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Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions

by John Cowper Powys · English · Gutenberg #26933 · 330,494 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions

Author: John Cowper Powys


        
Release date: October 16, 2008 [eBook #26933]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26933

Credits: Produced by Ruth Hart


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VISIONS AND REVISIONS: A BOOK OF LITERARY DEVOTIONS ***




Produced by Ruth Hart




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


VISIONS AND REVISIONS

A BOOK OF LITERARY DEVOTIONS

BY

JOHN COWPER POWYS


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


1915
G. ARNOLD SHAW
NEW YORK



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



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


BROOKLYN EAGLE PRESS



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



CONTENTS

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



PREFACE

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

Most books of critical essays take upon themselves, in unpardonable
effrontery, to weigh and judge, from their own petty suburban
pedestal, the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! How
should Professor This, or Doctor That, whose furthest experiences of
"dangerous living" have been squalid philanderings with their
neighbours' wives, bring an Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall put
Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton and Rabelais, into appropriate
niches?

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

My own object in these sketches is not to convert the reader to
whatever "opinions" I may have formulated in the course of my
spiritual adventures; it is to divest myself of such "opinions," and in
pure, passionate humility to give myself up, absolutely and
completely, to the various visions and temperaments of these great
dead artists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The test is always that of Permanence, and of immemorial human
association. It is, at bottom, nothing but human association that
makes the great style what it is. Things that have, for centuries upon
centuries, been associated with human pleasures, human sorrows,
and the great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives, can be
expressed in this style; and only such things. The great style is a sort
of organic, self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable units
of the great human family have all put their hands. That is why so
large a portion of what is written in the great style is anonymous--like
Homer and much of the Bible and certain old ballads and songs.
It is for this reason that Walter Pater is right when he says that the
important thing in Religion is the Ceremony, the Litany, the Ritual,
the Liturgical Chants, and not the Creeds or the Commandments, or
discussion upon Creed or Commandment. Creeds change, Morality
changes, Mysticism changes, Philosophy changes--but the Word of
our God--the Word of Humanity--in gesture, in ritual, in the heart's
natural crying--abideth forever!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The grand style announces and commands. It weeps and it pleads. It
utters oracles and it wrestles with angels. It never apologizes; it
never rationalizes; and it never explains. That is why the great
ineffable passages in the supreme masters take us by the throat and
strike us dumb. Deep calls unto deep in them, and our heart listens
and is silent. To do good scientific thinking in the cause of humanity
has its well-earned reward; but the gods throw incense on a different
temper. The "fine issues" that reach them, in their remoteness and
their disdain, are the "fine issues" of an antagonist worthy of their
own swift wrath, their own swift vengeance, and their own swift
love.

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

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

Yes, it is Beauty we crave, and yet, how often, in the strain and
stress of life, it seems as though this strange impossible Presence,
rising thus, like that figure in the Picture, "beside the waters" of the
fate that carries us, were too remote, too high and translunar, to
afford us the aid we need. Heine tells us somewhere, how, driven by
the roar of street-fighting, into the calm cool galleries of the Louvre,
sick and exhausted in mind and body, he fell down at the feet of the
Goddess of Beauty there, standing, as she still stands, at the end of
that corridor of mute witnesses, and as he looked to her for help, he
knew that she could never bend down to him, or lift him up out of
his weariness, for they had broken her long ago, and _she had no
arms!_

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

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



RABELAIS

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

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

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

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

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

To read Rabelais is to gather, as if from the earth-gods, spirit to
endure anything. Naturally he uses wine, and every kind of wanton
liquor, to serve as symbols of the intoxication he would produce. For
we must be "rendered drunk" to swallow Life at this rate--to
swallow it as the gods swallow it. We must be drunk but not mad.
For in the spiritual drunkenness that Rabelais produces there is not
the remotest touch of insanity. He is the sanest of all the great
writers; perhaps the only sane one. What he has the power of
communicating to us is a renewal of that _physiological energy,_
which alone makes it possible to enjoy this monstrous world. Other
writers interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabelais takes us
by the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids us
drink and be satisfied. What else could he use, if not _wine,_ as a
symbol for such quenching of such thirst. And after wine, sex. There
is no other who treats sex as Rabelais does; who treats it so
completely as it _ought_ to be treated!

Walt Whitman is too obsessed by it; too grave over it--Rabelais
enjoys it, fools with it, plunges into it, wallows in it; and then, with
multitudinous laughter, shakes himself free, and bids it go to the
Devil!

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

The virtuous and the vicious play indeed into each others hands; and
neither of them love laughter. Sexual dalliance is either too serious a
matter to be mocked by satyr-laughter; or it is too sad and
deplorable to be laughed at at all. In a few hundred years, surely, the
human race will recognize its absolute right to make mock at the
grotesque elements in the sex comedy, and such laughter will clear
the air of much "virtue" and much "vice."

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

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

Those who suffer most from Rabelais' manner of treating sex are the
incurably vicious. The really evil libidinous people, that is to say the
spiteful, the mean, the base and inhuman, fly from his presence, and
for the obvious reason that he makes sex-pleasure so generous, so
gay, so natural, so legitimate, that their dark morbid perverted
natures can get no more joy out of it. Their lust, their lechery, is a
cold dead Saurian thing, a thing with the gravity of a slow-worm--and
when this great laughing and generous sage comes forth into
the sunshine with his noble companies of amorous and happy
people, these Shadow-lovers, these Leut-lovers, these Fleshly
Sentimentalists, writhe in shame, and seek refuge in a deeper
darkness. How strained and inhuman, too; and one might add, how
mad and irrelevant--that high, cold, disdainful translunar scorn with
which the "moral-immoralism" of Nietzsche scourges our poor flesh
and blood. One turns with relief to Zarathustra after associating with
pious people. But, after Rabelais, even that terrific psychologist
seems contorted and _thin._

For after all it is generosity that we cry out for. Courage without
generosity hugs its knees in Hell.

From the noble pleasures of meat and drink and sex, thus generously
treated; we must turn to another aspect of Rabelais' work--his
predilection for excrement. This also, though few would admit it, is
a symbolic secret. This also is a path of initiation. In this peculiarity
Rabelais is completely alone among the writers of the earth. Others
have, for various reasons, dabbled in this sort of thing--but none
have ever piled it up--manure-heap upon manure-heap, until the
animal refuse of the whole earth seems to reek to the stars! There is
not the slightest reason to regret this thing or to expurgate it.
Rabelais is not Rabelais, just as life is not life, without it.

It is indeed the way of "salvation" for certain neurotic natures. Has
that been properly understood? There are people who suffer
frightfully--and they are often rare natures, too, though they are
sometimes very vicious--from their loathing of the excremental side
of life. Swift was one of these. The "disgusting" in his writing is a
pathological form, not at all unusual, of such a loathing. But
Rabelais is no Dean Swift--nor is there the remotest resemblance
between them. Rabelais may really save us from our loathing by the
huge all-embracing friendliness of his sense of humor.

There are certain people, no doubt, who would prefer the grave
enthusiasm of Whitman in regard to this matter to the freer
Rabelaisian touch. I cannot say that my personal experience agrees
with this view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How that "style" of his, that great oceanic avalanche of learning and
piety and obscenity and gigantic merriment, smells of the honest
earth!

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

There is also--who could help observing it?--a certain large and
patriarchal homeliness--a kind of royal domesticity--about much that
he writes. Those touches, as when Gargantua, his little dog in
advance, enters the dining hall, when they are discussing Panurge's
marriage, and they all rise to do him honor; as when Gargantua bids
Pantagruel farewell and gives him a benediction so wise and tender;
remain in the mind like certain passages in the Bible. These are the
things that aesthetic fools "with varnished faces" easily overlook and
misunderstand; but good simple fellows--"honest cods" as Rabelais
would say--are struck to the heart by them. How proud the man
might be, who in the turmoil of this troublesome world and beneath
the mystery of "le grand Peut-être" could answer to the ultimate
question, "I am a Christian of the faith of Rabelais!"

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

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

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



DANTE

The history of Dante's personal and literary appeal would be an
extremely interesting one. No great writer has managed to excite
more opposite emotions.

One thing may be especially noted as significant: Women have
always been more attracted to him than men. He is in a peculiar
sense the Woman's great poet. There is a type of masculine genius
which has always opposed him. Goethe cared little for him; Voltaire
laughed at him; Nietzsche called him "an hyaena poetizing among
the tombs."

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

Now it is quite clear that this pagan attitude towards sex, this
tendency to enjoy it in its place and leave it there, is one that, more
than anything else, is irritating to women. If, as a German thinker
says, every woman is a courtezan or a mother, it is obvious that the
artists and thinkers who refuse alike the beguilements of the one and
the ironic tenderness of the other, are not people to be "loved."
Dante refuses neither; and he has, further, that peculiar mixture of
harsh strength and touching weakness, which is so especially
appealing to women. They are reluctantly overcome--not without
pleasure--by his fierce authority; and they can play the "little
mother" to his weakness. The maternal instinct is as ironical as it is
tender. It smiles at the high ideals or the eccentric child it pets, but it
would not have him different. What a woman does not like, whether
she is mother or courtezan, is that other kind of irony, the irony of
the philosopher, which undermines both her maternal feeling and
her passionate caresses.

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

How fiercely is the interest of the most virtuous aroused, when any
question of a love affair is rumored. In this sense every woman is a
born "go-between." Sex is not with them a thing apart, an exciting
volcanic thing, liable to mad outbursts, to weird perversions, but
often completely forgotten. It is never completely forgotten. It is
diffused. It is everywhere. It lurks in a thousand innocent gestures
and intimations. The savage purity of an Artemis is no real
exception. Sex is a thing too pressing to be dallied with. It is all or
nothing.

One cannot play with fire. When we make observations of this kind
we do not derogate from the charm or dignity of women. It is no
aspersion upon them. They did not ask to have it so. It is so.

Domestic life as the European nations have evolved it is a queer
compromise. Its restraints weigh heavily, in alternate discord, upon
both sexes.

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

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

It is the close psychological association between the emotion of
religion and the emotion of sex which has always made women
more religious than men.

This is perhaps only to say that women are nearer the secret of the
universe than men. It may well be so. Man's rationalizing tendency
to divorce his intelligence from his intuition--may not be the precise
key which opens those magic doors! _Sanctity_ itself--that most
exquisite flower of the art of character--is a profoundly feminine
thing. The most saintly saints, that is to say those who wear the
indescribable distinction of their Master, are always possessed of a
certain feminine quality.

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

That is why the countries where the imagination is profoundly
feminine like Russia and France have sanctity as their ideal.
Whereas England has its Puritan morality, and Germany its
scientific efficiency. These latter races ought to sit at Dante's feet, to
learn the secret of the "Beatific Vision" that is as far beyond
morality as it is outside science. There are, it is true, certain
moments when the Italian poet leads us up into the cold rarified air
of that "Intellectual Love of God" which leaves sex, as it leaves
other human feelings, infinitely behind. But this Spinozistic mood is
not the natural climate of his soul. He is always ready to revert,
always anxious to "drag Beatrice in." Wagner's "Parsifal" is perhaps
the most flagrant example of this ambiguous association between
religion and sex. The sentimental blasphemy of that feet-washing
scene is an evidence of the depths of sexual morbidity into which
this voluptuous religion of pity can lead us. O that figure in the
white nightgown, blessing his reformed harlot!

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

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

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

Our brave Oscar understood him. Some of the most exquisite
passages in "Intentions" refer to his poetry. Was the "Divine
Comedy" too clear-cut and trenchant for Walter Pater? It is strange
how Dante has been left to second-rate interpreters! His illustrators,
too! O these sentimentalists, with their Beatrices crossing the Ponte
Vecchio, and their sad youths looking on! All this is an insult--a
sacrilege--to the proudest, most aristocratic spirit who ever dwelt on
earth! Why did not Aubrey Beardsley stop that beautiful boy on the
threshold? He who was the model of his "Ave atque vale!" might
have well served for Casella, singing among the cold reeds, in the
white dawn.

For there are scenes in Dante which have the strange, remote,
perverted, _archaic_ loveliness of certain figures on the walls of
Egyptian temples or on the earliest Greek vases. Here the real artist
in him forgets God and Beatrice and the whole hierarchy of the
saints. And it is because of things of this kind that many curious
people are found to be his worshipers who will never themselves
pass forth "to re-behold the stars." They are unwise who find Dante
so bitter and theological, so Platonic and devoted, that they cannot
open his books. They little know what ambiguous planets, what dark
heathen meteors move on the fringe of his great star-lit road. His
Earthly Lady, as well as his Heavenly Lady, may have the moon
beneath her feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dante himself, dreaming over the high Virgilian Prophecy of a
World-State, under a Spiritual Caesar, yearned to restore the Pax
Romana to a chaotic world. Such a vision, such an Orbis Terrarum
at the feet of Christ, has no element in common with the material
dominance of modern commercial empires. It much more closely
resembles certain Utopias of the modern Revolutionary. In its spirit
it is not less Latin than the traditional customs of the City-States it
would include. Its real implication may be found in the assimilative
genius of the Catholic Church, consecrating but not effacing local
altars; transforming, but not destroying, local pieties. Who can deny
that this formidable vision answers the deepest need of the modern
world?

The discovery of some Planetary Synthesis within the circle of
which all the passionate race cults may flourish; growing not less
intense but more intense, under the new World-City--this is nothing
else than what the soul of the earth, "dreaming on things to come"
may actually be evolving.

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

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



SHAKESPEARE

There is something pathetic about the blind devotion of humanity to
its famous names. But how indiscriminate it is; how lacking in
discernment!

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

It is not difficult to estimate the elements which have gone to make
up this Shakespeare-God. The voices of the priests behind the Idol
are only too clearly distinguishable. We hear the academic voice, the
showman's voice, and the voice of the ethical preacher. They are all
absurd, but their different absurdities have managed to flow together
into one powerful and unified convention. Our popular orators
gesticulate and clamour; our professors "talk Greek;" our ethical
Brutuses "explain;" and the mob "throw up their sweaty night-caps;"
while our poor Caesar of Poetry sinks down out of sight, helpless
among them all.

Charles Lamb, who understood him better than anyone--and who
loved Plays--does not hesitate to accuse our Stage-Actors of being
the worst of all in their misrepresentation. He doubts whether even
Garrick understood the subtlety of the roles he played, and the few
exceptions he allows in his own age make us wonder what he would
say of ours.

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

The irony of it is that the author of Hamlet and the Tempest does not
only live in a different world from that of these motley exponents.
He lives in an antagonistic one. Shakespeare was as profoundly the
enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritan
squeamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the
profane crowd. And his melancholy scepticism, with its half-humorous
assent to the traditional pieties, is at the extremest opposite
pole from the "truths" of metaphysical reason. The Shakespeare
of the Popular Revivals is a fantastic caricature. The Shakespeare
of the College Text-Books is a lean scarecrow. But the Shakespeare
of the philosophical moralists is an Hob-goblin from whom one flees
in dismay.

Enjoying the plays themselves--the interpreters forgotten--a
normally intelligent reader cannot fail to respond to a recognisable
Personality there, a Personality with apathies and antipathies, with
prejudices and predilections. Very quickly he will discern the absurd
unreality of that monstrous Idol, that ubiquitous Hegelian God. Very
soon he will recognize that in trying to make their poet everything
they have made him nothing.

No one can read Shakespeare with direct and simple enjoyment
without discovering in his plays a quite definite and personal
attitude towards life. Shakespeare is no Absolute Divinity,
reconciling all oppositions and transcending all limitations. He is not
that "cloud-capped mountain," too lofty to be scanned, of Matthew
Arnold's Sonnet. He is a sad and passionate artist, using his bitter
experiences to intensify his insight, and playing with his humours
and his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which he
was doomed to unmask. The best way of indicating the personal
mood which emerges as his final attitude is to describe it as that of
the perfectly natural man confronting the universe. Of course, there
is no such "perfectly natural man," but he is a legitimate lay-figure,
and we all approximate to him at times. The natural man, in his
unsophisticated hours, takes the Universe at its surface value, neither
rejecting the delicate compensations, nor mitigating the cruelty of
the grotesque farce. The natural man accepts _what is given._ He
swallows the chaotic surprises, the extravagant accidents, the whole
fantastic "pell-mell." He accepts, too, the traditional pieties of his
race, their "hope against hope," their gracious ceremonial, their
consecration of birth and death. He accepts these, not because he is
confident of their "truth" but because _they are there;_ because they
have been there so long, and have interwoven themselves with the
chances and changes of the whole dramatic spectacle.

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

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

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

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

So much for Life! And when we come to Death, how true it is, as
Charles Lamb says, that none has spoken of Death like Shakespeare!
And he has spoken of it so--with such an absolute grasp of our
mortal feeling about it--because his mood in regard to it is the mood
of the natural man; of the natural man, unsophisticated by false
hopes, undated by vain assurance. His attitude towards death neither
sweetens "the unpalatable draught of mortality" nor permits us to let
go the balm of its "eternal peace." How frightful "to lie in cold
obstruction and to rot; this sensible warm motion to become a
kneaded clod!" and yet, "after life's fitful fever," how blessed to
"sleep well!"

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

The gaiety and childlike animal spirits of Shakespeare's Comedies
need not deceive us. Why should we not forget the whips and scorns
for a while, and fleet the time carelessly, "as they did in the golden
age?" Such simple fooling goes better with the irresponsibility of
our fate than the more pungent wit of the moral comedians. The
tragic laughter which the confused issues of life excite in subtler
souls is not lacking, but the sweet obliquities of honest clowns carry
us just as far. Shakespeare loves fools as few have loved them, and it
is often his humour to put into their mouth the ultimate wisdom.

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

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

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

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

The noble spirit is not the spirit that condescends to pamper in itself
those inflated moods of false optimistic hope, which, springing from
mere physiological well-being, send us leaping and bounding, with
such boisterous assurance, along the sunny road. Such pragmatic
self-deception is an impertinence in the presence of a world like this.

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

To be "cheerful" about the Universe in the manner of these people is
to insult the Christ who died. It is to outrage the "little ones" over
whose bodies the Wheel has passed. When Nietzsche, the martyr of
his own murdered pity, calls upon us to "love Fate," he does not
shout so lustily. His laughter is the laughter of one watching his
darling stripped for the rods. He who would be "in harmony with
Nature." with those "murderous ministers" who, in their blind abyss,
throw dice with Chance, must be in harmony with the giants of
Jotunheim, as well as with the lords of Valhalla. He must be able to
look on grimly while Asgard totters; he must welcome "the Twilight
of the Gods." To have a mind inured to such conceptions, a mind
capable of remaining on such a verge, is, alone, to be, intellectually
speaking, what we call "aristocratic." When, even with eyes like
poor Gloucester's in the play, we can see "how this world wags," it
is slavish and "plebeian" to swear that it all "means intensely, and
means well." It is also to lie in one's throat!

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

Has it been realized how curiously the interpreters of Shakespeare
omit the principal thing? They revel in his Grammar, his History, his
Biology, his Botany, his Geography, his Psychology and his Ethics.
They never speak of his Poetry. Now Shakespeare is, above
everything, a poet. To poetry, over and over again, as our Puritans
know well, he sacrifices Truth, Morality, Probability, nay! the very
principles of Art itself.

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

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

And this pulse of personal passion is always expressing itself in
Poetry. He will let the probabilities of a character vanish into air, or
dwindle into a wistful note of attenuated convention, when once
such a one has served his purpose as a reed to pipe his strange tunes
through. He will whistle the most important personage down the
wind, lost to interest and identity, when once he has put into his
mouth his own melancholy brooding upon life--his own imaginative
reaction.

And so it happens that, in spite of all academic opinion, those who
understand Shakespeare best tease themselves least over his
dramatic lapses. For let it be whispered at once, without further
scruple. As far as _the art of the drama_ is concerned, Shakespeare
is _shameless._ The poetic instinct--one might call it "epical" or
"lyrical," for it is both these--is far more dominant in our "greatest
dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why
those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially
"drama since Ibsen," intolerably tiresome, revert again and again to
Shakespeare. Only absurd groups of Culture-Philistines can read
these "powerful modern productions" more than once! One knows
not whether their impertinent preaching, or their exasperating
technical cleverness is the more annoying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



EL GRECO

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

Barres--Frenchman of Frenchmen--sets off, with captivating and
plausible logic, to generalize into reasonable harmlessness this
formidable madman. He interprets Toledo, appreciates Spain, and
patronizes Domenico Theotocopoulos.

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

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

He makes of him an excuse for disparaging Velasquez, and launches
into a discourse upon the Higher Reality and the Inner Truth which
leaves one with a very dreary feeling, and, by some ponderous
application of spiritual ropes and pulleys, seems to jerk into empty
space all that is most personal and arresting in the artist.

If it is insulting to the ghostly Toledoan to smooth him out into
picturesque harmony with Castillian dances, Gothic cloisters and
Moorish songs, it is still worse to transform him into a rampant
Idealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to the
Aesthetics nor to the Idealists. He belongs to every individual soul
whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and
sufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle of his tyrannical
spell.

When, in that dark Toledo Church, one presses one's face against the
iron bars that separate one from the Burial of Count Orguz, it is
neither as a Dilettante nor an Idealist that one holds one's breath.
Those youthful pontifical saints, so richly arrayed, offering with
slender royal hands that beautiful body to the dust--is their
mysterious gesture only the rhythm of the secret of Death?

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

At what figured symbol points that epicene child?

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

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

How irrelevant seem Monsieur Barres' water-colour sketches of
prancing Moors and learned Jews and picturesque Visi-Goths, as
soon as one gets a direct glimpse into these unique perversions! And
why cannot one go a step with this dreamer of dreams without
dragging in the Higher Reality? To regard work as mad and
beautiful as this as anything but individual Imagination, is to insult
the mystery of personality.

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

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

Every artist mesmerizes us into his personal vision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As you enter the Museum and pass those magnificent Titians
crowded so close together--large and mellow spaces, from a more
opulent world than ours; greener branches, bluer skies and a more
luminous air; a world through which, naturally and at ease, the
divine Christ may move, grand, majestic, health-giving, a veritable
god; a world from whose grapes the blood of satyrs may be
quickened, from whose corn the hearts of heroes may be made
strong--and come bolt upon El Greco's glacial northern lights, you
feel that no fixed objective Truth and no traditional Ideal has a right
to put boundaries to the imagination of man.

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

The artist has painted the king as one grown weary of his difference
from other men. His moon-white armour and silvery crown show
like the ornaments of the dead. Misty and wavering, the long
shadows upon the high, strange brow seem thrown there by the
passing of all mortal Illusions.

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

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

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

The disenchanted irony upon the face of this figure; that look as of
one who--as Plato would have us do with kings--has been dragged
back from Contemplation to the vulgarity of ruling men; has been
deliberately blent by a most delicate art with a queer sort of fantastic
whimsicality.

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

Something about him, one fancies, would make an English child
think of the "White Knight" in _Alice Through the Looking Glass,_
so helpless and simple he looks, this poor "Revenant," propped up
by Youthful Imagination, and with the dews of night upon his
armour.

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

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

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

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

The suggestive power of genius plays us, indeed, strange tricks. I
have sometimes fancied that the famished craving in the eyes and
nostrils of El Greco's saints was a queer survival of that tragic look
which that earlier Greek, Scopas the Sculptor, took such pains to
throw upon the eyelids of his half-human amphibiums.

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

The moon--one must admit that, at least--rather than the sun, was
ever the mistress of El Greco's genius. He will come more and more
to represent for us those vague uneasy feelings that certain
inanimate and elemental objects have the power of rousing. It is of
him that one must think, when this or that rock-chasm cries aloud
for its Demon, or this or that deserted roadway mutters of its
unreturning dead.

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

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

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

One may walk the streets of Toledo to seek the impress of El
Greco's going and coming; but the soul of Domenico Theotocopoulos
is not there.

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



MILTON

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

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

Milton is a man's poet. It would be a strange thing if women loved
him. Modern criticism is a half-tipsy Hermaphrodite, in love only
with what is on the point of turning into something else. Milton is
always himself. His works of art are always themselves. He and they
are made of the same marble, of the same metal. They are never
likely to change into anything else! Milton is, like all the greatest
artists, a man of action. He, so learned in words, in their history, in
their weight, in their origin, in their evocations; he, the scholar of
scholars, is a man, not of words, but of deeds. That is why the style
of Milton is a thing that you can touch with your outstretched
fingers. It has been hammered into shape by a hand that could grasp
a sword; it has been moulded into form by a brain that could
dominate a council-chamber. No wonder we word-maniacs fear to
approach him. He repels us; he holds us back; he hides his
work-shop from us; and his art smites us into silent hatred.

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

Milton was more interested in the struggle of ideas, in the struggle
of races, in the struggle of immortal principles, in the struggle of
gods, in the great creative struggle of life and death, than he was
interested in the exquisite cadences of words or their laborious
arrangement. A modern artist's heart's desire is to escape from the
world to some "happy valley" and there, sitting cross-legged, like a
Chinese Idol, between the myrtle-bushes and the Lotus, to make
beautiful things in detachment forever, one by one, with no pause or
pain. Milton's desire was to take the whole round world between his
hands, with all the races and nations who dwell upon it, and mould
_that,_ and nothing less, into the likeness of what he believed. And
in what did he believe, this Lord of Time and Space, this accomplice
of Jehovah? He believed in Himself. He had the unquestioning,
unphilosophical belief in himself which great men of action have;
which the Caesars, Alexanders and Napoleons have, and which
Shakespeare seems to have lacked.

Milton, though people have been misled into thinking of him as very
different from that, was, in reality, the incarnation of the
Nietzschean ideal. He was hard, he was cold, he was contemptuous,
he was "magnanimous," he "remembered his whip" when he went
with women, he loved war for its own sake, and he dwelt alone on
the top of the mountains. To Milton the world presented itself as a
place where the dominant power, and the dominant interest, was the
wrestling of will with will. Why need we always fuss ourselves
about logical _names_? Milton, in reality--in his temperament and
his mood--was just as convinced of _Will_ being the ultimate secret
as Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Bergson or the modern Pragmatist.
Nothing seemed to him noble, or dramatic, or "true," that did not
imply the struggle to the death of opposing _wills_.

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

Milton's feeling for the more personal, more concrete aspects of
"God" goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. At heart he
was a savage Dualist, who lapsed occasionally into Pluralism. He
was, above all, an Individualist of the most extreme kind--an
Individualist so hard, so positive, so inflexible, that for him nothing
in the world really mattered except the clash of definite, clear-cut
Wills, contending against one another.

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

One feels, as one reads Milton, that his ultimate view of the universe
is a great chaotic battlefield, amid the confused elements of which
rise up the portentous figures of "Thrones, Dominations,
Principalities, and Powers," and in the struggle between these, the
most arbitrary, the most tyrannical, the most despotic, conquers the
rest, and, planting his creative Gonfalon further in the Abyss than
any, becomes "God"; the God whose personal and unrestrained
Caprice creates the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, out of Chaos; and
Man out of the dust of the Earth. Thus it is brought about that what
this God _wills_ is "Good," and what his strongest and most
formidable antagonist wills is "Evil." Between Good and Evil there
is no eternal difference, except in the eternal difference between the
conquering Personality of Jehovah and the conquered Personality of
Lucifer. So, far from it being true that Milton is the dull transcriber
of mere traditional Protestantism, a very little investigation reveals
the astounding fact that the current popular Evangelical view of the
origin of things and the drama of things is based, not upon the Bible
at all, but upon Milton's poem. In this respect he is a true Classic
Poet--a Maker of Mythology--a Delphic Demiurge.

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

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

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

The absence of vulgar sentiment, the classic reserve, the gentle
melancholy, the delicate gaiety, the subtle interweaving of divine,
rhythmic cadences, the ineffable lightness of touch, as of cunning
fingers upon reluctant clay; is there anything in poetry to equal these
things? One does not even regret the sudden devastating apparition
of that "two-handed engine at the door." For one remembers how
wickedly, how mercilessly, the beauty of life is even now being
spoiled by these accursed "hirelings"--and now, as then, "nothing
said."

The Nativity Hymn owes half the charm of its easy, natural grace to
the fact that the victory of Mary's infant son over the rest is treated
as if it were the victory of one pagan god over another--the final
triumph being to him who is the most "gentle" and "beautiful" of all
the gods. In the famous argument between the Lady and her
Tempter, in Comus, we have an exquisite example of the sweet,
grave refinement of virginal taste which shuns grossness as "a false
note." The doctrine of Comus--if so airy a thing can be supposed to
have a doctrine--is not very different from the doctrine of Marius the
Epicurean. One were foolish to follow the bestial enchanter; not so
much because it is "wrong" to do so, as because, then, one would
lose the finer edge of that heavenly music which turns the outward
shape "to the soul's essence."

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

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

What a retort was "Paradise Lost" to the lewd revellers who would
have profaned his aristocratic isolation with howlings and brutalities
and philistine uproar! Milton despised "priests and kings" from the
heights of a pride loftier than their own--and he did not love the
vulgar mob much better. In Paradise Lost he can "feel himself" into
the sublime tyranny of God, as well as into the sublime revolt of
Lucifer. Neither the one or other stoops to solicit "popular voices."
The thing to avoid, as one reads this great poem, are the paraphrases
from the book of Genesis. Here some odd scrupulousness of
scholarly conscience seems to prevent him launching out into his
native originality. But, putting this aside, what majestic
Pandemoniums of terrific Imagination he has the power to call up!
The opening Books are as sublime as the book of Job, and more
arresting than Aeschylus. The basic secrets of his blank verse can
never be revealed, but one is struck dumb with wonder in the
presence of this Eagle of Poetry as we attempt to follow him, flight
beyond flight, hovering beyond hovering, as he gets nearer and
nearer to the Sun.

It is by single paragraphs, all the same, and by single lines, that I
would myself prefer to see him judged. Long poems have been
written before and will be written again, but no one will ever
write--no one but Dante has ever written--such single lines as one reads
in Milton. Curiously enough, some of the most staggering of these
superb passages are interludes and allusions, rather than integral
episodes in the story, and not only interludes, but interludes in the
"pagan manner." Second only to those Luciferan defiances, which
seem able to inspire even us poor worms with the right attitude
towards Fate, I am tempted to place certain references to Astarte,
Ashtoreth and Adonis.

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

Or of Adonis:

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

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

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

It is only, however, when one comes to Samson Agonistes that the
full power of Milton's genius is felt. Written in a style which the
devotees of "free verse" in our time would do well to analyse, it is
the most complete expression of his own individual character that he
ever attained. Here the Captain of Jehovah, here the champion of
Light against Darkness, of Pride against Humility, of Man against
Woman, finds his opportunity and his hour. Out of his blindness, out
of his loneliness, out of the welter of hedonists and amorists and
feminists and fantasists who crowded upon him, the great, terrible
egoist strikes his last blow! No one can read Samson Agonistes
without being moved, and those who look deepest into our present
age may well be moved the most! One almost feels as if some great
overpowering tide of all the brutalities and crudities and false
sentiments and cunning hypocrisies, and evil voluptuousness, of all
the Philistias that have ever been, is actually rushing to overwhelm
us! Gath and Askalon in gross triumph--must this thing be? Will the
Lord of Hosts lift no finger to help his own? And then the end
comes; and the Euripidean "messenger" brings the great news! He is
dead, our Champion; but in his death he slew more than in his life.
"Nothing is here" for unworthy sorrow; "nothing" that need make us
"knock the breast;"--"No weakness, no contempt, dispraise or
blame--nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us in a death
so noble."

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



CHARLES LAMB

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

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

But the immense humour of the situation does not stop here. Not
only has this evasive City Clerk succeeded in fooling the "good
people;" he has fooled the "wicked ones." I have myself in the circle
of my acquaintance more than half a dozen charming people, of the
type who enjoy Aubrey Beardsley, and have a mania for Oscar
Wilde, and sometimes dip into Remy de Gourmont, and not one of
them "can read" Charles Lamb. He has succeeded in fooling them;
in making them suppose he is something quite different from what
he is. He used to tell his friends that every day he felt himself
growing more "official" and "moral." He even swore he had been
taken for a Verger or a Church warden. Well, our friends of the
"enclosed gardens" still take him for a Verger. But he is a more
remarkable Verger than they dream. As a matter of fact, there were
some extremely daring and modern spirits in Elia's "entourage,"
spirits who went further in an antinomian direction than--I devoutly
pray--my friends are ever likely to go, and these scandalous ones
adored him. And for his part, he seems to have liked them--more
than he ought.

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

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

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

So here we have the old sly Elia, fooling people now as he fooled
them in his lifetime, and a riddle both to the godly and the ungodly.
The great Goethe, whose Walpurgis Night "He-Apes" made Elia put
out his tongue, read, we learn, with no little pleasure some fantastic
skit of this incorrigible one. Did he discern--the sublime Olympian--what
a cunning flute player lurked under the queer mask? "Something
between a Jew, a Gentleman and an Angel" he liked to fancy
he looked; and one must confess that in the subtlest of all
senses of that word, a gentleman he was.

Lamb's "essays" were written at off hours, when he could escape
from his office. Once completely freed from the necessity of office
work, his writing lost its magic. His genius was of that peculiarly
delicate texture which requires the stimulus of reaction. One cannot
be too grateful that the incomparable Pater, after Lamb himself,
perhaps, the greatest master of English prose, found it necessary to
utter his appreciation. Pater, as usual, hits the mark with an infallible
hand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy which
darkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him.

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

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

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

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

And what is this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribable
blending of Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle's
"blackguards," achieves the same synthesis. It is this spiritual
achievement--at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph--that
makes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really great man.
The Wordsworths and Coleridges who patronized him were too
self-opiniated and individualistic to be able to enter into either
tradition.

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

How difficult, whether as a thinker or a man, is it to be natural in
one's loves and hates! How many quite authoritative Philistines
never really let the world know how Bohemian at heart they are!
And how much of our modern "artistic feeling" is a pure affectation!
Now, whatever Elia was not, he was wantonly, wickedly, whimsically
natural.

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

He accepted life's little pleasures as they appeared, and did not
hesitate to make "cults" of the ones that appeared most appealing. If
he had Philistine feelings, he indulged them without shame. If he
had recondite and "artistic" feelings, he indulged them also without
shame. He is one of the few great men not afraid to be un-original,
and hence he is the most original of all. "I cannot," says he, "sit and
think. Books think for me." Well, books did "think for him," for he
managed to press the books of the great poets into his service, as no
mortal writer has ever dared to do before. And he could do it
without impairing his originality, because he was as original as the
great poets he used. We say deliberately "poets," for, as Pater points
out, to find Lamb's rivals in sheer imaginative genius, we have to
leave the company of those who write prose.

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

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

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

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

Every single one of the "essays" and most of the "letters" can be
read over and over again, and their cadences caressed as if they were
living people's features. And they are living. They are as living as
those Japanese Prints so maddening to some among us, or as the
drawings of Lionardo. They also--in their place--are "pure line" to
use the ardent modern slang, and unpolluted "imaginative
suggestion."

The mistake our "aesthetes" made, these lovers of Egyptian dancers
and Babylonian masks, is that they suppose the simplicity of Lamb's
subjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He
can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead
Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and the
shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking
evasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things he
can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a
curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish
art-neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in Elia.
One wonders if they have ever felt the remote translunar beauty that
common faces and old, dim, pitiful things can wear sometimes. It
would seem not. Like Herod the Tetrarch, they must have "Peacocks
whose crying calls the rain, and the spreading of their tails brings
down the Moon;" they must have "opals that burn with flame as cold
as ice" and onyxes and amber and the tapestries of Tyre, The pansies
that "are for thoughts" touch them not and the voices of the
street-singers leave them cold.

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

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

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



DICKENS

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

Dickens is one of the great artists of the world, and he is so, in spite
of the fact that in certain spheres, in the sphere of Sex, for instance,
or the sphere of Philosophy, he is such a hopeless conventionalist. It
is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desire
to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a
great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a
mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst
foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal is seriously
handicapped.

Yet, given this "lacuna," this amazing "gap" in his work, a
deprivation much more serious than his want of "philosophy,"
Dickens is a writer of colossal genius, whose originality and vision
puts all our modern "literateurs" to shame. One feels this directly
one opens any volume of his. Only a great creative genius could so
dominate, for instance, his mere "illustrators," as to mesmerize them
completely into his manner. And certainly his illustrators are
_drugged_ with the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely
persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to
suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer
and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style of their
author?

Remembering my "brief" and the sort of jury, among my friends, I
have to persuade, I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out into
panegyrics upon Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff
and Betsy Trotwood and Bill Sikes and Dick Swiveller and Bob
Sawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge. The
mere mention of these names, which, to some, would suggest the
music of the spheres, to others would suggest forced merriment,
horrible Early Victorian sentiment, and that sort of hackneyed
"unction" of sly moral elders, which is youth's especial Hell. Much
wiser were it, as it seems to me, to indicate what in Dickens--in his
style, his method, his vision, his art--actually appeals to one
particular mind. I think it is to be found in his childlike Imagination.
Now, the modern cult for children has reached such fantastic limits
that one has to be very careful when one uses that word. But
Dickens is childlike, not as Oscar Wilde--that Uranian Baby--or as
Paul Verlaine--that little "pet lamb" of God--felt themselves to be
childlike, or as the artificial-minded Robert Louis Stevenson fooled
his followers into thinking him. He is really and truly childlike. His
imagination and vision are literally the imagination and vision of
children. We have not all played at Pirates and Buccaneers. We have
not all dreamed of Treasure-Islands and Marooned sailors. We have
not all "believed in Fairies." These rather tiresome and over-rung-upon
aspects of children's fancies are, after all, very often nothing
more than middle-aged people's damned affectations. The children's
cult at the present day plays strange tricks.

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

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

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

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

How hard a thing is it, to put into words the strange attraction and
the strange terror which the dwellings of mortal men have the power
of exciting! To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wander
through its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, empty
churches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by its
Prison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in some
tall house--the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer--surely
there is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the things
one sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors and
shutter-chinks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of men
upon earth are past finding out, and their madness beyond
interpretation!

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

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

Dickens' world is a world of gnomes and hob-goblins, of ghouls and
of laughing angels. The realist of the Thackeray School finds
nothing but monstrous exaggeration here--and fantastic mummery.
If he were right, par-dieu! If his sleek "reality" were all that there
was--"alarum!" We were indeed "betrayed"! But no; the children are
right. Dickens is right. Neither "realist" or "psychologist" hits the
mark, when it comes to the true diablerie of living people. There is
something more whimsical, more capricious, more _unreal,_ than
philosophers suppose about this human pantomime. People are
actually--as every child knows--much worse and much better than
they "ought" to be. And, as every child knows, too, they tune their
souls up to the pitch of their "masks." The surface of things is the
heart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head,
the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of the
mad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. People _think_ with their
bodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments are
words, tones, whispers, in their general Confession.

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

Think of the vast, queer, dim-lighted world wherein live and move
all those funny, dusty, attenuated, heart-breaking figures, of such as
wear the form of women--and yet may never know "love"! It is
wonderful--when you think of it--how much of absorbing interest is
left in life, when you have eliminated "sex," suppressed
"psychology," and left philosophy out! Then appear all those queer
attractions and repulsions which are purely superficial, and even
material, and yet which are so dominant. Mother of God! How
unnecessary to bring in Fairies and Blue Birds, when the solemnity
of some little seamstress and her sorceress hands, and the quaint
knotting of her poor wisp of hair, would be enough to keep a child
staring and dreaming for hours upon hours!

Life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest. One never
knows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hamadryad one may
encounter. And the little ways of all one's scrabbling and burrowing
and chuckling and nodding and winking house-mates! To go
through the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner or
later. But one need only cross one's threshold to find one adventure--the
adventure of a new, unknown fellow-creature, full of suspicion,
full of cloudy malice, full of secretive dreams, and yet ready to
respond--poor devil--to a certain kind of signal!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



GOETHE

As the enigmatic wisdom of Goethe been exhausted--after these
years--and after the sudden transits across our sky of more flashing
meteors? Ah! I deem not yet. Still he holds the entrance to the
mysterious Gate, over the portals of which is written, not "Lasciate
ogni speranza!" but "Think of Living!" A thunder-rifted heart he
bears, but victory, not defeat, looks forth from his wide, outward-gazing
eyes! One hand holds the skull, engraved with all the secret
symbols of man's ascent out of the bosom of Nature; engraved,
yes!--by all the cunningest tools of Science and her unwearied research;
but the other, raised aloft, noble and welcoming, carries the laurel
crown of the triumph of Imagination!

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

Exhausted, the wisdom of Goethe? Ah, no!--hardly fathomed yet, in
its uppermost levels! If it were really possible to put into words the
whole complex world of impressions and visions, of secrets and
methods, which that name suggests, one would be a wiser disciple
than Eckermann. Fragment by fragment, morsel by morsel, the great
Figure limns itself against the shadow of the years.

Is it too presumptuous a task to seek to evoke--taking first one
impression of him and then another, first one reaction and then
another--what this mysterious Name has come to mean for us? One
hears the word "cosmic" whispered. It is whispered too often in
these days. But "cosmic," with its Whitmanesque, modern
connotation, does not exactly fit Goethe. Goethe did not often
abandon himself in Dionysian fury to the ultimate Elements. When
he did--in his earlier youth--before the hardening process of his
Italian Journey had sealed his protection from such romantic lapses--it
was not quite in the strained, desperate, modern manner. One feels
certain, thinking of what he was, at Frankfurt, at Leipsig, at
Strassburg, at Weimar, that he always kept a clear, cool, Apollonian
head, mad and amorous though his escapades may seem!

I do not fancy that ever once did Goethe really "give himself away,"
or lose the foursquare solidity of his balance in any wild staggering
to left or right. No; the Goethean temper, the Goethean attitude,
cannot be described as "cosmic," while that word implies a certain
complete yielding to a vague earth-worship. There was nothing
vague about Goethe's _intimacy,_ if I may put it so, with the Earth.
He and It seemed destined to understand one another most
_serenely,_ in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy!

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

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

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

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

Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock-strata;
Goethe visiting Botanical Gardens and pondering on the Metamorphosis
of Plants; Goethe climbing Strassburg Cathedral-Spire; Goethe
meeting the Phantom of Himself as he returned from the arms
of Frederika; Goethe "experiencing the sensation" of crossing
the "Firing-Line"; Goethe "announcing" to Eckermann that
that worthy man had better avoid undertaking any "great" literary
work; Goethe sending Frau von Stein sausages from his breakfast-table;
Goethe consoling himself in the Storm by observing his birth-star
Lucifer, and thinking of the Lake of Galilee, are pictures of
noble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the Comedy of
Living!

How vividly returns to me--your pardon, reader!--the first time I
read "The Sorrows of Werter" in that little "Three-penny" edition
published by Messrs. Cassell! It was in a Barge, towed by three
Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the
County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a
set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a
ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them--this is twenty-five
years ago, reader!--a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand--and
teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered--as the
friendly mists rose--under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern.
Where is that girl now, I wonder? Is she alive? Will she ever blush
with anger at being thus gently lifted up, from beneath the kind
Somersetshire mists, into an hour's publicity? Who can tell? We are
all passing one another, in mist-darkened barges, swift or slow. She
is a wraith, a shadow, a receding phantom; but I wave my hand to
her over the years! I shall always associate her with Lotte; and I
never smell the peculiar smell of Tarpaulin without thinking of "the
Sorrows of Werter."

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

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

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

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

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

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

How wisely Goethe deals in Faust with the problem--if it be a
problem--of Evil! His suggestion seems to be that the spirit of Evil
in the world--"part of that Nothing out of which came the All"--plays
an absolutely essential role. "By means of it God fulfils his
most cherished purposes." Had Faust not seduced poor little
Gretchen, he would never have passed as far as he did along the
road of Initiation, and the spirit of his Victim--in her translunar
Apotheosis--would not have been _there_ to lift him Heavenwards
at the last. And yet no one could say that Goethe disparages the
enormity of Faust's crime. That ineffable retort of Mephistopheles,
when, on those "black horses," they are whirled through the night to
her dungeon, "She is not the first," has the essence of all pity and
wrath in its cruel sting. Mephistopheles himself is the most
interesting of all Devils. And he is so because, although he knows
perfectly well--queer Son of Chaos as he is--that he is bound to be
defeated, he yet goes on upon his evil way, and continues to resist
the great stream of Life which, according to his view, had better
never have broken loose from primeval Nothingness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Faust, both portions of it, dear reader, and see if you do not
feel, with me, that, in the last resort, one leaves this rich, strange
poem with a nobler courage to endure life, and a larger view of its
amazing possibilities!

I wonder if that curious novel of Goethe's called the "Elective
Affinities" is perused as widely as it deserves? That extraordinary
company of people! And the patient, portentious interest Goethe
compels us to take in the laying out of gardens and the beautifying
of church-yards! "The Captain," "the Architect"--not to speak of the
two bewildering women--do they not suggest fantastic figures out of
one's memories of remotest childhood? I suppose to a world-child
like Goethe, watching, with grave super-human interest, all our little
pre-occupations, we have all of us something of the sweet pedantry
of these people--we are all of us "Captains" and "Architects" with
some odd twist in our quiet heads.

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

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

One must remember his noble saying, "Earnestness alone makes life
Eternity" and that other "saying" about Art having, as its main
purpose, the turning of the "Transitory" into the "Permanent"! If the
Transitory is really to be turned into the Permanent, we must take
ourselves and our work very seriously indeed!

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

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



MATTHEW ARNOLD

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

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

As a critic, too, though illuminating and reassuring, he is far from
clairvoyant. A quaint vein of pure, good-tempered, ethical
_Philistinism_ prevents his really entering the evasive souls of
Shelley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he is
more at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in their
simple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of critical
metempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, who
loves his friend." In fact, when one compares him, as a sheer
illuminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizes
at once how easily a quite great man may "render himself stupid" by
sprinkling himself with the holy water of Fixed Principles!

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

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

You ask me what the Philosophy of Matthew Arnold was? It is easy
to answer that. It was the philosophy of all the very greatest among
mortal men! In his poetry he passes completely out of the region of
Theological argument, and his attitude to life is the attitude
of Sophocles and Virgil and Montaigne and Cervantes and
Shakespeare and Goethe. Those who read Matthew Arnold, and love
him, know that his intellectual tone is the tone of those great
classical writers, and his conclusions their conclusions.

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

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

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

Men and women still love and hate; still "enjoy the sun" and "live
light in the Spring"; still "advance true friends and beat back
dangerous foes"--and upon them the same Constellations look down;
and upon them the same winds blow; and upon them the same
Sphinx glides through the obscurity, with the same insoluble
Question.

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

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

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

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

In "The Forsaken Merman" for instance, there are many stanzas that
make you smell the salt-foam and imagine all that lies, hidden and
strange, down there upon the glittering sand. That line,

     "Where great whales go sailing by
     Round the world for ever and aye,"

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

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

It is all of a piece with the "resignation" of a philosophy which does
not expect that this or that change of dwelling will ease our pain; of
a philosophy that naturally loves to linger over familiar well-sides
and roadways and meadow-paths and hillsides, over the places
where we went together, when we "still had Thyrsis."

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

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

Or that description of the later season:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But even if it be--if the whole confluent ocean of its experiences
be--unintelligible and without meaning; it remains that mortal men
must endure it, and comfort themselves with their "little pleasures."
The immoral cruelty of Fate has been well expressed by Matthew
Arnold in that poem called "Mycerinus," where the virtuous king
_does not_ receive his reward. He, for his part will revel and care
not. There may be nobler, there may be happier, ways of awaiting
the end--but whether "revelling" or "refraining," we are all waiting
the end. Waiting and listening, half-bitterly, half-eagerly, seems the
lot of man upon earth! And meanwhile that

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Arnold is one of the poets who have what might be called
"the power of Liberation." He liberates us from the hot fevers of our
lusts. He liberates us from our worldliness, our perversions, our mad
preoccupations. He reduces things to their simple elements and
gives us back air and water and land and sea. And he does this
without demanding from us any unusual strain. We have no need to
plunge into Dionysian ecstacies, or cry aloud after "cosmic
emotion."

We have no need to relinquish our common sense; or to dress or eat
or talk or dream, in any strange manner. It is enough if we remember
the fields where we were born. It is enough if we do not altogether
forget out of what quarter of the sky Orion rises; and where the
lord-star Jupiter has his place. It is enough if we are not quite
oblivious of the return of the Spring and the sprouting of the
first leaves.

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

For it is the nature of poetry to heighten and to throw into relief
those eternal things in our common destiny which too soon get
overlaid--And some things only poetry can reach--Religion may
have small comfort for us when in the secret depths of our hearts we
endure a craving of which we may not speak, a sickening aching
longing for "the lips so sweetly forsworn." But poetry is waiting for
us, there also, with her Rosemary and her Rue. Not one human heart
but has its hidden shrine before which the professional ministrants
are fain to hold their peace. But even there, under the veiled Figure
itself, some poor poetic "Jongleur de Notre Dame" is permitted to
drop his monk's robe, and dance the dance that makes time and
space nothing!



SHELLEY

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

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

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

It troubles our peace. It passes over the sterility of our poor comfort
like a lost child's cry. It beats upon the door. It rattles the shut
casement. It sobs with the rain upon the roof. This is partly because
Shelley, more than any poet, has entered into the loneliness of the
elements, and given up his heart to the wind, and his soul to the
outer darkness. The other poets can _describe_ these things, but he
_becomes_ what they are. Listening to him, we listen to them. And
who can bear to listen to them? Who, in cold blood, can receive the
sorrows of the "many waters"? Who can endure while the heavens,
that are "themselves so old," bend down with the burden of their
secret?

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

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

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

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

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

Shelley is, indeed, a most rare and invaluable thinker, as well as a
most exquisite poet. His thought and his poetry can no more be
separated than could the thought and poetry of the Book of Job. His
poetry is the embodiment of his thought, its swift and splendid
incarnation.

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

It is tragic to think how little the world has changed since Shelley's
time, and how horribly relevant to the present hour are his outcries
against militarism, capitalism and privilege. If evidence were
wanted of the profound moral value of Shelley's revolutionary
thought, one has only to read the proclamations of any international
school of socialistic propaganda, and find how they are fighting now
what he fought then. His ideas have never been more necessary than
they are today. Tolstoi has preached some of them, Bernard Shaw
others, and Mr. Wells yet others. But none of our modern rebels
have managed to give to their new thought quite the comprehensiveness
and daring which we find in him.

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

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

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

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

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

To return to his poetry, as poetry. The remarkable thing about
Shelley's verse is the manner in which his whole physical and
psychic temperament has passed into it. This is so in a measure with
all poets, but it is so especially with him. His beautiful epicene face,
his boyish figure, his unearthly sensitiveness, haunt us as we read
his lines. They allure and baffle us, as the smile on the lips of the
Mona Lisa. One has the impression of listening to a being who has
really traversed the ways of the sea and returned with its secret. How
else could those indescribable pearly shimmerings, those opal tints
and rosy shadows, be communicated to our poor language? The very
purity of his nature, that ethereal quality in it that strikes a chill into
the heart of "normal humanity," lends a magic, like the reflection of
moonlight upon ice, to these inter-lunar melodies. The same ethereal
transparency of passion which excites, by reason of its sublime
"immorality," the gross fury of the cynical and the base, gives an
immortal beauty, cold and distant and beyond "the shadow of our
night," to his planetary melodies. It is, indeed, the old Pythagorean
"music of the spheres" audible at last again. Such sounds has the
_silence_ that descends upon us when we look up, above the roofs
of the city, at Arcturus or Aldebaran! To return to Shelley from the
turmoil of our gross excitements and cramped domesticities is to
bathe our foreheads in the "dew of the morning" and cool our hands
in the ultimate Sea. Whatever in us transcends the vicious circle of
personal desire; whatever in us belongs to that Life which lasts
while we and our individual cravings perish; whatever in us
underlies and overlooks this mad procession of "births and
forgettings;" whatever in us "beacons from the abode where the
Eternal are" rises to meet this celestial harmony, and sloughs off the
"muddy vesture" that would "grossly close it in." What separates
Shelley from all other poets is that with them "art" is the paramount
concern, and, after "art," morality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



KEATS

It is well that there should be at least one poet of Beauty--of Beauty
alone--of Beauty and naught else. It is well that one should dare to
follow that terrible goddess even to the bitter end. That pitiless
marble altar has its victims, as the other Altars. The "white
implacable Aphrodite" cries aloud for blood--for the blood of our
dearest affections; for the blood of our most cherished hopes; for the
blood of our integrity and faith; for the blood of our reason. She
drugs us, blinds us, tortures us, maddens us, and slays us--yet we
follow her--to the bitter end!

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

His way of approaching Nature, his way of approaching every event
in life, was "pluralistic." He did not ask that things should come in
upon him in logical order or in rational coherence. He only asked
that each unique person who appeared; each unique hill-side or
meadow or hedgerow or vineyard or flower or tree; should be for
him a new incarnation of Beauty, a new avatar of the merciless One
he followed.

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

If you will, you may use, for what he was, the word "materialistic";
but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression. The physical
nerves of his abnormally troubled senses, were too exquisitely, too
passionately stirred, to let their vibrations die away in material
bondage. They quiver off into remotest psychic waves, these shaken
strings; and a touch will send them shuddering into the high regions
of the Spirit. For a nature like this, with the fever of consumption
wasting his tissues, and the fever of his thirst for Beauty ravaging
his soul, it was nothing less than the cruellest tragedy that he should
have been driven by the phantom-flame of sex-illusion to find all the
magic and wonder of the Mystery he worshiped, caught, imprisoned,
enclosed, _blighted,_ in the poisonous loveliness of one capricious
girl. An anarchist at heart--as so many great artists are--Keats hated,
with a furious hatred, any bastard claims and privileges that
insolently intruded themselves between the godlike senses of Man
and the divine madness of their quest. Society? the Public? Moral
Opinion? Intellectual Fashion? The manners and customs of the
Upper Classes? What were all these but vain impertinences,
interrupting his desperate Pursuit? "Every gentleman" he cried "is
my natural enemy!"

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

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

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

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

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

St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, has
a beauty so poignant, so _sensuously unearthly,_ that one dare not
quote a line of it, in a mere "critical essay," for fear of breaking such
a spell!

The long-drawn solemn harmonies of "Hyperion"--Miltonian, and
yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew--madden
the reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which is
only increased when in that other "Version," the influence of Dante
becomes evident. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!" Ah, there we find
him--there we await him--the poet of _the tragedy of bodily
craving,_ transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to the
psychic plane!

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

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

Is it possible that words, mere words, can work such miracles? Or
are they not words at all, but chalices and Holy graals, of human
passion, full of the life-blood, staining the lips that approach them
scarlet, of heart-drained pulse-wearied ravishment?

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

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

I suppose Keats suffered more in his brief life than any mortal child
of the Muses. These ultimate creations of supreme Beauty are
evoked in no other way. Everything has to be sacrificed--everything--if
we are to be--like the gods, _creators of Life._ For Life is a thing
that can only be born in _that soil_--only planted where the wound
goes deepest--only watered when we strike where that fountain
flows! He wrote for himself. The crowd, the verdict of his friends--what
did all that matter? He wrote for himself; and for those who
dare to risk the taste of that wine, which turns the taste of all else to
a weary irrelevance!

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

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

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

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

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

And the vibrating, stricken nerves of our too great devotion may
have at least the balm of feeling that they have not languished
untouched by the fingers that thrill while they slay. After

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