+it, in his consciousness? We will not presume to answer, mindful that Mr
+Masefield may not recognise himself in our mirror, but we will content
+ourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of the almost
+heroic effort that has gone to its composition _Reynard the Fox_ lacks
+all the qualities essential to durability.
+
+[JANUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Lost Legions_
+
+
+One day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by the
+breath which moves the Spirits of Pity in Mr Hardy's _Dynasts_. It will
+be a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of the
+generation that perished in the war. It will be a work of genius, for
+the essence that must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief,
+almost beyond imagination. We know of its existence by signs hardly more
+material than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet all
+but inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead.
+The autobiographer-novelists have been legion, yet we turn from them all
+with a slow shake of the head. 'No, it was not that. Had we lost only
+that we could have forgotten. It was not that.'
+
+No, it was the spirit that troubled, as in dream, the waters of the
+pool, some influence which trembled between silence and a sound, a
+precarious confidence, an unavowed quest, a wisdom that came not of
+years or experience, a dissatisfaction, a doubt, a devotion, some
+strange presentiment, it may have been, of the bitter years in store, in
+memory an ineffable, irrevocable beauty, a visible seal on the forehead
+of a generation.
+
+    'When the lamp is shattered.
+  The light in the dust lies dead--
+    When the cloud is scattered
+  The rainbow's glory is shed.
+    When the lute is broken,
+  Sweet tones are remembered not...'
+
+Yet out of a thousand fragments this memory must be created anew in a
+form that will outlast the years, for it was precious. It was something
+that would vindicate an epoch against the sickening adulation of the
+hero-makers and against the charge of spiritual sterility; a light in
+whose gleam the bewildering non-achievements of the present age, the art
+which seems not even to desire to be art, the faith which seems not to
+desire to be faith, have substance and meaning. It was shot through and
+through by an impulse of paradox, an unconscious straining after the
+impossible, gathered into two or three tremulous years which passed too
+swiftly to achieve their own expression. Now, what remains of youth is
+cynical, is successful, publicly exploits itself. It was not cynical
+then.
+
+Elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lasted
+long enough to receive a name. There was Unanimism. The name is
+remembered; perhaps the books are read. But it will not be found in the
+books. They are childish, just as the English novels which endeavoured
+to portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited. Behind
+all the conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay a
+fundamental candour of which only a flickering gleam can now be
+recaptured. It glints on a page of M. Romains's _Europe_; the memory of
+it haunts Wilfred Owen's poems; it touches Keeling's letters; it hovers
+over these letters of Charles Sorley.[14] From a hundred strange
+lurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers and
+withdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for if
+it wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever.
+
+   [Footnote 14: _The Letters of Charles Sorley_. (Cambridge University
+   Press.)]
+
+Charles Sorley was the youngest fringe of the strange unity that
+included him and men by ten years his senior. He had not, as they had,
+plunged with fantastic hopes and unspoken fears into the world. He had
+not learned the slogans of the day. But, seeing that the slogans were
+only a disguise for the undefined desires which inspired them he lost
+little and gained much thereby. The years at Oxford in which he would
+have taken a temporary sameness, a sameness in the long run protective
+and strengthening, were spared him. In his letters we have him
+unspoiled, as the sentimentalists would say--not yet with the
+distraction of protective colouring.
+
+One who knew him better than the mere reader of his letters can pretend
+to know him declares that, in spite of his poems, which are among the
+most remarkable of those of the boy-poets killed in the war, Sorley
+would not have been a man of letters. The evidence of the letters
+themselves is heavy against the view; they insist upon being regarded as
+the letters of a potential writer. But a passionate interest in
+literature is not the inevitable prelude to a life as a writer, and
+although it is impossible to consider any thread in Sorley's letters as
+of importance comparable to that which joins the enthronement and
+dethronement of his literary idols, we shall regard it as the record of
+a movement of soul which might as easily find expression (as did
+Keeling's) in other than literary activities. It takes more than
+literary men to make a generation, after all.
+
+And Sorley was typical above all in this, that, passionate and
+penetrating as was his devotion to literature, he never looked upon it
+as a thing existing in and for itself. It was, to him and his kind, the
+satisfaction of an impulse other and more complex than the aesthetic. Art
+was a means and not an end to him, and it is perhaps the apprehension of
+this that has led one who endeavoured in vain to reconcile Sorley to
+Pater into rash prognostication. Sorley would never have been an artist
+in Pater's way; he belonged to his own generation, to which _l'art pour
+l'art_ had ceased to have meaning. There had come a pause, a throbbing
+silence, from which art might have emerged, may even now after the
+appointed time arise, with strange validities undreamed of or forgotten.
+Let us not prophesy; let us be content with the recognition that
+Sorley's generation was too keenly, perhaps too disastrously aware of
+destinies, of
+
+    'the beating of the wings of Love
+  Shut out from his creation,'
+
+to seek the comfort of the ivory tower.
+
+Sorley first appears before us radiant with the white-heat of a
+schoolboy enthusiasm for Masefield. Masefield is--how we remember the
+feeling!--the poet who has lived; his naked reality tears through 'the
+lace of putrid sentimentalism (educing the effeminate in man) which
+rotters like Tennyson and Swinburne have taught his (the superficial
+man's) soul to love.' It tears through more than Tennyson and Swinburne.
+The greatest go down before him.
+
+    'So you see what I think of John Masefield. When I say that he has
+    the rapidity, simplicity, nobility of Homer, with the power of
+    drawing character, the dramatic truth to life of Shakespeare, along
+    with a moral and emotional strength and elevation which is all his
+    own, and therefore I am prepared to put him above the level of these
+    two great men--I do not expect you to agree with me.'--(From a paper
+    read at Marlborough, November, 1912.)
+
+That was Sorley at seventeen, and that, it seems to us, is the quality
+of enthusiasm which should be felt by a boy of seventeen if he is to
+make his mark. It is infinitely more important to have felt that flaming
+enthusiasm for an idol who will be cast down than to have felt what we
+ought to feel for Shakespeare and Homer. The gates of heaven are opened
+by strange keys, but they must be our own.
+
+Within six months Masefield had gone the way of all flesh. In a paper on
+_The Shropshire Lad_ (May, 1913), curious both for critical subtlety and
+the faint taste of disillusion, Sorley was saying: 'His (Masefield's)
+return (to the earth) was purely emotional, and probably less
+interesting than the purely intellectual return of Meredith.' At the
+beginning of 1914, having gained a Scholarship at University College,
+Oxford, he went to Germany. Just before going he wrote:--
+
+    'I am just discovering Thomas Hardy. There are two methods of
+    discovery. One is when Columbus discovers America. The other is when
+    some one begins to read a famous author who has already run into
+    seventy editions, and refuses to speak about anything else, and
+    considers every one else who reads the author's works his own
+    special converts. Mine is the second method. I am more or less
+    Hardy-drunk.'
+
+The humorous exactness and detachment of the description are remarkable,
+and we feel that there was more than the supersession of a small by a
+great idol in this second phase. By April he is at Jena, 'only 15 miles
+from Goethe's grave, whose inhabitant has taken the place of Thomas
+Hardy (successor to Masefield) as my favourite prophet.'
+
+    'I hope (if nothing else) before I leave Germany to get a thorough
+    hang of _Faust_.... The worst of a piece like _Faust_ is that it
+    completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself.
+    There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not
+    somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it.'
+
+He had a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. He
+lumped together 'nasty old Lyttons, Carlyles, and Dickenses.' And the
+intoxication itself was swift and fleeting. There was something wrong
+with Goethe by July; it is his 'entirely intellectual' life.
+
+    'If Goethe really died saying "more light," it was very silly of
+    him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth.'
+
+And he writes home for Richard Jefferies, the man of his own county--for
+through Marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the Wiltshire
+Downs.
+
+    'In the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities--Masefield,
+    Hardy, Goethe--I always fall back on Richard Jefferies wandering
+    about in the background. I have at least the tie of locality with
+    him.'
+
+A day or two after we incidentally discover that Meredith is up (though
+not on Olympus) from a denunciation of Browning on the queer non- (or
+super-) aesthetic grounds of which we have spoken:--
+
+    'There is much in B. I like. But my feeling towards him has (ever
+    since I read his life) been that of his to the "Lost Leader." I
+    cannot understand him consenting to live a purely literary life in
+    Italy, or (worse still) consenting to be lionised by fashionable
+    London society. And then I always feel that if less people read
+    Browning, more would read Meredith (his poetry, I mean.)'
+
+Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He had
+loved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from
+illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are made
+of. The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while
+training at Shorncliffe:--
+
+    'For the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope
+    Germany will win. It would do the world good, and show that real
+    faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just,"
+    but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard
+    defeat."'...
+
+    'England--I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight
+    for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy,
+    that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling
+    "imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to
+    generation.... And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany
+    (who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "Huns," because
+    they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making
+    experiments in morality. Not that I approve of the experiment in
+    this particular case. Indeed I think that after the war all brave
+    men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers
+    and pilgrims on the earth. "For they that say such things declare
+    plainly that they seek a country." But all these convictions are
+    useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them.
+    What a worm one is under the cart-wheels--big, clumsy, careless,
+    lumbering cart-wheels--of public opinion. I might have been giving
+    my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity: instead, I am giving
+    my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most
+    enterprising nation in the world.'
+
+The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more
+wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders
+written throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said;
+he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in
+complete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to
+suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of
+1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last
+always the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken.
+
+His intellectual evolution went on to the end. No wonder that he found
+Rupert Brooke's sonnets overpraised:--
+
+    'He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice.... It was not that
+    "they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but
+    that the essence of these things had been endangered by
+    circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to
+    recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he
+    has taken the sentimental attitude.'
+
+Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this
+criticism of Brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one
+who has given up the search. 'There is no such thing as a just war,'
+writes this boy. 'What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.' From
+this position Sorley never flinched. Never for a moment was he renegade
+to his generation by taking 'the sentimental attitude.' Neither had he
+in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect.
+
+Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We do
+not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those
+lost legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it to
+the end. In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems.
+After rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circumstance"' as bad poetry,
+and passing an incisive criticism on 'Men who March away,' he
+continues:--
+
+    'I cannot help thinking that Hardy is the greatest artist of the
+    English character since Shakespeare; and much of _The Dynasts_
+    (except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare. But I value
+    his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into
+    the comprehensiveness of his novels and _The Dynasts_) as truly, and
+    with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in
+    his novels. His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare's or
+    Shelley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but I like them and they
+    stick.'
+
+A little later, having finished _The Egoist_,--
+
+    'I see now that Meredith belongs to that class of novelists with
+    whom I do not usually get on so well (_e.g._ Dickens), who create
+    and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters
+    with amusement, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as
+    with Hardy's people, into whom the author does not inject his own
+    exaggerated characteristics.'
+
+The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died. What would he
+not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone stands
+equal? But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange
+company, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in his
+heart, for other reasons than that the love of the Wessex hills had
+crept into his blood. He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in the
+head by a sniper as he led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench near
+Hulluch.
+
+[JANUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_The Cry in the Wilderness_
+
+
+We have in Mr Irving Babbitt's _Rousseau and Romanticism_ to deal with a
+closely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind.
+We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the
+author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that
+the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever
+may be our final attitude towards the author's conclusions, we cannot
+but regard _Rousseau and Romanticism_ as masterly. Its style is, we
+admit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which
+animates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare
+that it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared for
+clarity and depth of thought with Mr Santayana's _Three Philosophical
+Poets_.
+
+By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more
+easily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt's
+achievement. We think that it would be easy to show that in the last
+generation--we will go no further back for the moment, though our
+author's arraignment reaches at least a century earlier--criticism has
+imperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may call
+appreciation. The emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the
+individual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern 'critic' has
+been to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the last
+resort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminated
+in the artistic creation of the author examined. And there modern
+criticism has stopped. There has been no indication that it was aware of
+the necessity of going further. Many influences went to shape the
+general conviction that mere presentation was the final function of
+criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of a
+scientific terminology. The word 'objectivity' had a great vogue; it was
+felt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the critic
+was faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard, irreducible
+facts, and his function was, like the scientist's, that of recording
+them as compendiously as possible and without prejudice. The unconscious
+programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. All facts may be of
+equal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary
+critic. He chose those which interested him most for the exercise of his
+talent for demonstration. But that choice was, as a general rule, the
+only specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it was
+usually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a
+'scientific' importance. Reasoned judgments of value were rigorously
+eschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is at
+times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is better
+than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist's
+intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of his
+appreciation. Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which
+all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. What
+every artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. As
+between things unique there is no possibility of subordination or
+comparison.
+
+That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism,
+although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the
+impulse towards the penetration of an artist's consciousness is in
+itself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism,
+provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final critical
+judgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea. Such a
+diagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an older
+generation than that to which it is applied. But they should not rejoice
+prematurely. We require of them an answer to the question whether they
+were really in better case--whether they were not the fathers whose sins
+are visited upon the children. Professor Babbitt, at least, has no doubt
+of their responsibility. From his angle of approach we might rake their
+ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: When you invoked the
+sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When you
+riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget
+that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical
+facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name of
+truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those
+creations of men's minds were _capax imperii_ in man's universe? What
+right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger
+for his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that same
+truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to
+bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why did
+you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the
+most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the
+greatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one
+moment pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe
+your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the
+world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who
+guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why
+did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's
+responsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you
+clothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you had
+not the time (or was it the courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce us
+because our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?
+
+But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with
+morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is
+conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital
+centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism
+inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only
+temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a
+supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an
+adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is
+no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two.
+The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised,
+and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last
+resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality
+affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literature
+should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty
+prevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of
+the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a
+deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as
+he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was an
+age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than
+this. Its philosophy has played it false. It has passed from the
+nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would
+have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of
+Aristotle's _Poetics_, the mere title, _The Philosophy of History_ would
+have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of
+instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man _is_ a beast'; from the
+other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment of reason is
+to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the
+imagination, the vital principle of control.
+
+Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our
+senses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain
+that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a
+remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the
+world. It is the confusion between existence and value. That strange
+malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress
+was supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, and
+which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a
+literature of objective realism. One of the most admired of
+contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of a
+mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of
+almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such
+reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled
+her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers
+who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when
+they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older
+generation. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical
+outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously
+cherished? They may not like the bastard progeny of the various
+mistresses they adored--of a Science which they enthroned above instead
+of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the
+so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane
+devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which
+appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute
+indolence--but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it.
+Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the aesthetic and
+moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt's indictment
+of themselves and decide whether they have no sin:--
+
+    '"If I am to judge by myself," said an eighteenth-century Frenchman,
+    "man is a stupid animal." Man is not only a stupid animal, in spite
+    of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source
+    of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that Buddha,
+    with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. In spite of
+    the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material
+    success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this
+    effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance.
+    An energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the
+    failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. Just
+    this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the
+    ages--the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been
+    witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a
+    vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for
+    one another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a
+    world which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in
+    spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be
+    caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution
+    of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse
+    in some respects than that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success
+    that has been obtained in 'perfecting the mystery of murder.'
+    Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up
+    the beast in man. Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the
+    leadership of the Occident is no longer here. The leaders have
+    succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been
+    tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks
+    no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this
+    law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with
+    brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own
+    soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way,
+    for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with
+    the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding
+    of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a
+    necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of
+    wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he
+    wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the
+    facts. But the veto power is itself a fact--the weightiest with
+    which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off
+    traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet
+    without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both
+    Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority
+    that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the
+    veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on
+    hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be
+    proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their
+    wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.'
+
+We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this
+indictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the
+universe in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller and
+larger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger
+in spiritual possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of science
+seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an
+invitation to disaster. Humanism must reassert itself, for even we can
+see that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets. The reassertion of
+humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and
+conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual
+to this ideal. There must now be a period of critical and humanistic
+positivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say frankly that it is
+not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. We regard
+them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, It
+is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new
+traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are more
+keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are
+trembling.
+
+[FEBRUARY, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Poetry and Criticism_
+
+
+Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways
+peculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning
+was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently
+more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in a
+curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled
+by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of
+extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come
+out of it. Having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry
+is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds
+for some fuller justification of the poetic activity. A presentiment
+that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable
+with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard
+should be once more created and applied.
+
+What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a
+world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a
+glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom? All these things--all
+different, yet not all contradictory--have been required of poetry. What
+shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as
+vague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded
+of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be
+adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a
+culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete
+universality.
+
+Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand
+these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is a
+lyrical age.' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that
+poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always
+been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all
+experience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there
+have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately
+made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching
+experience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great
+lyrical poetry. Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental
+achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always
+been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel
+of the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable.
+
+Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and
+not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the
+condition of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_ or Milton's
+_Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the
+colloquial prose of Tchehov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good a claim to be
+called poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ as _The
+Ring and the Book_, _The Possessed_ as _Phedre_? Where are we to call a
+halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge
+into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in
+danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon
+what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference.
+The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.
+
+The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt's _New Study of English
+Poetry_ is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage,
+sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highest
+spiritual activity of man. It has seldom been our good fortune to read a
+book of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call
+a purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim is
+single, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on a
+matter of infinite moment. Perhaps better, because subtler, books of
+literary criticism have appeared in England during the last ten
+years--if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more truly
+tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product of
+a soul in which no lie remains. Whether it is that Sir Henry has like
+Plato's Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know,
+but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus's
+peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods and
+left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate.
+
+Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newbolt
+should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to
+the same kind. It is important not because there is anything very novel
+in the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune
+because at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital
+element that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. The
+general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it
+loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact
+that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are
+legion. An age of fiddlesticks! Whatever the present age is--and it is
+an age of many interesting characteristics--it is not an age of poetry.
+It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of
+five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the
+impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. The differentia
+of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or
+literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. Where you
+have the evidence of that act, the sovereign aesthetic process, there you
+have poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or
+both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which
+those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does not
+suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be
+content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each
+single act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is the
+comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is not
+sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's _Arabia_ or Mr
+Davies's _Lovely Dames_ or Miss Katherine Mansfield's _Prelude_ or Mr
+Eliot's _Portrait of a Lady_, in each of which the vital act of
+intuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish a
+hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly
+comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must be
+prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its
+kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been
+created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.
+
+That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one
+which is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type of
+criticism which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation and
+appreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitive
+comprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. Where
+there are real poets--and only a bigot will deny that there are real
+poets among us now: we have just named four--there will always be true
+criticism of poetic method, though it may seldom find utterance in the
+printed word. But criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, no
+perspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing under
+the aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily most often does,
+assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life of
+man; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the standards
+that are implicit in such an assumption. That is the function of
+philosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined with
+criticism of method--and there is no reason why they should not coexist
+in a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenth
+century, Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind--so much the better;
+but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need
+at this moment.
+
+A good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets we
+possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the
+kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to
+point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must
+inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if
+a non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not
+to urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their
+work. Who but a fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or Miss
+Mansfield to give us a novel? But he might be a wise man who called upon
+Mr Eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and
+without a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who should
+summon the popular imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot to
+begin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired
+to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of
+unprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have so
+far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid
+imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the
+attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus. There is something
+heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an altitude.
+
+Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a
+continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately
+in every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on
+to the horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplines
+sensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the
+counterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of
+one's own or the nation's affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held
+up to ridicule. Opportunism in politics has its complement in
+opportunism in poetry. Mr Lloyd George's moods are reflected in Mr
+----'s. And, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of a
+whole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poetic
+intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at any
+disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. Perhaps they
+will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of
+literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction
+they will have. They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the
+acid of philosophical criticism. If a reaction to life has in itself the
+seeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. If a
+young poet's nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant of
+anything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of being
+refined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of the
+appropriate mechanism or myth. But to register the mere facts of
+consciousness, undigested by the being, without assessment or
+reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry,
+no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets.
+
+We do not wish to suggest that Sir Henry Newbolt would regard this
+lengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction. He, we think, is a
+good deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate to
+work out the consequences of the principles which he enunciates and
+apply them vigorously to the present time. But as a vindication of the
+supreme place of poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus to
+critical thought and a guide to exquisite appreciation of which his
+essay on Chaucer is an honourable example--_A New Study of English
+Poetry_ deserves all the praise that lies in our power to give.
+
+[MARCH, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Coleridge's Criticism_
+
+
+It is probably true that _Biographia Literaria_ is the best book of
+criticism in the English language; nevertheless, it is rash to assume
+that it is a book of criticism of the highest excellence, even when it
+has passed through the salutary process of drastic editing, such as that
+to which, in the present case,[15] the competent hands of Mr George
+Sampson have submitted it. Its garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage,
+the marks which even the finest portions show of submersion in the tepid
+transcendentalism that wrought such havoc upon Coleridge's mind--these
+are its familiar disfigurements. They are not easily removed; for they
+enter fairly deeply even in the texture of those portions of the book in
+which Coleridge devotes himself, as severely as he can, to the proper
+business of literary criticism.
+
+   [Footnote 15: _Coleridge: Biographia Literaria_, Chapters I.-IV.,
+   XIV.-XXII.--_Wordsworth: Prefaces and Essays on Poetry_, 1800-1815.
+   Edited by George Sampson, with an Introductory Essay by Sir Arthur
+   Quiller-Couch. (Cambridge University Press.)]
+
+It may be that the prolixity with which he discusses and refutes the
+poetical principles expounded by Wordsworth in the preface of _Lyrical
+Ballads_ was due to the tenderness of his consideration for Wordsworth's
+feelings, an influence to which Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch directs our
+attention in his introduction. That is honourable to Coleridge as a man;
+but it cannot exculpate him as a critic. For the points he had to make
+for and against Wordsworth were few and simple. First, he had to show
+that the theory of a poetic diction drawn exclusively from the language
+of 'real life' was based upon an equivocation, and therefore was
+useless. This Coleridge had to show to clear himself of the common
+condemnation in which he had been involved, as one wrongly assumed to
+endorse Wordsworth's theory. He had an equally important point to make
+for Wordsworth. He wished to prove to him that the finest part of his
+poetic achievement was based upon a complete neglect of this theory, and
+that the weakest portions of his work were those in which he most
+closely followed it. In this demonstration he was moved by the desire to
+set his friend on the road that would lead to the most triumphant
+exercise of his own powers.
+
+There is no doubt that Coleridge made both his points; but he made them,
+in particular the former, at exceeding length, and at the cost of a good
+deal of internal contradiction. He sets out, in the former case, to
+maintain that the language of poetry is essentially different from the
+language of prose. This he professes to deduce from a number of
+principles. His axiom--and it is possibly a sound one--is that metre
+originated in a spontaneous effort of the mind to hold in check the
+workings of emotion. From this, he argues, it follows that to justify
+the existence of metre, the language of a poem must show evidence of
+emotion, by being different from the language of prose. Further, he
+says, metre in itself stimulates the emotions, and for this condition of
+emotional excitement 'correspondent food' must be provided. Thirdly, the
+emotion of poetical composition itself demands this same 'correspondent
+food.' The final argument, if we omit one drawn from an obscure theory
+of imitation very characteristic of Coleridge, is the incontrovertible
+appeal to the authority of the poets.
+
+Unfortunately, the elaborate exposition of the first three arguments is
+not only unnecessary but confusing, for Coleridge goes on to
+distinguish, interestingly enough, between a language proper to poetry,
+a language proper to prose, and a neutral language which may be used
+indifferently in prose and poetry, and later still he quotes a beautiful
+passage from Chaucer's _Troilus and Cressida_ as an example of this
+neutral language, forgetting that, if his principles are correct,
+Chaucer was guilty of a sin against art in writing _Troilus and
+Cressida_ in metre. The truth, of course, is that the paraphernalia of
+principles goes by the board. In order to refute the Wordsworthian
+theory of a language of real life supremely fitted for poetry you have
+only to point to the great poets, and to judge the fitness of the
+language of poetry you can only examine the particular poem. Wordsworth
+was wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but Coleridge was
+equally wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre
+_necessitated_ a language essentially different from that of prose.
+
+So it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literary
+criticism of the _Biographia_ takes us nowhere in particular. The
+valuable part is contained in his critical appreciation of Wordsworth's
+poetry and that amazing chapter--a little forlorn, as most of
+Coleridge's fine chapters are--on 'the specific symptoms of poetic power
+elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_.
+In these few pages Coleridge is at the summit of his powers as a critic.
+So long as his attention could be fixed on a particular object, so long
+as he was engaged in deducing his general principles immediately from
+particular instances of the highest kind of poetic excellence, he was a
+critic indeed. Every one of the four points characteristic of early
+poetic genius which he formulates deserves to be called back to the mind
+again and again:--
+
+    'The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty
+    excess, if it be evidently original and not the result of an easily
+    imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the
+    compositions of a young man....
+
+    'A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote
+    from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself.
+    At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately
+    from the author's personal sensations and experiences the excellence
+    of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a
+    fallacious pledge, of genuine poetical power....
+
+    'Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature,
+    and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves
+    characterise the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as
+    far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated
+    thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the
+    effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant;
+    or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them
+    from the poet's own spirit....
+
+    'The last character ... which would prove indeed but little, except
+    as taken conjointly with the former--yet without which the former
+    could scarce exist in a high degree ... is _depth_ and _energy_ of
+    _thought_. No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the
+    same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the
+    fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions,
+    emotions, language.'
+
+In the context the most striking peculiarity of this enunciation of the
+distinguishing marks of poetic power, apart from the conviction which it
+brings, is that they are not in the least concerned with the actual
+language of poetry. The whole subject of poetic diction is dropped when
+Coleridge's critical, as opposed to his logical, faculty is at work;
+and, although this Chapter XV is followed by many pages devoted to the
+analysis and refutation of the Wordsworthian theory and to the
+establishment of those principles of poetic diction to which we have
+referred, when Coleridge comes once more to engage his pure critical
+faculty, in the appreciation of Wordsworth's actual poetry in Chapter
+XXII, we again find him ignoring his own principles precisely on those
+occasions when we might have thought them applicable.
+
+Coleridge enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, he
+says, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke his
+principles: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style
+which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it
+into the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry;
+_second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutral
+or common to both.' But in the very first instance which Coleridge
+gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair,
+and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. He
+gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind Highland
+Boy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting,
+had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of
+probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):--
+
+  'And one, the rarest, was a shell
+  Which he, poor child, had studied well:
+  The Shell of a green Turtle, thin
+  And hollow;--you might sit therein,
+      It was so wide, and deep.
+
+  'Our Highland Boy oft visited
+  The house which held this prize; and led
+  By choice or chance, did thither come
+  One day, when no one was at home,
+      And found the door unbarred.'
+
+The discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it
+does not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworth
+has used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus
+of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the
+detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of
+the poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, however,
+indubitable:--
+
+  'Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest.
+  And though little troubled with sloth,
+  Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth
+  To be such a traveller as I.
+      Happy, happy liver!
+  _With a soul as strong as a mountain River
+  Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver_,
+  Joy and jollity be with us both,
+  Hearing thee or else some other
+      As merry as a Brother
+  I on the earth will go plodding on,
+  By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.'
+
+The two lines in italics are discordant. But again it is no question of
+language in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of a
+whole already debilitated by metrical insecurity.
+
+Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a _matter-of-factness_
+in certain poems.' Once more there is no question of language. Coleridge
+takes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth's
+obsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential
+catholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested in
+laboriously exact description both of places and persons. The poet
+sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for no
+reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediate
+object a moral end instead of the giving of aesthetic pleasure. His
+prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable
+that they should be of this condition--it is on the contrary highly
+improbable--but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral
+lesson. The question of language in itself, if it enters at all here,
+enters only as the indifferent means by which a non-poetic end is
+sought. The accidentality lies not in the words, but in the poet's
+intention.
+
+Coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for the
+dramatic form,' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought,'
+may be passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case they
+could only be the cause of a jejuneness of language. The fifth, more
+interesting, is the appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for the
+subject ... an approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast.'
+Coleridge brings forward as his first instance of this four lines which
+have taken a deep hold on the affections of later generations:--
+
+  'They flash upon the inward eye
+  Which is the bliss of solitude!
+  And then my heart with pleasure fills
+  And dances with the daffodils.'
+
+Coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet after
+the first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that
+verdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a
+description of physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting to
+note that the objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner which
+confirms Coleridge's criticism. The 'inward eye' is almost universally
+remembered apart from its context, and interpreted as a description of
+the purely spiritual process to which alone, in Coleridge's opinion, it
+was truly apt.
+
+The enumeration of Wordsworth's excellences which follows is masterly;
+and the exhilaration with which one rises through the crescendo to the
+famous: 'Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
+_Imagination_ in the highest and strictest sense of the word ...' is
+itself a pleasure to be derived only from the gift of criticism of the
+highest and strictest kind.
+
+The object of this examination has been to show, not that the
+_Biographia Literaria_ is undeserving of the high praise which has been
+bestowed upon it, but that the praise has been to some extent
+undiscriminating. It has now become almost a tradition to hold up to our
+admiration Coleridge's chapter on poetic diction, and Sir Arthur
+Quiller-Couch, in a preface that is as unconventional in manner as it is
+stimulating in most of its substance, maintains the tradition. As a
+matter of fact, what Coleridge has to say on poetic diction is prolix
+and perilously near commonplace. Instead of making to Wordsworth the
+wholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest kind employs a
+language that by no perversion can be called essentially the same as the
+language of prose, he allows himself to be led by his German metaphysic
+into considering poetry as a _Ding an sich_ and deducing therefrom the
+proposition that poetry _must_ employ a language different from that of
+prose. That proposition is false, as Coleridge himself quite adequately
+shows from his remarks upon what he called the 'neutral' language of
+Chaucer and Herbert. But instead of following up the clue and beginning
+to inquire whether or not narrative poetry by nature demands a language
+approximating to that of prose, and whether Wordsworth, in so far as he
+aimed at being a narrative poet, was not working on a correct but
+exaggerated principle, he leaves the bald contradiction and swerves off
+to the analysis of the defects and excellences of Wordsworth's actual
+achievement. Precisely because we consider it of the greatest importance
+that the best of Coleridge's criticism should be studied and studied
+again, we think it unfortunate that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should
+recommend the apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart.
+He will be condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubious
+logic and a false conclusion. What is worth while learning from
+Coleridge is something different; it is not his behaviour with 'a
+principle,' but his conduct when confronted with poetry in the concrete,
+his magisterial ordonnance (to use his own word) and explication of his
+own aesthetic intuitions, and his manner of employing in this, the
+essential task of poetic criticism, the results of his own deep study of
+all the great poetry that he knew.
+
+[APRIL, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+_Shakespeare Criticism_
+
+
+It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the
+great modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover. One derives from
+the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which
+cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his
+merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to
+have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to
+admire the amazing erudition of Steevens. One sees the phases of the
+curious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of
+the nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal man of genius could
+breathe. For a dizzy moment every line that he wrote bore the authentic
+impress of the divine. _Efflavit deus_. In a century, from being largely
+beneath criticism Shakespeare had passed to a condition where he was
+almost completely beyond it.
+
+_King John_ affords an amusing instance of this reverential attitude.
+The play, as is generally known, was based upon a slightly earlier and
+utterly un-Shakespearean production entitled _The Troublesome Raigne of
+King John_. The only character Shakespeare added to those he found ready
+to his hand was that of James Gurney, who enters with Lady Falconbridge
+after the scene between the Bastard and his brother, says four words,
+and departs for ever.
+
+  '_Bast_.--James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?
+
+  _Gur_.--Good leave, good Philip.
+
+  _Bast_.--Philip! Sparrow! James.'
+
+It is obvious that Shakespeare's sole motive in introducing Gurney is to
+provide an occasion for the Bastard's characteristic, though not to a
+modern mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that Philip was at
+the time a common name for a sparrow. The Bastard, just dubbed Sir
+Richard Plantagenet by the King, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at his
+former name, Philip, to which he had just shown such breezy
+indifference. The jest could not have been made to Lady Falconbridge
+without a direct insult to her, which would have been alien to the
+natural, blunt, and easygoing fondness of the relation which Shakespeare
+establishes between the Bastard and his mother. So Gurney is quite
+casually brought in to receive it. But this is not enough for the
+Shakespeare-drunken Coleridge.
+
+    'For an instance of Shakespeare's power _in minimis_, I generally
+    quote James Gurney's character in _King John_. How individual and
+    comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!'
+
+Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge's title
+as a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. He is the
+greatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is
+displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play.
+In Act III, scene ii., Warburton's emendation of 'airy' to 'fiery' had
+in Coleridge's day been received into the text of the Bastard's lines:--
+
+  'Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
+  Some airy devil hovers in the sky.'
+
+On which Coleridge writes:--
+
+    'I prefer the old text: the word 'devil' implies 'fiery.' You need
+    only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil,'
+    to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's
+    alteration.'
+
+The test is absolutely convincing--a poet's criticism of poetry. But
+that Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence
+of his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that
+is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume
+of the modern _Variorum_. There has been much editing, much comment, but
+singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread
+to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from
+niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing
+exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a
+typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon
+the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, _King John_ is an
+intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate
+the idea of treachery.' We remember that Mr Masefield has much better
+than this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon
+this sentence because it is set before us in the _Variorum_, and because
+it too 'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions
+illustrates his idea of criticism.' Genetically, it is a continuation of
+the shoddy element in Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism, a continual
+bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take the
+origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the
+feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object)
+after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer
+part of Coleridge's brain.
+
+_King John_ is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerous
+influence, has persuaded himself it is. It is simply the effort of a
+young man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. The
+effort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a
+good one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising. The miracle is
+that anything should have been made of _The Troublesome Raigne_ at all.
+The _Variorum_ extracts show that, of the many commentators who studied
+the old play with Shakespeare's version, only Swinburne saw, or had the
+courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. To have made
+Shakespeare's Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created
+the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that
+decrepit skeleton--that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on
+the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no
+doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination.
+
+But 'ideas of treachery'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been
+beguiled by Coleridge's laudanum trances? A limbo--of this we are
+confident--where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life,
+and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We
+must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our
+eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good)
+play. Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the
+influence and ravages of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, but
+merely a Shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic genius
+which can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist every
+attempt at invasion by the 'idea'-bacillus.
+
+In considering a Shakespeare play the word 'idea' had best be kept out
+of the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it might
+be intelligibly used. You might call the dramatic skeleton Shakespeare's
+idea of the play. It is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in the
+work of poetic creation--the necessary means by which a poet can
+conveniently explicate and express his manifold aesthetic intuitions.
+This dramatic skeleton is governed by laws of its own, which were first
+and most brilliantly formulated by Aristotle in terms that, in
+essentials, hold good for all time. You may investigate this skeleton,
+seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by which it is differentiated
+from all other skeletons; you may say, for instance, that _Othello_ is a
+tragedy of jealousy, or _Hamlet_ of the inhibition of self-consciousness.
+But if your 'idea' is to have any substance it must be moulded very
+closely upon the particular object with which you are dealing; and in
+the end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individual
+characters.
+
+On the other hand, the word 'idea' might be intelligibly used of
+Shakespeare's whole attitude to the material of his contemplation, the
+centre of comprehension from which he worked, the aspect under which he
+viewed the universe of his interest. There is no reason to rest content
+with Coleridge's application of the epithet 'myriad-minded,' which is,
+at the best, an evasion of a vital question. The problem is to see
+Shakespeare's mind _sub specie unitatis_. It can be done; there never
+has been and never will be a human mind which can resist such an inquiry
+if it is pursued with sufficient perseverance and understanding. What
+chiefly stands in the way is that tradition of Shakespeariolatry which
+Coleridge so powerfully inaugurated, not least by the epithet
+'myriad-minded.'
+
+But of 'ideas' in any other senses than these--and in neither of these
+cases is 'idea' the best word for the object of search--let us beware as
+we would of the plague, in criticism of Shakespeare or any other great
+poet. Poets do not have 'ideas'; they have perceptions. They do not have
+an 'idea'; they have comprehension. Their creation is aesthetic, and the
+working of their mind proceeds from the realisation of one aesthetic
+perception to that of another, more comprehensive if they are to be
+great poets having within them the principle of poetic growth. There is
+undoubtedly an organic process in the evolution of a great poet, which
+you may, for convenience of expression, call logical; but the moment you
+forget that the use of the word 'logic,' in this context, is
+metaphorical, you are in peril. You can follow out this 'logical
+process' in a poet only by a kindred creative process of aesthetic
+perception passing into aesthetic comprehension. The hunt for 'ideas'
+will only make that process impossible; it prevents the object from ever
+making its own impression upon the mind. It has to speak with the
+language of logic, whereas its use and function in the world is to speak
+with a language not of logic, but of a process of mind which is at least
+as sovereign in its own right as the discursive reason.
+
+Let us away then with 'logic' and away with 'ideas' from the art of
+literary criticism; but not, in a foolish and impercipient reaction, to
+revive the impressionistic criticism which has sapped the English brain
+for a generation past. The art of criticism is rigorous; impressions are
+merely its raw material; the life-blood of its activity is in the
+process of ordonnance of aesthetic impressions.
+
+It is time, however, to return for a moment to Shakespeare, and to
+observe in one crucial instance the effect of the quest for logic in a
+single line. In the fine scene where John hints to Hubert at Arthur's
+murder, he speaks these lines (in the First Folio text):--
+
+  'I had a thing to say, but let it goe:
+  The Sunne is in the heauen, and the proud day,
+  Attended with the pleasure of the world,
+  Is all too wanton, and too full of gawdes
+  To giue me audience: If the midnight bell
+  Did with his yron tongue, and brazen mouth
+  Sound on into the drowzie race of night,
+  If this same were a Churchyard where we stand,
+  And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs:
+  ... Then, in despight of brooded watchfull day,
+  I would into thy bosome poure my thoughts....'
+
+If one had to choose the finest line in this passage, the choice would
+fall upon
+
+  'Sound on into the drowsy race of night.'
+
+Yet you will have to look hard for it in the modern editions of
+Shakespeare. At the best you will find it with the mark of corruption:--
+
+  +'Sound on into the drowsy race of night ('Globe');
+
+and you run quite a risk of finding
+
+  'Sound one into the drowsy race of night' ('Oxford').
+
+There are six pages of close-printed comment upon the line in the
+_Variorum_. The only reason, we can see, why it should be the most
+commented line in _King John_ is that it is one of the most beautiful.
+No one could stand it. Of all the commentators, only one, Miss Porter,
+whom we name _honoris causa_, stands by the line with any conviction of
+its beauty. Every other person either alters it or regrets his inability
+to alter it.
+
+'How can a bell sound on into a race?' pipe the little editors. What is
+'the race of night?' What _can_ it mean? How _could_ a race be drowsy?
+What an _awful_ contradiction in terms! And so while you and I, and all
+the other ordinary lovers of Shakespeare are peacefully sleeping in our
+beds, they come along with their little chisels, and chop out the
+horribly illogical word and pop in a horribly logical one, and we
+(unless we can afford the _Variorum_, which we can't) know nothing
+whatever about it. We have no redress. If we get out of our beds and
+creep upon them while they are asleep--they never are--and take out our
+little chisels and chop off their horribly stupid little heads, we shall
+be put in prison and Mr Justice Darling will make a horribly stupid
+little joke about us. There is only one thing to do. We must make up our
+minds that we have to combine in our single person the scholar and the
+amateur; we cannot trust these gentlemen.
+
+And, indeed, they have been up to their little games elsewhere in _King
+John_. They do not like the reply of the citizens of Angiers to the
+summons of the rival kings:--
+
+  'A greater powre than We denies all this,
+  And till it be undoubted, we do locke
+  Our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates;
+  Kings of our feare, untill our feares resolu'd
+  Be by some certaine king, purg'd and depos'd.'
+
+Admirable sense, excellent poetry. But no! We must not have it. Instead
+we are given 'King'd of our fears' ('Globe') or 'Kings of ourselves'
+('Oxford'). Bad sense, bad poetry.
+
+They do not like Pandulph's speech to France:--
+
+  'France, thou maist hold a serpent by the tongue,
+  A cased lion by the mortall paw,
+  A fasting tiger safer by the tooth
+  Than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold.'
+
+'Cased,' caged, is too much for them. We must have 'chafed,' in spite of
+
+  'If thou would'st not entomb thyself alive
+  And case thy reputation in thy tent.'
+
+Again, the Folio text of the meeting between the Bastard and Hubert in
+Act V., when Hubert fails to recognise the Bastard's voice, runs thus:--
+
+  'Unkinde remembrance: thou and endles night,
+  Have done me shame: Brave Soldier, pardon me
+  That any accent breaking from thy tongue
+  Should scape the true acquaintaince of mine eare.'
+
+This time 'endless' is not poetical enough for the editors. Theobald's
+emendation 'eyeless' is received into the text. One has only to read the
+brief scene through to realise that Hubert is wearied and obsessed by
+the night that will never end. He is overwrought by his knowledge of
+
+             'news fitting to the night,
+  Black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible,'
+
+and by his long wandering in search of the Bastard:--
+
+  'Why, here I walk in the black brow of night
+  To find you out.'
+
+Yet the dramatically perfect 'endless' has had to make way for the
+dramatically stupid 'eyeless.' Is it surprising that we do not trust
+these gentlemen?
+
+[APRIL, 1920
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Aspects of Literature, by J. Middleton Murry
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