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diff --git a/old/65992-0.txt b/old/65992-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index ba4ac36..0000000 --- a/old/65992-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4360 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Portraits and Speculations, by Arthur -Ransome - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Portraits and Speculations - -Author: Arthur Ransome - -Release Date: August 4, 2021 [eBook #65992] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Tim Lindell, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed - Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was - produced from images generously made available by The Internet - Archive/American Libraries.) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS *** - - - - -PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS - - - - -_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ - - - A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING: STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE. - 1909 - - EDGAR ALLAN POE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1910 - - THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN. 1911 - - OSCAR WILDE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1912 - - - - - PORTRAITS - - AND - - SPECULATIONS - - BY - - ARTHUR RANSOME - - MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED - ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON - 1913 - - - - -_Copyright_ - - - - - TO - - JOHN MASEFIELD - - - - -NOTE - - -Of the Essays in this book, “Art for Life’s Sake” appeared in _The -English Review_; “The Poetry of Yone Noguchi,”[1] “Remy de Gourmont,” -and “Aloysius Bertrand” in _The Fortnightly Review_; “Kinetic and -Potential Speech,” in _The Oxford and Cambridge Review_. The papers -on Daudet and Coppée were prefixed to collections of stories by these -writers: I thank the publishers, Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack, for -permission to reproduce them here. - - - - -CONTENTS - - - PAGE - ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE 1 - - ALOYSIUS BERTRAND 35 - - ALPHONSE DAUDET 57 - - THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE 71 - - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 87 - - WALTER PATER 129 - - REMY DE GOURMONT 161 - - THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI 187 - - KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH 207 - - - - -ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE - - - - -ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE - - -It is not yet fifty years since one or two men of genius, followed -presently by a score of men of talent, noisier, shriller in voice than -themselves, preached a theory of art new in this country, shocking to -our prejudices at that time, and imported from some French artists and -from a German philosopher. This was the doctrine of art for art’s sake. -Baudelaire had written: “Poetry ... has no other end than itself; it -can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly -worthy of the name of a poem, as that which has been written solely -for the pleasure of writing a poem.” Whistler, that butterfly of -letters, who had borrowed his sting from the wasp, directed it with gay -despair against the granite face of the British public. Rossetti and, -with certain qualifications, Pater, illustrated the theory in their -practice, as Whistler did also; and Wilde, a little later than they, -remarked: “All art is quite useless,” and “There is no such thing as a -moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That -is all.” - -With this doctrine of art for art’s sake we are now dissatisfied. We -object to it, not for the sake of “morality,” against which it was -partly directed, nor yet for the sake of “nature,” but for the sake of -art, whose function it limits rather than glorifies. We have seen the -school of art, if we may speak of a school of art, that carried the -banner on which those words were inscribed, tire and fall away as the -nineteenth century drew to its close, until now the tattered banner, -with words almost illegible, is carried only by a schoolboy who joined -the procession late and marches on, unconscious that the parade is -over, that he is marching alone, and that nobody is looking at him. -Yet the demonstration was successful; its promoters, who stitched -the banner with gaiety, hope, and defiance, themselves painted and -wrote fine things, and men are working to-day whose work would have -been impossible if, in the course of its march, that small, daring -procession had not walked seven times round a city of Jericho and blown -silver trumpets under its walls. - -Some battle-cries are no more than an irrelevant but inspiriting noise. -Most of them, however, are related to something fought for, (St. George -and Merry England!), something that, it is hoped, will superintend -the fight (God with us!), or something that is fought against (A bas -Marat!). The knight who shouted, “Two red roses across the moon” on a -sultry day when-- - - “... the battle was scattered from hill to hill - From the windmill to the watermill.” - -may have been incomprehensible to his enemies, but was not -incomprehensible to himself, and “Art for Art’s sake!” forty and fifty -years ago, a surprising, rather ridiculous phrase in the ears of the -early Victorians who then survived, was something very different for -the men who were fighting to destroy a petrified mental attitude -towards art in general. We must first understand what they fought -against before we have the right to speak of the meaning of their -battle-cry. - -They fought, primarily, against a moral valuation of art. They fought, -secondly, against “nature” ... against, that is to say, a crude -conception of the relation between nature and art; against, to put -that crude conception in its crudest form, the supposition that he -who looked at a picture could find something in the external world, -by its resemblance to which the picture should be judged. It would -be a fascinating task to show that the too faithful imitation of -external things is an impediment to the highest functions of art, and, -on the other hand, that imitation in some kind, in some degree, is -an essential part of that function. But I do not wish to be tempted -into discussion of the true relation between art and nature, though a -solution of that problem will, perhaps, suggest itself to those who -read this paper to its end. I am here chiefly interested in art’s -relation to ourselves. Nature for the moment is outside the discussion, -though, in justice to the artists for art’s sake, I must point out -that their revolt was not against “morality” alone. When we hear -Wilde’s gay proclamation that “Life imitates Art far more than Art -imitates Life,” we must take care to hear also, from Whistler, more -serious, that “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all -pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music,” and that -the artist “in all that is dainty and lovable ... finds hints for his -own combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at -his service, and to him is nought refused.” We must not imagine that -the revolt was merely playful. - -Against “nature” and against “morality.” In an age when the painter of -“Derby Day” assisted Ruskin by saying that he could not “see anything -of the true representation of water and atmosphere in the painting of -“Battersea Bridge,” they upheld the superiority of art to “nature.” -In an age when Dickens was praised for his reforms of the workhouse -and blamed for his love of low life, when novelists were judged by the -deeds, no, by the manners of the persons of their fiction, when poets -were judged by their private lives, they protested the irrelevance -of all such things to the question at issue, which was the goodness -or badness of the work of art to be judged. We must not blame their -formula, but the ideas against which it was directed, for the bad -manners, the morality that they hoped would be regarded as immorality, -for the unpublishable private lives, that were the excesses after -victory. We may, perhaps, smile as we observe how accurately they -balance those other excesses against which they were a reaction. - -The question, no longer how to conquer, became how to use the victory, -and we had the common spectacle of veterans and retired camp-followers -trying to live up to the battle-cry of their youth, and, unable to -free themselves from the habit of their excesses, committing these -excesses with less and less gusto and more and more skill. But skill, -even so acquired, is not valueless. The battle-cry, after opening a -primrose path to charlatans, after turning “morality” into “immorality” -as a spectre ruling over art, remained the stimulus to an improved -technique, a scrupulousness, an economy of effect, a delicacy in -the handling of material, a care for melody and counterpoint, an -intolerance of careless workmanship, for which for a long time it will -be our privilege to be grateful. - -Art, however, cannot live by perfection of technique alone, nor yet by -the repetition of remembered excesses. A new generation of artists, -working in a new environment, inspired by new aims, and threatened -by new dangers, requires a new formula, or a restatement of the old. -These artists of our own generation look at the faded banner with the -remains of reverence, or, in their dislike of the mistakes it made -possible, with a suspicion of contempt. In the turbulence of valuations -in this century, in the different, sharply defined attitudes of men -on such questions as property, labour, capital, the position of women -in the State, marriage, education, or the Church, they see a herd of -conflicting moralities. Involved in one or other of these conflicts, -perhaps in many of them, they cannot but believe, suspect, or hope that -art also must speak for or against, as tribune or as patrician, as -Churchman or as secularist, and, if the conflict be important to them, -the excellence of an artist must seem to be determined, at least in -part, by the views that he expresses. How then can art “have nothing to -do with morality”? They are, however, sufficiently critical to see that -it is possible that a work of art may be good for a democrat, bad for -an aristocrat, and yet, somehow, good in itself. Was there something in -“Art for Art’s sake” after all? - -Of the men whose names I mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay -one had founded his views on those of a philosopher, and so, whatever -may be his rank among those dogmatists, we are able to examine the -background of reasoning on which he saw his own dogmatic statements. It -is in that reasoning, and not in the cheerful taunts of the battlefield -that we are likely to learn how it was that the formula of “Art for -Art’s sake” seemed to be justified, and how it is that the formula is -fundamentally inadequate. Baudelaire’s proclamation, Pater’s practice, -Whistler’s blue-feathered, silver-tipped darts point us to no analysis. -The analysis that made Wilde’s paradoxes possible is open to our view -in the pages of Kant. - -Now Kant said that what was called beautiful was the object of a -delight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate -reference to our own circumstances or possible circumstances, so far -from being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our -judgment. Upon our judgment of what? The beautiful. How many crimes -has that word committed, how many discussions it has obscured, how -many it has closed at the very moment of their fertility. Not the -least of its knaveries has been this substitution of a condition of -art for the function of art, which, as I hope to show, is life itself. -A work of art suggests the achievement of the beautiful. That may be -its immediate object. It is not its ultimate object. It may be an -essential condition. It is not a function. Art for art’s sake means the -substitution of condition for function, and, as the beautiful can never -be a function of anything, the implicit denial that art has a function -at all. “All art is quite useless.” - -But that is not what we believe. And the reason why the theorists of -art for art’s sake were both right and wrong was that they did not want -art for the sake of anything irrelevant to the artistic phenomenon, but -were a little ungenerous in their interpretation of that phenomenon. -They saw that moralities, private lives, reforms, interests, had -nothing to do with the attempted achievement of the condition of the -beautiful, but, having seen that, forgot, in their hurry for battle, -that the work of art persists beyond this achievement or attempted -achievement; forgot that, will he nill he, the artist’s work cannot -but bear the impress of his personality, and forgot that through that -fact all the things they wished to rule out of the discussion had their -rightful place in it. - -The question is, what is their rightful place? And to answer it we must -first satisfy ourselves as to the nature of the artistic phenomenon. - -A work of art is a collaboration between two artists, whom, for -purposes of reference, I shall call the speaker and the listener. But, -before it is a collaboration, a re-creation, in which form we commonly -know it, it is an independent act performed by the speaker alone. He, -as first creator, isolates some from the flux of impressions in which -he lives. It is as if he were to arrest that flux, and momentarily to -stop its flow. He holds back the sun and the moon in their courses, -and, for a moment, the world stands motionless before him, embodied in -the dominating impressions given him by a single moment of its and his -existence. This one moment he disentangles from all others; the world, -the universe, at that moment, for him, he fashions into a memory, -clearer than life, and owing its clarity to his refusal to allow it to -have a before or an after, an above or a below, other than those which -itself implies. He isolates that moment with its implications. The -resulting clarity is as if he had suddenly stopped the cross-currents -of a stream, and the stream, losing the opaqueness of its tangled -motion, had become crystal. He isolates that moment by surrounding -it with his own consciousness, while other moments fly past taking -with them shreds of that tattered veil, no more.... There is a choice -of moments, and because the choice is not reasonable, but determined -by the moment itself, the speaker feels himself inspired. That which -attracts him, seduces him, compels him to catch it as it passes and -hold it fast, instead of letting it break free and join the myriad -others with their worthless trophies of incomplete comprehension, is -a moment whose impressions present themselves as melody, gesture, -words, shape, or ordered colour, or the promise of such. Two bars -are heard as it goes by, a significant arm swings out of the flood, a -jumble of words, like those of a sleeper, startle his mind, the ghost -of an unpainted picture wakes his eyes.... These things are pledges. -He seizes them and, warily, lest he lose them, listens for the rest -of the melody, watchfully draws out of the flood the figure whose -gesture had seemed to be the moment itself, pieces the brittle words -together, and shapes the picture in his brain. He allows the moment -to redeem the pledge it has given, his care being not to impede it by -forestalling its further appearance with something contradictory to -the original fragment, something that the character of that fragment -has not determined. He seeks only to be true to the original promise, -and the good artist is known by the fact that it is impossible to tell -with what he began, the bad artist by the fragment he has surrounded -with baser metal that does not ring with its note, or the phantom whose -vitality he has blurred by clothing it with flesh uninformed by its -peculiar vitality. - -The process of the speaker in the first creation of a work of art is -a process of finding out. He is engaged in _knowing_ the uttermost -implications of the fragment of impression caught by him from the flux -of unconscious or semi-conscious life. He is making the whole of that -impression his own by his profound, his complete consciousness of it. -That is why the artist can never understand those people, not artists, -who ask him how he can prefer art to life; imitation to the real thing. -He cannot believe that such people mean what they say. In his humility -he assumes that they too have the modesty to admit to themselves that -their life is unconscious, or semi-conscious, and he believes that this -process of _knowing_, of becoming conscious, is the intensest form of -living that there is. - -Then, when the work of art is as we know it, we, the listener, -collaborate with that other artist, the speaker, and from what he has -said, in stone, music, paint or words, try to reconstruct the fragment -of life that he has made his own and to share his consciousness of -it. Accurately speaking, this is impossible. We become conscious of a -moment of life different from his. We cannot give his words the precise -atmosphere they had for him, we cannot see with exactly his eyes, or -hear with his ears, we are without his private and individual memory. -We can but be inaccurate translators. We can, however, perceive, -uncertainly, that he has been successful himself in allowing a moment -of life to redeem the pledge it had given him, that his work does not -contradict itself, and so is true to the original inspiration bedded -in it or clothed by it. And this perception suggests to us that, if it -were possible, we should find, certainly, what we already believe, that -his share in the collaboration is perfect. We then say that a work of -art is beautiful; the wistfulness with which we sometimes say it, the -tears that sometimes dim our eyes as we close a book or turn from a -picture that we believe to be beautiful, and the sadness that has often -been associated with the name of beauty, are due to the half-conscious -knowledge that our share in the collaboration is imperfect, since we -can never stand exactly where he stood. - -Our judgment of the beautiful then depends on our belief that, were -certain unalterable facts altered in the constitution of the universe -and of ourselves, we should be sharing a perfect expression, an -expression, that is to say, in perfect unity with itself. Art then for -art’s sake, perfection of expression first. But what is this expression -in perfect unity with itself, but a moment of conscious living, -isolated from all else, lifted from the unconscious flux and given -us--to live? - -Let us rewrite the half-obliterated formula. Let us write it now: Art -for Life’s sake, and raise a party cry from its momentary usefulness -into a proud suggestion of the noble function of art. This function is -not merely to teach us how to act, as was supposed by the old critics, -who recommended Homer for the heroism of his heroes, though, as we -shall see, they were not wholly wrong, nor yet merely to teach us -how to order our lives, though it may do that by suggestion. Art is -itself life. Its function is to increase our consciousness of life, -to make us more than wise or sensitive, to transform us from beings -overwhelmed by the powerful stream of unconscious living to beings -dominating that stream, to change us from objects acted upon by life -to joyful collaborators in that reaction. By its means we become -conscious gainers by life’s procreative activity. No longer hiding -our faces from that muddied storm that sweeps irresistibly from the -future to the past, a medley of confused figures, a babel of cries of -joy, of laughter, of sorrow, of pain, by its means we lift our heads, -and, learning from the isolation of moments in eternity, to imagine -the isolation of all such moments, we conquer that storm, and accept -pain, joy, laughter or sorrow, with equal gratitude, in our continually -realised desire to feel ourselves alive. - -Let us examine from this point of view the fundamental quarrel between -the theorists of “Art for Art’s sake” and the moralists. What are their -respective beliefs? - -_The Moralist._--The noblest end of being is to be good. All human -activities must serve this end or be pernicious. Art, the most -eloquent, the most powerful of pleaders, cannot, without violating the -trust that humanity puts in her, turn devil’s advocate. Let the artist -be as skilful an artist as he can, but let him make a right use of his -excellence. In peace we ask no more of a good shot than that he hit -the bull’s eye of a target. But we live in times of war between the -hosts of good and of evil. The fight is to the death, and we admire the -good shot if he fire from among the ranks of angels, and fear him if we -see that his skill is at the service of our opponents, who in age-long -battle have shown themselves merciless and strong. - -_The Artist for Art’s sake._--Morality in art is an accident of no -importance. We hear the battle of which you speak, but do not take -part in it, though we listen sometimes to the music of its trumpets -far away, and see the red glow it throws up to the sky. But morality -concerns our circumstances or possible circumstances, and so has -nothing to do with the beautiful, which is art’s sole concern. A work -of art that declares its sympathy with one or other party to your -battle is one whose creator has looked aside to ends other than beauty. -It is therefore a failure as a work of art. Art must not be limited to -edifying subjects. There is nothing that may not become beautiful in -the hands of an artist. Church and lupanar, angel and courtesan, are of -equal value in his eyes. They are material, no more, and he will not -tolerate that morality should hamper him by dictating the choice or -use of his material. A work of art is independent of morality. - -_To these two we reply, believing that art is for life’s sake._--When -a man tells you that his work of art has nothing to do with morality, -ask him, With whose morality has it nothing to do? He will be compelled -to admit that the morality of which he is thinking is the morality he -attributes to somebody else. Morality is a code of values, differing in -each individual, and dictated to each individual by his character and -his environment. No artist, no human being, escapes morality, and the -code of values that is his will be one of the determining influences -on an artist’s vision of life. If, perchance, he is so uncritical as -to believe that he has nothing to do with morality, that belief will -itself share in giving his work a moral value. There is no escape -from morality in art. If, therefore, we choose to consider ourselves -as one of a band of people whose moralities are more or less similar, -and to regard their average morality, their average code of values as -important, we shall be perfectly justified in judging art by what we -suppose to be its effect on that average morality. But we must not -forget that we are then regarding artists as a regiment from which we -are engaged in picking out the traitors and the loyalists--and that it -is a regiment whose immediate business is not war, a regiment which -does not know that it is enlisted. - -Let us now consider the nature of the moral influence which the speaker -exerts upon the listener. It will not be surprising if we find that it -has a direct bearing upon the point under discussion. - -The artist whose act of conscious living is the work of art cannot -alter his personality without disloyalty to the moment of life that -under his hands is simultaneously becoming conscious and becoming -expression. His personality, and with it his morality, is already -involved; any dishonesty blurs his vision, and the crystal whose -increasing clarity was his delight becomes for ever opaque. Here and -nowhere else must we find the origin of the artist’s distrust of -morality. He means by it not “morality,” but any morality other than -his own at the time of artistic creation or _knowing_. A work of art -is always the expression of _a_ morality, the morality of its creator -at the moment when he began its creation, a morality that has ceased -to exist, since its creator has been changed to a greater or less -degree by the very fact of its creation. Returning to our metaphor -of speaker and listener, we may say that the listener, who tries as -nearly as possible to share the moment of conscious life that was the -speaker’s, to stand where he stood, and think what he thought, does, in -contemplation of the work of art, share to some extent in the morality, -that momentary morality we have described, of another man. - -Besides this fundamental morality of a work of art, it may hold other -moralities which are also not without their influence. Codes of values -may themselves be the material of artistic creation. A code of values -foreign to the speaker may enter into the moment of conscious life -that is his work of art. Plato and Socrates were different men with -different moralities. The Socrates of Plato’s Dialogues, however -Platonized, is not Plato, and, as well as the fundamental morality of -those dialogues, the morality of those speeches which are supposed -to be Socratic has its separate influence upon us. Anatole France -plays with the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, and with Jacques Tournebroche, -and beside the morality of _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_ we are -offered these other moralities included in it and ruled by it. - -There would seem to be little else but morality in art, and its -influence would seem to be so largely as to be almost exclusively -moral. But observe what actually happens. Have you not noticed, -in reading a book, that you insensibly pick out and offer to your -digestion those of the accidental moralities in it that seem to be -cousins of your own. You linger over the sayings of Coignard, if -you feel that in some mood or other you could have said them. You -accept with gratitude the follies, the humours of M. Bergeret, if -you recognise in him a kinship, however distant, with yourself. In -listening to a play you side, at least in simpler moods, with the -character whose code of values approximates to that by which you are -in the habit of weighing your actions and those of others. These minor -judgments are independent of your judgment of the work of art, though -here too a similar instinct bids you prefer those artists in whom you -recognise, let us say, the full development of some one possibility -that your personality contains. And, since our temperament thus picks -and chooses among the moralities that art offers, because it is like -Paracelsus’ alchemist, situate in the stomach of man, digesting the -food that is good for him and rejecting the poison, art does not so -much alter our morality as increase our consciousness of it. It is -an individualising influence on morality, essentially hostile to the -averaging of codes of values. It seeks uniqueness, not uniformity, and -so does not so much spread moralities abroad as cherish and grow to -their full strength the moralities it finds among its listeners. In -this sentence the moralists and the artists for art’s sake come to an -understanding. - -Leaving now the question of its moral influence, let me give an -example, of the simplest nature, to show what I mean by the conscious -living that is art. I find one in the following exquisite poem, “The -Happy Child,” by William Davies: - - “I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick, - But not one like the child did pick. - - I heard the pack-hounds in green park, - But not one like the child heard bark. - - I heard this day bird after bird, - But not one like the child has heard. - - A hundred butterflies saw I, - But not one like the child saw fly. - - I saw the horses roll in grass, - But no horse like the child saw pass. - - My world this day has lovely been, - But not like what the child has seen.” - -Rossetti believed that “Poetry should seem to the hearer to have -been always present to his thought, but never before heard,” and -the statement that this has been accomplished (so just, sometimes, -is popular instinct) is the commonest praise accorded to individual -works of art. Many of Mr. Davies’ readers must have said, rightly, -but, critically speaking, with imperfect accuracy, “Now that expresses -what I have always felt.” They should have said, “That enables me -to feel what I always could have felt.” For they have never truly -felt it. That wistful, regretful moment, now articulate, was carried -unhappily past them in the general flux of incompletely conscious -life. They suspected a possibility of feeling something, of knowing -what they dimly felt, but it eluded them in the tangled currents of -the stream, and they did not detain it, _know_ it, and make it part -of themselves. Mr. Davies has not so allowed it to escape; he warily -netted it in his consciousness, _learnt_ it accurately and fully, and -wrote that poem, thus isolating it for ever from unconsciousness. And -we, reading those words, collaborate with him in the re-creation of -the work of art for whose notation they serve, and, with our memories -behind us, not his, ourselves win out of the river of unconsciousness -such a moment, different a little from his, our own, filled delicately -with our vitality, and giving us, for the vitality we have given it, -an increased consciousness of the life that is in ourselves. The -conscious life of art does not imply what is known with contempt as -self-consciousness, which means a hampering inability to forget not -self but other people’s eyes. It implies a new reading of the Delphic -command, γνῶθι σεαυτόν. It does not mean Know thy opinions only, nor -yet, Know what are thy desires, but Know thy life, not thy biography -but thy living, thine innumerable acts of life. - -I took my example from a short poem of extreme simplicity, and, as I -have again and again in this essay spoken of “moments” of conscious -life, a scrupulous reader might well conclude that I concerned myself -only with what is commonly known as lyrical art, or that I should -presently offer a proof of Croce’s theory that all art is essentially -lyrical. I agree with Croce, and perhaps go further than he in -believing, for reasons with which I will not burden this discussion, -that all lyricism in art is dramatic, in that it involves a dramatic -conception of himself by the author. His care is, that his creation -shall be wholly determined by one moment, not by a series, and for -this reason, he is compelled as he works to refer continually to -himself as he was at that moment. For if a work of art were to be -representative of more than one moment, it would be representative -of more than one man. It would not be homogeneous, and could not be -beautiful. This applies not only to a song or a picture, but to those -works of art which are in appearance the most elaborate, the least -uniform, the least determined by a single moment. A play, whose reading -or performance may occupy hours, during which a number of characters -whom we accept provisionally as human, as separate entities, live -imaginary lives before us, is, no less than a song, the result of -becoming completely conscious of a single moment. The duration of the -reading is in no way affected by the duration of the moment of life -that set the author playing with his marionettes. A moment of life such -as would, for a poet, become articulate in a song, may require from a -playwright that he represent it to himself in persons talking, a clash -of personalities, a breaking of personalities by destiny, a series -of events explicable within itself, not resembling any one moment of -his life, but in their totality representing his means of _knowing_ a -moment, and the means he offers us whereby, as nearly as we may, we -shall share that knowing. When a play is not the artist’s learning a -moment of his own life, it is mere scaffolding, resembling a building -at dusk, or at a sudden first sight, but presently found out to be -empty and fraudulent, when with contempt we leave it to oblivion. -Passage of time, intricacy of construction, apparent multiplicity of -imagined lives do not affect the question. - -John Masefield did not by a sudden effort of genius conceive “Nan,” -scenes, persons, and dialogue in a moment. One moment, however, -determined its conception, and implied all that is in the play. Let me, -with deference, suggest what may have happened. He heard a story that -affected him with a mixture of emotions. If he had not been an artist, -he would probably have done no more than repeat the story to others as -it was told to him, and wonder idly if it produced the same mixture of -emotions in them. Instead, he lingered with it, and let the unconscious -flux flow on unobserved while he brooded over this one emotional -moment, becoming more and more clearly conscious of the emotions it -contained as they, in the formative processes of his mind, came to be -represented by persons and actions and words. His mind was not making -but discovering, following the implications of the original emotional -moment, careful only to be true to that, and rejecting proffered -representations solely on account of their inaccuracy. His skill was -shown only in so dealing with the flood of representations that no -one particle of it should contradict another, should hamper the full -realisation of that moment. His greatness was shown in the profundity -with which he realised that moment, and the depth to which he could -follow its implications. - -Therein, by the way, is suggested the criterion of greatness that is -contained in the doctrine that art is for life’s sake. The theory of -art for art’s sake left its holders at a loss before the question “Is -no man greater than another, if his works are beautiful, if he is an -equally skilful artist?” They knew that he was, but their theory could -not tell them why, and they had to take refuge in cynicism. The theory -of art for “morality’s” sake was no more satisfying. It suggested that -the greatest artist was he who preached the most good, and so left its -holders in speechless difficulty before a comparison of Rossetti and -Dr. Watts. The theory of art for life’s sake has a clear answer, and -offers a valid test. That man is the greatest artist who makes us the -most profoundly conscious of life. Shakespeare is set above Herrick, -who was a better technician, and Leonardo above Murillo, who painted -more devotional subjects, on grounds with which men, neither as -artists nor as moralists, need quarrel. - -Art for Art’s sake was a battle-cry, and, to understand it, we had -to understand what those who used it fought. Art for Life’s sake is -also a battle-cry, though it includes in those four words a suggestion -not only of the function of art but of its nature. Let us review the -enemies we attack with those words upon our lips. What do we fight -against? What are the misunderstandings which in our time encourage the -production of false, of secondary art, and obscure the excellence of -the finest? - -We fight first against a political valuation of art, that imagines -poetry, pictures and music as auxiliaries in the reconstruction or -conservation of the state, and judges them by their efficiency as -political pamphlets. - -We fight secondly against an educational valuation of art, that judges -works of art by the accuracy of the facts they happen to embody, the -accuracy of the pictures they paint of this or that form of life, the -clearness with which they illustrate generalisations. - -We fight thirdly against the valuation of art by its technical skill, -by the beauty that is a universal condition of its being. These things -cannot afford a scale of comparison for works of art, but only a -guarantee that they are worthy of judgment. We should not fight against -this valuation if it showed itself in practice capable of so useful an -office. It is, however, not sufficiently selective, but allows itself -to be tricked by things built in imitation of perfect building, things -whose form is not identical with their content, things which manifest -more skill than vitality. This, our old ally, since it made our battle -possible, is now our subtlest enemy. - -Our battle is far from being easy, for we fight not to kill but to -make captive, and it is easier and safer to fight to kill. We fight -not to destroy those valuations, but to destroy their pre-eminence. -Recognising (1) that a work of art has a political, comparable to its -moral, influence, (2) that it always embodies knowledge, (3) that it -is nothing if it does not wake in us the feeling that we are near the -achievement of the beautiful, we wish to deny none of these facts, -but to prevent any one of them from being taken as the foundation -of a criterion of art. We wish to set over them a criterion of art -that shall include them all. Above technique, above opinion, above -information, we set life, of the special kind that is here described, -whose conscious vitality is to unconscious vitality what living is to -existence. - -What, then, do we ask ourselves after experiencing a work of art. - -We ask one thing only, though, perhaps, in many forms: Has it given -us an increased consciousness of life, or has it merely had in view -one or other of those valuations whose supreme authority we reject? -Is its title to the name of art merely that it is an illustration of -a doctrine that has elbowed out the doctrine it illustrates, merely -that it gives us a clear idea how some people live, merely that it -has a skin-deep appearance of unity? Or is it a piece of conscious -life, separated watchfully from the flux of living, a piece of -_knowing_ carried out by the artist, which we are allowed to share? -Does it give us a new possession by making us aware of something we -possess. We do not ask an artist for opinions, for facts, for skill, -alone. We have the right to ask for more. We ask him for ourselves; -we ask him for life. “Poetry enriches the blood of the world” by the -practice it affords of living consciously. Vain learning, opinion, -skill, impoverish it. We ask from an artist opportunities of conscious -living, which, taken as they come, multiply the possibilities of their -recurrence, turn us into artists, and help us to contract the habit of -being alive. - - 1912. - - - - - ALOYSIUS BERTRAND: - A ROMANTIC OF 1830 - - - - - ALOYSIUS BERTRAND: - A ROMANTIC OF 1830 - - -In the preface to _Petits Poèmes en Prose_, Baudelaire makes respectful -reference to a little-known book: “J’ai une petite confession à vous -faire. C’est en feuilletant pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameux -_Gaspard de la Nuit_, d’Aloysius Bertrand (un livre connu de vous, de -moi et de quelques-uns de nos amis, n’a-t-il pas tous les droits à -être appelé fameux?), que l’idée m’est venue de tenter quelque chose -d’analogue, et d’appliquer à la description de la vie moderne, ou -plutot d’_une_ vie moderne et plus abstraite, le procédé qu’il avait -appliqué à la peinture de la vie ancienne, si étrangement pittoresque.” -He speaks of Bertrand as “mon mystérieux et brillant modèle,” though, -remembering the teaching of Poe, he adds that he is ashamed to have -made something so different from _Gaspard de la Nuit_, since he holds -that the highest honour of a poet is to accomplish exactly what he -set out to perform. A writer who wrote prose poems good enough to be -read “twenty times at least” by Baudelaire, good enough to suggest an -imitation, a writer but for whom the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ would not -have been written, or would have been written differently, is more than -a literary curiosity. I was led to examine his book, and, presently, to -find an interest in the man himself as well as in his accomplishment. -M. Anatole France was good enough to direct me in my search for -information. My friend, M. Champion, of the Quai Malaquais, generously -put his bibliographical knowledge at my disposal. The files of -forgotten magazines and newspapers and essays by Sainte-Beuve, Charles -Asselineau, and M. Leon Séché combined to build in my mind a portrait -of this picturesque and luckless Romantic, a portrait blistered here -and there, obliterated in patches, but not without vitality. - - * * * * * - -Louis-Jacques-Napoleon Bertrand, who took the name of Ludovic and later -preferred that of Aloysius, was born on April 20, 1807, at Céva, in -Piedmont. Hugo was born in 1802, and Gautier in 1811. He was a child -of that old grey-haired army of which Musset speaks in the _Confession -d’un Enfant du Siècle_. His mother was an Italian, his father a -Frenchman of Lorraine, an old soldier described by his son, in a fiery -letter to a newspaper which had insulted him, as “only a patriot of -1789, only an officer of fortune, who at eighteen rushed to pour out -his blood on the banks of the Rhine, and, at fifty, counted thirty -years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds.” At the age of seven -the young Bertrand was brought to France. He grew up at Dijon, learned -in youth of the great things that were being done in Paris, and read -Hugo, Nodier, Hoffmann, and Scott, all of whom helped him to turn the -modern Dijon into a mediæval city of dreams. - -Early in 1828, a few young men of Dijon founded a newspaper, _Le -Provincial_, to be a mouthpiece for their enlightened generation. It -endured for a few months, and Bertrand contributed prose and verse to -it, including a first draft of a prose poem that, in a much altered -form, was printed in _Gaspard de la Nuit_. The paper was not unnoticed -in Paris, and when it died and Bertrand left Dijon for the capital, he -found some doors already open to him. He was twenty-one, penniless, -with rolls of manuscript in his pocket, and a shy eagerness to read -aloud from them. - -Two portraits of him remain, one by Sainte-Beuve and the other by -Victor Pavie. Sainte-Beuve describes him as “... a tall, thin young -man of twenty-one, with a yellow and brown complexion, very lively -little black eyes, a face mocking and sharp without doubt, rather -wretched perhaps, and a long, silent laugh. He seemed timid, or rather -uncivilised....” - -Victor Pavie says: “His awkward walk, his incorrect and unsophisticated -costume, his lack of balance and of aplomb, betrayed that he had newly -escaped from the provinces. One divined the poet in the ill-restrained -fire of his timid and wandering eyes. As for the expression of his -face, a lofty taste for beauty was combined in it with a somewhat -uncivilised taciturnity....” - -Beside these pictures let me print Bertrand’s portrait of the imaginary -Gaspard de la Nuit: “A poor devil whose exterior announced nothing but -poverty and suffering. I had already noticed in the garden his frayed -overcoat, buttoned to the chin, his shapeless hat that never brush had -brushed, his hair long as a weeping-willow, combed like a thicket, his -fleshless hands like ossuaries, his mocking, wretched, and sickly face; -and my conjectures had charitably placed him among those itinerant -artists, violin-players and portrait-painters, whom an insatiable -hunger and an unquenchable thirst condemn to travel the world in the -footsteps of the Wandering Jew....” It is different from the portraits -of himself, but not more different than would be such a Germanicised -caricature as might have been made by Hoffmann. - -Bertrand’s life in Paris was hidden from the celebrated men whom he -met at Nodier’s evening receptions and in Sainte-Beuve’s study. He -showed himself for a moment, recited some of his verses “d’une voix -sautillante,” and disappeared. He had no money, and probably suffered -from that lack of confidence which can only be removed by a banking -account. Sainte-Beuve, who saw him two or three times and gave him a -copy of the _Consolations_, with the inscription “Mon ami Bertrand,” -speaks of him threading lonely streets with the air of Pierre -Gringoire, the out-at-elbows poet of _Notre Dame de Paris_. He paints -what must be an imaginary portrait of the young and penniless genius -leaning on the window-sill of his garret, “talking for long hours with -the pale gilliflowers of the roof.” - -Unable to earn a living in Paris, he went back to Dijon in 1830, where -he contributed to a Liberal newspaper, _Le Patriote de la Côte-d’Or_. -In spite of his poverty, his blood was young and proud, and as he -walked the streets of Dijon he must have felt himself a representative -of that exuberant young Parisian manhood that was putting _Hernani_ -on the stage and sending _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ to the press. A -rival paper jeered at him, and he was able to reply: “Je préfère vos -dédains à vos suffrages,” and to quote a letter from Victor Hugo to -explain his independence. Hugo had written: “Je lis vos vers en cercle -d’amis, comme je lis André Chenier, Lamartine et Alfred de Vigny: il -est impossible de posséder à un plus haut point les secrets de la -facture.” With such a testimonial in his pocket he need not care for -the scorn or the approval of a provincial journalist. - -At this time his Liberalism was as ardent as his youth. Asselineau -quotes a fiery article praying for war, bloody war, against the Holy -Alliance: “It is time to throw the dice on a drum; and, should we all -perish, the honour of France and of liberty shall perish not.” But, as -was not unnatural, he presently left France and liberty to take care of -themselves, and, full of new plans for literary achievement, returned -hopefully to Paris, where he was joined by his mother and sister. He -was again unable to earn a living. The last lines of a piteous letter -written to Antoine de Latour in September 1833, show how miserable was -his condition: - - “Si je te disais que je suis au point de n’avoir bientôt plus de - chaussures, que ma redingote est usée, je t’apprendrais là le - dernier de mes soucis: ma mère et ma sœur manquent de tout dans - une mansarde de l’hôtel des Etats-Unis qui n’est pas payée. Qu’est - ce pour toi qu’une soixantaine de francs (mon Dieu, à quelle - humiliation le malheur me contraint!). Quelques pièces d’argent - dans une bourse, pour nous c’est un mois de loger, c’est du pain! - - “Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage. - Mon camarade de collège!!! - “Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.” - -It is not known whether the money was sent him, nor whether he found -employment as a proof-reader. - -In such poverty, in such dejection, he put together the book that -preserves his memory, dreaming, when he could forget his empty stomach -and the holes in his shoes, of the prose that Baudelaire was to -imagine after him, “une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans -rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements -lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de -la conscience.” He would not, perhaps, have thought of sudden starts -of conscience, for his was a simpler soul than Baudelaire’s, and he -never felt that the portrait he was drawing might be only the portrait -of a portrait. He was born in 1807 and not in 1821, and, with the -Romantic joy in colour and local colour, he had more than the Romantic -simplicity. His fantasies are prefaced by quotations, and these are -taken from Scott, Hugo, Byron, folk-song, the Fathers of the Church, -Scottish ballads, Charles Nodier, old chronicles, Lope de Vega, -Fenimore Cooper, the cries of the night watchmen, Lamartine, Coleridge, -Chateaubriand, a medley of the Romantics and the writers and things -that they admired. They sometimes mistook the picturesque for the -beautiful, and so did Bertrand. He was a man who thought with his eyes. -He was not an analyst. - -So far indeed did his visual conception of life carry him that he -represents, better than any other French writer, the tendency, new at -that time, to identify literature with painting. Hoffmann, in Germany, -had written _Fantasy-pieces after the manner of Callot_. Leigh Hunt, -in England, amused himself, in _Imagination and Fancy_, by cutting -little bits out of Spenser and proposing them as subjects to the -ghosts of Titian and Rubens. Bertrand used words like oil-colours, -and in _Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et -de Callot_, wrote what, if he had had a palette and brush, he might -very well have painted. If he thought through his eyes, his eyes had -been trained by the painters, and he was proud to offer his book as a -series of engravings after imaginary pictures, or etchings from plates -that had never been bitten. - -“Art,” he says in his preface, “has always two antithetical faces; it -is a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image -of Rembrandt, and the other that of Jacques Callot.... Rembrandt is -the white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his -retreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes -his eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of -beauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in -penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other -hand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the -square, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his -carbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache.... -Now, the author of this book has envisaged art under this double -personification, but he has not been too exclusive, and presents, -besides fantasies in the manners of Rembrandt and of Callot, studies -after Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Durer, Peeter Neef, Breughel -de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator Rosa, -Murillo, Fusely, and many other masters of different schools.” - -Bertrand’s book is one of the documents that must be studied by any -historian of the grotesque who would trace the re-awakening of a spirit -in art that had dozed during the eighteenth century, a spirit quite -different from that of Hogarth, with which it is sometimes confounded. -Bertrand’s was not the noble, the sublime conception of the grotesque -that ruled the finer drawings and much of the poetry of William Blake. -It was akin to that whose love of a gargoyle brought it to life and -sent Quasimodo to haunt the dark and winding stairs of the towers of -Notre Dame. Bertrand contrasts Rembrandt and Callot, but does not see -that in the mind of the man “who consumes himself in penetrating the -mysterious symbols of nature” there is the essence of the feeling for -the grotesque, which, in such men as Callot, having forgotten its -origins, too often becomes mere sport, shadows flung on a wall by a -will-o’-the-wisp instead of by a philosopher’s lamp. But in _Gaspard -de la Nuit_ this feeling is groping towards consciousness, recognising -its food in the etchings alike of Rembrandt and of Callot, of Salvator -and of Durer, noticing the more obvious differences between them, but -as yet incapable of a more sensitive distinction. It is interesting to -notice that he takes suggestions from the Breughel[2] whose wild and -energetic picture made Flaubert, ten years later, set to work on _The -Temptation of St. Anthony_. - -Bertrand’s book is made up of six series of fantasies, labelled -“Flemish School,” “Old Paris,” “The Chronicles,” like the rooms in a -picture-gallery. The usual form of the pieces is that of a small number -of carefully balanced paragraphs, mostly single sentences, sometimes -linked by refrains of movement or meaning. Some have minute prologues -and epilogues. Some are like prose-ballades, finished by an _envoi_. -Few cover more than two or three pages in a small book of large type. -Each one is complete in itself, and built of a firm, noun-ful prose, -richer in colour than in subtlety. - -They were written by a man to whom sustained effort was impossible, -a man elusive, _fugace_, who could not settle in one place or in one -mood, and perhaps found in these little scraps of goldsmithery the -nearest approach to permanence and solidity in his life. He was a -hunter of the moment, and these fantasies are the only trophies of his -chase. Their form seems made for him and he for it, and he needed no -models for the gait of his soul. - -Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble -personality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming -that owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else. -His was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet. -He felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all -he could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of -dreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams -with their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a -cottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights -while the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a study as -Faustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in -his dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their -phantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a -Messire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait -by Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo’s reconstruction, and the old -Dijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to -keep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered -him her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes -of the moon. - -This is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries: - - “LE CLAIR DE LUNE. - “‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormez - Et priez pour les trépassés.’ - --_Le cri du crieur de nuit._ - -“Oh! qu’il est doux, quand l’heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de -regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d’or! - -“Deux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fenêtre, un chien hurlait dans le -carrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer vaticinait tout bas. - -“Mais bientôt mon oreille n’interrogea plus qu’un silence profond. Les -lépreux étaient rentrés dans leurs chenils, aux coups de Jacquemart qui -battait sa femme. - -“Le chien avait enfilé une venelle, devant les pertuisanes du guet -enrouillé par la pluie et morfondu par la bise. - -“Et le grillon s’était endormi, dès que la dernière bluette avait -éteint sa dernière lueur dans la cendre de la cheminée. - -“Et moi, il me semblait,--tant la fièvre est incohérente,--que la lune, -grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!” - - “MOONLIGHT. - “‘Wake, men who sleep, - And pray for the dead.’ - --_Cry of the night-watchman._ - -“Oh! how pleasant it is, when the hour trembles in the belfry, at -night, to look at the moon, whose nose is shaped like a golden -carolus![3] - -“Two lepers were complaining under my window, a dog was howling at the -cross-ways, and the cricket on my hearth was prophesying in a whisper. - -“But soon my ear no longer questioned anything but a profound silence. -The lepers had gone back into their kennels, at the sound of Jacquemart -beating his wife.[4] - -“The dog had fled away up an alley, before the halberds of the watch, -rain-soaked, and wind-frozen. - -“And the cricket had fallen asleep, as soon as the last spark had put -out its last glimmer in the ashes of the fire-place. - -“And, as for me, it seemed to me--fever is so incoherent--that the -moon, wrinkling her face, put out her tongue at me like a man who has -been hanged.” - -The moon put out her tongue at her faithful admirer, and helped him -neither to honey-dew nor to the milk of Paradise. His biographers -do not agree as to the way he lived during his few remaining years. -Sainte-Beuve says that he was a private secretary, and that he wrote -in various inconspicuous newspapers. M. Séché, to whom we owe a great -deal of new information, thinks that these employments are not likely -to have held Bertrand for long. About 1835, he found in Eugène Renduel -a publisher for _Gaspard de la Nuit_. He sold the right to print -an edition of 800 copies, of which 300 were to be called “Keepsake -Fantastique,” for the sum of 150 francs. The money was paid and the -manuscript was put into the publisher’s desk, where, for some reason -or other, it remained for a very long time. Its publication was -promised from year to year. In a letter written to David d’Angers, in -1837, Bertrand says: “_Gaspard de la Nuit_, ce livre de mes douces -prédilections, où j’ai essayé de créer un nouveau genre de prose, -attend le bon vouloir d’Eugène Renduel pour paraître enfin cet -automne....” Bertrand did not make the gallant figure in poverty that -was made, for example, by Richard Steele, who turned bailiffs into -liveried footmen, as Whistler is said to have done more recently; but -once, at least, he showed a smiling face to misfortune, even if the -smile was a little awry. In 1840, the book being still unpublished, -he called on his publisher and left a sonnet on him, as an ordinary -person might leave a visiting-card. A more charming protest against -procrastination was surely never written: - - “Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux, - Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange: - C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange, - Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous. - - A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous? - Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange, - Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange; - Nous avons une vigne--eh bien, vendangeons nous! - - Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne, - La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne, - Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit. - - J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes, - A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes. - Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.” - -Six months later Bertrand was dead. At least once he had known for -several months the inside of a public hospital. He was attacked by -phthisis. David d’Angers obtained a grant of 300 francs for him and the -promise of a post as librarian; but he was not to leave the hospital -again. David, who was himself ill, did all that could be done for him, -sent him oranges, and made portraits of him before and after death, -and saw to it that his grave-clothes were not of the coarseness deemed -fitting for the bodies of the poor. David alone followed his bier, -and, no doubt, supplied Sainte-Beuve with the material for his picture -(in the introduction to the first edition of _Gaspard de la Nuit_, -published in 1842 by Victor Pavie, who bought the rights from Renduel -for the sum originally paid):--“It was the eve of Ascension; a terrible -storm was rumbling; the Mass for the dead had been spoken, and the -funeral procession did not come. The priest had ended by leaving; the -only friend present watched the abandoned remains. At the end of the -chapel a sister of charity was decorating an altar with garlands for -the next day’s feast.” - -So ended a life that was like a thread blown in the wind, swung this -way and that, without weight, and at last torn from its weak hold and -whirled away over the edge of the world. Bertrand’s life was that of -the real Bohemian, whose struggle is not the less difficult because his -head is high and his eyes, instead of seeing where he is going, are -full of magnificent things. Bertrand was like a man trying to speak -high poetry when his enemy has him by the throat. He saw, and wrote, -and wrestled, in a breath; his achievement was scarcely recognised -till he was overthrown. And that achievement, such as it was, that -little flame he contrived to light before going out himself, kindled a -greater, and in its brighter luminosity almost became invisible. But -when we look back from the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ to this little -book that suggested their creation, we find that it is not without an -independent interest, personal as well as historical. Bertrand himself -was somebody, and no book so well as his lets us share the day-dreams -of 1830. - - 1911. - - - - -ALPHONSE DAUDET - - - - -ALPHONSE DAUDET - - -Daudet’s was the scintillant, flamelike vitality that makes its -possessor the youngest in whatever company he may find himself. -Anatole France writes of him that he believes no human creature ever -loved nature and art with a more ardent and more generous affection, -or enjoyed the universe with more delight, more force, and more -tenderness. Even in old age and suffering, he brought merriment with -him when he limped into the big room that Edmond de Goncourt called his -“grenier,” and kept for talk and friendship. If the room had been sad -or silent, it woke to laughter when this invalid came in and began to -speak. Men felt themselves more alive in his presence. This vitality -is different from the physical and mental momentum of a Balzac. It is -a lambent flame rather than a conflagration; light without heat. It -scorched no one, not even Daudet himself, who made it into a public -entertainer. He could use it at will; it did not impel him into a -restless activity. I can imagine that indolent people felt ill at ease -with Balzac in the room, as if from a fear that he might go off like -a dynamite bomb. Daudet’s vitality was gentle, and insinuated itself -into his listeners’ veins, so that when they left they had the pleasant -sensation of having themselves been more than usually vivacious. “I -have missed my vocation,” he said; “I should have been a merchant of -happiness.” It was a vocation that he had not missed. A merchant of -happiness was precisely what he was, since one kind of happiness is a -childish enjoyment of everything that may occur. Children run about -all day, without forethought, and play at being all sorts of things, -and chatter and fall asleep, still chattering, in the middle of a -sentence. They wake next morning to perform a variation ever so blithe -on yesterday’s performance. Daudet lived just so, and was able to share -his life with other people. - -_Le Petit Chose_ is the story of his childhood. It is the tale of a -little boy whose father is an unsuccessful man of business, a little -boy with a parrot and a dream of Robinson Crusoe, who is transplanted -from his south to a northern manufacturing town, a child who becomes -an usher in a school where his youth and his poverty make him butt of -boys and masters alike, where he writes love-letters for a gymnastic -instructor, and suffers in his stead for their success, a child who -goes to Paris at seventeen to join his brother in poverty and hope, -and to write a poem about blue butterflies. The book is almost true -to history, except that, unlike Daudet, _le Petit Chose_ ends as -partner in a china shop, regretfully resigning his blue butterflies to -marry the daughter of the china shop’s proprietor. The real tale of -his shyness and pathetic adventures, that Daudet was never tired of -telling, since it was his own, goes on in other books. There is in them -all a _joie d’écrire_ as much as _joie de vivre_. He rejoices in every -misfortune of his childhood, because, in describing it, he finds an -opportunity for life as a young man. His life as a child had been told -to himself as a fairy tale. He had told ingenious lies to excuse his -truant days on the river, killing off a Pope to hide, in his family’s -excitement, his lateness for a meal. He told lies to himself to excuse -the sordid appearances of his existence, and now he had a chance of -telling lies again, and so living another romance. Daudet’s writing -was always a means of living for him. His own life could be multiplied -indefinitely by the glosses he put upon it. He is not, like Coppée, -a disillusioned man remembering dreams, paining himself with the -memory of the boy he was. Daudet, far from envying that boy of whom he -writes, seems to be still identical with him, and tells his escapades -as if they were yesterday’s, as indeed they might be. Even when he -tries to write disillusioned novels, he sits in a rosy cloud, and is -irrepressibly happy in spite of them. He never knows whether pain or -pleasure is the more enjoyable. Either is an aid to living, and perhaps -the former gives life a keener taste. - -Men of this kind do not spend their vitality altogether for nothing. -More than others they need affection and applause. A face of -disapproval in their audience is enough to wither their wings, and they -ask for goodwill, if only to help them to continue the performance. -_Le Petit Chose_, like most of Daudet’s work, like his life, and his -other representations of his life, conversational or on paper, is an -appeal to be loved. He asks to be seen as he sees himself, and asks -very successfully. It is this, I think, that makes it easy to forgive -him his sins against pure art; this that accounts for his friends’ love -of him, and also for the popular success that made him feel a little -uncomfortable among them. His greed of affection made him not very -fastidious; he was glad to be loved by his baker as well as by Edmond -de Goncourt. - -Daudet acquired the habit of being lovable. He made his own life into -a fairy tale, and, since it was the surest way to gratitude, soon -found it difficult to see the lives of others in any different way. -He copied his men and women from nature, as he said, but each one -of them readily became _le Petit Chose_, and he his affectionate, -rose-spectacled biographer. When his novels are laid aside, and we -look at their backs, we forget their extraordinary observation, and -see characters exaggerated by a man who is anxious to persuade; and -when these characters have faded away into framed drawings like those -taken from back numbers of _Punch_, we remember little of the books -but a spirit that asks love and gives it, is ready to understand more -than there is to be understood, and to make excuses for those who are -without them. We think of Daudet as the tenderest possible biographer -for ourselves, and at the same time feel a little shrinking from the -idea of being exhibited with such emphasis. Some of the novels, with -which we are not here particularly concerned, do their best to dispel -the atmosphere of rose-leaves and sunshine, involving us in a swift and -keen analysis of unkind and unpleasant motives. But when we close even -these, little is left of them but their author’s charm, and the memory -of those incidents or descriptions, in which, freed from the burden of -an ambitious task, he loosens the bridle of his romancing vitality. - -His books are not so consistent as his character. They are always most -satisfactory when most directly concerned with it. This is partly -because he wrote of himself in anecdotes, and his inspiration was -facile and short-winded rather than persevering. The effects he secures -in his writings are the same as those he won in conversation, snatches -of colour and feeling, like the studies in an artist’s notebook, -often better than when repainted into pictures. Ambition perhaps -obstructed his talent in setting it to do other men’s work, however -well he may have been able to do it. He was not a novelist, although he -made himself one. His big books, in which he describes many lives and -kinds of life, are already being sieved out by time, and the work by -which his name will be remembered is reducing itself to his real and -imaginary reminiscences and his short stories. In these he does not -mingle contradictory ingredients; while his novels, even the best, are -too much like battle-grounds between Queen Mab and Zola. - -In his short stories he is perfectly at ease. His talent was no eagle -for long flights, but one of his own blue butterflies. It flew far only -with effort, and tired as it flew, drooping its wings or flapping them -irregularly. But in the short tales no flight was so long as to tire -it. It was happy and at ease, opened its wings with grace, and as it -dropped, folded them with all imaginable delicacy. In the _Contes du -Lundi_ he reconciled his powers and his ambition. He was a romancer, a -_conteur_, a _causeur_, and romantic anecdotes refuse to be fettered -to a strict and steady veracity. He wished to be a painter after -nature, to be accurate, to be real, to be mistaken for reality. There -are moments, but only moments, when the two kinds of truth, that these -powers and this ambition severally suggest, coalesce in a truth that -is charming and, at the same time, almost photographic. In the novels -the truth disintegrated into opposing masses. In short stories he was -able to combine them. His brief, flashing sketches, with their curious -air of stereoscopic perspective, are seldom in the least unreal. Yet, -poignant little things, unforgettable, however slight, they are not -the probabilities of life but its possibilities. They are the lies -that ought to be true. The story of the Alsatian schoolmaster, or that -of the siege of Berlin, with the old colonel, in his worn uniform, -standing on the balcony to welcome the victorious French, and seeing -instead the Uhlans of the advance guard, and hearing the triumphal -march of Schubert, as the Prussians enter Paris; all these minute -things are too dramatic, too pathetic, not to be allowed their moment -of existence. Daudet writes them, and they bring tears to our eyes, -tears that, unfortunately, we must submit to a rather cruel analysis. - -Tears, and also laughter. Daudet with his firm belief in the ultimate -victory of all good and pleasant people, and the corresponding -punishment of the bad and unkind, enjoyed, like many happy-minded -men, a highly developed faculty of pity. It was one of his means of -being alive, and this man, who “died of having loved life too well,” -neglected none of the exercises that made his nerves tingle and his -heart beat. He lived in being sorry for people and things, and he -lived in being glad. Another group of his short stories is made up -of pure fairy tales that dance before the eyes, their words running -and tripping after each other, like a band of elves on midsummer’s -eve. They are southern tales of old Provence that he read in the -grasshopper’s library under the blue sky, where the librarians sing all -day, and there are gossamers for bookmarks. Their heartsome feeling is -that of the old song: - - “Sur le pont d’Avignon - Tout le monde danse en rond.” - -Even when he brings the elves to town, as in _Un Réveillon dans le -Marais_, when, into the old courtyard of the mansion that has been -turned into a mineral water factory, he introduces cavaliers and ladies -of the ancient time, fairies now, being dead so long, he brings with -them half a memory of the farandole, and makes them drunk with seltzer. - -Laughter and tears; it is by these that we remember Daudet. His art -is that of wearing his heart on his sleeve. “Here,” he seems to say, -“is a sad tale to make you cry (I cried myself in making it), and -here is a merry one to make you laugh (my pen quivered with merriment -as I wrote it down for you).” Laughter and tears tempted him perhaps -too strongly. He was accustomed to tell his stories many times before -he wrote them. They shaped themselves, like folktales, in successive -recitations, until the inessentials fell away from them and they won -economical and immediate effects. The danger of such a manner of -composition is a confusion of ends. The only safe audience for a writer -is that undiscoverable and absolute judge, who, from his niche in our -consciousness, signs now and again his knowledge that such and such -an expression is truly expressed, is really expression and not an -incomplete and muffling mask. That other audience, whose lips open, -whose eyes smile or weep as we read to them, is not a judge of art. -Its values are not aesthetic. Its most obvious criticisms are those of -laughter and tears, and these are written too clearly not to become -more important to us than they should. How can the jocund tale be bad -that made you laugh? How can that sad one fail that sent your kerchief -to your eyes? There may be imperfections in them; yes, but by removing -them, I must be careful not to lose that laughter or those tears. And -so, almost inevitably, the tears and laughter come to seem the ends of -art instead of its by-products. And they are not the wistful tears that -dew the eyelashes before a perfect work, nor the impersonal laughter -that rings out like a spring song because some man has made a new thing -well for the eternal gods to see. - -Most Frenchmen are performers; and the Frenchman from the south is he -who wins the greatest joy from his performance. I remember a big bare -studio in the Boulevard Vaugirard, where a crowd of students, poets, -sculptors, painters, and their women, used to be merry together and -drink coffee (if there was coke for the stove), and eat Olibet biscuits -(if there was money to buy them). Among us were two curly-headed -Provençals, whose voices had a more persuasive abandon than ours to -whatever they wished to say. There was a balcony in the studio with a -ladder fastened to it, so that the artist might climb to his bed. One -of the Provençals used to stand up, leaning on the ladder, and sing us -old songs of his country, while his friend sat on the lower steps and -dropped the deeper notes of a silver flute into their proper places -in the melody. The songs were sometimes joyful, sometimes sad. More -than once, when some pathetic tune or words made his audience weep, I -have seen the flute-player, unable to restrain his happiness, caper -about the studio with his instrument. Something of Daudet was in the -flute-player and something of the flute-player in Daudet. - - 1909. - - - - -THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE - - - - -THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE - - -Some writers seem to represent single moods of life. Most men grow -from childhood to old age, passing from illusion to disillusion (in -which illusion does no more than turn its coat), then to resignation -(a kind of agnostic attitude towards their own sensations), and, -finally, perhaps, end in the most obstinate illusion of all. But there -are writers who seem to stop at this or that point in the road, to -take up their stand there, and to date from that resting-place all -the monologues that they allow humanity to overhear. The work of the -greatest artists is sent off from every post-office on the journey, or, -if their work is done in age, it holds proof that they have travelled -all the way. Coppée hesitates on the brow of that hill from which -can be seen for the last time the sunlit country of youth. Already -disillusioned, he looks back, and spends his life in regretting the -past. All his work has a retrospective glamour, and where he writes -joyously of the present, it is easy to feel that the joy is a religious -joy, and that his work is a memorial rite, re-enacting something that -has long since faded away. - -He took this attitude when very young. There are, indeed, men whose -eyes have always been turned back, men whose earliest memory is a -regret for the memory earlier still that they have lost. In the -prologue to _Le Reliquaire_, published in 1866, he wrote: - - “Et de même que, tous les soirs, - Ils font autour du reliquaire - Fumer les légers encensoirs. - Dédaignant le douleur vulgaire - Qui pousse des cris importuns, - Dans ces poèmes je veux faire - A tous mes beaux rêves défunts, - A toutes mes chères reliques, - Une chapelle de parfums - Et de cierges mélancoliques.” - -In building for his fair dead dreams a chapel of sad perfumes and -melancholy candles, he spent the better part of his life. His prose -was written later than his verse, but years did not alter the object of -his architecture. - -He was sometimes assailed by other moods, but did not allow himself -to yield to them. He had succeeded young; it is possible that having -charmed already, he was half afraid of losing by any change the odour -and the essence impossible to analyse, in which he knew that he could -trust, and which, once at any rate, had been personal to himself. There -remain, however, the indications of occasional faith in mutability. -Sometimes he flung himself boldly in the direction whither life would -have taken him. But the feeling of boldness, of experiment, that -pervades, for example, _Le Coupable_, is enough to show that he was ill -at ease. The story is that of a man who leaves his mistress, a Parisian -grisette. She has a child, who, born in the gutter, grows up among the -vicious and finds his way to a penitentiary, and, at last, committing a -serious crime, is brought for judgment before his father. The father, -learning his identity, tells the whole story, and asks whether he -himself, rather than his son, is not the true _coupable_. Coppée finds -in it an opportunity for a study of society from below, for much close -and accurate description, and for a very searching account of the -reformatory system. It is a clever book, but somehow Coppée has dropped -out of it. - -I do not mean that all Coppée’s best work is to be known by an -atmosphere of sentimental yearning for the past. His mood is much more -delicate. He writes as a man whose illusions are gone, but he does not -often cry aloud, - - “Hélas! les beaux jours sont finis.” - -He only says that there have been fine days. By fine days he means days -of enthusiasm and of a simple heart. He has once walked with the world -far below his feet; but, now that its wisdom has risen over his head, -he cannot recover that old enthusiasm by pretending to be ignorant. -Knowing too much, his only care is to preserve as a touchstone the -memory of his lost unwisdom. He does not often more directly express -his regret. But it is a recognition of his regretfulness that makes his -stories bitter to the very young, half-conscious of their youth, and -pained by all that helps to waken them to simultaneous knowledge and -loss of it. - -In _Toute une Jeunesse_ he confesses that his hero, “personnage -imaginaire dans une action imaginaire, sent la vie comme je la sentais -quand j’étais un enfant, et quand j’étais un jeune homme.” Much of -the imaginary action follows very closely the course of his own life, -and it is possible in reading it to watch the fine days and then the -gradual realisation that they had been fine. Amédée Violette, born in -a little flat in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, behind the gardens of -the Luxembourg, the son of a government clerk, loses his mother very -young, and grows up in loneliness, except for the little girls next -door. He goes to school in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, turning out -of the other. There is a plane-tree in the schoolyard, which allows -the schoolmaster to offer a garden on his prospectus. The assistant -masters are grotesque and wretched. The head of the principal is like -the terrestrial globe that stands on the desk in his study to impress -his pupils’ parents. Amédée grows up, spending fine evenings in long -walks through Paris with his father, the widower, who takes gradually -to absinthe for the sake of forgetfulness. He grows up in the quarter, -studies at the university, solitary in the midst of its gregarious -frivolity, partly from poverty, partly from love of the child with -whom he used to play. He leaves the university with a degree, and is -taken on in the same office as his father, as a supernumerary clerk. -So many hours a day disappear from his life, and he wakens only in the -evenings, which he spends in rhyming, and on Sundays when he writes -all day without leaving his room. He has a few friends who count him -almost a hermit. A young actor takes him to the Café de Séville in the -Boulevard Montmartre, where he introduces him to Paul Sillery, a poet -and editor of an unpopular review--Catulle Mendès, perhaps. The café is -full of men with beards, politicians, and men with hair, poets. Sillery -recognises a poet in him, and when the actor recites one of his poems -with success at a charity performance in a theatre, sends him to a -publisher--no doubt Lemerre, who published the Parnassians. His first -volume is printed and successful. He has come so far when his youth is -taken from him. His nearest friend betrays him, and he has to compel -him to marry the girl he has so long loved himself. He passes through -various more or less empty adventures. The Franco-Prussian war leaves -the girl a widow with a boy, and his friend’s last wish is that they -should marry. The wish is fulfilled: Amédée, married to a woman he has -loved from childhood, has a wife whose heart is buried with his friend. -It is all so different from its promises. The poet is left with the -consolation of his art, and the book ends: “Hélas! ta jeunesse est -finie, pauvre sentimental! Les feuilles tombent! Les feuilles tombent!” - -The leaves fall on the paper as Coppée writes. It is always autumn in -his books, because he is always thinking of spring. But _Toute une -Jeunesse_ lets us into more of his secrets than this. It is full of -love for Paris, and obsessed by the contrast between rich and poor, or -rather between appearances and the other appearances they hide. Life -is very much like one of those Japanese nests of coloured boxes; you -open the little round scarlet wooden cylinder, and there is a green one -inside. You open that and find a blue. Within the blue is a scarlet -one again. It is so with life. No state of disillusionment is final. -There is always another behind it which will turn what seemed to be an -unemotional acceptance of life as it is into a regretted and fantastic -dream. Coppée is less conscious of the infinite endurance of mutability -than of his regret for particular yesterdays. He must put all he writes -of in the scarlet box. Paris for him is always the Paris of 1866. He -felt, he said, like Madame de Staël, “la nostalgie de son cher ruisseau -de la rue du Bac,” but the gutter he yearned for flowed in the days -when he was young. It is this that gives some of his work an appeal -that has nothing to do with its merit. For there are many to whom Paris -represents the days when they were young, many to whom the names tune -the pulses to a quick and joyous march, names like the rue Notre Dame -des Champs, twisting grey street, whose pavements still beat with the -airy tread of new generations of dreamers. It is the same throughout. -When he talks of buying books at the Odéon, we do not watch an old man -choosing what he wishes, and paying for it from a pocketful of money -that he has not counted. We see the Coppée of 1864, or ourselves of -ten years ago; boys, with the price of the book, and perhaps ten sous -for dinner, spending nevertheless an hour in looking at all the other -books on the stalls, and then buying the one for which we had come with -the swift manner of those who have walked straight to the bookshop, -and, having got what they want as expeditiously as possible, are going -straight off again. We see that dead Coppée, or ourselves, sitting -among the nurse-maids in the gardens opposite, cutting the leaves with -a clasp-knife from a fair. The Café de Seville, once a meeting-place -for men of beards and men of hair, is made a tryst for Coppée and his -dead youth. And when he says that for the Parisian the seasons come to -town, and that, in a green and rose sunset, he can find the autumn’s -morbid melancholy, and, in a sunny morning in the Luxembourg gardens, -all the divine joyousness of spring, we know of what Parisian he is -speaking. - -His obsession by the contrast between rich and poor reduces to the -same sentiment. He does not hate the rich because they are rich; he is -only sorry for them if money has taken away from them something they -might have had in poverty. He is not sorry for the poor because they -are poor, but only if their poverty expresses the lack of something -that, with money, they think they might have had. He has come to regard -illusions as the only sterling coin. In the two contrasted tales of -“The Italian Organ” he seems to weigh rich and poor in opposite scales, -and to find a balance between them. One tune of the organ reminds a -poor clerk’s wife of the days before she married, when she was the -prettiest girl at the cheap dances, and Monsieur Fred, amusing himself, -filled her head with dreams. Riches have carried him away from her, -and she has grown paler, and married Jules with the stiff collar and -the india-rubber-cleaned gloves. It is very sad. Another tune reminds -the Countess of the days before she married, when as la Belle Adah of -the American Circus, she reigned in her own place. The Count fell in -love with her, pursued her, married her, and trained her to be a lady. -She spends her mornings in visiting institutions, and there is a vicar -waiting on her in the drawing-room. It is very sad. But the sorrow -of both these women is not for their riches or their poverty. It is -mourning for a life that can never be lived. Coppée’s love for the poor -is unlike Daudet’s. Daudet loves the poor because they are brave and -picturesque. Coppée sees in them the simpleness of heart and the power -of dreaming that were his when he was poor himself, that is to say, -when he was young. The poor invented Christianity. - -Very little happens in Coppée’s short stories. In some of them nothing -happens at all. Things are remembered and set down, and from those -notes rises less a tale than the suggestion of a story that might have -been told. Now it is old Mother Bernu, who saw Marie Antoinette carried -to the guillotine in a white shirt, and is thrown up by a careless -Time to take the little Coppée out for walks. Now it is a couple of -old bachelors talking of might-have-beens. Now, “Mon Ami Meurtrier,” -a swaggering athletic clerk, is discovered to be the mildest of men, -attending to his mother’s lap-dog, and mixing good coffee. In most of -the stories it is more than usually evident that the author is the real -hero. “The White Frock” is the tale of a lame child whose only white -dress is worn at her first communion. All her friends wear a second -on their wedding days, and she will never be married. It is really -the tale of a man who passes daily through a little street, and, in -watching the street change, beards whiten, and children marry, sees his -own youth passing from him, and, in the little lame girl, a melancholy -piece of childhood’s jetsam whose dream will never be realised, never -be destroyed. There was a little boy who lived near the gardens of the -Luxembourg, and walked there in the spring, when the trees were caught -in a net of fluttering green, and in the summer heat, when those long -walks were patterned black and white with sun-thrown shadows, and in -the autumn, when the leaves were rusty gold, and fell to the ground to -make a pleasant trampling place for children’s feet, and in the winter, -when, over the round steel pond, the grey stone Queens of France looked -mournfully at the straight-fronted palace. He walked there, intimate -with all the moods of the garden, his eyes awake with possibilities, -rhyming verses that perhaps would never be published, and finding the -world a fairy-tale with so many ends from which to choose that it was -fortunate it would not finish soon. He was always alone there, in the -midst of the students, girls and nurse-maids. He and the sparrows -seemed to have the garden to themselves. The others did not seem to -matter. And this boy never left the study of François Coppée. If Coppée -looked up from his desk he was there, almost reproachful, a ghostly -boy with clear and truthful eyes, walking under the trees, in ragged -clothes, rhyming verses for himself. The wisdom of the world turned to -dross beside his golden ignorance, and the man who had grown up felt, -like the loiterer along the quays, a continuous pride and pain in -thinking of the days when the sunset had shone for him alone. - - 1909. - - - - -FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE - - - - -FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE - -AN ESSAY IN COMPREHENSION - -_To I. C. R._ - - -Philosophy in the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the -tremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of -dialectic. A philosopher’s pride is in the impersonal nature of his -thought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery, -on which the maker’s name is the only sign that it was once a daring, -personal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of -the body of a man. Its maker, when it is finished, would wish to wipe -the filings and the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste, -and, folding his arms, to watch it in independent activity. The reason -of this ambition is to be found neither in modesty, nor yet in vanity, -but in a ruling intellectual concept, the concept of absolute truth. -If the true is universally true, if a thing either _is_, or _is not_, -then the personality of the thinker either is grit in the wheels, or, -by the necessity of its presence and assistance, betrays the weakness -of the thought whose truth or untruth can in no way be affected by the -existence or non-existence of its discoverer. This Nietzsche resolutely -denied, and denied in two ways. - -First, he denied the absolute nature of truth, asserting that the -word “true” was merely a title given by men to opinions, and that -the justice of its application was, in a broad sense, to be judged -pragmatically. A pragmatist before William James, he said: “The -falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is -here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The -question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, -species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally -inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic -judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us; that -without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of -reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, -without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, -man could not live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a -renunciation of life, a negation of life.”[5] - -Secondly, he denied that the personality of the thinker was a -disturbing factor in his thought. It was, on the contrary, the -guarantee that once at least that thought had been true. “Now -philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders; to -all later philosophers they are usually a single big mistake, and -to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths.... Therefore many -disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs.... -Whoever, on the contrary, finds any pleasure at all in great men -finds pleasure also in all such systems, be they ever so erroneous, -for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal -touch and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the -philosopher, just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can -form conclusions as to the soil. _That_ mode of life, of viewing human -affairs at any rate, has existed once, and is therefore possible.” He -wrote that quite early in his career in his little book on early Greek -philosophy, a history like the dawn setting on fire the tips of the -distant mountains, then the nearer, and at last throwing on the ground -behind him the shadow of the observer. For Nietzsche, the mountain -peaks are those fragments of the crumbled systems which are personal -to their authors, and, even if refutable as philosophy are irrefutable -as particular and individual revelations. It is a delightful little -gathering of philosophers and, perhaps, more important than has yet -been admitted, in its promise of Nietzsche’s habit of thought, his -impatience of dialectic, his dislike of the Parmenidean mind, his trust -in the poetic, the particular. “What verse is to the poet,” he says, -“dialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order -to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.” From this view -he never departed. In _Beyond Good and Evil_ he repeats his belief in -the personal character of thought: “In each cardinal problem there -speaks an unchangeable ‘I am this’; a thinker cannot learn anew about -man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully--he can only -follow to the end what is ‘fixed’ about them in himself.” And again in -_Zarathustra_: “‘This is now my way--where is yours?’ Thus did I answer -those who asked me ‘the way.’ For _the_ way--it doth not exist.” - -And so, for Nietzsche, truth is infinitely variable, minted afresh -by each man and dependent upon his image and superscription for a -guarantee of its particular validity. It was for this reason that -he despised the elaborate stage-play of reasoning. He believed that -to exhibit ideas in a white light and at a mean temperature, when -they offered themselves in the glow of the morning or in the heat of -noon, was to strip them of their credentials. He insisted that his -own thoughts were true in relation to himself, and preserved their -concreteness by way of preserving the conditions of their truth. He -refused the step from the concrete to the abstract as a step into -annihilation, and in this way identified himself with the poets. To -misunderstand him here is to misread him everywhere. - -We are examining, then, in Friedrich Nietzsche a man whose view of -truth demanded the personal presence of the thinker as guarantee of -the thought. Consequently, though for reasons I have already given it -is usual on the part of philosophers and their critics to rule the -personality of a thinker out of a discussion of his thought, here, -at least, we are justified in glancing at a man’s character before -we examine the ideas that will help us to fill it out to approximate -verisimilitude. - -Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, went mad in January 1889, and -died on August 25, 1900. His father was a country parson, simple, -upright, patriotic and monarchical. He found joy in the coincidence of -his son’s birthday with that of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and this -circumstance gave Nietzsche his names. His mother was a young woman of -high spirits and great physical energy, so exuberant and so lovable -as to be described as “a gorgeous savage” by her mother-in-law. His -father, “preordained to pay only a flying visit--a gracious reminder -of life rather than life itself,” died in his six and thirtieth year, -before Nietzsche was five. A grandmother, two aunts and his mother -presided over a pious happy childhood, from which he emerged as a model -schoolboy, laughably virtuous, walking slowly home in a rainstorm -in spite of his mother’s frenzied urging, and rebuking this urging -with pained austerity: “But, mamma, in the rules of the school it is -written, ‘On leaving school boys are forbidden to jump and run about -in the streets, but must walk quietly and decorously to their homes.’” -This sedateness persisted with him, although he could so completely -forget himself in playing with children, that when he was twenty-six -and a professor, he was laughed at and told he was only fourteen. He -always dressed with notable nicety. Though he said, with pride, that -he would rather be a satyr than a saint, he had a dignity that belongs -rather to holiness than to lust. Children and old women loved him. The -fruit-sellers in the Turin market-place hurried to pick out for him -their finest grapes. He had gentle manners, a beautiful voice, and a -profound sense of the politeness that an aristocrat owes to himself. -He clung to the legend that he was the descendant of Polish noblemen, -and was proud of being mistaken by Poles for a Pole, that Frenchman -among the Slavs. His favourite books were the courteous unruffled -French moralists of the seventeenth century, and the works of Stendhal, -who resembled them in wearing a sword and in his love of fine manners. - -His precarious health gave him extreme sensitiveness to his physical -condition. He believed that clear thinking was only possible in dry air -and on hills. His highest praise for his work was that it was mountain -thought. He composed in the open air and in motion, and advised other -people to follow his example. “Remain seated as little as possible, -put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the -accompaniment of free bodily motion--nor in one in which even the -muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in -the intestines.” - -He seized on Flaubert’s “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis,” with a -cry: “Here have I got you, you nihilist? A sedentary life is the real -sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking -have any value.” - -He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that -“apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of -such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was -detrimental to him, “as the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.” A healthy -man, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses “the -will to health,” and “is strong enough to make everything turn to his -own advantage.” He found in convalescence “a pale delicate light and -a sunshine happiness,” “a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect, -and haughtiness.” From the combination of his ill-health and his -healthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche -learnt, he says, “to look upon healthier concepts and values from the -standpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret -work of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is -laden and rich with the richness of life.” He mentions “the sweetness -and spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of -blood and muscle,” and remembers the unusual dialectical clearness he -enjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious -than most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain. -When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of -Silvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition -of this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added -the exultant postscript: “6000 feet beyond man and time!” - -Such, sketched as briefly as possible, is the physiological background -on which we must set his work. - -The greater part of that work (which fills seventeen volumes in the -English translation) is made up of short numbered paragraphs, arranged -under general headings. The lectures and poems are, indeed, the only -exceptions, for though _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays called -_Thoughts out of Season_, are less disintegrated than later books, -we can perceive, in their numbered sections, the promise of sections -shorter and continually shortening to the brief “Maxims and Missiles” -at the beginning of _The Twilight of the Idols_. Even _Thus Spake -Zarathustra_ was built in a similar manner, though disguised by -the rush of prophecy and a more definite general scheme. Nietzsche -allowed such constructive power as he had to atrophy. He was never a -systematic thinker, but, because his paragraphs are not such separate -and individual observations like those of Chamfort or Vauvenargues; -because they were often written in swift succession, one after another, -there is a dangerous possibility that in reading them we may feel we -are reading notes for a book which the author has not troubled to piece -together into the superficial form to which we are accustomed. We may -resent this, but we are more likely to grow weary of the constant -change of subject, of the staccato iteration of ideas without prologues -or epilogues to awaken slowly and lull again to repose our sluggish -brains. It is well to remember that we have learnt to read too fast, -and that Nietzsche foresaw our discomfort. “He that writeth in blood -doth not want to be read but learnt by heart.... It is no easy task -to understand unfamiliar blood. I hate the reading idlers.” We cease -to feel the superficial confusion and inconsistency of those ten -thousand paragraphs when we become better aware of the half-dozen -ideas that were the parents of that numerous family. We are then able -to trace a paragraph’s pedigree, and to place it in a larger scheme -than that of the volume in which it happens to be printed. No reader -of Nietzsche can have failed to notice that his books, different in -detail, different in application, yet often seem coincident with each -other. Nor is this due to chance repetitions that would betray an -uncritical improvisation. It is an accurate indication of Nietzsche’s -habit of mind. His books were gleanings, and, after his mature work -began, they were gleanings from fields almost uniformly sown. The -seasons varied and the sower’s arm was irregular in its swing, but -the harvest was always from a field that had been fertilised by a -fairly uniform mixture of ideas. The ideas of the pragmatic nature of -truth, of Eternal Recurrence, of the Will to Power, of the Superman, -and of master and servant morality, yield in book after book a new -crop of lesser ideas, applied, amplified, restricted or illustrated in -psychological observation. For this reason I do not intend, in what can -but be a short essay, any detailed criticism of Nietzsche’s books, -but rather to note the results of such criticism. The reading of his -books, unless it be impatient, careless, and unworthy, is a process of -discovering what were those half-dozen ideas that separated Nietzsche -from the thinkers of his time, stimulated his brain until at last it -broke, and during many years kept him in the lonely joyful ecstasy of -continual exploration. - -“The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it,” -but they often so obscure it as to postpone its eventual utility. -Some of the half-dozen ideas I have mentioned have been so often -caricatured that it is extremely difficult to recognise them without -the exaggeration with which we have been made familiar. It is not -easy to state another man’s ideas. To fail is to do him an injury. To -succeed is not unlike taking the words out of his mouth, which is rude. -But I am neither a translator of Nietzsche nor an opponent. I wish to -understand, not to persuade. And, for understanding, such statement is -desirable. - -Nietzsche neither escapes nor attempts to escape the contradictions -in the form of thought that make logic and life battledores to toss -laughter at each other like a shuttlecock. He is a determinist and -yet gives advice, the giving of which presupposes a belief in free -will and a possible choice. He seeks to influence others, and, in his -manner at least, forgets that the logical determinist should only allow -himself to say: “Circumstances compel me to make certain statements, -which, in the form of circumstances, may or may not share in the sum of -circumstances that compel you to actions and thoughts which in their -totality I cannot conceive.” That is not the view of his own activity -which dictates the eager vivid combination of argument and incantation -that makes Nietzsche’s books. He is free, in that he has the illusion -of freedom. The illusion of freedom is one of the determining -circumstances. Its effect is to make it unnecessary to remember in -practice that circumstances determine. - -We need not therefore hesitate over the inconsistency apparent between -some of Nietzsche’s ideas. We do better to notice it as characteristic -of his thought, and simply to state his ideas, remembering, if we will, -that they belong to different circles of consciousness; some to that -wider circle that includes the universe and with it determinism, and -some to that smaller circle, concentric with the first, and including -only the area of practical activity. Let us be determinists first and -examine the Nietzschean universe. - -The idea of Eternal Recurrence seems to have had for Nietzsche -something of the hypnotic character of those ideas that made Poe write -of his _Eureka_: “What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot -die;--or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will -‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’” Indeed the idea itself is not -unlike that of Poe, who, untrained alike in philology and philosophy, -expressed himself in a manner that would have given Nietzsche exquisite -pain: - - “Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the - law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in - entertaining a belief--let us say, rather, indulging a hope--that - the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for - ever, and for ever, and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into - existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of - the Heart Divine?” (Poe’s _Eureka_.) - -Now Nietzsche would not have spoken of a “Heart Divine,” even -explaining, as Poe did, that this heart was our own; but he did -contemplate a perpetually self-renewing Universe. Only--and herein -lay the importance of his idea to himself--he saw it renewing itself -in every detail, in every minutest action of the minutest of its -individual parts, at every moment of its cycle. Every moment of the -future being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner -or later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in -every detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a -similar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. He said: - - “If the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy, - as a definite number of centres of energy--and every other concept - remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows therefrom that - the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations - in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In - infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must - once have been realised; not only this, but it must have been - realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between - every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every - other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone, - and since every one of these combinations would determine the - whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely - identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown - to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself - an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all - eternity.” - -Nietzsche, hypnotised by this idea, believed it new, but there is a -clear suggestion of it in the third book of Lucretius’ poem: - - “Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omne - Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai - Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis, - Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta - Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse: - Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente: - Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque - Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.” - -Lines which Mr. Cyril Bailey in his translation of Lucretius[6] -admirably renders as follows: “For when you look back over all the -lapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are -the motions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these -same seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same -order as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our life’s -memory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have -wandered everywhere far astray from sense.” - -The character of Nietzsche’s thinking appears in his application of -this idea. It is for him “the great disciplinary thought,” and he -leaps the gulf between determinism and free will in the most careless -manner, to remark: “The question which thou shalt have to answer before -every deed that thou doest--Is this such a deed as I am prepared to -perform an infinite number of times?--is the best ballast.” It does -not matter to him at all that a determinist idea is to be used as a -standard of choice by a being whose free will he assumes. His thoughts -are all thoughts for himself to live with. He is conscious of them not -as abstractions, but particularly, as concrete things, combinations of -ideas with their effects. He is able to speak of Eternal Recurrence as -“the most oppressive thought,” and to consider “the means of enduring -it.” I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas. - -Moving now in a smaller circle of consciousness, let us examine -Nietzsche’s view of the world and man and man’s activity within this -eternally recurring universe. “The world,” he says, “as we know it, is -representation and erroneous representation: the world, if we could -know it, might well give us a sensation of disillusion, ‘so full of -meaning, so deep, so wonderful, bearing happiness and unhappiness in -its bosom,’ is the world that we unconsciously create.” In Nietzsche’s -world we come at once to the third of his ruling ideas (the first -being his idea of truth, the second, Eternal Recurrence). A regiment -of artillery, galloping to war, filled Nietzsche (who was at the -time serving as assistant to the field surgeon) with disgust at the -conception of a dull struggle for life that dictated most nineteenth -century thought. Schopenhauer, at that time still his master, had -supposed that the motive of man was the will to live. But, as the -regiment of artillery thundered to battle, Nietzsche answered, No; the -will to power, in which that other will may or may not be included. -Men are willing to risk existence; they are not ready to risk power, -unless in hope of increased intensity of power, or of an increased area -over which to exercise it. - -But the Will to Power is to be found in races as well as in -individuals; it is the motive not of races only but of humanity. -Humanity wills to power, wills to the continual re-creation of itself -as a species ever more powerful; wills, as Nietzsche puts it, the -creation of the Superman. This is the fourth of his ideas. Here, again, -Nietzsche’s concrete habit of thought exposed him to misunderstanding, -not only by his disciples, but also by himself. He did not at first -imagine the Superman as a suddenly appearing demi-god whose path -was to be made smooth by the human sacrifices of the “down-goers.” -He saw him as the result of a long continued and conscious will to -power, working through many generations, and gradually evolving a -superior type. Much of his writing is devoted to making conscious this -particular application of the will. But the idea of a superior type -shone with such effulgence as to dazzle his eyes, and to blind him to -the slow evolution which he would never have denied. He could say with -Seannchan, the poet: - - “The stars had come so near me that I caught - Their singing. It was praise of that great race - That would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied, - With a high head, and open hand, and how, - Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.” - -Supermen were no longer men, but something different. The long series -of gradually improving types vanished in the conception of their -result, itself to be improved upon, and it became possible for him to -speak of Man and Superman as two distinct beings, forgetting the series -of beings no less distinct implied by the development of one into the -other. - -Here, too, it is profitable to notice how Nietzsche translated an idea -from speculation into life. The hypothesis of the future Superman -allowed him a noble view of friendship. He has often been compared -to Whitman, partly, no doubt, because the rhythmical _Zarathustra_ -reminded his readers of the triumphant, unrhymed movement of the -sooth-saying _Leaves of Grass_. But his friendship is very different -from Whitman’s. Whitman’s the hand-grip, the smile at meeting, the -large tolerance, the collaboration in simple things; Nietzsche’s a -friendship more exacting. He would have thought Whitman’s friend a -neighbour, and he said, “Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the -friend. Let the friend be the festival of earth to you, and a foretaste -of the Superman,” and “Let the future and the farthest be the motive of -thy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.” -A friend for Nietzsche was one who fulfilled desires that he could not -realise himself. Not the least profound of his observations was this: -“Our faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in -ourselves.” His own friendship with Wagner provides a commentary of -fact. Begun in the belief that Wagner was bringing to earth such an -art as that of which Nietzsche dreamed, and ended in the disillusion -confirmed by “the preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness, and strong -pepper” in the first performances at Bayreuth, it was at once the -greatest inspiration and the greatest disappointment of his life. -Nietzsche, who had published _The Birth of Tragedy_ to serve Wagner, -wrote _The Case of Wagner_ to destroy him, or, perhaps, to cleanse -himself of a mistaken admiration. But listen to his clear-sighted -comment: “I gained an insight into the injustice of _idealism_, by -noticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I -had cherished of him.” - -Nietzsche’s fifth ruling idea is most clearly expressed in the book -that he wrote for his friend. He summed it up in the words Amor Fati, -the acceptance of life, be it what it might, a joyful “yea-saying” -to all its pronouncements, written in the most cruel facts though -they might be. Now this, as he pointed out, is the attitude of the -tragic artist, whose work is the expression not of pity but of a -proud acquiescence, an acquiescence that is an intellectual conquest. -He wished men to be artists in their attitude towards life, and -this desire brought his writings on art nearer to “the business and -bosoms of men” than the discreet distance from these things usually -preserved by aesthetic theory. His _Birth of Tragedy_ was not merely -an historical speculation, but offered for the criticism of life -words that Nietzsche applied for the moment to the criticism of art. -These words were “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” The latter word has -been persistently applied to Nietzsche himself, though he saw “in the -fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian -as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.” What does he mean by this -antithetical conception? Let me answer by two quotations: - - 1. “It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two - art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in - the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between - the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of - music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies - were parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, - and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful - births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which - is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term ‘Art’; till - at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they - appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually - generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic - tragedy.” - - 2. “In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts - from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of - every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities - of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the - living and conspicuous representatives of _two_ worlds of art which - differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo - stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the _principium - individuationis_ through which alone the redemption in appearance - is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus - the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the - Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.” - -He conceives these as “the separate art-worlds of dreamland and -drunkenness,” and makes for himself a parable about the Apollonian -artist in dreams and the Dionysian artist in ecstasies, comparable to -Blake’s poem of “The Mental Traveller,” in which there is just such an -alternation of conquest and captivity: - - “And if the babe is born a boy - He’s given to a woman old, - Who nails him down upon a rock, - Catches his shrieks in cups of gold. - - She binds iron thorns around his head, - She pierces both his hands and feet, - She cuts his heart out at his side, - To make it feel both cold and heat. - - Her fingers number every nerve, - Just as a miser counts his gold; - She lives upon his shrieks and cries, - And she grows young as he grows old. - - Till he becomes a bleeding youth, - And she becomes a virgin bright; - Then he rends up his manacles, - And binds her down for his delight.” - -It is a fine pictorial expression of the formative processes of -consciousness, the domination of the unconscious flux by the shaping of -the knowing intellect, and the escape of that flux, the overbalancing -of the intellect by the onrush of unrealised impressions. I do -not think it has or can have any deeper significance in aesthetic -criticism. It was, however, of considerable service to Nietzsche in the -criticism of life. In life, he would be, for the moment, a worshipper -of Dionysus, seeking less to control life than to live--because -Dionysus, he felt, was being a little neglected. In a “Dionysian age” -he would have left ecstasy below him and worshipped the placid Apollo, -shaping dreams untroubled by the turmoil in the valleys. In such an age -as that for which he hoped, such an age as that of Greek tragedy, he -would have stormed Olympus at the head of the Dionysian revellers, and -conquered the Dionysian ecstasy to bind it captive in the service of -Apollo. - -There remains Nietzsche’s distinction between good and evil and good -and bad. His conception of morality resembles his conception of -truth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not -man for them. He goes further, believing that they were made and -are continually being re-made _by_ man. “There is no such thing as -moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena,” which -interpretation a free and healthy man should make in accordance with -his own nature. The morality generally current in his time Nietzsche -believed to be slave morality, as opposed to aristocratic or ruler -morality, and he attributed its prevalence to the spreading of the -Christian religion. He believed that good was invented by those who -possessed it. “The judgment ‘good’ did _not_ originate among those to -whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves; -that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the -high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that -their actions were good: that is to say of the first order, in -contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the -plebeian.” The code of honour, the list of deeds that a gentleman -forbids himself, would, I suppose, be considered by Nietzsche as a -survival of this original morality. He weighs “moral interpretations” -of phenomena in the same scale as he weighs “truths,” asking, “Have -they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being?” His -hostility to Christianity may be traced to his answer to this question. -The replacement of the aristocratic judgment of actions done, by the -plebeian judgment on actions suffered, the substitution of the slave’s -point of view for that of the ruler, and its half-hearted adoption -by those who should rule were impediments to that ruling, and checks -to the will to power in which he recognised the mainspring of human -activity. He found then that the common morality was hostile to the -highest development of humanity, a frustration of its highest hopes -by hampering the will to power of “the highest men,” and proceeded -to call those who had ears to listen “beyond good and evil,” begging -them to make their own interpretation of phenomena, and not to accept -that of men whose submission to themselves should be part of their -natural ambition. The morality of “the small” is, he says, a handicap -to greater men, because “virtue for them is what maketh modest and -tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s -best domestic animal.” He delights accordingly in using as terms for -praise the words that “the small” use in condemnation. He speaks, for -example, of the “widespread heaven of clear _wicked_ spirituality,” a -spirituality beyond the good and evil of the tame. Yet he would not -abolish the tame, nor lighten their shackles. “For must there not be -that which is danced _over_, danced beyond? Must there not, for the -sake of the nimble, the nimblest--be moles and clumsy dwarfs?” It is -not Nietzsche’s fault that his books have stimulated “moles and clumsy -dwarfs” to the grotesque exercise of trying to dance over themselves. -He did not write for them, and told them so. He insisted at all times -that he wrote “for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant and -merrier, for such as are built squarely in body and soul.” And his -writings are intended to teach such “laughing lions” to “become what -they are,” unimpeded by the morality that a thousand hands offer them -from below. He has not the vain, foolish hope of doing away with -moralities, but asks each of his “higher men” to be true to his -own. If he goes “beyond good and evil,” he is to carry with him his -private scale of good and bad, with which he is to measure his deeds in -accordance with the will to power that leads him and his descendants to -a higher, a more laughing perfection. - -After the brief statement of these ideas, we can examine with better -hope of understanding the general character of Nietzsche’s thought. It -was not “systematic” in the usual sense, but it seems to me foolish to -describe as “unsystematic” a method of thinking whose formula was as -simple as his. He used the ideas I have catalogued precisely as the -alchemists hoped to use the philosopher’s stone for the transmutation -of metals. Applying them severally or together to a very large number -of statements he noted the resulting reactions, and found that they -turned truisms into popular fallacies. His books accordingly became -corrections of Pseudodoxia. He saw, for example, that if the Will -to Power be substituted for the Will to Live, and Ruler for Slave -Morality, the common judgments of men on everything in the world that -is capable of moral interpretation are in some way changed. He was -not content to leave others to find out in what way. He called this -change a “transvaluation of values,” and wished thus to transvaluate -all values, and so to offer to other men and to himself a new -representation of the world in the light of his own ideas, a task so -Sisyphean that it is in itself a sufficient explanation of the collapse -of his brain. His madness was not promised by his work, any more than a -broken neck is promised by riding to hounds. Nor did the vivid summer -lightning of his mind destroy him or even threaten destruction. His -madness was a catastrophe, not the culmination of a disease. His method -of thought, the continual endless application of his ideas, allowed him -to think too fast. No sedate erection of a system kept his brain to a -normal speed. Its disaster was like that of an engine which “races,” -as engineers say, breaks its crankshaft, or so whirls its flywheel as -to allow it to satisfy its centrifugality. All men build worlds for -themselves, but they borrow from each other, and are content to fill -with hasty scene-painting the gaps in their construction. No man is -capable of building in innumerable fragments a world complete and -homogeneous. Nietzsche’s mind, working with frenzied, unchecked speed -in this perilous attempt, ran suddenly amok, and snapped, and with its -snapping his life ends. The automaton that fed and slept and was not -sure if it had written books, was not Nietzsche, though it prolonged -his physical existence. For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the -ten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the -months of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the -heat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to -explain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness -as the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he -lost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to -refuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation. - -Nietzsche’s applications of his ideas in book after book are not frigid -illustrations, but sentences, maxims, aphorisms, and observations -of great psychological subtlety, earning a place beside those of -La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, or Stendhal by the guarantee of a -scale of values peculiar to their author. I think it not impossible -that Nietzsche will one day be remembered chiefly as a psychologist -and moralist, a late nineteenth century representative of a great -tradition, and that the ideas which are now a noise in men’s ears, -and, misunderstood, obscure our views of him, will then be remarked -merely as explanatory of his psychology’s private and individual tone. -The Superman will be mentioned in a note appended to his observations -on friends and friendship, and his theory of the Will to Power tucked -away in small print for those who wish more clearly to understand his -remarks on self-development or war. - -I have not spoken of Nietzsche as an artist. That prose, now -hammer-welded, now silver filigree, dancing, walking, running in -time with his ideas and moods, is not the least of his achievements. -When he wrote: “One day it will be said of Heine and me that we were -by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever -existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in -this language an incalculable distance behind us,” he was not far -from the truth. _Thus spake Zarathustra_, that Ossianic poem of a -hero of thought, _Ecce Homo_, in the self-assertion of which is not -only pride, but pride a little hurt that it should have so to assert -itself, those paragraphs of witty and profound psychology, the noble -essays on Schopenhauer and History, the muddled processional triumph of -_The Birth of Tragedy_; whatever be our view of his ideas, we cannot -but admire the artist who made these things. His very thought has an -aesthetic value, as he saw himself, due, no doubt, to its concreteness; -in reading his books we are translated to the tops of mountains, where -there is a dry wind, a warm sun, and snow not yet melted. Far below us -are valley and vineyard and a sea with no haze. Our lungs are so full -that we cannot commit “the sin against the Holy Spirit”; we cannot sit -still. There is dancing, there is singing in the air, and, as we turn -to more sedate philosophy, it is as if we were suddenly to leave sun, -wind, and valley for the cloistered dust of a dark room. - -In his own eyes, however, Nietzsche the artist, like Nietzsche the -thinker, was the humble, reverent servant of Nietzsche the educator. -In childhood he made respectful word-portraits of his schoolmasters. -When he went to the universities, he said he was spending his time in -discovering the best means of teaching instead of in learning what was -usually taught in such places. His professorship was a symbol of his -life, and he only resigned it to sit on mountain tops and teach. No -man since Plato has had such a boundless dream of education. Milton -desiring his pupils to be good for peace and for war, strong men behind -their bows, skilful with the lute, learning to “repair the ruins of -their first parents by regaining to know God aright,” until “they -have confirmed and solidly united the whole body of their perfected -knowledge, like the last embattling of a Roman legion”: Ascham with his -longer list of exercises, “not only comely and decent, but also very -necessary for a courtly gentleman to use,” and his more detailed scheme -of learning: neither of these looked so far as he, neither of them -hoped to educate more than men of a city or of a nation, and for the -service of that limited community. Nietzsche dreamed of the education -of mankind in its highest men, and, where Milton and Ascham feared for -lack of teachers, he feared nothing so much as the scarcity of worthy -pupils. “Companions did the creating one seek, and children of _his_ -hope, and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he -himself should first create them.” - -In his early dissatisfaction with the educational methods of the German -universities, there was more than a mere pedagogic discontent. In his -attack on the pseudo-culture of such men as Strauss, in his exposure of -the abuse of history, in his farewell to “Schopenhauer as Educator,” he -learnt more and more clearly what it was that he was seeking. He sought -to educate “higher men” to be themselves, to free them from impediments -to their growth, and failing that, to let them perceive the impediments -and attack them, and so weaken the enemies long trained to devour them -should they show themselves. For his “higher men,” and for no others, -he found the ballast of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, to replace -the misleading strings of the morality of the downtrodden. For their -sakes he destroyed the divine right of the judgments of good and of -evil; theirs was to be the Amor Fati, the cheerful acceptance of life, -theirs the Dionysian ecstasy, and theirs the Apollonian calm. For them -he invented his watchword: “Man is something that is to be surpassed.” -He did not expect to find such pupils, but only to make their advent -possible, to prevent them from being strangled at birth. In the -meantime he spoke on to the empty benches, and, however extravagant, -daring, impossible his dream may have been, it is yet a privilege for -us to sit and listen in that school of phantom Titans. - -I shall close this essay with a quotation that seems to me to sum up -in its final sentences all that is best in Nietzsche’s teaching, the -ultimate advice on which all his work is a commentary: - - “Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then - they disparaged all high hopes. - - Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the - day had hardly an aim. - - ‘Spirit is also voluptuousness,’ said they. Then broke the wings - of their spirit; and now it creepeth about and defileth where it - gnaweth. - - Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now. - A trouble and a terror is a hero to them. - - But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in - thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!” - -The man who wrote this has been called irreverent, because his choice -of things to revere was not identical with his accuser’s. But in -these sentences there is proof of his reverence for something more -profound, more important to mankind, than churches, than submissions -to authority, a thing that men are not accustomed openly, if at all, -to reverence, that quest of the Holy Grail on which all men set out, -though most turn back, and very few pursue it till they die. It is a -quest whose goal is in each moment of seeking. Of this he was indeed -reverent, of the glowing cheek and kindled eye of intellectual youth, -of unsoiled ambition, of the flame alight before the altar of the -potential hero, who is alive for a little while in every man, and whose -continuance of life is the measure of each man’s nobility. - - 1912. - - - - -WALTER PATER - - - - -WALTER PATER - - -Walter Pater was brought up at Enfield, where he was near London, and -knew from his earliest years “those quaint suburban pastorals” that -gather “a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great -city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid -light on dome and bleached stone steeples.” Something of that weighty -atmosphere, and with it something of that rapid light, I find in his -work, whether he is writing of the Italians of the Renaissance, of -Montaigne, of the Greek philosophers, of the Dutch van Storck, or the -German Carl of Rosenmold. - -The external facts of his life may be shortly dismissed. He “was fond,” -as a child, “of organising little processional pomps,” and a meeting -with Keble strengthened for a time his boyish resolve to enter the -Church. That part of his temperament which sought satisfaction in -such a course found it, perhaps, in the hieratic character of his -prose. He read Ruskin when he was nineteen, but his appreciations were -too independent of Ruskin’s sanction to allow us to recognise the -deep influence that is popularly attributed to the older man. Ruskin -believed that he had “discovered” Botticelli, but he first spoke of him -in the Oxford lectures of 1871, and Pater’s essay had been published in -the _Fortnightly Review_ the year before. Pater went from the King’s -School at Canterbury to Queen’s College, Oxford, took a Second Class in -the Final Classical Schools, and, in 1864, was elected to a fellowship -at Brasenose. He lived at Oxford thenceforward, with only occasional -periods of residence in London. In different long vacations he knew -Heidelberg, Dresden, and various parts of France, and, in 1869, four -years before the publication of _The Renaissance_, travelled in Italy. -He died at Oxford after a life of unhurried labour on July 30, 1894. - -There are some words that one would never use in speaking of him. “Joy” -is one of them; “despair” is another. They would be represented by the -less exuberant “pleasure,” and the less violent “regret.” His was a -personality in half tones, lit by the pallid glow of a heavy sky, or by -the “peculiar daylight” he noticed in the church at Canterbury, that -daylight which “seemed to come from further than the light outside.” -Yet his mind was not without intensity, though this was expressed -more by its freedom of invasion than by any obvious hardness of line -or brilliance of colour. When he said, “I should be afraid to read -Kipling, lest he should come between me and my page next time I sat -down to write,” he was confessing an unnecessary carefulness. But his -very fear was not due to uncertainty of himself. It was that of the -jealous acolyte who will not expose the sacred glimmer of a votive -lamp to even momentary comparison with a flash of limelight, sure as -he may be of the lamp’s superior persistence, dignity, and, for him, -significance. Pater set a high value on his own personality, which in -a world of relative truth, was perhaps the only thing that he could -trust. He tended it, protected it from undue disturbance, even from -the contagion of others, fed it from time to time with victories ... -his essays are the carefully prepared conquests of other personalities -by his own ... and strengthened it always in the habit of a private -supremacy, a supremacy that neither sought nor needed external -acknowledgment. - -It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of his work, or, -more exactly, of the mental attitude reflected in his work, on the -literature of the end of the last century and of the beginning of our -own. He was a landmark in the history of consciously rhythmical prose, -the first English preacher (though very quietly) of the doctrine of -art for art’s sake, the exponent of an unusually precise technique, -the first example of a man whose life was consciously lived for art’s -sake; a man who, though he disguised the fact by many professions of -hedonism, found in art the finest means of living, and preferred, -with something of his childish love for processional pomps, to meet -life only when it came to him, decorous, arranged, unified to single -purposes, instead of with the medley of motives from which the artist -disentangles it. - -His ideas have come to be more noticeable in other books than in his -own. He seemed to deprecate too exuberant agreement. He did not like to -stir his audience to an unbecoming enthusiasm. This is, perhaps, one -reason why he has seldom been considered as a thinker. But another -reason was more potent. “The sensible vehicle” of his expression almost -annulled his abstract thought. Pater is the best illustration of the -way in which ideas can be obliterated by the personality of which they -were a part. He has never been compared to Nietzsche. Yet no student of -Pater’s _ideas_ could avoid such a comparison, fantastic as it may seem -to those to whom it has not occurred to refuse, for critical purposes, -to adopt his attitude towards thought; to refuse, that is, “to assign -very little to the abstract thought and much to its sensible vehicle or -occasion.” Even this attitude, if we examine it closely, is not unlike -the Nietzschean demand for the personal touch in a theory before the -theory itself. Elsewhere the resemblance is clearer. In _Plato and -Platonism_ he says: “Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it -is not so much what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after -all really tells.” In smaller things he offers a parallel, strange from -one who lived as he lived, to Nietzsche’s outburst against sedentary -thinking: “It might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that -promoted movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate -parturitions of the mind.” In more important things--things more -important to Nietzsche--Pater offers a similar aloof parallel, as if -from another planet. Before _The Birth of Tragedy_ was written, Pater -had distinguished Apollo and Dionysus, for his own purposes and in his -own way, as the particular deities of opposed artistic tendencies. -At one with Nietzsche in his conception of the relative nature of -truth, though he shrank from carrying it to battle _à l’outrance_, -he says almost what Nietzsche says of the evil influence of “the -ideal,” “the absolute,” on European thought, though, more eclectic, -incapable of partisanship, he does not let it disturb his admiration -of Plato. Mildly, as if it did not matter, he murmurs what Nietzsche -shouted: “The European mind will never be quite sane again....” And -he traces its insanity, as Nietzsche might have traced it, through -the Neo-Platonists, _The Imitation_, Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche, -Leibnitz, Berkeley. “By one and all it is assumed, in the words of -Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable, is the note of -the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing steadily, -as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite unattainable) -condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by the -suppression of all the rule and outline of one’s own actual experience -and thought.” And, in his criticism of the Sophists, he shows that he -is aware, smilingly perhaps, of the theory of two moralities, one of -the ruler and another of the ruled. He says of the Sophists: “And if -old-fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better -than they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that -was not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for -the control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent -to it, in regard to one’s self? ‘It will break up--this or that ethical -deposit in your mind, ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear, -when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the -vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such -presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to -know their place.’” This may seem like ironic criticism of Nietzsche -before the fact, but it has not been noticed as such, even by -Nietzscheans, and that is a proof of the completeness with which Pater -made negligible what he said, beside the manner, the personal quality, -of himself saying it. - -Yet these and many other neglected ideas were of real importance to -the personality that obscures them now. Pater owed much of the slow -rhythm of his mind to his careful observation of his own philosophic -attitude. It is easy to talk of a battle in his mind between metaphysic -and art; but no such battle was fought. Pater never lost his interest -in philosophies, and that interest never interfered with his interest -in art, but was rather its ally, an essential element in the mental -temper of all his work. He shared Nietzsche’s dislike of dialectic, -because in approaching the condition of mathematical speculation -philosophy denudes itself of personality. He disliked, for example, -Spinoza’s Euclidean demonstrations, “the dry bones of which rattle in -one’s ears,” but was enabled to use finely, in _Sebastian van Storck_, -that one of Spinoza’s sayings in which the man seems to be epitomised: -“Whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return.” -“Philosophic truth,” for him, “consists in the philosophic temper.” -He finds that “perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of -seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but -from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade -of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which -may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract -questions.... Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them.” -That was said in the first of his printed papers. In the last book -of his that was published in his lifetime, he says of the essay: “It -provided him (Montaigne) with precisely the literary form necessary -to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable -not as a general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a -particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully -those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself -with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to -the very last asking: _Que scais-je?_ Who knows?--in the very spirit of -that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined -sense of one’s ignorance.” The essay, we must not forget, was the form -chosen by himself. - -Nowhere does he better illustrate his conception of philosophic truth, -of the philosophic temper, than in that harmony of essays, written for -delivery as lectures, and printed as _Plato and Platonism_. Philosophy -clothes herself with humanity, or rather retains the clothes of which -dialectic would deprive her, and we watch her as a human being, are -nervous for her in the difficult places, as she threads her way through -the lives of men and the history of a nation. Pater is engaged in -portraiture, not in exposition, so humane has his subject become. The -three philosophers whose images are impressed upon the theories of -“the flux,” of “the one,” and of “number,” Heraclitus, Parmenides, -Pythagoras, are no longer outline drawings, like illustrations in a -classical dictionary, but coloured and modelled with something of -Blake’s enthusiastic vision, softened and quieted, till the enthusiasm -is like summer lightning behind the hills, clear and bright but without -menace for his general intention. Their portraits, inset in the “Plato” -like the vignettes that encircle the central picture in those old -engraved frontispieces, are curiously suggestive of paragraphs of -Nietzsche’s _Early Greek Philosophy_. They are ruled by just such a -conception of truth, but are without the spirit of proselytism, so -inconsistent with it, and yet so characteristic of the man who preached -rather than denounced his version of the Eternal Recurrence. It is -hard to know which is most admirable--the delicate disentangling of -Socrates from Plato, the clearly visualised picture of the Sophists -(there never was a book on philosophy so full of concrete vision), -the synthesis of Plato’s personality, lover, seer, observer, “who has -lingered too long in the brazier’s workshops” to be able to speak of -“dumb matter,” or the beautiful appreciation of the method of the -dialogues and of the often travestied aims of Socratean talk, which -represent both the “demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or -knowledge worthy of the name,” and Plato’s method of learning and -teaching, the essential quality of these conversations with himself -being their endlessness. Then there is the dream, to the making of -which has gone so much knowledge content to be hidden by the perfection -of its service, of the city of Lacedaemon in Sparta, so necessary a -prelude to the account of Plato’s dreamed republic. Finally, perhaps -because dearest to himself, there is the chapter on Plato’s aesthetics, -which, to Pater, were not what some have made them, but of immediate -import to men living their lives, and suggested a purpose, a hope “to -get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of -control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic -or impassioned acts.” It is, in a sense, a white heat of decorum -for which he asks, a scrupulousness, a patience which is “quite as -much as fire, of the mood of all true lovers.” He is really asking -for self-conscious life, for the kind of life that is only given by -art, whether by the contemplation of the work of artists or by the -private acts of artistic creation, which we all perform, more or less -often, and which are indeed processes of becoming conscious acts of -scrupulous, observant and comprehensive living. I can think of no book -better fitted to lead a student into philosophy, and I am not sure that -it is not also the best book with which to begin the study of Walter -Pater. It is certainly the book that made the most various demands upon -his personality. - -More than any other writer of his time he was justified in speaking -of “the irrepressible conscience of art.” For many he is, I suppose, -chiefly interesting as the man who brought into English literary -workshops the craftsman’s creed of Flaubert. This importation of his -was not a mere translation and expansion of the few sentences from -Flaubert that appear in his essay on “Style.” Those sentences and his -comments upon them, do but form, in the structure of that essay, a -pendant to, an illustration of, Pater’s original remarks, which are -themselves a complete, if resolutely non-technical, exposition of -his own clearly comprehended methods. It is possible that Pater saw, -a little more circumspicuously than he, what it was that Flaubert -believed. At any rate that belief is here unified with the suggestions -of earlier writers, and given corollaries whose implication in it -Flaubert never troubled to see. The theory is, briefly stated, as -follows: Literature will fulfil the condition of all good art “by -finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the -term to its import.” Its first, indeed, accurately speaking, its only -object is truth, the exact fitting of words to meaning, which involves -the watchfulness over the whole that will guard details from being made -inexact by the reflected light of other details; and this involves -also a loving scholarship in the precise meanings and implications of -the words used. - -He accepts De Quincey’s distinction between “the literature of power -and the literature of knowledge,” with the comment, “in the former -of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of -fact, whether past or present.” In the fine art of literature, the -identity sought between words and meaning is an identity between words -and the thing they represent in its private atmosphere, with its -particular meaning to the particular mind that thinks it. Throughout -his works is scattered evidence of the importance that Pater attributed -to this particularity of thought, dependent on the thinker and his -circumstances, the personality of thought which is really the guarantee -of its uniqueness, and in a sense, not only of its truth but of its -artistic rightness. In _The Child in the House_, for example: - - “In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much - in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal - elements in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; - and, in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to - the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.” - -And, in the essay on “Style” we are considering: - - “... just in proportion as the writer’s aim, consciously or - unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not - of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his - work _fine_ art....” - - “Literary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative - or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or incident--is the - representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific - personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.” - -Let me attach to these another quotation from the same essay, to -illustrate his use of the word “soul,” the keyword of his belief: - - “Mind and soul;--hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinction - is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes - in conflict, with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an - instance of preponderating soul embarrassed, at a loss, in an era - of preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul - is a fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing - language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, - with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some - inexplicable inspiration.” - -When we talk of words it is, if possible, better to talk in terms of -speech than thus indirectly in terms liable to debate, of the nature -of man, which, in this case at least, have led a careful writer into -inaccuracy. Blake was neither embarrassed nor at a loss. He thought -all the rest of the world was. A sort of diffidence would not allow -Pater to admit that he was thinking neither of soul nor of mind but -of a quality in Blake’s language, a quality markedly less evident in -the work of his contemporaries. Whenever Pater uses the word soul in -this sense he is thinking of the magical power in contradistinction -from the practical power of words. Blake’s words say more by what -they carry with them in suggestive atmosphere, than by what they -say. His speech is highly _potential_; and when Pater talks of soul -in literature he is talking of the potential element in the language -of literature, the element so noticeable in the language of his own -works. His insistence on truth, not only in the merely kinetic speech, -the thing said, but also in the potential speech that gives the thing -said its atmospherical particularity, distinguished his own work, and -deeply influenced the writers who followed him--Wilde, Dowson, perhaps -Mr. Yeats, at least in his prose, certainly Mr. Arthur Symons. It was -an indigenous spring of the tendency that, in France, has been called -Symbolist, with which the last of the younger writers I have mentioned -definitely allied himself. Pater’s expressed admirations for modern -French books are only such as suggest his ignorance of the best writers -in a later generation than that of Flaubert, who was, of course, not -twenty years his senior. He does not seem to have read those younger -men whose ideas so closely resembled his own, so closely that Frenchmen -often claim Pater’s most obvious disciple[7] for a pupil of the school -of Mallarmé. - -With his care in the use of words, he had also a care for structure, -and for similar reasons. He says, as in a cruder way Poe had said long -before, but not with such close significance: - - “The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, - in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple - sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural - member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity - with its subject and with itself:--style is in the right way when - it tends towards that.” - -Those words embody in technical wisdom the profoundest understanding of -the aims of art and of the nature of artistic creation. - -His practice was not quite on the level of his theory. His details -sometimes fail to preserve a unity of tone and rhythm with the whole -of which they are a part. Sometimes too, the effort to preserve that -unity compels the whole to a chafing monotone. An over-zealous pursuit -of accuracy sometimes allowed those careful sentences to encumber -themselves with adjectival burs, and a too visual method of composition -sometimes cost them their harmony with the music it was their business -to maintain, and even brought that music to an abrupt stop. “Pater,” -Mr. Benson says, who knew him, “when he had arranged his notes, began -to write on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank; and in -these spaces he would insert new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then -the whole was re-copied, again on alternate lines, which would again -be filled; moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at his -own expense in print, that he might better be able to judge of the -effect....” Such a method, however careful the writer might be to make -continual appeal to his ear, could not but allow the eye to assume too -great a share in that collaboration in which ear should be the sole -dictator and eye the ear’s obedient servant. It would make it difficult -to reject pleasant, exact phrases put in on those alternate lines, even -if they made the sentences top-heavy with their own distinguished, -highly specialised meaning. They would make this top-heaviness hard to -perceive, and, if perceived, erroneously attributable to the visible -crowding and elaboration of the written page. The setting up in print, -while useful as a guide to the general outline, would only confirm -these sentences in their condition. Nobody who has tried to read Pater -aloud can be without instances when the reading became difficult, -breathless, impossible, even while the words demanded admiration for -their subtle accuracy and perfect choice. Let me give no more than two -examples of the awkward constructions Pater allowed himself. I shall -take them from the least decorative of his works, from a book actually -written for oral delivery. On page 35 of _Plato and Platonism_[8] there -is this sentence: - - “From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek - religious poets, that most abstract and arid of formulæ, _Pure - Being_, closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and - suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal - ball, as he says; ‘The Absolute’; ‘The One’; passed to his - fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking, doubtless in the true spirit of - philosophy, for the centre of the universe, of his own experience - of it, for some common measure of the experience of all men.” - -Now there are 37 words in 8 clauses, needing 5 commas and 3 semi-colons -to make up the subject of that sentence. The underlining of the words -_Pure Being_ seems to me a manifest concession to the eye. - -On page 32 of the same book there is a characteristic construction -partly due to a wish to preserve in his writing, tapestried as it might -be, a flavour of conversational speech, and, for all that, dependent on -the visibility of print, demanding a swift review of the beginning of -the sentence as the reader arrives at its end: - - “That which _is_, so purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing - at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:--Parmenides and the - Eleatic School were much preoccupied with the determination of the - thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.” - -Such sentences are blemishes, not because of inaccuracy, for their -accuracy is their excuse, but because they trouble our reception of -the whole, as a whole, by drawing too much attention to themselves. - -With all his care for shapely building, for unity of impression, -he could not avoid occasional over-insistence on details, rather -pleasant than otherwise, unlike the troubling halts of his failures -in sentence-making. Indeed, I am not sure that we can describe as a -fault what was characteristic of a whole manner of vision, and due -not to carelessness but to the peculiar gift of a rare intimacy of -imagination. In his imaginary portraits (which include not only the -book of that name, but “Emerald Uthwart,” “The Child in the House,” -“Apollo in Picardy,” “Gaston de Latour,” “Marius the Epicurean,” -and, less obviously, most of his critical work) we can observe his -way of laying hold of small, separate facts, and expanding them, as -Gaston expanded the poems of Ronsard, “to the full measure of their -intention.” His was never a sweeping, large-rhythmed, narrative -imagination; I fancy, even, that Pater felt a danger of losing himself -when he had to say that something happened, and more than once, when -his characters were compelled to significant, visible action, he did -indeed lose himself ... for a sentence or two it is as if not Pater -spoke but another. There was a danger of things happening in _Gaston -de Latour_, the most lovable of his books. For seven chapters Pater -put them off, and then, as they crowded up on the horizon, and became -imminent, he laid the story aside before they could overwhelm him and -carry him off his feet.[9] - -Pater’s imagination loved not action but intellectual circumstance, -and the significance not of deeds but of the promise of deeds yet -unperformed. The story of Marius, the story of Gaston, as far as it -had been carried, was the story of exceptional character in particular -intellectual environment; and for us, perhaps, the interest lies as -much in the one as in the other. When I think of the second of those -two books, I think less of that scrupulous, finely strung youth than of -Montaigne, whose portrait, in the old tower above his open house, seems -to me at least equally important. Now to offer the reader a choice -between the part and the whole is not the way of the perfect artist. -Again, it is idle to say that the narrative of “Marius the Epicurean” -is broken by the inclusion of that lovely rendering of the tale of -Cupid and Psyche. It is idle to point to that tale as an interruption, -when there is nothing for it to interrupt, nothing that is not already -in repose. In Pater’s books it is the reader who moves from one -contemplation to another, and, in “Marius,” quite naturally, from Pisa -and the boy’s education there, and his friendship with Flavian, to the -tale they read together on hot Italian afternoons. - -In a way the inclusion of that tale is an illustration on a large -scale of Pater’s invariable manner of using detail. It was the work of -another man, and, before placing it in his book, Pater made it his own -by translating it into a prose which, if purposely and also necessarily -a little different from that of the rest of the book, was yet his. -Just so smaller details, fragments of observation of external nature, -for example, are not directly set upon the page, with no more than the -imprint of the hands that plucked them to give them a spurious unity -with the rest. They are all translated, idiomatically, until they are -so wholly his that it seems he has looked within for them and not -without. The light through the arched windows of the old church, the -spires of London, the burial vault of the Dukes of Rosenmold: these -things are so intimately imagined, so completely veiled in Pater’s mood -that when we recognise them in life we accuse ourselves of plagiarism -because we cannot see them other than as he saw them, and they come to -us, almost, as remembered sentences. - -“The Golden Book” takes its place in “Marius” as a single touch in the -portrait of a time: a fragment, carefully chosen, of the local colour -of ideas. Just so Pater uses details more minute. Irrelevant as they -may seem, to a careless observer, irrelevant as perhaps they were -before he had translated them, they help in the painting of the mood of -a man, as that story in the painting of a mood of the ancient world, -in each case a mood of Pater’s own, half borrowed from, half lent to, -man or world. This mutual creation is like that which happens in the -contemplation of a work of art. It is criticism, and, even when Pater -is not criticising what are known as works of art, he is criticising -not the world, or a period or a man, but works of art he has already -made, privately, for himself. He used “the finer sort of memory, -bringing its object to mind with a quiet clearness, yet, as sometimes -happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary -retrospect.” He believed that criticism was a form of creation: for him -it was often a second stage of creation, for he had given artistic form -to his material before, in contemplation of it, he began the criticism -that he offers us in its place. I do not know that this is, accurately -speaking, possible, but it is at least a fable that very fairly -represents the process whereby, in Pater’s books, life comes to seem at -once so ordered, so tapestried, so aloof and yet so intimately known. - -I speak there of life in general, of the flux without, a turmoil -until it has been arrested by one of those personal acts of artistic -creation which it is the function of art to make more frequent, more -habitual. The turbulent nature of the flux itself is disguised alike -in his critical and his more obviously imaginative work. For his -critical essays tend always to become imaginary portraits, no less -than his studies in Greek mythology. They are not portraits of men -as Pater believed them to be, but reproductions of their aspect in -sudden side-lights that change them, specialise them, and for those -readers who are vainly looking for a general view, simplify them a -little too far. But what sometimes seems to be the reduction of a -complex personality to a simple formula--Michelangelo, for example, to -the repeated _ex forti dulcedo_--is not so intended. It is rather the -reduction of a personality to the expression of a single mood. There is -warp and woof in Pater’s essays, and the shuttle must thread parallel -lines and not a maze as it weaves what is meant less as the portrait -of a man than as the pattern of a mood. Pater never sacrificed his -own personality to his nominal subject. He sacrificed his sitter, not -himself. Nothing is more remarkable in _Marius the Epicurean_ (where it -would have been easier to disclaim the writer’s own time, to waive the -centuries that separated him from his supposed material) than Pater’s -resolute modernity. He will not allow us to forget the distinction in -circumstances that makes so subtle the relation between subject and -object. He will strip off nothing that has been brought him by the -years between Marius and himself. Deliberately, he sees Marius with -eyes enriched by those centuries, and, with the later knowledge that -can compare Apuleius to Swift or to Théophile Gautier, takes pleasure -in a reference to Wilhelm Meister and remarks that Marius thinks in -the vein of St. Augustine. And so, caring more for the point of view -from which he sees them than for the actual objects, that can be seen -a thousand ways, he has no wish to “say the last word” on Lamb, on -Pico, on Sir Thomas Browne. He does say it, however, on those men in -those moods, or, more truly, on the moods in which he saw them. We -often leave an essay of Pater’s with a new appreciation of someone -else; but that is not because Pater has told us anything, but because, -in reproducing the mood of his essay we have given ourselves a mood -in which that other, Botticelli, Ronsard, Giorgione, can be more than -usually significant. - -Thus, though it is as a critic that Pater lives and will live, it is -as a critic of a kind that he may almost be said to have invented. -His criticism is aesthetic and personal. Though compelled to offer a -profusion of theories, he is impatient of them, submits himself to a -work of art, and criticises that work not by showing what he feels, -but by a reproduction of the mood which that work induces in him. His -criticism, always indirect, is always creative, since the reproduction -of a mood, unlike the recording of opinions, is itself a work of art. -It has the validity of his own temperament and circumstances, lyrical -as opposed to abstract truth. We can never say of him that he was -wrong, unless in the theories that he could not avoid but considered -unimportant. We can only say that he was different--from ourselves, -from someone else. We read this critic as we read a poet, collaborating -with him in the reproduction of a mood, in the searching knowledge of -the fragment of life that was coloured for him by this or that book -or picture. The book or picture becomes a secondary matter, and the -first is the rapid light, the weighty atmosphere that he had made his -own. After reading him I remember his words on Montaigne: “A mind for -which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as a general -conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal -experience.” - - 1912. - - - - -REMY DE GOURMONT - - - - -REMY DE GOURMONT - - -I - -M. de Gourmont lives on the fourth floor of an old house in the Rue -des Saints-Pères. A copper chain hangs as bell-rope to his door. The -rare visitor, for it is well known that for many years he has been a -solitary and seldom receives even his friends, pulls the chain and -waits. The door opens a few inches, ready to be closed immediately, -by a man of middle size, in a monk’s brown robe, with a small, round, -grey felt cap. The robe is fastened with silver buckles, in which are -set large blue stones. The admitted visitor walks through a passage -into a room whose walls are covered with books. In the shadow at the -back of the room is a loaded table. Another table, with a sloping -desk upon it, juts out from the window. M. de Gourmont sits in a big -chair before the desk, placing his visitor on the opposite side of -the table, with the light falling on his face so that he can observe -his slightest expression. In conversation he often disguises his face -with his hand, but now and again looks openly and directly at his -visitor. His eyes are always questioning, and almost always kindly. -His face was beautiful in the youth of the flesh, and is now beautiful -in the age of the mind, for there is no dead line in it, no wrinkle, -no minute feature not vitalised by intellectual activity. The nose -is full and sensitive, with markedly curved nostrils. There is a -little satiric beard. The eyebrows lift towards the temples, as in -most men of imagination. The eyes are weighted below, as in most men -of critical thought. The two characteristics are, in M. de Gourmont, -as in his work, most noticeable together. The lower lip, very full, -does not pout, but falls curtain-like towards the chin. It is the lip -of a sensualist, and yet of one whose sensuality has not clogged but -stimulated the digestive processes of his brain. Omar might have had -such a lip, if he had been capable not only of his garlands of roses, -but also of the essays of Montaigne. - -He was born in a château in Normandy on 4th April 1858. Among his -ancestors was Gilles de Gourmont, a learned printer and engraver of -the fifteenth century. He has himself collected old woodcuts, and in -_L’Ymagier_ amused himself by setting the most ancient specimens of -the craft, among which he is proud to show some examples of the work -of his family, side by side with drawings by Whistler and Gauguin. He -came to Paris in 1883, when he obtained a post in the Bibliothèque -Nationale. Huysmans was “sous-chef de bureau à la direction de la -Sûreté générale,” and M. de Gourmont, who made his acquaintance through -the dedication of a book, used to call for him between four and five -of the afternoon, and walk with him across the river to a café, that -has since disappeared, where he listened to the older man’s rather -savage characterisations of men, women, movements and books. A few -years later he was held to be lacking in patriotism, and relieved of -his post on account of an article urging the necessity of Franco-German -agreement. He wrote incessantly. _Merlette_, a rather naïve and awkward -little novel, published in 1886, did not promise the work he was to -do. It was no more than an exercise, well done, but no more, the -work of a good brain as yet uncertain of its personal impulse. But -about this time he was caught in the stream of a movement for which -he had been waiting, for which, indeed, the art of his time had been -waiting, the movement that was introduced to English readers by Mr. -Arthur Symons’s admirable series of critical portraits.[10] In 1890 he -published _Sixtine_, dedicated to Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who had died -the year before. In 1892 appeared _Le Latin Mystique_, a book on the -Latin poets of the Middle Ages. He has always been “a delicate amateur -of the curiosities of beauty,” though the character that Mr. Symons -gave him has since become very inadequate. He edited Gérard de Nerval, -_Aucassin et Nicolette_, and Rutebeuf’s _La Miracle de Théophile_, -and wrote _Lilith_, 1892, and _Théodat_, a dramatic poem in prose -that was produced by my friend M. Paul Fort at the Théâtre d’Art on -December 11th of the same year. Several other curious works of this -period were united later in _Le Pèlerin du Silence_. I extract from the -bibliography by M. van Bever, printed in _Poètes d’aujourd’hui_, a -list of the more important books that have followed these very various -beginnings: _Le Livre des Masques_, 1896; _Les Chevaux de Diomède_, -1897; _Le II^{me} Livre des Masques_, 1898; _Esthétique de la langue -française_, 1899; _La Culture des Idées_, 1900; _Le Chemin de Velours_, -1902; _Le Problème du Style_, 1902; _Physique de l’Amour_, 1903; -_Une Nuit au Luxembourg_, 1906; besides four volumes of literary and -philosophical criticism, and four volumes of comment on contemporary -events. - -All this mass of work is vitalised by a single motive. Even the -divisions of criticism and creation (whose border line is very dim) -are made actually one by a desire common to both of them, a desire not -expressed in them, but satisfied, a desire for intellectual freedom. -The motto for the whole is written in _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_: -“L’exercice de la pensée est un jeu, mais il faut que ce jeu soit -libre et harmonieux.” I am reminded of this sentence again and again -in thinking of M. de Gourmont and his books. There must be no loss of -self-command, none of the grimaces and the awkward movements of the -fanatic, the man with whom thought plays. The thinker must be superior -to his thought. He must make it his plaything instead of being sport -for it. His eyes must be clear, not hallucinated; his arms his own, -not swung with the exaggerated gestures of the preacher moved beyond -himself by his own words. M. de Gourmont seems less an artist than a -man determined to conquer his obsessions, working them out one by one -as they assail him, in order to regain his freedom. It is a fortunate -accident that he works them out by expressing them, twisting into -garlands the brambles that impede his way. - - -II - -M. de Gourmont almost immediately left the half-hearted realism -of _Merlette_, and, just as in his scientific writings he is more -profoundly scientific than the men of science, so in his works of -this period he carried to their uttermost limits the doctrines of -the symbolists. In his critical work the historian must look for the -manifestoes and polemics of the group that gathered in Mallarmé’s -rooms in the Rue de Rome. The theories are in _Idéalisme_, published -in 1893, and in such essays as his defence of Mallarmé, written -in 1898, and included in the _Promenades Littéraires_. Of their -practice he supplies plenty of examples. “Nommer un objet, c’est -supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du -bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer voilà le rêve.” Mallarmé -wrote that in 1891, and during the ’nineties Remy de Gourmont was -publishing mysterious little books of poetry and prose, of which -small limited editions were issued on rare paper, in curious covers, -with lithographed decorations as reticent as the writing. There is -the _Histoire tragique de la Princesse Phénissa expliquée en quatre -épisodes_, a play whose action might be seen through seven veils, a -play whose motive, never stated directly, is, perhaps, the destruction -of the future for the sake of the present. There is _Le Fantôme_, the -story of a _liaison_ between a man and a woman if you will, between the -intellect and the flesh if you will, that begins with such an anthem -as might have been sung by some of those strange beings whom Poe took -“into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets -and heartsease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns.” -The man--is it a man?--who tells the story, ends with a regret for -something too real to be visible, something that is seen because it is -not visible: “Je me sentais froid, j’avais peur--car je la voyais, sans -pouvoir m’opposer à cette transformation doloureuse--je la voyais s’en -aller rejoindre le groupe des femmes indécises d’où mon amour l’avait -tirée--je la voyais redevenir le fantôme qu’elles sont toutes.” There -is _Le Livre des Litanies_, with its elaborate incantation, from which -I take the beginning and end: - - “Fleur hypocrite, - - “Fleur du silence. - - “Rose couleur de cuivre, plus frauduleuse que nos joies, rose - couleur de cuivre, embaume-nous dans tes mensonges, fleur - hypocrite, fleur du silence. - - * * * * * - - “Rose améthyste, étoile matinale, tendresse épiscopale, rose - améthyste, tu dors sur des poitrines dévotes et douillettes, gemme - offerte à Marie, ô gemme sacristine, fleur hypocrite, fleur du - silence. - - “Rose cardinale, rose couleur du sang de l’Eglise romaine, rose - cardinale, tu fais rêver les grands yeux des mignons et plus d’un - t’épingla au nœud de sa jarretière, fleur hypocrite, fleur du - silence. - - “Rose papale, rose arrosée des mains qui bénissent le monde, rose - papale, ton cœur d’or est en cuivre, et les larmes qui perlent sur - ta vaine corolle, ce sont les pleurs du Christ, fleur hypocrite, - fleur du silence. - - “Fleur hypocrite, - - “Fleur du silence.” - - -III - -These, and other things like them, made it possible for M. de Gourmont -to proceed in the discovery of himself. He drank his mood to the dregs, -leaving no untried experiment to clog his mind with a regret as he -moved on. “I have always been excessive,” he says; “I do not like to -stop half-way.” He follows each impulse as far as it will take him, -lest, by chance, he should leave some flower untasted in a bypath he -has seen but not explored. Unlike most authors, he never has to copy -himself, and does not feel bound, because he has written one book whose -prose is malachite green, to produce another of the same colour. “Un -artiste,” said Wilde, “ne recommence jamais deux fois la même chose -... ou bien c’est qu’il n’avait pas réussi.” The surest way to fail in -an experiment is to make it with a faint heart. M. de Gourmont always -burns his boats. - -Some preoccupations, however boldly attacked, are not to be conquered -at a blow. The preoccupation of sex is unlike that of a theory of -art. Conquered again and again by expression, it returns with a new -face, a new mystery, a new power of building the intellect, a new -Gorgon to be seen in the mirror of art and decapitated. As the man -changes so does Medusa vary her attack, and so must he vary the manner -of her death. Now he will write a _Physique de l’Amour_, and, like -Schopenhauer, relieve himself of the problem of sex by reducing it to -its lowest terms. Now he will conquer it by the lyrical and concrete -expression of a novel or a poem. Sex continually disturbs him, but -the disturbance of the flesh is always, sooner or later, pacified by -the mind. All his later novels are, like _Sixtine_, “romans de la vie -cérébrale.” _Sixtine_ is the story of a writer’s courtship of a woman -no more subtle than himself, but far more ready with her subtlety. It -displays the workings of a man’s mind and the states of emotion through -which he passes, by including in the text, as they were written, the -stories and poems composed under the influence of the events. The man -is intensely analytic, afterwards. Emotion blurs the windows of his -brain, and cleans hers to a greater lucidity. He always knows what -he ought to have done. “Nul n’avait à un plus haut degré la présence -d’esprit du bas de l’escalier.” More than once the woman was his, if -he had known it before he left her. Finally, she is carried off by a -rival whose method he has himself suggested. The book is a tragedy -of self-consciousness, whose self-conscious heroine is a prize for -the only man who is ignorant of himself, and, in the blindness of -that ignorance, is able to act. But there is no need to analyse the -frameworks of M. de Gourmont’s novels. Frameworks matter very little. -They are all vitalised by an almost impatient knowledge of the subtlety -of a woman’s mind in moments of pursuit or flight, and the impotence of -a man whose brain seeks to be an honest mediator between itself and his -flesh. His men do not love like the heroes of ordinary books, and are -not in the least likely to suggest impossible ideals to maidens. They -are unfaithful in the flesh nearly always. They use one experience -as an anaesthetic for the pain they are undergoing in another. They -seek to be masters of themselves by knowledge, and are unhappy without -thinking of suicide on that account. Unhappiness no less than joy is -a thing to be known. They fail, not getting what they want, and are -victorious in understanding, with smiling lips, their non-success. - - -IV - -One afternoon, in the Rue des Saints-Pères, M. de Gourmont confirmed -the impression already given me by his books and his eyebrows. “I -have always been both _romanesque_ and _critique_.” Side by side he -has built separate piles of books. While writing the curiosities -of symbolism that are collected in _Le Pèlerin du Silence_, he was -preparing the _Livres des Masques_, two series of short critical -portraits of the writers of his time, which, in the case of those -who survive, are as true to-day as when they were written. It has -been so throughout. In the one pile are little volumes of poetry like -_Les Saintes du Paradis_, and such romances as those we have been -discussing; in the other are works of science like the _Physique de -l’Amour_, books benevolently polemical like _Le Problème du Style_, and -collections of criticism in which an agile intelligence collaborates -with a wakeful sense of beauty. - -In this critical work, as in what is more easily recognised as -creative, M. de Gourmont builds for freedom. He will be bound -neither by his own preoccupations nor by other men’s thoughts. It is -characteristic of him that his most personal essays in criticism are -“Dissociations of Ideas.” The dissociation of ideas is a method of -thought that separates the ideas put into double harness by tradition, -just as the chemist turns water into hydrogen and oxygen, with which, -severally, he can make other compounds. This, like most questions of -thought, is a question of words. Words are the liberators of ideas, -since without them ideas cannot escape from the flux of feeling into -independent life. They are also their gaolers, since they are terribly -cohesive, and married words cling together, binding in a lover’s -knot the ideas they represent. All men using words in combination -abet these marriages, though in doing so they are making bars of -iron for the prisons in which they speculate on the torn fragment of -sky that their window lets them perceive. Nothing is easier than, -by taking words and their associations as they are commonly used, -to strengthen the adherence of ideas to each other. Nothing needs a -more awakened intelligence than to weaken the bonds of such ideas -by separating the words that bind them. That is the method of M. de -Gourmont. He separates, for example, the idea of Stéphane Mallarmé -and that of “decadence,” the idea of glory and that of immortality, -the idea of success and that of beauty. It is, too, a dissociation of -ideas when he inquires into the value of education, these two ideas of -worth and knowledge being commonly allied. The method, or rather the -consciousness of the method, is fruitful in material for discussion, -though this advantage cannot weigh much with M. de Gourmont, whose -brain lacks neither motive power nor grist to grind. It is, for him, no -more than a recurrent cleaning of the glasses through which he looks at -the subjects of his speculation. - -He speculates continually, and, if questions are insoluble, is not -content until he has so posed them as to show the reason of their -insolubility. He prefers a calm question mark to the more emotional -mark of exclamation, and is always happy when he can turn the second -into the first. He is extraordinarily thorough, moving always in mass -and taking everything with him, so that he has no footsteps to retrace -in order to pick up baggage left behind. Unlike Theseus, he unrolls no -clue of thread when he enters the cavern of Minotaur. He will come out -by a different way or not at all. The most powerful Minotaur of our -day does not dismay him. Confident in his own probity, he will walk -calmly among the men of science and bring an _Esthétique de la langue -française_, or a _Physique de l’Amour_, meat of unaccustomed richness, -to lay before their husk-fed deity. - -In criticism, as in creation, he does not like things half-done. The -story of the origin of one of these books is the story of them all. -There is a foolish little work by M. Albalat, which professes to teach -style in twenty-seven lessons. M. de Gourmont read it and smiled; he -wrote an article, and still found something to smile at; he wrote a -book, _Le Problème du Style_, in which, mocking M. Albalat through a -hundred and fifty-two courteous pages, he showed, besides many other -things, that style is not to be taught in twenty-seven lessons, and, -indeed, is not to be taught at all. Then he felt free to smile at -something else. - -M. de Gourmont is careful to say that he brought to the _Esthétique de -la langue française_, “ni lois, ni règles, ni principes peut-être; je -n’apporte rien qu’un sentiment esthétique assez violent et quelques -notions historiques: voilà ce que je jette au hasard dans la grande -cuve où fermente la langue de demain.” An aesthetic feeling and some -historical notions were sufficiently needed in the fermenting vat -where the old French language, in which there is hardly any Greek, is -being horribly adulterated with brainless translations of good French -made by Hellenists of the dictionary. M. de Gourmont is in love with -his language, but knows that she is rather vain and ready to wear all -kinds of borrowed plumes, whether or not they suit her. He would take -from her her imitation ostrich feathers, and would hide also all -ribbons from the London market, unless she first dye them until they -fall without discord into the scheme of colour that centuries have made -her own. Why write “high life,” for example, or “five o’clock,” or -“sleeping”? Why shock French and English alike by writing “Le Club de -Rugby” on a gate in Tours? A kingfisher in England flies very happily -as martin-pêcheur in France, and the language is not so sterile as to -be unable to breed words from its own stock for whatever needs a name. - -_Physique de l’Amour; Essai sur l’instinct sexuel_, “qui n’est qu’un -essai, parce que la matière de son idée est immense, représente -pourtant une ambition: on voudrait agrandir la psychologie générale de -l’amour, la faire commencer au commencement même de l’activité mâle -et femelle, situer la vie sexuelle de l’homme dans le plan unique de -la sexualité universelle.” It is a book full of illustration, a vast -collection of facts, and throws into another fermenting vat than that -of language some sufficiently valuable ideas. It lessens the pride -of man, and, at the same time, gives him a desperate courage, as it -shows him that even in the eccentricities of his love-making he is not -alone, that the modesty of his women is a faint hesitation beside the -terrified flight of the she-mole, that his own superiority is but an -accident, and that he must hold himself fortunate in that nature does -not treat him like the male bee, and toss his mangled body disdainfully -to earth as soon as he has done her work. M. de Gourmont’s books do not -flatter humanity. They clear the eyes of the strong, and anger the weak -who cannot bear to listen to unpalatable truths. - - -V - -M. de Gourmont’s most obvious quality is versatility, and though, as I -have tried to point out, it is not difficult to find a unity of cause -or intention in his most various expressions, his lofty and careless -pursuit of his inclinations, his life of thought for its own sake, has -probably cost him a wide and immediate recognition. That loss is not -his, but is borne by those who depend for their reading on the names -that float upward from the crowd. Even his admirers complain: some -that he has not given them more poems; others that his _Physique de -l’Amour_ stands alone on its shelf; others that a critic such as he -should have spent time on romances; others, again, that a writer of -such romances should have used any of his magnificent power in what -they cannot see to be creative work. M. de Gourmont is indifferent to -all alike, and sits aloft in the Rue des Saints-Pères, indulging his -mind with free and harmonious play. - -In one of his books, far more than in the others, two at least of -his apparently opposite activities have come to work in unison. -All his romances, after and including _Sixtine_, are vitalised by -a never-sleeping intellect; but one in particular is a book whose -essence is both critical and romantic, a book of thought coloured like -a poem and moving with a delicate grace of narrative. _Une Nuit au -Luxembourg_[11] was published in 1906, and is the book that opens most -vistas in M. de Gourmont’s work. A god walks in the gardens behind the -Odéon, and a winter’s night is a summer’s morning, on which the young -journalist who has dared to say “My friend” to the luminous unknown in -the church of Saint-Sulpice, hears him proclaim the forgotten truth -that in one age his mother has been Mary, and in another Latona, and -the new truth that the gods are not immortal though their lives are -long. Flowers are in bloom where they walk, and three beautiful girls -greet them with divine amity. Most of the book is written in dialogue, -and in this ancient form, never filled with subtler essences, doubts -are born and become beliefs, beliefs become doubts and die, while -the sun shines, flowers are sweet, and girls’ lips soft to kiss. -Where there is God he will not have Love absent, and where Love is he -finds the most stimulating exercise for his brain. Ideas not new but -gathered from all the philosophers are given an aesthetic rather than a -scientific value, and are used like the tints on a palette. Indeed, the -book is a balanced composition in which each colour has its complement. -Epicurus, Lucretius, St. Paul, Christianity, the replenishment of the -earth by the Jews; it is impossible to close the book at any page -without finding the mind as it were upon a springboard and ready to -launch itself in delightful flight. There are many books that give a -specious sensation of intellectual business while we read them. There -are very few that leave, long after they are laid aside, stimuli to -independent activity. - - -VI - -“Il ne faut pas chercher la vérité; mais devant un homme comprendre -quelle est sa vérité.” We must not seek in a man’s work for the truth, -since there are as many truths as brains; but it is worth while to -define an answer here and an answer there out of the many. What is the -answer of Remy de Gourmont? _Quelle est sa vérité?_ Of what kind is his -truth? Does he bring rosemary for remembrance or poppy for oblivion? -Not in what he says, but in the point from which he says it, we must -look for our indications. His life, like _Sixtine_, is a “roman de la -vie cérébrale.” It is the spectacle of a man whose conquests are won -by understanding. For him the escape of mysticism was inadequate, and -an invitation to cowardice. He would not abdicate, but, since those -empires are unstable whose boundaries are fixed, conquer continually. -The conquests of the mind are not won by neglect. It is not sufficient -to refuse to see. The conqueror must see so clearly that life blushes -before his sober eyes, and, understood, no longer dominates. Remy de -Gourmont has suffered and conquered his suffering in understanding -it. He would extend this dominion. He would realise all that happens -to him, books, a chance visitor, a meeting in the street, the liquid -bars of light across the muddy Seine. He would transmute all into the -mercurial matter of thought, until, at last impregnable, he should -see life from above, having trained his digestive powers to the same -perfection as his powers of reception. Although one of the Symbolists, -he has moved far from the starting-point assigned to that school by -Mr. Symons. His books are not “escapes from the thought of death.” The -thought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow -to be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious -game. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind -against the universe which it creates, has come to seem more important -to him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured. -It has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his -desire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the -unity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. His later -books have been the by-products of a more intimate labour. He has left -them by the road whose end he has not hoped to reach, whose pursuit -suffices him. They wake in the reader a desire which has nothing to -do with art. This desire--a desire for intellectual honesty--and with -that, perhaps, for intellectual gaiety, is the characteristic gift of -his work. It is never offered alone. He accompanies it with criticism, -with witty epilogues, serious dissertations, and licentious little -stories; but it is not so much for the sake of these things as for the -stimulus of that desire that we turn, and seldom in vain, to M. de -Gourmont’s books. - - 1911. - - - - -THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI - - - - -THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI - - -So-shi, a Chinese philosopher, dreamed that he was a butterfly, and, in -the moment of waking, asked himself: “Are you So-shi who has dreamed -that he was a butterfly, or are you a butterfly who is dreaming that he -is So-shi?” That question is continually repeated in the works of Yone -Noguchi, who seems, indeed, to have the freedom of two worlds, and to -find reality as often in one as in the other. Noguchi is for ever in -doubt of his own existence, suspicious of appearances, and searching -for the reality in things beyond touch or description. “My soul,” he -writes: - - “My soul, like a chilly winged fly, roams about the sadness-walled - body, hunting for a casement to fly out. - Lo, suddenly, an inspired bird flies upright into the atom-eyed sky! - Alas, his reflection sinks far down into the mileless bottom of the - mirrory rivulet! - Is this world the solid being?--or a shadowy nothing? - Is the form that flies up the real bird? or the figure that sinks - down?” - -And again: - - “The world is not my residence to the end! - Alas, the moon has lost her way, harassed among the leaf-fellows on - the darkling hill-top! - Isn’t there chance for my flying out?” - -The world is not too much with this poet of Japan who writes in our -language, and it is interesting to compare this symbolist of a nation -of conscious symbolists with the few men who in France and England have -turned an unconscious but almost universal practice into a theory of -poetry.[12] - -But I must not, in my care for his work, pretend that the poet is the -immaterial floating fairy that he almost seems to be. “I have cast the -world,” he says, “and think me as nothing, - - “Yet I feel cold on snow-falling day, - And happy on flower day.” - -Let me, before saying more, set down such facts as I know about his -physical existence. - -Yone Noguchi was born in Japan about 1876. He was in America before -he was twenty, and, in company with a few other Japanese students, -suffered extreme poverty, and the starvation which those who have not -tried it consider so efficacious a stimulant to the soul. He made some -friends among American writers, and stayed for a time with Joaquin -Miller. In 1897 he published _Seen and Unseen: or Monologues of a -Homeless Snail_, and in the next year _The Voice of the Valley_, a -little book inspired by a stay in the Yosemite. In 1902 he came to -England, and lived with Mr. Yoshio Markino (who had not then realised -himself and London in his water-colours) in poor lodgings in the -Brixton Road. From these lodgings he issued a sixteen-page pamphlet of -verse printed on brown paper, which drew such notice that the Unicorn -Press (an unfortunate little firm that published some very good books, -some bad ones, and died) produced a volume, called, like the pamphlet, -_From the Eastern Sea_, and containing, besides those sixteen pages -of poetry, other verses from the American books and a number of new -pieces. The cover of this edition was designed by Mr. Yoshio Markino. -I knew Noguchi at this time, and often walked with him along the -Embankment in the evenings, or under those “lamp-lights of web-like -streets bathed in the opiate mists,” that he and Yoshio Markino have -used so delicately in their several arts. I remember him as a small -man, though perhaps not noticeably small by Japanese standards, with -black hair less orderly and geometrical in growth than most Japanese -hair, and a face of extraordinary sensitiveness, high-browed but with -broadly set eyes, and a mouth like a woman’s, like that of a woman -controlling some almost tearful emotion. Even in the handling of a -cigarette, whose end he stripped of its paper so that the tobacco might -serve in the making of another (we were almost penniless in those -days), there was a delicacy that made it impossible not to recognise -that he was a man who lived more finely than most. His conversations -were of poetry, of the principles of the particular poetry he held -that it was his to write, and of the works of those English poets he -had read. “I hate your Longfellow,” he said, “and I love your Keats,” -and in contrasting the two he was, perhaps, defining to himself an -important tendency of his own. - -He left London in 1903, and went to New York and then to Japan. He had -some difficulties there, difficulties, I believe, of misunderstanding -on the part of his own countrymen. He crossed to the mainland and -travelled in China for a year, and perhaps longer. In 1906 he published -_The Summer Cloud_ in Tokio, and, in June last year, he sent me a -two-volume book in a blue case with small ivory fastenings, printed by -the Valley Press in Kamakura. This book, _The Pilgrimage_, has been -issued in England by Mr. Elkin Mathews. - -These five books do not contain a large body of verse, but they contain -verse whose interest for us is not concentrated in the nationality of -the writer. The title of the brown-paper pamphlet published in the -Brixton Road is _From the Eastern Sea_, “by Yone Noguchi (_Japanese_),” -but though that word aroused a careless curiosity, the curiosity was -turned into something more valuable by qualities less incidental. The -imagery of Noguchi’s verse is Japanese in feeling, just as the imagery -in Synge’s plays is Irish, and that of Verlaine’s poetry French, but -the imagery in any one of these three cases would have been worthless -if the man who used it had been merely Japanese, Irish, or French, and -not a man of genius with the gift of setting words free with living -breath. Our concern is not with the nationality of this writer, but -with his conception of the poet, and with his poetry. - -Noguchi wrote his first book in 1896, and so had not read Mr. Arthur -Symons’ _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, which was issued three -years later. He would have found there an account of poets not unlike -himself, and of a poetry nearer than Keats’ to his own, and further -removed than Keats’ from that of the hated Longfellow. - -Symons, writing of Verlaine, says: “Is not his whole art a delicate -waiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they -are, which is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us, -and a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily, -experience taught nothing; or rather it taught him only to cling the -more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate -part of our spiritual life.” Noguchi lives almost continuously in those -moods; experience with him is momentary rather than cumulative; and his -aim, expressed more than once in his verse, is only to keep himself a -vessel as clear as possible for the unsullied transference of those -moments from the bowl of life to that of art. It will not be difficult -to make from his verses a portrait of his ideal poet, and, in writing -of a man not yet very widely known, I believe I shall best be doing my -duty by him in quoting his own words as often as I can. In _The Poet_ -he says: - - “The roses live by the eating of their own beauty and then die. - His song is the funeral chant for his own death of every moment.” - -And again, of himself: - - “I sing the song of my heart-strings, alone in the eternal muteness, - in the face of God.” - -And again: - - “The God-beloved man welcomes, respects as an honoured guest, his own - soul and body in his solitude. - Lo! the roses under the night dress themselves in silence, and - expect no mortal applaud--content with that of their voiceless - God.” - -And again: - - “O, wash me and wash me again with thy light, - And burn my body to a flame of soul! - It is this moment that I conquer the intervention of flesh, - And its rebellions that worked in me at unexpected time. - It’s not too much to say I am a revelation or a wonder, - Winging as a falcon into the breast of loveliness and air.” - -And again: - - “... What a bird - Dreams in the moonlight is my dream, - What a rose sings is my song.” - -“O, to lose the world and gain a song,” he cries, and then, “I am glad -to be no-man to-day, with the laughter and dance of the sea soul.” His -thoughts fall like leaves in autumn “on the snowy cheeks of his paper.” -His is the poetry of self-abnegation, of identification of himself -with the world. His soul dances “on the silver strings” of the rain. -“We,” he sings, are “happy to be biographers of each other, I and a -bird.” He flies himself as a kite, to be lifted or let fall by the -winds that do not move at all those whose pride is in their sage and -measured footsteps on the ground. - -In the last of his volumes there are a few specimens of Japanese -seventeen-syllabled verse, _hokku_, and in a note Noguchi writes that -such a poem “in Japanese mind, might be compared with a tiny star, I -dare say, carrying the whole sky at its back. It is like a slightly -open door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy. Its value -depends on how much it suggests. The Hokku poet’s chief aim is to -impress the reader with the high atmosphere in which he is living.” -The Hokku poet, like Noguchi, never writes of the thing about which -he is writing. The emotions he wishes to express are too subtle for -description in words, and can only be written of in the spaces between -the lines, just as between the petals of a flower we may find dreams -that the flower has never known, and the suggestions of something less -ponderable than the earth in which it had its roots. An example of -Hokku poetry will illustrate the method of all Noguchi’s: - - “Where the flowers sleep, - Thank God! I shall sleep to-night. - Oh, come, butterfly.” - -That is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl -to be dissolved in the wine of a mood. Pearls are not wine, nor in -themselves to be thought of as drink, but there is a kind of magic in -the wine in which they are dissolved. - -In Noguchi’s poems there is the co-operation between silence and speech -of which Carlyle was thinking when he wrote: “In a Symbol there is -concealment and yet revelation: here therefore by Silence and Speech -acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be -itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their -union be!” In many poems of the French symbolists the Speech is almost -meaningless, except in the Silence that is covered by its melody. -In Noguchi both Speech and Silence are full of a charm that we can -scarcely find in life but in fortunate rare moods. He writes: - - “I am stirring the waves of Reverie with my meaningless but - wisdom-wreathed syllables.” - -But he is incapable of denying his own charm to the carefully-worded -accompaniment of the Silence with which he is really concerned. He sees -the world with eyes too guileless not to make it alive, even when using -it as an invocation. He sees ideas too clearly not to make them, even -in a spell, independently vivid for his listeners. For an example of -the one take this picture: - - “Alas, the mother cow, with matron eyes, utters her bitter heart, - kidnapped of her children by the curling gossamer mist!” - -For an example of the other, this idea: - - “The Universe, too, has somewhere its shadow; but what about my - songs? - An there be no shadow, no echoing to the end--my broken-throated - lute will never again be made whole.” - -He is a poet whose flame has been so scrupulously tended as to flicker -with the slightest breath. He is as many-mooded as the combinations -between sunshine and shadow. His poetry actually _is_ the thing that -has induced a mood in him, trimmed of all that he has had to remove -for himself, and so made into something between nature and that pure -elevation of mind from which Noguchi feels. This quality of pale -flame-like emotion is common to all his poems, extraordinarily various -as they are. - -Sometimes he speaks with grandeur, as in these lines: - - “When I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill, - The universe seems built with me as its pillar! - Am I the God upon the face of the deep, nay deepless deepness in the - beginning?” - -Sometimes wistfully: - - “Alas! my soul is like a paper lantern, its paste wetted off under - the rain. - _My love, wilt thou not come back to-night?_ - Lo, the snail at my door stealthily hides his horns. - _Oh, put forth thy honourable horns for my sake! - Where is Truth? Where is Light?_” - -Sometimes questioning: - - “My poetry begins with the tireless songs of the cricket, on the lean - grey-haired hill, in sober-faced evening. - And the next page is Stillness---- - And what then, about the next to that? - Alas, the God puts his universe-covering hand over its sheets! - _Master, take off your hand for the humble servant!_ - Asked in vain:---- - How long for my meditation?” - -But it is impossible with the quotations permissible in an article to -give an adequate presentment of a poet whose poems are so separate -that a hundred of them do not suffice for his expression. Noguchi has, -like Verlaine, escaped the wisdom of experience; his latest moods are -as sky-clear as his first, different though they are in technique and -in feeling. Each one of them is a glint of light from a diamond; it is -impossible, but in seeing innumerable glints together, satisfactorily -to perceive the diamond itself. - -Noguchi’s technique is his own, though it would be possible to find -in reminiscent phrases suggestions of influence. A man using English -words with something of the surprising daring of the Irish peasants -on whose talk Mr. Synge modelled his prose, using them, too, like a -foreigner who has fallen in love with them, he is able to give them a -morning freshness newer and stranger than is given them (though the -words of all fine writers are newly discovered) by men whose ancestors -have bandied them about. He uses them in short and long lines that, -in his later books, learn more and more of rhythm. Rhyme he has not -attempted, and it would, I think, have hampered the butterfly-flash -of his verse from thought to thought. In _The Summer Cloud_ many of -the poems of his early books are altered to prose simply by the plan -of their printing. The type is differently set on the page and they -are called prose poems. I do not know what led Noguchi to make this -experiment, but it proved that the irregular, broken lines in which his -poems were originally published had a real power over the effect the -words produced. The spaces between the lines were a kind of thought -punctuation, and the mind needed these moments between the little, -breathless, scarcely-worded sighs that make his poems. In reading -them aloud it becomes clear that the ritual of the line-spacing was -more important than that of commas or full-stops. Noguchi’s songs are -like bird flights, timing themselves with the pulse of the mind that -follows them. His ideal is a poetry of pure suggestion whose melody -shall be of thought, capricious and uncertain as the mind, but only -with the mind’s caprice, the mind’s uncertainty. The following poem was -printed as prose in _The Summer Cloud_, and as it stands here in _The -Pilgrimage_. - - “Little Fairy, - Little Fairy by a hearth, - Flight in thine eyes, - Hush on thy feet, - Shall I go with thee up to Heaven - By the road of the fire-flame? - - Little Fairy, - Little Fairy by a river, - Dance in thy heart, - Longing at thy lips, - Shall I go down with thee to “Far-Away,” - Rolling over the singing bubbles? - - Little Fairy, - Little Fairy by a poppy, - Dream in thy hair, - Solitude under thy wings, - Shall I sleep with thee to-night in the golden cup - Under the stars?” - -It is easy, in reading it aloud, to recognise that its form is not -accidental, but follows, breath for breath, the movements of the mind. - -But who shall analyse charm, or separate the tints of the opal? In -writing of Noguchi, I am writing of something that can only be defined -by itself. I can only take shred after shred from the cloak of gossamer -he has woven for himself, and only hope in doing so to persuade other -readers to buy his books and find for themselves a hundred shreds -as beautiful as these. The frontispiece to _The Pilgrimage_ is a -reproduction of a drawing by Utamaru, a thing of four pale colours and -a splash of black, and made as light as wind by curves as subtle and as -indefinable as those traced by worshipping stars round the object of -their adoration. I had forgotten that it is the picture of a girl, and -that fact is, indeed, as immaterial as the titles of Noguchi’s poems. -In looking at it, I forget not only its subject, but the book in which -it is, for this art, of poet or painter, Verlaine, Noguchi, Utamaru, -Whistler, frees us, infecting us with its own freedom, from the world -which is too much with us, for the exploration of that other world of -dream which, unless we, too, are children, is with us so fitfully, and -so seldom. - - “Beckoned by an appointed hand, unseen yet sure, in holy air - We wander as a wind, silver and free, - With one song in heart, we, the children of prayer. - - Our song is not of a city’s fall; - No laughter of a kingdom bids our feet wait; - Our heart is away, with sun, wind, and rain: - We, the shadowy roamers on the holy highway.” - - 1909. - - - - -KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH - - - - -KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH - - -Definitions, like mythologies, wear out. It is then important to -replace them. Aladdin’s wife had a choice, but we have none. We must -change our old lamps for new, or sit in the dark. A natural philosopher -who retained the mythological definition of thunder could not speak -of lightning to young men who had learnt of electricity without an -air of irrelevance of which he might be quite unconscious. Not so his -listeners, who would brush his explanations impatiently aside as soon -as they knew the beliefs on which he based them. Whenever historians -or critics seem irrelevant, we are safe in assuming a difference -between their definitions and our own. When they seem irrelevant to -many people beside ourselves, we can go further and assume that their -definitions are either worn out or not yet accepted. Sometimes, of -course, they are without definitions either old or new, but then they -need not trouble us, for they disappear like cuttle-fishes in the -darkness of their own ink. There is at the present day a widespread -dissatisfaction with historians of literature. It is impossible not to -feel that their dicta do not matter, that their sense of perspective -is wrong or uncertain, that their books are of no use to us except as -bibliographies. A new definition of literature is needed, that shall -give them some scale, some standard to which they can refer. For -without such standard or scale, they can do no more than gossip, or -judge poetry by its passion, by its sense, by its smoothness, or by -any other half-remembered scrap from a definition that is no longer -adequate. - -If we would get rid of these irrelevancies, and write histories of -literature that shall deal with the matter of which they propose to -treat, we must find a new standard of values, and to find that we -must make a new definition. We must have a statement of the nature of -literature applicable not to the books of one nation of one time only, -but to those of all nations and of all times. It must supply us with -terms in which we can state the aims of widely different schools and -writers, with regard to their medium and not to any accidental quality. -If it is to do that we must escape from the prejudices of our own time -(which may be invisible to us) by seeking our formula in a definition -of the medium common to all writers, a statement of the function of -words in combination. - -To make such a statement I have borrowed two epithets from the -terminology of physical science. Energy is described by physicists -as kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted. -Potential energy is force that a body is in a position to exert. -Applying these terms to language, without attempting too strict -an analogy, I wish to define literature, or rather the medium of -literature, as a combination of kinetic with potential speech. In -this combination the two are coincident. There is no such thing in -literature as speech purely kinetic or purely potential. Purely kinetic -speech is prose, not good prose, not literature, but colourless -prose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that M. Jourdain -discovered he had been speaking all his life. It says things. An -example of purely potential speech may be found in music. I do not -think it can be made with words, though we can give our minds a taste -of it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a -poem in a language that we do not understand. The proportion between -kinetic and potential speech and the energy of the combination varies -with different works and the literature of different ages. There is no -literature to which it is impossible to apply the formula. Let us try -to clarify it by example and particularisation. - -It may be asked, what of ballad poetry in which there is much so stated -as to approach purely kinetic speech? Does not the admitted power -of a sea-song, a song whose words are utterly trivial, disprove our -assertion? It does not; for to such songs or chanties the music to -which they are sung has given a quality of potential speech, without -which they would be worthless and speedily forgotten. In that case -the words and the melody respectively represent kinetic and potential -speech. It has been very truly said that a prima-donna can turn the -alphabet to poetry by the emotional power of her voice. - -It may further be asked by any one who has not clearly apprehended my -meaning (and this would be more than excusable), Do I mean to suggest -that literature is not literature unless it contains a double meaning? -and, if so, do I not find in allegory the most perfect example of the -simultaneous existence of kinetic and potential speech? This would -indeed be a _reductio ad absurdum_. I must answer, that allegory -(though it may represent the result of an early guess at the nature of -art) is not necessarily poetry. There is, indeed, a gross and obvious -duality of meaning in such a work as _The Faërie Queene_. The tale -written on the paper enables us to reconstruct another. But that other -might have been written with no greater difficulty. It does not aid, -and may clog with external preoccupations, the tale that we sit down -to read. It is an impertinent shadow, a dog that keeps too closely at -our heels. Hazlitt rebukes those who think that the allegory of _The -Faërie Queene_ will bite them. We are more afraid that it will lick our -hands, and all we ask is, that it will allow itself to be forgotten. -An acrostic sonnet may be a good sonnet, but we are not likely to -perceive its excellence if we are intent upon the initial letters of -the lines. No; allegory may be a rude attempt to copy in things said -the duality of poetic speech. The old delight in conscious allegory may -be comparable to the modern delight in conscious symbolism. But we must -not forget for a moment that the resemblance is only one of analogy. -When Spenser writes of Mammon’s cave: - - “Both roof, and floor, and walls were all of gold - But overgrown with rust and old decay, - And hid in darkness that none could behold - The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day - Did never in that house itself display, - But a faint shadow of uncertain light; - Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away; - Or as the moon clothéd with cloudy night, - Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.” - -When he writes thus, we do not, in our search for potential speech, -have to remember that he is writing of the love of money. Away with -such tedious recollections. The stanza is like a picture by Rembrandt -of an alchemist’s laboratory, where dusty alembic and smouldering -fire mean far more than themselves. The lines say something, but we -hear much for which they have not words. “The moon clothéd with cloudy -night,” is not richer in suggestion than that same description. Not in -the allegory but in the words themselves, their order and their melody, -must we find, if they are to be literature, that combination of kinetic -and potential speech. - -Let me take another example of fine poetry, and show that it does -perform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the -first stanza of Blake’s “The Tiger”: - - “Tiger! Tiger! burning bright - In the forests of the night, - What immortal hand or eye - Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” - -It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four -lines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The -kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed -tiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and -on either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the -phosphorescence of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear. -And who shall speak in fit terms of its potentiality? That glowing -image, that surprised address; not in the enumeration of such things -shall we come upon its secret. - -The test of a formula is, that it shall fit. It must enable us to -co-ordinate scattered knowledge, and throw into a clear perspective -the jumble of loose statements and scraps of information whose -value we cannot but recognise, although they have remained outside -previous schemes and done little more than disturb the equilibrium of -once-established theories. It is a comfort and a joy to a thinker when -he can say that a formula of his has almost been proposed by minds that -have approached his problem along roads other than his own. When he can -find statements, true in themselves but inadequate, pegging out, as -it were, the ground from which his formula has been dug, he can feel -that it is no mere chance that has given it a momentary appearance of -usefulness. He can speak of it with the solid confidence that it has -behind it the collaboration of his predecessors. - -We can bring such confidence to the use of this formula of kinetic -and potential speech, for to whatever problem of literary theory or -phenomenon of the history of literature we apply it, we find that it -has been almost stated by those who have separately considered that -problem or phenomenon. It smelts the ore that they have dug, and forges -a weapon for the attack not of one problem, but of all. - -For example; though kinetic speech may be translated without loss from -one language to another, potential speech would not be potential but -kinetic if we were able to express it otherwise than by itself. This is -what Shelley means when he denies the possibility of the translation -of poetry, though he does not perceive the full reason, but only that -the poetic quality of a poem is partly dependent on a succession -of inimitable sounds. His statement, incomplete though it is, is a -recognition of the duality of poetic speech. He does not for a moment -contend that we cannot render the meaning; he sees that the meaning is -not all. The body is one thing and the soul is another. If we leave the -soul behind we have nothing but dead matter, fit for manure or food. -Life, or poetry, delicate-footed, mysterious, gracious with knowledge -of her mystery, is passed away and we cannot recapture her. - -Sometimes, indeed, she goes without our interference, and disappears -only because of our neglect. There are poems that many men cannot -perceive to be poetry. There are others, once poetry, now no longer -so. Let us apply our formula to these phenomena, and first to the -varying popularity of poetry, since our solution of this question will -help us in solving the other. We shall find that the nearer poetry -approaches to kinetic speech, the more easily is it apprehended by the -multitude. Kinetic speech secures its effects by the presentation of -facts, situations and stories, which are stuff not so fine as to slip -through the coarse meshes of the general understanding. This explains -the immediate and wide popularity of such poets as Longfellow, Scott, -and Macaulay. Because prose, as a rule, depends more nearly on its -kinetic than on its potential utterance, it is, as a rule, the more -widely read. When, as in the hands of some nineteenth century writers, -it emphasizes the potential element of speech it correspondingly -narrows its public. Whenever poetry of high potentiality is read by a -large public it will be found that its potential speech is condoned -for them or hidden from them by more than usually vigorous kinetic -speech. For potential speech secures its effects by suggestion. There -is a bloom on its wings that a callous retina does not perceive. It -is like a butterfly that has visited flowers and scatters their scent -in its flight. The scent and the fluttering of its bloom-laden wings -are more important than the direction or speed of its flying. It is -always easier for the public to say, how fast, or where it is going -than to notice these delicate things. The kinetic speech of a poem is -understood by all; the potential depends for its apprehension upon -the taste and knowledge of the reader. Words must have for us the -associations that they had for the poet. We must be able to see them -with his eyes, hear them with his ears, and taste their scents with -nostrils not dissimilar to his. In time these things change. Unpopular -poetry becomes quite popular, and indeed, no longer poetry, as it -loses, through usage or forgetfulness, its proximity to the condition -of potential speech. Accents are shifted from one to another syllable, -and we should be deaf to the melody if we were unable to replace them. -New meanings gather round the words, and they come back from later -travels disguised in strange perfumes. The kinetic speech may be -disturbed, but the potential has disappeared in a jargon of new sounds, -a quarrel of new memories, and a chaos of new odours. Sometimes indeed, -it is as if it had never existed. - -In this light it is easy to understand the curious business of -criticism, and to formulate an account of what occurs when poetry dies, -or falls asleep like the princess in the wood, to be awakened after -two centuries by a critic’s kiss. The Elizabethan dramatists lost -their potential and were judged only by their kinetic speech during -the eighteenth century. They were considered coarse and bloody-minded, -because there is rapine and murder in their plays. Lamb restored to -them the potentiality they had lost and turned bleak rock to flowering -country. Spenser had become a mere monger of allegory, until Hazlitt -and Leigh Hunt reconstituted him poet by discovering for themselves -and others the attitude that restores to his kinetic its lost -potential speech. Writers of Wordsworth’s generation realised, at least -subconsciously, that a poem is not independent of knowledge. They tried -to help us by printing at the head of a poem information about the -circumstances of its conception. When a poet tells us that a sonnet was -composed “on Westminster Bridge” or “suggested by Mr. Westell’s views -of the caves, &c. in Yorkshire,” he is trying to ease for us the task -of aesthetic reproduction to which his poem is a stimulus. He is trying -to ensure that we shall approach it as he did, and hear as well as the -kinetic the potential speech that he values. There is a crudity about -such obvious assistance, and it would be quite insufficient without -the wider knowledge on which we draw unconsciously as we read. But the -crudity of those pitiable scraps of proffered information is not so -remarkable as the dulness of perception that can allow a man to demand -of a poem that it shall itself compel him accurately to enjoy it. It -is possible that much of the old poetry that now seems to us no more -than direct speech was once wrapped in a veil of suggestion. It is the -critic’s business to rediscover those forgotten veils and to restore to -the kinetic the magic of potential speech. - -The formula of kinetic and potential speech illumines not only the -critic’s business but also that of the historian. It enables him to -link together in a single scheme the prose of Goldsmith with that of -Pater and the poetry of the eighteenth century with poetry, like that -of the Symbolists of the nineteenth, so different as to seem completely -unrelated. It enables him to explain a phenomenon that he has usually -alluded to as a mere curious accident, the fact that there have been -ages when poetry has been popular and others in which it has been the -possession of a few. It will, I think, be found that this periodicity -coincides with a general variation between kinetic and potential -speech. In the eighteenth century, when poetry was often rhymed prose, -when the common standard of poetry was good sense, when she gave advice -and said things, and did not seem to realise that there were things -she could not say, when, in short, the kinetic almost overwhelmed the -potential, then poetry was a popular form of literature. In other -ages, when poetry has approached the condition of potential speech -and so has needed for its appreciation such knowledge as that lately -discussed, it has not swelled the publisher’s purse so swiftly as forms -of literature that happened to be more nearly kinetic and so more -easily enjoyed. - -The eighteenth century poets and the Symbolists alike come under our -definition and can be classed by the formula that depends upon it. -I have suggested that the eighteenth century poets cared mostly for -kinetic speech, and, indeed, carried their appreciation of it so high -as sometimes to forget that poetry could do anything but speak wisely -and well. Few schools have suffered a greater variety of imperfect -and bungling definitions than that of Symbolism. The Symbolist aims -have been described as “an escape from the thought of death,” and -“intimacy with spiritual things.” Nowhere has there been a definition -that has shown their relation to the aims of poetry in general. But, -when Mallarmé says: “Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts -de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à -peu; le suggérer, voilà le rêve,” he is saying, in other words, that -poetry depends on potential speech. The Symbolists sought to write -poetry that should be purely potential, and in the revision of certain -of his poems Mallarmé tried to eliminate bit by bit the whole structure -of kinetic speech that had been in them. The eighteenth century aims -carried to their extreme would have meant bad prose; the Symbolist -aims carried to their extreme would have meant (as they sometimes did) -unintelligibility. Poetry is made by a combination of kinetic with -potential speech. Eliminate either and the result is no longer poetry. - -I do not propose the words kinetic and potential as terms of abuse or -praise, though in different ages there have been artists who would have -used them so. The eighteenth century poets would have used kinetic -as a term of praise; the Symbolists would have used it as a term -of abuse. The fact that different schools would have set different -values on the words is itself a proof that they may be serviceable -to historians and critics. Literature does indeed vary between these -extremes, its kinetic quality preserving it from nonsense, its -potential quality separating it from bad prose. Some sort of relevancy -would be discoverable in any history that set itself to trace these -variations. Some sort of relevancy is obvious in all criticism that -attempts (as all good criticism does) the enhancement of the potential -and the clarification of the kinetic element in such literature as -happens to be its subject. In any case, an adoption of the definition -of literature that this essay upholds would make ridiculous the -classification of books by their subjects and of writers by their -opinions, on which so many intellects have wasted time and vitality -worthy of a more profitable employment. - - 1911. - - - Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. - Edinburgh & London - - - - -FOOTNOTES - - -[1] After passing this note for press, I learn that this essay has been -reprinted at Tokyo in a new edition of Mr. Noguchi’s _The Pilgrimage_. - -[2] For the reputation of Breughel d’Enfer is based on his imitations -of his father, Breughel le Vieux, to whom is attributed the _Temptation -of St. Anthony_ at Genoa. - -[3] A piece of money coined by Charles VIII. - -[4] Figures that strike the hour on the clock-tower at Dijon. - -[5] The quotations in this essay are taken from Dr. Oscar Levy’s -admirable English edition of Nietzsche, translated by Drs. W. A. -Haussmann and M. A. Mügge, Messrs. Paul V. Cohn, Thomas Common, J. -M. Kennedy, A. M. Ludovici and H. B. Samuel, and Miss Helen Zimmern: -eighteen volumes published by Mr. T. N. Foulis. - -[6] Clarendon Press. 1910. - -[7] Oscar Wilde. - -[8] These references are to the page-numbers in Messrs. Macmillan’s -library edition. - -[9] His inability to tell a story was perhaps the reason of, or, -at least supplies a commentary upon, his readiness to admire the -narratives of M. Filon, Octave Feuillet, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and to -admire them, quite ingenuously, for the story’s sake, like the ordinary -reader of novels. - -[10] _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, 1899. - -[11] An English translation was published in 1912 by Messrs. Stephen -Swift. - -[12] When I wrote this article I was still hypnotised, like the -symbolists themselves, with the idea that symbolism was a method. My -later article on kinetic and potential speech contains what I believe -to be a more accurate account of the significance of what is called -the “symbolist movement.” It did not turn a practice into a theory, -but merely emphasized one of the two inseparable functions of words -when combined in poetic speech, and emphasized it at the expense of the -other. - -Japanese poets have always insisted on the potential element in poetic -speech. Its intensity has always been for them the test of a poem. -Noguchi, except in that he is a Japanese poet who happens to write in -English, is not an innovator but the heir to a long Japanese tradition. - - - - -Transcriber’s Notes - - -Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a -predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they -were not changed. - -Inconsistent use of accent marks has not been remedied. - -Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation -marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left -unbalanced. - -Page 167: A superscript is represented as ^{me}. - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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