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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Visions and Revisions, by John Cowper Powys
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Visions and Revisions
+       A Book of Literary Devotions
+
+Author: John Cowper Powys
+
+Release Date: October 16, 2008 [EBook #26933]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VISIONS AND REVISIONS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ruth Hart
+
+
+
+
+[Note:  I have made the following spelling changes:  intransigeant to
+intransigent, rythm of the secret to rhythm of the secret,
+accummulated to accumulated, potentious and solemn to portentious
+and solemn, terrestial to terrestrial, Light-cormer to Light-comer,
+Aldeboran to Aldebaran, enter competely to enter completely,
+aplomb and nonchalence to aplomb and nonchalance, Hyppolytus to
+Hippolytus, abyssmal to abysmal, appelations to appellations,
+intellectual predominence to intellectual predominance, deilberately
+outraging to deliberately outraging, pour vitrol to pour vitriol,
+Gethsamene to Gethsemane, Sabacthani to Sabachthani, conscience-striken
+to conscience-stricken, abssymal gulfs to abysmal gulfs,
+rhymmic incantations to rhythmic incantations, perpetual insistance
+to perpetual insistence, and water-cariers to water-carriers.  Next, I
+have also incorporated the errata listed at the end of the book into
+the text.  Finally, I have standardized all the poetry quotations with
+indentation and spacing which were not in the original text.]
+
+
+VISIONS AND REVISIONS
+
+A BOOK OF LITERARY DEVOTIONS
+
+BY
+
+JOHN COWPER POWYS
+
+
+_Ham._--Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers--if  the rest of
+my fortunes turn Turk with me--with two Provincial roses on my ras'd
+shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir?
+_Her_.--Half a share.
+
+
+1915
+G. ARNOLD SHAW
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1915, by G. Arnold Shaw
+Copyright in Great Britain and Colonies
+
+
+
+First Printing, February, 1915
+Second Printing, March, 1915
+Third Printing, October, 1915
+
+
+BROOKLYN EAGLE PRESS
+
+
+
+To Those who love
+     Without understanding;
+To Those who understand
+     Without loving;
+     And to Those
+Who, neither loving or understanding,
+     Are the Cause
+     Why Books are written.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Preface             9
+Rabelais           25
+Dante              35
+Shakespeare        55
+El Greco           75
+Milton             87
+Charles Lamb      105
+Dickens           119
+Goethe            135
+Matthew Arnold    153
+Shelley           169
+Keats             183
+Nietzsche         197
+Thomas Hardy      213
+Walter Pater      227
+Dostoievsky       241
+Edgar Allen Poe   263
+Walt Whitman      281
+Conclusion        293
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+What I aim at in this book is little more than to give complete
+reflection to those great figures in Literature which have so long
+obsessed me. This poor reflection of them passes, as they pass,
+image by image, eidolon by eidolon, in the flowing stream of my
+own consciousness.
+
+Most books of critical essays take upon themselves, in unpardonable
+effrontery, to weigh and judge, from their own petty suburban
+pedestal, the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! How
+should Professor This, or Doctor That, whose furthest experiences of
+"dangerous living" have been squalid philanderings with their
+neighbours' wives, bring an Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall put
+Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton and Rabelais, into appropriate
+niches?
+
+Every critic has a right to his own Aesthetic Principles, to his own
+Ethical Convictions; but when it comes to applying these, in
+tiresome, pedantic agitation, to Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Lamb,
+we must beg leave to cry off! What we want is not the formulating
+of new Critical Standards, and the dragging in of the great masters
+before our last miserable Theory of Art. What we want is an honest,
+downright and quite _personal_ articulation, as to how these great
+things in literature really hit us when they find us for the moment
+natural and off our guard--when they find us as men and women,
+and not as ethical gramaphones.
+
+My own object in these sketches is not to convert the reader to
+whatever "opinions" I may have formulated in the course of my
+spiritual adventures; it is to divest myself of such "opinions," and in
+pure, passionate humility to give myself up, absolutely and
+completely, to the various visions and temperaments of these great
+dead artists.
+
+There is an absurd notion going about, among those half-educated
+people who frequent Ethical Platforms, that Literary Criticism must
+be "constructive." O that word "constructive"! How, in the name of
+the mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry,
+a worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake
+these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and
+wrote in order to buttress up such poor wretches as these are upon
+the particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their
+moral security and refuge.
+
+No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean
+receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells,
+one by one, are thrown and withdrawn.
+
+Who wants to know what Professor So-and-so's view of Life may be?
+We want to use Professor So-and-so as a Mirror, as a Medium, as a
+Go-Between, as a Sensitive Plate, so that we may once more get the
+thrill of contact with this or that dead Spirit. He must keep his
+temperament, our Critic; his peculiar angle of receptivity, his
+capacity for personal reaction. But it is the reaction of his own
+natural nerves that we require, not the pallid, second-hand reaction
+of his tedious, formulated opinions. Why cannot he see that, as a
+natural man, physiologically, nervously, temperamentally,
+pathologically _different_ from other men, he is an interesting
+spectacle, as he comes under the influence first of one great artist
+and then another, while as a silly, little, preaching school-master, he
+is only a blot upon the world-mirror!
+
+It is thus that I, moi qui vous parle, claim my humble and modest
+role. If, in my reaction from Rabelais, for instance, I find myself
+responding to his huge laughter at "love" and other things, and a
+moment later, in my reaction from Thomas Hardy, feeling as if
+"love" and the rest were the only important matters in the Universe;
+this psychological variability, itself of interest as a curious human
+phenomenon, has made it possible to get the "reflections," each
+absolute in its way, of the two great artists as they advance and
+recede.
+
+If I had tried to dilute and prune and "correct" the one, so as to make
+it "fit in" with the other, in some stiff, ethical theory of my own,
+where would be the interest for the reader? Besides, who am I to
+"improve" upon Rabelais?
+
+It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for
+"variable reaction" that there are so few good critics. But we are all,
+I think, more multiple-souled than we care to admit. It is our foolish
+pride of consistency, our absurd desire to be "constructive," that
+makes us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the world
+from the "pluralistic" angle; but there must be something of such
+"pluralism" in his natural temper, or the writers he can respond to
+will be very few!
+
+Let it be quite plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a
+great genius halfway. It is a case of all or nothing. If you lack the
+courage, or the variability, to _go all the way_ with very different
+masters, and to let your constructive consistency take care of itself,
+you may become, perhaps, an admirable moralist; you will never be
+a clairvoyant critic. All this having been admitted, it still remains
+that one has a right to draw out from the great writers one loves
+certain universal aesthetic tests, with which to discriminate between
+modern productions.
+
+But even such tests are personal and relative. They are not to be
+foisted on one's readers as anything "ex cathedra." One such test is
+the test of what has been called "the grand style"--that grand style
+against which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our race
+beats in vain! I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting my
+devotion to the "grand style" into an academic "narrow way,"
+through which I would force every writer I approach. Some most
+winning and irresistible artists never come near it.
+
+And yet--what a thing it is! And with what relief do we return to it,
+after the "wallowings" and "rhapsodies," the agitations and
+prostitutions, of those who have it not!
+
+It is--one must recognize that--the thing, and the only thing, that, in
+the long run, _appeals._ It is because of the absence of it that one
+can read so few modern writers _twice!_ They have flexibility,
+originality, cleverness, insight--but they lack _distinction_--they
+fatally lack distinction.
+
+And what are the elements, the qualities, that go to make up this
+"grand style"?
+
+Let me first approach the matter negatively. There are certain things
+that _cannot_--because of something essentially ephemeral in
+them--be dealt with in the grand style.
+
+Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problem
+of Sex. We may be Feminists or Anti-Feminists--what you will--and
+we may be able to throw interesting light on these complicated
+relations, but we cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in
+the grand style, because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because,
+with all its gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimately
+matter!
+
+Such, to take another example, are our elaborate arguments about
+the interpretation, ethical or otherwise, of Christian Doctrine. We
+can be very entertaining, very moral, very eloquent, very subtle, in
+this particular sphere; but we cannot deal with it in the "great style,"
+because the permanent issues that really count lie out of reach of
+such discussion and remain unaffected by it.
+
+Let me make myself quite clear. Hector and Andromache can talk to
+one another of their love, of their eternal parting, of their child, and
+they can do this in the great style; but if they fell into dispute over
+the particular sex conventions that existed in their age, they might be
+attractive still, but they would not be uttering words in the "great
+style."
+
+Matthew Arnold may argue eloquently about the true modernistic
+interpretation of the word "Elohim," and very cleverly and wittily
+give his reasons for translating it "the Eternal" or "the Shining One";
+but into what a different atmosphere we are immediately transported
+when, in the midst of such discussion, the actual words of the
+Psalmist return to our mind: "My soul is athirst for God--yea! even
+for the living God! When shall I come to appear before the presence
+of God?"
+
+The test is always that of Permanence, and of immemorial human
+association. It is, at bottom, nothing but human association that
+makes the great style what it is. Things that have, for centuries upon
+centuries, been associated with human pleasures, human sorrows,
+and the great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives, can be
+expressed in this style; and only such things. The great style is a sort
+of organic, self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable units
+of the great human family have all put their hands. That is why so
+large a portion of what is written in the great style is anonymous--like
+Homer and much of the Bible and certain old ballads and songs.
+It is for this reason that Walter Pater is right when he says that the
+important thing in Religion is the Ceremony, the Litany, the Ritual,
+the Liturgical Chants, and not the Creeds or the Commandments, or
+discussion upon Creed or Commandment. Creeds change, Morality
+changes, Mysticism changes, Philosophy changes--but the Word of
+our God--the Word of Humanity--in gesture, in ritual, in the heart's
+natural crying--abideth forever!
+
+Why do the eloquent arguments of an ethical orator, explaining to us
+our social duties, go a certain way and never go further, whereas we
+have only to hear that long-drawn _Vox Humana,_ old as the
+world--older certainly than any creed--"Santa Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro
+nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae"--and we are
+struck, disarmed, pierced to the marrow, smitten to the bone, shot
+through, "Tutto tremente?" Because arguments and reasoning;
+because morality and logic, are not of the nature of the "great style,"
+while the cry--"save us from eternal death!"--addressed by the
+passion and remorse and despair of our human heart to the
+unhearing Universe, takes that great form as naturally as a man
+breathes.
+
+Why, of all the religious books in the world, have "the Psalms of
+David," whether in Hebrew or Latin or English, touched men's souls
+and melted and consoled them? They are not philosophical. They are
+not logical. They are not argumentative. They are not moral. And
+yet they break our hearts with their beauty and their appeal!
+
+It is the same with certain well-known _words._ Is it understood, for
+instance, why the word "Sword" is always poetical and in "the grand
+style," while the word "Zeppelin" or "Submarine" or "Gatling gun"
+or "Howitzer" can only be introduced by Free Versifiers, who let the
+"grand style" go to the Devil? The word "Sword" like the word
+"Plough," has gathered about it the human associations of
+innumerable centuries, and it is impossible to utter it without feeling
+something of their pressure and their strain. The very existence of
+the "grand style" is a protest against any false views of "progress"
+and "evolution." Man may alleviate his lot in a thousand directions;
+he may build up one Utopia after another; but the grand style will
+still remain; will remain as the ultimate expression of those aspects
+of his life that _cannot change_--while he remains Man.
+
+If there is any unity in these essays, it will be found in a blurred and
+stammered attempt to indicate how far it may be possible, in spite of
+the limitations of our ordinary nature, to live in the light of the
+"grand style." I do not mean that we--the far-off worshippers of
+these great ones--can live _as they thought and felt._ But I mean that
+we can live in the atmosphere, the temper, the mood, the attitude
+towards things, which "the grand style" they use evokes and sustains.
+
+I want to make this clear. There are a certain number of solitary
+spirits moving among us who have a way of troubling us by their
+aloofness from our controversies, our disputes, our arguments, our
+"great problems." We call them Epicures, Pagans, Heathen, Egoists,
+Hedonists, and Virtuosos. And yet not one of these words exactly
+fits them. What they are really doing is living in the atmosphere and
+the temper of "the grand style"--and that is why they are so irritating
+and provocative! To them the most important thing in the world is to
+realize to the fullest limit of their consciousness what it means to be
+born a Man. The actual drama of our mortal existence, reduced to
+the simplest terms, is enough to occupy their consciousness and their
+passion. In this sphere--in the sphere of the "inevitable things" of
+human life--everything becomes to them a sacrament. Not a symbol--be
+it noted--but a Sacrament! The food they eat; the wine they drink;
+their waking and sleeping; the hesitancies and reluctances of their
+devotions; the swift anger of their recoils and retreats; their long
+loyalties; their savage reversions; their sudden "lashings out"; their
+hate and their love and their affection; the simplicities of these
+everlasting moods are in all of us--become, every one of them,
+matters of sacramental efficiency. To regard each day, as it dawns,
+as a "last day," and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of its
+sun-setting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods--this is to live in
+the spirit of the "grand style." It has nothing to do with "right" or
+"wrong." Saints may practise it, and sometimes do. Sinners often
+practise it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious of
+those moods and events which are permanent and human, as
+compared with those other moods and events which are transitory
+and unimportant.
+
+When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy,
+devotion, admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces,
+that can speak, if they will, in "the great style." When a man or
+woman "argues" or "explains" or "moralizes" or "preaches," they are
+the victims of accidental dust-storms, which rise from futility and
+return to vanity. That is why Rhetoric, as Rhetoric, can never be in
+the great style. That is why certain great revolutionary Anarchists,
+those who have the genius to express in words their heroic defiance
+of "the something rotten in Denmark," move us more, and assume a
+grander outline, than the equally admirable, and possibly more
+practical, arguments of the Scientific Socialists. It is the eternal
+appeal we want, to what is basic and primitive and undying in our
+tempestuous human nature!
+
+The grand style announces and commands. It weeps and it pleads. It
+utters oracles and it wrestles with angels. It never apologizes; it
+never rationalizes; and it never explains. That is why the great
+ineffable passages in the supreme masters take us by the throat and
+strike us dumb. Deep calls unto deep in them, and our heart listens
+and is silent. To do good scientific thinking in the cause of humanity
+has its well-earned reward; but the gods throw incense on a different
+temper. The "fine issues" that reach them, in their remoteness and
+their disdain, are the "fine issues" of an antagonist worthy of their
+own swift wrath, their own swift vengeance, and their own swift
+love.
+
+The ultimate drama of the world, a drama never-ending, lies
+between the children of Zeus and the children of Prometheus;
+between the hosts of Jehovah and the Sons of the Morning. God and
+Lucifer still divide the stage, and in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante,
+Milton, and Goethe the great style is never more the great style than
+when it brings these eternal Antagonists face to face, and compels
+them to cross swords. What matter if, in reality, they have their
+kingdoms in the heart of man rather than the Empyrean or Tartarus?
+The heart of man, in its unchangeable character, must ever remain
+the true Coliseum of the world, where the only interesting, the only
+dramatic, the only beautiful, the only classical things are born and
+turned into music.
+
+Beauty! That is what we all, even the grossest of us, in our heart of
+hearts are seeking. Lust seeks it; Love creates it; the miracle of Faith
+finds it--but nothing less, neither truth nor wisdom nor morality nor
+knowledge, neither progress nor reaction, can quench the thirst we
+feel.
+
+Yes, it is Beauty we crave, and yet, how often, in the strain and
+stress of life, it seems as though this strange impossible Presence,
+rising thus, like that figure in the Picture, "beside the waters" of the
+fate that carries us, were too remote, too high and translunar, to
+afford us the aid we need. Heine tells us somewhere, how, driven by
+the roar of street-fighting, into the calm cool galleries of the Louvre,
+sick and exhausted in mind and body, he fell down at the feet of the
+Goddess of Beauty there, standing, as she still stands, at the end of
+that corridor of mute witnesses, and as he looked to her for help, he
+knew that she could never bend down to him, or lift him up out of
+his weariness, for they had broken her long ago, and _she had no
+arms!_
+
+Alas! It is true enough that there are moments, when, under the
+pressure of the engines of fate, we can only salute her--the immortal
+one--afar off. But if we have the courage, the obstinacy, the
+endurance, to wait--even a short while longer--she will be near us
+again; and the old magical spell, transforming the world, will thrill
+through us like the breath of spring!
+
+Why should we attempt to deceive ourselves? We cannot always
+live with those liberating airs blowing upon our foreheads. We have
+to bear the burden of the unillumined hours, even as our fathers
+before us, and our children after us. Enough if we keep our souls so
+prepared that when the touch, the glimpse, the word, the gesture,
+that carries with it the thrilling revelation of the "grand manner",
+returns to us in its appointed hour, it shall find us not unworthy of
+our inheritance.
+
+
+
+RABELAIS
+
+There are certain great writers who make their critics feel even as
+children, who picking up stray wreckage and broken shells from the
+edge of the sea waves, return home to show their companions "what
+the sea is like."
+
+The huge suggestiveness of this tremendous spirit is not easy to
+communicate in the space of a little essay.
+
+But something can be done, if it only take the form of modest
+"advice to the reader."
+
+Is it a pity, one asks oneself, or is it a profound advantage, that
+enjoyment of Rabelais should be so limited? At least there are no
+false versions to demolish here--no idealizations to unmask.
+
+The reading of Rabelais is not easy to everyone, and perhaps to
+those for whom it is least easy, he would be most medicinal. What in
+this mad world, do we lack, my dear friends? Is it possibly
+_courage?_ Well, Rabelais is, of all writers, the one best able to give
+us that courage. If only we had courage, how the great tides of
+existence might sweep us along--and we not whine or wince at all!
+
+To read Rabelais is to gather, as if from the earth-gods, spirit to
+endure anything. Naturally he uses wine, and every kind of wanton
+liquor, to serve as symbols of the intoxication he would produce. For
+we must be "rendered drunk" to swallow Life at this rate--to
+swallow it as the gods swallow it. We must be drunk but not mad.
+For in the spiritual drunkenness that Rabelais produces there is not
+the remotest touch of insanity. He is the sanest of all the great
+writers; perhaps the only sane one. What he has the power of
+communicating to us is a renewal of that _physiological energy,_
+which alone makes it possible to enjoy this monstrous world. Other
+writers interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabelais takes us
+by the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids us
+drink and be satisfied. What else could he use, if not _wine,_ as a
+symbol for such quenching of such thirst. And after wine, sex. There
+is no other who treats sex as Rabelais does; who treats it so
+completely as it _ought_ to be treated!
+
+Walt Whitman is too obsessed by it; too grave over it--Rabelais
+enjoys it, fools with it, plunges into it, wallows in it; and then, with
+multitudinous laughter, shakes himself free, and bids it go to the
+Devil!
+
+The world will have to come to this, sooner or later--to the
+confusion of the vicious--and the virtuous!
+
+The virtuous and the vicious play indeed into each others hands; and
+neither of them love laughter. Sexual dalliance is either too serious a
+matter to be mocked by satyr-laughter; or it is too sad and
+deplorable to be laughed at at all. In a few hundred years, surely, the
+human race will recognize its absolute right to make mock at the
+grotesque elements in the sex comedy, and such laughter will clear
+the air of much "virtue" and much "vice."
+
+Wine is his first symbol of the large, sane, generous mood he
+bequeaths to us--the focusing of the poetry of life, and the glow and
+daring of it, and its eternal youthfulness.
+
+But it is more than a symbol--it is a sacrament and an initiation. It is
+the sap that rises in the world's recurrent spring. It is the ichor, the
+quintessence of the creative mystery. It is the blood of the sons of
+the morning. It is the dew upon the paradisic fields. It is the red-rose
+light, upon the feet of those who dance upon graves. Wine is a sign
+to us how there is required a certain generous and sane intoxication,
+a certain large and equable friendliness in dealing with people and
+things and ideas. It is a sign that the earth calls aloud for the
+passionate dreamer. It is a sign that the truth of truth is not in labor
+and sorrow, but in joy and happiness. It is a sign that gods and men
+have a right to satisfy their hearts desire, with joy and pleasure and
+splendid freedom. And just as he uses wine, so he uses meat. Bread
+that strengthened man's heart (and bologna-sausages, gammons of
+bacon, or what you will, else) this also is a symbol and a sacrament.
+And it is indeed more, for one must remember that Rabelais was a
+great doctor of medicine, as well as of Utopian Theology--and the
+stomach, with the wise indulgence thereof, is the final master of all
+arts! Let it be understood that in Rabelais sex is treated with the
+same reverence, and the same humor, as meat and wine. Why not? Is
+not the body of man the temple of the Holy Ghost? Is it not
+sacrosanct and holy within and without; and yet, at the same time, is
+it not a huge and palpable absurdity?
+
+Those who suffer most from Rabelais' manner of treating sex are the
+incurably vicious. The really evil libidinous people, that is to say the
+spiteful, the mean, the base and inhuman, fly from his presence, and
+for the obvious reason that he makes sex-pleasure so generous, so
+gay, so natural, so legitimate, that their dark morbid perverted
+natures can get no more joy out of it. Their lust, their lechery, is a
+cold dead Saurian thing, a thing with the gravity of a slow-worm--and
+when this great laughing and generous sage comes forth into
+the sunshine with his noble companies of amorous and happy
+people, these Shadow-lovers, these Leut-lovers, these Fleshly
+Sentimentalists, writhe in shame, and seek refuge in a deeper
+darkness. How strained and inhuman, too; and one might add, how
+mad and irrelevant--that high, cold, disdainful translunar scorn with
+which the "moral-immoralism" of Nietzsche scourges our poor flesh
+and blood. One turns with relief to Zarathustra after associating with
+pious people. But, after Rabelais, even that terrific psychologist
+seems contorted and _thin._
+
+For after all it is generosity that we cry out for. Courage without
+generosity hugs its knees in Hell.
+
+From the noble pleasures of meat and drink and sex, thus generously
+treated; we must turn to another aspect of Rabelais' work--his
+predilection for excrement. This also, though few would admit it, is
+a symbolic secret. This also is a path of initiation. In this peculiarity
+Rabelais is completely alone among the writers of the earth. Others
+have, for various reasons, dabbled in this sort of thing--but none
+have ever piled it up--manure-heap upon manure-heap, until the
+animal refuse of the whole earth seems to reek to the stars! There is
+not the slightest reason to regret this thing or to expurgate it.
+Rabelais is not Rabelais, just as life is not life, without it.
+
+It is indeed the way of "salvation" for certain neurotic natures. Has
+that been properly understood? There are people who suffer
+frightfully--and they are often rare natures, too, though they are
+sometimes very vicious--from their loathing of the excremental side
+of life. Swift was one of these. The "disgusting" in his writing is a
+pathological form, not at all unusual, of such a loathing. But
+Rabelais is no Dean Swift--nor is there the remotest resemblance
+between them. Rabelais may really save us from our loathing by the
+huge all-embracing friendliness of his sense of humor.
+
+There are certain people, no doubt, who would prefer the grave
+enthusiasm of Whitman in regard to this matter to the freer
+Rabelaisian touch. I cannot say that my personal experience agrees
+with this view.
+
+I have found both great men invaluable; but I think as far as dealing
+with the Cloaca Maxima side of things is concerned, Rabelais has
+been the braver in inspiration. In these little matters one can only say,
+"some are born Rabelaisian, and some require to have Rabelais
+thrust upon them!"
+
+Surely it is wisdom, in us terrestrial mortals, to make what
+imaginative use we can of _every phase_ of our earthly condition?
+
+Imagination has a right to play with everything that exists; and
+humor has a right to laugh at everything that exists. Everything in
+life is sacred and everything is a huge jest.
+
+It is the association of this excremental aspect of life, with those
+high sacraments of meat and drink and sex, which some find so hard
+to endure. Be not afraid my little ones! The great and humorous
+gods have arranged for this also; and have seen to it that no brave,
+generous, amorous "sunburnt" emotion shall ever be hurt by such
+associations! If a person _is_ hurt by them, that is only an indication
+that they are in grievous need of the wholesome purgative medicine
+of the great doctor! When one comes to speak of the actual contents
+of these books criticism itself must borrow Gargantua's mouth.
+
+What characters! The three great royal giants, Graugousier,
+Gargantua and Pantagruel--have there ever been such kings? And
+the noble servants of such noble masters! The whole atmosphere is
+so large, so genial, so courteous, so sweet-tempered, so entirely
+what the life of man upon earth should be.
+
+Even the military exploits of Friar John, even the knavish tricks of
+Panurge, cannot spoil our tenderness for these dear bully-boys, these
+mellow and magnanimous rogues! Certain paragraphs in Rabelais
+recur to one's mind daily. That laudation of Socrates at the
+beginning, and the description of the "little boxes called _Silent"_
+that outside have so grotesque an adornment, but within are full of
+ambergris and myrrh and all manner of precious odours.
+
+And the picture of the banquet "when they fell to the chat of the
+afternoon's collation and began great goblets to ring, great bowls to
+ting, great gammons to trot; pour me out the fair Greek wine, the
+extravagant wine, the good wine, Lacrima Christi, supernaculum!"
+And, above all, the most holy Abbey of Thelema, over the gate of
+which was written the words that are never far from the hearts of
+wise Utopian Christians, the profound words, the philosophical
+words, the most shrewd Cabalistic words, and the words that
+"lovers" alone can understand--"Fay que ce Vouldray!" Do as Thou
+Wilt!
+
+Little they know of Rabelais who call him a lewd buffoon--the
+profanest of mountebanks. He was one of those rare spirits that
+redeem humanity. To open his book--though the steam of the
+grossness of it rises to Heaven--is to touch the divine fingers--the
+fingers that heal the world.
+
+How that "style" of his, that great oceanic avalanche of learning and
+piety and obscenity and gigantic merriment, smells of the honest
+earth!
+
+How, with all his huge scholarship, he loves to depend for his
+richest, most human effects, upon his own peasant-people of
+Touraine! The proverbs of the country-side, the wisdom of tavern-wit,
+the shrewdness and fantasy of old wives tales, the sly earthly
+humors of farmers and vine-tenders and goat-herds and goose-girls--these
+are things out of which he distils his vision, his oracles, his courage.
+
+There is also--who could help observing it?--a certain large and
+patriarchal homeliness--a kind of royal domesticity--about much that
+he writes. Those touches, as when Gargantua, his little dog in
+advance, enters the dining hall, when they are discussing Panurge's
+marriage, and they all rise to do him honor; as when Gargantua bids
+Pantagruel farewell and gives him a benediction so wise and tender;
+remain in the mind like certain passages in the Bible. These are the
+things that aesthetic fools "with varnished faces" easily overlook and
+misunderstand; but good simple fellows--"honest cods" as Rabelais
+would say--are struck to the heart by them. How proud the man
+might be, who in the turmoil of this troublesome world and beneath
+the mystery of "le grand Peut-etre" could answer to the ultimate
+question, "I am a Christian of the faith of Rabelais!"
+
+Such a one, under the spell of such a master, might indeed be able to
+comfort the sick and sorry, and to whisper in their ears that cosmic
+secret--"Bon Espoir y gist au fond!" "Good Hope lies at the
+Bottom!" "Good Hope" for all; for the best and the worst--for the
+whole miserable welter of this chaotic farce!
+
+Therefore, "with angels and archangels" let us bow our heads and
+hold our tongues. Those who fancy Rabelais to be lacking in the
+kind of religious feeling that great souls respect, let them read that
+passage in the voyage of Pantagruel that speaks of the Death of Pan.
+Various accounts are given; various explanations made; of the great
+cry, that the sailors, "coming from Paloda," heard over land and sea.
+At the last Pantagruel himself speaks; and he tells them that to him it
+refers to nothing less than the death of Him whom the Scribes and
+Pharisees and Priests of Jerusalem slew. "And well is He called Pan,
+which in the Greek means 'All'; for in Him is all we are or have or
+hope." And having said this he fell into silence, and "tears large as
+ostrich-eggs rolled down his cheeks."
+
+To all who read Rabelais and love him, one can offer no better wish
+than that the mystic wine of his Holy Bottle may fulfil their heart's
+desire. Happy, indeed, those who are not "unwillingly drawn" by the
+"Fate" we all must follow! "Go now, my friends," says the strange
+Priestess, "and may that Circle whose Centre is everywhere and its
+Circumference nowhere, keep you in His Almighty protection!"
+
+
+
+DANTE
+
+The history of Dante's personal and literary appeal would be an
+extremely interesting one. No great writer has managed to excite
+more opposite emotions.
+
+One thing may be especially noted as significant: Women have
+always been more attracted to him than men. He is in a peculiar
+sense the Woman's great poet. There is a type of masculine genius
+which has always opposed him. Goethe cared little for him; Voltaire
+laughed at him; Nietzsche called him "an hyaena poetizing among
+the tombs."
+
+The truth is, women love Dante for the precise reason that these men
+hate him. He makes sex the centre of everything. One need not be
+deceived by the fact that Dante worships "purity," while Voltaire,
+Goethe and Nietzsche are little concerned with it. This very
+laudation of continence is itself an emphasis upon sex. These others
+would play with amorous propensities; trifle with them in their life,
+in their art, in their philosophy; and then, that dangerous plaything
+laid aside would, as Machiavel puts it, "assume suitable attire, and
+return to the company of their equals--the great sages of antiquity."
+
+Now it is quite clear that this pagan attitude towards sex, this
+tendency to enjoy it in its place and leave it there, is one that, more
+than anything else, is irritating to women. If, as a German thinker
+says, every woman is a courtezan or a mother, it is obvious that the
+artists and thinkers who refuse alike the beguilements of the one and
+the ironic tenderness of the other, are not people to be "loved."
+Dante refuses neither; and he has, further, that peculiar mixture of
+harsh strength and touching weakness, which is so especially
+appealing to women. They are reluctantly overcome--not without
+pleasure--by his fierce authority; and they can play the "little
+mother" to his weakness. The maternal instinct is as ironical as it is
+tender. It smiles at the high ideals or the eccentric child it pets, but it
+would not have him different. What a woman does not like, whether
+she is mother or courtezan, is that other kind of irony, the irony of
+the philosopher, which undermines both her maternal feeling and
+her passionate caresses.
+
+Women, too, even quite good women, have the stress of the sexual
+difference constantly before them. Indeed it may be said that the
+class of women who are least sex-conscious are those who have
+habitually to sell themselves. It all matters so little then!
+
+How fiercely is the interest of the most virtuous aroused, when any
+question of a love affair is rumored. In this sense every woman is a
+born "go-between." Sex is not with them a thing apart, an exciting
+volcanic thing, liable to mad outbursts, to weird perversions, but
+often completely forgotten. It is never completely forgotten. It is
+diffused. It is everywhere. It lurks in a thousand innocent gestures
+and intimations. The savage purity of an Artemis is no real
+exception. Sex is a thing too pressing to be dallied with. It is all or
+nothing.
+
+One cannot play with fire. When we make observations of this kind
+we do not derogate from the charm or dignity of women. It is no
+aspersion upon them. They did not ask to have it so. It is so.
+
+Domestic life as the European nations have evolved it is a queer
+compromise. Its restraints weigh heavily, in alternate discord, upon
+both sexes.
+
+Masculine depravity rebels against it, and the whole modern
+feministic movement shakes it to the base. It remains to be seen
+whether Nature will admit of any satisfactory readjustment.
+
+Certainly, as far as overt acts are concerned, women are far "purer"
+than men. It is only when we leave the sphere of outward acts and
+enter the sphere of cerebral undercurrents, that all this is changed.
+There the Biblical story finds its proof, and the daughters of Eve
+revert to their mother. This is the secret of that mania for the
+personal which characterizes women's conversation. She can say
+fine things and do fine work; but both in her wit and her art, one is
+conscious of a mind that has voluptuously welcomed, or vindictively
+repulsed, the approach of a particular invasion; never of a mind that,
+in its abstract love for the beautiful, cannot even remember how it
+came to give birth to such thoughts!
+
+It is the close psychological association between the emotion of
+religion and the emotion of sex which has always made women
+more religious than men.
+
+This is perhaps only to say that women are nearer the secret of the
+universe than men. It may well be so. Man's rationalizing tendency
+to divorce his intelligence from his intuition--may not be the precise
+key which opens those magic doors! _Sanctity_ itself--that most
+exquisite flower of the art of character--is a profoundly feminine
+thing. The most saintly saints, that is to say those who wear the
+indescribable distinction of their Master, are always possessed of a
+certain feminine quality.
+
+Sanctity is woman's ideal--morality is man's. The one is based upon
+passion, and by means of love lifts us above law. The other is based
+upon vice and the recoil from vice; and has no horizons of any sort.
+
+That is why the countries where the imagination is profoundly
+feminine like Russia and France have sanctity as their ideal.
+Whereas England has its Puritan morality, and Germany its
+scientific efficiency. These latter races ought to sit at Dante's feet, to
+learn the secret of the "Beatific Vision" that is as far beyond
+morality as it is outside science. There are, it is true, certain
+moments when the Italian poet leads us up into the cold rarified air
+of that "Intellectual Love of God" which leaves sex, as it leaves
+other human feelings, infinitely behind. But this Spinozistic mood is
+not the natural climate of his soul. He is always ready to revert,
+always anxious to "drag Beatrice in." Wagner's "Parsifal" is perhaps
+the most flagrant example of this ambiguous association between
+religion and sex. The sentimental blasphemy of that feet-washing
+scene is an evidence of the depths of sexual morbidity into which
+this voluptuous religion of pity can lead us. O that figure in the
+white nightgown, blessing his reformed harlot!
+
+It is a pity Wagner ever touched the Celtic Legend--German
+sentimentality and Celtic romance need a Heine to deal with them!
+
+It is indeed a difficult task to write of the relations between romantic
+love and devotional religion and to do it in the grand style. That is
+where Dante is so supremely great. And that is why, for all his
+greatness, his influence upon modern art has been so morbid and
+evil. The odious sensuality of the so-called "Pre-Raphaelite School"
+--a sensuality drenched with holy water and perfumed with incense--has
+a smell of corruption about it that ought never to be associated
+with Dante's name.
+
+The worst of modern poets, the most affected and the most
+meticulous, are all anxious to seal themselves of the tribe of Dante.
+But they are no more like that divine poet than the flies that feed on
+a dead Caesar are like the hero they cause to stink!
+
+Our brave Oscar understood him. Some of the most exquisite
+passages in "Intentions" refer to his poetry. Was the "Divine
+Comedy" too clear-cut and trenchant for Walter Pater? It is strange
+how Dante has been left to second-rate interpreters! His illustrators,
+too! O these sentimentalists, with their Beatrices crossing the Ponte
+Vecchio, and their sad youths looking on! All this is an insult--a
+sacrilege--to the proudest, most aristocratic spirit who ever dwelt on
+earth! Why did not Aubrey Beardsley stop that beautiful boy on the
+threshold? He who was the model of his "Ave atque vale!" might
+have well served for Casella, singing among the cold reeds, in the
+white dawn.
+
+For there are scenes in Dante which have the strange, remote,
+perverted, _archaic_ loveliness of certain figures on the walls of
+Egyptian temples or on the earliest Greek vases. Here the real artist
+in him forgets God and Beatrice and the whole hierarchy of the
+saints. And it is because of things of this kind that many curious
+people are found to be his worshipers who will never themselves
+pass forth "to re-behold the stars." They are unwise who find Dante
+so bitter and theological, so Platonic and devoted, that they cannot
+open his books. They little know what ambiguous planets, what dark
+heathen meteors move on the fringe of his great star-lit road. His
+Earthly Lady, as well as his Heavenly Lady, may have the moon
+beneath her feet.
+
+But neither of them know, as does their worshiper and lover, _what
+lies on the other side of the moon._
+
+What Dante leaves to us as his ultimate gift is his pride and his
+humility. The one answers the other. And both put us to shame. He,
+alone of great artists, holds in his hand the true sword of the Spirit
+for the dividing asunder of men and things. There is no necessity to
+lay all the stress upon the division between the Lower and
+the Higher Love, between Hell and Heaven. There are other
+_distinctions_ in life than these. And between all distinctions,
+between all those differences which separate the "fine" from the
+"base," the noble from the ignoble, the beautiful from the hideous,
+the generous from the mean; Dante draws the pitiless sword-stroke
+of that "eternal separation" which is the most tragic thing in the
+world. In the truest sense tragic! For so many things, and so many
+people, that must be thus "cut off," are among those who harrow our
+hearts with the deadliest attraction and are so wistful in their
+weakness. Through the mists and mephitic smoke of our confused
+age--our age that cries out to be beyond the good, when it is beneath
+the beautiful--through the thick air of indolence masquerading as
+toleration and indifference posing as sympathy, flashes the
+scorching sword of the Florentine's Disdain, dividing the just from
+the unjust, the true from the false, and the heroic from the
+commonplace. What matter if his "division" is not our "division,"
+his "formula" our "formula"? It is good for us to be confronted with
+such Disdain. It brings us back once more to "Values"; and whether
+our "Values" are values of taste or values of devotion what matter?
+Life becomes once more arresting. The everlasting Drama recovers
+its "Tone"; and the high Liturgy of the last Illusion rolls forward to
+its own Music!
+
+That Angel of God, who when their hearts were shaken with fear
+before the flame-lit walls of Dis, came, so straight across the waters,
+and quelled the insolence of Hell; with what Disdain he turns away
+his face, even from those he has come to save!
+
+These "messengers" of God, who have so superb a contempt for all
+created things, does one not meet them, sometimes, even in this life,
+as they pass us by upon their secret errands?
+
+The beginning of the Inferno contains the cruellest judgment upon
+our generation ever uttered. It is so exactly adapted to the spirit of
+this age that, hearing it, one staggers as if from a stab. Are we not
+this very tribe of caitiffs who have committed the "Great Refusal?"
+Are we not these very wretches whose blind life is so base that they
+envy every other Fate? Are we not those who are neither for God or
+for his Enemies but are "for themselves"; those who may not even
+take refuge in Hell, lest the one damned get glory of them! The very
+terror of this clear-cutting sword-sweep, dividing us, bone from
+bone, may, nay! probably will, send us back to our gentle "lovers of
+humanity" who, "knowing everything pardon everything." But one
+sometimes wonders whether a life all "irony," all "pity," all urbane
+"interest," would not lose the savor of its taste! There is a danger,
+not only to our moral sense, but to our immoral sense, in that genial
+air of universal acceptance which has become the fashion.
+
+What if, after all--even though this universe be so poor a farce--the
+mad lovers and haters, the terrible prophets and artists, _were
+right?_
+
+Suppose the farce had a climax, a catastrophe! One loves to repeat
+"all is possible;" but _that_ particular possibility has little attraction.
+It would be indeed an anti-climax if the queer Comedy we have so
+daintily been patronizing turned out to be a Divine Comedy--and
+ourselves the point of the jest! Not that this is very likely to occur. It
+is more in accordance with what we know of the terrestrial stage that
+in this wager of faith with un-faith neither will ever discover who
+really won!
+
+But Dante's "Disdain" is not confined to the winners in the cosmic
+dicing match. There are heroic hearts in hell who, for all their
+despair, still yield not, nor abate a jot of their courage. Such a one
+was that great Ghibelline Chief who was lost for "denying
+immortality." "If my people fled from thy people--_that_ more
+torments me than this flame." In one respect Dante is, beyond doubt,
+the greatest poet of the world. I mean in his power of heightening
+the glory and the terribleness of the human race. Across the three-fold
+kingdom of his "Terza Rima" passes, in tragic array, the whole
+procession of human history--and each figure there, each solitary
+person, whether of the Blessed or the Purged, or the Condemned,
+wears, like a garment of fire, the dreadful dignity of having been a
+man! The moving sword-point that flashes, first upon one and then
+upon another, amid our dim transactions, is nothing but the angry
+arm of human imagination, moulding life to grander issues;
+_creating,_ if not discovering, sublimer laws.
+
+In conveying that thrilling sense of the momentousness of human
+destiny which beyond anything else certain historic names evoke,
+none can surpass him. The brief, branding lines, with which the
+enemies of God are engraved upon their monuments "more lasting
+than brass," seem to add a glory to damnation. Who can forget how
+that "Simonist" and "Son of Sodom" lifts his hands up out of the
+deepest Pit, and makes "the fig" at God? "Take it, God, for at Thee I
+aim it!" There is a sting of furious blasphemy in this; _personal
+outrage_ that goes beyond all limits.
+
+Yet who is there, but does not feel _glad_ that the "Pistoian" uttered
+what he uttered--out of his Hell--to his Maker?
+
+Is not Newman right when he says that the heart of man does not
+naturally "love God?"
+
+But perhaps in the whole poem nothing is more beautiful than that
+great roll of honor of the unchristened Dead, who make up the
+company of the noble Heathen. Sad, but not unhappy, they walk to
+and fro in their Pagan Hades, and occupy themselves, as of old, in
+discoursing upon philosophy and poetry and the Mystery of Life.
+
+Those single lines, devoted to such names, are unlike anything else
+in literature. That "Caesar, in armour, with Ger-Falcon eyes,"
+challenges one's obeisance as a great shout of his own legionaries,
+while that "Alone, by himself, the Soldan" bows to the dust our
+Christian pride, as the Turbaned Commander of the Faithful, with
+his ghostly crescent blade, strides past, dreaming of the Desert.
+
+It is in touches like these, surely, rather than in the Beatrice scenes
+or the devil scenes, that the poet is most himself.
+
+It needs, perhaps, a certain smouldering dramatic passion, in regard
+to the whole spectacle of human life, to do justice to such lines. It
+needs also that mixture of disdain and humility which is his own
+paramount attribute.
+
+And the same smouldering furnace of "reverence" characterizes
+Dante's use of the older literatures. No writer who has ever lived has
+such a dramatic sense of the "great effects" in style, and the ritual of
+words.
+
+That passage, _"Thou_ art my master and my author. It is from
+_thee_ I learnt the beautiful style that has done me so much honour,"
+with its reiteration of the rhythmic syllables of "honour," opens up a
+salutary field of aesthetic contemplation. His quotations, too, from
+the Psalms, and from the Roman Liturgy, become, by their
+imaginative inclusion, part of his own creative genius. That "Vexilla
+regis prodeunt Inferni!" Who can hear it without the same thrill, as
+when Napoleonic trumpets heralded the Emperor! In the presence of
+such moments the whole elaboration of the Beatrice Cult falls away.
+That romantic perversion of the sex instinct is but the psychic
+motive force. Once started on his splendid and terrible road, the poet
+forgets everything except the "Principle of Beauty" and the
+"Memory of Great Men." Parallel with these things is Dante's
+passion of reverence for the old historic places--provinces, cities,
+rivers and valleys of his native Italy. Even when he lifts up his voice
+to curse them, as he curses his own Firenze, it is but an inversion of
+the same mood. The cities where men dwelt then took to themselves
+living personalities; and Dante, who in love and hate was Italian of
+the Italians, was left indifferent by none of these. How strange to
+modern ears this thrill of recognition, when one exile, even among
+the dead, meets another, of their common citizenship of "no mean
+city!" Of this classic "patriotism" the world requires a Renaissance,
+that we may be saved from the shallowness of artificial commercial
+Empires. The new "inter-nationalism" is the sinister product of a
+generation that has grown "deracinated," that has lost its roots in the
+soil. It is an Anglo-Germanic thing and opposed to it the proud
+tenacity of the Latin race turns, even today, to what Barres calls the
+"worship of one's Dead."
+
+Anglo-Saxon Industrialism, Teutonic Organization, have their world
+place; but it is to the Latin, and, it may be, to the Slav also, that the
+human spirit must turn in those subtler hours when it cannot "live by
+bread alone."
+
+The modern international empires may obliterate local boundaries
+and trample on local altars. In spite of them, and in defiance of them,
+the soul of an ancient race lives on, its saints and its artists forging
+the urn of its Phoenix-ashes!
+
+Dante himself, dreaming over the high Virgilian Prophecy of a
+World-State, under a Spiritual Caesar, yearned to restore the Pax
+Romana to a chaotic world. Such a vision, such an Orbis Terrarum
+at the feet of Christ, has no element in common with the material
+dominance of modern commercial empires. It much more closely
+resembles certain Utopias of the modern Revolutionary. In its spirit
+it is not less Latin than the traditional customs of the City-States it
+would include. Its real implication may be found in the assimilative
+genius of the Catholic Church, consecrating but not effacing local
+altars; transforming, but not destroying, local pieties. Who can deny
+that this formidable vision answers the deepest need of the modern
+world?
+
+The discovery of some Planetary Synthesis within the circle of
+which all the passionate race cults may flourish; growing not less
+intense but more intense, under the new World-City--this is nothing
+else than what the soul of the earth, "dreaming on things to come"
+may actually be evolving.
+
+Who knows if the new prominence given by the war to Russian
+thought may not incredibly hasten such a Vita Nuova? We know
+that the Pan-Slavic dream, even from the days of Ivan the Terrible,
+has been of this spiritual unity, and it may be remembered that it
+was always from "beyond the Alps" that Dante looked for the
+Liberator. Who knows? The great surging antipodal tides of life lash
+one another into foam. Out of chaos stars are born. And it may be
+the madness of a dream even so much as to speak of "unity" while
+creation seethes and hisses in its terrible vortex. Mockingly laugh
+the imps of irony, while the Saints keep their vigil. Man is a
+surprising animal; by no means always bent on his own redemption;
+sometimes bent on his own destruction!
+
+And meanwhile the demons of life dance on. Dante may build up his
+great triple universe in his great triple rhyme, and encase it in walls
+of brass. But still they dance on. We may tremble at the supreme
+poet's pride and wonder at the passion of his humility--but "the
+damned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind upon the sand!"
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE
+
+There is something pathetic about the blind devotion of humanity to
+its famous names. But how indiscriminate it is; how lacking in
+discernment!
+
+This is, above all, true of Shakespeare, whose peculiar and quite
+personal genius has almost been buried under the weight of popular
+idolatry. No wonder such critics as Voltaire, Tolstoi, and Mr.
+Bernard Shaw have taken upon themselves to intervene. The
+Frenchman's protest was an aesthetic one. The more recent objectors
+have adopted moral and philosophic grounds. But it is the
+unreasoning adoration of the mob which led to both attacks.
+
+It is not difficult to estimate the elements which have gone to make
+up this Shakespeare-God. The voices of the priests behind the Idol
+are only too clearly distinguishable. We hear the academic voice, the
+showman's voice, and the voice of the ethical preacher. They are all
+absurd, but their different absurdities have managed to flow together
+into one powerful and unified convention. Our popular orators
+gesticulate and clamour; our professors "talk Greek;" our ethical
+Brutuses "explain;" and the mob "throw up their sweaty night-caps;"
+while our poor Caesar of Poetry sinks down out of sight, helpless
+among them all.
+
+Charles Lamb, who understood him better than anyone--and who
+loved Plays--does not hesitate to accuse our Stage-Actors of being
+the worst of all in their misrepresentation. He doubts whether even
+Garrick understood the subtlety of the roles he played, and the few
+exceptions he allows in his own age make us wonder what he would
+say of ours.
+
+Finally there is the "Philosophical Shakespeare" of the German
+appreciation, and this we feel instinctively to be the least like the
+original of all!
+
+The irony of it is that the author of Hamlet and the Tempest does not
+only live in a different world from that of these motley exponents.
+He lives in an antagonistic one. Shakespeare was as profoundly the
+enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritan
+squeamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the
+profane crowd. And his melancholy scepticism, with its half-humorous
+assent to the traditional pieties, is at the extremest opposite
+pole from the "truths" of metaphysical reason. The Shakespeare
+of the Popular Revivals is a fantastic caricature. The Shakespeare
+of the College Text-Books is a lean scarecrow. But the Shakespeare
+of the philosophical moralists is an Hob-goblin from whom one flees
+in dismay.
+
+Enjoying the plays themselves--the interpreters forgotten--a
+normally intelligent reader cannot fail to respond to a recognisable
+Personality there, a Personality with apathies and antipathies, with
+prejudices and predilections. Very quickly he will discern the absurd
+unreality of that monstrous Idol, that ubiquitous Hegelian God. Very
+soon he will recognize that in trying to make their poet everything
+they have made him nothing.
+
+No one can read Shakespeare with direct and simple enjoyment
+without discovering in his plays a quite definite and personal
+attitude towards life. Shakespeare is no Absolute Divinity,
+reconciling all oppositions and transcending all limitations. He is not
+that "cloud-capped mountain," too lofty to be scanned, of Matthew
+Arnold's Sonnet. He is a sad and passionate artist, using his bitter
+experiences to intensify his insight, and playing with his humours
+and his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which he
+was doomed to unmask. The best way of indicating the personal
+mood which emerges as his final attitude is to describe it as that of
+the perfectly natural man confronting the universe. Of course, there
+is no such "perfectly natural man," but he is a legitimate lay-figure,
+and we all approximate to him at times. The natural man, in his
+unsophisticated hours, takes the Universe at its surface value, neither
+rejecting the delicate compensations, nor mitigating the cruelty of
+the grotesque farce. The natural man accepts _what is given._ He
+swallows the chaotic surprises, the extravagant accidents, the whole
+fantastic "pell-mell." He accepts, too, the traditional pieties of his
+race, their "hope against hope," their gracious ceremonial, their
+consecration of birth and death. He accepts these, not because he is
+confident of their "truth" but because _they are there;_ because they
+have been there so long, and have interwoven themselves with the
+chances and changes of the whole dramatic spectacle.
+
+He accepts them spontaneously, humorously, affectionately; not
+anxious to improve them--what would be the object of that?--and
+certainly not seeking to controvert them. He reverences this Religion
+of his Race not only because it has its own sad, pathetic beauty, but
+because it has got itself involved in the common burden; lightening
+such a burden here, making it, perhaps, a little heavier there, but
+lending it a richer tone, a subtler colour, a more significant shape. It
+does not trouble the natural man that Religion should deal with "the
+Impossible." Where, in such a world as this, does _that_ begin? He
+has no agitating desire to reconcile it with reason.
+
+At the bottom of his soul he has a shrewd suspicion that it rather
+grew out of the earth than fell from the sky, but that does not
+concern him. It may be based upon no eternal verity. It may lead to
+no certain issue. It may be neither very "useful" or very "moral." But
+it is, at any rate, a beautiful work of imaginative art, and it lends life
+a certain dignity that nothing can quite replace. As a matter of fact,
+the natural man's attitude to these things does not differ much from
+the attitude of the great artists. It is only that a certain lust for
+creation, and a certain demonic curiosity, scourge these latter on to
+something beyond passive resignation.
+
+A Da Vinci or a Goethe accepts religion and uses it, but between it
+and the depths of his own mind remains forever an inviolable film of
+sceptical "white light." This "qualified assent" is precisely what
+excites the fury of such individualistic thinkers as Tolstoi and
+Bernard Shaw. It were amusing to note the difference between the
+"humour" of this latter and the "humour" of Shakespeare. Shaw's
+humour consists in emphasizing the absurdity of human Custom,
+compared with the good sense of the philosopher. Shakespeare's
+humour consists in emphasizing the absurdity of philosophers,
+compared with the good sense of Custom. The one is the humour of
+the Puritan, directed against the ordinary man, on behalf of the
+Universe. The other is the humour of the Artist, directed against the
+Universe, on behalf of the ordinary man.
+
+Shakespeare is, at bottom, the most extreme of Pessimists. He has
+no faith in "progress," no belief in "eternal values," no
+transcendental "intuitions," no zeal for reform. The universe to him,
+for all its loveliness, remains an outrageous jest. The cosmic is the
+comic. Anything may be expected of this "pendant world," except
+what we expect; and when it is a question of "falling back," we can
+only fall back on human-made custom. We live by Illusions, and
+when the last Illusion fails us, we die. After reading Shakespeare,
+the final impression left upon the mind is that the world can only be
+justified as an aesthetic spectacle. To appreciate a Show at once so
+sublime and so ridiculous, one needs to be very brave, very tender,
+and very humorous. Nothing else is needed. "Man must abide his
+going hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all." When
+Courage fails us, it is--"as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
+They kill us for their sport." When tenderness fails us, it
+is--"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace
+from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time." When humour
+fails us, it is--"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me
+all the uses of this world!"
+
+So much for Life! And when we come to Death, how true it is, as
+Charles Lamb says, that none has spoken of Death like Shakespeare!
+And he has spoken of it so--with such an absolute grasp of our
+mortal feeling about it--because his mood in regard to it is the mood
+of the natural man; of the natural man, unsophisticated by false
+hopes, undated by vain assurance. His attitude towards death neither
+sweetens "the unpalatable draught of mortality" nor permits us to let
+go the balm of its "eternal peace." How frightful "to lie in cold
+obstruction and to rot; this sensible warm motion to become a
+kneaded clod!" and yet, "after life's fitful fever," how blessed to
+"sleep well!"
+
+What we note about this mood--the mood of Shakespeare and the
+natural man--is that it never for a moment dallies with philosophic
+fancies or mystic visions. It "thinks highly of the soul," but in the
+natural, not the metaphysical, sense. It is the attitude of Rabelais and
+Montaigne, not the attitude of Wordsworth or Browning. It is the
+tone we know so well in the Homeric poems. It is the tone of the
+Psalms of David. We hear its voice in "Ecclesiastes," and the
+wisdom of "Solomon the King" is full of it. In more recent times, it
+is the feeling of those who veer between our race's traditional hope
+and the dark gulf of eternal silence. It is the "Aut Christus aut Nihil"
+of those who "by means of metaphysic" have dug a pit, into which
+metaphysic has disappeared!
+
+The gaiety and childlike animal spirits of Shakespeare's Comedies
+need not deceive us. Why should we not forget the whips and scorns
+for a while, and fleet the time carelessly, "as they did in the golden
+age?" Such simple fooling goes better with the irresponsibility of
+our fate than the more pungent wit of the moral comedians. The
+tragic laughter which the confused issues of life excite in subtler
+souls is not lacking, but the sweet obliquities of honest clowns carry
+us just as far. Shakespeare loves fools as few have loved them, and it
+is often his humour to put into their mouth the ultimate wisdom.
+
+It is remarkable that these plays should commence with a
+"Midsummer Night's Dream" and end with a "Tempest." In the
+interval the great sombre passions of our race are sounded and
+dismissed; but as he began with Titania, so he ends with Ariel. From
+the fairy forest to the enchanted island; from a dream to a dream.
+With Shakespeare there is no Wagnerian, Euripidean "apologia."
+There is no "Parsifal" or "Bacchanals." From the meaningless tumult
+of mortal passions he returns, with a certain ironic weariness, to the
+magic of Nature and the wonder of youth. Prospero, dismissing his
+spirits "into thin air," has the last word; and the last word is as the
+first: "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is
+rounded with a sleep." The easy-going persons who reluct at the idea
+of a pessimistic Shakespeare should turn the pages of Troilus and
+Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens. What we
+guessed as we read Hamlet and Lear grows a certainty as we read
+these plays.
+
+Here the "gentle Shakespeare" does the three things that are most
+unpardonable. He unmasks virtue; he betrays Woman; and he curses
+the gods. The most intransigent of modern revolutionaries might
+learn a trick or two from this sacred poet. In Lear he puts the very
+voice of Anarchy into the mouth of the King--"Die for adultery?
+No!" "Handy-dandy, which is the Magistrate and which is the
+Thief?" "A dog's obeyed in office."
+
+Have I succeeded in making clear what I feel about the
+Shakespearean attitude? At bottom, it is absolutely sceptical. Deep
+yawns below Deep; and if we cannot read "the writing upon the
+wall," the reason may be that there is no writing there. Having lifted
+a corner of the Veil of Isis, having glanced once into that
+Death-Kingdom where grope the roots of the Ash-Tree whose name is
+Fear, we return to the surface, from Nadir to Zenith, and become
+"superficial"--"out of profundity."
+
+The infinite spaces, as Pascal said, are "frightful." That way
+madness lies. And those who would be sane upon earth must drug
+themselves with the experience, or with the spectacle of the
+experience, of human passion. Within this charmed circle, and here
+alone, they may be permitted to forget the Outer Terror.
+
+The noble spirit is not the spirit that condescends to pamper in itself
+those inflated moods of false optimistic hope, which, springing from
+mere physiological well-being, send us leaping and bounding, with
+such boisterous assurance, along the sunny road. Such pragmatic
+self-deception is an impertinence in the presence of a world like this.
+
+It is a sign of what one might call a philosophically ill-bred nature. It
+is the indecent "gratitude" of the pig over his trough. It is the little
+yellow eye of sanctified bliss turned up to the God who _"must_ be
+in His Heaven" if _we_ are so privileged. This "never doubting
+good will triumph" is really, when one examines it, nothing but the
+inverted prostration of the helot-slave, glad to have been allowed to
+get so totally drunk! It blusters and swaggers, but at heart it is base
+and ignoble. For it is not sensitive enough to feel that the Universe
+_cannot be pardoned_ for the cry of one tortured creature, and that
+all "the worlds we shall traverse" cannot make up for the despair of
+one human child.
+
+To be "cheerful" about the Universe in the manner of these people is
+to insult the Christ who died. It is to outrage the "little ones" over
+whose bodies the Wheel has passed. When Nietzsche, the martyr of
+his own murdered pity, calls upon us to "love Fate," he does not
+shout so lustily. His laughter is the laughter of one watching his
+darling stripped for the rods. He who would be "in harmony with
+Nature." with those "murderous ministers" who, in their blind abyss,
+throw dice with Chance, must be in harmony with the giants of
+Jotunheim, as well as with the lords of Valhalla. He must be able to
+look on grimly while Asgard totters; he must welcome "the Twilight
+of the Gods." To have a mind inured to such conceptions, a mind
+capable of remaining on such a verge, is, alone, to be, intellectually
+speaking, what we call "aristocratic." When, even with eyes like
+poor Gloucester's in the play, we can see "how this world wags," it
+is slavish and "plebeian" to swear that it all "means intensely, and
+means well." It is also to lie in one's throat!
+
+No wonder Shakespeare treats reverently every "superstition," every
+anodyne and nepenthe offered to the inmates of this House of the
+Incurable. Such "sprinkling with holy water," such "rendering
+ourselves stupid," is the only alternative. Anything else is the insight
+of the hero, or the hypocrisy of the preacher!
+
+Has it been realized how curiously the interpreters of Shakespeare
+omit the principal thing? They revel in his Grammar, his History, his
+Biology, his Botany, his Geography, his Psychology and his Ethics.
+They never speak of his Poetry. Now Shakespeare is, above
+everything, a poet. To poetry, over and over again, as our Puritans
+know well, he sacrifices Truth, Morality, Probability, nay! the very
+principles of Art itself.
+
+As Dramas, many of his plays are scandalously bad; many of his
+characters fantastic. One can put one's finger in almost every case
+upon the persons and situations that interested him and upon those
+that did not. And how carelessly he "sketches in" the latter! So far
+from being "the Objective God of Art" they seek to make him, he is
+the most wayward and subjective of all wandering souls.
+
+No natural person can read him without feeling the pulse of extreme
+personal passion behind everything he writes.
+
+And this pulse of personal passion is always expressing itself in
+Poetry. He will let the probabilities of a character vanish into air, or
+dwindle into a wistful note of attenuated convention, when once
+such a one has served his purpose as a reed to pipe his strange tunes
+through. He will whistle the most important personage down the
+wind, lost to interest and identity, when once he has put into his
+mouth his own melancholy brooding upon life--his own imaginative
+reaction.
+
+And so it happens that, in spite of all academic opinion, those who
+understand Shakespeare best tease themselves least over his
+dramatic lapses. For let it be whispered at once, without further
+scruple. As far as _the art of the drama_ is concerned, Shakespeare
+is _shameless._ The poetic instinct--one might call it "epical" or
+"lyrical," for it is both these--is far more dominant in our "greatest
+dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why
+those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially
+"drama since Ibsen," intolerably tiresome, revert again and again to
+Shakespeare. Only absurd groups of Culture-Philistines can read
+these "powerful modern productions" more than once! One knows
+not whether their impertinent preaching, or their exasperating
+technical cleverness is the more annoying.
+
+They may well congratulate themselves on being different from
+Shakespeare. They are extremely different. They are, indeed,
+nothing but his old enemies, the Puritans, "translated," like poor
+Bottom, and wearing the donkey's head of "art for art's sake" in
+place of their own simple foreheads.
+
+Art for art's sake! The thing has become a Decalogue of forbidding
+commandments, as devastating as _those Ten._ It is the new avatar
+of the "moral sense" carrying categorical insolence into the sphere of
+our one Alsatian sanctuary!
+
+I am afraid Shakespeare was a very "immoral" artist. I am afraid he
+wrote as one of the profane.
+
+But what of the Greeks? The Greeks never let themselves go! No!
+And for a sufficient reason. Greek Drama was Religion. It was
+Ritual. And we know how "responsible" ritual must be. The gods
+must have their incense from the right kind of censer.
+
+But you cannot evoke Religion "in vacuo." You cannot, simply by
+assuming grave airs about your personal "taste," or even about the
+"taste" of your age, give it _that consecration._
+
+Beauty? God knows what beauty is. But I can tell you what it is not.
+It is not the sectarian anxiety of any pompous little clique to get
+"saved" in the artistic "narrow path." It is much rather what Stendhal
+called it. But he spoke so frivolously that I dare not quote him.
+
+Has it occurred to you, gentle reader, to note how "Protestant" this
+New Artistic Movement is? Shakespeare, in his aesthetic method, as
+well as in his piety, had a Catholic soul. In truth, the hour has
+arrived when a "Renaissance" of the free spirit of Poetry in Drama is
+required. Why must this monstrous shadow of the Hyperborean
+Ibsen go on darkening the play-instinct in us, like some ugly,
+domineering John Knox? I suspect that there are many generous
+Rabelaisian souls who could lift our mortal burden with oceanic
+merriment, only the New Movement frightens them. They are afraid
+they would not be "Greek" enough--or "Scandinavian" enough.
+Meanwhile the miserable populace have to choose between
+Babylonian Pantomimes and Gaelic Mythology, if they are not
+driven, out of a kind of spite, into the region of wholesome
+"domestic sunshine."
+
+What, in our hearts, we natural men desire is to be delivered at one
+blow from the fairies with weird names (so different from poor
+Titania!), and from the three-thousand "Unities!" What "poetry" we
+do get is so vague and dim and wistful and forlorn that it makes us
+want to go out and "buy clothes" for someone. We veer between the
+abomination of city-reform and the desolation of Ultima Thule.
+
+But Shakespeare is Shakespeare still. O those broken and gasped-out
+human cries, full of the old poignancy, full of the old enchantment!
+Shakespeare's poetry is the extreme opposite of any "cult." It is the
+ineffable expression, in music that makes the heart stop, of the
+feelings which have stirred every Jack and Jill among us, from the
+beginning of the world! It has the effect of those old "songs" of the
+countryside that hit the heart in us so shrewdly that one feels as
+though the wind had made them or the rain or the wayside grass; for
+they know too much of what we tell to none! It is the "one touch of
+Nature." And how they break the rules, these surpassing lines, in
+which the emotions of his motley company gasp themselves away!
+
+It is not so much in the great speeches, noble as these are, as in the
+brief, tragic cries and broken stammerings, that his unapproachable
+felicity is found. "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods
+themselves throw incense." Thick and fast they crowd upon our
+memory, these little sentences, these aching rhythms! It is with the
+flesh and blood of the daily Sacrifice of our common endurance that
+he celebrates his strange Mass. Hands that "smell of mortality," lips
+that "so sweetly were forsworn," eyes that "look their last" on all
+they love, these are the touches that make us bow down before the
+final terrible absolution. And it is the same with Nature. Not to
+Shakespeare do we go for those pseudo-scientific, pseudo-ethical
+interpretations, so crafty in their word-painting, so cunning in their
+rational analysis, which we find in the rest. A few fierce-flung words,
+from the hot heart of an amorist's lust, and all the smouldering magic
+of the noon-day woods takes your breath. A sobbing death-dirge
+from the bosom of a love-lorn child, and the perfume of all the
+"enclosed gardens" in the world shudders through your veins.
+
+And what about the ancient antagonist of the Earth? What about the
+Great Deep? Has anyone, anywhere else, gathered into words the
+human tremor and the human recoil that are excited universally
+when we go down "upon the beached verge of the salt flood, who
+once a day with his embossed froth the turbulent surge doth cover?"
+John Keats was haunted day and night by the simple refrain in Lear,
+"Canst thou not hear the Sea?"
+
+Charming Idyllists may count the petals of the cuckoo-buds in the
+river-pastures; and untouched, we admire. But let old Falstaff, as he
+lies a' dying, "babble o' green fields," and all the long, long thoughts
+of youth steal over us, like a summer wind.
+
+The modern critic, with a philosophic bias, is inclined to quarrel
+with the obvious human congruity of Shakespeare's utterances. What
+is the _use_ of this constant repetition of the obvious truism: "When
+we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools?"
+
+No use, my friend! No earthly use! And yet it is not a premeditated
+reflection, put in "for art's sake." It is the poetry of the pinch of Fate;
+it is the human revenge we take upon the insulting irony of our lot.
+
+But Shakespeare does not always strike back at the gods with bitter
+blows. In this queer world, where we have "nor youth, nor age, but,
+as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both," there come
+moments when the spirit is too sore wounded even to rise in revolt.
+Then, in a sort of "cheerful despair," we can only wait the event.
+And Shakespeare has his word for this also.
+
+Perhaps the worst of all "the slings and arrows" are the intolerable
+partings we have to submit to, from the darlings of our soul. And
+here, while he offers us no false hope, his tone loses its bitterness,
+and grows gentle and solemn.
+
+It is--"Forever and forever, farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again,
+why then 'tis well; if not, this parting was well made." And for the
+Future:
+
+     "O that we knew
+     The end of this day's business ere it comes!
+     But it suffices that the day will end;
+     And then the end is known."
+
+
+
+EL GRECO
+
+The emerging of a great genius into long retarded pre-eminence is
+always attended by certain critical misunderstandings. To a cynical
+observer, on the lookout for characteristic temperamental lapses,
+two recent interpretations of El Greco may be especially
+commended. I mean the _Secret of Toledo,_ by Maurice Barres, and
+an article in the "Contemporary" of April, 1914, by Mr. Aubrey Bell.
+
+Barres--Frenchman of Frenchmen--sets off, with captivating and
+plausible logic, to generalize into reasonable harmlessness this
+formidable madman. He interprets Toledo, appreciates Spain, and
+patronizes Domenico Theotocopoulos.
+
+The _Secret of Toledo_ is a charming book, with illuminating
+passages, but it is too logical, too plausible, too full of the preciosity
+of dainty generalization, to reach the dark and arbitrary soul, either
+of Spain or of Spain's great painter.
+
+Mr. Bell, on the contrary, far from turning El Greco into an
+epicurean cult, drags him with a somewhat heavy hand before the
+footlights of English Idealism.
+
+He makes of him an excuse for disparaging Velasquez, and launches
+into a discourse upon the Higher Reality and the Inner Truth which
+leaves one with a very dreary feeling, and, by some ponderous
+application of spiritual ropes and pulleys, seems to jerk into empty
+space all that is most personal and arresting in the artist.
+
+If it is insulting to the ghostly Toledoan to smooth him out into
+picturesque harmony with Castillian dances, Gothic cloisters and
+Moorish songs, it is still worse to transform him into a rampant
+Idealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to the
+Aesthetics nor to the Idealists. He belongs to every individual soul
+whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and
+sufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle of his tyrannical
+spell.
+
+When, in that dark Toledo Church, one presses one's face against the
+iron bars that separate one from the Burial of Count Orguz, it is
+neither as a Dilettante nor an Idealist that one holds one's breath.
+Those youthful pontifical saints, so richly arrayed, offering with
+slender royal hands that beautiful body to the dust--is their
+mysterious gesture only the rhythm of the secret of Death?
+
+Those chastened and winnowed spectators, with their withdrawn,
+remote detachment--not sadness--are they the initiated sentinels of
+the House of Corruption?
+
+At what figured symbol points that epicene child?
+
+Sumptuous is the raiment of the dead; and the droop of his limbs has
+a regal finality; but look up! Stark naked, and in abandoned
+weakness, the liberated soul shudders itself into the presence of God!
+
+The El Greco House and Museum in Toledo contains amazing
+things. Every one of those Apostles that gaze out from the wall upon
+our casual devotion has his own furtive madness, his own
+impossible dream! The St. John is a thing one can never forget. El
+Greco has painted his hair as if it were literally live flame and the
+exotic tints of his flesh have an emphasis laid upon them that makes
+one think of the texture of certain wood orchids.
+
+How irrelevant seem Monsieur Barres' water-colour sketches of
+prancing Moors and learned Jews and picturesque Visi-Goths, as
+soon as one gets a direct glimpse into these unique perversions! And
+why cannot one go a step with this dreamer of dreams without
+dragging in the Higher Reality? To regard work as mad and
+beautiful as this as anything but individual Imagination, is to insult
+the mystery of personality.
+
+El Greco re-creates the world, in pure, lonely, fantastic arbitrariness.
+
+His art does not represent the secret Truth of the Universe, or the
+Everlasting Movement; it represents the humour of El Greco.
+
+Every artist mesmerizes us into his personal vision.
+
+A traveller, drinking wine in one of those cafes in the crowded
+Zocodover, his head full of these amazing fantasies, might well let
+the greater fantasy of the world slip by--a dream within a dream!
+
+With El Greco for a companion, the gaunt waiter at the table takes
+the form of some incarcerated Don Quixote and the beggars at the
+window appear like gods in disguise.
+
+This great painter, like the Russian Dostoivsky, has a mania for
+abandoned weakness. The nearer to God his heroic Degenerates get,
+the more feverishly enfeebled becomes their human will.
+
+Their very faces--with those retreating chins, retrousse noses, loose
+lips, quivering nostrils and sloping brows--seem to express the
+abandonment of all human resolution or restraint, in the presence of
+the Beatific Vision. Like the creatures of Dostoievsky, they seem to
+plunge into the ocean of the Foolishness of God, so much wiser than
+the wisdom of men!--as divers plunge into a bath.
+
+There is not much attempt among these ecstatics to hold on to the
+dignity of their reason or the reticence of their self-respect. Naked,
+they fling themselves into the arms of Nothingness.
+
+This passionate "Movement of Life," of which Mr. Bell, quoting
+Pater's famous quotation from Heraclitus, makes so much, is, after
+all, only the rush of the wind through the garments of the
+World--Denier, as he plunges into Eternity.
+
+Like St. John of the Cross, El Greco's visionaries pass from the
+Night of the Reason to the Night of the Senses; from the Night of
+the Senses to the Night of Soul; and if this final Night is nothing less
+than God Himself, the divine submersion does not bring back any
+mortal daylight.
+
+Domenico's portraits have a character somewhat different from his
+visions. Here, into these elongated, bearded hermits, into these grave,
+intellectual maniacs, whose look is like the look of Workers in some
+unlit Mine, he puts what he knows and feels of his own identity.
+
+They are diverse masks and mirrors, these portraits, surfaces of deep
+water in various lonely valleys, but from the depths of them rises up
+the shadow of the same lost soul, and they are all ruffled by the
+breath of the same midnight.
+
+The Crucifixion in the Prado, and that other, which, by some freak
+of Providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgrounds
+which carry our imagination very far. Is this primordial ice, with its
+livid steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods make other
+planets than ours--dead planets, without either sun or star? Are these
+the sheer precipices of Chaos, against which the Redeemer hangs, or
+the frozen edges of the grave of all life?
+
+El Greco's magnificent contempt for material truth is a lesson to all
+artists. We are reminded of William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley.
+He seems to regard the human-frame as so much soft clay, upon
+which he can trace his ecstatic hieroglyphs, in defiance both of
+anatomy and nature.
+
+El Greco is the true precursor of our present-day Matissists and
+Futurists. He, as they, has the courage to strip his imagination of all
+mechanical restrictions and let it go free to mould the world at its
+fancy.
+
+What stray visitor to Madrid would guess the vastness of the
+intellectual sensation awaiting him in that quiet, rose-coloured
+building?
+
+As you enter the Museum and pass those magnificent Titians
+crowded so close together--large and mellow spaces, from a more
+opulent world than ours; greener branches, bluer skies and a more
+luminous air; a world through which, naturally and at ease, the
+divine Christ may move, grand, majestic, health-giving, a veritable
+god; a world from whose grapes the blood of satyrs may be
+quickened, from whose corn the hearts of heroes may be made
+strong--and come bolt upon El Greco's glacial northern lights, you
+feel that no fixed objective Truth and no traditional Ideal has a right
+to put boundaries to the imagination of man.
+
+Not less striking than any of these is the extraordinary portrait of
+"Le Roi Ferdinand" in the great gallery at the Louvre.
+
+The artist has painted the king as one grown weary of his difference
+from other men. His moon-white armour and silvery crown show
+like the ornaments of the dead. Misty and wavering, the long
+shadows upon the high, strange brow seem thrown there by the
+passing of all mortal Illusions.
+
+Phantom-like in his gleaming ornaments, a king of Lost Atlantis, he
+waits the hour of his release.
+
+And not only is he the king of Shadows; he is also the king of
+Players, the Player-King.
+
+El Greco has painted him holding two sceptres, one of which,
+resembling a Fool's Bauble, is tipped with the image of a naked
+hand--a dead, false hand--symbol of the illusion of Power. The very
+crown he wears, shimmering and unnaturally heavy, is like the
+crown a child might have made in play, out of shells and sea-weed.
+
+The disenchanted irony upon the face of this figure; that look as of
+one who--as Plato would have us do with kings--has been dragged
+back from Contemplation to the vulgarity of ruling men; has been
+deliberately blent by a most delicate art with a queer sort of fantastic
+whimsicality.
+
+"Le Roi Ferdinand" might almost be an enlarged reproduction of
+some little girl's Doll-King, dressed up in silver tinsel and left out of
+doors, by mistake, some rainy evening.
+
+Something about him, one fancies, would make an English child
+think of the "White Knight" in _Alice Through the Looking Glass,_
+so helpless and simple he looks, this poor "Revenant," propped up
+by Youthful Imagination, and with the dews of night upon his
+armour.
+
+You may leave these pictures far behind you as you re-cross the
+Channel, but you can never quite forget El Greco.
+
+In the dreams of night the people of his queer realm will return and
+surround you, ebbing and flowing, these passionate shadows,
+stretching out vain arms after the infinite and crying aloud for the
+rest they cannot win.
+
+Yes, in the land of dreams we know him, this proud despiser of earth!
+
+From our safe inland retreat we watch the passing of his Dance of
+Death, and we know that what they seek, these wanderers upon the
+wind, is not our Ideal nor our Real, not our Earth or our Heaven, but
+a strange, fairy-like Nirvana, where, around the pools of
+Nothingness, the children of twilight gambol and play.
+
+The suggestive power of genius plays us, indeed, strange tricks. I
+have sometimes fancied that the famished craving in the eyes and
+nostrils of El Greco's saints was a queer survival of that tragic look
+which that earlier Greek, Scopas the Sculptor, took such pains to
+throw upon the eyelids of his half-human amphibiums.
+
+It might even seem to us, dreaming over these pictures as the gusts
+of an English autumn blow the fir branches against the window, as
+though all that weird population of Domenico's brain were tossing
+their wild, white arms out there and emitting thin, bat-like cries
+under the drifting moon.
+
+The moon--one must admit that, at least--rather than the sun, was
+ever the mistress of El Greco's genius. He will come more and more
+to represent for us those vague uneasy feelings that certain
+inanimate and elemental objects have the power of rousing. It is of
+him that one must think, when this or that rock-chasm cries aloud
+for its Demon, or this or that deserted roadway mutters of its
+unreturning dead.
+
+There will always be certain great artists, and they are the most
+original of all who refuse to submit to any of our logical categories,
+whether scientific or ideal.
+
+To give one's self up to them is to be led by the hand into the
+country of Pure Imagination, into the Ultima Thule of impossible
+dreams.
+
+Like Edgar Allan Poe, this great painter can make splendid use of
+the human probabilities of Religion and Science; but it is none of
+these things that one finally thinks, as one comes to follow him, but
+of things more subtle, more remote, more translunar, and far more
+imaginative.
+
+One may walk the streets of Toledo to seek the impress of El
+Greco's going and coming; but the soul of Domenico Theotocopoulos
+is not there.
+
+It is with Faust, in the cave of the abysmal "Mothers."
+
+
+
+MILTON
+
+It is outrageous, the way we modern world-children play with words.
+How we are betrayed by words! How we betray with words! We
+steal from one another and from the spirit of the hour; and with our
+phrases and formulas and talismans we obliterate all distinction. One
+sees the modern god as one who perpetually apologises and explains;
+and the modern devil as one who perpetually apologises and
+explains. Everything has its word-symbol, its word-mask, its
+word-garment, its word-disgrace. Nothing comes out clear into the open,
+unspeakable and inexplicable, and strikes us dumb!
+
+That is what the great artists do--who laugh at our word-play. That is
+what Milton does, who, in the science and art of handling words, has
+never been equalled. Milton, indeed, remains, by a curious fate, the
+only one of the very great poets who has never been "interpreted" or
+"appreciated" or "re-created" by any critical modern. And they have
+left him alone; have been frightened of him; have not dared to slime
+their "words" over him, for the very reason that he is the supreme
+artist in words! He is so great an artist that his creations detach
+themselves from all dimness--from all such dimness as modern
+"appreciation" loves--and stand out clear and cold and "unsympathetic";
+to be bowed down before and worshipped, or left unapproached.
+
+Milton is a man's poet. It would be a strange thing if women loved
+him. Modern criticism is a half-tipsy Hermaphrodite, in love only
+with what is on the point of turning into something else. Milton is
+always himself. His works of art are always themselves. He and they
+are made of the same marble, of the same metal. They are never
+likely to change into anything else! Milton is, like all the greatest
+artists, a man of action. He, so learned in words, in their history, in
+their weight, in their origin, in their evocations; he, the scholar of
+scholars, is a man, not of words, but of deeds. That is why the style
+of Milton is a thing that you can touch with your outstretched
+fingers. It has been hammered into shape by a hand that could grasp
+a sword; it has been moulded into form by a brain that could
+dominate a council-chamber. No wonder we word-maniacs fear to
+approach him. He repels us; he holds us back; he hides his
+work-shop from us; and his art smites us into silent hatred.
+
+For Milton himself, though he is the artist of artists, art is not the
+first thing. It is only the first thing with us because we are life's
+slaves, and not its masters. Art is what we protect ourselves
+with--from life. For us it is a religion and a drug. To Milton it was a
+weapon and a plaything.
+
+Milton was more interested in the struggle of ideas, in the struggle
+of races, in the struggle of immortal principles, in the struggle of
+gods, in the great creative struggle of life and death, than he was
+interested in the exquisite cadences of words or their laborious
+arrangement. A modern artist's heart's desire is to escape from the
+world to some "happy valley" and there, sitting cross-legged, like a
+Chinese Idol, between the myrtle-bushes and the Lotus, to make
+beautiful things in detachment forever, one by one, with no pause or
+pain. Milton's desire was to take the whole round world between his
+hands, with all the races and nations who dwell upon it, and mould
+_that,_ and nothing less, into the likeness of what he believed. And
+in what did he believe, this Lord of Time and Space, this accomplice
+of Jehovah? He believed in Himself. He had the unquestioning,
+unphilosophical belief in himself which great men of action have;
+which the Caesars, Alexanders and Napoleons have, and which
+Shakespeare seems to have lacked.
+
+Milton, though people have been misled into thinking of him as very
+different from that, was, in reality, the incarnation of the
+Nietzschean ideal. He was hard, he was cold, he was contemptuous,
+he was "magnanimous," he "remembered his whip" when he went
+with women, he loved war for its own sake, and he dwelt alone on
+the top of the mountains. To Milton the world presented itself as a
+place where the dominant power, and the dominant interest, was the
+wrestling of will with will. Why need we always fuss ourselves
+about logical _names_? Milton, in reality--in his temperament and
+his mood--was just as convinced of _Will_ being the ultimate secret
+as Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Bergson or the modern Pragmatist.
+Nothing seemed to him noble, or dramatic, or "true," that did not
+imply the struggle to the death of opposing _wills_.
+
+Milton, in reality, is less of a Christian than any European writer,
+since the Gospel appeared. In his heart, like Nietzsche, he regarded
+the binding into one volume of those "Two Testaments" an insult to
+"the great style." He does, indeed, in a manner find a place for Christ,
+but it is the place of one demigod among many other demi-gods; the
+conqueror's place possibly, but still the place of one in a hierarchy,
+not of one alone. It is absurd to quarrel with Milton's deification of
+the Judaic Jehovah. Every man has his own God. The God he _has a
+right to_. And the Jewish Jehovah, after all, is no mean figure. He,
+like Milton, was a God of War. He, like Milton, found Will--human
+and divine Will--the central cosmic fact. He, like Milton, regarded
+Good and Evil, not as universal principles, but as arbitrary
+_commands_, issued by eternal personal antagonists! It is one of the
+absurd mistakes into which our conceptual and categorical minds so
+easily fall--this tendency to eliminate Milton's Theology as mere
+Puritanical convention, dull and uninteresting. Milton's Theology
+was the most _personal creation_ that any great poet has ever dared
+to launch upon--more personal even than the Theology of Milton's
+favourite Greek poet, Euripides.
+
+Milton's feeling for the more personal, more concrete aspects of
+"God" goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. At heart he
+was a savage Dualist, who lapsed occasionally into Pluralism. He
+was, above all, an Individualist of the most extreme kind--an
+Individualist so hard, so positive, so inflexible, that for him nothing
+in the world really mattered except the clash of definite, clear-cut
+Wills, contending against one another.
+
+Milton is the least mystical, the least pantheistic, the least monistic,
+of all writers. That magical sense of the brooding Over-Soul which
+thrills us so in Goethe's poetry never touches his pages. The
+Wordsworthian intimations of "something far more deeply
+interfused" never crossed his sensibility; and, as far as he is
+concerned, Plato might never have existed.
+
+One feels, as one reads Milton, that his ultimate view of the universe
+is a great chaotic battlefield, amid the confused elements of which
+rise up the portentous figures of "Thrones, Dominations,
+Principalities, and Powers," and in the struggle between these, the
+most arbitrary, the most tyrannical, the most despotic, conquers the
+rest, and, planting his creative Gonfalon further in the Abyss than
+any, becomes "God"; the God whose personal and unrestrained
+Caprice creates the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, out of Chaos; and
+Man out of the dust of the Earth. Thus it is brought about that what
+this God _wills_ is "Good," and what his strongest and most
+formidable antagonist wills is "Evil." Between Good and Evil there
+is no eternal difference, except in the eternal difference between the
+conquering Personality of Jehovah and the conquered Personality of
+Lucifer. So, far from it being true that Milton is the dull transcriber
+of mere traditional Protestantism, a very little investigation reveals
+the astounding fact that the current popular Evangelical view of the
+origin of things and the drama of things is based, not upon the Bible
+at all, but upon Milton's poem. In this respect he is a true Classic
+Poet--a Maker of Mythology--a Delphic Demiurge.
+
+One of the most difficult questions in the world to answer would be
+the question how far Milton "believed" simply and directly, in the
+God he thus half-created. Probably he did "believe" more than his
+daring, arbitrary "creations" would lead us to suppose. His nature
+demanded positive and concrete facts. Scepticism and mysticism
+were both abhorrent to him; and it is more likely than not that, in the
+depths of his strange cold, unapproachable heart, a terrible and
+passionate prayer went up, day and night, to the God of Isaac and
+Jacob that the Lord should not forget his Servant.
+
+The grandeur and granite-like weight of Milton's learning was fed
+by the high traditions of Greece and Rome; but, in his heart of hearts,
+far deeper than anything that moved him in Aeschylus or Virgil, was
+the devotion he had for the religion of Israel, and the Fear of Him
+who "sitteth between the Cherubims." It is often forgotten, amid the
+welter of modern ethical ideals and modern mystical theosophies,
+how grand and unique a thing is this Religion of Israel--a religion
+whose God is at once Personal and Invisible. After all, what do we
+know? A Prince of Righteousness, a King of Sion, a Shepherd of his
+People--such a "Living God" as David cries out upon, with those
+dramatic cries that remain until today the most human and tragic of
+all our race's wrestling with the Unknown--is this not a Faith quite
+as "possible" and far more moving, than all the "Over-Souls" and
+"Immanent All's Fathers" and "Streams of Tendency" which have
+been substituted for it by unimaginative modern "breadth of mind"?
+It is time that it was made clear that the alternative at present for all
+noble souls is between the reign of "crass Casuality" and the reign of
+Him "who maketh the clouds His chariot and walketh upon the
+wings of the wind." Those who, "with Democritus, set the world
+upon Chance" have a right to worship their Jesus of Nazareth, and,
+in him, the Eternal Protest against the Cruelty of Life. But if Life is
+to be deified, if Life is to be "accepted," if Life is to be worshipped;
+if Courage, not Love, be the secret of the cosmic system, then let us
+call aloud upon it, under personal and palpable symbols, in the old
+imaginative, _poetic_ way, rather than fool ourselves with thin
+mysticities, vague intuitions, and the "sounding brass" of "ethical
+ideals"!
+
+The earlier poems of Milton are among the most lovely in the
+English language. Lycidas is, for those who understand what poetry
+means, the most lovely of all. There is nothing, anywhere, quite like
+this poem. The lingering, elaborate harmonies, interrupted in pause
+after pause, by lines of reverberating finality; and yet, sweetly,
+slowly leading on to a climax of such airy, lucid calm--it is one's
+"hope beyond hope" of what a poem should be.
+
+The absence of vulgar sentiment, the classic reserve, the gentle
+melancholy, the delicate gaiety, the subtle interweaving of divine,
+rhythmic cadences, the ineffable lightness of touch, as of cunning
+fingers upon reluctant clay; is there anything in poetry to equal these
+things? One does not even regret the sudden devastating apparition
+of that "two-handed engine at the door." For one remembers how
+wickedly, how mercilessly, the beauty of life is even now being
+spoiled by these accursed "hirelings"--and now, as then, "nothing
+said."
+
+The Nativity Hymn owes half the charm of its easy, natural grace to
+the fact that the victory of Mary's infant son over the rest is treated
+as if it were the victory of one pagan god over another--the final
+triumph being to him who is the most "gentle" and "beautiful" of all
+the gods. In the famous argument between the Lady and her
+Tempter, in Comus, we have an exquisite example of the sweet,
+grave refinement of virginal taste which shuns grossness as "a false
+note." The doctrine of Comus--if so airy a thing can be supposed to
+have a doctrine--is not very different from the doctrine of Marius the
+Epicurean. One were foolish to follow the bestial enchanter; not so
+much because it is "wrong" to do so, as because, then, one would
+lose the finer edge of that heavenly music which turns the outward
+shape "to the soul's essence."
+
+Milton's Sonnets occupy a place by themselves in English Literature,
+and they may well be pondered upon by those who think that the
+relinquishing of the "old forms" makes it easier to express one's
+personality. It makes it, as a matter of fact, much harder, just as the
+stripping from human beings of their characteristic "outer garments"
+makes them so dreadfully, so devastatingly, alike! Nothing could be
+more personal than a Miltonic Sonnet. The rigid principles of form,
+adhered to so scrupulously in the medium used, intensify, rather
+than detract from, his individualistic character. That Miltonic wit, so
+granite-like and mordant, how well it goes with the magical
+whispers that "syllable men's names"!
+
+All Milton's personal prejudices may be found in the Sonnets, from
+his hatred of those frightful Scotch appellations that would "make
+Quintlian gasp" to his longing for Classic companionship and "Attic
+wine" and "immortal notes" and "Tuscan airs"! As one reads on,
+laughing gently at the folly of those who have so misunderstood him,
+one is conscious more and more of that high, cold, clear, lonely
+tenderness, which found so little satisfaction in the sentiment of the
+rabble and still less in the endearments of women! As in the case of
+"sad Electra's poet," his own favorite, it is easy to grow angry about
+his "Misogyny" and take Christian exception to his preference for
+mistresses over wives. It is true that Milton's view of marriage is
+more than "heathen." But one has to remember that in these matters
+of purely personal taste no public opinion has right to intervene.
+When the well-married Brownings of our age succeed in writing
+poetry in the "grand style," it will be time--and, perhaps, not even
+then--to let the dogs of democratic domesticity loose upon this
+austere lover of the classic way.
+
+What a retort was "Paradise Lost" to the lewd revellers who would
+have profaned his aristocratic isolation with howlings and brutalities
+and philistine uproar! Milton despised "priests and kings" from the
+heights of a pride loftier than their own--and he did not love the
+vulgar mob much better. In Paradise Lost he can "feel himself" into
+the sublime tyranny of God, as well as into the sublime revolt of
+Lucifer. Neither the one or other stoops to solicit "popular voices."
+The thing to avoid, as one reads this great poem, are the paraphrases
+from the book of Genesis. Here some odd scrupulousness of
+scholarly conscience seems to prevent him launching out into his
+native originality. But, putting this aside, what majestic
+Pandemoniums of terrific Imagination he has the power to call up!
+The opening Books are as sublime as the book of Job, and more
+arresting than Aeschylus. The basic secrets of his blank verse can
+never be revealed, but one is struck dumb with wonder in the
+presence of this Eagle of Poetry as we attempt to follow him, flight
+beyond flight, hovering beyond hovering, as he gets nearer and
+nearer to the Sun.
+
+It is by single paragraphs, all the same, and by single lines, that I
+would myself prefer to see him judged. Long poems have been
+written before and will be written again, but no one will ever
+write--no one but Dante has ever written--such single lines as one reads
+in Milton. Curiously enough, some of the most staggering of these
+superb passages are interludes and allusions, rather than integral
+episodes in the story, and not only interludes, but interludes in the
+"pagan manner." Second only to those Luciferan defiances, which
+seem able to inspire even us poor worms with the right attitude
+towards Fate, I am tempted to place certain references to Astarte,
+Ashtoreth and Adonis.
+
+     "Astarte, queen of Heaven, with crescent horns,
+     To whose bright Image nightly, by the moon,
+     Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs."
+
+Or of Adonis:
+
+     "Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured
+     The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
+     In amorous ditties all a Summer's day--"
+
+That single line, "Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured," seems
+to me better than any other that could be quoted, to evoke the awe
+and the thrill and the seduction of all true poetry.
+
+Then those great mysterious allusions to the planetary orbits and the
+fixed stars and the primeval spaces of land and sea; what a power
+they have of spreading wide before us the huge horizons of the
+world's edge! Who can forget "the fleecy star that bears Andromeda
+far off Atlantic seas"? Or that phrase about the sailors "stemming
+mightly to the pole"? Or the sudden terror of that guarded Paradisic
+Gate--"with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms"? The same
+extraordinary beauty of single passages may be found in "Paradise
+Regained," a poem which is much finer than many guess. The
+descriptions there of the world-cities, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem,
+have the same classic thrill of reserved awe and infinite reverence
+that some of Dante's lines possess--only, with Milton, the thing is
+longer drawn out and more grandiloquent. Satan's speech about his
+own implacable fatality, "his harbour, and his ultimate repose," and
+that allusion to Our Lord's gentleness, like "the cool intermission of
+a summer's cloud" are both in the manner we love.
+
+It is only, however, when one comes to Samson Agonistes that the
+full power of Milton's genius is felt. Written in a style which the
+devotees of "free verse" in our time would do well to analyse, it is
+the most complete expression of his own individual character that he
+ever attained. Here the Captain of Jehovah, here the champion of
+Light against Darkness, of Pride against Humility, of Man against
+Woman, finds his opportunity and his hour. Out of his blindness, out
+of his loneliness, out of the welter of hedonists and amorists and
+feminists and fantasists who crowded upon him, the great, terrible
+egoist strikes his last blow! No one can read Samson Agonistes
+without being moved, and those who look deepest into our present
+age may well be moved the most! One almost feels as if some great
+overpowering tide of all the brutalities and crudities and false
+sentiments and cunning hypocrisies, and evil voluptuousness, of all
+the Philistias that have ever been, is actually rushing to overwhelm
+us! Gath and Askalon in gross triumph--must this thing be? Will the
+Lord of Hosts lift no finger to help his own? And then the end
+comes; and the Euripidean "messenger" brings the great news! He is
+dead, our Champion; but in his death he slew more than in his life.
+"Nothing is here" for unworthy sorrow; "nothing" that need make us
+"knock the breast;"--"No weakness, no contempt, dispraise or
+blame--nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us in a death
+so noble."
+
+And the end of Samson Agonistes is as the end of Milton's own life.
+Awaited in calm dignity, as a Roman soldier might wait for Caesar's
+word, Death has claimed its own. But let not the "daughters of the
+uncircumsized" triumph! Grandeur and nobility, beauty and heroism,
+live still; and while these live, what matter though our bravest and
+our fairest perish? It only remains to let the thunderbolt, when it
+does fall, find us prepared; find us in calm of mind, "all passion
+spent."
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB
+
+Charles Lamb occupies a very curious position in English literature
+and a very enviable one. He is, perhaps, the most widely known, and
+widely spoken of, of any stylist we possess, and the least understood.
+It was his humour, while living, to create misunderstanding, and he
+creates it still. And yet he is recognized on all sides as a Classic of
+the unapproachable breed. Charles Lamb has among his admirers
+more uninteresting people than any great artist has ever had except
+Thackeray. He has more academic people in his train than anyone
+has ever had except Shakespeare. And more severe, elderly, pedantic
+persons profess to love him than love any other mortal writer.
+
+These people all read Lamb, talk Lamb, quote Lamb, but they do not
+_suggest_ Lamb; they do not "smack," as our ancestors used to say,
+of the true Elia vein.
+
+But the immense humour of the situation does not stop here. Not
+only has this evasive City Clerk succeeded in fooling the "good
+people;" he has fooled the "wicked ones." I have myself in the circle
+of my acquaintance more than half a dozen charming people, of the
+type who enjoy Aubrey Beardsley, and have a mania for Oscar
+Wilde, and sometimes dip into Remy de Gourmont, and not one of
+them "can read" Charles Lamb. He has succeeded in fooling them;
+in making them suppose he is something quite different from what
+he is. He used to tell his friends that every day he felt himself
+growing more "official" and "moral." He even swore he had been
+taken for a Verger or a Church warden. Well, our friends of the
+"enclosed gardens" still take him for a Verger. But he is a more
+remarkable Verger than they dream. As a matter of fact, there were
+some extremely daring and modern spirits in Elia's "entourage,"
+spirits who went further in an antinomian direction than--I devoutly
+pray--my friends are ever likely to go, and these scandalous ones
+adored him. And for his part, he seems to have liked them--more
+than he ought.
+
+It is, indeed, very curious and interesting, the literary fate of Charles
+Lamb. Jocular Bishops, archly toying Rural Deans, Rectors with a
+"penchant" for anecdote, scholarly Canons with a weakness for Rum
+Punch, are all inclined to speak as if in some odd way he was of
+their own very tribe. He had absolutely nothing in common with
+them, except a talent for giving false impressions! With regard to the
+devotion to him which certain gentle and old-fashioned ladies
+have--one's great-aunts, for instance--I am inclined to think that much
+more might be said. There is a quality, a super-refined, exquisite
+quality, and one with a pinch of true ironic salt in it, which the more
+thick-skinned among us sensationalists may easily miss.
+
+It is all very well for us to talk of "burning with a hard gem-like
+flame," when, as a matter of fact, we move along, dull as cave-men,
+to some of the finest aesthetic effects in the world. Not to appreciate
+the humour of that rarest and sweetest of all human types, the
+mischievous-tongued Great-Aunt, is to be nothing short of a profane
+fool.
+
+But Charles Lamb is a very different person from our Goldsmiths
+and Cowpers and Austens, and their modern representatives. It
+needs something else in a Great-Aunt than old-fashioned irony to
+appreciate _him._ It needs an imagination that is very nearly
+"Shakespearean" and it needs a passion for beautiful style of which a
+Flaubert or an Anatole France might be proud.
+
+So here we have the old sly Elia, fooling people now as he fooled
+them in his lifetime, and a riddle both to the godly and the ungodly.
+The great Goethe, whose Walpurgis Night "He-Apes" made Elia put
+out his tongue, read, we learn, with no little pleasure some fantastic
+skit of this incorrigible one. Did he discern--the sublime Olympian--what
+a cunning flute player lurked under the queer mask? "Something
+between a Jew, a Gentleman and an Angel" he liked to fancy
+he looked; and one must confess that in the subtlest of all
+senses of that word, a gentleman he was.
+
+Lamb's "essays" were written at off hours, when he could escape
+from his office. Once completely freed from the necessity of office
+work, his writing lost its magic. His genius was of that peculiarly
+delicate texture which requires the stimulus of reaction. One cannot
+be too grateful that the incomparable Pater, after Lamb himself,
+perhaps, the greatest master of English prose, found it necessary to
+utter his appreciation. Pater, as usual, hits the mark with an infallible
+hand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy which
+darkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him.
+
+It is, of course, this, the sense of one living always on the edge of a
+precipice, that gives such piquancy and charm to Elia's mania for
+"little things." Well might he turn to "little things," when great
+things--his Sun and his Moon--had been turned for him to Blood!
+But, as Pater suggests, there is "Philosophy" in all this, and more
+Philosophy than many suppose. It is unfortunate that the unworldly
+Coleridge and the worldly Thackeray should have both pitched upon
+Lamb's "saintliness" to make copy of. Nothing infuriated him more
+than such a tone towards himself. And he was right to be infuriated.
+His "unselfishness," his "sweetness," of which these good men make
+so much, were only one aspect of the Philosophy of his whole life.
+Lamb was, in his life, a great epicurean philosopher, as, in all
+probability, many other "saints" have been. The things in him that
+fretted Carlyle, his fits of intoxication, his outbursts of capricious
+impishness, his perversity and his irony, were just as much part of
+the whole scheme as were his celibacy and his relation to his sister.
+
+What one can really gather from Lamb is nothing less than a very
+wise and very subtle "way of life," a way that, amid many
+outrageous experiences, will be found singularly lucky.
+
+In the first place, let it be noted, Lamb deliberately cultivates the art
+of "transforming the commonplace." It is as absurd to deny the
+existence of this element--from which we all suffer--as it is to
+maintain that it cannot be changed. It _can_ be changed. That is
+precisely what this kind of rare genius does. It is a miracle, of course,
+but everything in art is a miracle.
+
+Nature tosses out indiscriminately her motley productions, and if
+you are born for such "universalism," you may swallow them
+wholesale. The danger of such a downright manner of going to work
+is that it blunts one's critical sense. If you swallow everything just as
+it is, you _taste_ very little. But Charles Lamb is nothing if not
+"critical," nothing if not an Epicure, and his manner of dealing with
+the "commonplace" sharpens rather than blunts the edge of one's
+taste.
+
+And what is this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribable
+blending of Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle's
+"blackguards," achieves the same synthesis. It is this spiritual
+achievement--at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph--that
+makes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really great man.
+The Wordsworths and Coleridges who patronized him were too
+self-opiniated and individualistic to be able to enter into either
+tradition.
+
+Wordsworth is neither a Christian or a Pagan. He is a moral
+philosopher. Elia is an artist, who understands the _importance of
+ritual_ in life--but of naturalness in ritual.
+
+How difficult, whether as a thinker or a man, is it to be natural in
+one's loves and hates! How many quite authoritative Philistines
+never really let the world know how Bohemian at heart they are!
+And how much of our modern "artistic feeling" is a pure affectation!
+Now, whatever Elia was not, he was wantonly, wickedly, whimsically
+natural.
+
+He never concealed his religious feelings, his superstitious feelings.
+He never concealed his fancies, his fads, his manias, his vices. He
+never concealed his emotion when he felt a thrill of passionate faith.
+He never concealed it when he felt a thrill of blasphemous doubt.
+
+He accepted life's little pleasures as they appeared, and did not
+hesitate to make "cults" of the ones that appeared most appealing. If
+he had Philistine feelings, he indulged them without shame. If he
+had recondite and "artistic" feelings, he indulged them also without
+shame. He is one of the few great men not afraid to be un-original,
+and hence he is the most original of all. "I cannot," says he, "sit and
+think. Books think for me." Well, books did "think for him," for he
+managed to press the books of the great poets into his service, as no
+mortal writer has ever dared to do before. And he could do it
+without impairing his originality, because he was as original as the
+great poets he used. We say deliberately "poets," for, as Pater points
+out, to find Lamb's rivals in sheer imaginative genius, we have to
+leave the company of those who write prose.
+
+Do the humorous ecclesiastics and scholarly tutors who profess to
+understand Elia ever peep into that Essay called "Witches," or that
+other Essay called "A Child-Angel"? There are things here that are
+written for a very different circle. Certain sentences in
+"Dream-children," too, have a beauty that takes a natural man's breath
+completely away. Touches of far-off romance, terrible and wistful as
+"anonymous ballads," alternate with gestures of Rabelaisian humour,
+such as generous souls love. Elia's style is the only thing in English
+prose that can be called absolutely perfect. Compared with the rich,
+capricious, wilful, lingering by the way of Lamb's manner, Pater's is
+precise, demure and over-grave, Wilde's fantastic and over-provocative,
+Ruskin's intolerably rhetorical.
+
+Into what other prose style could the magic of Shakespeare's "little
+touches" be drawn, or the high melancholy of Milton's imagery be
+led, without producing a frightful sense of the incongruous? He can
+quote them both--or any other great old master--and if it were not
+for the "inverted commas" we should not be aware of the insertion.
+
+Elia cannot say anything, not the simplest thing, without giving it a
+turn, a twist, a lift, a lightness, a grace, that would redeem the very
+grease-spots on a scullion's apron!
+
+There is no style in the world like it. Germany, France, Italy, Russia
+have no Charles Lamb. Their Flauberts and D'Annunzios belong to a
+different tribe. Even Turgenieff, just because he has to "get on with
+his story" cannot do precisely this.
+
+Every single one of the "essays" and most of the "letters" can be
+read over and over again, and their cadences caressed as if they were
+living people's features. And they are living. They are as living as
+those Japanese Prints so maddening to some among us, or as the
+drawings of Lionardo. They also--in their place--are "pure line" to
+use the ardent modern slang, and unpolluted "imaginative
+suggestion."
+
+The mistake our "aesthetes" made, these lovers of Egyptian dancers
+and Babylonian masks, is that they suppose the simplicity of Lamb's
+subjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He
+can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead
+Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and the
+shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking
+evasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things he
+can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a
+curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish
+art-neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in Elia.
+One wonders if they have ever felt the remote translunar beauty that
+common faces and old, dim, pitiful things can wear sometimes. It
+would seem not. Like Herod the Tetrarch, they must have "Peacocks
+whose crying calls the rain, and the spreading of their tails brings
+down the Moon;" they must have "opals that burn with flame as cold
+as ice" and onyxes and amber and the tapestries of Tyre, The pansies
+that "are for thoughts" touch them not and the voices of the
+street-singers leave them cold.
+
+It is precisely the lack of natural kindly humour in these people, who
+must always be clutching "cameos from Syracuse" between their
+fingers, which leads them, when the tension of the "gem-like flame"
+can be borne no more, into sheer garishness and brutality. One
+knows it so well, that particular tone; the tone of the jaded amorist,
+for whom "the unspeakable rural solitudes" and "the sweet security
+of streets" mean, both of them, boredom and desolation.
+
+It is not their subtlety that makes them thus suffer; it is their lack of
+it. What? Is the poignant world-old play of poor mortal men and
+women, with their absurdities and excesses, their grotesque reserves
+and fantastic confessions, their advances and withdrawals, not
+_interesting_ enough to serve? It serves sufficiently; it serves well
+enough, when genius takes it in hand. Perhaps, after all, it is _that_
+which is lacking.
+
+Charles Lamb went through the world with many avoidances, but
+one thing he did not avoid--the innocence of unmitigated foolishness!
+He was able to give to the Simple Simons of this life that
+Rabelaisian touch of magnanimous understanding which makes
+even the leanest wits among us glow. He went through the world
+with strange timidities and no daring stride. He loitered in its
+by-alleys. He drifted through its Bazaars. He sat with the crowd in its
+Circuses. He lingered outside its churches. He ate his "pot of honey"
+among its graves. And as he went his way, irritable and freakish,
+wayward and arbitrary, he came, by chance, upon just those
+side-lights and intimations, those rumours and whispers, those figures
+traced on sand and dust and water, which, more than all the Law and
+the Prophets, draw near to the unuttered word.
+
+
+
+DICKENS
+
+It is absurd, of course, to think that it is necessary to "hold a brief"
+for Dickens. But sometimes, when one comes across charming and
+exquisite people who "cannot read him," one is tempted to give
+one's personal appreciation that kind of form.
+
+Dickens is one of the great artists of the world, and he is so, in spite
+of the fact that in certain spheres, in the sphere of Sex, for instance,
+or the sphere of Philosophy, he is such a hopeless conventionalist. It
+is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desire
+to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a
+great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a
+mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst
+foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal is seriously
+handicapped.
+
+Yet, given this "lacuna," this amazing "gap" in his work, a
+deprivation much more serious than his want of "philosophy,"
+Dickens is a writer of colossal genius, whose originality and vision
+puts all our modern "literateurs" to shame. One feels this directly
+one opens any volume of his. Only a great creative genius could so
+dominate, for instance, his mere "illustrators," as to mesmerize them
+completely into his manner. And certainly his illustrators are
+_drugged_ with the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely
+persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to
+suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer
+and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style of their
+author?
+
+Remembering my "brief" and the sort of jury, among my friends, I
+have to persuade, I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out into
+panegyrics upon Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff
+and Betsy Trotwood and Bill Sikes and Dick Swiveller and Bob
+Sawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge. The
+mere mention of these names, which, to some, would suggest the
+music of the spheres, to others would suggest forced merriment,
+horrible Early Victorian sentiment, and that sort of hackneyed
+"unction" of sly moral elders, which is youth's especial Hell. Much
+wiser were it, as it seems to me, to indicate what in Dickens--in his
+style, his method, his vision, his art--actually appeals to one
+particular mind. I think it is to be found in his childlike Imagination.
+Now, the modern cult for children has reached such fantastic limits
+that one has to be very careful when one uses that word. But
+Dickens is childlike, not as Oscar Wilde--that Uranian Baby--or as
+Paul Verlaine--that little "pet lamb" of God--felt themselves to be
+childlike, or as the artificial-minded Robert Louis Stevenson fooled
+his followers into thinking him. He is really and truly childlike. His
+imagination and vision are literally the imagination and vision of
+children. We have not all played at Pirates and Buccaneers. We have
+not all dreamed of Treasure-Islands and Marooned sailors. We have
+not all "believed in Fairies." These rather tiresome and over-rung-upon
+aspects of children's fancies are, after all, very often nothing
+more than middle-aged people's damned affectations. The children's
+cult at the present day plays strange tricks.
+
+But Dickens, from beginning to end, has the real touch, the authentic
+reaction. How should actual and living children, persecuted by
+"New Educational Methods," glutted with toys, depraved by
+"understanding sympathy," and worn out by performances of "Peter
+Pan," believe--really and truly--in fairies any more? But, in spite of
+sentimental Child-worshippers, let us not hesitate to whisper: "It
+doesn't matter in the least if they don't!" The "enlightened" and
+cultivated mothers, who grow unhappy when they find their darlings
+cold to Titania and Oberon and to the more "poetic" modern fairies,
+with the funny names, may rest in peace. If the house they inhabit
+and the street they inhabit be not sanitarized and art-decorated
+beyond all human interest, they may let their little ones alone. They
+will dream their dreams. They will invent their games. They will
+talk to their shadows. They will blow kisses to the Moon. And all
+will go well with "the Child in the House," even if he has not so
+much as even heard of "the Blue Bird"!
+
+If these uncomfortably "childlike" people read Dickens, they would
+know how a child really does regard life, and perhaps they would be
+a little shocked. For it is by no means only the "romantic" and
+"aesthetic" side of things that appeals to children. They have their
+nightmares, poor imps, and such devils follow them as older people
+never dream of. Dickens knew all that, and in his books the thrill of
+the supernatural, as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots and
+pans, is never far away. It lurks, that repelling-alluring Terror, in a
+thousand simple places. It moves in the darkness of very modern
+cupboards. It hides in the recesses of very modern cellars. It pounces
+out from the eaves of quite modern attics. It is there, halfway up the
+Staircase. It is there, halfway down the Passage. And God knows
+whither it comes or where it goes!
+
+To endow the little every-day objects that surround us--a certain
+picture in a certain light, a certain clock or stove in a certain shadow,
+a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it--with the
+fetish-magic of natural "animism"; that is the real childlike trick, and
+that is what Dickens does. It is, of course, something not confined to
+people who are children in years. It is the old, sweet Witch-Hag,
+Mystery, that, sooner or later, has us all by the throat!
+
+And that is why, to me, Dickens is so great a writer. Since men have
+come to live so much in cities; since houses and streets and rooms
+and passages and windows and basements have come to mean more
+to them than fields and woods, it is essential that "the Old Man
+covered with a Mantle," the Ancient of Ancients, the Disturber of
+Rational Dreams, should move into the town, too, and mutter and
+murmur in its shadows!
+
+How hard a thing is it, to put into words the strange attraction and
+the strange terror which the dwellings of mortal men have the power
+of exciting! To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wander
+through its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, empty
+churches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by its
+Prison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in some
+tall house--the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer--surely
+there is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the things
+one sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors and
+shutter-chinks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of men
+upon earth are past finding out, and their madness beyond
+interpretation!
+
+It is not only children--and yet it is children most of all--who get the
+sense, in a weird, sudden flash, of the demonic life of inanimate
+things. Why are our houses so full of things that one had better not
+look at, things that, like the face of Salome, had better be seen in
+mirrors, and things that must be forbidden to look at us? The houses
+of mortal men are strange places. They are sepulchres and
+cemeteries. Dungeons are they, and prison cells. Not one of them
+but have murderous feet going up and down. Not one of them but
+have lavisher's hands, fumbling, back and forth, along the walls. For
+the secret wishes, and starved desires, and mad cravings, and furious
+revolts, of the hearts of men and women, living together decently in
+their "homes," grow by degrees palpable and real and gather to
+themselves strange shapes.
+
+No writer who has ever lived can touch Dickens in indicating this
+sort of familiar sorcery and the secret of its terror. For it is children,
+more than any, who are conscious how "haunted" all manner of
+places and things are. And people themselves! The searching
+psychologists are led singularly astray. They peer and pry and repine,
+and all the while the real essence of the figure lies in its momentary
+expression--in its most superficial gesture.
+
+Dickens' world is a world of gnomes and hob-goblins, of ghouls and
+of laughing angels. The realist of the Thackeray School finds
+nothing but monstrous exaggeration here--and fantastic mummery.
+If he were right, par-dieu! If his sleek "reality" were all that there
+was--"alarum!" We were indeed "betrayed"! But no; the children are
+right. Dickens is right. Neither "realist" or "psychologist" hits the
+mark, when it comes to the true diablerie of living people. There is
+something more whimsical, more capricious, more _unreal,_ than
+philosophers suppose about this human pantomime. People are
+actually--as every child knows--much worse and much better than
+they "ought" to be. And, as every child knows, too, they tune their
+souls up to the pitch of their "masks." The surface of things is the
+heart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head,
+the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of the
+mad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. People _think_ with their
+bodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments are
+words, tones, whispers, in their general Confession.
+
+The world of Dickens' fantastic creations is all the nearer to the truth
+of our life because it is so arbitrary and "impossible." He seems to
+go backwards and forwards with a torch, throwing knobs, jags,
+wrinkles, corrugations, protuberancies, cavities, horns, and snouts
+into terrifying illumination. But we are like that! That is what we
+actually are. That is how the Pillar of Fire sees us. Then, again, are
+we to limit our interest, as these modern writers do, to the beautiful
+people or the interesting people or the gross, emphatic
+people. Dickens is never more childlike than when he draws us,
+wonderingly and confidingly, to the stark knees of a Mrs. Pipchin,
+or when he drives us away, in unaccountable panic-terror, from the
+rattling jet-beads of a Miss Murdstone.
+
+Think of the vast, queer, dim-lighted world wherein live and move
+all those funny, dusty, attenuated, heart-breaking figures, of such as
+wear the form of women--and yet may never know "love"! It is
+wonderful--when you think of it--how much of absorbing interest is
+left in life, when you have eliminated "sex," suppressed
+"psychology," and left philosophy out! Then appear all those queer
+attractions and repulsions which are purely superficial, and even
+material, and yet which are so dominant. Mother of God! How
+unnecessary to bring in Fairies and Blue Birds, when the solemnity
+of some little seamstress and her sorceress hands, and the quaint
+knotting of her poor wisp of hair, would be enough to keep a child
+staring and dreaming for hours upon hours!
+
+Life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest. One never
+knows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hamadryad one may
+encounter. And the little ways of all one's scrabbling and burrowing
+and chuckling and nodding and winking house-mates! To go
+through the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner or
+later. But one need only cross one's threshold to find one adventure--the
+adventure of a new, unknown fellow-creature, full of suspicion,
+full of cloudy malice, full of secretive dreams, and yet ready to
+respond--poor devil--to a certain kind of signal!
+
+Long reading of Dickens' books, like long living with children, gives
+one a wholesome dread of cynicism and flippancy. Children's games
+are more serious than young men's love-affairs, and they must be
+treated so. It is not exactly that life is to be "taken seriously." It is
+to be taken for what it is--an extraordinary Pantomime. The people
+who will not laugh with Pierrot because his jokes are so silly, and
+the people who will not cry with Columbine because her legs are so
+thin, may be shrewd psychologists and fastidious artists--but, God
+help them! they are not in the game.
+
+The romance of city-life is one thing. The romance of a particular
+city leads us further. Dickens has managed to get the inner identity
+of London; what is permanent in it; what can be found nowhere else;
+as not even Balzac got hold of Paris. London is terrible and ghastly.
+One knows that; but the wretchedest of its "gamins" knows that it is
+something else also. More than any place on earth it seems to have
+that weight, that mass, that depth, that foursquare solidity, which
+reassures and comforts, in the midst of the illusions of life. It
+descends so far, with its huge human foundations, that it gives one
+the impression of a monstrous concrete Base, sunk into eternity,
+upon which, for all its accumulated litter and debris, man will be
+able to build, perhaps has begun already, to build, his Urbs Beata.
+And Dickens entered with dramatic clairvoyance into every secret of
+this Titanic mystery. He knew its wharfs, its bridges, its viaducts, its
+alleys, its dens, its parks, its squares, its churches, its morgues, its
+circuses, its prisons, its hospitals, and its mad-houses. And as the
+human atoms of that fantastic, gesticulating, weeping, grinning
+crowd of his dance their crazy "Carmagnole," we cannot but feel
+that somehow we _must_ gather strength and friendliness enough to
+applaud such a tremendous Performance.
+
+Dickens was too great a genius to confine his demonic touch to the
+town alone. There are _suggestions_ of his, relating to country roads
+and country Inns and country solitudes, like nothing else, except,
+perhaps, the Vignettes of Bewick. He carries the same "animism"
+into this also. And he notes and records sensations of the most
+evasive kind. The peculiar terror we feel, for instance, mixed with a
+sort of mad pity, when by chance we light upon some twisted
+root-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. The
+vague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of a
+lonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, or
+tumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that in
+some weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy,
+are feelings that Dickens alone among writers seems to understand.
+A road with no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there;
+with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; a pool by the edge of a wide
+marsh-land--like the marsh-land in "Great Expectations"--with I
+know not what reflected in it, and waiting, always waiting, for
+something that does not come; a low, bent, knotted pine-tree, over
+which the ravens fly, one by one, shrieking; these are the things that
+to some people--to children, for instance--remain in the mind when
+all else of their country journey is forgotten.
+
+There is no one but Dickens who has a style that can drag these
+things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at
+the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At
+other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an
+old man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunders
+like ten thousand drunken devils. At other times it breaks into
+wistful, tender, little-girl sobs--and catches the rhythm of poetry--as
+in the death of Nell. Sometimes a character in Dickens will say
+something so humorously pregnant, so directly from what we hear in
+street and tavern, that art itself "gives up," and applauds, speechless.
+
+After all, it is meet and right that there should be one great author,
+undistracted by psychology--unseduced by eroticism. There remain
+a few quite important things to deal with, when these are removed!
+Birth, for instance--the mystery of birth--and the mystery of death.
+One never forgets death in reading Dickens. He has a thought, a pity,
+for those things that once were men and women, lying, with their six
+feet of earth upon them, in our English Churchyards, so horribly still,
+while the mask of their sorrow yields to the yet more terrible grin of
+our mortality's last jest.
+
+And to the last he is--like all children--the lover of Players. Every
+poor dog of Public Entertainer, from the Barrel-Organ man to him
+who pulls the ropes for Punch and Judy, has his unqualified
+devotion. The modern Stage may see strange revolutions, some of
+them by no means suitable to children--but we need not be alarmed.
+There will always remain the larger Stage, the stage of man's own
+Exits and Entrances; and there, at any rate, while Dickens is their
+"Manager," Pierrot may weep and dance, and Pierrette dance and
+weep, knowing that they will not be long without their audience, or
+long without their applause!
+
+He was a vulgar writer. Why not? England would not be England--and
+what would London be?--if we didn't have a touch, a smack, a
+sprinkling of that ingredient!
+
+He was a shameless sentimentalist. Why not? It is better to cry than
+to comb one's hair all day with an ivory comb.
+
+He was a monstrous melodramatist. Why not? To be born is a
+melodrama. To play "hide-and-seek" with Death is a melodrama.
+And some have found melodramatic satisfaction in letting
+themselves be caught. All the World's a Puppet-Show, and if the Big
+Showman jerks his wires so extravagantly, why should not the Little
+Showman do the same?
+
+
+
+GOETHE
+
+As the enigmatic wisdom of Goethe been exhausted--after these
+years--and after the sudden transits across our sky of more flashing
+meteors? Ah! I deem not yet. Still he holds the entrance to the
+mysterious Gate, over the portals of which is written, not "Lasciate
+ogni speranza!" but "Think of Living!" A thunder-rifted heart he
+bears, but victory, not defeat, looks forth from his wide, outward-gazing
+eyes! One hand holds the skull, engraved with all the secret
+symbols of man's ascent out of the bosom of Nature; engraved,
+yes!--by all the cunningest tools of Science and her unwearied research;
+but the other, raised aloft, noble and welcoming, carries the laurel
+crown of the triumph of Imagination!
+
+So, between Truth and Poetry--"im ganzen guten, schonen,"--stands
+our Lord of Life!
+
+Exhausted, the wisdom of Goethe? Ah, no!--hardly fathomed yet, in
+its uppermost levels! If it were really possible to put into words the
+whole complex world of impressions and visions, of secrets and
+methods, which that name suggests, one would be a wiser disciple
+than Eckermann. Fragment by fragment, morsel by morsel, the great
+Figure limns itself against the shadow of the years.
+
+Is it too presumptuous a task to seek to evoke--taking first one
+impression of him and then another, first one reaction and then
+another--what this mysterious Name has come to mean for us? One
+hears the word "cosmic" whispered. It is whispered too often in
+these days. But "cosmic," with its Whitmanesque, modern
+connotation, does not exactly fit Goethe. Goethe did not often
+abandon himself in Dionysian fury to the ultimate Elements. When
+he did--in his earlier youth--before the hardening process of his
+Italian Journey had sealed his protection from such romantic lapses--it
+was not quite in the strained, desperate, modern manner. One feels
+certain, thinking of what he was, at Frankfurt, at Leipsig, at
+Strassburg, at Weimar, that he always kept a clear, cool, Apollonian
+head, mad and amorous though his escapades may seem!
+
+I do not fancy that ever once did Goethe really "give himself away,"
+or lose the foursquare solidity of his balance in any wild staggering
+to left or right. No; the Goethean temper, the Goethean attitude,
+cannot be described as "cosmic," while that word implies a certain
+complete yielding to a vague earth-worship. There was nothing
+vague about Goethe's _intimacy,_ if I may put it so, with the Earth.
+He and It seemed destined to understand one another most
+_serenely,_ in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy!
+
+The Goethean attitude to the Universe is too self-poised and
+self-centered to be adequately rendered by any word that suggests
+complete abandonment. It is too--what shall I say?--too sly and
+_demonic_--too much _inside_ the little secrets of the great Mother--to
+be summed up in a word that suggests a sort of Titanic whirlwind
+of embraces. And yet, on the other hand, it is quite as easy to
+exaggerate the Olympian aspect of Goethe. When this is carried too
+far, something in him, something extraordinarily characteristic,
+evaporates, like a thin stream of Parnassian smoke.
+
+How shall I express what this is? Perhaps it is the _German_ in him.
+For, in spite of all Nietzsche's Mediterraneanizing of this Superman,
+Goethe was profoundly and inveterately German. The Rhine-Maidens
+rocked him in his cradle and, though he might journey to
+Rome or Troy or Carthage, it was to the Rhine-Maidens that he
+returned. Yes, I do not think that those understand him best who
+keep bowing to the ground and muttering "Olympian"!
+
+Am I carrying this particular taper-light of discrimination too far
+when I say that there is, to the Celtic mind at least, something
+humorously naive and childlike in Goethe, mixed in, queerly enough,
+with all his rich, mellow, and even worldly, wisdom? One overtakes
+him, now and then, and catches him, as it were, off his guard, in
+little pathetic lapses into a curious simplicity--a simplicity grave-eyed,
+portentious and solemn--almost like that of some great Infant-Faun,
+trying very seriously to learn the difficult syllables of our
+human "Categorical Imperative"! World-child, as he was, the magic
+of the universe pouring through him, one sometimes feels a strange,
+dim hope with regard to that dubious general Issue, when we find
+him so confident about the presence of the mysterious Being he
+worshipped; and so transparently certain of his personal survival
+after Death!
+
+There is no one, except Leonardo Da Vinci, in the whole history of
+our Planet, who gives us quite that sense of a person possessed of
+some secret illumination not granted to the rest of the world. There
+is much reassurance in this. More than has been, perhaps, realized.
+For it is probable that "in his caves of ice," Leonardo also felt
+himself indestructible by the Arch-Enemy. One thinks of those
+Cabalistic words of old Glanville, "Man does not yield himself to
+Death--save by the weakness of his mortal Will."
+
+Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock-strata;
+Goethe visiting Botanical Gardens and pondering on the Metamorphosis
+of Plants; Goethe climbing Strassburg Cathedral-Spire; Goethe
+meeting the Phantom of Himself as he returned from the arms
+of Frederika; Goethe "experiencing the sensation" of crossing
+the "Firing-Line"; Goethe "announcing" to Eckermann that
+that worthy man had better avoid undertaking any "great" literary
+work; Goethe sending Frau von Stein sausages from his breakfast-table;
+Goethe consoling himself in the Storm by observing his birth-star
+Lucifer, and thinking of the Lake of Galilee, are pictures of
+noble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the Comedy of
+Living!
+
+How vividly returns to me--your pardon, reader!--the first time I
+read "The Sorrows of Werter" in that little "Three-penny" edition
+published by Messrs. Cassell! It was in a Barge, towed by three
+Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the
+County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a
+set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a
+ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them--this is twenty-five
+years ago, reader!--a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand--and
+teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered--as the
+friendly mists rose--under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern.
+Where is that girl now, I wonder? Is she alive? Will she ever blush
+with anger at being thus gently lifted up, from beneath the kind
+Somersetshire mists, into an hour's publicity? Who can tell? We are
+all passing one another, in mist-darkened barges, swift or slow. She
+is a wraith, a shadow, a receding phantom; but I wave my hand to
+her over the years! I shall always associate her with Lotte; and I
+never smell the peculiar smell of Tarpaulin without thinking of "the
+Sorrows of Werter."
+
+"Werter" has certainly the very droop and bewilderment of youth's
+first passion. It is good to plunge one's hands, when one has grown
+cynical and old, into that innocent, if somewhat turbid, fountain.
+When we pass to "Wilhelm Meister," we are in quite a different
+world. The earlier part of this book has the very stamp of the
+Goethean "truth and poetry." One can read it side by side with the
+great "Autobiography" and find the shrewd insight and oracular
+wisdom quite equally convincing in the invention and the reality.
+What an unmistakable and unique character all these imaginary
+persons of Goethe's stories have! They are so different from any
+other persons in fiction! Wherein does the difference lie? It is hard
+to say. In a sense, they are more life-like and real. In another sense,
+they are more fantastic. Sometimes they seem mere dolls--like the
+figures in his own puppet-show--and we can literally "see the
+puppets dallying."
+
+Jarno is a queer companion for a man to have. And what of the lady
+who, when she was asked whether she had ever loved, answered,
+"never or always"? Phillina is a very loving and an extremely
+vivacious wench. Goethe's sublime unconsciousness of ordinary
+moral qualms is never better observed than in the story of this
+extravagant young minx. Then, in the midst of it all, the arresting,
+ambiguous little figure of poor Mignon! What does she do--a child
+of pure lyrical poetry--a thing out of the old ballads--in this queer,
+grave, indecent company? That elaborate description of Mignon's
+funeral so carefully arranged by the Aesthetic "Uncle," has it not all
+the curious qualities of the Goethean vein--its clairvoyant insight
+into the under-truth of Nature--its cold-blooded pre-occupation with
+"Art"--its gentle irony--its mania for exact detail? The "gentle irony"
+of which I speak has its opportunity in the account of the "Beautiful
+Soul" or "Fair Saint." It reads, in places, like the tender dissection of
+a lovely corpse by a genial, elderly Doctor.
+
+But the passage which, for me, is most precious is that Apprentice's
+"Indenture." I suppose in no other single paragraph of human prose
+is there so much concentrated wisdom. "To act is easy--to think is
+hard!" How extraordinarily true that is! But it is not the precise tune
+of the strenuous preachers of our time! The whole idea of the
+"Pedagogic Province," ruled over by that admirable Abbe, is so
+exquisitely in Goethe's most wise and yet most simple manner! The
+passage about the "Three Reverences" and the "Creed" is as good an
+instance of that sublime Spinozistic way of dealing with the current
+religion as that amazing remark he made once to Eckerman about
+his own faith: "When I want scientific unity, I am a Pantheist. When
+I desire poetical multifariousness, I am a Polytheist. And when my
+moral nature requires a Personal God--_there is room for That
+also?"_
+
+When one comes to speak of Faust, it is necessary for us to
+remember the words the great man himself used to his follower
+in speaking of this masterpiece. Eckermann teased him for
+interpretations. "What," said he to Goethe, "is the leading Idea in the
+Poem?" "Do you suppose," answered the Sage, "that a thing into
+which I have put the Life-Blood of all my days is able to be
+summoned up in anything so narrow and limited as an Idea?"
+
+Personally, I do not hesitate to say that I think Faust is the most
+permanently _interesting_ of all the works that have proceeded from
+the human brain.
+
+Its attitude to life is one which ultimately has more to strengthen and
+sustain and put courage--if not the Devil--into us than anything I
+know. When I meet a man who shall tell me that the Philosophy of
+his life is the Philosophy of Faust, I bow down humbly before him. I
+did meet such a man once. I think he was a Commercial Traveller
+from Buffalo.
+
+How wisely Goethe deals in Faust with the problem--if it be a
+problem--of Evil! His suggestion seems to be that the spirit of Evil
+in the world--"part of that Nothing out of which came the All"--plays
+an absolutely essential role. "By means of it God fulfils his
+most cherished purposes." Had Faust not seduced poor little
+Gretchen, he would never have passed as far as he did along the
+road of Initiation, and the spirit of his Victim--in her translunar
+Apotheosis--would not have been _there_ to lift him Heavenwards
+at the last. And yet no one could say that Goethe disparages the
+enormity of Faust's crime. That ineffable retort of Mephistopheles,
+when, on those "black horses," they are whirled through the night to
+her dungeon, "She is not the first," has the essence of all pity and
+wrath in its cruel sting. Mephistopheles himself is the most
+interesting of all Devils. And he is so because, although he knows
+perfectly well--queer Son of Chaos as he is--that he is bound to be
+defeated, he yet goes on upon his evil way, and continues to resist
+the great stream of Life which, according to his view, had better
+never have broken loose from primeval Nothingness.
+
+That is ultimately Goethe's contribution to the disputes about what
+we call "God." The name does not matter. "Feeling is all in all. The
+name is sound and smoke." "God," or "the Good," is to Goethe
+simply the eternal stream of life, working slowly upwards, onwards,
+to unknown goals. All that opposes itself to this Life-stream is evil.
+Morality, a man-made local convention, is our present blundering
+method of assisting this great Force, and preventing its sterility, or
+dissipation. In his conception of the nature of this Life-stream
+Goethe is more Catholic and more subtle than Nietzsche.
+
+_Self-realization?_ Certainly! That is an aspect of it which was not
+likely to be forgotten by the great Egoist whose sole object, as he
+confessed, was to "build up the Pyramid of his Existence" from the
+broadest possible base. But not only self-realization. The "dying to
+live" of the Christian, as well as "the rising above one's body" of the
+Platonist, have their part there. Ascetism itself, with all its degrees
+of passionate or philosophical purity, is as much an evocation of the
+world-spirit--of the essential nature of the System of Things--as is
+the other.
+
+It is, of course, ultimately, quite a mad hope to desire to _convert_
+"the Spirit that Denies." He, too, under the Lord, is an accomplice of
+the Life-stream. He helps it forward, even while he opposes himself
+to it, just as a bulwark of submerged rocks make the tide leap
+landward with more foaming fury!
+
+Goethe's idea of the "Eternal Feminine" leading us "upward and on"
+is not at all the sentimental nonsense which Nietzsche fancied it. In a
+profound sense it is absolutely true. Nor need the more anti-feminist
+among us be troubled by such a Truth. We have just seen that the
+Devil himself is a means, and a very essential means, for leading us
+"upward and on."
+
+Goethe is perfectly right. The "love of women," though a destructive
+force, and a frightful force as far as certain kinds of "art" and
+"philosophy" are concerned, cannot be looked upon as anything but
+"a provocation to creation," when the whole large scheme of
+existence is taken into account.
+
+I think myself that it is easy to make too much of Goethe's
+Pantheism. The Being he worshipped was simply "Whatever
+Mystery" lies behind the ocean of Life. And if no "mystery" lies
+behind the ocean of life,--very well! A Goethean disciple is able,
+then, to worship Life, with no mystery behind it! It is rather the
+custom among clever, tiresome people to disparage that _second
+part of Faust,_ with its world-panoramic procession of all the gods
+and demi-gods and angels and demons that have ever visited this
+earth. I do not disparage it. I have never found it dull. Dull would he
+be, as "the fat weed that rots itself in case on Lethe's wharf," who
+found nothing curious and provocative about these Sirens and
+Centaurs and Lemures and Larvae and Cabiri and Phorkyads! I can
+myself endure very pleasantly even the society of those "Blessed
+Boys" which some have found so distressing. As for the Devil, in
+the end, making "indecent overtures" to the little Heavenly
+Butterflies, who pelt him with roses--even that does not confuse my
+mind or distract my senses. It is the "other side of the Moon"--the
+under-mask of the world-comedy, and the incidental "saving" of Dr.
+Faust is not more essential in the great mad game!
+
+Read Faust, both portions of it, dear reader, and see if you do not
+feel, with me, that, in the last resort, one leaves this rich, strange
+poem with a nobler courage to endure life, and a larger view of its
+amazing possibilities!
+
+I wonder if that curious novel of Goethe's called the "Elective
+Affinities" is perused as widely as it deserves? That extraordinary
+company of people! And the patient, portentious interest Goethe
+compels us to take in the laying out of gardens and the beautifying
+of church-yards! "The Captain," "the Architect"--not to speak of the
+two bewildering women--do they not suggest fantastic figures out of
+one's memories of remotest childhood? I suppose to a world-child
+like Goethe, watching, with grave super-human interest, all our little
+pre-occupations, we have all of us something of the sweet pedantry
+of these people--we are all of us "Captains" and "Architects" with
+some odd twist in our quiet heads.
+
+The solemn immorality, amounting to outrageous indecency, of
+those scenes between the assorted lovers when they make "double"
+love, and behind the mask of their legitimate attachments follow
+their "elective affinities," is a thing that may well stagger the puritan
+reader. The puritan reader will, indeed, like old Carlyle, be tempted
+more than once to fling these grave, unblushing chronicles, with
+their deep, oracular wisdom and their shameless details, into the
+dust-heap. But it were wiser to refrain. After all, one cannot conceal
+from one's self that things are _like that_--and if the hyaena's howl,
+from the filthy marshes of earth's weird edge and the thick saliva on
+his oozing jaws, nauseates our preciosity, and besmirches our
+self-esteem, we must remember that this is the way the Lord of "the
+Prologue in Heaven" has willed that the scavengers of life's
+cesspools go about their work!
+
+Probably it will not be the "indecency" of certain things in Goethe
+that will most offend our modern taste; it will be that curious, grave
+pre-occupation of his, so objective and stiff, with artistic details, and
+architectural details, and theatrical details!
+
+One must remember his noble saying, "Earnestness alone makes life
+Eternity" and that other "saying" about Art having, as its main
+purpose, the turning of the "Transitory" into the "Permanent"! If the
+Transitory is really to be turned into the Permanent, we must take
+ourselves and our work very seriously indeed!
+
+And such "seriousness," such high, patient, unwearied seriousness,
+is, after all, Goethe's bequest to our flippant and fanciful generation.
+He knows well enough our deepest doubt, our most harrowing
+scepticism. He has long ago "been through all that." But he has
+"returned"--not exactly like Nietzsche, with a fierce, scornful,
+dramatic cry, to a contemptuous "superficiality"--he has returned to
+the actual possibilities that the world offers, "superficial" and
+otherwise, of turning the whole strange business into a solid,
+four-square "work of art." We must reject "evil," quietly and ironically;
+not because it is condemned by human morality, but because "we
+have our work to do"! We must live in "the good" and "the true," not
+because it is our "duty" so to do, but because only along this
+particular line does the "energy without agitation" of the "abysmal
+mothers" communicate itself to our labour.
+
+And so we come back, like the grief-stricken children over Mignon's
+grave, to Life and Life's toil. There only, in the inflexible
+development of what taste, of what discernment, of what power, of
+what method, of what demonic genius, we may have been granted
+by the gods, lies "the cosmic secret." That is all we have in our
+human hands, that malleable stuff out of which Fate made us--and
+only in the shrewd, unwearied use of that shall we prove our love to
+the Being "who cannot love us in return" and make our illusion of
+Free-Will part of his universal Purpose!
+
+
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD
+
+It is easy to miss the especial grandeur of Matthew Arnold's work.
+The airy persiflage of his prose--its reiterated lucidities--pleasing to
+some, irritating to others, will have a place, but not a very important
+place, in English Literature. Even those magical and penetrating
+"aphorisms" with which he has held the door open to so many
+religious and moral vistas tease us a little now, and--suggestive
+enough in their hour--do not deepen and deepen upon the intellect
+with the weight of "aphorisms" from Epictetus or Goethe.
+
+The "stream of tendency that makes for righteousness" runs a little
+shallow, and it has so many pebbles under its clear wave! That word
+of his, "the Secret of Jesus," wears best of all. It was a happy
+thought to use the word "secret"--a thought upon which those whose
+religious creed binds them to "the method" rather than "the secret,"
+may well ponder!
+
+As a critic, too, though illuminating and reassuring, he is far from
+clairvoyant. A quaint vein of pure, good-tempered, ethical
+_Philistinism_ prevents his really entering the evasive souls of
+Shelley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he is
+more at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in their
+simple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of critical
+metempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, who
+loves his friend." In fact, when one compares him, as a sheer
+illuminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizes
+at once how easily a quite great man may "render himself stupid" by
+sprinkling himself with the holy water of Fixed Principles!
+
+No, it is neither of Arnold, the Theological Free-Lance, or of Arnold,
+the Critic of Literature, that I want to speak, but of Arnold, the Poet.
+
+Personally I hold the opinion that he was a greater poet than either
+Tennyson or Browning. His philosophy is a far nobler, truer, and
+more permanent thing than theirs, and there are passages and single
+lines in his poetry which over-top, by enormous distances, anything
+that they achieved.
+
+You ask me what the Philosophy of Matthew Arnold was? It is easy
+to answer that. It was the philosophy of all the very greatest among
+mortal men! In his poetry he passes completely out of the region of
+Theological argument, and his attitude to life is the attitude
+of Sophocles and Virgil and Montaigne and Cervantes and
+Shakespeare and Goethe. Those who read Matthew Arnold, and love
+him, know that his intellectual tone is the tone of those great
+classical writers, and his conclusions their conclusions.
+
+He never mocks our pain with foolish, unfounded hopes and he
+never permits mad despair to paralyse him. He takes life as it is, and,
+as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here
+"as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and
+flight, where ignorant armies clash by night," we can at least be
+"true to one another."
+
+One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energetic
+teachers of youth that there is only one intellectual attitude towards
+life, only one philosophy, only one ultimate mood. This is that mood
+of "resignation," which, from Homer to Matthew Arnold, is alone
+adapted, in the long run, to the taste of our days upon earth.
+
+The real elements of our situation have not altered in the remotest
+degree since Achilles dragged Hector round the walls of Troy.
+
+Men and women still love and hate; still "enjoy the sun" and "live
+light in the Spring"; still "advance true friends and beat back
+dangerous foes"--and upon them the same Constellations look down;
+and upon them the same winds blow; and upon them the same
+Sphinx glides through the obscurity, with the same insoluble
+Question.
+
+Nothing has really changed. The "river of time" may pass through
+various landscapes, but it is the same river, and, at the last, it brings
+to us, as "the banks fade dimmer away" and "the stars come out"
+"murmurs and scents" of the same infinite Sea. Yes, there is only
+one Philosophy, as Disraeli said, jesting; and Matthew Arnold,
+among the moderns, is the one who has been allowed to put it into
+his poetry. For though, before the "Flamantia Moenia" of the world's
+triple brass, we are fain to bow our heads inconsolably, there come
+those moments when, a hand laid in ours, we think we know "the
+hills whence our life flows"!
+
+The flowing of the river of life--the washing of the waves of
+life--how well one recalls, from Arnold's broken and not always musical
+stanzas, references to that sound--to the sound so like the sound of
+those real sea-tides that "Sophocles, long ago, heard in the
+Aegaean," and listened, thinking of many things, as we listen and
+think of many things today!
+
+     "For we are all like swimmers in the Sea,
+     Poised on the top of a huge wave of Fate,
+     And whether it will lift us to the land
+     Or whether it will bear us out to Sea,
+     Back out to Sea, to the dark gulfs of Death,
+     We know not--
+     Only the event will teach us, in its hour."
+
+I sometimes think that a certain wonderful blending of realism and
+magic in Matthew Arnold's poetry has received but scant justice.
+
+In "The Forsaken Merman" for instance, there are many stanzas that
+make you smell the salt-foam and imagine all that lies, hidden and
+strange, down there upon the glittering sand. That line,
+
+     "Where great whales go sailing by
+     Round the world for ever and aye,"
+
+has a liberating power that may often recur, when one is, God knows,
+far enough from the spouting of any whale! And the whole poem
+has a wistful, haunting beauty that never grows tedious.
+
+Matthew Arnold is a true classical poet. It is strictly in accordance
+with the authentic tradition to introduce those touches of light,
+quaint, playful, airy realism into the most solemn poetry. It is what
+Virgil, Catullus, Theocritus, Milton, Landor, all did. Some persons
+grow angry with him for a certain tone of half-gay, half-sad, allusive
+tenderness, when he speaks of Oxford and the country round Oxford.
+I do not think there is anything unpleasing in this. So did Catullus
+talk of Sirmio; Horace of his Farm; Milton of "Deva's wizard-stream";
+Landor of Sorrento and Amalfi.
+
+It is all of a piece with the "resignation" of a philosophy which does
+not expect that this or that change of dwelling will ease our pain; of
+a philosophy that naturally loves to linger over familiar well-sides
+and roadways and meadow-paths and hillsides, over the places
+where we went together, when we "still had Thyrsis."
+
+The direct Nature-poetry of Matthew Arnold, touching us with the
+true classic touch, and yet with something, I know not what, of more
+wistful tenderness added, is a great refreshment after the pseudo-magic,
+so vague and unsatisfying, of so much modern verse.
+
+     "It matters not. Light-comer he has flown!
+     But we shall have him in the sweet spring days,
+     With whitening hedges and uncrumpling fern,
+     And blue-bells trembling by the forest ways,
+     And scent of hay new-mown--"
+
+Or that description of the later season:
+
+     "Too quick despairer! Wherefore wilt thou go?
+     Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
+     Soon shall we have gold-dusted Snapdragon,
+     Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell,
+     And Stocks, in fragrant blow.
+     Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
+     And open Jasmin-muffled lattices,
+     And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
+     And the pale Moon and the white Evening-Star."
+
+True to the "only philosophy," Matthew Arnold is content to
+indicate how for each one of us the real drama of life goes on with a
+certain quite natural, quite homely, quite quiet background of the
+strip of earth where we first loved and dreamed, and were happy,
+and were sad, and knew loss and regret, and the limits of man's
+power to change his fate.
+
+There is a large and noble calm about the poetry of this writer which
+has the effect upon one of the falling of cool water into a dark,
+fern-fringed cave. He strips away lightly, delicately, gently, all the
+trappings of our feverish worldliness, our vanity and ambition, and
+lifts open, at one touch, the great moon-bathed windows that look
+out upon the line of white foam--and the patient sands.
+
+And never is this calm deeper than when he refers to Death. "For
+there" he says, speaking of that Cemetery at Firenze where his
+Thyrsis lies;
+
+     "For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep
+     The morningless and unawakening sleep,
+     Under the flowery Oleanders pale--"
+
+Sometimes, as in his "Tristram and Iseult," he is permitted little
+touches of a startling and penetrating beauty; such as, returning to
+one's memory and lips, in very dusty and arid places, bring all the
+tears of half-forgotten romance back again to us and restore to us the
+despair that is dearer than hope!
+
+Those lines, for instance, when Tristram, dying in his fire-lit,
+tapestried room, tended by the pale Iseult of Brittany, knows that his
+death-longing is fulfilled, and that she, his "other" Iseult, has come
+to him at last--have they not the very echo in them of what such
+weariness feels when, only not too late, the impossible happens?
+Little he cares for the rain beating on the roof, or the moan of the
+wind in the chimney, or the shadows on that tapestried wall! He
+listens--his heart almost stops.
+
+     "What voices are those in the still night air?
+     What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"
+
+One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves, that strange
+fragmentary unrhymed poem, called "the Strayed Reveller," with its
+vision of Circe and the sleeping boy-faun, and the wave-tossed
+Wanderer, and its background of "fitful earth-murmurs" and
+"dreaming woods"--Strangely down, upon the weary child, smiles
+the great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin, and
+the berries in his hair. The thing is slight enough; but in its coolness,
+and calmness, and sad delicate beauty, it makes one pause and grow
+silent, as in the long hushed galleries of the Vatican one pauses and
+grows silent before some little known, scarcely-catalogued Greek
+Vase. The spirit of life and youth is there--immortal and tender--yet
+there too is the shadow of that pitiful "in vain," with which the
+brevity of such beauty, arrested only in chilly marble, mocks us as
+we pass!
+
+It is life--but life at a distance--Life refined, winnowed, sifted,
+purged. "Yet, O Prince, what labour! O Prince, what pain!" The
+world is perhaps tired of hearing from the mouths of its great lonely
+exiles the warning to youth "to sink unto its own soul," and let the
+mad throngs clamour by, with their beckoning idols, and treacherous
+pleading. But never has this unregarded hand been laid so gently
+upon us as in the poem called "Self-Dependence."
+
+Heaven forgive us--we cannot follow its high teaching--and yet we
+too, we all, have felt that sort of thing, when standing at the prow of
+a great ship we have watched the reflection of the stars in the
+fast-divided water.
+
+     "Unaffrightened by the silence round them
+     Undistracted by the sights they see
+     These demand not that the world about them
+     Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.
+     But with joy the stars perform their shining
+     And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll;
+     For self-poised they live; nor pine with noting
+     All the fever of some differing soul."
+
+The "one philosophy" is, as Matthew Arnold himself puts it,
+"utrumque paratus," prepared for either event. Yet it leans, and how
+should it not lean, in a world like this, to the sadder and the more
+final. That vision of a godless universe, "rocking its obscure body to
+and fro," in ghastly space, is a vision that refuses to pass away. "To
+the children of chance," as my Catholic philosopher says, "chance
+would seem intelligible."
+
+But even if it be--if the whole confluent ocean of its experiences
+be--unintelligible and without meaning; it remains that mortal men
+must endure it, and comfort themselves with their "little pleasures."
+The immoral cruelty of Fate has been well expressed by Matthew
+Arnold in that poem called "Mycerinus," where the virtuous king
+_does not_ receive his reward. He, for his part will revel and care
+not. There may be nobler, there may be happier, ways of awaiting
+the end--but whether "revelling" or "refraining," we are all waiting
+the end. Waiting and listening, half-bitterly, half-eagerly, seems the
+lot of man upon earth! And meanwhile that
+
+          --"Power, too great and strong
+     Even for the gods to conquer or beguile,
+     Sweeps earth and heaven and men and gods along
+     Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile
+     And the great powers we serve, themselves must be
+     Slaves of a tyrannous Necessity--"
+
+Matthew Arnold had--and it is a rare gift--in spite of his peaceful
+domestic life and in spite of that "interlude" of the "Marguerite"
+poems--a noble and a chaste soul. "Give me a clean heart, O God,
+and renew a right spirit within me!" prayed the Psalmist. Well! this
+friend of Thyrsis had "a clean heart" and "a right spirit"; and these
+things, in this turbulent age, have their appeal! It was the purging of
+this "hyssop" that made it possible for him even in the "Marguerite"
+poems, to write as only those can write whose passion is more than
+the craving of the flesh.
+
+     "Come to me in my dreams and then
+     In sleep I shall be well again--
+     For then the night will more than pay
+     The hopeless longing of the day!"
+
+It was the same chastity of the senses that made it possible for him
+to write those verses upon a young girl's death, which are so much
+more beautiful--though _those_ are lovely too--than the ones Oscar
+Wilde wrote on the same subject.
+
+     "Strew on her, roses, roses,
+     But never a spray of yew;
+     For in silence she reposes--
+     Ah! would that I did too!
+     Her cabined ample spirit
+     It fluttered and failed for breath.
+     Tonight it doth inherit
+     The vasty halls of death."
+
+Matthew Arnold is one of the poets who have what might be called
+"the power of Liberation." He liberates us from the hot fevers of our
+lusts. He liberates us from our worldliness, our perversions, our mad
+preoccupations. He reduces things to their simple elements and
+gives us back air and water and land and sea. And he does this
+without demanding from us any unusual strain. We have no need to
+plunge into Dionysian ecstacies, or cry aloud after "cosmic
+emotion."
+
+We have no need to relinquish our common sense; or to dress or eat
+or talk or dream, in any strange manner. It is enough if we remember
+the fields where we were born. It is enough if we do not altogether
+forget out of what quarter of the sky Orion rises; and where the
+lord-star Jupiter has his place. It is enough if we are not quite
+oblivious of the return of the Spring and the sprouting of the
+first leaves.
+
+From the poetry of Matthew Arnold it is possible to derive an art of
+life which carries us back to the beginnings of the world's history.
+He, the civilized Oxonian; he, domestic moralist; he, the airily
+playful scholar, has yet the power of giving that _Epic solemnity_ to
+our sleep and our waking; to our "going forth to our work arid our
+labour until the evening"; to the passing of the seasons over us;
+which is the ground and substance of all poetic imagination, and
+which no change or progress, or discovery, can invade or spoil.
+
+For it is the nature of poetry to heighten and to throw into relief
+those eternal things in our common destiny which too soon get
+overlaid--And some things only poetry can reach--Religion may
+have small comfort for us when in the secret depths of our hearts we
+endure a craving of which we may not speak, a sickening aching
+longing for "the lips so sweetly forsworn." But poetry is waiting for
+us, there also, with her Rosemary and her Rue. Not one human heart
+but has its hidden shrine before which the professional ministrants
+are fain to hold their peace. But even there, under the veiled Figure
+itself, some poor poetic "Jongleur de Notre Dame" is permitted to
+drop his monk's robe, and dance the dance that makes time and
+space nothing!
+
+
+
+SHELLEY
+
+One of the reasons why we find it hard to read the great poets is that
+they sadden us with their troubling beauty. Sadden us--and put us to
+shame! They compel us to remember the days of our youth; and that
+is more than most of us are able to bear! What memories! Ye gods,
+what memories!
+
+And this is true, above all, of Shelley. His verses, when we return to
+them again, seem to have the very "perfume and suppliance" of the
+Spring; of the Spring of our frost-bitten age. Their sweetness has a
+poignancy and a pang; the sweetness of things too dear; of things
+whose beauty brings aching and a sense of bitter loss. It is the
+sudden uncovering of dead violets, with the memory of the soil they
+were plucked from. It is the strain of music over wide waters--and
+over wider years.
+
+These verses always had something about them that went further
+than their actual meaning. They were always a little like planetary
+melodies, to which earthly words had been fitted. And now they
+carry us, not only beyond words, but beyond thought,--"as doth
+Eternity." There is, indeed, a sadness such as one cannot bear long
+"and live" about Shelley's poetry.
+
+It troubles our peace. It passes over the sterility of our poor comfort
+like a lost child's cry. It beats upon the door. It rattles the shut
+casement. It sobs with the rain upon the roof. This is partly because
+Shelley, more than any poet, has entered into the loneliness of the
+elements, and given up his heart to the wind, and his soul to the
+outer darkness. The other poets can _describe_ these things, but he
+_becomes_ what they are. Listening to him, we listen to them. And
+who can bear to listen to them? Who, in cold blood, can receive the
+sorrows of the "many waters"? Who can endure while the heavens,
+that are "themselves so old," bend down with the burden of their
+secret?
+
+Not to "describe," but to share the life, or the death-in-life, of the
+thing you write of, that is the true poetic way. The "arrowy odours"
+of those first white violets he makes us feel, darting forth from
+among the dead leaves, do they leave us content with the art of their
+description? They provoke us with their fine essence. They trouble
+us with a fatality we have to share. The passing from its "caverns of
+rain" of the newborn cloud--we do not only follow it, obedient to the
+spell of rhetoric; we are whirled forward with it, laughing at its
+"cenotaph" and our own, into unimagined aerial spaces. One feels all
+this and more under Shelley's influence--but alas! as soon as one has
+felt it, the old cynical, realistic mood descends again, "heavy as
+frost," and the vision of ourselves, poor, straggling, forked animals,
+caught up into such regions, shows but as a pantomimic farce; and
+we awake, shamed and clothed, and in our "right mind!"
+
+With some poets, with Milton and Matthew Arnold, for example,
+there is always a kind of implicit sub-reference, accompanying the
+heroic gesture or the magical touch, to our poor normal humanity.
+With others, with Tennyson or Browning, for instance, one is often
+rather absurdly aware of the worthy Victorian Person, behind the
+poetic mask, "singing" his ethical ditty--like a great, self-conscious
+speckled thrush upon a prominent bough.
+
+But with Shelley everything is forgotten. It is the authentic fury, the
+divine madness; and we pass out of ourselves, and "suffer a
+sea-change into something rich and strange." Into something "strange,"
+perhaps, rather than something "rich"; for the temperament of
+Shelley, like that of Corot, leads him to suppress the more glowing
+threads of Nature's woof; leads him to dissolve everything in filmy
+white light; in the light of an impossible dawn. Has it been noticed
+how all material objects dissolve at his touch, and float away, as
+mists and vapours? He has, it seems, an almost insane predilection
+for _white_ things. White violets, white pansies, white wind-flowers,
+white ghosts, white daisies and white moons thrill us, as we read,
+with an almost unearthly awe. White Death, too; the shadow of
+white Corruption, has her place there, and the appalling whiteness of
+lepers and corpses. The liturgy he chants is the liturgy of the White
+Mass, and the "white radiance" of Eternity is his Real Presence.
+
+Weird and fantastic though Shelley's dreams may appear, it is more
+than likely that some of them will be realized before we expect it.
+His passionate advocacy of what now is called "Feminism," his
+sublime revolutionary hopes for the proletariat, his denunciation of
+war, his arraignment of so-called "Law" and "Order," his indictment
+of conventional Morality, his onslaughts on outworn Institutions, his
+invectives against Hypocrisy and Stupidity, are not by any means
+the blind Utopian rhetoric that some have called them. That crafty
+slur upon brave new thought which we know so well--that
+"how-can-you-take-him-seriously" attitude of the "status-quo"
+rascals--must not mislead us with regard to Shelley's philosophy.
+
+He is a genuine philosopher, as well as a dreamer. Or shall we say
+he is the only kind of philosopher who _must_ be taken seriously--the
+philosopher who creates the dreams of the young?
+
+Shelley is, indeed, a most rare and invaluable thinker, as well as a
+most exquisite poet. His thought and his poetry can no more be
+separated than could the thought and poetry of the Book of Job. His
+poetry is the embodiment of his thought, its swift and splendid
+incarnation.
+
+Strange though it may seem, there are not very many poets who
+have the particular kind of _ice-cold intellect_ necessary if one is to
+detach one's self completely from the idols of the market-place.
+Indeed, the poetic temperament is only too apt, out of the very
+warmth of its sensitive humanity, to idealize the old traditions and
+throw a glamour around them. That is why, both in politics and
+religion, there have been, ever since Aristophanes, so many great
+reactionary poets. Their warmth of human sympathy, their "nihil
+alienum" attitude; nay! their very sense of humour, have made this
+inevitable. There is so often, too, something chilly and "unhomely,"
+something pitiless and cruel, about quite rational reform, which
+alienates the poetic mind. It must be remembered that the very thing
+that makes so many objects poetical--I mean their _traditional
+association_ with normal human life--is the thing that _has to be
+destroyed_ if the new birth is to take place. The ice-cold austerity of
+mind, indicated in the superb contempt of the Nietzschean phrase,
+"human, too human," is a mood essential, if the world is to cast off
+its "weeds outworn." Change and growth, when they are living and
+organic, imply the element of destruction. It is easy enough to talk
+smoothly about natural "evolution." What Nature herself does, as we
+are beginning to realize at last, is to advance by leaps and bounds.
+One of these mad leaps having produced the human brain, it is for us
+to follow her example and slough off another Past. Man is _that
+which has to be left behind!_ We thus begin to see what I must be
+allowed to call the essential inhumanity of the true prophet. The
+false prophet is known by nothing so easily as by his crying "peace"--his
+crying, "hands off! enough!"
+
+It is tragic to think how little the world has changed since Shelley's
+time, and how horribly relevant to the present hour are his outcries
+against militarism, capitalism and privilege. If evidence were
+wanted of the profound moral value of Shelley's revolutionary
+thought, one has only to read the proclamations of any international
+school of socialistic propaganda, and find how they are fighting now
+what he fought then. His ideas have never been more necessary than
+they are today. Tolstoi has preached some of them, Bernard Shaw
+others, and Mr. Wells yet others. But none of our modern rebels
+have managed to give to their new thought quite the comprehensiveness
+and daring which we find in him.
+
+And he has achieved this by the intensity of his devotion. Modern
+literary anarchists are so inclined to fall into jocularity, and irony,
+and "human, too human" humour. Their Hamlet-like consciousness
+of the "many mansions" of truth tends to paralyse the impetus of
+their challenge. They are so often, too, dramatists and novelists
+rather than prophets, and their work, while it gains in sympathy and
+subtlety, loses in directness. The immense encouragement given to
+really drastic, original thought by Nietzsche's writings is an evidence
+of the importance of what might be called _cruel positivity_ in
+human thinking. Shelley has, however, an advantage over Nietzsche
+in his recognition of the transformative power of love. In this respect,
+iconoclast though he is, he is rather with the Buddha and the Christ
+than with the modern antinomians.
+
+His _mania_ for "love"--one can call it nothing else--frees his
+revolutionary thought from that arbitrary isolation, that savage
+subjectivity, which one notes in many philosophical anarchists. His
+Platonic insistence, too, on the more spiritual aspects of love
+separates his anti-Christian "immorality" from the easy-going,
+pleasant hedonism of such a bold individualist as Remy de
+Gourmont.
+
+Shelley's individualism is always a thing with open doors; a thing
+with corridors into Eternity. It never conveys that sad, cynical,
+pessimistic sense of "eating and drinking" before we die, which one
+is so familiar with just now.
+
+It is precisely this fact that those who reprobate Shelley's
+"immorality" should remember. With him "love" was truly a
+mystical initiation, a religious sacrament, a means of getting into
+touch with the cosmic secret, a path--and perhaps the only path--to
+the Beatific Vision.
+
+It is not wise to turn away from Shelley because of his lack of
+"humour," of his lack of a "sense of proportion." The mystery of the
+world, whatever it may be, shows itself sometimes quite as
+indifferent as Shelley to these little nuances. We hear it crying aloud
+in the night with no humorous cry; and it is too often to stop our ears
+to what we hear, that we jest so lightly! It is doubtful whether
+Nature cares greatly for our "sense of proportion."
+
+To return to his poetry, as poetry. The remarkable thing about
+Shelley's verse is the manner in which his whole physical and
+psychic temperament has passed into it. This is so in a measure with
+all poets, but it is so especially with him. His beautiful epicene face,
+his boyish figure, his unearthly sensitiveness, haunt us as we read
+his lines. They allure and baffle us, as the smile on the lips of the
+Mona Lisa. One has the impression of listening to a being who has
+really traversed the ways of the sea and returned with its secret. How
+else could those indescribable pearly shimmerings, those opal tints
+and rosy shadows, be communicated to our poor language? The very
+purity of his nature, that ethereal quality in it that strikes a chill into
+the heart of "normal humanity," lends a magic, like the reflection of
+moonlight upon ice, to these inter-lunar melodies. The same ethereal
+transparency of passion which excites, by reason of its sublime
+"immorality," the gross fury of the cynical and the base, gives an
+immortal beauty, cold and distant and beyond "the shadow of our
+night," to his planetary melodies. It is, indeed, the old Pythagorean
+"music of the spheres" audible at last again. Such sounds has the
+_silence_ that descends upon us when we look up, above the roofs
+of the city, at Arcturus or Aldebaran! To return to Shelley from the
+turmoil of our gross excitements and cramped domesticities is to
+bathe our foreheads in the "dew of the morning" and cool our hands
+in the ultimate Sea. Whatever in us transcends the vicious circle of
+personal desire; whatever in us belongs to that Life which lasts
+while we and our individual cravings perish; whatever in us
+underlies and overlooks this mad procession of "births and
+forgettings;" whatever in us "beacons from the abode where the
+Eternal are" rises to meet this celestial harmony, and sloughs off the
+"muddy vesture" that would "grossly close it in." What separates
+Shelley from all other poets is that with them "art" is the paramount
+concern, and, after "art," morality.
+
+With him one thinks little of art, little of the substance of any
+material "teaching;" one is simply transported into the high, cold
+regions where the creative gods build, like children, domes of
+"many-coloured glass," wherewith to "stain the white radiance of
+eternity." And after such a plunge into the antenatal reservoirs of life,
+we may, if we can, go on spitting venom and raking in the gutter
+with the old too-human zest, and let the "ineffectual" madman pass
+and be forgotten!
+
+I said that the effect of his writing is to trouble and sadden us. It was
+as a man I spoke. That in us which responds to Shelley's verse is
+precisely what dreams of the transmutation of "man" into "beyond-man."
+That which saddens humanity beyond words is the daily food
+of the immortals.
+
+And yet, even in the circle of our natural moods, there is something,
+sometimes, that responds to such strains as "When the lamp is
+shattered" and "One word is too often profaned." Perhaps only those
+who have known what it is to love as children love, and to lose hope
+with the absoluteness wherewith children lose it, can enter
+completely into this delicate despair. It is, indeed, the long, pitiful,
+sobbing cry of bewildered disenchantment that breaks the heart of
+youth when it first learns of what gross clay earth and men are made.
+
+And the artless simplicity of Shelley's technique--much more really
+simple than the conscious "childishness" exquisite though that is, of
+a Blake or Verlaine--lends itself so wonderfully to the expression of
+youth's eternal sorrow. His best lyrics use words that fall into their
+places with the "dying fall" of an actual fit of sobbing. And they are
+so naturally chosen, his images and metaphors! Even when they
+seem most remote, they are such as frail young hearts cannot help
+happening upon, as they soothe their "love-laden souls" in "secret
+hour."
+
+The infallible test of genuine poetry is that it forces us to recall
+emotions that we ourselves have had, with the very form and
+circumstance of their passion. And who can read the verses of
+Shelley without recalling such? That peculiar poignancy of memory,
+like a sharp spear, which arrests us at the smell of certain plants or
+mosses, or nameless earth-mould, or "growths by the margins of
+pond-waters;" that poignancy which brings back the indescribable
+balm of Spring and the bitter-sweetness of irremediable loss; who
+can communicate it like Shelley?
+
+There are lovely touches of foreign scenery in his poems,
+particularly of the vineyards and olive gardens and clear-cut hill
+towns of Italy; but for English readers it will always be the rosemary
+"that is for remembrance" and the pansies that "are for thoughts" that
+give their perfume to the feelings he excites.
+
+Other poets may be remembered at other times, but it is when the
+sun-warmed woods smell of the first primroses, and the daffodils,
+coming "before the swallow dares," lift up their heads above the
+grass, that the sting of this sweetness, too exquisite to last beyond a
+moment, brings its intolerable hope and its intolerable regret.
+
+
+
+KEATS
+
+It is well that there should be at least one poet of Beauty--of Beauty
+alone--of Beauty and naught else. It is well that one should dare to
+follow that terrible goddess even to the bitter end. That pitiless
+marble altar has its victims, as the other Altars. The "white
+implacable Aphrodite" cries aloud for blood--for the blood of our
+dearest affections; for the blood of our most cherished hopes; for the
+blood of our integrity and faith; for the blood of our reason. She
+drugs us, blinds us, tortures us, maddens us, and slays us--yet we
+follow her--to the bitter end!
+
+Beauty hath her Martyrs, as the rest; and of these Keats is the
+Protagonist; the youngest and the fairest; the most enamoured victim.
+From those extraordinary letters of his, to his friends and to his love,
+we gather that this fierce amorist of Beauty was not without his
+Philosophy. The Philosophy of Keats, as we gather up the threads of
+it, one by one, in those fleeting confessions, is nothing but the old
+polytheistic paganism, reduced to terms of modern life. He was a
+born "Pluralist" to use the modern phrase; and for him, in this
+congeries of separate and unique miracles, which we call the World,
+there was neither Unity, nor Progress, nor Purpose, nor Over-soul--nothing
+but the mystery of Beauty, and the Memory of great men!
+
+His way of approaching Nature, his way of approaching every event
+in life, was "pluralistic." He did not ask that things should come in
+upon him in logical order or in rational coherence. He only asked
+that each unique person who appeared; each unique hill-side or
+meadow or hedgerow or vineyard or flower or tree; should be for
+him a new incarnation of Beauty, a new avatar of the merciless One
+he followed.
+
+Never has there been a poet less _mystical_--never a poet less
+_moral._ The ground and soil, and sub-soil, of his nature, was
+Sensuality--a rich, quivering, tormented Sensuality!
+
+If you will, you may use, for what he was, the word "materialistic";
+but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression. The physical
+nerves of his abnormally troubled senses, were too exquisitely, too
+passionately stirred, to let their vibrations die away in material
+bondage. They quiver off into remotest psychic waves, these shaken
+strings; and a touch will send them shuddering into the high regions
+of the Spirit. For a nature like this, with the fever of consumption
+wasting his tissues, and the fever of his thirst for Beauty ravaging
+his soul, it was nothing less than the cruellest tragedy that he should
+have been driven by the phantom-flame of sex-illusion to find all the
+magic and wonder of the Mystery he worshiped, caught, imprisoned,
+enclosed, _blighted,_ in the poisonous loveliness of one capricious
+girl. An anarchist at heart--as so many great artists are--Keats hated,
+with a furious hatred, any bastard claims and privileges that
+insolently intruded themselves between the godlike senses of Man
+and the divine madness of their quest. Society? the Public? Moral
+Opinion? Intellectual Fashion? The manners and customs of the
+Upper Classes? What were all these but vain impertinences,
+interrupting his desperate Pursuit? "Every gentleman" he cried "is
+my natural enemy!"
+
+The feverish fanaticism of his devotion knew absolutely no limits.
+His cry day and night was for "new sensations"; and such
+"sensation," a mere epicurean indulgence to others, was a lust, a
+madness, a frenzy, a fury, a rushing upon death, to him.
+
+How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born,
+jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled him
+bleeding to the ground!
+
+But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it in
+the world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening,
+drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe--the very
+philtre of Sun-poison. "A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever"! A Joy?
+Yes--but a Joy _drugged_ from its first pouring forth. We follow.
+We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way!
+
+What an exultant hymn that is,--the one in honour of Pan, which
+comes so soon in Endymion! The dim rich depths of the dark forests
+are stirred by it, and its murmurs die away, over the wailing spaces
+of the marshes. Obscure growths, and drowsy weeds overhanging
+moon-lit paths, where fungoid things fumble for light and air, hear
+that cry in their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily. The dumb
+vegetable _expectancy_ of young tree-trunks is roused by it into
+sensual terror. For this is the sound of the hoof of Pan, stamping on
+the moist earth, as he rages for Syrinx. No one has ever understood
+the torment of the Wood-god and his mad joy, as the author of
+Endymion understood them. The tumultuous ground-swell of this
+poet's insane craving for Beauty must in the end have driven him on
+the rocks; but there came sometimes softer, gentler, less
+"vermeil-tinctured" moods, which might have prolonged his days,
+had he never met "that girl."
+
+"The Pot of Basil" expresses one of these. Wistful and heart-breaking,
+it has a tender yearning _pity_ in it, a gentle melancholy
+brooding, over the irremediable pain of love-loss, which haunts one
+like the sound of drowned Angelus-bells, under a hushed sea. The
+description of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and his
+vague troubled speech, is like nothing else that has ever been written.
+
+St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, has
+a beauty so poignant, so _sensuously unearthly,_ that one dare not
+quote a line of it, in a mere "critical essay," for fear of breaking such
+a spell!
+
+The long-drawn solemn harmonies of "Hyperion"--Miltonian, and
+yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew--madden
+the reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which is
+only increased when in that other "Version," the influence of Dante
+becomes evident. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!" Ah, there we find
+him--there we await him--the poet of _the tragedy of bodily
+craving,_ transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to the
+psychic plane!
+
+For "La Belle Dame" is the Litany of the Beauty-Maniac--his
+death-in-life Requiem, his eternal Dirge! Those who have ever met Her,
+this "Lady in the mead, full-beautiful, a fairy-child," whose foot
+"was light" and whose hair "was long" and whose eyes "were wild,"
+will know--and only they--the meaning of "the starved lips, through
+the gloom, with horrid warning, gaping wide"! And has the secret of
+the gasping pause of that broken half-line, "where no birds sing,"
+borrowed originally from poor Ophelia's despair, and echoed
+wonderfully by Mr. Hardy in certain of his incomparable lyrics,
+been conveyed to my reader?
+
+But it is, of course, in his five great Odes, that Keats is most
+supreme, most entirely, without question, the unapproachable artist.
+Heaven forbid that I should shatter the sacred silence that such
+things produce, by any profane repetition! They leave behind them,
+every one of them, an echo, a vibration, a dying fall, leaving us
+enchanted and trembling; as when we have been touched, before the
+twittering of the birds at dawn, by the very fingers of Our Lady of
+sweet Pain!
+
+Is it possible that words, mere words, can work such miracles? Or
+are they not words at all, but chalices and Holy graals, of human
+passion, full of the life-blood, staining the lips that approach them
+scarlet, of heart-drained pulse-wearied ravishment?
+
+Certainly he has the touch, ineffable, final, absolute, of the supreme
+Beauty. And over it all, over the ardours and ecstasies, hangs the
+shadow of Death; and in the heart of it, an adder in the deep drugged
+cup, coiled and waiting, the poisonous bite of incurable anguish! We
+may stand mesmerized, spell-bound, amid "the hushed cool-rooted
+flowers, fragrant-eyed" watching Psyche sleep. We may open those
+"charmed magic casements" towards "the perilous foam." We may
+linger with Ruth "sick for home amid the alien corn." We may gaze,
+awed and hushed, at the dead, cold, little, mountain-built town,
+"emptied of its folks"--We may "glut our sorrow on the morning
+rose, or on the wealth of globed Peonies." We may "imprison our
+mistress's soft hand, and gaze, deep, deep, within her peerless eyes."
+We may brood, quieted and sweetly-sad, upon the last melancholy
+"oozings" of the rich year's vintage. But across all these things lies,
+like a streak of red, breath-catching, spilled heart's blood, the
+knowledge of _what it means_ to have been able to turn all this into
+poetry!
+
+It means Torment. It means Despair. It means _that cry,_ out of the
+dust of the cemetery at Rome, "O God! O God! has there ever been
+such pain as my pain?"
+
+I suppose Keats suffered more in his brief life than any mortal child
+of the Muses. These ultimate creations of supreme Beauty are
+evoked in no other way. Everything has to be sacrificed--everything--if
+we are to be--like the gods, _creators of Life._ For Life is a thing
+that can only be born in _that soil_--only planted where the wound
+goes deepest--only watered when we strike where that fountain
+flows! He wrote for himself. The crowd, the verdict of his friends--what
+did all that matter? He wrote for himself; and for those who
+dare to risk the taste of that wine, which turns the taste of all else to
+a weary irrelevance!
+
+One is unwilling to leave our Adonais, whose "annual wound in
+Lebanon allures" us thus fatally, with nothing but such a bitter cry.
+One has a pathetic human longing to think of him _as he was,_ in
+those few moments of unalloyed pleasure the gods allowed him
+before "consumption," and "that girl," poisoned the springs of his
+life! And those moments, how they have passed into his poetry like
+the breath of the Spring!
+
+When "the grand obsession" was not upon him, who, like Keats, can
+make us feel the cool, sweet, wholesome touch of our great Mother,
+the Earth? That sleep, "full of sweet dreams and health and quiet
+breathing," which the breast that suckled Persephone alone can give
+may heal us also for a brief while.
+
+We, too, on this very morning--listen reader!--may wreath "a
+flowery band to bind us to the Earth, spite of despondence." Some
+"shape of beauty may yet move away the pall from our dark spirits."
+Even with old Saturn under his weight of grief, we may drink in the
+loveliness of those "green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks,
+branch-charmed by the earnest stars." And in the worst of our moods
+we can still call aloud to the things of beauty that pass not away. We
+can even call out to them from her very side who is "the cause," "the
+cause, my soul," of what we suffer.
+
+     "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art!
+     Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
+     And watching, with eternal lids apart,
+     Like Nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
+     The moving waters at their priest-like task
+     Of pure ablution round earth's human shores--"
+
+This desperate, sensuous pain which makes us cry out to the
+"midnight" that we might "cease upon it," need not harden our hearts
+before we pass hence. The "gathering swallows twittering in the
+sky" of our little interludes of peace may still attune us to some
+strange, sad thankfulness that we have been born into life, even
+though life turned out to mean _this!_
+
+And the vibrating, stricken nerves of our too great devotion may
+have at least the balm of feeling that they have not languished
+untouched by the fingers that thrill while they slay. After all, "we
+have lived"; we also; and we would not "change places" with those
+"happy innocents" who have never known the madness of what it
+may be to have been born a son of man!
+
+But let none be deluded. The tragic life upon earth is not the life of
+the spirit, but the life of the senses. The senses are the aching doors
+to the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of our tyranny over one
+another. Does anyone think that that love is greater, more real, more
+poignant, which can stand over the dead body of its One-of-all, and
+dream of encounters and reconciliations, in other worlds? It is not so!
+What we have loved is cold, cold and dead, and has become _that
+thing_ we scarcely recognise. Can any vague, spiritual reunion make
+up for the loss of the little gestures, the little touches, _the little
+ways,_ we shall never through all eternity know again? Ah! those
+reluctances and hesitations, over now, quite over now! Ah! those
+fretful pleadings, those strange withdrawals, those unheeded protests;
+nothing, less than nothing, and mere memories! When the life of the
+senses invades the affections of the heart--then, then, mon enfant,
+comes the pinch and the sting!
+
+And this is what happens with such doomed sensualists as Keats was.
+What tortured him in death was the thought that he must leave his
+darling--and the actual look, touch, air, ways and presence of her,
+forever. "Vain," as that inspired Lover, Emily Bronte, cries, "vain,
+unutterably vain, are 'all the creeds' that would console!" Tired of
+hearing "simple truth miscalled simplicity"; tired of all the weariness
+of life--from these we "would begone"--"save that to die we leave
+our love alone"!
+
+But it is not only in the fatal danger of eternal separation from the
+flesh that has become to us more necessary than sun or moon, that
+_the tragedy of the senses lies._ It lies in the very intensity with
+which we have sifted, winnowed, tormented and refined these
+panthers of holy lust. Those who understand the poetry of Keats
+recognise that in the passion which burns him for the "heavenly
+quintessence" as Marlowe calls it, there is also the ghastly danger of
+reaction. The pitiless hands of Joy "are ever at his lips, bidding
+adieu" and "veiled melancholy has her 'sovran shrine' in the heart of
+all delight."
+
+This is the curse upon those who follow the _supreme Beauty_--that
+is to say, the Beauty that belongs, not to ideas and ideals, but to
+living forms. They are driven by the gross pressure of circumstance
+to forsake her, to leave her, to turn aside and eat husks with the
+swine!
+
+It is the same with that supreme mystery of _words_ themselves, put
+of which such an artist as this one was creates his spells and his
+sorcery. How, after tasting, drop by drop, that draught of "lingered
+sweetness long drawn-out" of his unequalled style, can we bear to
+fall back upon the jabbering and screeching, the howling and hissing,
+of the voices we have to listen to in common resort? Ah, child, child!
+Think carefully before you turn your candid-innocent eyes to the
+fatal entrance to these mysteries! It is better never to have known
+what the high, terrible loveliness of Her of Melos is than, _having
+seen her,_ to pass the rest of our days with these copies, and
+prostitutions, and profanations, and parodies, "which mimic
+humanity so abominably"!
+
+That is the worst of it. That is the sting of it. All the _great quests_
+in this world tempt us and destroy us, for, though they may touch
+our famished lips once and again before we perish, one thing they
+cannot do--one thing Beauty herself, the most sacred of all such
+quests, cannot do--and that is to make the arid intervals of our
+ordinary life tolerable, when we have to return to the common world,
+and the people and things that stand gaping in that world, like stupid,
+staring idols!
+
+But what matter? Let us pay the penalty. Let us pay the price. _Is it
+not worth it?_ Beauty! O divine, O cruel Mistress! Thee, thee we
+must worship still, and with thee the acolytes who bear thy censers!
+For the secret of life is to take every risk without fear; even the risk
+of finding one's self an exile, with "no shrine, no grove, no oracle,
+no heat of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming" in the land without
+memories, without altars, without Thee!
+
+
+
+NIETZSCHE
+
+It is not the hour in which to say much about Nietzsche. The
+dissentient voices are silent. The crowd has stopped howling. But a
+worse thing is happening to him, the thing of all others he dreaded
+most;--he is becoming "accepted"--The preachers are quoting him
+and the theologians are explaining him.
+
+What he would himself pray for now are Enemies--fierce
+irreconcilable Enemies--but our age cannot produce such. It can
+only produce sneering disparagement; or frightened conventional
+approbation.
+
+What one would like to say, at this particular juncture, is that
+_here,_ or again _there,_ this deadly antagonist of God missed his
+aim. But who can say that? He aimed too surely. No, he did not miss
+his aim. He smote whom he went out to smite. But one thing he
+could not smite; he could neither smite it, or unmask it, or
+"transvalue" it. I mean the Earth itself--the great, shrewd, wise,
+all-enduring Mother of us all--who knows so much, and remains so
+silent!
+
+And sometimes one feels, walking some country road, with the
+smell of upturned sods and heavy leaf-mould in one's nostrils, that
+even Lucifer himself is not as deep or strong or wise as is patient
+furrowed earth and her blundering children. A rough earth-hint, a
+Rabelaisian ditty, a gross amazing jest, a chuckle of deep Satyric
+humour;--and the monstrous "thickness" of Life, its friendly aplomb
+and nonchalance, its grotesque irreverence, its shy shrewd common-sense,
+its tough fibres, and portentous indifference to "distinction";
+tumbles us over in the mud--for all our "aloofness"--and roars over
+us, like a romping bull-calf!
+
+The antidote to Nietzsche is not to be found in the company of the
+Saints. He was too much of a Saint himself for that. It is to be found
+in the company of Shakespearean clodhoppers, and Rabelaisian
+topers, and Cervantian serving-wenches. In fact, it is to be found, as
+with the antidotes for other noble excesses, in burying your face in
+rough moist earth; and grubbing for pig-nuts under the beech-trees.
+A summer's day in the woods with Audrey will put "Fatality" into its
+place and remove "the Recurrence of all things" to a very modest
+remoteness. And this is not a relinquishing of the secret of life. This
+is not a giving up of the supreme quest. It is an opening of another
+door; a letting in of a different air; a reversion to a more primitive
+level of the mystery.
+
+The way to reduce the tyranny of this proud spirit to its proper
+proportion is not to talk about "Love" or "Morality" or "Orthodoxy,"
+or "the strength of the vulgar herd"--it is simply to call up in one's
+mind the motley procession of gross, simple, quaint, _bulbous,_
+irrepressible objects--human and otherwise--whose mere existence
+makes it as impossible for Nietzsche to deal with the _massiveness_
+of Life, as it is impossible for anyone else to deal with it.
+
+No, we shall not free ourselves from his intellectual predominance
+by taking refuge with the Saints. We shall not do this because he
+himself was essentially a Saint. A Saint and a Martyr! Is it for me
+now to prove that?
+
+It is realized, I suppose, what the history of his spiritual contest
+actually was? It was a deliberate self-inflicted Crucifixion of the
+Christ in him, as an offering to the Apollo in him. Nietzsche
+was--that cannot be denied--an Intellectual Sadist; and his Intellectual
+Sadism took the form--as it can (he has himself taught us so) take
+many curious forms--of deliberately outraging his own most
+sensitive nerves. This is really what broke his reason, in the end. By
+a process of spiritual vivisection--the suffering of which one dare
+not conceive--he took his natural "sanctity," and carved it, as a dish
+fit for the gods, until it assumed an Apollonian shape. We must
+visualize Nietzsche not only as the Philosopher with the Hammer;
+but as the Philosopher with the Chisel.
+
+We must visualize him, with such a sculptor's tool, standing in the
+presence of the crucified figure of himself; and altering one by one,
+its natural lineaments! Nietzsche's own lacerated "intellectual
+nerves" were the vantage-ground of his spiritual vision. He could
+write "the Antichrist" because he had "killed." in his own nature,
+"the thing he loved" It was for this reason that he had such a
+supernatural insight into the Christian temperament. It was for this
+reason that he could pour vitriol upon its "little secrets"; and hunt it
+to its last retreats.
+
+Let none think he did not understand the grandeur, and the terrible
+intoxicating appeal, of the thing he fought. He understood these only
+too well. What vibrating sympathy--as for a kindred spirit--may be
+read between the lines of his attack on Pascal--Pascal, the supreme
+type of the Christian Philosopher!
+
+It must be further realized--for after all what are words and
+phrases?--that it was really nothing but the "Christian conscience" in
+him that forced him on so desperately to kick against the pricks. It
+was the "Christian conscience" in him--has he not himself analysed
+the voluptuous cruelty of that?--which drove him to seek something--if
+possible--nobler, austerer, gayer, more innocently wicked, than
+Christianity!
+
+It was not in the interests of Truth that he fought it. True Christian,
+as he was, at heart, he never cared greatly for Truth as Truth. It was
+in the interest of a Higher Ideal, a more exacting, less human Ideal,
+that he crushed it down. The Christian spirit, in him set him upon
+strangling the Christian spirit--and all in the interest of a madness of
+nobility, itself perforated with Christian conscience!
+
+Was Nietzsche really Greek, compared with--Goethe, let us say?
+Not for a moment. It was in the desperation of his attempt to be so,
+that he seized upon Greek tragedy and made it dance to Christian
+cymbals! This is, let it be clearly understood, the hidden secret of his
+mania for Dionysus--Dionysus gave him his opportunity. In the
+worship of this god--also a wounded god, be it remarked;--he was
+able to satisfy his perverted craving for "ecstasy of laceration" under
+the shadow of another Name.
+
+But after all--as Goethe says--"feeling is all in all; the name is sound
+and smoke." What he felt were Christian feelings, the feelings of a
+Mystic, a Visionary, a Flagellant. What matter by what name you
+call them? Christ? Dionysus? It is the secret creative passion of the
+human heart that sends them Both forth upon their warfaring.
+
+Is any one simple enough to think that whatever Secret Cosmic
+Power melts into human ecstasy, it waits to be summoned by certain
+particular syllables? That this arbitrary strangling of the Christ in
+him never altogether ended, is proved by the words of those tragic
+messages he sent to Cosima Wagner from "the aristocratic city of
+Turin" when his tormented brain broke like a taut bow-string. Those
+messages resembled arrows of fire, shot into space; and on one was
+written the words "The Crucified" and on the other the word
+"Dionysus."
+
+The grand and heart-breaking appeal of this lonely Victim of his
+own merciless scourge, does not depend, for its effect upon us, upon
+any of the particular "ideas" he announced. The idea of the "Eternal
+Recurrence of all things"--to take the most terrible--is clearly but
+another instance of his intellectual Sadism.
+
+The worst thing that could happen to those innumerable Victims of
+Life, for whom he sought to kill his Pity, was that they should have
+to go through the same punishment again--not once or twice, but for
+an infinity of times--and it was just that that he, whose immense Pity
+for them took so long a killing, suddenly felt must be what _had_ to
+happen--had to happen for no other reason than that it was
+_intolerable_ that it should happen. Again, we may note, it was not
+"Truth" he sought, but ecstasy, and, in this case, the ecstasy of
+"accepting" the very worst kind of issue he could possibly imagine.
+
+The idea of the Superman, too, is an idea that could only have
+entered the brain of one, pushed on to think, at the spear-head of his
+own cruelty. It is a great and terrible idea, sublime and devastating,
+this idea of the human race yielding place to _another race,_
+stronger, wiser, fairer, sterner, gayer, and more godlike! Especially
+noble and compelling is Nietzsche's constant insistence that the
+moment has come for men to take their Destiny out of the blind
+power of Evolution, and to guide it themselves, with a strong hand
+and a clear will, towards a _definite goal._
+
+The fact that this driving force, of cruelty to himself and, through
+himself, to humanity, scourged him on to so formidable an
+illumination of our path, is a proof how unwise it is to suppress any
+grand perversion. Such motive-forces should be used, as Nietzsche
+used his, for purposes of intellectual insight--not simply trampled
+upon as "evil."
+
+Whether our poor human race ever will surpass itself, as he demands,
+and rise to something psychologically different, "may admit a wide
+solution." It is not an unscientific idea. It is not an irreligious idea.
+It has all the dreams of the Prophets behind it. But--who can tell? It is
+quite as possible that the spirit of destruction in us will wantonly
+ruin this great Chance as that we shall seize upon it. Man has many
+other impulses besides the impulse of creation. Perhaps he will
+never be seduced into even _desiring_ such a goal, far less "willing"
+it over long spaces of time.
+
+The curious "optimism" of Nietzsche, by means of which he sought
+to force himself into a mood of such Dionysian ecstasy as to be able
+not only to endure Fate, but to "love" it, is yet another example of
+the subterranean "conscience" of Christianity working in him. In the
+presence of such a mood, and, indeed, in the presence of nearly all
+his great dramatic Passions, it is Nietzsche, and not his humorous
+critic, who is "with Our Lord" in Gethsemane. One does not drink of
+the cup of Fate "lovingly"--without bloody sweat!
+
+The interesting thing to observe about Nietzsche's ideas is that the
+wider they depart from what was essentially Christian in him, the
+less convincing they grow. One cannot help feeling he recognised
+this himself--and, infuriated by it, strode further and further into the
+Jungle.
+
+For instance, one cannot suppose that the cult of "the Blonde Beast,"
+and the cult of Caesar Borgia, were anything but mad reprisals,
+directed towards himself, in savage revenge; blind blows struck at
+random against the lofty and penetrating spirituality in which he had
+indulged when writing Zarathustra.
+
+But there is a point here of some curious psychological interest, to
+which we are attracted by a certain treacherous red glow upon his
+words when he speaks of this sultry, crouching, spotted, tail-lashing
+mood. Why is it precisely this Borgian type, this Renaissance type,
+among the world's various Lust-Darlings that he chooses to select?
+
+Why does he not oppose, to the Christian Ideal, _its true opposite_--the
+naive, artless, faun-like, pagan "child of Nature," who has never
+known "remorse"?
+
+The answer is clear. He chooses the Borgian type--the type which is
+_not_ free from "superstition," which is always wrestling with
+"superstition"--the type that sprinkles holy water upon its
+dagger--because such a type is the inevitable _product_ of the presence
+among us of the Christian Ideal. The Christian Ideal has made a
+certain complication of "wickedness" possible, which were
+impossible without it.
+
+If Nietzsche had not been obsessed by Christianity he would have
+selected as his "Ideal Blond Beast" that perfectly naive, "unfallen"
+man, of imperturbable nerves, of classic nerves, such as Life
+abounded in _before Christ came._ He makes, indeed, a pathetic
+struggle to idealize this type, rather than the "conscience-stricken"
+Renaissance one. He lets his fingers stray more than once over the
+red-stained limbs of real sun-burnt "Pompeian" heathenism. He
+turns feverishly the wanton pages of Petronius to reach this
+unsullied, "imperial" Animal. But he cannot reach him. He never
+could reach him. The "consecrated" dagger of the Borgia gleams and
+scintillates between. Even, therefore, in the sort of "wickedness" he
+evokes, Nietzsche remains Christ-ridden and Christ-mastered. The
+matter is made still more certain when one steals up silently, so to
+speak, behind the passages where he speaks of Napoleon.
+
+If a reader has the remotest psychological clairvoyance, he will be
+aware of a certain strain and tug, a certain mental jerk and contortion,
+whenever Napoleon is introduced.
+
+Yes, he could engrave that fatal "N" over his mantlepiece at
+Weimar--to do so was the last solace of his wounded brain. But he
+was never really at ease with the great Emperor. Never did he--in
+pure, direct, classic recognition--greet him as "the Demonic Master
+of Destiny," with the Goethean salutation! Had Goethe and
+Napoleon, in their notorious encounter, wherein they recognized one
+another as "Men," been interrupted by the entrance of Nietzsche, do
+you suppose they would not have both stiffened and recoiled,
+recognizing their natural Enemy, the Cross-bearer, the Christ-obsessed
+one, _"Il Santo"?_
+
+The difference between the two types can best be felt by recalling
+the way in which Napoleon and Goethe treated the Christ-Legend,
+compared with Nietzsche's desperate wrestling.
+
+Napoleon uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his High
+Policy and Worldly Statecraft.
+
+Goethe uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his aesthetic
+culture and his mystic symbolism. Neither of them are, for one
+moment, touched by it themselves.
+
+They are born Pagans; and when this noble, tortured soul flings
+himself at their feet in feverish worship, one feels that, out of their
+Homeric Hades, they look wonderingly, _unintelligently,_ at him.
+
+One of the most laughable things in the world is the attempt some
+simple critics make to turn Nietzsche into an ordinary "Honest
+Infidel," a kind of poetic Bradlaugh-Ingersoll, offering to humanity
+the profound discovery that there is no God, and that when we die,
+we die! The absurdity is made complete when this naive, revivified
+"Pagan" is made to assure us--us, "the average sensual men"--that
+the path of wisdom lies, not in resisting, but in yielding to
+_temptation;_ not in spiritual wrestling to "transform" ourselves, but
+in the brute courage "to be ourselves," and "live out our type"!
+
+The good folk who play with such a childish illusion would do well
+to scan over again their "pagan" hero's branding and flaying of the
+philosopher Strauss. Strauss was precisely what they try to turn
+Nietzsche into--a rancorous, insensitive, bullying, materialistic
+Heathen, making sport of "the Cross" and drinking Laager Beer.
+Nietzsche loathed Laager Beer, and "the Cross" _burnt_ day and
+night in his tormented, Dionysian soul.
+
+It occurs to me sometimes that if there had been no "German
+Reformation" and no overrunning of the world by vulgar evangelical
+Protestantism, it would be still possible to bring into the circle of the
+Church's development the lofty and desperate Passion of this
+"saintly" Antichrist. After all, why should we concede that those
+agitated, voluptuous, secret devices to get "saved," those super-subtle,
+subliminal tricks of the weak and the perverted to be _revenged_
+on the beautiful and the brave, which Nietzsche laments
+were ever "bound up" in the same cover as the "Old Testament."
+must remain forever the dominant "note" in the Faith of
+Christendom? While the Successor of Caesar, while the Pontifex
+Maximus of our "Spiritual Rome," still represents the Infallible
+Element in the world's nobler religious Taste, there is yet, perhaps, a
+remote chance that this vulgarizing of "the mountain summits" this
+degrading of our Planet's Passion-Play, may be cauterized and
+eliminated.
+
+And yet it is not likely! Much more likely is it that the real "secret"
+of Jesus, together with the real "secret" of Nietzsche--and they do
+not differ in essence, for all his Borgias!--will remain the sweet and
+deadly "fatalities" they have always been--for the few, the few, the
+few who understand them!
+
+For the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is
+the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar
+brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises
+of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with
+some of us an hour; with some of us a day--with a few of us a
+handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience.
+As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmal
+gulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in the
+face.
+
+Liberated from our own lusts, or using them, contemptuously and
+indifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death of
+worlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowning
+Nothingness.
+
+We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing and
+receding--and we see the _new race_--in the hours of the "Great
+Noon-tide"--fulfilling its Prophet's hope--and we see _the end of that
+also!_ And seeing all this, because the air of our watch-tower is so
+ice-cold and keen, we neither tremble or blench. The world is deep,
+and deep is pain, and deeper than pain is joy. We have seen Creation,
+and have exulted in it. We have seen Destruction, and have exulted
+in it. We have watched the long, quivering Shadow of Life shudder
+across our glacial promontory, and we have watched that drowning
+tide receive it. It is enough. It is well. We have had our Vision. We
+know now what gives to the gods "that look" their faces wear.
+
+It now only remains for us to return to the familiar human Stage; to
+the "Gala-Night, within the lonesome latter years," and be gay, and
+"hard," and "superficial"!
+
+That ice-bound Promontory into the Truth of Things has only known
+one Explorer whose "Eloi, Eloi Lama Sabachthani" was not the
+death-cry of his Pity. And that Explorer--did we only dream of his
+Return?
+
+
+
+THOMAS HARDY
+
+With a name suggestive of the purest English origin, Mr. Hardy has
+become identified with that portion of England where the various
+race-deposits in our national "strata" are most dear and defined. In
+Wessex, the traditions of Saxon and Celt, Norman and Dane, Roman
+and Iberian, have grown side by side into the soil, and all the
+villages and towns, all the hills and streams, of this country have
+preserved the rumour of what they have seen.
+
+In Celtic legend the country of the West Saxons is marvellously rich.
+Camelot and the Island of Avalon greet one another across the
+Somersetshire vale. And Dorsetshire, Hardy's immediate home, adds
+the Roman traditions of Casterbridge to tragic memories of King
+Lear. Tribe by tribe, race by race, as they come and go, leaving their
+monuments and their names behind, Mr. Hardy broods over them,
+noting their survivals, their lingering footprints, their long decline.
+
+In his well-loved Dorchester we find him pondering, like one of his
+own spirits of Pity and Irony, while the moonlight shines on the
+haunted amphitheatre where the Romans held their games. He
+devotes much care to noting all those little "omens by the way" that
+make a journey along the great highways of Wessex so full of
+imaginative suggestion.
+
+It is the history of the human race itself that holds him with a
+mesmeric spell, as century after century it unrolls its acts and scenes,
+under the indifferent stars. The continuity of life! The long, piteous
+"ascent of man," from those queer fossils in the Portland Quarries--to
+what we see today, so palpable, so real! And yet for all his tragic
+pity, Mr. Hardy is a sly and whimsical chronicler. He does not allow
+one point of the little jest the gods play on us--the little long-drawn-out
+jest--to lose its sting. With something of a goblin-like alertness
+he skips here and there, watching those strange scene shifters at their
+work. The dual stops of Mr. Hardy's country pipe are cut from the
+same reed. With the one he challenges the Immortals on behalf of
+humanity; with the other he plays such a shrewd Priapian tune that
+all the Satyrs dance.
+
+I sometimes think that only those born and bred in the country can
+do justice to this great writer. That dual pipe of his is bewildering to
+city people. They over emphasize the "magnanimity" of his art, or
+they over emphasize its "miching-mallecho." They do not catch the
+secret of that mingled strain. The same type of cultured "foreigner"
+is puzzled by Mr. Hardy's self-possession. He ought to commit
+himself more completely, or he ought not to have committed himself
+at all! There is something that looks to them--so they are tempted to
+express it--like the cloven hoof of a most Satyrish cunning, about his
+attitude to certain things. That little caustic by-play, for instance,
+with which he girds at the established order, never denouncing it
+wholesale like Shelley, or accepting it wholesale like Wordsworth--and
+always with a tang, a dash of gall and wormwood, an impish malice.
+
+The truth is, there are two spirits in Mr. Hardy, one infinitely
+sorrowful and tender, the other whimsical, elfish and malign.
+
+The first spirit rises up in stern Promethean revolt against the
+decrees of Fate. The second spirit deliberately allies itself in wanton,
+bitter glee, with the humorous provocation of humanity, by the cruel
+Powers of the Air. The psychology of all this is not hard to unravel.
+The same abnormal sensitiveness that makes him pity the victims of
+destiny makes him also not unaware of what may be sweet to the
+palate of the gods in such "merry jests." These two tendencies seem
+to have grown upon him as years went on and to have become more
+and more pronounced. Often, with artists, the reverse thing happens.
+Every human being has his own secretive reaction, his own furtive
+recoil, from the queer trap we are all in,--his little private method of
+retaliation. But many writers are most unscrupulously themselves
+when they are young. The changes and chances of this mortal life
+mellow them into a more neutral tint. Their revenge upon life grows
+less personal and more objective as they get older. They become
+balanced and resigned. They attain "the wisdom of Sophocles."
+
+The opposite of this has been the history of Mr. Hardy's progression.
+He began with quite harmless rustic realism, fanciful and quaint.
+Then came his masterpieces wherein the power and grandeur of a
+great artist's inspiration fused everything into harmony. At the last,
+in his third period, we have the exaggeration of all that is most
+personal in his emotion intensified to the extreme limit.
+
+It is absurd to turn away from these books, books like Jude the
+Obscure and the Well-Beloved. If Mr. Hardy had not had such
+sardonic emotions, such desire to "hit back" at the great "opposeless
+wills," and such Goblin-like glee at the tricks they play us, he would
+never have been able to write "Tess." Against the ways of God to
+this sweet girl he raises a hand of terrible revolt, but it is with more
+than human "pity" that he lays her down on the Altar of Sacrifice.
+
+But, after all, it is in the supreme passages of pure imaginative
+grandeur that Mr. Hardy is greatest. Here he is "with Shakespeare"
+and we forget both Titan and Goblin. How hard it is exactly to put
+into words what this "imaginative grandeur" consists of! It is, at any
+rate, an intensification of our general consciousness of the
+Life-Drama as a whole, but this, under a poetic, rather than a scientific,
+light, and yet with the scientific facts,--they also not without their
+dramatic significance--indicated and allowed for. It is a clarifying of
+our mental vision and a heightening of our sensual apprehension. It
+is a certain withdrawing from the mere personal pull of our own fate
+into a more rarified air, where the tragic beauty of life falls into
+perspective, and, beholding the world in a clear mirror, we escape
+for a moment from "the will to live."
+
+At such times it is as though, "taken up upon a high mountain, we
+see, without desire and without despair, the kingdoms of the world
+and the glories of them." Then it is that we feel the very wind of the
+earth's revolution, and the circling hours touch us with a palpable
+hand.
+
+And the turmoil of the world grown so distant, it is then that we feel
+at once the greatness of humanity and the littleness of what it strives
+for. We are seized with a shuddering tenderness for Man. This
+bewildered animal--wrestling in darkness with he knows not what.
+
+And gazing long and long into this mirror, the poignancy of what we
+behold is strangely softened. After all, it is something, whatever
+becomes of us, to have been conscious of all this. It is something to
+have outwatched Arcturus, and felt "the sweet influences" of the
+Pleiades. Congruous with such a mood is the manner in which,
+while Mr. Hardy opposes himself to Christianity, he cannot forget it.
+He cannot "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which
+weighs upon the heart." It troubles and vexes him. It haunts him.
+And his work both gains and suffers. He flings gibe after gibe at
+"God," but across his anger falls the shadow of the Cross. How
+should it not be so? "All may be permitted," but one must not add a
+feather's weight to the wheel that breaks our "little ones."
+
+It is this that separates Mr. Hardy's work from so much modern
+fiction that is clever and "philosophical" but does not satisfy one's
+imagination. All things with Mr. Hardy--even the facts of geology
+and chemistry--are treated with that imaginative clairvoyance that
+gives them their place in the human comedy. And is not Christianity
+itself one of these facts? How amazing that such a thing should have
+appeared at all upon the earth! When one reads Meredith, with his
+brilliant intellectual cleverness, one finds Christianity "taken for
+granted," and dismissed as hardly relevant to modern topics.
+
+But Mr. Hardy is too pagan, in the true sense, too fascinated by the
+poetry of life and the essential ritual of life, to dismiss any great
+religion in this way. The thing is always with him, just as the Gothic
+Tower of St. Peter's Church in Casterbridge is always with him. He
+may burst into impish fury with its doctrines, but, like one of those
+queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet never
+leave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the same
+reason, in spite of his intellectual realization of the mechanical
+processes of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he is
+always being driven to _personify_ these ultimate powers; to
+personify them, or _it,_ as something that takes infernal satisfaction
+in fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourging
+them to madness.
+
+Mr. Hardy's ultimate thought is that the universe is blind and
+unconscious; that it knows not what it does. But, standing among the
+graves of those Wessex churchyards, or watching the twisted threads
+of perverse destiny that plague those hapless hearts under a thousand
+village roofs, it is impossible for him not to long to "strike back" at
+this damned System of Things that alone is responsible. And how
+can one "strike back" unless one converts unconscious machinery
+into a wanton Providence? Where Mr. Hardy is so incomparably
+greater than Meredith and all his modern followers is that in these
+Wessex novels there is none of that intolerable "ethical discussion"
+which obscures "the old essential candours" of the human situation.
+
+The reaction of men and women upon one another, in the presence
+of the solemn and the mocking elements; this will outlast all social
+readjustments and all ethical reforms.
+
+While the sun shines and the moon draws the tides, men and women
+will ache from jealousy, and the lover will not be the beloved! Long
+after a quite new set of "interesting modern ideas" have replaced the
+present, children will break the hearts of their parents, and parents
+will break the hearts of their children. Mr. Hardy is indignant
+enough over the ridiculous conventions of Society, but he knows
+that, at the bottom, what we suffer from is "the dust out of which we
+are made;" the eternal illusion and disillusion which must drive us
+on and "take us off" until the planet's last hour.
+
+Mr. Hardy's style, at its best, has an imaginative suggestiveness
+which approaches, though it may not quite reach, the indescribable
+touch of the Shakespearean tragedies. There is also a quality in it
+peculiar to himself--threatening and silencing; a thunderous
+suppression, a formidable reserve, an iron tenacity. Sometimes,
+again, one is reminded of the ancient Roman poets, and not
+unfrequently, too, of the rhythmic incantations of Sir Thomas
+Browne, that majestic and perverted Latinist.
+
+The description, for instance, of Egdon Heath, at the beginning of
+the Return of the Native, has a dusky architectural grandeur that is
+like the Portico of an Egyptian Temple. The same thing may be
+noted of that sudden apparition of Stonehenge, as Tess and Angel
+stumble upon it in their flight through the darkness.
+
+One thinks of the words of William Blake: "He who does not love
+Form more than Colour is a coward." For it is, above all, Form that
+appeals to Mr. Hardy. The iron plough of his implacable style drives
+pitilessly through the soft flesh of the earth until it reaches the
+architectural sub-structure. Whoever tries to visualize any scene out
+of the Wessex Novels will be forced to see the figures of the persons
+concerned "silhouetted" against a formidable skyline. One sees them,
+these poor impassioned ones, moving in tragic procession along the
+edge of the world, and, when the procession is over, darkness
+re-establishes itself. The quality that makes Mr. Hardy's manner such a
+refuge from the levities and gravities of the "reforming writers" is a
+quality that springs from the soil. The soil has a gift of "proportion"
+like nothing else. Things fall into due perspective on Egdon Heath,
+and among the water-meadows of Blackmoor life is felt as the tribes
+of men have felt it since the beginning.
+
+The modern tendency is to mock at sexual passion and grow grave
+over social and artistic problems. Mr. Hardy eliminates social and
+artistic problems and "takes nothing seriously"--not even
+"God"--except the love and the hate of men and women, and the natural
+elements that are their accomplices. It is for this lack in them, this
+uneasy levity over the one thing that really counts, that it is so hard
+to read many humorous and arresting modern writers, except in
+railway trains and cafes. They have thought it clever to dispossess
+the passion of our poor heart of its essential poetry. They have not
+understood that man would sooner suffer the bitterness of death than
+be deprived of his _right_ to suffer the bitterness of love.
+
+It must be, I suppose, that these flippant triflers are so optimistic
+about their reforms and their ethical ideals and their sanitary projects
+that to them such things as how the sun rises over Shaston and sinks
+over Budmouth; such things as what Eustacia felt when she walked,
+"talking to herself," across the blasted heath; such things as the
+mood of Henchard when he cursed the day of his birth, are mere
+accidents and irrelevancies, by no means germane to the matter.
+
+Well, perhaps they are wise to be so hopeful. But for the rest of us,
+for whom the world does not seem likely to "improve" so fast, it is
+an unspeakable relief that there should be at least one writer left
+interested in the things that interested Sophocles and Shakespeare,
+and possessed of a style that does not, remembering the work of
+such hands, put our generation altogether to shame.
+
+
+
+WALTER PATER
+
+What are the qualities that make this shy and furtive Recluse, this
+Wanderer in the shadow, the greatest of critics? Imagination, in the
+first place, and then that rare, unusual, divine gift of limitless
+Reverence for the Human Senses. Imagination has a two-fold power.
+It visualizes and it creates. With clairvoyant ubiquity it floats and
+flows into the most recondite recesses, the most reluctant sanctuaries,
+of other men's souls. With clear-cut, architectural volition it builds
+up its own Byzantium, out of the quarried debris of all the centuries.
+
+One loves to think of Pater leaving that Olney country, where he
+"hated" to hear anything more about "the Poet Cowper," and nursing
+his weird boy-fancies in the security of the Canterbury cloisters. The
+most passionate and dedicated spirit he--to sulk, and dream, and
+hide, and love, and "watch the others playing," in that quiet
+retreat--since the great soul of Christopher Marlowe flamed up there into
+consciousness!
+
+And then Oxford. And it is meet and right, at such a point as this, to
+lay our offering, modest, secret, shy--a shadow, a nothing--at the
+feet of this gracious Alma Mater; "who needs not June for Beauty's
+heightening!" One revolts against her sometimes. The charm is too
+exclusive, too withdrawn. And something--what shall I say?--of
+ironic, supercilious disillusion makes her forehead weary, and her
+eyelids heavy. But after all, to what exquisite children, like rare,
+exotic flowers, she has the power to give birth! But did you know,
+you for whom the syllables "Oxford" are an Incantation, that to the
+yet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elaborate soul of
+Walter Pater, Oxford Herself appeared, as time went on, a little
+vulgar and silly?
+
+Indeed, he fled from her, and took refuge-sometimes with his sisters,
+for, like Charles Lamb, Pater was "Conventual" in his taste--and
+sometimes with the "original" of Marius the Epicurean. But what
+matter where he fled--he who always followed the "shady side" of
+the road? He has not only managed to escape, himself, with all his
+"Boxes of Alabaster," into the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower, that
+even Oxford cannot reach, but he has carried us thither with him.
+
+And there, from the opal-clouded windows of that high place, he
+shows us still the secret kingdoms of art and philosophy and life,
+and the remotest glories of them. We see them all--from those
+windows--a little lovelier, a little rarer, a little more "selective,"
+than, perchance, they really are. But what matter? What does one expect
+when one looks through opal-clouded windows? And, after all, those
+are the kinds of windows from which it is best to look at the
+dazzling limbs of the immortal gods!
+
+Not but what, sometimes, he permits us to throw those "magic
+casements" wide open. And then, in how lucid an air, in how clean
+and fresh a morning of reality, those pure forms and godlike figures
+stand out, their naked feet in the cold, clear dew!
+
+For one must note two things about Walter Pater. He is able to throw
+the glimmering mantle of his own elaborate _sophistry of the
+senses_ over comparatively fleeting, unarresting objects. And he is
+able to compel us to follow, line by line, curve by curve, contour by
+contour, the very palpable body and presence of the Beauty that
+passeth not away.
+
+In plainer words, he is a great and exact scholar--laborious, patient,
+indefatigable, reserved; and, at the same time, a Protean Wizard,
+breathing forbidden life into the Tyrian-stained writhings of many
+an enchanted Lamia! At a thousand points he is the only modern
+literary figure who draws us towards him with the old Leonardian,
+Goethean spell. For, like Goethe and Da Vinci, he is never far from
+those eternal "Partings of the Ways." which alone make life
+interesting.
+
+He is, for instance, more profoundly drenched, dyed, and endued in
+"Christian Mythology" than any mortal writer, short of the Saints
+themselves. He is more native to the pure Hellenic air than any since
+Walter Savage Landor. And he is more subtle, in his understanding
+of "German Philosophy" as opposed to "Celtic Romance," than
+all--outside the most inner circles--since Hegel--or Heine! The greedy,
+capricious "Uranian Babyishness" of his pupil Oscar, with its
+peevish clutching at all soft and provocative and glimmering things,
+is mere child's play, compared with the deep, dark Vampirism with
+which this furtive Hermit drains the scarlet blood of the Vestals of
+every Sanctuary.
+
+How little the conventional critics have understood this master of
+their own craft! What hopeless people have "rushed in" to interpret
+this super-subtle Interpreter! Mr. Gosse has, however, done one
+thing for us. Somewhere, somehow, he once drew a picture of
+Walter Pater "gambolling," in the moonlight, on the velvet lawn of
+his own secluded Oxford garden, like a satin-pawed Wombat! I
+always think of that picture. It is a pleasanter one than that of Mark
+Pattison, running round his Gooseberry bushes, after great
+screaming girls. But they are both touching sketches, and, no doubt,
+very indicative of Life beneath the shadow of the Bodleian.
+
+Why have the professional philosophers--ever since that Master of
+Baliol who used to spend his time boring holes in the Ship that
+carried him--"fought shy" of Pater's Philosophy? For a sufficient
+reason! Because, like Protagoras the Sophist, and like Aristippus the
+Cyrenean, he has undermined Metaphysic, _by means of Metaphysic._
+
+For Walter Pater--is that clearly understood?--was an adept, long
+before Nietzsche's campaign began, at showing the human desire,
+the human craving, the human ferocity, the human spite, hidden
+behind the mask of "Pure Reason."
+
+He treats every great System of Metaphysic as a great work of
+Art--with a very human, often a too human, artizan behind it--a work of
+Art which we have a perfect right to appropriate, to enjoy, to look at
+the world through, and then _to pass on!_
+
+Every Philosophy has its "secret," according to Pater, its "formula,"
+its lost Atlantis. Well! It is for us to search it out; to take colour from
+its dim-lit under-world; to feed upon its wavering Sea-Lotus--and
+then, returning to the surface, to swim away, in search of other
+diving-grounds!
+
+No Philosopher except Pater has dared to carry Esoteric Eclecticism
+quite as far as this. And, be it understood, he is no frivolous
+Dilettante. This draining the secret wine of the great embalmed
+Sarcophagi of Thought is his Life-Lure, his secret madness, his
+grand obsession. Walter Pater approaches a System of Metaphysical
+Thought as a somewhat furtive amorist might approach a sleeping
+Nymph. On light-stepping, crafty feet he approaches--and the hand
+with which he twitches the sleeve of the sleeper is as soft as the
+flutter of a moth's wing. "I do not like," he said once, "to be called a
+Hedonist. It gives such a queer impression to people who don't know
+Greek."
+
+Ardent young people sometimes come to me, when in the wayfaring
+of my patient academic duties, I speak about Pater, and ask me
+point-blank to tell them what his "view-point"--so they are pleased
+to express it--"really and truly" was. Sweet reader, do you know the
+pain of these "really and truly" questions? I try to answer in some
+blundering manner like this. I try to explain how, for him, nothing in
+this world was certain or fixed; how everything "flowed away"; how
+all that we touch or taste or see, vanished, changed its nature,
+became something else, even as we vanish, as the years go on, and
+change our nature and become something else. I try to explain how,
+for him, we are ourselves but the meeting-places of strange forces,
+journeying at large and by chance through a shifting world; how we,
+too, these very meeting-places of such forces, waver and flicker and
+shift and are transformed, like dreams within dreams!
+
+I try to explain how, this being so, and nothing being "written in the
+sky" it is our right to test every single experience that life can offer,
+short of those which would make things bitterer, harder, narrower,
+less easy, for "the other person."
+
+And if my Innocents ask--as they do sometimes--Innocents are like
+that!--"Why must we consider the other person?" I answer--for no
+_reason,_ and under no threat or danger or categorical imperative;
+but simply because we have grown to be the sort of animal, the sort
+of queer fish, who _cannot_ do the things "that he would"! It is not, I
+try to indicate, a case of conscience; it is a matter of taste; and there
+are certain things, when it comes to that point, which an animal
+possessed of such taste _cannot do,_ even though he desire to do
+them. And one of these things is to hurt the other trapped creatures
+who happen to have been caught in the same "gin" as ourself.
+
+With regard to Art and Literature, Pater has the same method as with
+regard to Philosophy. Everything in a world so fluid is obviously
+relative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolute
+standard--even of beauty itself. Those high and immutable Principles
+of The Good and True are as much an illusion as any other human dream.
+There are no such principles. Beauty is a Daughter of Life, and is
+forever changing as Life changes, and as we change who have to
+live. The lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold
+"Mathematic" of the Universe, the rhythm of whose ordered
+Harmony is the Music of the Spheres, is a Faith that may well
+inspire and solemnize us; it cannot persuade or convince us.
+
+Beauty is not Mathematical; it is--if one may say so--physiological
+and psychological, and though that austere severity of pure line and
+pure color, the impersonal technique of art, has a seemingly
+pre-ordained power of appeal, in reality it is far less immutable than it
+appears, and has far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growth
+and change than we sometimes would care to allow.
+
+Walter Pater's magnetic spell is never more wonder-working than
+when he deals with the _materials_ which artists use. And most of
+all, with _words,_ that material which is so stained and corrupted
+and outraged--and yet which is the richest of all. But how tenderly
+he always speaks of materials! What a limitless reverence he has for
+the subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human senses
+and what--so thrillingly, so dangerously, sometimes!--they
+apprehend. Wood and clay and marble and bronze and gold and
+silver; these--and the fabrics of cunning looms and deft, insatiable
+fingers--he handles with the reverence of a priest touching
+consecrated elements.
+
+Not only the great main rivers of art's tradition, but the little streams
+and tributaries, he loves. Perhaps he loves some of these best of all,
+for the pathways to their exquisite margins are less trodden than the
+others, and one is more apt to find one's self alone there.
+
+Perhaps of all his essays, three might be selected as most
+characteristic of certain recurrent moods. That one on Denys
+L'Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled god--has
+he really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorched
+white Flesh?--leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau,
+the Prince of Court Painters, where his passion for things faded and
+withdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one of
+those always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of their
+own too vivid days, and seek a wistful escape in some fantastic
+valley of dreams. Watteau's "happy valley" is, indeed, sadder than
+our most crowded hours--how should it not be, when it is no
+"valley" at all, but the melancholy cypress-alleys of Versailles?--but,
+though sadder, it is so fine; so fine and rare and gay!
+
+And along the borders of it and under its clipped trees, by its
+fountains and ghostly lawns, still, still can one catch in the twilight
+the shimmer of the dancing feet of the Phantom-Pierrot, and the
+despair in his smile! For him, too--for Gilles the Mummer--as for
+Antoine Watteau and Walter Pater, the wistfulness of such places is
+not inconsistent with their levity. Soon the music must stop. Soon it
+must be only a garden, "only a garden of Lenotre, correct, ridiculous
+and charming." For the lips of the Despair of Pierrot cannot always
+touch the lips of the Mockery of Columbine; in the end, the Ultimate
+Futility must turn them both to stone!
+
+And, finally, that Essay upon Leonardo, with the lines "we say to
+our friend" about Her who is "older than the rocks on which she
+sits."
+
+What really makes Pater so great, so wise, so salutary a writer is his
+perpetual insistence on the criminal, mad foolishness of letting slip,
+in silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturning days of our
+youth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens," he seems to say. "Carry
+with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life
+on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no
+rain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, fall into it and spoil
+its taste. For it is all you have, and it cannot last long!"
+
+He is a great writer, because from him we may learn the difficult
+and subtle art of drinking the cup of life _so as to taste every drop._
+
+One could expatiate long upon his attitude to Christianity--his final
+desire to be "ordained Priest"--his alternating pieties and
+incredulities. His deliberate clinging to what "experience" brought
+him, as the final test of "truth," made it quite easy for him to dip his
+arms deep into the Holy Well. He might not find the Graal; he might
+see nothing there but his own shadow! What matter? The Well itself
+was so cool and chaste and dark and cavern-like, that it was worth
+long summer days spent dreaming over it--dreaming over it in the
+cloistered garden, out of the dust and the folly and the grossness of
+the brutal World, that knows neither Apollo or Christ!
+
+
+
+DOSTOIEVSKY
+
+The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such
+a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered,
+insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hit
+in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat.
+Everything that has been _forbidden,_ by discretion, by caution, by
+self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of
+the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.
+
+All that one has _felt,_ but has not dared to think; all that one has
+_thought,_ but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from
+the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the
+unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.
+
+There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them,
+cannot, _will_ not, say. There is so much that the normal
+self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not _want_ said. But this
+Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace?
+What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such
+revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We _require_
+embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have
+no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its
+microcosmic reflections, even _down there,_ where it has to be
+driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great
+writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's
+beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by
+the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what
+will serve _their_ purpose! This applies as much to the Realists,
+with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with their
+traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpreters
+of Sex, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in their
+conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!
+
+The lucky-unlucky individual whose path this formidable writer
+crosses, quickly begins, as he reads page by page, to cry out in
+startled wonder, in terrified protest. This rending Night Hawk
+reveals just what one hugged most closely of all--just what one did
+_not_ confess! Such a person, reading this desperate "clairvoyant,"
+finds himself laughing and chuckling, under his breath, and _against
+his willy_ over the little things there betrayed. It is not any more a
+case of enjoying with distant aesthetic amusement the general
+human spectacle. He himself is the one scratched and pricked. He
+himself is the one so abominably tickled. That is why women--who
+have so mad a craving for the personal in everything--are especially
+caught by Dostoievsky. He knows them so fatally well. Those
+startling, contradictory feelings that make their capricious bosoms
+rise and fall, those feelings that they find so difficult themselves to
+understand, he drags them all into the light. The kind of delicate
+cruelty, that in others becomes something worse, refines itself in his
+magnetic genius into a cruelty of insight that knows no scruple. Nor
+is the reluctance of these gentle beings, so thrillingly betrayed, to
+yield their passionate secrets, unaccompanied by pleasure. They
+suffer to feel themselves so exposed, but it is an exquisite suffering.
+It may, indeed, be said that the strange throb of satisfaction with
+which we human beings feel ourselves _at the bottom,_ where we
+cannot fall lower, or be further unmasked, is never more frequent
+than when we read Dostoievsky. And that is largely because he
+alone understands _the depravity_ _of the spirit,_ as well as of the
+flesh, and the amazing wantonness, whereby the human will does
+not always seek its own realization and well-being, but quite as
+often its own laceration and destruction.
+
+Dostoievsky has, indeed, a demonic power of revelation in regard to
+that twilight of the human brain, where lurk the phantoms of
+unsatisfied desire, and where unspoken lusts stretch forth pitiable
+hands. There are certain human experiences which the conventional
+machinery of ordinary novel-writing lacks all language to express.
+He expresses these, not in tedious analysis, but in the living cries,
+and gasps, and gestures, and fumblings and silences of his characters
+themselves. Who, like Dostoievsky, has shown the tragic association
+of passionate love with passionate hate, which is so frequent a
+human experience?
+
+This monstrous _hate-love,_ caressing the bruises itself has made,
+and shooting forth a forked viper-tongue of cruelty from between
+the lips that kiss--has anyone but he held it fast, through all its
+Protean changes? I suppose, when one really thinks of it, at the
+bottom of every one of us lurk two _primary emotions_--vanity and
+fear. It is in their knowledge of the aberrations of these, of the mad
+contortions that these lead to, that the other writers seem so
+especially simple-minded. Over and over again, in reading
+Dostoievsky, one is positively seized by the throat with
+astonishment at the man's insight into the labyrinthian retreats of our
+secret pride--and of our secret fear. His characters, at certain
+moments, seem actually to spit gall and wormwood, as they tug at
+the quivering roots of one another's self-esteem. But this fermenting
+venom, this seething scum, is only the expression of what goes on
+below the surface every day, in every country.
+
+Dostoievsky's Russians are cruelly voluble, but their volubility taps
+the evil humour of the universal human disease. Their thoughts are
+_our_ thoughts, their obsessions, _our_ obsessions. Let no one think,
+in his vain security, that he has a right to say: "I have no part in this
+morbidity. I am different from these poor madmen."
+
+The curious nervous relief we experience as we read these books is
+alone a sufficient vindication. They relieve us, as well as trouble us,
+because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed
+to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange
+accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a
+burden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in this
+sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven
+the stuff whereof men are made.
+
+Certainly the Russian soul has its peculiarities, and these
+peculiarities we feel in Dostoievsky as nowhere else. He, not Tolstoi
+or Turgenieff, is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity of
+the Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men
+feel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but a
+universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem
+wanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view he
+may seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantage
+over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer,
+except, perhaps, Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever approached it.
+He writes with human nerves upon parchment made of human tissue,
+and "abyssum evocat abyssum," from the darkness wherein he
+moves.
+
+Among other things, Dostoievsky's insight is proved by the
+profound separation he indicates between "morality" and "religion."
+To many of us it comes with something of a shock to find harlots
+and murderers and robbers and drunkards and seducers and idiots
+expressing genuine and passionate religious faith, and discussing
+with desperate interest religious questions. But it is _our_
+psychology that is shallow and inhuman, not his, and the presence of
+real religious feeling in a nature obsessed with the maddest lusts is a
+phenomenon of universal experience. It may, indeed, be said that
+what is most characteristically Russian in his point of view--he has
+told us so himself--is the substitution of what might be called
+"sanctity" for what is usually termed "morality," as an ideal of life.
+The "Christianity" of which Dostoievsky has the key is nothing if
+not an ecstatic invasion of regions where ordinary moral laws, based
+upon prudence and self-preservation, disappear, and give place to
+something else. The secret of it, beyond repentance and remorse, lies
+in the transforming power of "love;" lies, in fact, in "vision" purged
+by pity and terror; but its precise nature is rather to be felt than
+described.
+
+It is in connection with this Christianity of his, a Christianity
+completely different from what we are accustomed to, that we find
+the explanation of his extraordinary interest in the "weak" as
+opposed to the "strong." The association between Christianity and a
+certain masterful, moral, self-assertive energy, such as we feel the
+presence of in England and America, might well tend to make it
+difficult for us to understand his meaning. It is precisely this sort of
+thing that makes it difficult for us to understand Russia and the
+Russian religion.
+
+But as one reads Dostoievsky it is impossible to escape a suspicion
+that we Western nations have as yet only touched the fringe of what
+the Christian Faith is capable of, whether considered as a cosmic
+secret or as a Nepenthe for human suffering.
+
+He saw, with clairvoyant distinctness, how large a part of the
+impetus of life's movement proceeds from the mad struggle, always
+going on, between the strong and the weak. It was his emphasis
+upon this struggle that helped Nietzsche to those withering
+exposures of "the tyranny of the weak" which cleared the path for
+his terrific transvaluations. It was Dostoievsky's demonic insight
+into the pathological sub-soil of the Religion of Pity which helped
+Nietzsche to forge his flashing counterblasts, but though their vision
+of the "general situation" thus coincided, their conclusions were
+diametrically different. For Nietzsche the hope of humanity is found
+in the strong; for Dostoievsky it is found in the weak. Their only
+ground of agreement is that they both refute the insolent claims of
+mediocrity and normality.
+
+One of the most arresting "truths" that emerge, like silvery fish, at
+the end of the line of this Fisher in the abysses is the "truth" that any
+kind of departure from the Normal may become a means of mystic
+illumination. The same perversion or contortion of mind which may,
+in one direction, lead to crime may, in another direction, lead to
+extraordinary spiritual clairvoyance. And this applies to _all_
+deviations from the normal type, and to all moods and inclinations
+in normal persons under unusual excitement or strain. The theory is,
+as a matter of fact, as old as the oldest races. In Egypt and India, as
+well as in Rome and Athens, the gods were always regarded as in
+some especial way manifesting their will, and revealing their secrets,
+to those thus stricken. The view that wisdom is attained along the
+path of normal health and rational sanity has always been a
+"philosophical" and never a "religious" view. Dostoievsky's
+dominant idea has, indeed, many affinities with the Pauline one, and
+is certainly a quite justifiable derivation from the Evangelical
+doctrine. It is, however, none the less startling to our Western mind.
+
+In Dostoievsky's books, madmen, idiots, drunkards, consumptives,
+degenerates, visionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, nympholepts,
+criminals and saints jostle one another in a sort of "Danse Macabre,"
+but not one of them but has his moment of ecstasy. The very worst
+of them, that little band of fantastic super-men of lust, whose
+extravagant manias and excesses of remorse suggest attitudes and
+gestures that would need an Aubrey Beardsley for illustration, have,
+at moments, moods of divine sublimity. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch
+Stavrogin, in "the Possessed;" Svridigilaiof Dounia's would-be
+seducer, in "Crime and Punishment," and Ivan, in "the Brothers
+Karamazov," though all inspired by ten thousand demons, cannot be
+called devoid of a certain mysterious spiritual greatness. Perhaps the
+interesting thing about them is that their elaborate wickedness is
+itself a _spiritual_ rather than a _sensual_ quality, or, to put it in
+another way, there are abysmal depths of spiritual subtlety in their
+most sensual obsession. The only entirely _base_ criminal I can
+recall in Dostoievsky is Stavrogin's admirer, Peter Stepanovitch, and
+he is transformed and transfigured at times by the sheer intensity of
+his worship for his friend. It would be overpowering the reader with
+names, themselves like ritualistic incantations, to enumerate all the
+perverts and abnormalists whose various lapses and diseases become,
+in these books, mediums of spiritual insight. Though dealing
+continually with every form of tragedy and misery, Dostoievsky
+cannot be called a Pessimist. He is so profoundly affected by the
+spirit of the Evangelical "Beatitudes" that for him "poverty" and
+"meekness" and "hungering and thirsting" and "weeping and
+mourning" are always in the true sense "blessed"--that is to say, they
+are the path of initiation, the sorrowful gates to the unspeakable joy.
+
+The most beautiful characters he has drawn are, perhaps, Alyosha
+Karamazov and Prince Myshkin; both of these being young men,
+and both of them so Christ-like, that in reading about them one is
+compelled to acknowledge that something in the temper of that
+Figure, hitherto concealed from His followers, has been
+communicated to this Russian. The naive, and yet ironical,
+artlessness of their retorts to the aggressive Philistines who surround
+them remind one over and over again of those Divine "bon-mots"
+with which, to use Oscar Wilde's allusion, the Redeemer bewildered
+His assailants. Stephan Trophinovitch reading the Miracle of the
+Swine with his female Colporteur; Raskolnikoff reading the Miracle
+of the Raising of Lazarus with his prostitute Sonia, are scenes that
+might strike an English mind as mere melodramatic sentiment, but
+those who have entered into the Dostoievsky secret know how much
+more than that there is in them, and how deep into the mystery of
+things and the irony of things they go. One is continually coming
+upon passages in Dostoievsky the strange and ambiguous nature of
+which leads one's thought far enough from Evangelical simplicities;
+passages that are, indeed, at once so beautiful and so sinister that
+they make one think of certain demonic sayings of Goethe or
+Spinoza; and yet even these passages do no more than throw new
+and formidable light upon the "old situations," the old "cross-roads."
+Dostoievsky is not content with indicating how weakness and
+disease and suffering can become organs of vision; he goes very
+far--further than anyone--in his recognition of the secret and perverted
+cruelty that drives certain persons on to lacerate themselves with all
+manner of spiritual flagellation.
+
+He understands, better than anyone else, how absurd the
+philosophical utilitarians are with their axiom that everyone
+pursueshis own happiness. He exposes over and over again, with
+nerve-rending subtlety, how intoxicating to the human spirit is the mad
+lust of self-immolation, of self-destruction. It is really from him that
+Nietzsche learnt that wanton Dionysic talisman which opens the
+door to such singular spiritual orgies.
+
+Nothing is more characteristic of Dostoievsky's method than his
+perpetual insistence upon the mania which certain curious human
+types display for "making fools of themselves." The more sacred
+aspects of this deliberate self-humiliation require no comment. It is
+obviously good for our spirit's salvation to be made Fools in Christ.
+What one has to observe further, under his guidance, is the strange
+passion that certain derelicts in the human vortex have for being
+trampled upon and flouted. These queer people--but there are more
+of them than one would suppose--derive an almost sensual pleasure
+from being abominably treated. They positively lick the dust before
+their persecutors. They run to "kiss the rod." It is this type of person
+who, like the hero in that story in "L'Esprit Souterrain," deliberately
+rushes into embarrassing situations; into situations and among
+people where he will look a fool--in order to avenge himself upon
+the spectators of his "folly" by going deeper and deeper into it.
+
+If Dostoievsky astounds us by his insight into the abnormalities of
+"normal" men, he is still more startling when he deals with women.
+There are certain scenes--the scene between Aglaia and Nastasya in
+"The Idiot;" the scene between Sonia and the mother and sister of
+Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment;" the scene in "The
+Possessed" where Liza leaves Stavrogin on the morning after the fire;
+and the scene where the woman, loved by the mad Karamazov
+brothers, tears her nerves and  theirs to pieces, in outrageous
+obliquity--which brand themselves upon the mind as reaching the
+uttermost limit of devasting vision.
+
+In reviewing the final impression left upon one by the reading of
+Dostoievsky one must confess to many curious reactions. He
+certainly has the power of making all other novelists seem dull in
+comparison; dull--or artistic and rhetorical. Perhaps the most marked
+effect he has is to leave one with the feeling of a universe _with
+many doors;_ with many doors, and not a few terrifyingly dark
+passages; but a universe the opposite of "closed" or "explained."
+Though not a single one of his books ends "happily," the final
+impression is the reverse of hopeless. His very mania for tragedy,
+his Dionysic embracing of it, precludes any premature despair.
+Perhaps a profound deepening of one's sense of the mysterious
+_perversity_ of all human fate is the thing that lingers, a perversity
+which is itself a kind of redemption, for it implies arbitrariness and
+waywardness, and these things mean power and pleasure, even in
+the midst of suffering.
+
+He is the best possible antidote for the peculiar and paralysing
+fatalism of our time, a fatalism which makes so much of
+"environment" and so little of "character," and which tends to endow
+mere worldly and material success with a sort of divine prerogative.
+A generation that allows itself to be even _interested_ in such types
+as the "strong," efficient craftsmen of modern industry and finance
+is a generation that can well afford a few moral shocks at the hands
+of Dostoievsky's "degenerates." The world he reveals is, after all, in
+spite of the Russian names, the world of ordinary human obliquity.
+The thing for which we have to thank him is that it is made so rich
+and deep, so full of fathomless pits and unending vistas.
+
+Every great writer brings his own gift, and if others satisfy our
+craving for destruction and beauty, and yet others our longing for
+simplification and rational form, the suggestions he brings of
+mystery and passion, of secret despairs and occult ecstasies, of
+strange renunciations and stranger triumphs, are such as must
+quicken our sense of the whole weird game. Looking back over
+these astonishing books, it is curious to note the impression left of
+Dostoievsky's feeling for "Nature." No writer one has met with has
+less of that tendency to "describe scenery," which is so tedious an
+aspect of most modern work. And yet Russian scenery, and Russian
+weather, too, seem somehow, without our being aware of it, to have
+got installed in our brains. Dostoievsky does it incidentally, by
+innumerable little side-touches and passing allusions, but the general
+effect remains in one's mind with extraordinary intimacy. The great
+Russian cities in Summer and Winter, their bridges, rivers, squares,
+and crowded tenements; the quaint Provincial towns and wayside
+villages; the desolate outskirts of half-deserted suburbs; and, beyond
+them all, the feeling of the vast, melancholy plains, crossed by
+lonely roads; such things, associated in detail after detail with the
+passions or sorrows of the persons involved, recur as inveterately to
+the memory as the scenes and weather of our own personal
+adventures. It is not the self-conscious _art_ of a Loti or a
+D'Annunzio; it is that much more penetrating and imaginative
+_suggestiveness_ which arrests us by its vague beauty and terror in
+Lear or Macbeth. This subtle inter-penetration between humanity
+and the familiar Stage of its "exits and entrances" is only one portion
+of the weight of "cosmic" destiny--one can use no other
+word--which bears so heavily upon us as we read these books. In other
+writers one feels that when one has gone "full circle" with the
+principal characters, and has noted the "descriptive setting" all has
+been done. Here, as in Aeschylus and Euripides, as in Shakespeare
+and Goethe, one is left with an intimation of the clash of forces
+beyond and below humanity, beyond and below nature. One stands
+at the brink of things unspoken and unspeakable. One "sees the
+children sport upon the shore, and hears the mighty waters rolling
+evermore."
+
+In ordinary life we are led, and rightly led--what else can we do?--this
+way and that by personal feeling and taste and experience. We
+fight for Religion or fight against Religion. We fight for Morality or
+fight against Morality. We are Traditionalists or Rebels,
+Reactionaries or Revolutionaries. Only sometimes, in the fury of our
+Faith and our Un-Faith, there come, blown across the world-margins,
+whispers and hints of undreamed of secrets, of unformulated hopes.
+Then it is that the faces of the people and things we know grow
+strange and distant, or yield their place to faces we know not and
+things "lighter than air." Then it is that the most real seems the most
+dream-like, and the most impossible the most true, for the flowing of
+the waters of Life have fallen into a new rhythm, and even the
+children of Saturn may lift up their hearts!
+
+It is too fatally easy, in these days, when machinery--that "Star
+called Wormwood"--dominates the world, to fall into a state of hard
+and flippant cynicism, or into a yet more hopeless and weary irony.
+The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; the
+disingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such
+blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood
+worthy of normal intelligence were the mood of callous indifference
+and universal mockery.
+
+All men are liars, and "the Ultimate Futility" grins horribly from its
+mask. Well! It is precisely at these hours, at the hours when the little
+pincers of the gods especially nip and squeeze, that it is good to turn
+the pages of Fyodor Dostoievsky. He brings us his "Balm of Gilead"
+between the hands of strange people, but it is a true "alabaster box of
+precious ointment," and though the flowers it contains are snatched
+from the House of the Dead, one knows at whose feet it was once
+poured forth, and for whose sake it was broken!
+
+The books that are the most valuable in this world are not the books
+that pretend to solve life's mystery with a system. They are the
+books which create a certain mood, a certain temper--the mood, in
+fact, which is prepared for incredible surprises--the temper which no
+surprise can overpower. These books of Dostoievsky must always
+take their place in this great roll, because, though he arrives at no
+conclusion and utters no oracle, the atmosphere he throws round us
+is the atmosphere in which Life and Death are "equal;" the gestures
+his people make, in their great darkness, are the gestures of _that
+which goes upon its way,_ beyond Good and beyond Evil!
+
+Dostoievsky is more than an artist. He is, perhaps--who can tell?--the
+founder of a new religion. And yet the religion he "founds" is a
+religion which has been about us for more years than human history
+can count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near--too
+palpable--O Christ! The terror of it!--that shadowy, monstrous
+weight of oppressive darkness, through which we signal to each
+other from our separate Hells. _It_ sways and wavers, it gathers and
+re-gathers, it thickens and deepens, it lifts and sinks, and we know
+all the while that it is the Thing we ourselves have made, and the
+intolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our own
+thoughts, of our lusts, of our fears, of our terrible creative dreams.
+
+Dostoievsky's books seem, as one handles them, to flow
+mysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of the
+Last Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full of
+desolate marshes, and forlorn spaces, and hemlock-roots, and
+drowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards and
+unutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmost
+selves, and for which we are _answerable_ and none else.
+
+Across this Land we wander, feeling for some fingers, cold and dead
+as our own, to share that terror with, and, it may be, finding none,
+for as we have groped forward we have been pitiless in the darkness,
+and, half-dead ourselves, have trodden the dead down, and the dead
+are those who cannot forgive; for murdered "love" has no heart
+wherewith it should forgive:--_Will the Christ never come?_
+
+
+
+EDGAR ALLEN POE
+
+One does not feel, by any means, that the last word has been uttered
+upon this great artist. Has attention been called, for instance, to the
+sardonic cynicism which underlies his most thrilling effects? Poe's
+cynicism is itself a very fascinating pathological subject. It is an
+elaborate thing, compounded of many strange elements. There is a
+certain dark, wilful melancholy in it that turns with loathing from all
+human comfort. There is also contempt in it, and savage derision.
+There is also in it a quality of mood that I prefer to call
+_Saturnian_--the mood of those born under the planet Saturn. There is
+cruelty in it, too, and voluptuous cruelty, though cold, reserved, and
+evasive. It is this "cynicism" of his which makes it possible for him
+to introduce into his poetry--it is of his poetry that I wish to speak--a
+certain colloquial salt, pungent and acrid, and with the smell of the
+tomb about it. It is colloquialism; but it is such colloquialism as
+ghosts or vampires would use.
+
+Poe remains--that has been already said, has it not?--absolutely cold
+while he produces his effects. There is a frozen contempt indicated
+in every line he writes for the poor facile artists "who speak with
+tears." Yet the moods through which his Annabels and Ligeias and
+Ulalumes lead us are moods he must surely himself have known.
+Yes, he knew them; but they were, so to speak, so completely the
+atmosphere he lived in that there was no need for him to be carried
+out of himself when he wrote of them; no need for anything but icy,
+pitiless transcription. Has it been noticed how inhumanly immoral
+this great poet is? Not because he drank wine or took drugs. All that
+has been exaggerated, and, anyway, what does it matter now? But in
+a much deeper and more deadly sense. It is strange! The world
+makes such odd blunders. It seems possessed of the idea that absurd
+amorous scamps like Casanova reach the bottom of wickedness.
+They do not even approach it. Intrinsically they are quite stupidly
+"good." Then, again, Byron is supposed to have been a wicked man.
+He himself aspired to be nothing less. But he was everything less.
+He was a great, greedy, selfish, swaggering, magnanimous infant!
+Oscar Wilde is generally regarded as something short of "the just
+man made perfect," but his simple, babyish passion for touching
+pretty things, toying with pretty people, wearing pretty clothes, and
+drinking absinthe, is far too naive a thing to be, at bottom, _evil._
+No really wicked person could have written "The Importance of
+Being Earnest," with those delicious, paradoxical children rallying
+one another, and "Aunt Augusta" calling aloud for cucumber-sandwiches!
+Salome itself--that Scarlet Litany--which brings to us, as
+in a box of alabaster, all the perfumes and odours of amorous lust,
+is not really a "wicked" play; not wicked, that is to say, unless all
+mad passion is wicked. Certainly the lust in "Salome" smoulders and
+glows with a sort of under-furnace of concentration, but, after all, it
+is the old, universal obsession. Why is it more wicked to say, "Suffer
+me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan!" than to say, "Her lips suck forth
+my soul--see where it flies!"? Why is it more wicked to say, "Thine
+eyes are like black holes, burnt by torches in Tyrian tapestry!" than
+to cry out, as Antony cries out, for the hot kisses of Egypt?
+Obviously the madness of physical desire is a thing that can hardly
+be tempered down to the quiet stanzas of Gray's Elegy. But it is not
+in itself a wicked thing; or the world would never have consecrated
+it in the great Love-Legends. One may admit that the entrance of the
+Nubian Executioner changes the situation; but, after all, the frenzy
+of the girl's request--the terror of that Head upon the silver
+charger--were implicit in her passion from the beginning; and are,
+God knows! never very far from passion of that kind.
+
+But all this is changed when we come to Edgar Allen Poe. Here we
+are no longer in Troy or Antioch or Canopus or Rimini. Here it is
+not any more a question of ungovernable passion carried to the limit
+of madness. Here it is no more the human, too human, tradition of
+each man "killing" the "thing he loves." Here we are in a world
+where the human element, in passion, has altogether departed, and
+left something else in its place; something which is really, in the true
+sense, "inhumanly immoral." In the first place, it is a thing devoid of
+any physical emotion. It is sterile, immaterial, unearthly, ice-cold. In
+the second place, it is, in a ghastly sense, self-centered! It feeds upon
+itself. It subdues everything to itself. Finally, let it be said, it is a
+thing with a mania for Corruption. The Charnel-House is its bridal-couch,
+and the midnight stars whisper to one another of its perversion.
+There is no need for it "to kill the thing it loves," for it
+loves only what is already dead. _Favete linguis!_ There must be no
+profane misinterpretation of this subtle and delicate difference. In
+analysing the evasive chemistry of a great poet's mood, one moves
+warily, reverently, among a thousand betrayals. The mind of such a
+being is as the sand-strewn floor of a deep sea. In this sea we poor
+divers for pearls, and _stranger things,_ must hold our breath long
+and long, as we watch the great glittering fish go sailing by, and
+touch the trailing, rose-coloured weeds, and cross the buried coral. It
+may be that no one will believe us, when we return, about what we
+have seen! About those carcanets of rubies round drowned throats
+and those opals that shimmered and gleamed in dead men's skulls!
+
+At any rate, the most superficial critic of Poe's poetry must admit
+that every single one of his great verses, except the little one "to
+Helen," is pre-occupied with Death. Even in that Helen one, perhaps
+the loveliest, though, I do not think, the most _characteristic,_ of all,
+the poet's desire is to make of the girl he celebrates a sort of Classic
+Odalisque, round whose palpable contours and lines he may hang
+the solemn ornaments of the Dead--of the Dead to whom his soul
+turns, even while embracing the living! Far, far off, from where the
+real Helen waits, so "statue-like"--the "agate lamp" in her hands--wavers
+the face of that other Helen, the face "that launched a thousand
+ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium."
+
+The longer poem under the same title, and apparently addressed to
+the same sorceress, is more entirely "in his mood." Those shadowy,
+moon-lit "parterres," those living roses--Beardsley has planted them
+since in another "enchanted garden"--and those "eyes," that grow so
+luminously, so impossibly large, until it is almost pain to be "saved"
+by them--these things are in Poe's true manner; for it is not "Helen"
+that he has ever loved, but her body, her corpse, her ghost, her
+memory, her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach! And these things
+none can take from him. The maniacal egoism of a love of this kind--its
+frozen inhumanity--can be seen even in those poems which
+stretch yearning hands towards Heaven. In "Annabel Lee," for
+instance, in that sea-kingdom where the maiden lived who had no
+thought--who _must_ have no thought--"but to love and be loved by
+me"--what madness of implacable possession, in that "so all the
+night-tide I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life
+and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the
+sounding sea!"
+
+The same remorseless "laying on of hands" upon what God himself
+cannot save from us may be discerned in that exquisite little poem
+which begins:
+
+     "Thou wast all to me, love,
+          For which my soul did pine;
+     A green isle in the Sea, love,
+          A Fountain and a Shrine
+     All wreathed with Fairy fruits and flowers;
+          And all the flowers were mine!"
+
+That "dim-gulf" o'er which "the spirit lies, mute, motionless,
+aghast"--how well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those
+days of his which are "trances," and in those "nightly dreams" which
+are all he lives for, he is with her; with her still, with her always;
+
+     "In what ethereal dances,
+     By what eternal streams!"
+
+The essence of "immorality" does not lie in mad Byronic passion, or
+in terrible Herodian lust. It lies in a certain deliberate "petrifaction"
+of the human soul in us; a certain glacial detachment from all
+interests save one; a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with our
+own emotion. And this emotion, for the sake of which every earthly
+feeling turns to ice, is our Death-hunger, our eternal craving to make
+_what has been_ be again, and again, forever!
+
+The essence of immorality lies not in the hot flame of natural, or
+even unnatural, desire. It lies in that inhuman and forbidden wish to
+arrest _the processes of life_--to lay a freezing hand--a dead hand--upon
+what we love, so that it _shall always be the same._ The really
+immoral thing is to isolate, from among the affections and passions
+and attractions of this human world, one particular lure; and then,
+having endowed this with the living body of "eternal death," to bend
+before it, like the satyr before the dead nymph in Aubrey's drawing,
+and murmur and mutter and shudder over it, through the eternal
+recurrence of all things!
+
+Is it any longer concealed from us wherein the "immorality" of this
+lies? It lies in the fact that what we worship, what we _will not,_
+through eternity, let go, is not a living person, but the "body" of a
+person; a person who has so far been "drugged," as not only to die
+for us--that is nothing!--but to remain dead for us, through all the
+years!
+
+In his own life--with that lovely consumptive Child-bride dying by
+his side--Edgar Allen Poe lived as "morally," as rigidly, as any
+Monk. The popular talk about his being a "Drug-Fiend" is ridiculous
+nonsense. He was a laborious artist, chiselling and refining his
+"artificial" poems, day in and day out. Where his "immorality" lies is
+much deeper. It is in the mind--the mind, Master Shallow!--for he is
+nothing if not an absolute "Cerebralist." Certainly Poe's verses are
+"artificial." They are the most artificial of all poems ever written.
+And this is natural, because they were the premeditated expression
+of a premeditated cult. But to say they are artificial does not
+derogate from their genius. Would that there were more such
+"artificial" verses in the world!
+
+One wonders if it is clearly understood how the "unearthly" element
+in Poe differs from the "unearthly" element in Shelley. It differs
+from it precisely as Death differs from Life.
+
+Shelley's ethereal spiritualism--though, God knows, such gross
+animals are we, it seems inhuman enough--is a passionate white
+flame. It is the thin, wavering fire-point of all our struggles after
+purity and eternity. It is a centrifugal emotion, not, as was the other's,
+a centripedal one. It is the noble Platonic rising from the love of one
+beautiful person to the love of many beautiful persons; and from that
+onward, through translunar gradations, to the love of the supreme
+Beauty itself. Shelley's "spirituality" is a living, growing, creative
+thing. In its intrinsic nature it is not egoistic at all, but profoundly
+altruistic. It uses Sex to leave Sex behind. In its higher levels it is
+absolutely Sexless. It may transcend humanity, but it springs from
+humanity. It is, in fact, humanity's dream of its own transmutation.
+For all its ethereality and remoteness, it yearns, "like a God in pain,"
+over the sorrows of the world. With infinite planetary pity, it would
+heal those sorrows.
+
+Edgar Allen's "spirituality" has not the least flicker of a longing to
+"leave Sex behind." It is bound to Sex, as the insatiable Ghoul is
+bound to the Corpse he devours. It is not concerned with the
+physical ecstasies of Sex. It has no interest in such human matters.
+But deprive it of the fact of Sex-difference, and it drifts away
+whimpering like a dead leaf, an empty husk, a wisp of chaff, a
+skeleton gossamer. The poor, actual, warm lips, "so sweetly
+forsworn," may have had small interest for this "spiritual" lover, but
+now that she is dead and buried, and a ghost, they must remain a
+woman's lips forever! Nor have Edgar Allen's "faithful ones" the
+remotest interest in what goes on around them. Occupied with their
+Dead, their feeling towards common flesh and blood is the feeling of
+Caligula. "What have I done to thee?" that proud, reserved face
+seems to say, as it looks out on us from its dusty title-page; "what
+have I done to thee, that I should despise thee so?"
+
+Shelley's clear, erotic passion is always a "cosmic" thing. It is the
+rhythmic expression of the power that creates the world. But there is
+nothing "cosmic" about the enclosed gardens of Edgar Allen Poe;
+and the spirits that walk among those Moon-dials and dim Parterres
+are not of the kind who go streaming up, from land and ocean,
+shouting with joy that Prometheus has conquered! But what a master
+he is--what a master! In the suggestiveness of _names_--to mention
+only one thing--can anyone touch him? That word "Porphyrogene"--the
+name of the Ruler of, God knows what, Kingdom of the Dead--does
+it not linger about one--and follow one--like the smell of
+incense?
+
+But the poem of all poems in which the very genius Edgar Allen is
+embodied is, of course, "Ulalume." Like this, there is nothing; in
+Literature--nothing in the whole field of human art. Here he is, from
+beginning to end, a supreme artist; dealing with the subject for
+which he was born! That undertone of sardonic, cynical _humour_--for
+it can be called nothing else--which grins at us in the background
+like the grin of a Skull; how extraordinarily characteristic it is! And
+the touches of "infernal colloquialism," so deliberately fitted in, and
+making us remember--many things!--is there anything in the world
+like them?
+
+     "And now as the night was senescent,
+          And the star-dials hinted of morn,
+     At the end of our path a liquescent
+          And nebulous lustre was born,
+     Out of which a miraculous crescent
+          Arose with a duplicate horn--
+     Astarte's be-diamonded crescent,
+          Distinct with its duplicate horn!"
+
+"And I said"--but let us pass to his Companion. The cruelty of this
+conversation with "Psyche" is a thing that may well make us
+shudder. The implication is, of course, double. Psyche is his own
+soul; the soul in him which would live, and grow, and change, and
+know the "Vita Nuova." She is also "the Companion," to whom he
+has turned for consolation. She is the Second One, the Other One, in
+whose living caresses he would forget, if it might be, that which lies
+down there in the darkness!
+
+     "Then Psyche, uplifting her finger,
+     Said, 'sadly this star I mistrust,
+     Its pallor I strangely mistrust.
+     O hasten! O let us not linger!
+     O fly! Let us fly! for we must!'"
+
+Thus the Companion; thus the Comrade; thus the "Vita Nuova"!
+
+Now mark what follows:
+
+     "Then I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
+     And tempted her out of her gloom.
+     And conquered her scruples and gloom.
+     And we passed to the end of a Vista,
+     But were stopped by the door of a Tomb.
+     By the door of a Legended Tomb,
+     And I said: 'What is written, sweet sister,
+     On the door of this legended Tomb?'
+     She replied, Ulalume--Ulalume--
+     Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"
+
+The end of the poem is like the beginning, and who can utter the
+feelings it excites? That "dark tarn of Auber," those "Ghoul-haunted
+woodlands of Weir" convey, more thrillingly than a thousand words
+of description, what we have actually felt, long ago, far off, in that
+strange country of our forbidden dreams.
+
+What a master he is! And if you ask about his "philosophy of life,"
+let the Conqueror Worm make answer:
+
+     "Lo! Tis a Gala-Night
+     Within the lonesome latter years--"
+
+Is not that an arresting commencement? The word "Gala-Night"--has
+it not the very malice of the truth of things?
+
+Like Heine, it gave this poet pleasure not only to love the Dead, but
+to love feeling himself dead. That strange poem about "Annie." with
+its sickeningly sentimental conclusion, where the poet lies prostrate,
+drugged with all the drowsy syrops in the world, and celebrates his
+euthanasia, has a quality of its own. It is the "inverse" of life's
+"Danse Macabre." It is the way we poor dancers long to sleep. "For
+to sleep you must slumber in just such a bed!" The old madness is
+over now; the old thirst quenched. It was quenched in a water that
+"does not flow so far underground." And luxuriously, peacefully, we
+can rest at last, with the odour of "puritan pansies" about us, and
+somewhere, not far off, rosemary and rue!
+
+Edgar Allen Poe's philosophy of Life? It may be summed up in the
+lines from that little poem, where he leaves her side who has, for a
+moment, turned his heart from the Tomb. The reader will remember
+the way it begins: "Take this kiss upon thy brow." And the
+conclusion is the confusion of the whole matter:
+
+     "All that we see or seem
+     Is but a dream within a dream."
+
+Strangely--in forlorn silence--passes before us, as we close his pages,
+that procession of "dead, cold Maids." Ligeia follows Ulalume; and
+Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the
+moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of
+eternity. I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion, in the
+reader, to know the shudder of the loss, more dear than life, of such
+as these! The more normal memory of man will still continue
+repeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem:
+
+     "O daughters of dreams and of stories,
+     That Life is not wearied of yet--
+     Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
+     Felise, and Yolande and Julette!"
+
+Yes, Life and the Life-Lovers are enamoured still of these exquisite
+witches, these philtre-bearers, these Sirens, these children of Circe.
+But a few among us--those who understand the poetry of Edgar
+Allen--turn away from them, to that rarer, colder, more virginal
+Figure; to Her who has been born and has died, so many times; to
+Her who was Ligeia and Ulalume and Helen and Lenore--for are not
+all these One?--to Her we have loved in vain and shall love in vain
+until the end--to Her who wears, even in the triumph of her
+Immortality, the close-clinging, heavily-scented cerements of the
+Dead!
+
+     "The old bards shall cease and their memory that lingers
+     Of frail brides and faithless shall be shrivelled as with fire,
+     For they loved us not nor knew us and our lips were dumb, our
+          fingers
+     Could wake not the secret of the lyre.
+     Else, else, O God, the Singer,
+     I had sung, amid their rages,
+     The long tale of Man,
+     And his deeds for good and ill.
+     But the Old World knoweth--'tis the speech of all his ages--
+     Man's wrong and ours; he knoweth and is still."
+
+
+
+WALT WHITMAN
+
+I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of all
+profaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry.
+We all know what a splendid heroic Anarchist he was. We all know
+with what rude zest he gave himself up to that "Cosmic Emotion," to
+which in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence.
+We know his mania for the word "en masse," for the words
+"ensemble," "democracy" and "libertad." We know his defiant
+celebrations of Sex, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love of
+Comrades which "passeth the love of women." We know the world-shaking
+effort he made--and to have made it at all, quite apart from
+its success, marks him a unique genius!--to write poetry about every
+mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable
+world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at
+these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to
+Dorian flutes, but they form a background--like the lists of the Kings
+in the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer--against which, as
+against the great blank spaces of Life itself, "the writing upon the
+wall" may make itself visible.
+
+What seems much less universally realized is the extraordinary
+genius for sheer "poetry" which this Prophet of Optimism possessed.
+I agree that Walt Whitman's Optimism is the only kind, of that sort
+of thing, that one can submit to without a blush. At least it is not
+indecent, bourgeois, and ill-bred, like the fourth-hand Protestantism
+that Browning dishes up, for the delectation of Ethical Societies. It is
+the optimism of a person who has seen the American Civil War. It is
+the optimism of a man who knows "the Bowery" and "the road," and
+has had queer friends in his mortal pilgrimage.
+
+It is an interesting psychological point, this difference between the
+"marching breast-forward" of Mrs. Browning's energetic husband,
+and the "taking to the open road" of Whitman. In some curious way
+the former gets upon one's nerves where the latter does not. Perhaps
+it is that the boisterous animal-spirits which one appreciates in the
+open air become vulgar and irritating when they are practised within
+the walls of a house. A Satyr who stretches his hairy shanks in the
+open forest is a pleasant thing to see; but a gentleman, with
+lavender-colored gloves, putting his feet on the chimney-piece is not
+so appealing. No doubt it is precisely for these Domestic Exercises
+that Mr. Chesterton, let us say, would have us love Browning. Well!
+It is a matter of taste.
+
+But it is not of Walt Whitman's Optimism that I want to speak; it is
+of his poetry.
+
+To grasp the full importance of what this great man did in this
+sphere one has only to read modern "libre vers." After Walt
+Whitman, Paul Fort, for instance, seems simply an eloquent prose
+writer. And none of them can get the trick of it. None of them!
+Somewhere, once, I heard a voice that approached it; a voice
+murmuring of
+
+     "Those that sleep upon the wind,
+     And those that lie along in the rain,
+     Cursing Egypt--"
+
+But that voice went its way; and for the rest--what banalities! What
+ineptitudes! They make the mistake, our modern free-versifiers, of
+thinking that Art can be founded on the Negation of Form. Art can
+be founded on every other Negation. But not on that one--never on
+that one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent--if they
+can--new forms. But they must invent them. They must not just
+arrange their lines _to look like poetry,_ and leave it at that.
+
+Walt Whitman's New Form of Verse was, as all such things must be,
+as Mr. Hardy's strange poetry, for instance, is, a deliberate and
+laborious struggle--ending in what is a struggle no more--to express
+his own personality in a unique and recognisable manner. This is the
+secret of all "style" in poetry. And it is the absence of this labour, of
+this premeditated concentration, which leads to the curious result we
+see on all sides of us, the fact, namely, that all young modern poets
+_write alike._ They write alike, and they _are_ alike--just as all men
+are like all other men, and all women like all other women, when,
+without the "art" of clothing, or the "art" of flesh and blood, they lie
+down side by side in the free cemetery. The old poetic forms will
+always have their place. They can never grow old-fashioned; any
+more than Pisanello, or El Greco, or Botticelli, or Scopas, or any
+ancient Chinese Painter, can grow old-fashioned. But when a
+modern artist or poet sets to work to create a new form, let him
+remember what he is doing! It is not the pastime of an hour, this. It
+is not the casual gesture of a mad iconoclast breaking Classic
+Statues into mud, out of which to make goblins. It is the fierce,
+tenacious, patient, constructive work of a lifetime, based upon
+a tremendous and overpowering Vision! Such a vision Walt
+Whitman had, and to such constant inspired labour he gave his
+life--notwithstanding his talk about "loafing and inviting his soul"!
+
+The "free" poetry of Walt Whitman obeys inflexible, occult laws,
+the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct. We need,
+as Nietzsche says, to learn the art of "commands" of this kind!
+Transvaluers of old values do not spend all their time sipping
+absinthe. Is it a secret still, then, the magical unity of rhythm, which
+Walt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses? Those long,
+plangent, wailing lines, broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs;
+those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions; those far-drawn
+flute-notes; those resounding sea-trumpets; all such effects have
+their place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts!
+
+Take that little poem--quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bit
+of democratic vulgarity--which begins:
+
+     "Come, I will build a Continent indissoluble;
+      I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon--"
+
+Is it possible to miss the hidden spheric law which governs such a
+challenge? Take the poem which begins:
+
+     "In the growths, by the margins of pond-waters--"
+
+Do you not divine, delicate reader, the peculiar subtlety of that
+reference to the rank, rain-drenched _anonymous weeds,_ which
+every day we pass in our walks inland? A botanical name would
+have driven the magic of it quite away.
+
+Walt Whitman, more than anyone, is able to convey to us that sense
+of the unclassified pell-mell, of weeds and stones and rubble and
+wreckage, of vast, desolate spaces, and spaces full of debris and
+litter, which is most of all characteristic of your melancholy
+American landscape, but which those who love England know
+where to find, even among our trim gardens! No one like Walt
+Whitman can convey to us the magical _ugliness_ of certain aspects
+of Nature--the bleak, stunted, God-forsaken things; the murky pools
+where the grey leaves fall; the dead reeds where the wind whistles
+no sweet fairy tunes; the unspeakable margins of murderous floods;
+the tangled sea-drift, scurfed with scum; the black sea-winrow of
+broken shells and dead fishes' scales; the roots of willow trees in
+moonlit places crying out for demon-lovers; the long, moaning grass
+that grows outside the walls of prisons; the leprous mosses that
+cover paupers' graves; the mountainous wastes and blighted
+marshlands which only unknown wild-birds ever touch with their
+flying wings, and of which madmen dream--these are the things, the
+ugly, terrible things, that this great optimist turns into poetry. "Yo
+honk!" cries the wild goose, as it crosses the midnight sky. Others
+may miss that mad-tossed shadow, that heartbreaking defiance--but
+from amid the drift of leaves by the roadside, this bearded Fakir of
+Outcasts has caught its meaning; has heard, and given it its answer.
+
+Ah, gentle and tender reader; thou whose heart, it may be has never
+cried all night for what it must not name, did you think Swinburne
+or Byron were the poets of "love"? Perhaps you do not know that the
+only "short story" on the title-page of which Guy de Maupassant
+found it in him to write _that word_ is a story about the wild things
+we go out to kill?
+
+Walt Whitman, too, does not confine his notions of love to normal
+human coquetries. The most devastating love-cry ever uttered,
+except that of King David over his friend, is the cry this American
+poet dares to put into the heart of "a wild-bird from Alabama" that
+has lost its mate. I wonder if critics have done justice to the
+incredible genius of this man who can find words for that aching of
+the soul we do not confess even to our dearest? The sudden words
+he makes use of, in certain connections, awe us, hush us, confound
+us, take our breath,--as some of Shakespeare's do--with their
+mysterious congruity. Has my reader ever read the little poem called
+"Tears"? And what _purity_ in the truest, deepest sense, lies behind
+his pity for such tragic craving; his understanding of what
+love-stricken, banished ones feel. I do not speak now of his happily
+amorous verses. They have their place. I speak of those desperate
+lines that come, here and there, throughout his work, where, with his
+huge, Titanic back set against the world-wall, and his wild-tossed
+beard streaming in the wind, he seems _to hold open_ by main,
+gigantic force that door of hope which Fate and God and Man and
+the Laws of Nature are all endeavoring to close! _And he holds it
+open!_ And it is open still. It is for this reason--let the profane hold
+their peace!--that I do not hesitate to understand very clearly why he
+addresses a certain poem to the Lord Christ! Whether it be true or
+not that the Pure in Heart see God, it is certainly true that they have
+a power of saving us from God's Law of Cause and Effect!
+According to this Law, we all "have our reward" and reap what we
+have sown. But sometimes, like a deep-sea murmur, there rises from
+the poetry of Walt Whitman a Protest that _must_ be heard! Then it
+is that the Tetrarchs of Science forbid in vain "that one should raise
+the Dead." For the Dead are raised up, and come forth, even in the
+likeness wherein we loved them! If words, my friends; if the use of
+words in poetry can convey such intimations as these to such a
+generation as ours, can anyone deny that Walt Whitman is a great
+poet?
+
+Deny it, who may or will. There will always gather round him--as he
+predicted--out of City-Tenements and Artist-Studios and Factory-Shops
+and Ware-Houses and Bordelloes--aye! and, it may be, out of
+the purlieus of Palaces themselves--a strange, mad, heart-broken
+company of life-defeated derelicts, who come, not for Cosmic
+Emotion or Democracy or Anarchy or Amorousness, or even
+"Comradeship," but for that touch, that whisper, that word, that hand
+outstretched in the darkness, which makes them _know_--against
+reason and argument and all evidence--that they may hope still--_for
+the Impossible is true!_
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+We have been together, you who read this--and to you, whoever you
+are, whether pleased or angry, I make a comrade's signal. Who
+knows? We might be the very ones to understand each other, if we
+met! We have been together, in the shadow of the presences that
+make life tolerable; and now we must draw our conclusion and go
+our way.
+
+Our conclusion? Ah! that is a hard matter. The world we live in
+lends itself better to beginnings than conclusions. Or does anything,
+in this terrible flowing tide, even _begin_? End or beginning, we
+find ourselves floating upon it--this great tide--and we must do what
+we can to get a clear glimpse of the high stars before we sink. I
+wonder if, in the midst of the stammered and blurted incoherences,
+the lapses and levities, of this quaint book, a sort of "orientation," as
+the theologians say now, has emerged at all? I feel, myself, as
+though it had, though it is hard enough to put it into words. I seem to
+feel that a point of view, not altogether irrelevant in our time, has
+projected a certain light upon us, as we advanced together.
+
+Let me try to catch some few filmy threads of this before it vanishes,
+even though, like a dream in the waking, its outlines waver and
+recede and fade, until it is lost in space. We gather, then, I fancy,
+from this kind of hurried passing through enchanted gardens, a sort
+of curious unwillingness to let our "fixed convictions" deprive us
+any more of the spiritual adventures to which we have a right. We
+begin to understand the danger of such convictions, of such opinions,
+of such "constructive consistency." We grow prepared to "give
+ourselves up" to "yield ourselves willingly," to whatever new
+Revelation of the Evasive One chance may throw in our way. It is in
+such yieldings, such surprises by the road, such new vistas and
+perspectives, that life loves to embody itself. To refuse them is to
+turn away from Life and dwell in the kingdom of the shadow.
+
+"Why not?" the Demon who has presided over our wanderings
+together seems to whisper--"why not for a little while try the
+experiment of having no 'fixed ideas,' no 'inflexible principles,' no
+'concentrated aim'? Why not simply react to one mysterious visitor
+after another, as they approach us, and caress or hurt us, and go their
+way? Why not, for an interlude, be Life's children, instead of her
+slaves or her masters, and let Her lead us, the great crafty Mother,
+whither she will?"
+
+There will be much less harm done by such an embracing of Fate,
+and such a cessation of foolish agitations, than many might suppose.
+And more than anything else, this is what our generation requires!
+We are over-ridden by theorists and preachers and ethical
+water-carriers; we need a little rest--a little yawning and stretching and
+"being ourselves"; a little quiet sitting at the feet of the Immortal
+Gods. We need to forget to be troubled, for a brief interval, if the
+Immortal Gods speak in strange and variable tongues, and offer us
+diverse-shaped chalices. Let us drink, dear friends, let us drink, as
+the most noble prophetess Bacbuc used to say! There are many
+vintages in the kingdom of Beauty; and yet others--God knows!
+even outside that. Let us drink, and ask no troublesome questions.
+The modern puritan seeks to change the nature of our natural
+longing. He tells us that what we need is not less labor but more
+labor, not less "concentrated effort," but more "concentrated effort";
+not "Heaven," in fact, but "Hell."
+
+I do not know. There is much affectation abroad, and some
+hypocrisy. Puritans were ever addicted to hypocrisy. But because of
+these "virtuous" prophets of "action," are we to give up our Beatific
+Vision? Why not be honest for once, and confess that what Man,
+born of Woman, craves for in his heart is a little joy, a little
+happiness, a little pleasure, before "he goes hence and is no more
+seen"? We know that we know nothing. Why, then, pretend that we
+know the importance of being "up and doing"? There may be no
+such importance. The common burden of life we have, indeed, all to
+bear--and they are not very gracious or lovely souls who seek to put
+it off on others--but for this additional burden, this burden of "being
+consistent" and having a "strong character," does it seem very wise,
+in so brief an interval, to put the stress just there?
+
+Somehow I think a constant dwelling in the company of the "great
+masters" leads us to take with a certain "pinch of salt" the strenuous
+"duties" which the World's voices make so clamorous! It may be
+that our sense of their greatness and remoteness produces a certain
+"humility" in us, and a certain mood of "waiting on the Spirit," not
+altogether encouraging to what this age, in its fussy worship of
+energy, calls "our creative work." Well! There is a place doubtless
+for these energetic people, and their strenuous characters, and their
+"creative work." But I think there is a place also for those who
+cannot rush about the market-place, or climb high Alps, or make
+engines spin, or race, with girded loins, after "Truth." I think there is
+a place still left for harmless spectators in this Little Theatre of the
+Universe, And such spectators will do well if they see to it that
+nothing of the fine or the rare or the exquisite escapes them.
+Somebody must have the discrimination and the detachment
+necessary to do justice to our "creative minds." The worst of it is,
+everybody in these days rushes off to "create," and pauses not a
+moment to look round to see whether what is being created is worth
+creating!
+
+We must return to the great masters; we must return to the things in
+life that really matter; and then we shall acquire, perhaps, in our
+little way the art of keeping the creators of ugliness at a distance!
+
+Let us at least be honest. The world is a grim game, and we need
+sometimes the very courage of Lucifer to hold our enemies back.
+But in the chaos of it all, and the madness and frenzy, let us
+at least hold fast to that noble daughter of the gods men name
+_Imagination._ With that to aid us, we can console ourselves for
+many losses, for many defeats. For the life of the Imagination flows
+deep and swift, and in its flowing it can bear us to undreamed-of
+coasts, where the children of fantasy and the children of irony dance
+on--heedless of theory and argument.
+
+The world is deep, as Zarathustra says, and deep is pain; and deeper
+than pain is joy. I do not think that they have reached the final clue,
+even with their talk of "experience" and "struggle" and the "storming
+of the heights." Sometimes it is not from "experience," but from
+beyond experience, that the rumour comes. Sometimes it is not from
+the "struggle," but from the "rest" after the struggle, that the whisper
+is given. Sometimes the voice comes to us, not from the "heights,"
+but from the depths.
+
+The truth seems to be that if the clue is to be caught at all, it will be
+caught where we least expect it; and, for the catching of it, what we
+have to do is not to let our theories, our principles, our convictions,
+our opinions, impede our vision--but now and then to lay them aside;
+but whether with them or without them, to be _prepared_--for the
+Spirit bloweth where it listeth and we cannot tell whence it cometh,
+or whither it goeth!
+
+
+
+ERRATA
+
+For Edgar Allen Poe read Edgar Allan Poe.
+
+Page 33, line 1, for "and goose-girls. These are the things" read "and
+goose-girls--these are the things."
+
+Page 33, line 19, for "Penetre" read "Peut-etre."
+
+Page 50, line 10, for "iron" read "urn."
+
+Page 59, line 16, for "De Vinci" read "Da Vinci."
+
+Page 129, line 8, for "Berwick" read "Bewick."
+
+Page 138, line 25, for "Cabbalistic" read "Cabalistic."
+
+Page 268/269, line 30, and line 1, for "dim-gulf," etc, read "That
+dim-gulf o'er which The spirit lies, mute, motionless, aghast--how
+well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those days," etc.
+
+Page 270, line 20, for Celebralist read Cerebralist.
+
+Page 285, line 12, for "long-drawn" read "far-drawn."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Visions and Revisions, by John Cowper Powys
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