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diff --git a/old/60866-0.txt b/old/60866-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 909ce51..0000000 --- a/old/60866-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4923 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Margin, by Aldous Huxley - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - -Title: On the Margin - Notes and Essays - -Author: Aldous Huxley - -Release Date: December 7, 2019 [EBook #60866] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE MARGIN *** - - - - -Produced by MFR, Nigel Blower and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was -produced from images made available by the HathiTrust -Digital Library.) - - - - - - - - - - ON THE MARGIN - - -------------- - - ALDOUS HUXLEY - - - - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - BY THE SAME AUTHOR - - -------------- - - MORTAL COILS - CROME YELLOW - LIMBO - LEDA: AND OTHER POEMS - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - ON THE - MARGIN - - -------------- - - NOTES AND ESSAYS - By ALDOUS HUXLEY - - [Illustration: G.H.D. logo] - - NEW YORK - GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - COPYRIGHT, 1923, - - BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY - - [Illustration: G.H.D. logo] - - - ON THE MARGIN. II - - ------- - - PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - CONTENTS - - PAGE - I: CENTENARIES 9 - II: ON RE-READING _CANDIDE_ 19 - III: ACCIDIE 25 - IV: SUBJECT-MATTER OF POETRY 32 - V: WATER MUSIC 43 - VI: PLEASURES 48 - VII: MODERN FOLK POETRY 55 - VIII: BIBLIOPHILY 62 - IX: DEMOCRATIC ART 67 - X: ACCUMULATIONS 74 - XI: ON DEVIATING INTO SENSE 80 - XII: POLITE CONVERSATION 86 - XIII: NATIONALITY IN LOVE 94 - XIV: HOW THE DAYS DRAW IN! 100 - XV: TIBET 106 - XVI: BEAUTY IN 1920 112 - XVII: GREAT THOUGHTS 118 - XVIII: ADVERTISEMENT 123 - XIX: EUPHUES REDIVIVUS 129 - XX: THE AUTHOR OF _EMINENT VICTORIANS_ 136 - XXI: EDWARD THOMAS 143 - XXII: A WORDSWORTH ANTHOLOGY 150 - XXIII: VERHAEREN 155 - XXIV: EDWARD LEAR 161 - XXV: SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN 167 - XXVI: BEN JONSON 177 - XXVII: CHAUCER 194 - - -NOTE: Most of these Essays appeared in _The Athenæum_, under the title -“Marginalia” and over the signature AUTOLYCUS. The others were first -printed in _The Weekly Westminster Gazette_, _The London Mercury_ and -_Vanity Fair_ (New York). - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - ON THE MARGIN - - - - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - ON THE MARGIN - - - I: CENTENARIES - -From Bocca di Magra to Bocca d’Arno, mile after mile, the sandy beaches -smoothly, unbrokenly extend. Inland from the beach, behind a sheltering -belt of pines, lies a strip of coastal plain—flat as a slice of Holland -and dyked with slow streams. Corn grows here and the vine, with -plantations of slim poplars interspersed, and fat water-meadows. Here -and there the streams brim over into shallow lakes, whose shores are -fringed with sodden fields of rice. And behind this strip of plain, four -or five miles from the sea, the mountains rise, suddenly and steeply: -the Apuan Alps. Their highest crests are of bare limestone, streaked -here and there with the white marble which brings prosperity to the -little towns that stand at their feet: Massa and Carrara, Serravezza, -Pietrasanta. Half the world’s tombstones are scooped out of these noble -crags. Their lower slopes are grey with olive trees, green with woods of -chestnut. Over their summits repose the enormous sculptured masses of -the clouds. - - From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, - Over a torrent sea, - Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,— - The mountains its columns be. - -The landscape fairly quotes Shelley at you. This sea with its luminous -calms and sudden tempests, these dim blue islands hull down on the -horizon, these mountains and their marvellous clouds, these rivers and -woodlands are the very substance of his poetry. Live on this coast for a -little and you will find yourself constantly thinking of that lovely, -that strangely childish poetry, that beautiful and child-like man. -Perhaps his spirit haunts the coast. It was in this sea that he sailed -his flimsy boat, steering with one hand and holding in the other his -little volume of Æschylus. You picture him so on the days of calm. And -on the days of sudden violent storm you think of him, too. The -lightnings cut across the sky, the thunders are like terrible explosions -overhead, the squall comes down with a fury. What news of the flimsy -boat? None, save only that a few days after the storm a young body is -washed ashore, battered, unrecognizable; the little Æschylus in the coat -pocket is all that tells us that this was Shelley. - -I have been spending the summer on this haunted coast. That must be my -excuse for mentioning in so self-absorbed a world as is ours the name of -a poet who has been dead these hundred years. But be reassured. I have -no intention of writing an article about the ineffectual angel beating -in the void his something-or-other wings in vain. I do not mean to add -my croak to the mellifluous chorus of centenary-celebrators. No; the -ghost of Shelley, who walks in Versilia and the Lunigia, by the shores -of the Gulf of Spezia and below Pisa where Arno disembogues, this ghost -with whom I have shaken hands and talked, incites me, not to add a -supererogatory and impertinent encomium, but rather to protest against -the outpourings of the other encomiasts, of the honey-voiced -centenary-chanters. - -The cooing of these persons, ordinarily a specific against insomnia, is -in this case an irritant; it rouses, it exacerbates. For annoying and -disgusting it certainly is, this spectacle of a rebellious youth praised -to fulsomeness, a hundred years after his death, by people who would -hate him and be horrified by him, if he were alive, as much as the -Scotch reviewers hated and were horrified by Shelley. How would these -persons treat a young contemporary who, not content with being a -literary innovator, should use his talent to assault religion and the -established order, should blaspheme against plutocracy and patriotism, -should proclaim himself a Bolshevik, an internationalist, a pacifist, a -conscientious objector? They would say of him that he was a dangerous -young man who ought to be put in his place; and they would either -disparage and denigrate his talent, or else—if they were a little more -subtly respectable—they would never allow his name to get into print in -any of the periodicals which they controlled. But seeing that Shelley -was safely burnt on the sands of Viareggio a hundred years ago, seeing -that he is no longer a live dangerous man but only a dead classic, these -respectable supporters of established literature and established society -join in chorus to praise him, and explain his meaning, and preach -sermons over him. The mellifluous cooing is accompanied by a snuffle, -and there hangs over these centenary celebrations a genial miasma of -hypocrisy and insincerity. The effect of these festal anniversaries in -England is not to rekindle life in the great dead; a centenary is rather -a second burial, a reaffirmation of deadness. A spirit that was once -alive is fossilized and, in the midst of solemn and funereal ceremonies, -the petrified classic is duly niched in the temple of respectability. - -How much better they order these things in Italy! In that country—which -one must ever admire more the more one sees of it—they duly celebrate -their great men; but celebrate them not with a snuffle, not in black -clothes, not with prayer-books in their hands, crape round their hats -and a hatred, in their hearts, of all that has to do with life and -vigour. No, no; they make their dead an excuse for quickening life among -the living; they get fun out of their centenaries. - -Last year the Italians were celebrating the six hundredth anniversary of -Dante’s death. Now, imagine what this celebration would have been like -in England. All the oldest critics and all the young men who aspire to -be old would have written long articles in all the literary papers. That -would have set the tone. After that some noble lord, or even a Prince of -the Blood, would have unveiled a monument designed by Frampton or some -other monumental mason of the Academy. Imbecile speeches in words of not -more than two syllables would then have been pronounced over the ashes -of the world’s most intelligent poet. To his intelligence no reference -would, of course, be made; but his character, ah! his character would -get a glowing press. The most fiery and bitter of men would be held up -as an example to all Sunday-school children. - -After this display of reverence, we should have had a lovely historical -pageant in the rain. A young female dressed in white bunting would have -represented Beatrice, and for the Poet himself some actor manager with a -profile and a voice would have been found. Guelfs and Ghibellines in -fancy dress of the period would go splashing about in the mud, and a -great many verses by Louis Napoleon Parker would be declaimed. And at -the end we should all go home with colds in our heads and suffering from -septic ennui, but with, at the same time, a pleasant feeling of -virtuousness, as though we had been at church. - -See now what happens in Italy. The principal event in the Dante -celebration is an enormous military review. Hundreds of thousands of -wiry little brown men parade the streets of Florence. Young officers of -a fabulous elegance clank along in superbly tailored riding breeches and -glittering top-boots. The whole female population palpitates. It is an -excellent beginning. Speeches are then made, as only in Italy they can -be made—round, rumbling, sonorous speeches, all about Dante the -Italianissimous poet, Dante the irredentist, Dante the prophet of -Greater Italy, Dante the scourge of Jugo-Slavs and Serbs. Immense -enthusiasm. Never having read a line of his works, we feel that Dante is -our personal friend, a brother Fascist. - -After that the real fun begins; we have the _manifestazioni sportive_ of -the centenary celebrations. Innumerable bicycle races are organized. -Fierce young Fascisti with the faces of Roman heroes pay their homage to -the Poet by doing a hundred and eighty kilometres to the hour round the -Circuit of Milan. High speed Fiats and Ansaldos and Lancias race one -another across the Apennines and round the bastions of the Alps. Pigeons -are shot, horses gallop, football is played under the broiling sun. Long -live Dante! - -How infinitely preferable this is to the stuffiness and the snuffle of -an English centenary! Poetry, after all, is life, not death. Bicycle -races may not have very much to do with Dante—though I can fancy him, -his thin face set like metal, whizzing down the spirals of Hell on a -pair of twinkling wheels or climbing laboriously the one-in-three -gradients of Purgatory Mountain on the back of his trusty Sunbeam. No, -they may not have much to do with Dante; but pageants in Anglican -cathedral closes, boring articles by old men who would hate and fear him -if he were alive, speeches by noble lords over monuments made by Royal -Academicians—these, surely, have even less to do with the author of the -_Inferno_. - -It is not merely their great dead whom the Italians celebrate in this -gloriously living fashion. Even their religious festivals have the same -jovial warm-blooded character. This summer, for example, a great feast -took place at Loreto to celebrate the arrival of a new image of the -Virgin to replace the old one which was burnt some little while ago. The -excitement started in Rome, where the image, after being blessed by the -Pope, was taken in a motor-car to the station amid cheering crowds who -shouted, “Evviva Maria” as the Fiat and its sacred burden rolled past. -The arrival of the Virgin in Loreto was the signal for a tremendous -outburst of jollification. The usual bicycle races took place; there -were football matches and pigeon-shooting competitions and Olympic -games. The fun lasted for days. At the end of the festivities two -cardinals went up in aeroplanes and blessed the assembled multitudes—an -incident of which the Pope is said to have remarked that the blessing, -in this case, did indeed come from heaven. - -Rare people! If only we Anglo-Saxons could borrow from the Italians some -of their realism, their love of life for its own sake, of palpable, -solid, immediate things. In this dim land of ours we are accustomed to -pay too much respect to fictitious values; we worship invisibilities and -in our enjoyment of immediate life we are restrained by imaginary -inhibitions. We think too much of the past, of metaphysics, of -tradition, of the ideal future, of decorum and good form; too little of -life and the glittering noisy moment. The Italians are born Futurists. -It did not need Marinetti to persuade them to celebrate Dante with -bicycle races; they would have done it naturally, spontaneously, if no -Futurist propaganda had ever been issued. Marinetti is the product of -modern Italy, not modern Italy of Marinetti. They are all Futurists in -that burningly living Italy where we from the North seek only an escape -into the past. Or rather, they are not Futurists: Marinetti’s label was -badly chosen. They are Presentists. The early Christians preoccupied -with nothing but the welfare of their souls in the life to come were -Futurists, if you like. - -We shall do well to learn something of their lively Presentism. Let us -hope that our great-grandchildren will celebrate the next centenary of -Shelley’s death by aerial regattas and hydroplane races. The living will -be amused and the dead worthily commemorated. The spirit of the man who -delighted, during life, in wind and clouds, in mountain-tops and waters, -in the flight of birds and the gliding of ships, will be rejoiced when -young men celebrate his memory by flying through the air or skimming, -like alighting swans, over the surface of the sea. - - The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night - I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds - Which trample the dim winds; in each there stands - A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight. - Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there, - And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars; - Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink - With eager lips the wind of their own speed, - As if the thing they loved fled on before, - And now, even now, they clasped it. - -The man who wrote this is surely more suitably celebrated by aeroplane -or even bicycle races than by seven-column articles from the pens of -Messrs.—well, perhaps we had better mention no names. Let us take a leaf -out of the Italian book. - - - - - II: ON RE-READING _CANDIDE_ - - -The furniture vans had unloaded their freight in the new house. We were -installed, or, at least, we were left to make the best of an unbearable -life in the dirt and the confusion. One of the Pre-Raphaelites, I forget -at the moment which, once painted a picture called “The Last Day in the -Old Home.” A touching subject. But it would need a grimmer, harder brush -to depict the horrors of “The First Day in the New Home.” I had sat down -in despair among the tumbled movables when I noticed—with what a thrill -of pleased recognition—the top of a little leather-bound book protruding -from among a mass of bulkier volumes in an uncovered case. It was -_Candide_, my treasured little first edition of 1759, with its -discreetly ridiculous title-page, “_Candide ou L’Optimisme_, Traduit de -l’Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph.” - -Optimism—I had need of a little at the moment, and as Mr. le Docteur -Ralph is notoriously one of the preachers most capable of inspiring it, -I took up the volume and began to read: “Il y avait en Westphalie, dans -le Château de Mr. le Baron de Thunder-ten-tronckh....” I did not put -down the volume till I had reached the final: “Il faut cultiver notre -jardin.” I felt the wiser and the more cheerful for Doctor Ralph’s -ministrations. - -But the remarkable thing about re-reading _Candide_ is not that the book -amuses one, not that it delights and astonishes with its brilliance; -that is only to be expected. No, it evokes a new and, for me at least, -an unanticipated emotion. In the good old days, before the Flood, the -history of Candide’s adventures seemed to us quiet, sheltered, -middle-class people only a delightful phantasy, or at best a -high-spirited exaggeration of conditions which we knew, vaguely and -theoretically, to exist, to have existed, a long way off in space and -time. But read the book to-day; you feel yourself entirely at home in -its pages. It is like reading a record of the facts and opinions of -1922; nothing was ever more applicable, more completely to the point. -The world in which we live is recognizably the world of Candide and -Cunégonde, of Martin and the Old Woman who was a Pope’s daughter and the -betrothed of the sovereign Prince of Massa-Carrara. The only difference -is that the horrors crowd rather more thickly on the world of 1922 than -they did on Candide’s world. The manœuvrings of Bulgare and Abare, the -intestine strife in Morocco, the earthquake and _auto-da-fé_ are but -pale poor things compared with the Great War, the Russian Famine, the -Black and Tans, the Fascisti, and all the other horrors of which we can -proudly boast. “Quand Sa Hautesse envoye un vaisseau en Egypte,” -remarked the Dervish, “s’embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui sont dans -le vaisseau sont à leur aise ou non?” No; but there are moments when Sa -Hautesse, absent-mindedly no doubt, lets fall into the hold of the -vessel a few dozen of hungry cats; the present seems to be one of them. - -Cats in the hold? There is nothing in that to be surprised at. The -wisdom of Martin and the Old Woman who was once betrothed to the Prince -of Massa-Carrara has become the everyday wisdom of all the world since -1914. In the happy Victorian and Edwardian past, Western Europe, like -Candide, was surprised at everything. It was amazed by the frightful -conduct of King Bomba, amazed by the Turks, amazed by the political -chicanery and loose morals of the Second Empire—(what is all Zola but a -prolonged exclamation of astonishment at the goings-on of his -contemporaries?). After that we were amazed at the disgusting behaviour -of the Boers, while the rest of Europe was amazed at ours. There -followed the widespread astonishment that in this, the so-called -twentieth century, black men should be treated as they were being -treated on the Congo and the Amazon. Then came the war: a great outburst -of indignant astonishment, and afterwards an acquiescence as complete, -as calmly cynical as Martin’s. For we have discovered, in the course of -the somewhat excessively prolonged _histoire à la Candide_ of the last -seven years, that astonishment is a supererogatory emotion. All things -are possible, not merely for Providence, whose ways we had always known, -albeit for some time rather theoretically, to be strange, but also for -men. - -Men, we thought, had grown up from the brutal and rampageous -hobbledehoyism of earlier ages and were now as polite and genteel as -Gibbon himself. We now know better. Create a hobbledehoy environment and -you will have hobbledehoy behaviour; create a Gibbonish environment and -every one will be, more or less, genteel. It seems obvious, now. And now -that we are living in a hobbledehoy world, we have learnt Martin’s -lesson so well that we can look on almost unmoved at the most appalling -natural catastrophes and at exhibitions of human stupidity and -wickedness which would have aroused us in the past to surprise and -indignation. Indeed, we have left Martin behind and are become, with -regard to many things, Pococurante. - -And what is the remedy? Mr. le Docteur Ralph would have us believe that -it consists in the patient cultivation of our gardens. He is probably -right. The only trouble is that the gardens of some of us seem hardly -worth cultivating. The garden of the bank clerk and the factory hand, -the shop-girl’s garden, the garden of the civil servant and the -politician—can one cultivate them with much enthusiasm? Or, again, there -is my garden, the garden of literary journalism. In this little plot I -dig and delve, plant, prune, and finally reap—sparsely enough, goodness -knows!—from one year’s end to another. And to what purpose, to whom for -a good, as the Latin Grammar would say? Ah, there you have me. - -There is a passage in one of Tchekov’s letters which all literary -journalists should inscribe in letters of gold upon their writing desks. -“I send you,” says Tchekov to his correspondent, “Mihailovsky’s article -on Tolstoy.... It’s a good article, but it’s strange: one might write a -thousand such articles and things would not be one step forwarder, and -it would still remain unintelligible why such articles are written.” - -_Il faut cultiver notre jardin._ Yes, but suppose one begins to wonder -why? - - - - - III: ACCIDIE - - -The cœnobites of the Thebaid were subjected to the assaults of many -demons. Most of these evil spirits came furtively with the coming of -night. But there was one, a fiend of deadly subtlety, who was not afraid -to walk by day. The holy men of the desert called him the _dæmon -meridianus_; for his favourite hour of visitation was in the heat of the -day. He would lie in wait for monks grown weary with working in the -oppressive heat, seizing a moment of weakness to force an entrance into -their hearts. And once installed there, what havoc he wrought! For -suddenly it would seem to the poor victim that the day was intolerably -long and life desolatingly empty. He would go to the door of his cell -and look up at the sun and ask himself if a new Joshua had arrested it -midway up the heavens. Then he would go back into the shade and wonder -what good he was doing in that cell or if there was any object in -existence. Then he would look at the sun again and find it indubitably -stationary, and the hour of the communal repast of the evening as remote -as ever. And he would go back to his meditations, to sink, sink through -disgust and lassitude into the black depths of despair and hopeless -unbelief. When that happened the demon smiled and took his departure, -conscious that he had done a good morning’s work. - -Throughout the Middle Ages this demon was known as Acedia, or, in -English, Accidie. Monks were still his favourite victims, but he made -many conquests among the laity also. Along with _gastrimargia_, -_fornicatio_, _philargyria_, _tristitia_, _cenodoxia_, _ira_ and -_superbia_, _acedia_ or _tædium cordis_ is reckoned as one of the eight -principal vices to which man is subject. Inaccurate psychologists of -evil are wont to speak of accidie as though it were plain sloth. But -sloth is only one of the numerous manifestations of the subtle and -complicated vice of accidie. Chaucer’s discourse on it in the “Parson’s -Tale” contains a very precise description of this disastrous vice of the -spirit. “Accidie,” he tells us, “makith a man hevy, thoghtful and -wrawe.” It paralyzes human will, “it forsloweth and forsluggeth” a man -whenever he attempts to act. From accidie comes dread to begin to work -any good deeds, and finally wanhope, or despair. On its way to ultimate -wanhope, accidie produces a whole crop of minor sins, such as idleness, -tardiness, _lâchesse_, coldness, undevotion and “the synne of worldly -sorrow, such as is cleped _tristitia_, that sleth man, as seith seint -Poule.” Those who have sinned by accidie find their everlasting home in -the fifth circle of the Inferno. They are plunged in the same black bog -with the Wrathful, and their sobs and words come bubbling up to the -surface: - - Fitti nel limo dicon: “Tristi fummo - nell’ aer dolce che dal sol s’ allegra, - portando dentro accidioso fummo; - - Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra.” - Quest’ inno si gorgoglian nella strozza, - chè dir nol posson con parola integra. - -Accidie did not disappear with the monasteries and the Middle Ages. The -Renaissance was also subject to it. We find a copious description of the -symptoms of acedia in Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_. The results of -the midday demon’s machinations are now known as the vapours or the -spleen. To the spleen amiable Mr. Matthew Green, of the Custom House, -devoted those eight hundred octosyllables which are his claim to -immortality. For him it is a mere disease to be healed by temperate -diet: - - Hail! water gruel, healing power, - Of easy access to the poor; - -by laughter, reading and the company of unaffected young ladies: - - Mothers, and guardian aunts, forbear - Your impious pains to form the fair, - Nor lay out so much cost and art - But to deflower the virgin heart; - -by the avoidance of party passion, drink, Dissenters and missionaries, -especially missionaries: to whose undertakings Mr. Green always declined -to subscribe: - - I laugh off spleen and keep my pence - From spoiling Indian innocence; - -by refraining from going to law, writing poetry and thinking about one’s -future state. - -_The Spleen_ was published in the thirties of the eighteenth century. -Accidie was still, if not a sin, at least a disease. But a change was at -hand. “The sin of worldly sorrow, such as is cleped _tristitia_,” became -a literary virtue, a spiritual mode. The apostles of melancholy wound -their faint horns, and the Men of Feeling wept. Then came the nineteenth -century and romanticism; and with them the triumph of the meridian -demon. Accidie in its most complicated and most deadly form, a mixture -of boredom, sorrow and despair, was now an inspiration to the greatest -poets and novelists, and it has remained so to this day. The Romantics -called this horrible phenomenon the _mal du siècle_. But the name made -no difference; the thing was still the same. The meridian demon had good -cause to be satisfied during the nineteenth century, for it was then, as -Baudelaire puts it, that - - L’Ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité, - Prit les proportions de l’immortalité. - -It is a very curious phenomenon, this progress of accidie from the -position of being a deadly sin, deserving of damnation, to the position -first of a disease and finally of an essentially lyrical emotion, -fruitful in the inspiration of much of the most characteristic modern -literature. The sense of universal futility, the feelings of boredom and -despair, with the complementary desire to be “anywhere, anywhere out of -the world,” or at least out of the place in which one happens at the -moment to be, have been the inspiration of poetry and the novel for a -century and more. It would have been inconceivable in Matthew Green’s -day to have written a serious poem about ennui. By Baudelaire’s time -ennui was as suitable a subject for lyric poetry as love; and accidie is -still with us as an inspiration, one of the most serious and poignant of -literary themes. What is the significance of this fact? For clearly the -progress of accidie is a spiritual event of considerable importance. How -is it to be explained? - -It is not as though the nineteenth century invented accidie. Boredom, -hopelessness and despair have always existed, and have been felt as -poignantly in the past as we feel them now. Something has happened to -make these emotions respectable and avowable; they are no longer sinful, -no longer regarded as the mere symptoms of disease. That something that -has happened is surely simply history since 1789. The failure of the -French Revolution and the more spectacular downfall of Napoleon planted -accidie in the heart of every youth of the Romantic generation—and not -in France alone, but all over Europe—who believed in liberty or whose -adolescence had been intoxicated by the ideas of glory and genius. Then -came industrial progress with its prodigious multiplication of filth, -misery, and ill-gotten wealth; the defilement of nature by modern -industry was in itself enough to sadden many sensitive minds. The -discovery that political enfranchisement, so long and stubbornly fought -for, was the merest futility and vanity so long as industrial servitude -remained in force was another of the century’s horrible -disillusionments. - -A more subtle cause of the prevalence of boredom was the -disproportionate growth of the great towns. Habituated to the feverish -existence of these few centres of activity, men found that life outside -them was intolerably insipid. And at the same time they became so much -exhausted by the restlessness of city life that they pined for the -monotonous boredom of the provinces, for exotic islands, even for other -worlds—any haven of rest. And finally, to crown this vast structure of -failures and disillusionments, there came the appalling catastrophe of -the War of 1914. Other epochs have witnessed disasters, have had to -suffer disillusionment; but in no century have the disillusionments -followed on one another’s heels with such unintermitted rapidity as in -the twentieth, for the good reason that in no century has change been so -rapid and so profound. The _mal du siècle_ was an inevitable evil; -indeed, we can claim with a certain pride that we have a right to our -accidie. With us it is not a sin or a disease of the hypochondries; it -is a state of mind which fate has forced upon us. - - - - - IV: SUBJECT-MATTER OF POETRY - - -It should theoretically be possible to make poetry out of anything -whatsoever of which the spirit of man can take cognizance. We find, -however, as a matter of historical fact, that most of the world’s best -poetry has been content with a curiously narrow range of subject-matter. -The poets have claimed as their domain only a small province of our -universe. One of them now and then, more daring or better equipped than -the rest, sets out to extend the boundaries of the kingdom. But for the -most part the poets do not concern themselves with fresh conquests; they -prefer to consolidate their power at home, enjoying quietly their -hereditary possessions. All the world is potentially theirs, but they do -not take it. What is the reason for this, and why is it that poetical -practice does not conform to critical theory? The problem has a peculiar -relevance and importance in these days, when young poetry claims -absolute liberty to speak how it likes of whatsoever it pleases. - -Wordsworth, whose literary criticism, dry and forbidding though its -aspect may be, is always illumined by a penetrating intelligence, -Wordsworth touched upon this problem in his preface to _Lyrical -Ballads_—touched on it and, as usual, had something of value to say -about it. He is speaking here of the most important and the most -interesting of the subjects which may, theoretically, be made into -poetry, but which have, as a matter of fact, rarely or never undergone -the transmutation: he is speaking of the relations between poetry and -that vast world of abstractions and ideas—science and philosophy—into -which so few poets have ever penetrated. “The remotest discoveries of -the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of -the poet’s art as any upon which he is now employed, if the time should -ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations -under which they are contemplated shall be manifestly and palpably -material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” It is a formidable -sentence; but read it well, read the rest of the passage from which it -is taken, and you will find it to be full of critical truth. - -The gist of Wordsworth’s argument is this. All subjects—“the remotest -discoveries of the chemist” are but one example of an unlikely poetic -theme—can serve the poet with material for his art, on one condition: -that he, and to a lesser degree his audience, shall be able to apprehend -the subject with a certain emotion. The subject must somehow be involved -in the poet’s intimate being before he can turn it into poetry. It is -not enough, for example, that he should apprehend it merely through his -senses. (The poetry of pure sensation, of sounds and bright colours, is -common enough nowadays; but amusing as we may find it for the moment, it -cannot hold the interest for long.) It is not enough, at the other end -of the scale, if he apprehends his subject in a purely intellectual -manner. An abstract idea must be felt with a kind of passion, it must -mean something emotionally significant, it must be as immediate and -important to the poet as a personal relationship before he can make -poetry of it. Poetry, in a word, must be written by “enjoying and -suffering beings,” not by beings exclusively dowered with sensations or, -as exclusively, with intellect. - -Wordsworth’s criticism helps us to understand why so few subjects have -ever been made into poetry when everything under the sun, and beyond it, -is theoretically suitable for transmutation into a work of art. Death, -love, religion, nature; the primary emotions and the ultimate personal -mysteries—these form the subject-matter of most of the greatest poetry. -And for obvious reasons. These things are “manifestly and palpably -material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” But to most men, -including the generality of poets, abstractions and ideas are not -immediately and passionately moving. They are not enjoying or suffering -when they apprehend these things—only thinking. - -The men who do feel passionately about abstractions, the men to whom -ideas are as persons—moving and disquietingly alive—are very seldom -poets. They are men of science and philosophers, preoccupied with the -search for truth and not, like the poet, with the expression and -creation of beauty. It is very rarely that we find a poet who combines -the power and the desire to express himself with that passionate -apprehension of ideas and that passionate curiosity about strange remote -facts which characterize the man of science and the philosopher. If he -possessed the requisite sense of language and the impelling desire to -express himself in terms of beauty, Einstein could write the most -intoxicating lyrics about relativity and the pleasures of pure -mathematics. And if, say, Mr. Yeats understood the Einstein -theory—which, in company with most other living poets, he presumably -does not, any more than the rest of us—if he apprehended it exultingly -as something bold and profound, something vitally important and -marvellously true, he too could give us, out of the Celtic twilight, his -lyrics of relativity. It is those distressing little “ifs” that stand in -the way of this happy consummation. The conditions upon which any but -the most immediately and obviously moving subjects can be made into -poetry are so rarely fulfilled, the combination of poet and man of -science, poet and philosopher, is so uncommon, that the theoretical -universality of the art has only very occasionally been realized in -practice. - -Contemporary poetry in the whole of the western world is insisting, -loudly and emphatically through the mouths of its propagandists, on an -absolute liberty to speak of what it likes how it likes. Nothing could -be better; all that we can now ask is that the poets should put the -theory into practice, and that they should make use of the liberty which -they claim by enlarging the bounds of poetry. - -The propagandists would have us believe that the subject-matter of -contemporary poetry is new and startling, that modern poets are doing -something which has not been done before. “Most of the poets represented -in these pages,” writes Mr. Louis Untermeyer in his _Anthology of Modern -American Poetry_, “have found a fresh and vigorous material in a world -of honest and often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their -times; not only have their views changed, their vision has been widened -to include things unknown to the poets of yesterday. They have learned -to distinguish real beauty from mere prettiness, to wring loveliness out -of squalor, to find wonder in neglected places, to search for hidden -truths even in the dark caves of the unconscious.” Translated into -practice this means that contemporary poets can now write, in the words -of Mr. Sandburg, of the “harr and boom of the blast fires,” of “wops and -bohunks.” It means, in fact, that they are at liberty to do what Homer -did—to write freely about the immediately moving facts of everyday life. -Where Homer wrote of horses and the tamers of horses, our contemporaries -write of trains, automobiles, and the various species of wops and -bohunks who control the horsepower. That is all. Much too much stress -has been laid on the newness of the new poetry; its newness is simply a -return from the jewelled exquisiteness of the eighteen-nineties to the -facts and feelings of ordinary life. There is nothing intrinsically -novel or surprising in the introduction into poetry of machinery and -industrialism, of labour unrest and modern psychology: these things -belong to us, they affect us daily as enjoying and suffering beings; -they are a part of our lives, just as the kings, the warriors, the -horses and chariots, the picturesque mythology were part of Homer’s -life. The subject-matter of the new poetry remains the same as that of -the old. The old boundaries have not been extended. There would be real -novelty in the new poetry if it had, for example, taken to itself any of -the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has -endowed the modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had -worked out a satisfactory artistic method for dealing with abstractions. -It has not. Which simply means that that rare phenomenon, the poet in -whose mind ideas are a passion and a personal moving force, does not -happen to have appeared. - -And how rarely in all the long past he has appeared! There was -Lucretius, the greatest of all the philosophic and scientific poets. In -him the passionate apprehension of ideas, and the desire and ability to -give them expression, combined to produce that strange and beautiful -epic of thought which is without parallel in the whole history of -literature. There was Dante, in whose soul the mediæval Christian -philosophy was a force that shaped and directed every feeling, thought -and action. There was Goethe, who focussed into beautiful expression an -enormous diffusion of knowledge and ideas. And there the list of the -great poets of thought comes to an end. In their task of extending the -boundaries of poetry into the remote and abstract world of ideas, they -have had a few lesser assistants—Donne, for example, a poet only just -less than the greatest; Fulke Greville, that strange, dark-spirited -Elizabethan; John Davidson, who made a kind of poetry out of Darwinism; -and, most interesting poetical interpreter of nineteenth-century -science, Jules Laforgue. - -Which of our contemporaries can claim to have extended the bounds of -poetry to any material extent? It is not enough to have written about -locomotives and telephones, “wops and bohunks,” and all the rest of it. -That is not extending the range of poetry; it is merely asserting its -right to deal with the immediate facts of contemporary life, as Homer -and as Chaucer did. The critics who would have us believe that there is -something essentially unpoetical about a bohunk (whatever a Bohunk may -be), and something essentially poetical about Sir Lancelot of the Lake, -are, of course, simply negligible; they may be dismissed as -contemptuously as we have dismissed the pseudo-classical critics who -opposed the freedoms of the Romantic Revival. And the critics who think -it very new and splendid to bring bohunks into poetry are equally -old-fashioned in their ideas. - -It will not be unprofitable to compare the literary situation in this -early twentieth century of ours with the literary situation of the early -seventeenth century. In both epochs we see a reaction against a rich and -somewhat formalized poetical tradition expressing itself in a -determination to extend the range of subject-matter, to get back to real -life, and to use more natural forms of expression. The difference -between the two epochs lies in the fact that the twentieth-century -revolution has been the product of a number of minor poets, none of them -quite powerful enough to achieve what he theoretically meant to do, -while the seventeenth-century revolution was the work of a single poet -of genius, John Donne. Donne substituted for the rich formalism of -non-dramatic Elizabethan poetry a completely realized new style, the -style of the so-called metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. -He was a poet-philosopher-man-of-action whose passionate curiosity about -facts enabled him to make poetry out of the most unlikely aspects of -material life, and whose passionate apprehension of ideas enabled him to -extend the bounds of poetry beyond the frontiers of common life and its -emotions into the void of intellectual abstraction. He put the whole -life and the whole mind of his age into poetry. - -We to-day are metaphysicals without our Donne. Theoretically we are free -to make poetry of everything in the universe; in practice we are kept -within the old limits, for the simple reason that no great man has -appeared to show us how we can use our freedom. A certain amount of the -life of the twentieth century is to be found in our poetry, but precious -little of its mind. We have no poet to-day like that strange old Dean of -St. Paul’s three hundred years ago—no poet who can skip from the heights -of scholastic philosophy to the heights of carnal passion, from the -contemplation of divinity to the contemplation of a flea, from the rapt -examination of self to an enumeration of the most remote external facts -of science, and make all, by his strangely passionate apprehension, into -an intensely lyrical poetry. - -The few poets who do try to make of contemporary ideas the substance of -their poetry, do it in a manner which brings little conviction or -satisfaction to the reader. There is Mr. Noyes, who is writing four -volumes of verse about the human side of science—in his case, alas, all -too human. Then there is Mr. Conrad Aiken. He perhaps is the most -successful exponent in poetry of contemporary ideas. In his case, it is -clear, “the remotest discoveries of the chemist” are apprehended with a -certain passion; all his emotions are tinged by his ideas. The trouble -with Mr. Aiken is that his emotions are apt to degenerate into a kind of -intellectual sentimentality, which expresses itself only too easily in -his prodigiously fluent, highly coloured verse. - -One could lengthen the list of more or less interesting poets who have -tried in recent times to extend the boundaries of their art. But one -would not find among them a single poet of real importance, not one -great or outstanding personality. The twentieth century still awaits its -Lucretius, awaits its own philosophical Dante, its new Goethe, its -Donne, even its up-to-date Laforgue. Will they appear? Or are we to go -on producing a poetry in which there is no more than the dimmest -reflection of that busy and incessant intellectual life which is the -characteristic and distinguishing mark of this age? - - - - - V: WATER MUSIC - - -The house in which I live is haunted by the noise of dripping water. -Always, day and night, summer and winter, something is dripping -somewhere. For many months an unquiet cistern kept up within its iron -bosom a long, hollow-toned soliloquy. Now it is mute; but a new and more -formidable drip has come into existence. From the very summit of the -house a little spout—the overflow, no doubt, of some unknown receptacle -under the roof—lets fall a succession of drops that is almost a -continuous stream. Down it falls, this all but stream, a sheer forty or -fifty feet on to the stones of the basement steps, thence to dribble -ignominiously away into some appointed drain. The cataracts blow their -trumpets from the steep; but my lesser waterfalls play a subtler, I had -almost said a more “modern” music. Lying awake at nights, I listen with -a mixture of pleasure and irritation to its curious cadences. - -The musical range of a dripping tap is about half an octave. But within -the bounds of this major fourth, drops can play the most surprising and -varied melodies. You will hear them climbing laboriously up small -degrees of sound, only to descend at a single leap to the bottom. More -often they wander unaccountably about in varying intervals, familiar or -disconcertingly odd. And with the varying pitch the time also varies, -but within narrower limits. For the laws of hydrostatics, or whatever -other science claims authority over drops, do not allow the dribblings -much licence either to pause or to quicken the pace of their falling. It -is an odd sort of music. One listens to it as one lies in bed, slipping -gradually into sleep, with a curious, uneasy emotion. - -Drip drop, drip drap drep drop. So it goes on, this watery melody, for -ever without an end. Inconclusive, inconsequent, formless, it is always -on the point of deviating into sense and form. Every now and then you -will hear a complete phrase of rounded melody. And then—drip drop, -di-drep, di-drap—the old inconsequence sets in once more. But suppose -there were some significance in it! It is that which troubles my drowsy -mind as I listen at night. Perhaps for those who have ears to hear, this -endless dribbling is as pregnant with thought and emotion, as -significant as a piece of Bach. Drip drop, di-drap, di-drep. So little -would suffice to turn the incoherence into meaning. The music of the -drops is the symbol and type of the whole universe; it is for ever, as -it were, asymptotic to sense, infinitely close to significance, but -never touching it. Never, unless the human mind comes and pulls it -forcibly over the dividing space. If I could understand this wandering -music, if I could detect in it a sequence, if I could force it to some -conclusion—the diapason closing full in God, in mind, I hardly care -what, so long as it closes in something definite—then, I feel, I should -understand the whole incomprehensible machine, from the gaps between the -stars to the policy of the Allies. And growing drowsier and drowsier, I -listen to the ceaseless tune, the hollow soliloquy in the cistern, the -sharp metallic rapping of the drops that fall from the roof upon the -stones below; and surely I begin to discover a meaning, surely I detect -a trace of thought, surely the phrases follow one another with art, -leading on inevitably to some prodigious conclusion. Almost I have it, -almost, almost.... Then, I suppose, I fall definitely to sleep. For the -next thing I am aware of is that the sunlight is streaming in. It is -morning, and the water is still dripping as irritatingly and -persistently as ever. - -Sometimes the incoherence of the drop music is too much to be borne. The -listener insists that the asymptote shall somehow touch the line of -sense. He forces the drops to say something. He demands of them that -they shall play, shall we say, “God Save the King,” or the Hymn to Joy -from the Ninth Symphony, or _Voi che Sapete_. The drops obey -reluctantly; they play what you desire, but with more than the -ineptitude of the child at the piano. Still they play it somehow. But -this is an extremely dangerous method of laying the haunting ghost whose -voice is the drip of water. For once you have given the drops something -to sing or say, they will go on singing and saying it for ever. Sleep -becomes impossible, and at the two or three hundredth repetition of -_Madelon_ or even of an air from _Figaro_ the mind begins to totter -towards insanity. - -Drops, ticking clocks, machinery, everything that throbs or clicks or -hums or hammers, can be made, with a little perseverance, to say -something. In my childhood, I remember, I was told that trains said, “To -Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a pocket handkercher”—and _da capo_ -ad infinitum. They can also repeat, if desired, that useful piece of -information: “To stop the train, pull down the chain.” But it is very -hard to persuade them to add the menacing corollary: “Penalty for -improper use Five Pounds.” Still, with careful tutoring I have succeeded -in teaching a train to repeat even that unrhythmical phrase. - -Dadaist literature always reminds me a little of my falling drops. -Confronted by it, I feel the same uncomfortable emotion as is begotten -in me by the inconsequent music of water. Suppose, after all, that this -apparently accidental sequence of words should contain the secret of art -and life and the universe! It may; who knows? And here am I, left out in -the cold of total incomprehension; and I pore over this literature and -regard it upside down in the hope of discovering that secret. But -somehow I cannot induce the words to take on any meaning whatever. Drip -drop, di-drap, di-drep—Tzara and Picabia let fall their words and I am -baffled. But I can see that there are great possibilities in this type -of literature. For the tired journalist it is ideal, since it is not he, -but the reader who has to do all the work. All he need do is to lean -back in his chair and allow the words to dribble out through the nozzle -of his fountain pen. Drip, drop.... - - - - - VI: PLEASURES - - -We have heard a great deal, since 1914, about the things which are a -menace to civilization. First it was Prussian militarism; then the -Germans at large; then the prolongation of the war; then the shortening -of the same; then, after a time, the Treaty of Versailles; then French -militarism—with, all the while, a running accompaniment of such minor -menaces as Prohibition, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bryan, Comstockery.... - -Civilization, however, has resisted the combined attacks of these -enemies wonderfully well. For still, in 1923, it stands not so very far -from where it stood in that “giant age before the flood” of nine years -since. Where, in relation to Neanderthal on the one hand and Athens on -the other, where precisely it stood _then_ is a question which each may -answer according to his taste. The important fact is that these menaces -to our civilization, such as it is—menaces including the largest war and -the stupidest peace known to history—have confined themselves in most -places and up till now to mere threats, barking more furiously than they -bite. - -No, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the -external dangers—wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after -them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, -that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary -man. - -Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of -auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems -to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that -curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure.” -“Pleasure” (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I -mean, not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known -by the same name) “pleasure”—what nightmare visions the word evokes! -Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would -rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned -to lead a life of “pleasure”; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a -million words of journalism a year. - -The horrors of modern “pleasure” arise from the fact that every kind of -organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more -imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with -distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort. In -the seventeenth century, for example, royal personages and their -courtiers took a real delight in listening to erudite sermons (Dr. -Donne’s, for example) and academical disputes on points of theology or -metaphysics. Part of the entertainment offered to the Prince Palatine, -on the occasion of his marriage with James 1.’s daughter, was a -syllogistic argumentation, on I forget what philosophical theme, between -the amiable Lord Keeper Williams and a troop of minor Cambridge -logicians. Imagine the feelings of a contemporary prince, if a loyal -University were to offer him a similar entertainment! - -Royal personages were not the only people who enjoyed intelligent -pleasures. In Elizabethan times every lady and gentleman of ordinary -culture could be relied upon, at demand, to take his or her part in a -madrigal or a motet. Those who know the enormous complexity and subtlety -of sixteenth-century music will realize what this means. To indulge in -their favourite pastime our ancestors had to exert their minds to an -uncommon degree. Even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures -requiring the exercise of a certain intelligence, individuality and -personal initiative. They listened, for example, to _Othello_, _King -Lear_, and _Hamlet_—apparently with enjoyment and comprehension. They -sang and made much music. And far away, in the remote country, the -peasants, year by year, went through the traditional rites—the dances of -spring and summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of harvest -home—appropriate to each successive season. Their pleasures were -intelligent and alive, and it was they who, by their own efforts, -entertained themselves. - -We have changed all that. In place of the old pleasures demanding -intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that -provide us with ready-made distractions—distractions which demand from -pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of -any sort. To the interminable democracies of the world a million cinemas -bring the same stale balderdash. There have always been fourth-rate -writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died -without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in -which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go -out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak -passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of -them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open. - -Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it -themselves. Now, they merely turn on the gramophone. Or if they are a -little more up-to-date they adjust their wireless telephone to the right -wave-length and listen-in to the fruity contralto at Marconi House, -singing “The Gleaner’s Slumber Song.” - -And if they want literature, there is the Press. Nominally, it is true, -the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to -provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind -without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single -thought. This function, it must be admitted, it fulfils with an -extraordinary success. It is possible to go on for years and years, -reading two papers every working day and one on Sundays without ever -once being called upon to think or to make any other effort than to move -the eyes, not very attentively, down the printed column. - -Certain sections of the community still practise athletic sports in -which individual participation is demanded. Great numbers of the middle -and upper classes play golf and tennis in person and, if they are -sufficiently rich, shoot birds and pursue the fox and go ski-ing in the -Alps. But the vast mass of the community has now come even to sport -vicariously, preferring the watching of football to the fatigues and -dangers of the actual game. All classes, it is true, still dance; but -dance, all the world over, the same steps to the same tunes. The dance -has been scrupulously sterilized of any local or personal individuality. - -These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the -same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely -a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were. The -working hours of the day are already, for the great majority of human -beings, occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks in which -no mental effort, no individuality, no initiative are required. And now, -in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically -stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does -our work. Add such leisure to such work and the sum is a perfect day -which it is a blessed relief to come to the end of. - -Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might -easily decline into a kind of premature senility. With a mind almost -atrophied by lack of use, unable to entertain itself and grown so -wearily uninterested in the ready-made distractions offered from without -that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever-increasing violence -and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a -chronic and mortal boredom. It will go, perhaps, the way the Romans -went: the Romans who came at last to lose, precisely as we are doing -now, the capacity to distract themselves; the Romans who, like us, lived -on ready-made entertainments in which they had no participation. Their -deadly ennui demanded ever more gladiators, more tightrope-walking -elephants, more rare and far-fetched animals to be slaughtered. Ours -would demand no less; but owing to the existence of a few idealists, -doesn’t get all it asks for. The most violent forms of entertainment can -only be obtained illicitly; to satisfy a taste for slaughter and cruelty -you must become a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Let us not despair, -however; we may still live to see blood flowing across the stage of the -Hippodrome. The force of a boredom clamouring to be alleviated may yet -prove too much for the idealists. - - - - - VII: MODERN FOLK POETRY - - -To all those who are interested in the “folk” and their poetry—the -contemporary folk of the great cities and their urban muse—I would -recommend a little-known journal called _McGlennon’s Pantomime Annual_. -This periodical makes its appearance at some time in the New Year, when -the pantos are slowly withering away under the influence of approaching -spring. I take this opportunity of warning my readers to keep a sharp -look out for the coming of the next issue; it is sure to be worth the -modest twopence which one is asked to pay for it. - -_McGlennon’s Pantomime Annual_ is an anthology of the lyrics of the -panto season’s most popular songs. It is a document of first-class -importance. To the future student of our popular literature _McGlennon_ -will be as precious as the Christie-Miller collection of Elizabethan -broadsheets. In the year 2220 a copy of the _Pantomime Annual_ may very -likely sell for hundreds of pounds at the Sotheby’s of the time. With -laudable forethought I am preserving my copy of last year’s _McGlennon_ -for the enrichment of my distant posterity. - -The Folk Poetry of 1920 may best be classified according to -subject-matter. First, by reason of its tender associations as well as -its mere amount, is the poetry of Passion. Then there is the Poetry of -Filial Devotion. Next, the Poetry of the Home—the dear old earthly Home -in Oregon or Kentucky—and, complementary to it, the Poetry of the -Spiritual Home in other and happier worlds. Here, as well as in the next -section, the popular lyric borrows some of its best effects from -hymnology. There follows the Poetry of Recollection and Regret, and the -Poetry of Nationality, a type devoted almost exclusively to the praises -of Ireland. These types and their variations cover the Folk’s serious -poetry. Their comic vein is less susceptible to analysis. Drink, Wives, -Young Nuts, Honeymoon Couples—these are a few of the stock subjects. - -The Amorous Poetry of the Folk, like the love lyrics of more cultured -poets, is divided into two species: the Poetry of Spiritual Amour and -the more direct and concrete expression of Immediate Desire. _McGlennon_ -provides plenty of examples of both types: - - When love peeps in the window of your heart - -[it might be the first line of a Shakespeare sonnet] - - You seem to walk on air, - Birds sing their sweet songs to you, - No cloud in your skies of blue, - Sunshine all the happy day, etc. - -These rhapsodies tend to become a little tedious. But one feels the warm -touch of reality in - - I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle, - I know a cosy place for two. - I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle, - I want to feel that love is true. - Take me in your arms as lovers do. - Hold me very tight and kiss me too. - I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle, - I want to snuggle close to you. - -This is sound; but it does not come up to the best of the popular -lyrics. The agonized passion expressed in the words and music of “You -Made Me Love You” is something one does not easily forget, though that -great song is as old as the now distant origins of ragtime. - -The Poetry of Filial Devotion is almost as extensive as the Poetry of -Amour. _McGlennon_ teems with such outbursts as this: - - You are a wonderful mother, dear old mother of mine. - You’ll hold a spot down deep in my heart - Till the stars no longer shine. - Your soul shall live on for ever, - On through the fields of time, - For there’ll never be another to me - Like that wonderful mother of mine. - -Even Grandmamma gets a share of this devotion: - - Granny, my own, I seem to hear you calling me; - Granny, my own, you are my sweetest memory ... - If up in heaven angels reign supreme, - Among the angels you must be the Queen. - Granny, my own, I miss you more and more. - -The last lines are particularly rich. What a fascinating heresy, to hold -that the angels reign over their Creator! - -The Poetry of Recollection and Regret owes most, both in words and -music, to the hymn. _McGlennon_ provides a choice example in “Back from -the Land of Yesterday”: - - Back from the land of yesterday, - Back to the friends of yore; - Back through the dark and dreary way - Into the light once more. - Back to the heart that waits for me, - Warmed by the sunshine above; - Back from the old land of yesterday’s dreams - To a new land of life and love. - -What it means, goodness only knows. But one can imagine that, sunk to a -slow music in three-four time—some rich religious waltz-tune—it would be -extremely uplifting and edifying. The decay of regular churchgoing has -inevitably led to this invasion of the music-hall by the hymn. People -still want to feel the good uplifting emotion, and they feel it with a -vengeance when they listen to songs about - - the land of beginning again, - Where skies are always blue ... - Where broken dreams come true. - -The great advantage of the music-hall over the church is that the -uplifting moments do not last too long. - -Finally, there is the great Home motif. “I want to be,” these lyrics -always begin, “I want to be almost anywhere that is not the place where -I happen at the moment to be.” M. Louis Estève has called this longing -“Le Mal de la Province,” which in its turn is closely related to “Le Mal -de l’au-delà.” It is one of the worst symptoms of romanticism. - - Steamer, balançant ta mâture, - Lève l’ancre vers une exotique nature, - -exclaims Mallarmé, and the Folk, whom that most exquisite of poets -loathed and despised, echo his words in a hundred different keys. There -is not a State in America where they don’t want to go. In _McGlennon_ we -find yearnings expressed for California, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and -Georgia. Some sigh for Ireland, Devon, and the East. “Egypt! I am -calling you; oh, life is sweet and joys complete when at your feet I lay -[_sic_].” But the Southern States, the East, Devon, and Killarney are -not enough. The Mal de l’au-delà succeeds the Mal de la Province. The -Folk yearn for extra-mundane worlds. Here, for example, is an expression -of nostalgia for a mystical “Kingdom within your Eyes”: - - Somewhere in somebody’s eyes - Is a place just divine, - Bounded by roses that kiss the dew - In those dear eyes that shine. - Somewhere beyond earthly dreams, - Where love’s flower never dies, - God made the world, and He gave it to me - In that kingdom within your eyes. - -If there is any characteristic which distinguishes contemporary folk -poetry from the folk poetry of other times it is surely its -meaninglessness. Old folk poetry is singularly direct and to the point, -full of pregnant meaning, never vague. Modern folk poetry, as -exemplified in _McGlennon_, is almost perfectly senseless. The -Elizabethan peasant or mechanic would never have consented to sing or -listen to anything so flatulently meaningless as “Back from the Land of -Yesterday” or “The Kingdom within your Eyes.” His taste was for -something clear, definite and pregnant, like “Greensleeves”: - - And every morning when you rose, - I brought you dainties orderly, - To clear your stomach from all woes— - And yet you would not love me. - -Could anything be more logical and to the point? But we, instead of -logic, instead of clarity, are provided by our professional entertainers -with the drivelling imbecility of “Granny, my own.” Can it be that the -standard of intelligence is lower now than it was three hundred years -ago? Have newspapers and cinemas and now the wireless telephone -conspired to rob mankind of whatever sense of reality, whatever power of -individual questioning and criticism he once possessed? I do not venture -to answer. But the fact of _McGlennon_ has somehow got to be explained. -How? I prefer to leave the problem on a note of interrogation. - - - - - VIII: BIBLIOPHILY - - -Bibliophily is on the increase. It is a constatation which I make with -regret; for the bibliophile’s point of view is, to me at least, -unsympathetic and his standard of values unsound. Among the French, -bibliophily would seem to have become a kind of mania, and, what is -more, a highly organized and thoroughly exploited mania. Whenever I get -a new French book I turn at once—for in what disgusts and irritates one -there is always a certain odious fascination—to the fly-leaf. One had -always been accustomed to finding there a brief description of the -“vingt exemplaires sur papier hollande Van Gelder”; nobody objected to -the modest old Dutchman whose paper gave to the author’s presentation -copies so handsome an appearance. But Van Gelder is now a back number. -In this third decade of the twentieth century he has become altogether -too simple and unsophisticated. On the fly-leaf of a _dernière -nouveauté_ I find the following incantation, printed in block capitals -and occupying at least twenty lines: - - Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage, après impositions spéciales, 133 - exemplaires in-4. Tellière sur papier-vergé pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, au - filigrane de la _Nouvelle Revue Française_, dont 18 exemplaires hors - commerce, marqués de A à R, 100 exemplaires réservés aux Bibliophiles - de la _Nouvelle Revue Française_, numérotés de I à C, 15 exemplaires - numérotés de CI à CXV; 1040 exemplaires sur papier vélin pur-fil - Lafuma-Navarre, dont dix exemplaires hors commerce marqués de a à j, - 800 exemplaires réservés aux amis de l’Edition originale, numérotés de - 1 à 800, 30 exemplaires d’auteur, hors commerce, numérotés de 801 à - 830 et 200 exemplaires numérotés de 831 à 1030, ce tirage constituant - proprement et authentiquement l’Edition originale. - -If I were one of the hundred Bibliophiles of the _Nouvelle Revue -Française_ or even one of the eight hundred Friends of the Original -Edition, I should suggest, with the utmost politeness, that the -publishers might deserve better of their fellow-beings if they spent -less pains on numbering the first edition and more on seeing that it was -properly produced. Personally, I am the friend of any edition which is -reasonably well printed and bound, reasonably correct in the text and -reasonably clean. The consciousness that I possess a numbered copy of an -edition printed on Lafuma-Navarre paper, duly watermarked with the -publisher’s initials, does not make up for the fact that the book is -full of gross printer’s errors and that a whole sheet of sixteen pages -has wandered, during the process of binding, from one end of the volume -to the other—occurrences which are quite unnecessarily frequent in the -history of French book production. - -With the increased attention paid to bibliophilous niceties, has come a -great increase in price. Limited _éditions de luxe_ have become absurdly -common in France, and there are dozens of small publishing concerns -which produce almost nothing else. Authors like Monsieur André Salmon -and Monsieur Max Jacob scarcely ever appear at less than twenty francs a -volume. Even with the exchange this is a formidable price; and yet the -French bibliophiles, for whom twenty francs are really twenty francs, -appear to have an insatiable appetite for these small and beautiful -editions. The War has established a new economic law: the poorer one -becomes the more one can afford to spend on luxuries. - -The ordinary English publisher has never gone in for Van Gelder, -Lafuma-Navarre and numbered editions. Reticent about figures, he leaves -the book collector to estimate the first edition’s future rarity by -guesswork. He creates no artificial scarcity values. The collector of -contemporary English first editions is wholly a speculator; he never -knows what time may have in store. - -In the picture trade for years past nobody has pretended that there was -any particular relation between the price of a picture and its value as -a work of art. A magnificent El Greco is bought for about a tenth of the -sum paid for a Romney that would be condemned by any self-respecting -hanging-committee. We are so well used to this sort of thing in picture -dealing that we have almost ceased to comment on it. But in the book -trade the tendency to create huge artificial values is of a later -growth. The spectacle of a single book being bought for fifteen thousand -pounds is still sufficiently novel to arouse indignation. Moreover, the -book collector who pays vast sums for his treasures has even less excuse -than has the collector of pictures. The value of an old book is wholly a -scarcity value. From a picture one may get a genuine æsthetic pleasure; -in buying a picture one buys the unique right to feel that pleasure. But -nobody can pretend that _Venus and Adonis_ is more delightful when it is -read in a fifteen thousand pound unique copy than when it is read in a -volume that has cost a shilling. On the whole, the printing and general -appearance of the shilling book is likely to be the better of the two. -The purchaser of the fabulously expensive old book is satisfying only -his possessive instinct. The buyer of a picture may also have a genuine -feeling for beauty. - -The triumph and the _reductio ad absurdum_ of bibliophily were witnessed -not long ago at Sotheby’s, when the late Mr. Smith of New York bought -eighty thousand pounds’ worth of books in something under two hours at -the Britwell Court sale. The War, it is said, created forty thousand new -millionaires in America; the New York bookseller can have had no lack of -potential clients. He bought a thousand guinea volume as an ordinary -human being might buy something off the sixpenny shelf in a second-hand -shop. I have seldom witnessed a spectacle which inspired in me an -intenser blast of moral indignation. Moral indignation, of course, is -always to be mistrusted as, wholly or in part, the disguised -manifestation of some ignoble passion. In this case the basic cause of -my indignation was clearly envy. But there was, I flatter myself, a -superstructure of disinterested moral feeling. To debase a book into an -expensive object of luxury is as surely, in Miltonic language, “to kill -the image of God, as it were in the eye” as to burn it. And when one -thinks how those eighty thousand pounds might have been spent.... Ah, -well! - - - - - IX: DEMOCRATIC ART - - -There is intoxication to be found in a crowd. For it is good to be one -of many all doing the same thing—good whatever the thing may be, whether -singing hymns, watching a football match, or applauding the eternal -truths of politicians. Anything will serve as an excuse. It matters not -in whose name your two or three thousand are gathered together; what is -important is the process of gathering. In these last days we have -witnessed a most illuminating example of this tendency in the wild -outburst of mob excitement over the arrival in this country of Mary -Pickford. It is not as though people were really very much interested in -the Little Sweetheart of the World. She is no more than an excuse for -assembling in a crowd and working up a powerful communal emotion. The -newspapers set the excitement going; they built the fire, applied the -match, and cherished the infant flame. The crowds, only too happy to be -kindled, did the rest; they burned. - -I belong to that class of unhappy people who are not easily infected by -crowd excitement. Too often I find myself sadly and coldly unmoved in -the midst of multitudinous emotion. Few sensations are more -disagreeable. The defect is in part temperamental, and in part is due to -that intellectual snobbishness, that fastidious rejection of what is -easy and obvious, which is one of the melancholy consequences of the -acquisition of culture. How often one regrets this asceticism of the -mind! How wistfully sometimes one longs to be able to rid oneself of the -habit of rejection and selection, and to enjoy all the dear, obviously -luscious, idiotic emotions without an afterthought! And indeed, however -much we may admire the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach, we all of us have a -soft spot somewhere in our minds that is sensitive to “Roses in -Picardy.” But the soft spot is surrounded by hard spots; the enjoyment -is never unmixed with critical disapprobation. The excuses for working -up a communal emotion, even communal emotion itself, are rejected as too -gross. We turn from them as a cœnobite of the Thebaid would have turned -from dancing girls or a steaming dish of tripe and onions. - -I have before me now a little book, recently arrived from America, which -points out the way in which the random mob emotion may be systematically -organized into a kind of religion. This volume, _The Will of Song_ (Boni -& Liveright, 70 c.), is the joint production of Messrs. Harry Barnhart -and Percy MacKaye. “How are art and social service to be reconciled?... -How shall the Hermit Soul of the Individual Poet give valid, spontaneous -expression to the Communal Soul of assembled multitudes? How may the -surging Tides of Man be sluiced in Conduits of Art, without losing their -primal glory and momentum?” These questions and many others, involving a -great expense of capital letters, are asked by Mr. MacKaye and answered -in _The Will of Song_, which bears the qualifying sub-title, “A Dramatic -Service of Community Singing.” - -The service is democratically undogmatic. Abstractions, such as Will, -Imagination, Joy, Love and Liberty, some of whom are represented in the -dramatic performance, not by individuals, but by Group Personages -(_i.e._, choruses), chant about Brotherhood in a semi-Biblical -phraseology that is almost wholly empty of content. It is all -delightfully vague and non-committal, like a Cabinet Minister’s speech -about the League of Nations, and, like such a speech, leaves behind it a -comfortable glow, a noble feeling of uplift. But, like Cabinet -Ministers, preachers and all whose profession it is to move the people -by the emission of words, the authors of _The Will of Song_ are well -aware that what matters in a popular work of art is not the intellectual -content so much as the picturesqueness of its form and the emotion with -which it is presented. In the staging—if such a term is not -irreverent—of their service, Messrs. Barnhart and MacKaye have borrowed -from Roman Catholic ritual all its most effective emotion-creators. The -darknesses, the illuminations, the chiming bells, the solemn mysterious -voices, the choral responses—all these traditional devices have been -most scientifically exploited in the Communal Service. - -These are the stage directions which herald the opening of the service: - - As the final song of the Prelude ceases, the assembly hall grows - suddenly dark, and the DARKNESS is filled with fanfare of blowing - TRUMPETS. And now, taking up the trumpets’ refrain, the Orchestra - plays an elemental music, suggestive of rain, wind, thunder and the - rushing of waters; from behind the raised Central Seat great Flashes - of Fire spout upward, and while they are flaring there rises a FLAME - GOLD FIGURE, in a cone of light, who calls with deep, vibrant voice: - “Who has risen up from the heart of the people?” Instantaneous, from - three portions of the assembly, the VOICES OF THREE GROUPS, Men, Women - and Children, answer from the dark in triple unison: “I!” - -Even from the cold print one can see that this opening would be -extremely effective. But doubts assail me. I have a horrid suspicion -that that elemental music would not sweep me off my feet as it ought to. -My fears are justified when, looking up the musical programme, I -discover that the elemental music is by Langey, and that the orchestral -accompaniments that follow are the work of Massenet, Tschaikovsky, -Langey once more, Julia Ward Howe and Sinding. Alas! once more one finds -oneself the slave of one’s habit of selection and rejection. One would -find oneself left out in the cold just because one couldn’t stand -Massenet. Those who have seen Sir James Barrie’s latest play, _Mary -Rose_, will perhaps recall the blasts of music which prelude the piece -and recur at every mystical moment throughout the play. In theory one -ought to have mounted on the wings of that music into a serene -acceptance of Sir James Barrie’s supernatural machinery; one ought to -have been filled by it with deeply religious emotions. In practice, -however, one found oneself shrinking with quivering nerves from the -poignant vulgarity of that _Leitmotif_, isolated by what should have -united one with the author and the rest of the audience. The cœnobite -would like to eat the tripe and onions, but finds by experiment that the -smell of the dish makes him feel rather sick. - -One must not, however, reject such things as _The Will of Song_ as -absolutely and entirely bad. They are useful, they are even good, on -their own plane and for people who belong to a certain order of the -spiritual hierarchy. _The Will of Song_, set to elemental music by -Massenet and Julia Ward Howe, may be a moving spiritual force for people -to whom, shall we say, Wagner means nothing; just as Wagner himself may -be of spiritual importance to people belonging to a slightly higher -caste, but still incapable of understanding or getting any good out of -the highest, the transcendent works of art—out of the Mass in D, for -example, or Sonata Op. 111. - -The democratically minded will ask what right we have to say that the -Mass in D is better than the works of Julia Ward Howe, what right we -have to assign a lower place in the spiritual hierarchy to the admirers -of _The Will of Song_ than to the admirers of Beethoven. They will -insist that there is no hierarchy at all; that every creature possessing -humanity, possessing even life, is as good and as important, by the mere -fact of that possession, as any other creature. It is not altogether -easy to answer these objections. The arguments on both sides are -ultimately based on conviction and faith. The best one can do to -convince the paradoxical democrat of the real superiority of the Mass in -D over _The Will of Song_ is to point out that, in a sense, one contains -the other; that _The Will of Song_ is a part, and a very small part at -that, of a great Whole of human experience, to which the Mass in D much -more nearly approximates. In _The Will of Song_, and its “elemental” -accompaniment one knows exactly how every effect is obtained; its range -of emotional and intellectual experience is extremely limited and -perfectly familiar. But the range of the Mass in D is enormously much -larger; it includes within itself the range of _The Will of Song_, takes -it for granted, so to speak, and reaches out into remoter spheres of -experience. It is in a real sense quantitatively larger than _The Will -of Song_. To the democrat who believes in majorities this is an argument -which must surely prove convincing. - - - - - X: ACCUMULATIONS - - -In the brevity of life and the perishableness of material things the -moral philosophers have always found one of their happiest themes. -“Time, which antiquates Antiquities, hath an Art to make dust of all -things.” There is nothing more moving than those swelling elegiac organ -notes in which they have celebrated the mortality of man and all his -works. Those of us for whom the proper study of mankind is books dwell -with the most poignant melancholy over the destruction of literary -treasures. We think of all the pre-Platonic philosophers of whose -writings only a few sentences remain. We think of Sappho’s poems, all -but completely blotted from our knowledge. We think of the missing -fragments of the “Satyricon,” and of many other precious pages which -once were and are now no more. We complain of the holes that time has -picked in the records of history, bewailing the loss of innumerable -vanished documents. As for buildings, pictures, statues and the -accumulated evidence of whole civilizations, all destroyed as though -they had never been, they do not belong to our literary province, and, -if they did, would be too numerous to catalogue even summarily. - -But because men have once thought and felt in a certain way it does not -follow that they will for ever continue to do so. There seems every -probability that our descendants, some two or three centuries hence, -will wax pathetic in their complaints, not of the fragility, but the -horrible persistence and indestructibility of things. They will feel -themselves smothered by the intolerable accumulation of the years. The -men of to-day are so deeply penetrated with the sense of the -perishableness of matter that they have begun to take immense -precautions to preserve everything they can. Desolated by the -carelessness of our ancestors, we are making very sure that our -descendants shall lack no documents when they come to write our history. -All is systematically kept and catalogued. Old things are carefully -patched and propped into continued existence; things now new are hoarded -up and protected from decay. - -To walk through the book-stores of one of the world’s great libraries is -an experience that cannot fail to set one thinking on the appalling -indestructibility of matter. A few years ago I explored the recently dug -cellars into which the overflow of the Bodleian pours in an unceasing -stream. The cellars extend under the northern half of the great -quadrangle in whose centre stands the Radcliffe Camera. These catacombs -are two storeys deep and lined with impermeable concrete. “The muddy -damps and ropy slime” of the traditional vault are absent in this great -necropolis of letters; huge ventilating pipes breathe blasts of a dry -and heated wind, that makes the place as snug and as unsympathetic to -decay as the deserts of Central Asia. The books stand in metal cases -constructed so as to slide in and out of position on rails. So ingenious -is the arrangement of the cases that it is possible to fill two-thirds -of the available space, solidly, with books. Twenty years or so hence, -when the existing vaults will take no more books, a new cellar can be -dug on the opposite side of the Camera. And when that is full—it is only -a matter of half a century from now—what then? We shrug our shoulders. -After us the deluge. But let us hope that Bodley’s Librarian of 1970 -will have the courage to emend the last word to “bonfire.” To the -bonfire! That is the only satisfactory solution of an intolerable -problem. - -The deliberate preservation of things must be compensated for by their -deliberate and judicious destruction. Otherwise the world will be -overwhelmed by the accumulation of antique objects. Pigs and rabbits and -watercress, when they were first introduced into New Zealand, threatened -to lay waste the country, because there were no compensating forces of -destruction to put a stop to their indefinite multiplication. In the -same way, mere things, once they are set above the natural laws of -decay, will end by burying us, unless we set about methodically to get -rid of the nuisance. The plea that they should all be preserved—every -novel by Nat Gould, every issue of the _Funny Wonder_—as historical -documents is not a sound one. Where too many documents exist it is -impossible to write history at all. “For ignorance,” in the felicitous -words of Mr. Lytton Strachey, “is the first requisite of the -historian—ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and -omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.” Nobody -wants to know everything—the irrelevancies as well as the important -facts—about the past; or in any case nobody ought to desire to know. -Those who do, those who are eaten up by an itch for mere facts and -useless information, are the wretched victims of a vice no less -reprehensible than greed or drunkenness. - -Hand in hand with this judicious process of destruction must go an -elaborate classification of what remains. As Mr. Wells says in his -large, opulent way, “the future world-state’s organization of scientific -research and record compared with that of to-day will be like an ocean -liner beside the dug-out canoe of some early heliolithic wanderer.” With -the vast and indiscriminate multiplication of books and periodicals our -organization of records tends to become ever more heliolithic. Useful -information on any given subject is so widely scattered or may be hidden -in such obscure places that the student is often at a loss to know what -he ought to study or where. An immense international labour of -bibliography and classification must be undertaken at no very distant -date, if future generations of researchers are to make the fullest use -of the knowledge that has already been gained. - -But this constructive labour will be tedious and insipid compared with -the glorious business of destruction. Huge bonfires of paper will blaze -for days and weeks together, whenever the libraries undertake their -periodical purgation. The only danger, and, alas! it is a very real -danger, is that the libraries will infallibly purge themselves of the -wrong books. We all know what librarians are; and not only librarians, -but critics, literary men, general public—everybody, in fact, with the -exception of ourselves—we know what they are like, we know them: there -never was a set of people with such bad taste! Committees will doubtless -be set up to pass judgment on books, awarding acquittals and -condemnations in magisterial fashion. It will be a sort of gigantic -Hawthornden competition. At that thought I find that the flames of my -great bonfires lose much of their imagined lustre. - - - - - XI: ON DEVIATING INTO SENSE - - -There is a story, very dear for some reason to our ancestors, that -Apelles, or I forget what other Greek painter, grown desperate at the -failure of his efforts to portray realistically the foam on a dog’s -mouth, threw his sponge at the picture in a pet, and was rewarded for -his ill-temper by discovering that the resultant smudge was the living -image of the froth whose aspect he had been unable, with all his art, to -recapture. No one will ever know the history of all the happy mistakes, -the accidents and unconscious deviations into genius, that have helped -to enrich the world’s art. They are probably countless. I myself have -deviated more than once into accidental felicities. Recently, for -example, the hazards of careless typewriting caused me to invent a new -portmanteau word of the most brilliantly Laforguian quality. I had meant -to write the phrase “the Human Comedy,” but, by a happy slip, I put my -finger on the letter that stands next to “C” on the universal keyboard. -When I came to read over the completed page I found that I had written -“the Human Vomedy.” Was there ever a criticism of life more succinct and -expressive? To the more sensitive and queasy among the gods the last few -years must indeed have seemed a vomedy of the first order. - -The grossest forms of mistake have played quite a distinguished part in -the history of letters. One thinks, for example, of the name Criseida or -Cressida manufactured out of a Greek accusative, of that Spenserian -misunderstanding of Chaucer which gave currency to the rather ridiculous -substantive “derring-do.” Less familiar, but more deliciously absurd, is -Chaucer’s slip in reading “naves ballatrices” for “naves -bellatrices”—ballet-ships instead of battle-ships—and his translation -“shippes hoppesteres.” But these broad, straightforward howlers are -uninteresting compared with the more subtle deviations into originality -occasionally achieved by authors who were trying their best not to be -original. Nowhere do we find more remarkable examples of accidental -brilliance than among the post-Chaucerian poets, whose very indistinct -knowledge of what precisely _was_ the metre in which they were trying to -write often caused them to produce very striking variations on the -staple English measure. - -Chaucer’s variations from the decasyllable norm were deliberate. So, for -the most part, were those of his disciple Lydgate, whose favourite -“broken-backed” line, lacking the first syllable of the iambus that -follows the cæsura, is metrically of the greatest interest to -contemporary poets. Lydgate’s characteristic line follows this model: - - For speechéless nothing maist thou speed. - -Judiciously employed, the broken-backed line might yield very beautiful -effects. Lydgate, as has been said, was probably pretty conscious of -what he was doing. But his procrustean methods were apt to be a little -indiscriminate, and one wonders sometimes whether he was playing -variations on a known theme or whether he was rather tentatively groping -after the beautiful regularity of his master Chaucer. The later -fifteenth and sixteenth century poets seem to have worked very much in -the dark. The poems of such writers as Hawes and Skelton abound in the -vaguest parodies of the decasyllable line. Anything from seven to -fifteen syllables will serve their turn. With them the variations are -seldom interesting. Chance had not much opportunity of producing subtle -metrical effects with a man like Skelton, whose mind was naturally so -full of jigging doggerel that his variations on the decasyllable are -mostly in the nature of rough skeltonics. I have found interesting -accidental variations on the decasyllable in Heywood, the writer of -moralities. This, from the _Play of Love_, has a real metrical beauty: - - Felt ye but one pang such as I feel many, - One pang of despair or one pang of desire, - One pang of one displeasant look of her eye, - One pang of one word of her mouth as in ire, - Or in restraint of her love which I desire— - One pang of all these, felt once in all your life, - Should quail your opinion and quench all our strife. - -These dactylic resolutions of the third and fourth lines are extremely -interesting. - -But the most remarkable example of accidental metrical invention that I -have yet come across is to be found in the Earl of Surrey’s translation -of Horace’s ode on the golden mean. Surrey was one of the pioneers of -the reaction against the vagueness and uncertain carelessness of the -post-Chaucerians. From the example of Italian poetry he had learned that -a line must have a fixed number of syllables. In all his poems his aim -is always to achieve regularity at whatever cost. To make sure of having -ten syllables in every line it is evident that Surrey made use of his -fingers as well as his ears. We see him at his worst and most laborious -in the first stanza of his translation: - - Of thy life, Thomas, this compass well mark: - Ne by coward dread in shunning storms dark - Not aye with full sails the high seas to beat; - On shallow shores thy keel in peril freat. - -The ten syllables are there all right, but except in the last line there -is no recognizable rhythm of any kind, whether regular or irregular. But -when Surrey comes to the second stanza— - - Auream quisquis mediocritatem - Diligit, tutus caret obsoleti - Sordibus tecti, caret invidenda - Sobrius aula— - -some lucky accident inspires him with the genius to translate in these -words: - - Whoso gladly halseth the golden mean, - Void of dangers advisedly hath his home; - Not with loathsome muck as a den unclean, - Nor palace like, whereat disdain may gloam. - -Not only is this a very good translation, but it is also a very -interesting and subtle metrical experiment. What could be more -felicitous than this stanza made up of three trochaic lines, quickened -by beautiful dactylic resolutions, and a final iambic line of regular -measure—the recognized tonic chord that brings the music to its close? -And yet the tunelessness of the first stanza is enough to prove that -Surrey’s achievement is as much a product of accident as the foam on the -jaws of Apelles’ dog. He was doing his best all the time to write -decasyllabics with the normal iambic beat of the last line. His failures -to do so were sometimes unconscious strokes of genius. - - - - - XII: POLITE CONVERSATION - - -There are some people to whom the most difficult to obey of all the -commandments is that which enjoins us to suffer fools gladly. The -prevalence of folly, its monumental, unchanging permanence and its -almost invariable triumph over intelligence are phenomena which they -cannot contemplate without experiencing a passion of righteous -indignation or, at the least, of ill-temper. Sages like Anatole France, -who can probe and anatomize human stupidity and still remain serenely -detached, are rare. These reflections were suggested by a book recently -published in New York and entitled _The American Credo_. The authors of -this work are those _enfants terribles_ of American criticism, Messrs. -H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. They have compiled a list of four -hundred and eighty-eight articles of faith which form the fundamental -Credo of the American people, prefacing them with a very entertaining -essay on the national mind: - - Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is - never precisely the same at two successive moments. But error flows - down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or - infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in - a world of chaos. - -To look through the articles of the Credo is to realize that there is a -good deal of truth in this statement. Such beliefs as the following—not -by any means confined to America alone—are probably at least as old as -the Great Pyramid: - -That if a woman, about to become a mother, plays the piano every day, -her baby will be born a Victor Herbert. - -That the accumulation of great wealth always brings with it great -unhappiness. - -That it is bad luck to kill a spider. - -That water rots the hair and thus causes baldness. - -That if a bride wears an old garter with her new finery, she will have a -happy married life. - -That children were much better behaved twenty years ago than they are -to-day. - -And most of the others in the collection, albeit clothed in forms -distinctively contemporary and American, are simply variations on -notions as immemorial. - -Inevitably, as one reads _The American Credo_, one is reminded of an -abler, a more pitiless and ferocious onslaught on stupidity, I mean -Swift’s “_Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, -according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court and in -the Best Companies of England_. In three Dialogues. By Simon Wagstaff, -Esq.” I was inspired after reading Messrs. Mencken and Nathan’s work to -refresh my memories of this diabolic picture of the social amenities. -And what a book it is! There is something almost appalling in the way it -goes on and on, a continuous, never-ceasing stream of imbecility. Simon -Wagstaff, it will be remembered, spent the best part of forty years in -collecting and digesting these gems of polite conversation: - - I can faithfully assure the reader that there is not one single witty - phrase in the whole Collection which has not received the Stamp and - Approbation of at least One Hundred Years, and how much longer it is - hard to determine; he may therefore be secure to find them all - genuine, sterling and authentic. - -How genuine, sterling and authentic Mr. Wagstaff’s treasures of polite -conversation are is proved by the great number of them which have -withstood all the ravages of time, and still do as good service to-day -as they did in the early seventeen-hundreds or in the days of Henry -VIII.: “Go, you Girl, and warm some fresh Cream.” “Indeed, Madam, -there’s none left; for the Cat has eaten it all.” “I doubt it was a Cat -with Two Legs.” - -“And, pray, What News, Mr. Neverout?” “Why, Madam, Queen Elizabeth’s -dead.” (It would be interesting to discover at exactly what date Queen -Anne took the place of Queen Elizabeth in this grand old repartee, or -who was the monarch referred to when the Virgin Queen was still alive. -Aspirants to the degree of B. or D.Litt. might do worse than to take -this problem as a subject for their thesis.) - -Some of the choicest phrases have come down in the world since Mr. -Wagstaff’s day. Thus, Miss Notable’s retort to Mr. Neverout, “Go, teach -your Grannam to suck Eggs,” could only be heard now in the dormitory of -a preparatory school. Others have become slightly modified. Mr. Neverout -says, “Well, all Things have an End, and a pudden has two.” I think we -may flatter ourselves that the modern emendation, “except a roly-poly -pudding, which has two,” is an improvement. - -Mr. Wagstaff’s second dialogue, wherein he treats of Polite Conversation -at meals, contains more phrases that testify to the unbroken continuity -of tradition than either of the others. The conversation that centres on -the sirloin of beef is worthy to be recorded in its entirety: - - LADY SMART. Come, Colonel, handle your Arms. Shall I help you to some - Beef? - - COLONEL. If your Ladyship please; and, pray, don’t cut like a - Mother-in-law, but send me a large Slice; for I love to lay a good - Foundation. I vow, ’tis a noble Sir-loyn. - - NEVEROUT. Ay; here’s cut and come again. - - MISS. But, pray; why is it call’d a Sir-loyn? - - LORD SMART. Why, you must know that our King James the First, who - lov’d good Eating, being invited to Dinner by one of his Nobles, and - seeing a large Loyn of Beef at his Table, he drew out his Sword, and, - in a Frolic, knighted it. Few people know the Secret of this. - -How delightful it is to find that we have Mr. Wagstaff’s warrant for -such gems of wisdom as, “Cheese digests everything except itself,” and -“If you eat till you’re cold, you’ll live to grow old”! If they were a -hundred years old in his day they are fully three hundred now. Long may -they survive! I was sorry, however, to notice that one of the best of -Mr. Wagstaff’s phrases has been, in the revolution of time, completely -lost. Indeed, before I had read Aubrey’s “Lives,” Lord Sparkish’s -remark, “Come, box it about; ’twill come to my Father at last,” was -quite incomprehensible to me. The phrase is taken from a story of Sir -Walter Raleigh and his son. - - Sir Walter Raleigh [says Aubrey] being invited to dinner to some great - person where his son was to goe with him, he sayd to his son, “Thou - art expected to-day at dinner to goe along with me, but thou art so - quarrelsome and affronting that I am ashamed to have such a beare in - my company.” Mr. Walter humbled himselfe to his father and promised he - would behave himselfe mighty mannerly. So away they went. He sate next - to his father and was very demure at least halfe dinner time. Then - sayd he, “I this morning, not having the feare of God before my eies, - but by the instigation of the devill, went....” - -At this point Mr. Clark, in his edition, suppresses four lines of -Aubrey’s text; but one can imagine the sort of thing Master Walter said. - - Sir Walter, being strangely surprized and putt out of countenance at - so great a table, gives his son a damned blow over the face. His son, - as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the - face the gentleman that sate next to him and sayd, “Box about: ’twill - come to my father anon.” ’Tis now a common-used proverb. - -And so it still deserves to be; how, when and why it became extinct, I -have no idea. Here is another good subject for a thesis. - -There are but few things in Mr. Wagstaff’s dialogue which appear -definitely out of date and strange to us, and these super-annuations can -easily be accounted for. Thus the repeal of the Criminal Laws has made -almost incomprehensible the constant references to hanging made by Mr. -Wagstaff’s personages. The oaths and the occasional mild grossnesses -have gone out of fashion in mixed polite society. Otherwise their -conversation is in all essentials exactly the same as the conversation -of the present day. And this is not to be wondered at; for, as a wise -man has said: - - Speech at the present time retains strong evidence of the survival in - it of the function of herd recognition.... The function of - conversation is ordinarily regarded as being the exchange of ideas and - information. Doubtless it has come to have such a function, but an - objective examination of ordinary conversation shows that the actual - conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it. As a rule the - exchange seems to consist of ideas which are necessarily common to the - two speakers and are known to be so by each.... Conversation between - persons unknown to one another is apt to be rich in the ritual of - recognition. When one hears or takes part in these elaborate - evolutions, gingerly proffering one after another of one’s marks of - identity, one’s views on the weather, on fresh air and draughts, on - the Government and on uric acid, watching intently for the first low - hint of a growl, which will show one belongs to the wrong pack and - must withdraw, it is impossible not to be reminded of the similar - manœuvres of the dog and to be thankful that Nature has provided us - with a less direct, though perhaps a more tedious, code. - - - - - XIII: NATIONALITY IN LOVE - - -The hazards of indiscriminate rummaging in bookshops have introduced me -to two volumes of verse which seem to me (though I am ordinarily very -sceptical of those grandiose generalizations about racial and national -characteristics, so beloved of a certain class of literary people) to -illustrate very clearly some of the differences between the French and -English mind. The first is a little book published some few months back -and entitled _Les Baisers_.... The publisher says of it in one of those -exquisitely literary puffs which are the glory of the Paris book trade: -“Un volume de vers? Non pas! Simplement des baisers mis en vers, des -baisers variés comme l’heure qui passe, inconstants comme l’Amour -lui-même.... Baisers, baisers, c’est toute leur troublante musique qui -chante dans ces rimes.” The other volume hails from the antipodes and is -called _Songs of Love and Life_. No publisher’s puff accompanies it; but -a coloured picture on the dust-wrapper represents a nymph frantically -clutching at a coy shepherd. A portrait of the authoress serves as a -frontispiece. Both books are erotic in character, and both are very -indifferent in poetical quality. They are only interesting as -illustrations, the more vivid because of their very second-rateness, of -the two characteristic methods of approach, French and English, to the -theme of physical passion. - -The author of _Les Baisers_ approaches his amorous experiences with the -detached manner of a psychologist interested in the mental reactions of -certain corporeal pleasures whose mechanism he has previously studied in -his capacity of physiological observer. His attitude is the same as that -of the writers of those comedies of manners which hold the stage in the -theatres of the boulevards. It is dry, precise, matter-of-fact and -almost scientific. The comedian of the boulevards does not concern -himself with trying to find some sort of metaphysical justification for -the raptures of physical passion, nor is he in any way a propagandist of -sensuality. He is simply an analyst of facts, whose business it is to -get all the wit that is possible out of an equivocal situation. -Similarly, the author of these poems is far too highly sophisticated to -imagine that - - every spirit as it is most pure, - And hath in it the more of heavenly light, - So it the fairer body doth procure - To habit in, and it more fairly dight - With cheerful grace and amiable sight. - For of the soul the body form doth take; - For soul is form and doth the body make. - -He does not try to make us believe that physical pleasures have a divine -justification. Neither has he any wish to “make us grovel, hand and foot -in Belial’s gripe.” He is merely engaged in remembering “des heures et -des entretiens” which were extremely pleasant—hours which strike for -every one, conversations and meetings which are taking place in all -parts of the world and at every moment. - -This attitude towards _volupté_ is sufficiently old in France to have -made possible the evolution of a very precise and definite vocabulary in -which to describe its phenomena. This language is as exact as the -technical jargon of a trade, and as elegant as the Latin of Petronius. -It is a language of which we have no equivalent in our English -literature. It is impossible in English to describe _volupté_ elegantly; -it is hardly possible to write of it without being gross. To begin with, -we do not even possess a word equivalent to _volupté_. “Voluptuousness” -is feeble and almost meaningless; “pleasure” is hopelessly inadequate. -From the first the English writer is at a loss; he cannot even name -precisely the thing he proposes to describe and analyze. But for the -most part he has not much use for such a language. His approach to the -subject is not dispassionate and scientific, and he has no need for -technicalities. The English amorist is inclined to approach the subject -rapturously, passionately, philosophically—almost in any way that is not -the wittily matter-of-fact French way. - -In our rich Australian _Songs of Love and Life_ we see the -rapturous-philosophic approach reduced to something that is very nearly -the absurd. Overcome with the intensities of connubial bliss, the -authoress feels it necessary to find a sort of justification for them by -relating them in some way with the cosmos. God, we are told, - - looking through His hills on you and me, - Feeds Heaven upon the flame of our desire. - -Or again: - - Our passions breathe their own wild harmony, - And pour out music at a clinging kiss. - Sing on, O Soul, our lyric of desire, - For God Himself is in the melody. - -Meanwhile the author of _Les Baisers_, always elegantly _terre-à-terre_, -formulates his more concrete desires in an Alexandrine worthy of Racine: - - Viens. Je veux dégrafer moi-même ton corsage. - -The desire to involve the cosmos in our emotions is by no means confined -to the poetess of _Songs of Love and Life_. In certain cases we are all -apt to invoke the universe in an attempt to explain and account for -emotions whose intensity seems almost inexplicable. This is particularly -true of the emotions aroused in us by the contemplation of beauty. Why -we should feel so strongly when confronted with certain forms and -colours, certain sounds, certain verbal suggestions of form and -harmony—why the thing which we call beauty should move us at -all—goodness only knows. In order to explain the phenomenon, poets have -involved the universe in the matter, asserting that they are moved by -the contemplation of physical beauty because it is the symbol of the -divine. The intensities of physical passion have presented the same -problem. Ashamed of admitting that such feelings can have a purely -sublunary cause, we affirm, like the Australian poetess, that “God -Himself is in the melody.” That, we argue, can be the only explanation -for the violence of the emotion. This view of the matter is particularly -common in a country with fundamental puritanic traditions like England, -where the dry, matter-of-fact attitude of the French seems almost -shocking. The puritan feels bound to justify the facts of beauty and -_volupté_. They must be in some way made moral before he can accept -them. The French unpuritanic mind accepts the facts as they are tendered -to it by experience, at their face value. - - - - - XIV: HOW THE DAYS DRAW IN! - - -The autumn equinox is close upon us with all its presages of mortality, -a shortening day, a colder and longer night. How the days draw in! Fear -of ridicule hardly allows one to make the melancholy constatation. It is -a conversational gambit that, like fool’s mate, can only be used against -the simplest and least experienced of players. And yet how much of the -world’s most moving poetry is nothing but a variation on the theme of -this in-drawing day! The certainty of death has inspired more poetry -than the hope of immortality. The visible transience of frail and lovely -matter has impressed itself more profoundly on the mind of man than the -notion of spiritual permanence. - - Et l’on verra bientôt surgir du sein de l’onde - La première clarté de mon dernier soleil. - -That is an article of faith from which nobody can withhold assent. - -Of late I have found myself almost incapable of enjoying any poetry -whose inspiration is not despair or melancholy. Why, I hardly know. -Perhaps it is due to the chronic horror of the political situation. For -heaven knows, that is quite sufficient to account for a taste for -melancholy verse. The subject of any European government to-day feels -all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag’s -monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of -something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic. There sits the monkey -“on the ridge of a building five hundred yards above the ground, holding -us like a baby in one of his fore paws.” Will he let go? Will he squeeze -us to death? The best we can hope for is to be “let drop on a ridge -tile,” with only enough bruises to keep one in bed for a fortnight. But -it seems very unlikely that some “honest lad will climb up and, putting -us in his breeches pocket, bring us down safe.” However, I divagate a -little from my subject, which is the poetry of melancholy. - -Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall -contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and -despair. All the obvious people will be in it and as many of the obscure -apostles of gloom as vague and miscellaneous reading shall have made -known to me. A duly adequate amount of space, for example, will be -allotted to that all but great poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. For -dark magnificence there are not many things that can rival that summing -up against life and human destiny at the end of his “Mustapha.” - - Oh, wearisome condition of humanity, - Born under one law to another bound, - Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity, - Created sick, commanded to be sound. - What meaneth nature by these diverse laws, - Passion and reason, self-division’s cause? - - Is it the mark or majesty of power - To make offences that it may forgive? - Nature herself doth her own self deflower - To hate those errors she herself doth give.... - If nature did not take delight in blood, - She would have made more easy ways to good. - -Milton aimed at justifying the ways of God to man; Fulke Greville -gloomily denounces them. - -Nor shall I omit from my anthology the extraordinary description in the -Prologue to “Alaham” of the Hell of Hells and of Privation, the peculiar -torment of the place: - - Thou monster horrible, under whose ugly doom - Down in eternity’s perpetual night - Man’s temporal sins bear torments infinite, - For change of desolation must I come - To tempt the earth and to profane the light. - A place there is, upon no centre placed, - Deep under depths as far as is the sky - Above the earth, dark, infinitely spaced, - Pluto the king, the kingdom misery. - Privation would reign there, by God not made, - But creature of uncreated sin, - Whose being is all beings to invade, - To have no ending though it did begin; - And so of past, things present and to come, - To give depriving, not tormenting doom. - But horror in the understanding mixed.... - -Like most of his contemporaries in those happy days before the notion of -progress had been invented, Lord Brooke was what Peacock would have -called a “Pejorationist.” His political views (and they were also -Sidney’s) are reflected in his _Life of Sir Philip Sidney_. The best -that a statesman can do, according to these Elizabethan pessimists, is -to patch and prop the decaying fabric of society in the hope of staving -off for a little longer the final inevitable crash. It seems curious to -us, who have learnt to look at the Elizabethan age as the most splendid -in English history, that the men who were the witnesses of these -splendours should have regarded their time as an age of decadence. - -The notion of the Fall was fruitful in despairing poetry. One of the -most remarkable products of this doctrine is a certain “Sonnet Chrétien” -by the seventeenth-century writer, Jean Ogier de Gombauld, surnamed “le -Beau Ténébreux.” - - Cette source de mort, cette homicide peste, - Ce péché dont l’enfer a le monde infecté, - M’a laissé pour tout être un bruit d’avoir été, - Et je suis de moi-même une image funeste. - L’Auteur de l’univers, le Monarque céleste - S’était rendu visible en ma seule beauté. - Ce vieux titre d’honneur qu’autrefois j’ai porté - Et que je porte encore, est tout ce qui me reste. - - Mais c’est fait de ma gloire, et je ne suis plus rien - Qu’un fantôme qui court après l’ombre d’un bien, - Ou qu’un corps animé du seul ver qui le ronge. - Non, je ne suis plus rien quand je veux m’éprouver, - Qu’un esprit ténébreux qui voit tout comme en songe - Et cherche incessament ce qu’il ne peut trouver. - -There are astonishing lines in this, lines that might have been written -by a Baudelaire, if he had been born a Huguenot and two hundred years -before his time. That “carcase animated by the sole gnawing worm” is -something that one would expect to find rotting away among the sombre -and beautiful Flowers of Evil. - -An amusing speculation. If Steinach’s rejuvenating operations on the old -become the normal and accepted thing, what will be the effect on poetry -of this abolition of the depressing process of decay? It may be that the -poetry of melancholy and despair is destined to lose its place in -literature, and that a spirit of what William James called -“healthy-mindedness” will inherit its kingdom. Many “eternal truths” -have already found their way on to the dust-heap of antiquated ideas. It -may be that this last and seemingly most inexorable of them—that life is -short and subject to a dreadful decay—will join the other great -commonplaces which have already perished out of literature. - - The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee: - Timor mortis conturbat me:— - -Some day, it may be, these sentiments will seem as hopelessly -superannuated as Milton’s cosmology. - - - - - XV: TIBET - - -In moments of complete despair, when it seems that all is for the worst -in the worst of all possible worlds, it is cheering to discover that -there are places where stupidity reigns even more despotically than in -Western Europe, where civilization is based on principles even more -fantastically unreasonable. Recent experience has shown me that the -depression into which the Peace, Mr. Churchill, the state of -contemporary literature, have conspired to plunge the mind, can be -sensibly relieved by a study, even superficial, of the manners and -customs of Tibet. The spectacle of an ancient and elaborate civilization -of which almost no detail is not entirely idiotic is in the highest -degree comforting and refreshing. It fills us with hopes of the ultimate -success of our own civilization; it restores our wavering -self-satisfaction in being citizens of industrialized Europe. Compared -with Tibet, we are prodigious. Let us cherish the comparison. - -My informant about Tibetan civilization is a certain Japanese monk of -the name of Kawaguchi, who spent three years in Tibet at the beginning -of the present century. His account of the experience has been -translated into English, and published, with the title _Three Years in -Tibet_, by the Theosophical Society. It is one of the great travel books -of the world, and, so far as I am aware, the most interesting book on -Tibet that exists. Kawaguchi enjoyed opportunities in Tibet which no -European traveller could possibly have had. He attended the University -of Lhasa, he enjoyed the acquaintance of the Dalai Lama himself, he was -intimate with one of the four Ministers of Finance, he was the friend of -lama and layman, of all sorts and conditions of Tibetans, from the -highest class to the lowest—the despicable caste of smiths and butchers. -He knew his Tibet intimately; for those three years, indeed, he was for -all practical purposes a Tibetan. This is something which no European -explorer can claim, and it is this which gives Kawaguchi’s book its -unique interest. - -The Japanese, like people of every other nationality except the Chinese, -are not permitted to enter Tibet. Mr. Kawaguchi did not allow this to -stand in the way of his pious mission—for his purpose in visiting Tibet -was to investigate the Buddhist writings and traditions of the place. He -made his way to India, and in a long stay at Darjeeling familiarized -himself with the Tibetan language. He then set out to walk across the -Himalayas. Not daring to affront the strictly guarded gates which bar -the direct route to Lhasa, he penetrated Tibet at its southwestern -corner, underwent prodigious hardships in an uninhabited desert eighteen -thousand feet above sea-level, visited the holy lake of Manosarovara, -and finally, after astonishing adventures, arrived in Lhasa. Here he -lived for nearly three years, passing himself off as a Chinaman. At the -end of that time his secret leaked out, and he was obliged to accelerate -his departure for India. So much for Kawaguchi himself, though I should -have liked to say more of him; for a more charming and sympathetic -character never revealed himself in a book. - -Tibet is so full of fantastic low comedy that one hardly knows where to -begin a catalogue of its absurdities. Shall we start with the Tibetans’ -highly organized service of trained nurses, whose sole duty it is to -prevent their patients from going to sleep? or with the Dalai Lama’s -chief source of income—the sale of pills made of dung, at, literally, a -guinea a box? or with the Tibetan custom of never washing from the -moment of birth, when, however, they are plentifully anointed with -melted butter, to the moment of death? And then there is the University -of Lhasa, which an eminent Cambridge philosopher has compared with the -University of Oxford—somewhat unjustly, perhaps; but let that pass. At -the University of Lhasa the student is instructed in logic and -philosophy; every year of his stay he has to learn by heart from one to -five or six hundred pages of holy texts. He is also taught mathematics, -but in Tibet this art is not carried farther than subtraction. It takes -twenty years to get a degree at the University of Lhasa—twenty years, -and then most of the candidates are ploughed. To obtain a superior Ph.D. -degree, entitling one to become a really holy and eminent lama, forty -years of application to study and to virtue are required. But it is -useless to try to make a catalogue of the delights of Tibet. There are -too many of them for mention in this small space. One can do no more -than glance at a few of the brighter spots in the system. - -There is much to be said for the Tibetan system of taxation. The -Government requires a considerable revenue; for enormous sums have to be -spent in keeping perpetually burning in the principal Buddhist cathedral -of Lhasa an innumerable army of lamps, which may not be fed with -anything cheaper than clarified yak butter. This is the heaviest item of -expenditure. But a great deal of money also goes to supporting the -Tibetan clergy, who must number at least a sixth of the total -population. The money is raised by a poll tax, paid in kind, the amount -of which, fixed by ancient tradition, may, theoretically, never be -altered. Theoretically only; for the Tibetan Government employs in the -collection of taxes no fewer than twenty different standards of weight -and thirty-six different standards of measure. The pound may weigh -anything from half to a pound and a half; and the same with the units of -measure. It is thus possible to calculate with extraordinary nicety, -according to the standard of weight and measure in which your tax is -assessed, where precisely you stand in the Government’s favour. If you -are a notoriously bad character, or even if you are innocent, but live -in a bad district, your tax will have to be paid in measures of the -largest size. If you are virtuous, or, better, if you are rich, of good -family and _bien pensant_, then you will pay by weights which are only -half the nominal weight. For those whom the Government neither hates nor -loves, but regards with more or less contempt or tolerance, there are -the thirty-four intervening degrees. - -Kawaguchi’s final judgment of the Tibetans, after three years’ intimate -acquaintance with them, is not a flattering one: - - The Tibetans are characterized by four serious defects, these being: - filthiness, superstition, unnatural customs (such as polyandry), and - unnatural art. I should be sorely perplexed if I were asked to name - their redeeming points; but if I had to do so, I should mention first - of all the fine climate in the vicinity of Lhasa and Shigatze, their - sonorous and refreshing voices in reading the Text, the animated style - of their catechisms, and their ancient art. - -Certainly a bad lot of vices; but then the Tibetan virtues are not -lightly to be set aside. We English possess none of them: our climate is -abominable, our method of reading the holy texts is painful in the -extreme, our catechisms, at least in my young days, were far from -animated, and our ancient art is very indifferent stuff. But still, in -spite of these defects, in spite of Mr. Churchill and the state of -contemporary literature, we can still look at the Tibetans and feel -reassured. - - - - - XVI: BEAUTY IN 1920 - - -To those who know how to read the signs of the times it will have become -apparent, in the course of these last days and weeks, that the Silly -Season is close upon us. Already—and this in July with the menace of -three or four new wars grumbling on the thunderous horizon—already a -monster of the deep has appeared at a popular seaside resort. Already -Mr. Louis McQuilland has launched in the _Daily Express_ a fierce -onslaught on the younger poets of the Asylum. Already the picture-papers -are more than half filled with photographs of bathing nymphs—photographs -that make one understand the ease with which St. Anthony rebuffed his -temptations. The newspapermen, ramping up and down like wolves, seek -their prey wherever they may find it; and it was with a unanimous howl -of delight that the whole Press went pelting after the hare started by -Mrs. Asquith in a recent instalment of her autobiography. Feebly and -belatedly, let me follow the pack. - -Mrs. Asquith’s denial of beauty to the daughters of the twentieth -century has proved a god-sent giant gooseberry. It has necessitated the -calling in of a whole host of skin-food specialists, portrait-painters -and photographers to deny this far from soft impeachment. A great deal -of space has been agreeably and inexpensively filled. Every one is -satisfied, public, editors, skin-food specialists and all. But by far -the most interesting contribution to the debate was a pictorial one, -which appeared, if I remember rightly, in the _Daily News_. Side by -side, on the same page, we were shown the photographs of three beauties -of the eighteen-eighties and three of the nineteen-twenties. The -comparison was most instructive. For a great gulf separates the two -types of beauty represented by these two sets of photographs. - -I remember in _If_, one of those charming conspiracies of E. V. Lucas -and George Morrow, a series of parodied fashion-plates entitled “If -Faces get any Flatter. Last year’s standard, this year’s Evening -Standard.” The faces of our living specimens of beauty have grown -flatter with those of their fashion-plate sisters. Compare the types of -1880 and 1920. The first is steep-faced, almost Roman in profile; in the -contemporary beauties the face has broadened and shortened, the profile -is less noble, less imposing, more appealingly, more alluringly pretty. -Forty years ago it was the aristocratic type that was appreciated; -to-day the popular taste has shifted from the countess to the soubrette. -Photography confirms the fact that the ladies of the ’eighties looked -like Du Maurier drawings. But among the present young generation one -looks in vain for the type; the Du Maurier damsel is as extinct as the -mesozoic reptile; the Fish girl and other kindred flat-faced species -have taken her place. - -Between the ’thirties and ’fifties another type, the egg-faced girl, -reigned supreme in the affections of the world. From the early portraits -of Queen Victoria to the fashion-plates in the _Ladies’ Keepsake_ this -invariable type prevails—the egg-shaped face, the sleek hair, the -swan-like neck, the round, champagne-bottle shoulders. Compared with the -decorous impassivity of the oviform girl our flat-faced fashion-plates -are terribly abandoned and provocative. And because one expects so much -in the way of respectability from these egg-faces of an earlier age, one -is apt to be shocked when one sees them conducting themselves in ways -that seem unbefitting. One thinks of that enchanting picture of Etty’s, -“Youth on the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm.” The naiads are of the -purest egg-faced type. Their hair is sleek, their shoulders slope and -their faces are as impassive as blanks. And yet they have no clothes on. -It is almost indecent; one imagined that the egg-faced type came into -the world complete with flowing draperies. - -It is not only the face of beauty that alters with the changes of -popular taste. The champagne-bottle shoulders of the oviform girl have -vanished from the modern fashion-plate and from modern life. The -contemporary hand, with its two middle fingers held together and the -forefinger and little finger splayed apart, is another recent product. -Above all, the feet have changed. In the days of the egg-faces no -fashion-plate had more than one foot. This rule will, I think, be found -invariable. That solitary foot projects, generally in a strangely -haphazard way as though it had nothing to do with a leg, from under the -edge of the skirt. And what a foot! It has no relation to those -provocative feet in Suckling’s ballad: - - Her feet beneath her petticoat - Like little mice stole in and out. - -It is an austere foot. It is a small, black, oblong object like a -tea-leaf. No living human being has ever seen a foot like it, for it is -utterly unlike the feet of nineteen-twenty. To-day the fashion-plate is -always a biped. The tea-leaf has been replaced by two feet of rich -baroque design, curved and florid, with insteps like the necks of Arab -horses. Faces may have changed shape, but feet have altered far more -radically. On the text, “the feet of the young women,” it would be -possible to write a profound philosophical sermon. - -And while I am on the subject of feet I would like to mention another -curious phenomenon of the same kind, but affecting, this time, the -standards of male beauty. Examine the pictorial art of the eighteenth -century, and you will find that the shape of the male leg is not what it -was. In those days the calf of the leg was not a muscle that bulged to -its greatest dimensions a little below the back of the knee, to subside, -_decrescendo_, towards the ankle. No, in the eighteenth century the calf -was an even crescent, with its greatest projection opposite the middle -of the shin; the ankle, as we know it, hardly existed. This curious calf -is forced upon one’s attention by almost every minor picture-maker of -the eighteenth century, and even by some of the great masters, as, for -instance, Blake. How it came into existence I do not know. Presumably -the crescent calf was considered, in the art schools, to approach more -nearly to the Platonic Idea of the human leg than did the poor distorted -Appearance of real life. Personally, I prefer my calves with the bulge -at the top and a proper ankle at the bottom. But then I don’t hold much -with the _beau idéal_. - -The process by which one type of beauty becomes popular, imposes its -tyranny for a period and then is displaced by a dissimilar type is a -mysterious one. It may be that patient historical scholars will end by -discovering some law to explain the transformation of the Du Maurier -type into the flat-face type, the tea-leaf foot into the baroque foot, -the crescent calf into the normal calf. As far as one can see at -present, these changes seem to be the result of mere hazard and -arbitrary choice. But a time will doubtless come when it will be found -that these changes of taste are as ineluctably predetermined as any -chemical change. Given the South African War, the accession of Edward -VII. and the Liberal triumph of 1906, it was, no doubt, as inevitable -that Du Maurier should have given place to Fish as that zinc subjected -to sulphuric acid should break up into ZnSO4 + H2. But we leave it to -others to formulate the precise workings of the law. - - - - - XVII: GREAT THOUGHTS - - -To all lovers of unfamiliar quotations, aphorisms, great thoughts and -intellectual gems, I would heartily recommend a heavy volume recently -published in Brussels and entitled _Pensées sur la Science, la Guerre et -sur des sujets très variés_. The book contains some twelve or thirteen -thousand quotations, selected from a treasure of one hundred and -twenty-three thousand great thoughts gleaned and garnered by the -industry of Dr. Maurice Legat—an industry which will be appreciated at -its value by any one who has ever made an attempt to compile a -commonplace book or private anthology of his own. The almost intolerable -labour of copying out extracts can only be avoided by the drastic use of -the scissors; and there are few who can afford the luxury of mutilating -their copies of the best authors. - -For some days I made Dr. Legat’s book my _livre de chevet_. But I had -very soon to give up reading it at night, for I found that the Great -often said things so peculiar that I was kept awake in the effort to -discover their meaning. Why, for example, should it be categorically -stated by Lamennais that “si les animaux connaissaient Dieu, ils -parleraient”? What could Cardinal Maury have meant when he said, -“L’éloquence, compagne ordinaire de la liberté [astonishing -generalization!], est inconnue en Angleterre”? These were mysteries -insoluble enough to counteract the soporific effects of such profound -truths as this, discovered, apparently, in 1846 by Monsieur C. H. D. -Duponchel, “Le plus sage mortel est sujet à l’erreur.” - -Dr. Legat has found some pleasing quotations on the subject of England -and the English. His selection proves with what fatal ease even the most -intelligent minds are lured into making generalizations about national -character, and how grotesque those generalizations always are. -Montesquieu informs us that “dès que sa fortune se délabre, un anglais -tue ou se fait voleur.” Of the better half of this potential murderer -and robber Balzac says, “La femme anglaise est une pauvre créature -verteuse par force, prête à se dépraver.” “La vanité est l’âme de toute -société anglaise,” says Lamartine. Ledru-Rollin is of opinion that all -the riches of England are “des dépouilles volées aux tombeaux.” - -The Goncourts risk a characteristically dashing generalization on the -national characters of England and France: “L’Anglais, filou comme -peuple, est honnête comme individu. Il est le contraire du Français, -honnête comme peuple, et filou comme individu.” If one is going to make -a comparison Voltaire’s is more satisfactory because less pretentious. -Strange are the ways of you Englishmen, - - qui, des mêmes couteaux, - Coupez la tête au roi et la queue aux chevaux. - Nous Français, plus humains, laissons aux rois leurs têtes, - Et la queue à nos bêtes. - -It is unfortunate that history should have vitiated the truth of this -pithy and pregnant statement. - -But the bright spots in this enormous tome are rare. After turning over -a few hundred pages one is compelled, albeit reluctantly, to admit that -the Great Thought or Maxim is nearly the most boring form of literature -that exists. Others, it seems, have anticipated me in this grand -discovery. “Las de m’ennuyer des pensées des autres,” says d’Alembert, -“j’ai voulu leur donner les miennes; mais je puis me flatter de leur -avoir rendu tout l’ennui que j’avais reçu d’eux.” Almost next to -d’Alembert’s statement I find this confession from the pen of J. Roux -(1834-1906): “Emettre des pensées, voilà ma consolation, mon délice, ma -vie!” Happy Monsieur Roux! - -Turning dissatisfied from Dr. Legat’s anthology of thought, I happened -upon the second number of _Proverbe_, a monthly review, four pages in -length, directed by M. Paul Eluard and counting among its contributors -Tristan Tzara of _Dada_ fame, Messrs. Soupault, Breton and Aragon, the -directors of _Littérature_, M. Picabia, M. Ribemont-Dessaignes and -others of the same kidney. Here, on the front page of the March number -of _Proverbe_, I found the very comment on Great Thoughts for which I -had, in my dissatisfaction, been looking. The following six maxims are -printed one below the other: the first of them is a quotation from the -_Intransigeant_; the other five appear to be the work of M. Tzara, who -appends a footnote to this effect: “Je m’appelle dorénavant -exclusivement Monsieur Paul Bourget.” Here they are: - - Il faut violer les règles, oui, mais pour les violer il faut les - connaître. - - Il faut régler la connaissance, oui, mais pour la régler il faut la - violer. - - Il faut connaître les viols, oui, mais pour les connaître il faut les - régler. - - Il faut connaître les règles, oui, mais pour les connaître il faut les - violer. - - Il faut régler les viols, oui, mais pour les régler il faut les - connaître. - - Il faut violer la connaissance, oui, mais pour la violer il faut la - régler. - -It is to be hoped that Dr. Legat will find room for at least a selection -of these profound thoughts in the next edition of his book. “LE passé et -LA pensée n’existent pas,” affirms M. Raymond Duncan on another page of -_Proverbe_. It is precisely after taking too large a dose of “Pensées -sur la Science, la Guerre et sur des sujets très variés” that one half -wishes the statement were in fact true. - - - - - XVIII: ADVERTISEMENT - - -I have always been interested in the subtleties of literary form. This -preoccupation with the outward husk, with the letter of literature, is, -I dare say, the sign of a fundamental spiritual impotence. Gigadibs, the -literary man, can understand the tricks of the trade; but when it is a -question, not of conjuring, but of miracles, he is no more effective -than Mr. Sludge. Still, conjuring is amusing to watch and to practise; -an interest in the machinery of the art requires no further -justification. I have dallied with many literary forms, taking pleasure -in their different intricacies, studying the means by which great -authors of the past have resolved the technical problems presented by -each. Sometimes I have even tried my hand at solving the problems -myself—delightful and salubrious exercise for the mind. And now I have -discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the -most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I -mean the advertisement. - -Nobody who has not tried to write an advertisement has any idea of the -delights and difficulties presented by this form of literature—or shall -I say of “applied literature,” for the sake of those who still believe -in the romantic superiority of the pure, the disinterested, over the -immediately useful? The problem that confronts the writer of -advertisements is an immensely complicated one, and by reason of its -very arduousness immensely interesting. It is far easier to write ten -passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring -critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few -thousand of the uncritical buying public. The problem presented by the -Sonnet is child’s play compared with the problem of the advertisement. -In writing a Sonnet one need think only of oneself. If one’s readers -find one boring or obscure, so much the worse for them. But in writing -an advertisement one must think of other people. Advertisement writers -may not be lyrical, or obscure, or in any way esoteric. They must be -universally intelligible. A good advertisement has this in common with -drama and oratory, that it must be immediately comprehensible and -directly moving. But at the same time it must possess all the -succinctness of epigram. - -The orator and the dramatist have “world enough and time” to produce -their effects by cumulative appeals; they can turn all round their -subject, they can repeat; between the heights of their eloquence they -can gracefully practise the art of sinking, knowing that a period of -flatness will only set off the splendour of their impassioned moments. -But the advertiser has no space to spare; he pays too dearly for every -inch. He must play upon the minds of his audience with a small and -limited instrument. He must persuade them to part with their money in a -speech that is no longer than many a lyric by Herrick. Could any problem -be more fascinatingly difficult? No one should be allowed to talk about -the _mot juste_ or the polishing of style who has not tried his hand at -writing an advertisement of something which the public does not want, -but which it must be persuaded into buying. Your _boniment_ must not -exceed a poor hundred and fifty or two hundred words. With what care you -must weigh every syllable! What infinite pains must be taken to fashion -every phrase into a barbed hook that shall stick in the reader’s mind -and draw from its hiding-place within his pocket the reluctant coin! -One’s style and ideas must be lucid and simple enough to be understood -by all; but at the same time, they must not be vulgar. Elegance and an -economical distinction are required; but any trace of literariness in an -advertisement is fatal to its success. - -I do not know whether any one has yet written a history of advertising. -If the book does not already exist it will certainly have to be written. -The story of the development of advertising from its infancy in the -early nineteenth century to its luxuriant maturity in the twentieth is -an essential chapter in the history of democracy. Advertisement begins -abjectly, crawling on its belly like the serpent after the primal curse. -Its abjection is the oily humbleness of the shopkeeper in an -oligarchical society. Those nauseating references to the nobility and -clergy, which are the very staple of early advertisements, are only -possible in an age when the aristocracy and its established Church -effectively ruled the land. The custom of invoking these powers lingered -on long after they had ceased to hold sway. It is now, I fancy, almost -wholly extinct. It may be that certain old-fashioned girls’ schools -still provide education for the daughters of the nobility and clergy; -but I am inclined to doubt it. Advertisers still find it worth while to -parade the names and escutcheons of kings. But anything less than -royalty is, frankly, a “wash-out.” - -The crawling style of advertisement with its mixture of humble appeals -to patrons and its hyperbolical laudation of the goods advertised, was -early varied by the pseudo-scientific style, a simple development of the -quack’s patter at the fair. Balzacians will remember the advertisement -composed by Finot and the Illustrious Gaudissard for César Birotteau’s -“Huile Céphalique.” The type is not yet dead; we still see -advertisements of substances “based on the principles established by the -Academy of Sciences,” substances known “to the ancients, the Romans, the -Greeks and the nations of the North,” but lost and only rediscovered by -the advertiser. The style and manner of these advertisements belonging -to the early and middle periods of the Age of Advertisement continue to -bear the imprint of the once despicable position of commerce. They are -written with the impossible and insincere unctuousness of tradesmen’s -letters. They are horribly uncultured; and when their writers aspire to -something more ambitious than the counting-house style, they fall at -once into the stilted verbiage of self-taught learning. Some of the -earlier efforts to raise the tone of advertisements are very curious. -One remembers those remarkable full-page advertisements of Eno’s Fruit -Salt, loaded with weighty apophthegms from Emerson, Epictetus, Zeno the -Eleatic, Pomponazzi, Slawkenbergius and other founts of human wisdom. -There was noble reading on these strange pages. But they shared with -sermons the defect of being a little dull. - -The art of advertisement writing has flowered with democracy. The lords -of industry and commerce came gradually to understand that the right way -to appeal to the Free Peoples of the World was familiarly, in an honest -man-to-man style. They perceived that exaggeration and hyperbole do not -really pay, that charlatanry must at least have an air of sincerity. -They confided in the public, they appealed to its intelligence in every -kind of flattering way. The technique of the art became at once -immensely more difficult than it had ever been before, until now the -advertisement is, as I have already hinted, one of the most interesting -and difficult of modern literary forms. Its potentialities are not yet -half explored. Already the most interesting and, in some cases, the only -readable part of most American periodicals is the advertisement section. -What does the future hold in store? - - - - - XIX: EUPHUES REDIVIVUS - - -I have recently been fortunate in securing a copy of that very rare and -precious novel _Delina Delaney_, by Amanda M. Ros, authoress of _Irene -Iddesleigh_ and _Poems of Puncture_. Mrs. Ros’s name is only known to a -small and select band of readers. But by these few she is highly prized; -one of her readers, it is said, actually was at the pains to make a -complete manuscript copy of _Delina Delaney_, so great was his -admiration and so hopelessly out of print the book. Let me recommend the -volume, Mrs. Ros’s masterpiece, to the attention of enterprising -publishers. - -_Delina Delaney_ opens with a tremendous, an almost, in its richness of -vituperative eloquence, Rabelaisian denunciation of Mr. Barry Pain, who -had, it seems, treated _Irene Iddesleigh_ with scant respect in his -review of the novel in _Black and White_. “This so-called Barry Pain, by -name, has taken upon himself to criticize a work, the depth of which -fails to reach the solving power of his borrowed, and, he’d have you -believe, varied talent.” But “I care not for the opinion of half-starved -upstarts, who don the garb of a shabby-genteel, and fain would feed the -mind of the people with the worthless scraps of stolen fancies.” So -perish all reviewers! And now for Delina herself. - -The story is a simple one. Delina Delaney, daughter of a fisherman, -loves and is loved by Lord Gifford. The baleful influence of a -dark-haired Frenchwoman, Madame de Maine, daughter of the Count-av-Nevo, -comes between the lovers and their happiness, and Delina undergoes -fearful torments, including three years’ penal servitude, before their -union can take place. It is the manner, rather than the matter, of the -book which is remarkable. Here, for instance, is a fine conversation -between Lord Gifford and his mother, an aristocratic dame who -strenuously objects to his connection with Delina. Returning one day to -Columba Castle she hears an unpleasant piece of news: her son has been -seen kissing Delina in the conservatory. - - “Home again, mother?” he boldly uttered, as he gazed reverently in her - face. - - “Home to Hades!” returned the raging high-bred daughter of - distinguished effeminacy. - - “Ah me! what is the matter?” meekly inquired his lordship. - - “Everything is the matter with a broken-hearted mother of low-minded - offspring,” she answered hotly.... “Henry Edward Ludlow Gifford, son - of my strength, idolized remnant of my inert husband, who at this - moment invisibly offers the scourging whip of fatherly authority to - your backbone of resentment (though for years you think him dead to - your movements) and pillar of maternal trust.” - -Poor Lady Gifford! her son’s behaviour was her undoing. The shock caused -her to lose first her reason and then her life. Her son was heart-broken -at the thought that he was responsible for her downfall: - - “Is it true, O Death,” I cried in my agony, “that you have wrested - from me my mother, Lady Gifford of Columba Castle, and left me here, a - unit figuring on the great blackboard of the past, the shaky surface - of the present and fickle field of the future to track my life-steps, - with gross indifference to her wished-for wish?”... Blind she lay to - the presence of her son, who charged her death-gun with the powder of - accelerated wrath. - -It is impossible to suppose that Mrs. Ros can ever have read _Euphues_ -or the earlier romances of Robert Greene. How then shall we account for -the extraordinary resemblance to Euphuism of her style? how explain -those rich alliterations, those elaborate “kennings” and circumlocutions -of which the fabric of her book is woven? Take away from Lyly his -erudition and his passion for antithesis, and you have Mrs. Ros. Delina -is own sister to Euphues and Pandosto. The fact is that Mrs. Ros -happens, though separated from Euphuism by three hundred years and more, -to have arrived independently at precisely the same stage of development -as Lyly and his disciples. It is possible to see in a growing child a -picture in miniature of all the phases through which humanity has passed -in its development. And, in the same way, the mind of an individual -(especially when that individual has been isolated from the main current -of contemporary thought) may climb, alone, to a point at which, in the -past, a whole generation has rested. In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in -the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an -unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the -artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature -simplicity is invented. The first attempts of any people to be -consciously literary are always productive of the most elaborate -artificiality. Poetry is always written before prose and always in a -language as remote as possible from the language of ordinary life. The -language and versification of “Beowulf” are far more artificial and -remote from life than those of, say, _The Rape of the Lock_. The -Euphuists were not barbarians making their first discovery of -literature; they were, on the contrary, highly educated. But in one -thing they were unsophisticated: they were discovering prose. They were -realizing that prose could be written with art, and they wrote it as -artificially as they possibly could, just as their Saxon ancestors wrote -poetry. They became intoxicated with their discovery of artifice. It was -some time before the intoxication wore off and men saw that art was -possible without artifice. Mrs. Ros, an Elizabethan born out of her -time, is still under the spell of that magical and delicious -intoxication. - -Mrs. Ros’s artifices are often more remarkable and elaborate even than -Lyly’s. This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing -needlework: - - She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father’s - slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose - blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its - sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness. - -And Lord Gifford parts from Delina in these words: - - I am just in time to hear the toll of a parting bell strike its heavy - weight of appalling softness against the weakest fibres of a heart of - love, arousing and tickling its dormant action, thrusting the dart of - evident separation deeper into its tubes of tenderness, and fanning - the flame, already unextinguishable, into volumes of burning blaze. - -But more often Mrs. Ros does not exceed the bounds which Lyly set for -himself. Here, for instance, is a sentence that might have come direct -out of _Euphues_: - - Two days after, she quit Columba Castle and resolved to enter the holy - cloisters of a convent, where, she believed she’d be dead to the built - hopes of wealthy worth, the crooked steps to worldly distinction, and - the designing creaks [_sic_] in the muddy stream of love. - -Or again, this description of the artful charmers who flaunt along the -streets of London is written in the very spirit and language of -_Euphues_: - - Their hair was a light-golden colour, thickly fringed in front, hiding - in many cases the furrows of a life of vice; behind, reared coils, - some of which differed in hue, exhibiting the fact that they were on - patrol for the price of another supply of dye.... The elegance of - their attire had the glow of robbery—the rustle of many a lady’s - silent curse. These tools of brazen effrontery were strangers to the - blush of innocence that tinged many a cheek, as they would gather - round some of God’s ordained, praying in flowery words of decoying - Cockney, that they should break their holy vows by accompanying them - to the halls of adultery. Nothing daunted at the staunch refusal of - different divines, whose modest walk was interrupted by their bold - assertion of loathsome rights, they moved on, while laughs of hidden - rage and defeat flitted across their doll-decked faces, to die as they - next accosted some rustic-looking critics, who, tempted with their - polished twang, their earnest advances, their pitiful entreaties, - yielded, in their ignorance of the ways of a large city, to their - glossy offers, and accompanied, with slight hesitation, these - artificial shells of immorality to their homes of ruin, degradation - and shame. - - - - - XX: THE AUTHOR OF _EMINENT VICTORIANS_ - - -A superlatively civilized Red Indian living apart from the vulgar world -in an elegant and park-like reservation, Mr. Strachey rarely looks over -his walls at the surrounding country. It seethes, he knows, with crowds -of horribly colonial persons. Like the hosts of Midian, the innumerable -“poor whites” prowl and prowl around, but the noble savage pays no -attention to them. - -In his spiritual home—a neat and commodious Georgian mansion in the -style of Leoni or Ware—he sits and reads, he turns over portfolios of -queer old prints, he savours meditatively the literary vintages of -centuries. And occasionally, once in two or three years, he tosses over -his park palings a record of these leisured degustations, a judgment -passed upon his library, a ripe rare book. One time it is Eminent -Victorians; the next it is Queen Victoria herself. To-day he has given -us a miscellaneous collection of _Books and Characters_. - -If Voltaire had lived to the age of two hundred and thirty instead of -shuffling off at a paltry eighty-four, he would have written about the -Victorian epoch, about life and letters at large, very much as Mr. -Strachey has written. That lucid common sense, that sharp illuminating -wit which delight us in the writings of the middle eighteenth -century—these are Mr. Strachey’s characteristics. We know exactly what -he would have been if he had come into the world at the beginning of the -seventeen hundreds; if he is different from the men of that date it is -because he happens to have been born towards the end of the eighteens. - -The sum of knowledge at the disposal of the old Encyclopædists was -singularly small, compared, that is to say, with the knowledge which we -of the twentieth century have inherited. They made mistakes and in their -ignorance they passed what we can see to have been hasty and very -imperfect judgments on men and things. Mr. Strachey is the eighteenth -century grown-up; he is Voltaire at two hundred and thirty. - -Voltaire at sixty would have treated the Victorian era, if it could have -appeared in a prophetical vision before his eyes, in terms of “La -Pucelle”—with ribaldry. He would have had to be much older in knowledge -and inherited experience before he could have approached it in that -spirit of sympathetic irony and ironical sympathy which Mr. Strachey -brings to bear upon it. Mr. Strachey makes us like the old Queen, while -we smile at her; he makes us admire the Prince Consort in spite of the -portentous priggishness—duly insisted on in the biography—which -accompanied his intelligence. With all the untutored barbarity of their -notions, Gordon and Florence Nightingale are presented to us as -sympathetic figures. Their peculiar brand of religion and ethics might -be absurd, but their characters are shown to be interesting and fine. - -It is only in the case of Dr. Arnold that Mr. Strachey permits himself -to be unrestrainedly Voltairean; he becomes a hundred and seventy years -younger as he describes the founder of the modern Public School system. -The irony of that description is tempered by no sympathy. To make the -man appear even more ridiculous, Mr. Strachey adds a stroke or two to -the portrait of his own contriving—little inventions which deepen the -absurdity of the caricature. Thus we read that Arnold’s “outward -appearance was the index of his inward character. The legs, perhaps, -were shorter than they should have been; but the sturdy athletic frame, -especially when it was swathed (as it usually was) in the flowing robes -of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of an imposing vigour.” How -exquisitely right those short legs are! how artistically inevitable! Our -admiration for Mr. Strachey’s art is only increased when we discover -that in attributing to the Doctor this brevity of shank he is justified -by no contemporary document. The short legs are his own contribution. - -Voltaire, then, at two hundred and thirty has learned sympathy. He has -learned that there are other ways of envisaging life than the -common-sense, reasonable way and that people with a crack-brained view -of the universe have a right to be judged as human beings and must not -be condemned out of hand as lunatics or obscurantists. Blake and St. -Francis have as much right to their place in the sun as Gibbon and Hume. -But still, in spite of this lesson, learned and inherited from the -nineteenth century, our Voltaire of eleven score years and ten still -shows a marked preference for the Gibbons and the Humes; he still -understands their attitude towards life a great deal better than he -understands the other fellow’s attitude. - -In his new volume of _Books and Characters_ Mr. Strachey prints an essay -on Blake (written, it may be added parenthetically, some sixteen years -ago), in which he sets out very conscientiously to give that disquieting -poet his due. The essay is interesting, not because it contains anything -particularly novel in the way of criticism, but because it reveals, in -spite of all Mr. Strachey’s efforts to overcome it, in spite of his -admiration for the great artist in Blake, his profound antagonism -towards Blake’s view of life. - -He cannot swallow mysticism; he finds it clearly very difficult to -understand what all this fuss about the soul really signifies. The man -who believes in the absoluteness of good and evil, who sees the universe -as a spiritual entity concerned, in some transcendental fashion, with -morality, the man who regards the human spirit as possessing a somehow -cosmic importance and significance—ah no, decidedly no, even at two -hundred and thirty Voltaire cannot whole-heartedly sympathize with such -a man. - -And that, no doubt, is the reason why Mr. Strachey has generally shrunk -from dealing, in his biographies and his criticisms, with any of these -strange incomprehensible characters. Blake is the only one he had tried -his hand on, and the result is not entirely satisfactory. He is more at -home with the Gibbons and Humes of this world, and when he is not -discussing the reasonable beings he likes to amuse himself with the -eccentrics, like Mr. Creevey or Lady Hester Stanhope. The portentous, -formidable mystics he leaves severely alone. - -One cannot imagine Mr. Strachey coping with Dostoevsky or with any of -the other great explorers of the soul. One cannot imagine him writing a -life of Beethoven. These huge beings are disquieting for a Voltaire who -has learned enough sympathy to be able to recognize their greatness, but -whose temperament still remains unalterably alien. Mr. Strachey is wise -to have nothing to do with them. - -The second-rate mystics (I use the term in its widest and vaguest -sense), the men who believe in the spirituality of the universe and in -the queerer dogmas which have become tangled in that belief, without -possessing the genius which alone can justify such notions in the eyes -of the Voltaireans—these are the objects on which Mr. Strachey likes to -turn his calm and penetrating gaze. Gordon and Florence Nightingale, the -Prince Consort, Clough—they and their beliefs are made to look rather -absurd by the time he has done with them. He reduces their spiritual -struggles to a series of the most comically futile series of gymnastics -in the void. The men of genius who have gone through the same spiritual -struggles, who have believed the same sort of creeds, have had the -unanswerable justification of their genius. These poor absurd creatures -have not. Voltaire in his third century gives them a certain amount of -his newly learned sympathy; but he also gives them a pretty strong dose -of his old irony. - - - - - XXI: EDWARD THOMAS[1] - - -The poetry of Edward Thomas affects one morally as well as æsthetically -and intellectually. We have grown rather shy, in these days of pure -æstheticism, of speaking of those consoling or strengthening qualities -of poetry on which critics of another generation took pleasure in -dwelling. Thomas’s poetry is strengthening and consoling, not because it -justifies God’s ways to man or whispers of reunions beyond the grave, -not because it presents great moral truths in memorable numbers, but in -a more subtle and very much more effective way. Walking through the -streets on these September nights, one notices, wherever there are trees -along the street and lamps close beside the trees, a curious and -beautiful phenomenon. The light of the street lamps striking up into the -trees has power to make the grimed, shabby, and tattered foliage of the -all-but autumn seem brilliantly and transparently green. Within the -magic circle of the light the tree seems to be at that crowning moment -of the spring when the leaves are fully grown, but still luminous with -youth and seemingly almost immaterial in their lightness. Thomas’s -poetry is to the mind what that transfiguring lamplight is to the tired -trees. On minds grown weary in the midst of the intolerable turmoil and -aridity of daily wage-earning existence, it falls with a touch of -momentary rejuvenation. - -The secret of Thomas’s influence lies in the fact that he is genuinely -what so many others of our time quite unjustifiably claim to be, a -nature poet. To be a nature poet it is not enough to affirm vaguely that -God made the country and man made the town, it is not enough to talk -sympathetically about familiar rural objects, it is not enough to be -sonorously poetical about mountains and trees; it is not even enough to -speak of these things with the precision of real knowledge and love. To -be a nature poet a man must have felt profoundly and intimately those -peculiar emotions which nature can inspire, and must be able to express -them in such a way that his reader feels them. The real difficulty that -confronts the would-be poet of nature is that these emotions are of all -emotions the most difficult to pin down and analyze, and the hardest of -all to convey. In “October” Thomas describes what is surely the -characteristic emotion induced by a contact with nature—a kind of -exultant melancholy which is the nearest approach to quiet unpassionate -happiness that the soul can know. Happiness of whatever sort is -extraordinarily hard to analyze and describe. One can think of a hundred -poems, plays, and novels that deal exhaustively with pain and misery to -one that is an analysis and an infectious description of happiness. -Passionate joy is more easily recapturable in art; it is dramatic, -vehemently defined. But quiet happiness, which is at the same time a -kind of melancholy—there you have an emotion which is inexpressible -except by a mind gifted with a diversity of rarely combined qualities. -The poet who would sing of this happiness must combine a rare -penetration with a rare candour and honesty of mind. A man who feels an -emotion that is very difficult to express is often tempted to describe -it in terms of something entirely different. Platonist poets feel a -powerful emotion when confronted by beauty, and, finding it a matter of -the greatest difficulty to say precisely what that emotion is in itself, -proceed to describe it in terms of theology which has nothing whatever -to do with the matter in point. Groping after an expression of the -emotions aroused in him by the contemplation of nature, Wordsworth -sometimes stumbles doubtfully along philosophical byways that are at the -best parallel to the direct road for which he is seeking. Everywhere in -literature this difficulty in finding an expression for any undramatic, -ill-defined emotion is constantly made apparent. - -Thomas’s limpid honesty of mind saves him from the temptation to which -so many others succumb, the temptation to express one thing, because it -is with difficulty describable, in terms of something else. He never -philosophizes the emotions which he feels in the presence of nature and -beauty, but presents them as they stand, transmitting them directly to -his readers without the interposition of any obscuring medium. Rather -than attempt to explain the emotion, to rationalize it into something -that it is not, he will present it for what it is, a problem of which he -does not know the solution. In “Tears” we have an example of this candid -confession of ignorance: - - It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen— - Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall—that day - When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out - But still all equals in their age of gladness - Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon - In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun - And once bore hops: and on that other day - When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower - Into an April morning, stirring and sweet - And warm. Strange solitude was there and silence. - A mightier charm than any in the Tower - Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard, - Soldiers in line, young English countrymen, - Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums - And fifes were playing “The British Grenadiers.” - The men, the music piercing that solitude - And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed, - And have forgotten since their beauty passed. - -The emotion is nameless and indescribable, but the poet has intensely -felt it and transmitted it to us who read his poem, so that we, too, -feel it with the same intensity. Different aspects of this same nameless -emotion of quiet happiness shot with melancholy are the theme of almost -all Thomas’s poems. They bring to us precisely that consolation and -strength which the country and solitude and leisure bring to the spirits -of those long pent in populous cities, but essentialized and distilled -in the form of art. They are the light that makes young again the -tattered leaves. - -Of the purely æsthetic qualities of Thomas’s poetry it is unnecessary to -say much. He devised a curiously bare and candid verse to express with -all possible simplicity and clarity his clear sensations and -emotions.... “This is not,” as Mr. de la Mare says in his foreword to -Thomas’s _Collected Poems_, “this is not a poetry that will drug or -intoxicate.... It must be read slowly, as naturally as if it were prose, -without emphasis.” With this bare verse, devoid of any affectation, -whether of cleverness or a too great simplicity, Thomas could do all -that he wanted. See, for example, with what extraordinary brightness and -precision he could paint a picture: - - Lichen, ivy and moss - Keep evergreen the trees - That stand half flayed and dying, - And the dead trees on their knees - In dog’s mercury and moss: - And the bright twit of the goldfinch drops - Down there as he flits on thistle-tops. - -The same bare precision served him well for describing the interplay of -emotions, as in “After you Speak” or “Like the Touch of Rain.” And with -this verse of his he could also chant the praises of his English -countryside and the character of its people, as typified in -Lob-lie-by-the-fire: - - He has been in England as long as dove and daw, - Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree, - The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery; - And in a tender mood he, as I guess, - Christened one flower Love-in-idleness.... - - - - - XXII: A WORDSWORTH ANTHOLOGY[2] - - -To regard Wordsworth critically, impersonally, is for some of us a -rather difficult matter. With the disintegration of the solid -orthodoxies Wordsworth became for many intelligent, liberal-minded -families the Bible of that sort of pantheism, that dim faith in the -existence of a spiritual world, which filled, somewhat inadequately, the -place of the older dogmas. Brought up as children in the Wordsworthian -tradition, we were taught to believe that a Sunday walk among the hills -was somehow equivalent to church-going: the First Lesson was to be read -among the clouds, the Second in the primroses; the birds and the running -waters sang hymns, and the whole blue landscape preached a sermon “of -moral evil and of good.” From this dim religious education we brought -away a not very well-informed veneration for the name of Wordsworth, a -dutiful conviction about the spirituality of Nature in general, and an -extraordinary superstition about mountains in particular—a superstition -that it took at least three seasons of Alpine Sports to dissipate -entirely. Consequently, on reaching man’s estate, when we actually came -to read our Wordsworth, we found it extremely difficult to appraise his -greatness, so many veils of preconceived ideas had to be pushed aside, -so many inveterate deflections of vision allowed for. However, it became -possible at last to look at Wordsworth as a detached phenomenon in the -world of ideas and not as part of the family tradition of childhood. - -Like many philosophers, and especially philosophers of a mystical tinge -of thought, Wordsworth based his philosophy on his emotions. The -conversion of emotions into intellectual terms is a process that has -been repeated a thousand times in the history of the human mind. We feel -a powerful emotion before a work of art, therefore it partakes of the -divine, is a reconstruction of the Idea of which the natural object is a -poor reflection. Love moves us deeply, therefore human love is a type of -divine love. Nature in her various aspects inspires us with fear, joy, -contentment, despair, therefore nature is a soul that expresses anger, -sympathy, love, and hatred. One could go on indefinitely multiplying -examples of the way in which man objectifies the kingdoms of heaven and -hell that are within him. The process is often a dangerous one. The -mystic who feels within himself the stirrings of inenarrable emotions is -not content with these emotions as they are in themselves. He feels it -necessary to invent a whole cosmogony that will account for them. To him -this philosophy will be true, in so far as it is an expression in -intellectual terms of these emotions. But to those who do not know these -emotions at first hand, it will be simply misleading. The mystical -emotions have what may be termed a conduct value; they enable the man -who feels them to live his life with a serenity and confidence unknown -to other men. But the philosophical terms in which these emotions are -expressed have not necessarily any truth value. This mystical philosophy -will be valuable only in so far as it revives, in the minds of its -students, those conduct-affecting emotions which originally gave it -birth. Accepted at its intellectual face value, such a philosophy may -not only have no worth; it may be actually harmful. - -Into this beautifully printed volume Mr. Cobden-Sanderson has gathered -together most of the passages in Wordsworth’s poetry which possess the -power of reviving the emotions that inspired them. It is astonishing to -find that they fill the best part of two hundred and fifty pages, and -that there are still plenty of poems—“Peter Bell,” for example—that one -would like to see included. “The Prelude” and “Excursion” yield a rich -tribute of what our ancestors would have called “beauties.” There is -that astonishing passage in which the poet describes how, as a boy, he -rowed by moonlight across the lake: - - And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat - Went heaving through the water like a swan; - When, from behind that craggy steep till then - The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge, - As if with voluntary power instinct, - Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, - And growing still in stature the grim shape - Towered up between me and the stars, and still, - For so it seemed, with purpose of its own - And measured motion, like a living thing, - Strode after me. - -There is the history of that other fearful moment when - - I heard among the solitary hills - Low breathings coming after me, and sounds - Of undistinguishable motion, steps - Almost as silent as the turf they trod. - -And there are other passages telling of nature in less awful and -menacing aspects, nature the giver of comfort and strong serenity. -Reading these we are able in some measure to live for ourselves the -emotions that were Wordsworth’s. If we can feel his “shadowy -exaltations,” we have got all that Wordsworth can give us. There is no -need to read the theology of his mysticism, the pantheistic explanation -of his emotions. To Peter Bell a primrose by a river’s brim was only a -yellow primrose. Its beauty stirred in him no feeling. But one can be -moved by the sight of the primrose without necessarily thinking, in the -words of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson’s preface, of “the infinite tenderness of -the infinitely great, of the infinitely great which, from out the -infinite and amid its own stupendous tasks, stoops to strew the path of -man, the infinitely little, with sunshine and with flowers.” This is the -theology of our primrose emotion. But it is the emotion itself which is -important, not the theology. The emotion has its own powerful conduct -value, whereas the philosophy derived from it, suspiciously -anthropocentric, possesses, we should imagine, only the smallest value -as truth. - - - - - XXIII: VERHAEREN - - -Verhaeren was one of those men who feel all their life long “l’envie” -(to use his own admirably expressive phrase), “l’envie de tailler en -drapeaux l’étoffe de la vie.” The stuff of life can be put to worse -uses. To cut it into flags is, on the whole, more admirable than to cut -it, shall we say, into cerecloths, or money-bags, or Parisian -underclothing. A flag is a brave, a cheerful and a noble object. These -are qualities for which we are prepared to forgive the flag its -over-emphasis, its lack of subtlety, its touch of childishness. One can -think of a number of writers who have marched through literary history -like an army with banners. There was Victor Hugo, for example—one of -Verhaeren’s admired masters. There was Balzac, to whose views of life -Verhaeren’s was, in some points, curiously akin. Among the minor makers -of oriflammes there is our own Mr. Chesterton, with his heroic air of -being for ever on the point of setting out on a crusade, glorious with -bunting and mounted on a rocking-horse. - -The flag-maker is a man of energy and strong vitality. He likes to -imagine that all that surrounds him is as large, as full of sap and as -vigorous as he feels himself to be. He pictures the world as a place -where the colours are strong and brightly contrasted, where a vigorous -chiaroscuro leaves no doubt as to the true nature of light and darkness, -and where all life pulsates, quivering and taut, like a banner in the -wind. From the first we find in Verhaeren all the characteristics of the -tailor of banners. In his earliest book of verse, _Les Flamands_, we see -him already delighting in such lines as - - Leurs deux poings monstrueux pataugeaient dans la pâte. - -Already too we find him making copious use—or was it abuse?—as Victor -Hugo had done before him, of words like “vaste,” “énorme,” “infini,” -“infiniment,” “infinité,” “univers.” Thus, in “L’Ame de la Ville,” he -talks of an “énorme” viaduct, an “immense” train, a “monstrueux” sun, -even of the “énorme” atmosphere. For Verhaeren all roads lead to the -infinite, wherever and whatever that may be. - - Les grand’routes tracent des croix - A l’infini, à travers bois; - Les grand’routes tracent des croix lointaines - A l’infini, à travers plaines. - -Infinity is one of those notions which are not to be lightly played -with. The makers of flags like it because it can be contrasted so -effectively with the microscopic finitude of man. Writers like Hugo and -Verhaeren talk so often and so easily about infinity that the idea -ceases in their poetry to have any meaning at all. - -I have said that, in certain respects, Verhaeren, in his view of life, -is not unlike Balzac. This resemblance is most marked in some of the -poems of his middle period, especially those in which he deals with -aspects of contemporary life. _Les Villes tentaculaires_ contains poems -which are wholly Balzacian in conception. Take, for example, Verhaeren’s -rhapsody on the Stock Exchange: - - Une fureur réenflammée - Au mirage du moindre espoir - Monte soudain de l’entonnoir - De bruit et de fumée, - Où l’on se bat, à coups de vols, en bas. - Langues sèches, regards aigus, gestes inverses, - Et cervelles, qu’en tourbillons les millions traversent, - Echangent là leur peur et leur terreur ... - Aux fins de mois, quand les débâcles se décident - La mort les paraphe de suicides, - Mais au jour même aux heures blêmes, - Les volontés dans la fièvre revivent, - L’acharnement sournois - Reprend comme autrefois. - -One cannot read these lines without thinking of Balzac’s feverish -money-makers, of the Baron de Nucingen, Du Tillet, the Kellers and all -the lesser misers and usurers, and all their victims. With their -worked-up and rather melodramatic excitement, they breathe the very -spirit of Balzac’s prodigious film-scenario version of life. - -Verhaeren’s flag-making instinct led him to take special delight in all -that is more than ordinarily large and strenuous. He extols and -magnifies the gross violence of the Flemish peasantry, their almost -infinite capacity for taking food and drink, their industry, their -animalism. In true Rooseveltian style, he admired energy for its own -sake. All his romping rhythms were dictated to him by the need to -express this passion for the strenuous. His curious assonances and -alliterations— - - Luttent et s’entrebuttent en disputes— - -arise from this same desire to recapture the sense of violence and -immediate life. - -It is interesting to compare the violence and energy of Verhaeren with -the violence of an earlier poet—Rimbaud, the marvellous boy, if ever -there was one. Rimbaud cut the stuff of life into flags, but into flags -that never fluttered on this earth. His violence penetrated, in some -sort, beyond the bounds of ordinary life. In some of his poems Rimbaud -seems actually to have reached the nameless goal towards which he was -striving, to have arrived at that world of unheard-of spiritual vigour -and beauty whose nature he can only describe in an exclamatory metaphor: - - Millions d’oiseaux d’or, ô future vigueur! - -But the vigour of Verhaeren is never anything so fine and spiritual as -this “million of golden birds.” It is merely the vigour and violence of -ordinary life speeded up to cinema intensity. - -It is a noticeable fact that Verhaeren was generally at his best when he -took a holiday from the making and waving of flags. His Flemish bucolics -and the love poems of _Les Heures_, written for the most part in -traditional form, and for the most part shorter and more concentrated -than his poems of violence and energy, remain the most moving portion of -his work. Very interesting, too, are the poems belonging to that early -phase of doubt and depression which saw the publication of _Les -Débâcles_ and _Les Flambeaux Noirs_. The energy and life of the later -books is there, but in some sort concentrated, preserved and -intensified, because turned inwards upon itself. Of many of the later -poems one feels that they were written much too easily. These must have -been brought very painfully and laboriously to the birth. - - - - - XXIV: EDWARD LEAR - - -There are few writers whose works I care to read more than once, and one -of them is certainly Edward Lear. Nonsense, like poetry, to which it is -closely allied, like philosophic speculation, like every product of the -imagination, is an assertion of man’s spiritual freedom in spite of all -the oppression of circumstance. As long as it remains possible for the -human mind to invent the Quangle Wangle and the Fimble Fowl, to wander -at will over the Great Gromboolian Plain and the hills of the Cnankly -Bore, the victory is ours. The existence of nonsense is the nearest -approach to a proof of that unprovable article of faith, whose truth we -must all assume or perish miserably: that life is worth living. It is -when circumstances combine to prove, with syllogistic cogency, that life -is not worth living that I turn to Lear and find comfort and -refreshment. I read him and I perceive that it is a good thing to be -alive; for I am free, with Lear, to be as inconsequent as I like. - -Lear is a genuine poet. For what is his nonsense except the poetical -imagination a little twisted out of its course? Lear had the true poet’s -feeling for words—words in themselves, precious and melodious, like -phrases of music; personal as human beings. Marlowe talks of -entertaining divine Zenocrate; Milton of the leaves that fall in -Vallombrosa; Lear of the Fimble Fowl with a corkscrew leg, of runcible -spoons, of things meloobious and genteel. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense -by exaggerating sense—a too logical logic. His coinages of words are -intellectual. Lear, more characteristically a poet, wrote nonsense that -is an excess of imagination, coined words for the sake of their colour -and sound alone. His is the purer nonsense, because more poetical. -Change the key ever so little and the “Dong with a Luminous Nose” would -be one of the most memorable romantic poems of the nineteenth century. -Think, too, of that exquisite “Yonghy Bonghy Bo”! In one of Tennyson’s -later volumes there is a charming little lyric about Catullus, which -begins: - - Row us out from Desenzano, - To your Sirmione row! - So they row’d, and there we landed— - _O venusta Sirmio!_ - -Can one doubt for a moment that he was thinking, when he wrote these -words, of that superb stanza with which the “Yonghy Bonghy” opens: - - On the coast of Coromandel, - Where the early pumpkins blow, - In the middle of the woods, - Dwelt the Yonghy Bonghy Bo. - -Personally, I prefer Lear’s poem; it is the richer and the fuller of the -two. - -Lear’s genius is at its best in the Nonsense Rhymes, or Limericks, as a -later generation has learned to call them. In these I like to think of -him not merely as a poet and a draughtsman—and how unique an artist the -recent efforts of Mr. Nash to rival him have only affirmed—but also as a -profound social philosopher. No study of Lear would be complete without -at least a few remarks on “They” of the Nonsense Rhymes. “They” are the -world, the man in the street; “They” are what the leader-writers in the -twopenny press would call all Right-Thinking Men and Women; “They” are -Public Opinion. The Nonsense Rhymes are, for the most part, nothing more -nor less than episodes selected from the history of that eternal -struggle between the genius or the eccentric and his fellow-beings. -Public Opinion universally abhors eccentricity. There was, for example, -that charming Old Man of Melrose who walked on the tips of his toes. But -“They” said (with their usual inability to appreciate the artist), “It -ain’t pleasant to see you at present, you stupid old man of Melrose.” -Occasionally, when the eccentric happens to be a criminal genius, “They” -are doubtless right. The Old Man with a Gong who bumped on it all the -day long deserved to be smashed. (But “They” also smashed a quite -innocuous Old Man of Whitehaven merely for dancing a quadrille with a -raven.) And there was that Old Person of Buda, whose conduct grew ruder -and ruder; “They” were justified, I dare say, in using a hammer to -silence his clamour. But it raises the whole question of punishment and -of the relation between society and the individual. - -When “They” are not offensive, they content themselves with being -foolishly inquisitive. Thus, “They” ask the Old Man of the Wrekin -whether his boots are made of leather. “They” pester the Old Man in a -Tree with imbecile questions about the Bee which so horribly bored him. -In these encounters the geniuses and the eccentrics often get the better -of the gross and heavy-witted public. The Old Person of Ware who rode on -the back of a bear certainly scored off “Them.” For when “They” asked: -“Does it trot?” He replied, “It does not.” (The picture shows it -galloping _ventre à terre_.) “It’s a Moppsikon Floppsikon bear.” -Sometimes, too, the eccentric actually leads “Them” on to their -discomfiture. One thinks of that Old Man in a Garden, who always begged -every one’s pardon. When “They” asked him, “What for?” he replied, -“You’re a bore, and I trust you’ll go out of my garden.” But “They” -probably ended up by smashing him. - -Occasionally the men of genius adopt a Mallarméen policy. They flee from -the gross besetting crowd. - - La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres. - Fuir, là-bas, fuir.... - -It was surely with these words on his lips that the Old Person of Bazing -(whose presence of mind, for all that he was a Symbolist, was amazing) -went out to purchase the steed which he rode at full speed and escaped -from the people of Bazing. He chose the better part; for it is almost -impossible to please the mob. The Old Person of Ealing was thought by -his suburban neighbours to be almost devoid of good feeling, because, if -you please, he drove a small gig with three owls and a pig. And there -was that pathetic Old Man of Thermopylæ (for whom I have a peculiar -sympathy, since he reminds me so poignantly of myself), who never did -anything properly. “They,” said, “If you choose to boil eggs in your -shoes, you shall never remain in Thermopylæ.” The sort of people “They” -like do the stupidest things, have the vulgarest accomplishments. Of the -Old Person of Filey his acquaintance was wont to speak highly because he -danced perfectly well to the sound of a bell. And the people of Shoreham -adored that fellow-citizen of theirs whose habits were marked by decorum -and who bought an umbrella and sate in the cellar. Naturally; it was -only to be expected. - - - - - XXV: SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN - - -That an Englishman should be a very great plastic artist is always -rather surprising. Perhaps it is a matter of mere chance; perhaps it has -something to do with our national character—if such a thing really -exists. But, whatever may be the cause, the fact remains that England -has produced very few artists of first-class importance. The -Renaissance, as it spread, like some marvellous infectious disease of -the spirit, across the face of Europe, manifested itself in different -countries by different symptoms. In Italy, the country of its origin, -the Renaissance was, more than anything, an outburst of painting, -architecture and sculpture. Scholarship and religious reformation were, -in Germany, the typical manifestations of the disease. But when this -gorgeous spiritual measles crossed the English Channel, its symptoms -were almost exclusively literary. The first premonitory touch of the -infection from Italy “brought out” Chaucer. With the next bout of the -disease England produced the Elizabethans. But among all these poets -there was not a single plastic artist whose name we so much as remember. - -And then, suddenly, the seventeenth century gave birth to two English -artists of genius. It produced Inigo Jones and, a little later, Wren. -Wren died, at the age of more than ninety, in the spring of 1723. We are -celebrating to-day his bi-centenary—celebrating it not merely by -antiquarian talk and scholarly appreciations of his style but also (the -signs are not wanting) in a more concrete and living way: by taking a -renewed interest in the art of which he was so great a master and by -reverting in our practice to that fine tradition which he, with his -predecessor, Inigo, inaugurated. - -An anniversary celebration is an act of what Wordsworth would have -called “natural piety”; an act by which past is linked with present and -of the vague, interminable series of the days a single comprehensible -and logical unity is created in our minds. At the coming of the -centenaries we like to remember the great men of the past, not so much -by way of historical exercise, but that we may see precisely where, in -relation to their achievement, we stand at the present time, that we may -appraise the life still left in their spirit and apply to ourselves the -moral of their example. I have no intention in this article of giving a -biography of Wren, a list of his works, or a technical account of his -style and methods. I propose to do no more than describe, in the most -general terms, the nature of his achievement and its significance to -ourselves. - -Wren was a good architect. But since it is important to know precisely -what we are talking about, let us begin by asking ourselves what good -architecture is. Descending with majesty from his private Sinai, Mr. -Ruskin dictated to a whole generation of Englishmen the æsthetic Law. On -monolithic tables that were the Stones of Venice he wrote the great -truths that had been revealed to him. Here is one of them: - - It is to be generally observed that the proportions of buildings have - nothing to do with the style or general merit of their architecture. - An architect trained in the worst schools and utterly devoid of all - meaning or purpose in his work, may yet have such a natural gift of - massing and grouping as will render his structure effective when seen - at a distance. - -Now it is to be generally observed, as he himself would say, that in all -matters connected with art, Ruskin is to be interpreted as we interpret -dreams—that is to say, as signifying precisely the opposite of what he -says. Thus, when we find him saying that good architecture has nothing -to do with proportion or the judicious disposition of masses and that -the general effect counts for nothing at all, we may take it as more or -less definitely proven that good architecture is, in fact, almost -entirely a matter of proportion and massing, and that the general effect -of the whole work counts for nearly everything. Interpreted according to -this simple oneirocritical method, Ruskin’s pontifical pronouncement may -be taken as explaining briefly and clearly the secrets of good -architecture. That is why I have chosen this quotation to be the text of -my discourse on Wren. - -For the qualities which most obviously distinguish Wren’s work are -precisely those which Ruskin so contemptuously disparages and which we, -by our process of interpretation, have singled out as the essentially -architectural qualities. In all that Wren designed—I am speaking of the -works of his maturity; for at the beginning of his career he was still -an unpractised amateur, and at the end, though still on occasion -wonderfully successful, a very old man—we see a faultless proportion, a -felicitous massing and contrasting of forms. He conceived his buildings -as three-dimensional designs which should be seen, from every point of -view, as harmoniously proportioned wholes. (With regard to the exteriors -this, of course, is true only of those buildings which _can_ be seen -from all sides. Like all true architects, Wren preferred to build in -positions where his work could be appreciated three-dimensionally. But -he was also a wonderful maker of façades; witness his Middle Temple -gateway and his houses in King’s Bench Walk.) He possessed in the -highest degree that instinctive sense of proportion and scale which -enabled him to embody his conception in brick and stone. In his great -masterpiece of St. Paul’s every part of the building, seen from within -or without, seems to stand in a certain satisfying and harmonious -relation to every other part. The same is true even of the smallest -works belonging to the period of Wren’s maturity. On its smaller scale -and different plane, such a building as Rochester Guildhall is as -beautiful, because as harmonious in the relation of all its parts, as -St. Paul’s. - -Of Wren’s other purely architectural qualities I shall speak but -briefly. He was, to begin with, an engineer of inexhaustible resource; -one who could always be relied upon to find the best possible solution -to any problem, from blowing up the ruins of old St. Paul’s to providing -the new with a dome that should be at once beautiful and thoroughly -safe. As a designer he exhibited the same practical ingenuity. No -architect has known how to make so much of a difficult site and cheap -materials. The man who built the City churches was a practical genius of -no common order. He was also an artist of profoundly original mind. This -originality reveals itself in the way in which he combines the accepted -features of classical Renaissance architecture into new designs that -were entirely English and his own. The steeples of his City churches -provide us with an obvious example of this originality. His domestic -architecture—that wonderful application of classical principles to the -best in the native tradition—is another. - -But Wren’s most characteristic quality—the quality which gives to his -work, over and above its pure beauty, its own peculiar character and -charm—is a quality rather moral than æsthetic. Of Chelsea Hospital, -Carlyle once remarked that it was “obviously the work of a gentleman.” -The words are illuminating. Everything that Wren did was the work of a -gentleman; that is the secret of its peculiar character. For Wren was a -great gentleman: one who valued dignity and restraint and who, -respecting himself, respected also humanity; one who desired that men -and women should live with the dignity, even the grandeur, befitting -their proud human title; one who despised meanness and oddity as much as -vulgar ostentation; one who admired reason and order, who distrusted all -extravagance and excess. A gentleman, the finished product of an old and -ordered civilization. - -Wren, the restrained and dignified gentleman, stands out most clearly -when we compare him with his Italian contemporaries. The baroque artists -of the seventeenth century were interested above everything in the new, -the startling, the astonishing; they strained after impossible -grandeurs, unheard-of violences. The architectural ideals of which they -dreamed were more suitable for embodiment in theatrical cardboard than -in stone. And indeed, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century -was the golden age of scene-painting in Italy. The artists who painted -the settings for the elder Scarlatti’s operas, the later Bibienas and -Piranesis, came nearer to reaching the wild Italian ideal than ever mere -architects like Borromini or Bernini, their imaginations cramped by the -stubbornness of stone and the unsleeping activities of gravitations, -could hope to do. - -How vastly different is the baroque theatricality from Wren’s sober -restraint! Wren was a master of the grand style; but he never dreamed of -building for effect alone. He was never theatrical or showy, never -pretentious or vulgar. St. Paul’s is a monument of temperance and -chastity. His great palace at Hampton Court is no gaudy stage-setting -for the farce of absolute monarchy. It is a country gentleman’s -house—more spacious, of course, and with statelier rooms and more -impressive vistas—but still a house meant to be lived in by some one who -was a man as well as a king. But if his palaces might have housed, -without the least incongruity, a well-bred gentleman, conversely his -common houses were always dignified enough, however small, to be palaces -in miniature and the homes of kings. - -In the course of the two hundred years which have elapsed since his -death, Wren’s successors have often departed, with melancholy results, -from the tradition of which he was the founder. They have forgotten, in -their architecture, the art of being gentlemen. Infected by a touch of -the baroque _folie de grandeur_, the architects of the eighteenth -century built houses in imitation of Versailles and Caserta—huge stage -houses, all for show and magnificence and all but impossible to live in. - -The architects of the nineteenth century sinned in a diametrically -opposite way—towards meanness and a negation of art. Senselessly -preoccupied with details, they created the nightmare architecture of -“features.” The sham Gothic of early Victorian times yielded at the end -of the century to the nauseous affectation of “sham-peasantry.” Big -houses were built with all the irregularity and more than the -“quaintness” of cottages; suburban villas took the form of machine-made -imitations of the Tudor peasant’s hut. To all intents and purposes -architecture ceased to exist; Ruskin had triumphed. - -To-day, however, there are signs that architecture is coming back to -that sane and dignified tradition of which Wren was the great exponent. -Architects are building houses for gentlemen to live in. Let us hope -that they will continue to do so. There may be sublimer types of men -than the gentleman: there are saints, for example, and the great -enthusiasts whose thoughts and actions move the world. But for practical -purposes and in a civilized, orderly society, the gentleman remains, -after all, the ideal man. The most profound religious emotions have been -expressed in Gothic architecture. Human ambitions and aspirations have -been most colossally reflected by the Romans and the Italians of the -baroque. But it is in England that the golden mean of reasonableness and -decency—the practical philosophy of the civilized man—has received its -most elegant and dignified expression. The old gentleman who died two -hundred years ago preached on the subject of civilization a number of -sermons in stone. St. Paul’s and Greenwich, Trinity Library and Hampton -Court, Chelsea, Kilmainham, Blackheath and Rochester, St. Stephen’s, -Wallbrook and St. Mary Ab-church, Kensington orangery and Middle Temple -gateway—these are the titles of a few of them. They have much, if we -will but study them, to teach us. - - - - - XXVI: BEN JONSON[3] - - -It comes as something of a surprise to find that the niche reserved for -Ben Jonson in the “English Men of Letters” series has only now been -filled. One expected somehow that he would have been among the first of -the great ones to be enshrined; but no, he has had a long time to wait; -and Adam Smith, and Sydney Smith, and Hazlitt, and Fanny Burney have -gone before him into the temple of fame. Now, however, his monument has -at last been made, with Professor Gregory Smith’s qualified version of -“O rare Ben Jonson!” duly and definitively carved upon it. - -What is it that makes us, almost as a matter of course, number Ben -Jonson among the great? Why should we expect him to be an early -candidate for immortality, or why, indeed, should he be admitted to the -“English Men of Letters” series at all? These are difficult questions to -answer; for when we come to consider the matter we find ourselves unable -to give any very glowing account of Ben or his greatness. It is hard to -say that one likes his work; one cannot honestly call him a good poet or -a supreme dramatist. And yet, unsympathetic as he is, uninteresting as -he often can be, we still go on respecting and admiring him, because, in -spite of everything, we are conscious, obscurely but certainly, that he -was a great man. - -He had little influence on his successors; the comedy of humours died -without any but an abortive issue. Shadwell, the mountain-bellied “Og, -from a treason tavern rolling home,” is not a disciple that any man -would have much pride in claiming. No raking up of literary history will -make Ben Jonson great as a founder of a school or an inspirer of others. -His greatness is a greatness of character. There is something almost -alarming in the spectacle of this formidable figure advancing with -tank-like irresistibility towards the goal he had set himself to attain. -No sirens of romance can seduce him, no shock of opposition unseat him -in his career. He proceeds along the course theoretically mapped out at -the inception of his literary life, never deviating from this narrow way -till the very end—till the time when, in his old age, he wrote that -exquisite pastoral, _The Sad Shepherd_, which is so complete and -absolute a denial of all his lifelong principles. But _The Sad Shepherd_ -is a weakness, albeit a triumphant weakness. Ben, as he liked to look -upon himself, as he has again and again revealed himself to us, is the -artist with principles, protesting against the anarchic absence of -principle among the geniuses and charlatans, the poets and ranters of -his age. - - The true artificer will not run away from nature as he were afraid of - her; or depart from life and the likeness of truth; but speak to the - capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from the - vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the - Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age, which had nothing in them - but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to - the ignorant gapers. He knows it is his only art, so to carry it as - none but artificers perceive it. In the meantime, perhaps, he is - called barren, dull, lean, a poor writer, or by what contumelious word - can come in their cheeks, by these men who without labour, judgment, - knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred before him. - -In these sentences from _Discoveries_ Ben Jonson paints his own -picture—portrait of the artist as a true artificer—setting forth, in its -most general form, and with no distracting details of the humours or the -moral purpose of art, his own theory of the artist’s true function and -nature. Jonson’s theory was no idle speculation, no mere thing of words -and air, but a creed, a principle, a categorical imperative, -conditioning and informing his whole work. Any study of the poet must, -therefore, begin with the formulation of his theory, and must go on, as -Professor Gregory Smith’s excellent essay does indeed proceed, to show -in detail how the theory was applied and worked out in each individual -composition. - -A good deal of nonsense has been talked at one time or another about -artistic theories. The artist is told that he should have no theories, -that he should warble native wood-notes wild, that he should “sing,” be -wholly spontaneous, should starve his brain and cultivate his heart and -spleen; that an artistic theory cramps the style, stops up the Helicons -of inspiration, and so on, and so on. The foolish and sentimental -conception of the artist, to which these anti-intellectual doctrines are -a corollary, dates from the time of romanticism and survives among the -foolish and sentimental of to-day. A consciously practised theory of art -has never spoiled a good artist, has never dammed up inspiration, but -rather, and in most cases profitably, canalized it. Even the Romantics -had theories and were wild and emotional on principle. - -Theories are above all necessary at moments when old traditions are -breaking up, when all is chaos and in flux. At such moments an artist -formulates his theory and clings to it through thick and thin; clings to -it as the one firm raft of security in the midst of the surrounding -unrest. Thus, when the neo-Classicism, of which Ben was one of the -remote ancestors, was crumbling into the nothingness of _The Loves of -the Plants_ and _The Triumphs of Temper_, Wordsworth found salvation by -the promulgation of a new theory of poetry, which he put into practice -systematically and to the verge of absurdity in _Lyrical Ballads_. -Similarly in the shipwreck of the old tradition of painting we find the -artists of the present day clinging desperately to intellectual formulas -as their only hope in the chaos. The only occasions, in fact, when the -artist can afford entirely to dispense with theory occur in periods when -a well-established tradition reigns supreme and unquestioned. And then -the absence of theory is more apparent than real; for the tradition in -which he is working is a theory, originally formulated by someone else, -which he accepts unconsciously and as though it were the law of Nature -itself. - -The beginning of the seventeenth century was not one of these periods of -placidity and calm acceptance. It was a moment of growth and decay -together, of fermentation. The fabulous efflorescence of the Renaissance -had already grown rank. With that extravagance of energy which -characterized them in all things, the Elizabethans had exaggerated the -traditions of their literature into insincerity. All artistic traditions -end, in due course, by being reduced to the absurd; but the Elizabethans -crammed the growth and decline of a century into a few years. One after -another they transfigured and then destroyed every species of art they -touched. Euphuism, Petrarchism, Spenserism, the sonnet, the drama—some -lasted a little longer than others, but they all exploded in the end, -these beautiful iridescent bubbles blown too big by the enthusiasm of -their makers. - -But in the midst of this unstable luxuriance voices of protest were to -be heard, reactions against the main romantic current were discernible. -Each in his own way and in his own sphere, Donne and Ben Jonson -protested aganst the exaggerations of the age. At a time when sonneteers -in legions were quibbling about the blackness of their ladies’ eyes or -the golden wires of their hair, when Platonists protested in melodious -chorus that they were not in love with “red and white” but with the -ideal and divine beauty of which peach-blossom complexions were but -inadequate shadows, at a time when love-poetry had become, with rare -exceptions, fantastically unreal, Donne called it back, a little grossly -perhaps, to facts with the dry remark: - - Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use - To say, who have no mistress but their muse. - -There have been poets who have written more lyrically than Donne, more -fervently about certain amorous emotions, but not one who has formulated -so rational a philosophy of love as a whole, who has seen all the facts -so clearly and judged them so soundly. Donne laid down no literary -theory. His followers took from him all that was relatively -unimportant—the harshness, itself a protest against Spenserian facility, -the conceits, the sensuality tempered by mysticism—but the important and -original quality of Donne’s work, the psychological realism, they could -not, through sheer incapacity, transfer into their own poetry. Donne’s -immediate influence was on the whole bad. Any influence for good he may -have had has been on poets of a much later date. - -The other great literary Protestant of the time was the curious subject -of our examination, Ben Jonson. Like Donne he was a realist. He had no -use for claptrap, or rant, or romanticism. His aim was to give his -audiences real facts flavoured with sound morality. He failed to be a -great realist, partly because he lacked the imaginative insight to -perceive more than the most obvious and superficial reality, and partly -because he was so much preoccupied with the sound morality that he was -prepared to sacrifice truth to satire; so that in place of characters he -gives us humours, not minds, but personified moral qualities. - -Ben hated romanticism; for, whatever may have been his bodily habits, -however infinite his capacity for drinking sack, he belonged -intellectually to the party of sobriety. In all ages the drunks and the -sobers have confronted one another, each party loud in derision and -condemnation of the defects which it observes in the other. “The -Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age” accuse the sober Ben of -being “barren, dull, lean, a poor writer.” Ben retorts that they “have -nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to -warrant them to the ignorant gapers.” At another period it is the -Hernanis and the Rollas who reproach that paragon of dryness, the almost -fiendishly sober Stendhal, with his grocer’s style. Stendhal in his turn -remarks: “En paraissant, vers 1803, le _Génie_ de Chateaubriand m’a -semblé ridicule.” And to-day? We have our sobers and our drunks, our -Hardy and our Belloc, our Santayana and our Chesterton. The distinction -is eternally valid. Our personal sympathies may lie with one or the -other; but it is obvious that we could dispense with neither. Ben, then, -was one of the sobers, protesting with might and main against the -extravagant behaviour of the drunks, an intellectual insisting that -there was no way of arriving at truth except by intellectual processes, -an apotheosis of the Plain Man determined to stand no nonsense about -anything. Ben’s poetical achievement, such as it is, is the achievement -of one who relied on no mysterious inspiration, but on those solid -qualities of sense, perseverance, and sound judgment which any decent -citizen of a decent country may be expected to possess. That he himself -possessed, hidden somewhere in the obscure crypts and recesses of his -mind, other rarer spiritual qualities is proved by the existence of his -additions to _The Spanish Tragedy_—if, indeed, they are his, which there -is no cogent reason to doubt—and his last fragment of a masterpiece, -_The Sad Shepherd_. But these qualities, as Professor Gregory Smith -points out, he seems deliberately to have suppressed; locked them away, -at the bidding of his imperious theory, in the strange dark places from -which, at the beginning and the very end of his career, they emerged. He -might have been a great romantic, one of the sublime inebriates; he -chose rather to be classical and sober. Working solely with the logical -intellect and rejecting as dangerous the aid of those uncontrolled -illogical elements of imagination, he produced work that is in its own -way excellent. It is well-wrought, strong, heavy with learning and what -the Chaucerians would call “high sentence.” The emotional intensity and -brevity excepted, it possesses all the qualities of the French classical -drama. But the quality which characterizes the best Elizabethan and -indeed the best English poetry of all periods, the power of moving in -two worlds at once, it lacks. Jonson, like the French dramatists of the -seventeenth century, moves on a level, directly towards some logical -goal. The road over which his great contemporaries take us is not level; -it is, as it were, tilted and uneven, so that as we proceed along it we -are momently shot off at a tangent from the solid earth of logical -meaning into superior regions where the intellectual laws of gravity -have no control. The mistake of Jonson and the classicists in general -consists in supposing that nothing is of value that is not susceptible -of logical analysis; whereas the truth is that the greatest triumphs of -art take place in a world that is not wholly of the intellect, but lies -somewhere between it and the inenarrable, but, to those who have -penetrated it, supremely real, world of the mystic. In his fear and -dislike of nonsense, Jonson put away from himself not only the -Tamer-Chams and the fustian of the late age, but also most of the beauty -it had created. - -With the romantic emotions of his predecessors and contemporaries Jonson -abandoned much of the characteristically Elizabethan form of their -poetry. That extraordinary melodiousness which distinguishes the -Elizabethan lyric is not to be found in any of Ben’s writing. The poems -by which we remember him—“Cynthia,” “Drink to Me Only,” “It is Not -Growing Like a Tree”—are classically well made (though the cavalier -lyrists were to do better in the same style); but it is not for any -musical qualities that we remember them. One can understand Ben’s -critical contempt for those purely formal devices for producing musical -richness in which the Elizabethans delighted. - - Eyes, why did you bring unto me these graces, - Grac’d to yield wonder out of her true measure, - Measure of all joyes’ stay to phansie traces - Module of pleasure. - -The device is childish in its formality, the words, in their obscurity, -almost devoid of significance. But what matter, since the stanza is a -triumph of sonorous beauty? The Elizabethans devised many ingenuities of -this sort; the minor poets exploited them until they became ridiculous; -the major poets employed them with greater discretion, playing subtle -variations (as in Shakespeare’s sonnets) on the crude theme. When -writers had something to say, their thoughts, poured into these -copiously elaborate forms, were moulded to the grandest, poetical -eloquence. A minor poet, like Lord Brooke, from whose works we have just -quoted a specimen of pure formalism, could produce, in his moments of -inspiration, such magnificent lines as: - - The mind of Man is this world’s true dimension, - And knowledge is the measure of the mind; - -or these, of the nethermost hell: - - A place there is upon no centre placed, - Deepe under depthes, as farre as is the skie - Above the earth; darke, infinitely spaced: - Pluto the king, the kingdome, miserie. - -Even into comic poetry the Elizabethans imported the grand manner. The -anonymous author of - - Tee-hee, tee-hee! Oh sweet delight - He tickles this age, who can - Call Tullia’s ape a marmosite - And Leda’s goose a swan, - -knew the secret of that rich, facile music which all those who wrote in -the grand Elizabethan tradition could produce. Jonson, like Donne, -reacted against the facility and floridity of this technique, but in a -different way. Donne’s protest took the form of a conceited subtlety of -thought combined with a harshness of metre. Jonson’s classical training -inclined him towards clarity, solidity of sense, and economy of form. He -stands, as a lyrist, half-way between the Elizabethans and the cavalier -song-writers; he has broken away from the old tradition, but has not yet -made himself entirely at home in the new. At the best he achieves a -minor perfection of point and neatness. At the worst he falls into that -dryness and dulness with which he knew he could be reproached. - -We have seen from the passage concerning the true artificer that Jonson -fully realized the risk he was running. He recurs more than once in -_Discoveries_ to the same theme, “Some men to avoid redundancy run into -that [a “thin, flagging, poor, starved” style]; and while they strive to -have no ill-blood or juice, they lose their good.” The good that Jonson -lost was a great one. And in the same way we see to-day how a fear of -becoming sentimental, or “chocolate-boxy,” drives many of the younger -poets and artists to shrink from treating of the great emotions or the -obvious lavish beauty of the earth. But to eschew a good because the -corruption of it is very bad is surely a sign of weakness and a folly. - -Having lost the realm of romantic beauty—lost it deliberately and of set -purpose—Ben Jonson devoted the whole of his immense energy to portraying -and reforming the ugly world of fact. But his reforming satiric -intentions interfered, as we have already shown, with his realistic -intentions, and instead of recreating in his art the actual world of -men, he invented the wholly intellectual and therefore wholly unreal -universe of Humours. It is an odd new world, amusing to look at from the -safe distance that separates stage from stalls; but not a place one -could ever wish to live in—one’s neighbours, fools, knaves, hypocrites, -and bears would make the most pleasing prospect intolerable. And over it -all is diffused the atmosphere of Jonson’s humour. It is a curious kind -of humour, very different from anything that passes under that name -to-day, from the humour of _Punch_, or _A Kiss for Cinderella_. One has -only to read _Volpone_—or, better still, go to see it when it is acted -this year by the Phœnix Society for the revival of old plays—to realize -that Ben’s conception of a joke differed materially from ours. Humour -has never been the same since Rousseau invented humanitarianism. -Syphilis and broken legs were still a great deal more comic in -Smollett’s day than in our own. There is a cruelty, a heartlessness -about much of the older humour which is sometimes shocking, sometimes, -in its less extreme forms, pleasantly astringent and stimulating after -the orgies of quaint pathos and sentimental comedy in which we are -nowadays forced to indulge. There is not a pathetic line in _Volpone_; -all the characters are profoundly unpleasant, and the fun is almost as -grim as fun can be. Its heartlessness is not the brilliant, cynical -heartlessness of the later Restoration comedy, but something ponderous -and vast. It reminds us of one of those enormous, painful jokes which -fate sometimes plays on humanity. There is no alleviation, no purging by -pity and terror. It requires a very hearty sense of humour to digest it. -We have reason to admire our ancestors for their ability to enjoy this -kind of comedy as it should be enjoyed. It would get very little -appreciation from a London audience of to-day. - -In the other comedies the fun is not so grim; but there is a certain -hardness and brutality about them all—due, of course, ultimately to the -fact that the characters are not human, but rather marionettes of wood -and metal that collide and belabour one another, like the ferocious -puppets of the Punch and Judy show, without feeling the painfulness of -the proceeding. Shakespeare’s comedy is not heartless, because the -characters are human and sensitive. Our modern sentimentality is a -corruption, a softening of genuine humanity. We need a few more Jonsons -and Congreves, some more plays like _Volpone_, or that inimitable -_Marriage à la Mode_ of Dryden, in which the curtain goes up on a lady -singing the outrageously cynical song that begins: - - Why should a foolish marriage vow, - That long ago was made, - Constrain us to each other now - When pleasure is decayed? - -Too much heartlessness is intolerable (how soon one turns, revolted, -from the literature of the Restoration!), but a little of it now and -then is bracing, a tonic for relaxed sensibilities. A little ruthless -laughter clears the air as nothing else can do; it is good for us, every -now and then, to see our ideals laughed at, our conception of nobility -caricatured; it is good for solemnity’s nose to be tweaked, it is good -for human pomposity to be made to look mean and ridiculous. It should be -the great social function—as Marinetti has pointed out—of the music -halls, to provide this cruel and unsparing laughter, to make a -buffoonery of all the solemnly accepted grandeurs and nobilities. A good -dose of this mockery, administered twice a year at the equinoxes, should -purge our minds of much waste matter, make nimble our spirits and -brighten the eye to look more clearly and truthfully on the world about -us. - -Ben’s reduction of human beings to a series of rather unpleasant Humours -is sound and medicinal. Humours do not, of course, exist in actuality; -they are true only as caricatures are true. There are times when we -wonder whether a caricature is not, after all, truer than a photograph; -there are others when it seems a stupid lie. But at all times a -caricature is disquieting; and it is very good for most of us to be made -uncomfortable. - - - - - XXVII: CHAUCER - - -There are few things more melancholy than the spectacle of literary -fossilization. A great writer comes into being, lives, labours and dies. -Time passes; year by year the sediment of muddy comment and criticism -thickens round the great man’s bones. The sediment sets firm; what was -once a living organism becomes a thing of marble. On the attainment of -total fossilization the great man has become a classic. It becomes -increasingly difficult for the members of each succeeding generation to -remember that the stony objects which fill the museum cases were once -alive. It is often a work of considerable labour to reconstruct the -living animal from the fossil shape. But the trouble is generally worth -taking. And in no case is it more worth while than in Chaucer’s. - -With Chaucer the ordinary fossilizing process, to which every classical -author is subject, has been complicated by the petrifaction of his -language. Five hundred years have almost sufficed to turn the most -living of poets into a substitute on the modern sides of schools for the -mental gymnastic of Latin and Greek. Prophetically, Chaucer saw the fate -that awaited him and appealed against his doom: - - Ye know eke that, in form of speech is change - Within a thousand year, and wordes tho - That hadden price, now wonder nice and strange - Us thinketh them; and yet they spake them so, - And sped as well in love as men now do. - -The body of his poetry may have grown old, but its spirit is still young -and immortal. To know that spirit—and not to know it is to ignore -something that is of unique importance in the history of our -literature—it is necessary to make the effort of becoming familiar with -the body it informs and gives life to. The antique language and -versification, so “wonder nice and strange” to our ears, are obstacles -in the path of most of those who read for pleasure’s sake (not that any -reader worthy of the name ever reads for anything else but pleasure); to -the pedants they are an end in themselves. Theirs is the carcass, but -not the soul. Between those who are daunted by his superficial -difficulties and those who take too much delight in them Chaucer finds -but few sympathetic readers. I hope in these pages to be able to give a -few of the reasons that make Chaucer so well worth reading. - -Chaucer’s art is, by its very largeness and objectiveness, extremely -difficult to subject to critical analysis. Confronted by it, Dryden -could only exclaim, “Here is God’s plenty!”—and the exclamation proves, -when all is said, to be the most adequate and satisfying of all -criticisms. All that the critic can hope to do is to expand and to -illustrate Dryden’s exemplary brevity. - -“God’s plenty!”—the phrase is a peculiarly happy one. It calls up a -vision of the prodigal earth, of harvest fields, of innumerable beasts -and birds, of teeming life. And it is in the heart of this living and -material world of Nature that Chaucer lives. He is the poet of earth, -supremely content to walk, desiring no wings. Many English poets have -loved the earth for the sake of something—a dream, a reality, call it -which you will—that lies behind it. But there have been few, and, except -for Chaucer, no poets of greatness, who have been in love with earth for -its own sake, with Nature in the sense of something inevitably material, -something that is the opposite of the supernatural. Supreme over -everything in this world he sees the natural order, the “law of kind,” -as he calls it. The teachings of most of the great prophets and poets -are simply protests against the law of kind. Chaucer does not protest, -he accepts. It is precisely this acceptance that makes him unique among -English poets. He does not go to Nature as the symbol of some further -spiritual reality; hills, flowers, sea, and clouds are not, for him, -transparencies through which the workings of a great soul are visible. -No, they are opaque; he likes them for what they are, things pleasant -and beautiful, and not the less delicious because they are definitely of -the earth earthy. Human beings, in the same way, he takes as he finds, -noble and beastish, but, on the whole, wonderfully decent. He has none -of that strong ethical bias which is usually to be found in the English -mind. He is not horrified by the behaviour of his fellow-beings, and he -has no desire to reform them. Their characters, their motives interest -him, and he stands looking on at them, a happy spectator. This serenity -of detachment, this placid acceptance of things and people as they are, -is emphasized if we compare the poetry of Chaucer with that of his -contemporary, Langland, or whoever it was that wrote _Piers Plowman_. - -The historians tell us that the later years of the fourteenth century -were among the most disagreeable periods of our national history. -English prosperity was at a very low ebb. The Black Death had -exterminated nearly a third of the working population of the islands, a -fact which, aggravated by the frenzied legislation of the Government, -had led to the unprecedented labour troubles that culminated in the -peasants’ revolt. Clerical corruption and lawlessness were rife. All -things considered, even our own age is preferable to that in which -Chaucer lived. Langland does not spare denunciation; he is appalled by -the wickedness about him, scandalized at the openly confessed vices that -have almost ceased to pay to virtue the tribute of hypocrisy. -Indignation is the inspiration of _Piers Plowman_, the righteous -indignation of the prophet. But to read Chaucer one would imagine that -there was nothing in fourteenth-century England to be indignant about. -It is true that the Pardoner, the Friar, the Shipman, the Miller, and, -in fact, most of the Canterbury pilgrims are rogues and scoundrels; but, -then, they are such “merry harlots” too. It is true that the Monk -prefers hunting to praying, that, in these latter days when fairies are -no more, “there is none other incubus” but the friar, that “purse is the -Archdeacon’s hell,” and the Summoner a villain of the first magnitude; -but Chaucer can only regard these things as primarily humorous. The fact -of people not practising what they preach is an unfailing source of -amusement to him. Where Langland cries aloud in anger, threatening the -world with hell-fire, Chaucer looks on and smiles. To the great -political crisis of his time he makes but one reference, and that a -comic one: - - So hideous was the noyse, ah _benedicite_! - Certes he Jakke Straw, and his meyné, - Ne maden schoutes never half so schrille, - Whan that they wolden eny Flemyng kille, - As thilke day was mad upon the fox. - -Peasants may revolt, priests break their vows, lawyers lie and cheat, -and the world in general indulge its sensual appetites; why try and -prevent them, why protest? After all, they are all simply being natural, -they are all following the law of kind. A reasonable man, like himself, -“flees fro the pres and dwelles with soothfastnesse.” But reasonable men -are few, and it is the nature of human beings to be the unreasonable -sport of instinct and passion, just as it is the nature of the daisy to -open its eye to the sun and of the goldfinch to be a spritely and -“gaylard” creature. The law of kind has always and in everything -dominated; there is no rubbing nature against the hair. For - - God it wot, there may no man embrace - As to destreyne a thing, the which nature - Hath naturelly set in a creature. - Take any brid, and put him in a cage, - And do all thine entent and thy corrage - To foster it tendrely with meat and drynke, - And with alle the deyntees thou canst bethinke, - And keep it all so kyndly as thou may; - Although his cage of gold be never so gay, - Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand fold, - Lever in a forest, that is wyld and cold, - Gon ete wormes, and such wrecchidnes; - For ever this brid will doon his busynes - To scape out of his cage when that he may; - His liberté the brid desireth aye ... - Lo, heer hath kynd his dominacioun, - And appetyt flemeth (banishes) discrescioun. - Also a she wolf hath a vilayne kynde, - The lewideste wolf that she may fynde, - Or least of reputacioun, him will sche take, - In tyme whan hir lust to have a make. - Alle this ensaumples tell I by these men - That ben untrewe, and nothing by wommen. - -(As the story from which these lines are quoted happens to be about an -unfaithful wife, it seems that, in making the female sex immune from the -action of the law of kind, Chaucer is indulging a little in irony.) - - For men han ever a licorous appetit - On lower thing to parforme her delit - Than on her wyves, ben they never so faire, - Ne never so trewe, ne so debonaire. - -Nature, deplorable as some of its manifestations may be, must always and -inevitably assert itself. The law of kind has power even over immortal -souls. This fact is the source of the poet’s constantly expressed -dislike of celibacy and asceticism. The doctrine that upholds the -superiority of the state of virginity over that of wedlock is, to begin -with (he holds), a danger to the race. It encourages a process which we -may be permitted to call dysgenics—the carrying on of the species by the -worst members. The Host’s words to the Monk are memorable: - - Allas! why wearest thou so wide a cope? - God give me sorwe! and I were a pope - Nought only thou, but every mighty man, - Though he were shore brode upon his pan (head) - Should han a wife; for all this world is lorn; - Religioun hath take up all the corn - Of tredyng, and we burel (humble) men ben shrimpes; - Of feble trees there cometh wrecchid impes. - This maketh that our heires ben so sclendere - And feble, that they may not wel engendre. - -But it is not merely dangerous; it is anti-natural. That is the theme of -the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Counsels of perfection are all very well -when they are given to those - - That wolde lyve parfytly; - But, lordyngs, by your leve, that am not I. - -The bulk of us must live as the law of kind enjoins. - -It is characteristic of Chaucer’s conception of the world, that the -highest praise he can bestow on anything is to assert of it, that it -possesses in the highest degree the qualities of its own particular -kind. Thus of Cressida he says: - - She was not with the least of her stature, - But all her limbes so well answering - Weren to womanhood, that creature - Nas never lesse mannish in seeming. - -The horse of brass in the _Squire’s Tale_ is - - So well proportioned to be strong, - Right as it were a steed of Lombardye, - Thereto so _horsely_ and so quick of eye. - -Everything that is perfect of its kind is admirable, even though the -kind may not be an exalted one. It is, for instance, a joy to see the -way in which the Canon sweats: - - A cloote-leaf (dock leaf) he had under his hood - For sweat, and for to keep his head from heat. - But it was joye for to see him sweat; - His forehead dropped as a stillatorie - Were full of plantain or of peritorie. - -The Canon is supreme in the category of sweaters, the very type and idea -of perspiring humanity; therefore he is admirable and joyous to behold, -even as a horse that is supremely horsely or a woman less mannish than -anything one could imagine. In the same way it is a delight to behold -the Pardoner preaching to the people. In its own kind his charlatanism -is perfect and deserves admiration: - - Mine handes and my tonge gon so yerne, - That it is joye to see my busynesse. - -This manner of saying of things that they are joyous, or, very often, -heavenly, is typical of Chaucer. He looks out on the world with a -delight that never grows old or weary. The sights and sounds of daily -life, all the lavish beauty of the earth fill him with a pleasure which -he can only express by calling it a “joy” or a “heaven.” It “joye was to -see” Cressida and her maidens playing together; and - - So aungellyke was her native beauté - That like a thing immortal seemede she, - As doth an heavenish parfit creature. - -The peacock has angel’s feathers; a girl’s voice is heavenly to hear: - - Antigone the shene - Gan on a Trojan song to singen clear, - That it an heaven was her voice to hear. - -One could go on indefinitely multiplying quotations that testify to -Chaucer’s exquisite sensibility to sensuous beauty and his immediate, -almost exclamatory response to it. Above all, he is moved by the beauty -of “young, fresh folkes, he and she”; by the grace and swiftness of -living things, birds and animals; by flowers and placid, luminous, -park-like landscapes. - -It is interesting to note how frequently Chaucer speaks of animals. Like -many other sages, he perceives that an animal is, in a certain sense, -more human in character than a man. For an animal bears the same -relation to a man as a caricature to a portrait. In a way a caricature -is truer than a portrait. It reveals all the weaknesses and absurdities -that flesh is heir to. The portrait brings out the greatness and dignity -of the spirit that inhabits the often ridiculous flesh. It is not merely -that Chaucer has written regular fables, though the _Nun’s Priest’s -Tale_ puts him among the great fabulists of the world, and there is also -much definitely fabular matter in the _Parliament of Fowls_. No, his -references to the beasts are not confined to his animal stories alone; -they are scattered broadcast throughout his works. He relies for much of -his psychology and for much of his most vivid description on the -comparison of man, in his character and appearance (which with Chaucer -are always indissolubly blended), with the beasts. Take, for example, -that enchanting simile in which Troilus, stubbornly anti-natural in -refusing to love as the law of kind enjoins him, is compared to the -corn-fed horse, who has to be taught good behaviour and sound philosophy -under the whip: - - As proude Bayard ginneth for to skip - Out of the way, so pricketh him his corn, - Till he a lash have of the longe whip, - Then thinketh he, “Though I prance all biforn, - First in the trace, full fat and newe shorn, - Yet am I but an horse, and horses’ law - I must endure and with my feeres draw.” - -Or, again, women with too pronounced a taste for fine apparel are -likened to the cat: - - And if the cattes skin be sleek and gay, - She will not dwell in housé half a day, - But forth she will, ere any day be dawet - To show her skin and gon a caterwrawet. - -In his descriptions of the personal appearance of his characters Chaucer -makes constant use of animal characteristics. Human beings, both -beautiful and hideous, are largely described in terms of animals. It is -interesting to see how often in that exquisite description of Alisoun, -the carpenter’s wife, Chaucer produces his clearest and sharpest effects -by a reference to some beast or bird: - - Fair was this younge wife, and therewithal - As any weasel her body gent and small ... - But of her song it was as loud and yern - As is the swallow chittering on a barn. - Thereto she coulde skip and make a game - As any kid or calf following his dame. - Her mouth was sweet as bragot is or meath, - Or hoard of apples, laid in hay or heath. - Wincing she was, as is a jolly colt, - Long as a mast and upright as a bolt. - -Again and again in Chaucer’s poems do we find such similitudes, and the -result is always a picture of extraordinary precision and liveliness. -Here, for example, are a few: - - Gaylard he was as goldfinch in the shaw, - -or, - - Such glaring eyen had he as an hare; - -or, - - As piled (bald) as an ape was his skull. - -The self-indulgent friars are - - Like Jovinian, - Fat as a whale, and walken as a swan. - -The Pardoner describes his own preaching in these words: - - Then pain I me to stretche forth my neck - And east and west upon the people I beck, - As doth a dove, sitting on a barn. - -Very often, too, Chaucer derives his happiest metaphors from birds and -beasts. Of Troy in its misfortune and decline he says: Fortune - - Gan pull away the feathers bright of Troy - From day to day. - -Love-sick Troilus soliloquizes thus: - - He said: “O fool, now art thou in the snare - That whilom japedest at lovés pain, - Now art thou hent, now gnaw thin owné chain.” - -The metaphor of Troy’s bright feathers reminds me of a very beautiful -simile borrowed from the life of the plants: - - And as in winter leavés been bereft, - Each after other, till the tree be bare, - So that there nis but bark and branches left, - Lieth Troilus, bereft of each welfare, - Ybounden in the blacke bark of care. - -And this, in turn, reminds me of that couplet in which Chaucer compares -a girl to a flowering pear-tree: - - She was well more blissful on to see - Than is the newe parjonette tree. - -Chaucer is as much at home among the stars as he is among the birds and -beasts and flowers of earth. There are some literary men of to-day who -are not merely not ashamed to confess their total ignorance of all facts -of a “scientific” order, but even make a boast of it. Chaucer would have -regarded such persons with pity and contempt. His own knowledge of -astronomy was wide and exact. Those whose education has been as horribly -imperfect as my own will always find some difficulty in following him as -he moves with easy assurance through the heavens. Still, it is possible -without knowing any mathematics to appreciate Chaucer’s descriptions of -the great pageant of the sun and stars as they march in triumph from -mansion to mansion through the year. He does not always trouble to take -out his astrolabe and measure the progress of “Phebus, with his rosy -cart”; he can record the god’s movements in more general terms than may -be understood even by the literary man of nineteen hundred and -twenty-three. Here, for example, is a description of “the colde frosty -seisoun of Decembre,” in which matters celestial and earthly are mingled -to make a picture of extraordinary richness: - - Phebus wox old and hewed like latoun, - That in his hoté declinacioun - Shone as the burned gold, with streames bright; - But now in Capricorn adown he light, - Where as he shone full pale; I dare well sayn - The bitter frostes with the sleet and rain - Destroyed hath the green in every yerd. - Janus sit by the fire with double beard, - And drinketh of his bugle horn the wine; - Beforn him stont the brawn of tusked swine, - And “_noel_” cryeth every lusty man. - -In astrology he does not seem to have believed. The magnificent passage -in the _Man of Law’s Tale_, where it is said that - - In the starres, clearer than is glass, - Is written, God wot, whoso can it read, - The death of every man withouten drede, - -is balanced by the categorical statement found in the scientific and -educational treatise on the astrolabe, that judicial astrology is mere -deceit. - -His scepticism with regard to astrology is not surprising. Highly as he -prizes authority, he prefers the evidence of experience, and where that -evidence is lacking he is content to profess a quiet agnosticism. His -respect for the law of kind is accompanied by a complementary mistrust -of all that does not appear to belong to the natural order of things. -There are moments when he doubts even the fundamental beliefs of the -Church: - - A thousand sythes have I herd men telle - That there is joye in heaven and peyne in helle; - And I accorde well that it be so. - But natheless, this wot I well also - That there is none that dwelleth in this countree - That either hath in helle or heaven y-be. - -Of the fate of the spirit after death he speaks in much the same style: - - His spiryt changed was, and wente there - As I came never, I cannot tellen where; - Therefore I stint, I nam no divinistre; - Of soules fynde I not in this registre, - Ne me list not th’ opiniouns to telle - Of hem, though that they witten where they dwelle. - -He has no patience with superstitions. Belief in dreams, in auguries, -fear of the “ravenes qualm or schrychynge of thise owles” are all -unbefitting to a self-respecting man: - - To trowen on it bothe false and foul is; - Alas, alas, so noble a creature - As is a man shall dreaden such ordure! - -By an absurd pun he turns all Calchas’s magic arts of prophecy to -ridicule: - - So when this Calkas knew by calkulynge, - And eke by answer of this Apollo - That Grekes sholden such a people bringe, - Through which that Troye muste ben fordo, - He cast anon out of the town to go. - -It would not be making a fanciful comparison to say that Chaucer in many -respects resembles Anatole France. Both men possess a profound love of -this world for its own sake, coupled with a profound and gentle -scepticism about all that lies beyond this world. To both of them the -lavish beauty of Nature is a never-failing and all-sufficient source of -happiness. Neither of them are ascetics; in pain and privation they see -nothing but evil. To both of them the notion that self-denial and -self-mortification are necessarily righteous and productive of good is -wholly alien. Both of them are apostles of sweetness and light, of -humanity and reasonableness. Unbounded tolerance of human weakness and a -pity, not the less sincere for being a little ironical, characterize -them both. Deep knowledge of the evils and horrors of this -unintelligible world makes them all the more attached to its kindly -beauty. But in at least one important respect Chaucer shows himself to -be the greater, the completer spirit. He possesses, what Anatole France -does not, an imaginative as well as an intellectual comprehension of -things. Faced by the multitudinous variety of human character, Anatole -France exhibits a curious impotence of imagination. He does not -understand characters in the sense that, say, Tolstoy understands them; -he cannot, by the power of imagination, get inside them, become what he -contemplates. None of the persons of his creation are complete -characters; they cannot be looked at from every side; they are -portrayed, as it were, in the flat and not in three dimensions. But -Chaucer has the power of getting into someone else’s character. His -understanding of the men and women of whom he writes is complete; his -slightest character sketches are always solid and three-dimensional. The -Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_, in which the effects are almost -entirely produced by the description of external physical features, -furnishes us with the most obvious example of his three-dimensional -drawing. Or, again, take that description in the Merchant’s tale of old -January and his young wife May after their wedding night. It is wholly a -description of external details, yet the result is not a superficial -picture. We are given a glimpse of the characters in their entirety: - - Thus laboureth he till that the day gan dawe. - And then he taketh a sop in fine clarré, - And upright in his bed then sitteth he. - And after that he sang full loud and clear, - And kissed his wife and made wanton cheer. - He was all coltish, full of ragerye, - And full of jargon as a flecked pye. - The slacké skin about his necké shaketh, - While that he sang, so chanteth he and craketh. - But God wot what that May thought in her heart, - When she him saw up sitting in his shirt, - In his night cap and with his necké lean; - She praiseth not his playing worth a bean. - -But these are all slight sketches. For full-length portraits of -character we must turn to _Troilus and Cressida_, a work which, though -it was written before the fullest maturity of Chaucer’s powers, is in -many ways his most remarkable achievement, and one, moreover, which has -never been rivalled for beauty and insight in the whole field of English -narrative poetry. When one sees with what certainty and precision -Chaucer describes every movement of Cressida’s spirit from the first -movement she hears of Troilus’ love for her to the moment when she is -unfaithful to him, one can only wonder why the novel of character should -have been so slow to make its appearance. It was not until the -eighteenth century that narrative artists, using prose as their medium -instead of verse, began to rediscover the secrets that were familiar to -Chaucer in the fourteenth. - -_Troilus and Cressida_ was written, as we have said, before Chaucer had -learnt to make the fullest use of his powers. In colouring it is -fainter, less sharp and brilliant than the best of the _Canterbury -Tales_. The character studies are there, carefully and accurately worked -out; but we miss the bright vividness of presentation with which Chaucer -was to endow his later art. The characters are all alive and completely -seen and understood. But they move, as it were, behind a veil—the veil -of that poetic convention which had, in the earliest poems, almost -completely shrouded Chaucer’s genius, and which, as he grew up, as he -adventured and discovered, grew thinner and thinner, and finally -vanished like gauzy mist in the sunlight. When _Troilus and Cressida_ -was written the mist had not completely dissipated, and the figures of -his creation, complete in conception and execution as they are, are seen -a little dimly because of the interposed veil. - -The only moment in the poem when Chaucer’s insight seems to fail him is -at the very end; he has to account for Cressida’s unfaithfulness, and he -is at a loss to know how he shall do it. Shakespeare, when he re-handled -the theme, had no such difficulty. His version of the story, planned on -much coarser lines than Chaucer’s, leads obviously and inevitably to the -fore-ordained conclusion; his Cressida is a minx who simply lives up to -her character. What could be more simple? But to Chaucer the problem is -not so simple. His Cressida is not a minx. From the moment he first sets -eyes on her Chaucer, like his own unhappy Troilus, falls head over ears -in love. Beautiful, gentle, gay; possessing, it is true, somewhat -“tendre wittes,” but making up for her lack of skill in ratiocination by -the “sudden avysements” of intuition; vain, but not disagreeably so, of -her good looks and of her power over so great and noble a knight as -Troilus; slow to feel love, but once she has yielded, rendering back to -Troilus passion for passion; in a word, the “least mannish” of all -possible creatures—she is to Chaucer the ideal of gracious and courtly -womanhood. But, alas, the old story tells us that Cressida jilted her -Troilus for that gross prize-fighter of a man, Diomed. The woman whom -Chaucer has made his ideal proves to be no better than she should be; -there is a flaw in the crystal. Chaucer is infinitely reluctant to admit -the fact. But the old story is specific in its statement; indeed, its -whole point consists in Cressida’s infidelity. Called upon to explain -his heroine’s fall, Chaucer is completely at a loss. He makes a few -half-hearted attempts to solve the problem, and then gives it up, -falling back on authority. The old clerks say it was so, therefore it -must be so, and that’s that. The fact is that Chaucer pitched his -version of the story in a different key from that which is found in the -“olde bokes,” with the result that the note on which he is compelled by -his respect for authority to close is completely out of harmony with the -rest of the music. It is this that accounts for the chief, and indeed -the only, defect of the poem—its hurried and boggled conclusion. - -I cannot leave Cressida without some mention of the doom which was -prepared for her by one of Chaucer’s worthiest disciples, Robert -Henryson, in some ways the best of the Scottish poets of the fifteenth -and sixteenth centuries. Shocked by the fact that, in Chaucer’s poem, -Cressida receives no punishment for her infidelity, Henryson composed a -short sequel, _The Testament of Cresseid_, to show that poetic justice -was duly performed. Diomed, we are told, grew weary as soon as he had -“all his appetyte and mair, fulfillit on this fair ladie” and cast her -off, to become a common drab. - - O fair Cresseid! the flour and _A per se_ - Of Troy and Greece, how wast thow fortunait! - To change in filth all thy feminitie - And be with fleshly lust sa maculait, - And go amang the Grekis, air and late - So giglot-like. - -In her misery she curses Venus and Cupid for having caused her to love -only to lead her to this degradation: - - The seed of love was sowen in my face - And ay grew green through your supply and grace. - But now, alas! that seed with frost is slain, - And I fra lovers left, and all forlane. - -In revenge Cupid and his mother summon a council of gods and condemn the -_A per se_ of Greece and Troy to be a hideous leper. And so she goes -forth with the other lepers, armed with bowl and clapper, to beg her -bread. One day Troilus rides past the place where she is sitting by the -roadside near the gates of Troy: - - Then upon him she cast up both her een, - And with ane blenk it cam into his thocht, - That he some time before her face had seen, - But she was in such plight he knew her nocht, - Yet then her look into his mind it brocht - The sweet visage and amorous blenking - Of fair Cresseid, one sometime his own darling. - -He throws her an alms and the poor creature dies. And so the moral sense -is satisfied. There is a good deal of superfluous mythology and -unnecessary verbiage in _The Testament of Cresseid_, but the main lines -of the poem are firmly and powerfully drawn. Of all the disciples of -Chaucer, from Hoccleve and the Monk of Bury down to Mr. Masefield, -Henryson may deservedly claim to stand the highest. - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - FOOTNOTES - - -Footnote 1: - - _Collected Poems_, by Edward Thomas: with a Foreword by W. de la Mare. - Selwyn & Blount. - -Footnote 2: - - _Wordsworth: an Anthology_, edited, with a Preface, by T. J. - Cobden-Sanderson. R. Cobden-Sanderson. - -Footnote 3: - - _Ben Jonson_, by G. Gregory Smith. (English Men of Letters Series.) - Macmillan, 1919. - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - -Transcriber’s Notes - -The following minor changes have been made: - - The word “poety” was changed to “poetry” on page 42. - - A comma was added after “C” on page 63. - - Accents were added to “numérotés” on page 63 and “Où” on page 157. - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Margin, by Aldous Huxley - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE MARGIN *** - -***** This file should be named 60866-0.txt or 60866-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/6/0/8/6/60866/ - -Produced by MFR, Nigel Blower and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was -produced from images made available by the HathiTrust -Digital Library.) - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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