[Note: I have made the following spelling changes: qualites whichstrike to qualities which strike, revelled in to reveled in, protegés toprotégés, voluptuous femininty to voluptuous femininity, tyrranniseto tyrannise, Montagus to Montagues, Zarathrustra to Zarathustra, antiChrist to anti-Christ, Car nous voulous to Car nous voulons, Gélent votre chair to Gèlent votre chair, slips in in to slips in, irrresponsible a temperament to irresponsible a temperament, common occurences to common occurrences, philanthrophy tophilanthropy, demogorgon to Demogorgon, somethings which pallsupon us to something which palls upon us, never encounted to neverencountered, Arimathaea to Arimathea, the the contemptuous libelsto the contemptuous libels, lapséd soul to lapsed soul, philsophicalmotto to philosophical motto, sybilline to sibylline, pseudo-latin topseudo-Latin, and ninteenth century to nineteenth century. ]

SUSPENDED JUDGMENTSESSAYS ON BOOKS AND SENSATIONS

JOHN COWPER POWYS

1916G. ARNOLD SHAWNEW YORK

Copyright, 1916, by G. Arnold ShawCopyright in Great Britain and the Colonies

DEDICATEDTO MY DEAR FRIENDBERNARD PRICE O'NEILL

CONTENTS

The Art of Discrimination 3Montaigne 17Pascal 47Voltaire 63Rousseau 83Balzac 107Victor Hugo 133Guy de Maupassant 149Anatole France 171Paul Verlaine 197Remy de Gourmont 225William Blake 257Byron 279Emily Brontë 313Joseph Conrad 337Henry James 367Oscar Wilde 401Suspended Judgment 425

THE ART OF DISCRIMINATION

The world divides itself into people who can discriminate andpeople who cannot discriminate. This is the ultimate test ofsensitiveness; and sensitiveness alone separates us and unites us. 

We all create, or have created for us by the fatality of ourtemperament, a unique and individual universe. It is only bybringing into light the most secret and subtle elements of thisself-contained system of things that we can find out where our lonelyorbits touch. 

Like all primordial aspects of life the situation is double-edged andcontradictory. 

The further we emphasise and drag forth, out of their reluctanttwilight, the lurking attractions and antipathies of our destiny, thenearer, at once, and the more obscure, we find ourselves growing, tothose about us. 

And the wisdom of the difficult game we are called upon to play, lies in just this very antinomy, --in just this very contradiction--thatto make ourselves better understood we have to emphasise ourdifferences, and to touch the universe of our friend we have to travelaway from him, on a curve of free sky. 

The cultivation of what in us is lonely and unique creates ofnecessity a perpetual series of shocks and jars. The unruffled nervesof the lower animals become enviable, and we fall into moods ofmalicious reaction and vindictive recoil. And yet, --for Nature makesuse even of what is named evil to pursue her cherished ends--thevery betrayal of our outraged feelings produces no unpleasant effectupon the minds of others. They know us better so, and the sense ofpower in them is delicately gratified by the spectacle of ourweakness; even as ours is by the spectacle of theirs. 

The art of discrimination is the art of letting oneself go, more andmore wilfully; letting oneself go along the lines of one's uniquepredilections; letting oneself go with the resolute push of theinquisitive intellect; the intellect whose rôle it is to register--withjust all the preciseness it may--every one of the little discoveries wemake on the long road. 

The difference between interesting and uninteresting critics of life, is just the difference between those who have refused to letthemselves be thus carried away, on the stream of their fatality, andthose who have not refused. That is why in all the really arrestingwriters and artists there is something equivocal and disturbing whenwe come to know them. 

Genius itself, in the last analysis, is not so much the possession ofunusual vision--some of the most powerful geniuses have a visionquite mediocre and blunt--as the possession of a certain demonicdriving-force, which pushes them on to be themselves, in all thefatal narrowness and obstinacy, it may be, of their personaltemperament. 

The art of discrimination is precisely what such characters are bornwith; hence the almost savage manner in which they resent thebeckonings of alien appeals; appeals which would draw them out oftheir pre-ordained track. 

One can see in the passionate preference displayed by men of realpower for the society of simple and even truculent persons over thatof those who are urbanely plastic and versatile, how true this is. 

Between their own creative wilfulness and the more static obstinacyof these former, there is an instinctive bond; whereas the tolerantand colourless cleverness of the latter disconcerts and puzzles them. 

This is why--led by a profound instinct--the wisest men of geniusselect for their female companions the most surprising types, andsubmit to the most wretched tyranny. Their craving for the sureground of unequivocal naturalness helps them to put up with whatelse were quite intolerable. 

For it is the typical modern person, of normal culture and playfulexpansiveness, who is the mortal enemy of the art of discrimination. 

Such a person's shallow cleverness and conventional good-temper ismore withering to the soul of the artist than the blindest bigotrywhich has the recklessness of genuine passion behind it. 

Not to like or to dislike people and things, but to tolerate andpatronise a thousand passionate universes, is to put yourself out ofthe pale of all discrimination. To discriminate is to refine upon one'spassions by the process of bringing them into intelligentconsciousness. The head alone cannot discriminate; no! not with allthe technical knowledge in the world; for the head cannot love norhate, it can only observe and register. 

Nor can the nerves alone discriminate; for they can only cry aloudwith a blind cry. In the management of this art, what we need is thenerves and the head together, playing up to one another; and, between them, carrying further--always a little further--the silentadvance, along the road of experience, of the insatiable soul. 

It is indeed only in this way that one comes to recognise what is, surely, of the essence of all criticism; the fact, namely, that theartists we care most for are doing just the thing we are doingourselves--doing it in their own way and with their own inviolablesecret, but limited, just as we are, by the basic limitations of all flesh. 

The art of discrimination is, after all, only the art of appreciation, applied negatively as well as positively; applied to the flinging awayfrom us and the reducing to non-existence for us, of all those formsand modes of being, for which, in the original determination of ourtaste, we were not, so to speak, born. 

And this is precisely what, in a yet more rigorous manner, the artistswhose original and subtle paths we trace, effected for themselves intheir own explorations. 

What is remarkable about this cult of criticism is the way in which itlands us back, with quite a new angle of interest, at the very pointfrom which we started; at the point, namely, where Nature in herindiscriminate richness presents herself at our doors. 

It is just here that we find how much we have gained, in delicacy ofinclusion and rejection, by following these high and lonely tracks. All the materials of art, the littered quarries, so to speak, of itslaborious effects have become, in fact, of new and absorbing interest. Forms, colours, words, sounds; nay! the very textures and odours ofthe visible world, have reduced themselves, even as they lie here, ortoss confusedly together on the waves of the life-stream, intosomething curiously suggestive and engaging. 

We bend our attention to one and to another. We let them groupthemselves casually, as they will, in their random way, writing theirown gnomic hieroglyphics, in their own immense and primevallanguage, as the earth-mothers heave them up from the abyss ordraw them down; but we are no more confined to this stunned andbewildered apprehension. 

We can isolate, distinguish, contrast. 

We can take up and put down each delicate fragment of potentialartistry; and linger at leisure in the work-shop of the immortal gods. 

Discrimination of the most personal and vehement kind in itsrelation to human works of art, may grow largely and indolentlyreceptive when dealing with the scattered materials of such works, spread out through the teeming world. 

Just here lies the point of separation between the poetic and theartistic temper. The artist or the art-critic, discriminating still, evenamong these raw materials of human creation, derives an elaborateand subtle delight from the suggestiveness of their colours, theirodours, and their fabrics--conscious all the while of wondrous andvisionary evocations, wherein they take their place. 

The poetical temper, on the other hand, lets itself go with a morepassive receptivity; and permits the formless, wordless brooding ofthe vast earthpower to work its magic upon it, in its own place andseason. Not, however, in any destruction of the defining andregistering functions of the intellect does this take place. 

Even in the vaguest obsessions of the poetical mind the intellect ispresent, watching, noting, weighing, and, if you will, discriminating. 

For, after all, poetry, though completely different in its methods, itsaims, and its effects from the other arts, is itself the greatest of allthe arts and must be profoundly aware, just as they are aware, of theactual sense-impressions which produce its inspiration. 

The difference, perhaps, is that, whereas the materials for the otherarts become most suggestive when isolated and disentangled fromthe mass, the materials of poetry, though bringing with them, in thiscase or in the other, their particular sense-accompaniment, must beleft free to flow organically together, and to produce their effect inthat primeval wanton carelessness, wherein the gods themselvesmay be supposed to walk about the world. 

One thing at least is clear. The more we acquire a genuine art ofdiscrimination amid the subtler processes of the mind the less wecome to deal in formulated or rationalistic theory. 

The chief rôle of the intellect in criticism is to protect us from theintellect; to protect us from those tiresome and unprofitable"principles of art" which in everything that gives us thrillingpleasure are found to be magnificently contradicted!

Criticism, whether of literature or art, is but a dead hand laid upon aliving thing, unless it is genuine response, to the object criticised, ofsomething reciprocal in us. Criticism in fact, to be of any value, must be a stretching out of our whole organic nature, a sort ofsacramental partaking, with both senses and soul, of the bread andwine of the "new ritual. "

The actual written or spoken word in explanation of what we havecome to feel about the thing offered, is after all a mere subordinateissue. 

The essential matter is that what we experience in regard to the newtouch, the new style, should be a personal and absorbing plunge intoan element which we feel at once to have been, as it were, "waiting"to receive us with a predestined harmony. 

The point I am seeking to make is that what is called the "criticalattitude" towards new experiments in art is the extreme opposite ofthe mood required in genuine criticism. 

That negation of interest in any given new thing which is not onlyallowable but commendable, if we are to preserve the outlines of ouridentity from the violence of alien intrusion, becomes a sheer wasteof energy when it is transmuted into ponderous principles ofrejection. 

Give us, ye gods, full liberty to pass on our way indifferent. Give useven the illuminating insight of unbounded hate. But deliver us--thatat least we pray--from the hypocrisy of judicial condemnation!

More and more does it become necessary, as the fashion of newthings presses insolently upon us, to clear up once for all and in alargely generous manner, the difficult question of the relation ofexperiment to tradition. 

The number of shallow and insensitive spirits who make use of theexistence of these new forms, to display--as if it were a proof ofaesthetic superiority--their contempt for all that is old, should alonelead us to pause and consider. 

Such persons are as a rule quite as dull to real subtleties of thoughtand feeling as any absolute Philistine; and yet they are the ones whowith their fuss about what they call "creative art" do so much tomake reasonable and natural the ordinary person's prejudices againstthe whole business. 

They actually have the audacity to claim as a mark of higheraesthetic taste their inability to appreciate traditional beauty. Theymake their ignorance their virtue; and because they are dull to thedelicate things that have charmed the centuries, they clamorouslyacclaim the latest sensational novelty, as though it had altered thevery nature of our human senses. 

One feels instinctive suspicion of this wholesale way of going towork, this root and branch elimination of what has come down to usfrom the past. It is right and proper--heaven knows--for eachindividual to have his preferences and his exclusions. He has not, one may be quite sure, found himself if he lacks these. But to haveas one's basic preference a relinquishing in the lump of all that is old, and a swallowing in the lump of all that is new, is carrying thingssuspiciously far. 

One begins to surmise that a person of this brand is not a rebel or arevolutionary, but quite simply a thick-skin; a thick-skin endowedwith that insolence of cleverness which is the enemy of genius andall its works. 

True discrimination does not ride rough-shod over the past like this. It has felt the past too deeply. It has too much of the past in its ownblood. What it does, allowing for a thousand differences oftemperament, is to move slowly and warily forward, appropriatingthe new and assimilating, in an organic manner, the material it offers;but never turning round upon the old with savage and ignorantspleen. 

But it is hard, even in these most extreme cases, to draw rigorousconclusions. 

Life is full of surprises, of particular and exceptional instances. Theabnormal is the normal; and the most thrilling moments some of usknow are the moments when we snatch an inspiration from a quarteroutside our allotted circle. 

There are certain strangely constituted ones in our midst whosenatural world, it might seem, existed hundreds or even thousands ofyears ago. Bewildered and harassed they move through our modernstreets; puzzled and sad they gaze out from our modern windows. They seem, in their wistful way, hardly conscious of the movementsabout them, and all our stirring appeals leave them wearily cold. 

It is with the very wantonness of ironic insult that our novelty-mongerscome to these, bringing fantastic inventions. What is it to them, children of a nobler past, that this or the other newly botched-upcaprice should catch for an hour the plaudits of the mob?

On the other hand, one comes now and again, though rarely enough, upon exceptional natures whose proper and predestined habitationseems to be rather with our children's children than with us. 

The word has gone forth touching what is called super-man; but thenatures I speak of are not precisely that. 

Rather are they devoid in some strange manner of the gross weapons, the protective skin, adapted to the shocks and jolts of our rough andtumble civilisation. They seem prepared and designed to exist in afiner, a more elaborate, in a sense a more luxurious world, than theone we live in. 

Their passions are not our passions; nor is their scorn our scorn. Ifthe magic of the past leaves them indifferent, the glamour of thepresent finds them antipathetic and resentful. With glacial coldnessthey survey both past and present, and the frosty fire of theirdevotion is for what, as yet, is not. 

Dull indeed should we be, if in the search of finer and more delicatediscriminations in the region of art, we grew blunt and blind to thesubtle-edged pathos of all these delicate differences between manand man. 

It is by making our excursions in the aesthetic world thus entirelypersonal and idiosyncratic that we are best spared from the bitterremorse implicit in any blunders in this more complex sphere. 

We have learned to avoid the banality of the judicial decisions in thematter of what is called beautiful. We come to learn their evengreater uselessness in the matter of what is called the good. 

To discriminate, to discriminate endlessly, between types we adoreand types we suspect, this is well and wise; but in the long result weare driven, whether it is pleasant to our prejudices or not that itshould be so, crushingly to recognise that in the world of humancharacter there are really no types at all; only tragic and lonelyfigures; figures unable to express what they want of the universe, ofus, of themselves; figures that can never, in all the aeons of time, berepeated again; figures in whose obliquities and ambiguities themysteries of all the laws and all the prophets are transcended!

MONTAIGNE

We, who are interested rather in literature than in the history ofliterature, and rather in the reaction produced upon ourselves bygreat original geniuses than in any judicial estimate of their actualachievements, can afford to regard with serene indifference thecharges of arbitrariness and caprice brought against us byprofessional students. 

Let these professional students prove to us that, in addition to theirlearning, they have receptive senses and quickly stimulatedimagination, and we will accept them willingly as our guides. 

We have already accepted Pater, Brandes, de Gourmont, critics whohave the secret of combining immense erudition with creativeintelligence, and it is under the power and the spell of theseauthoritative and indisputable names that we claim our right to themost personal and subjective enjoyment, precisely as the occasionand hour calls, of the greatest figures in art and letters. 

Most of all we have a right to treat Montaigne as we please, eventhough that right includes the privilege of _not_ reading every wordof the famous Essays, and of only reverting--in our light return tothem--to those aspects and qualities which strike an answering chordin ourselves. 

This was, after all, what he--the great humanist--was always doing;he the unscrupulous, indiscriminate and _casual_ reader; and if wetreat him in the same spirit as that in which he treated the classicalauthors he loved most, we shall at least be acting under the cloak ofhis approval, however much we annoy the Calvins and Scaligers ofour age. 

The man must have been a colossal genius. No human writer hasdone quite what he did, anticipating the methods and spiritualsecrets of posterity, and creating for himself, with sublimeindifference to contemporary usage and taste, the sort of intellectualatmosphere that suited him. 

When one thinks how sensitive we all are to the intellectualenvironments in which we move--how we submit for instance, atthis very moment, without being able to help ourselves, to the ideasset in motion by Nietzsche, say, or Walt Whitman--it seemsimpossible to overrate as a sheer triumph of personal force, the thingthat Montaigne did in disentangling himself from the tendencies ofhis age, and creating almost "in vacuo, " with nothing to help him buthis own temperament and the ancient classics, a new emotionalattitude toward life, something that might without the leastexaggeration be called "a new soul. "

The magnitude of his spiritual undertaking can best be estimated ifwe conceive ourselves freeing our minds, at this moment, from theinfluences of Nietzsche and Dostoievsky and Whitman and Paterand Wilde, and launching out into some completely original attitudetoward existence, fortified it may be by the reading of Sophocles orof Lucretius, but with so original a mental vista that we leave everycontemporary writer hopelessly behind. 

Suppose we looked about us with a view to the undertaking of sohuge an intellectual venture, where should we go to discover theoriginal impetus, the first embryonic germ, of the new way?

In ourselves? In our own temperament? Ah! that is the crux of thewhole matter. It was in his temperament that he found the force andinexhaustible riches to carry the matter through--but have we gotsuch power at our disposal? It is doubtful. It is hard to even dreamthat we have. And yet--consider the simplicity of what he did!

He just took himself, Michael de Montaigne, as he was, in the plainunvarnished totality of his vigorous self-conscious temperament, and jotted down, more for his own amusement than for that ofposterity, carelessly, frankly, nonchalantly, his tastes, his vices, hisapathies, his antipathies, his prejudices and his pleasures. 

In doing this--though there is a certain self-revelation in Augustine'sconfessions and a certain autobiographical frankness in the writingsof many of the classical authors--he did what had never been doneby any one before his time, and what, not forgetting Rousseau andHeine and Casanova and Charles Lamb, has never been so well donesince. But whether, in these latter days, we can achieve this thing asMontaigne achieved it, the fact remains that this is what we are all atthe present time trying hard to do. 

The "new soul, " which he was permitted by the gods to evoke out ofthe very abyss, has become, in the passionate subjectivity of our age, the very life-blood of our intellect. Not one among our mostinteresting artists and writers but does his utmost to reveal to theworld every phase and aspect of his personal identity. What was buta human necessity, rather concealed and discouraged than reveled inand exploited before Montaigne, has, after Montaigne, become theobsession and preoccupation of us all. We have got the secret, thegreat idea, the "new soul. " It only remains for us to incarnate it inbeautiful and convincing form. 

Ah! it is just there where we find the thing so hard. It is easy tosay--"Find yourself, know yourself, express yourself!" It is extremelydifficult to do any of these things. 

No one who has not attempted to set down in words the palpableimage and body of what he is, or of what he seems to himself, canpossibly conceive the difficulty of the task. 

More--oh, so much more--is needed than the mere saying, "I likehoney and milk better than meat and wine" or "I like girls who areplump and fair better than those who are slim and dark. " That is whyso much of modern autobiographical and confessional writing is dullbeyond words. Even impertinence will not save our essays uponourselves from being tedious--nor will shamelessness in theflaunting of our vices. Something else is required than a mere wishto strip ourselves bare; something else than a mere desire to callattention to ourselves. And this "something else" is genius, andgenius of a very rare and peculiar kind. It is not enough to say, "I amthis or that or the other. " The writer who desires to give aconvincing picture of what he is must diffuse the essence of his soulnot merely into his statements about himself but into the style inwhich these statements are made. 

Two men may start together to write confessions, and one of the twomay dissect every nerve and fibre of his inmost soul, while the othermay ramble carelessly on about the places he has seen, and thepeople he has met; yet in the ultimate result it may turn out that it isthe latter rather than the former who has revealed his identity. 

Human personalities--the strange and subtle differences whichseparate us from one another--refuse to give up the secrets of theirquality save at the magical summons of what we call "style. " Mr. Pepys was a quaint fellow and no Goethean egotist; but he managedto put a peculiar flavour of style--with a rhythm and a colour all itsown--into his meticulous gossip. 

Montaigne's essays are not by any means of equal value. The moreintimately they deal with his own ways and habits, the more_physiological_ they become in their shameless candour, the betterdo they please us. They grow less interesting to my thinking wherethey debouch into quotations, some of them whole pages in length, from his favourite Roman writers. 

He seems to have kept voluminous scrap-books of such quotations, and, like many less famous people, to have savoured a peculiarsatisfaction from transcribing them. One can imagine the deliberateand epicurean way he would go about this task, deriving from themere bodily effort of "copying out" these long and carefully chosenexcerpts, an almost sensual pleasure; the sort of pleasure which theself-imposed observance of some mechanical routine in a leisuredperson's life is able to produce, not unaccompanied by agreeablesensations of physical well-being. 

But what, after all, is this "new soul" which Montaigne succeeded inputting into our western civilisation at the very moment whenCatholic and Protestant were so furiously striving for the mastery?What is this new tone, this new temper, this new temperamentalatmosphere which, in the intervals of his cautious public work andhis lazy compiling of scrap-books from the classics, he managed tofling abroad upon the air?

It is a spiritual ingredient, composed, when one comes to analyse it, of two chemical elements; of what might be called aesthetic egoismand of what we know as philosophic scepticism. Let us deal with theformer of these two elements first. 

Egoism, in the new psychological sense of the word, may beregarded as the deliberate attempt in an individual's life to throw thechief interest and emphasis of his days upon the inward, personal, subjective impressions produced by the world, rather than uponoutward action or social progress. Egoism does not necessarilyimply the invidious stigma of selfishness. Goethe, the greatest of allegoists, was notoriously free from such a vice. "Who, " criedWieland, when they first met at Weimar, "who can resist the_unselfishness_ of this man?"

Egoism does not necessarily imply "egotism, " though it must beconfessed that in Montaigne's case, though not in Goethe's, theremay have been a touch of that less generous attribute. 

Egoism is an intellectual gesture, a spiritual attitude, atemperamental atmosphere. It is a thing which implies a certaindefinite philosophical mood in regard to the riddle of existence;though, of course, between individual egoists there may be widegulfs of personal divergence. 

Between Montaigne and Goethe, for instance, there is an immensedifference. Goethe's egoism was creative; Montaigne's receptive. Goethe's was many-sided; driven forward by a tremendous_demonic_ urge toward the satisfaction of a curiosity which wascosmic and universal. Montaigne's was in a certain sense narrow, limited, cautious, earth-bound. It had nothing of the large poeticsweep, nothing of the vast mystical horizons and huge imaginativevistas of the great German. But on the other hand, it was closer tothe soil, homelier, more humorous, in a certain measure morenatural, normal and human. 

This "cult of egoism" is obviously not entirely modern. Traces of it, aspects of it, fragments and morsels of it, have existed from all time. It was the latent presence of this quality in his great Romans, muchmore than their mere "outward triumphs, " which led him to brood soincessantly upon their memories. 

But Montaigne himself was the first of all writers to give palpableintellectual shape to this diffused spiritual temper. 

In recent times, some of the most fascinating of our literary guideshave been philosophical egotists. Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Pater, Stendhal, Maurice Barrès (in his earlier work), deGourmont, D'Annunzio, Oscar Wilde--are all, in their widelydifferent ways, masters of the same cult. 

The out-looking activities and the out-looking social interests ofVoltaire or Renan, or Anatole France, give to these great writersquite a different psychological tone. The three I have just mentionedare all too inveterately spirits of mockery even to take seriously_their own_ "sensations and ideas"; and however ironical andhumorous an egoist may be with regard to other people'simpressions, with regard to his own he is grave, intent, preoccupied, almost solemn. 

When one thinks of it, there is a curious solemnity of preoccupationwith themselves and their own sensations about Wilde, Pater, Whitman, Stendhal, D'Annunzio and Barrès. And this "gravity ofegoism" is precisely the thing which, for all his humorous humanity, distinguished the great Montaigne and which his early critics foundso irritating. 

"What do I care--what does any one care, " grumbled the learnedScaliger, "whether he prefers white wine to red wine?"

The second element in the compound chemistry of the "moderntemper" introduced into the world by Montaigne may be found in hisfamous scepticism. The formidable levity of that notorious "quesais-je?" "What do I know?" writes itself nowadays across ourwhole sky. This also--"this film of white light, " as some one hascalled it, floating waveringly beneath each one of our mostcherished convictions was, not unknown before his time. 

All the great sophists--Protagoras especially, with his "man themeasure of all things"--were, in a sense, professional teachers of arefined scepticism. 

Plato himself, with his wavering and gracious hesitations, was morethan touched by the same spirit. 

Scepticism as a natural human philosophy--perhaps as the onlynatural human philosophy--underlies all the beautiful soft-colouredpanorama of pagan poetry and pagan thought. It must have been thehabitual temper of mind in any Periclean symposium or Caesareansalon. It is, pre-eminently and especially, the _civilised_ attitude ofmind; the attitude of mind most dominant and universal in the greatraces, the great epochs, the great societies. 

It is for this reason that France, among all modern nations, is themost sceptical. 

Barbarian peoples are rarely endowed with this quality. The crudeanimal energy, which makes them successful! in business, and evensometimes in war, is an energy which, for all its primitive force, isdestructive of civilisation. Civilisation, the rarest work of art of ourrace's evolution, is essentially a thing created in restraint of suchcrude energies; as it is created in restraint of the still cruder energiesof nature itself. 

The Protestant Reformation springing out of the soul of thecountries "beyond the Alps" is, of course, the supreme example ofthis uncivilised force. One frequently encounters sceptical-mindedCatholics, full of the very spirit of Montaigne--who died in theCatholic faith--but it is rare to meet a Protestant who is not, in amost barbarous sense, full of dogmatic and argumentative "truth. "

So uncivilised and unlovely is this controversial mood thatfree-thinkers are often tempted to be unfair to the Reformation. This is afault; for after all it is something, even for ingrained scepticsprepared to offer incense at any official altar, to be saved from thepersecuting alliance of church and state. 

It is not pleasant to meet argumentative revivalists, and the Puritaninfluence upon art and letters is no less than deadly; but it is better tobe teased with impertinent questions about one's soul than to be ledaway to the stake for its salvation. 

The mention of the situation, in which in spite of Shakespeare andthe rest poor modern sceptics still find themselves, is an indicationof how hopelessly illusive all talk of "progress" is. Between Calvinon the one hand and the Sorbonne on the other, Montaigne mightwell shuffle home from his municipal duties and read Horace in histower. And we, after three hundred odd years, have little better to do. 

Heine, impish descendant of this great doubter, took refuge fromhuman madness at the feet of Venus in the Louvre. Machiavel--forall his crafty wisdom--was driven back to his books and hismemories. Goethe built up the "pyramid of his existence" amongpictures and fossils and love affairs, leaving the making of history toothers, and keeping "religious truth" at a convenient distance. 

This scepticism of Montaigne is a much rarer quality among men ofgenius than the egoism with which it is so closely associated. I aminclined to regard it as the sanest of all human moods. Whatdistinguishes it from other intellectual attitudes is the fact that it isshared by the very loftiest with the very simplest minds. It is theprevailing temper of shepherds and ploughmen, of carters andherdsmen, of all honest gatherers at rustic taverns who discuss thestate of the crops, the prospects of the weather, the cattle market andthe rise and fall of nations. It is the wisdom of the earth itself;shrewd, friendly, full of unaccountable instincts; obstinate andcapricious, given up to irrational and inexplicable superstitions;sluggish, suspicious, cautious, hostile to theory, enamoured ofinconsistencies, humorously critical of all ideals, realistic, empirical, wayward, ready to listen to any magical whisper, to any faintpipings of the flutes of Pan, but grumblingly reluctant to follow thevoices of the prophets and the high doctrines of the leaders of men. 

Its wisdom is the wisdom of lazy noons in spacious corn-fields; ofdewy mornings in misty lanes and moss-grown paths; of dreamyshadows in deep grass when the apple boughs hang heavilyearthward, and long nights of autumn rain have left amber-colouredpools in the hollow places of the trees and in the mud trodden by thecattle. 

Its sanity is the sanity of farm-yards and smoking dung-heaps andPriapian jests beneath wintry hedges, and clear earth-sweetthoughtless laughter under large, liquid, mid-summer stars. 

The nonchalant "What do I know?"--"What does any one know?"--ofthis shrewd pagan spirit has nothing in it of the ache ofpessimistic disillusion. It has never had any illusions. It has takenthings as they appear, and life as it appears, and it is so close to thekindly earth-mud beneath our feet that it is in no fear of anydesperate fall. 

What lends the sceptical wisdom of Montaigne such massive andenduring weight is the very fact of its being the natural paganwisdom of generations of simple souls who live close to the earth. No wonder he was popular with the farmers and peasants of hiscountryside and with the thrifty burgesses of his town. He must havegathered much wisdom from his wayfaring among the fields, andmany scandalous sidelights upon human nature as he loitered amongthe streets and wharfs of the city. 

It is indeed the old joyous, optimistic, pagan spirit, full of courageand gaiety; full too, it must be confessed, of a humorous terror nowand then, and yet capable enough sometimes of looking veryformidable antagonists squarely in the face and refusing to quit thequiet ways it has marked out and the shrewd middle path it haschosen!

Turning over the pages of Cotton's translation--it is my fancy toprefer this one to the more famous Florio's--there seems to me toarise from these rambling discourses, a singularly wholesome savour. I seem to see Montaigne's massive and benignant countenance as hejogs home, wrapped against the wind in the cloak that was once hisfather's, along the muddy autumn lanes, upon his strong but notover-impetuous nag. Surely I have seen that particular cast offeatures in the weather-beaten face of many a farm labourer, andlistened too, from the same lips, to just as relishing a commentaryupon the surprising ways of providence with mortal men. 

Full of a profound sense of a physical well-being, which thetroublesome accidents of chance and time only served to intensify, Montaigne surveyed the grotesque panorama of human life with amassive and indelible satisfaction. 

His optimism, if you can call it by such a name, is not the optimismof theory; it is not the optimism of faith, far less is it that mystic andtranscendental optimism which teases one, in these later days, withits swollen words and windy rhetoric. It is the optimism of simple, shrewd, sane common sense, the optimism of the poor, the optimismof sound nerves, the optimism of cab-men and bus drivers, offishermen and gardeners, of "tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, apothecaries and thieves. "

What Montaigne really does is to bring into the courts of philosophyand to heighten with the classic style of one who was "brought upupon Latin, " the sheer, natural, incorrigible love of life, of suchpersons, rich or poor, as have the earth in their blood and the shrewdwisdom of the earth and the geniality of the earth, and themischievous wantonness of the earth, and the old, sly chucklingmalice of the earth, in their blood and in their soul. 

He can record, and does often record, in those queer episodic dipsinto his scrap-book, the outrageous stories of a thousand freaks ofnature. He loves these little impish tricks of the great careless gods. He loves the mad, wicked, astounding, abnormal things that arepermitted to happen as the world moves round. He reads Tacitus andPlutarch very much as a Dorsetshire shepherd might read the_Western Gazette, _ and makes, in the end, much of the samecommentary. 

In a certain sense Montaigne is the most human of all great geniuses. The whole turbulent stream of the motley spectacle passes throughhis consciousness and he can feel equal sympathy with the heroismof a Roman patriot and with the terrors of a persecuted philosopher. 

What pleases him best is to note the accidental little things--"life'slittle ironies"--which so frequently intervene between idealresolutions and their results in practise and fact. He chuckles overthe unfortunate lapses in the careers of great men much as amischievous gossip in a tavern might chuckle over similar lapses inthe careers of local potentates. 

Montaigne's scepticism is the result of his looking at the world notthrough books or through the theories of books, but through his owneyes. He is sceptical because he sees that any one who wishes to livein harmony with the facts of life must be sceptical. Life is made upof such evasive entangled confused elements that any other attitudethan this one is a noble madness if it is not knavish hypocrisy. Thetheories, convictions, moralities, opinions, of every child of Adamare subject to lamentable upheavals, as the incorrigible earth-gods, with their impish malice, seize them and play nine-pins with them. 

"All flows away and nothing remains, " says the ancient philosopher, and Montaigne shows clearly enough how vain it is to put our trustin any theory or system or principle or idea. 

It is a mistake to regard his scepticism as merely negative. It is farmore than that. Like all wise scepticism it is creative andconstructive; not out of theories and phrases, nor out of principlesand opinions, but out of events and persons and passions andinstincts and chances and occasions. 

It is realistic--this Montaignesque method--realistic not materialistic. It takes each occasion as it occurs, each person as he presentshimself, each passion, each instinct, each lust, each emotion, and outof these he creates a sort of piece-meal philosophy; modest enoughand making no claim to finality, but serving us, at a pinch, as a sortof rough-and-ready clue through the confusions of life. 

It will always appear presumptuous to the dogmatic type of mind, the mind made up of rationalistic and logical exigencies, to callscepticism like this by the name of "philosophy. " It will be still moreobscure to such a mind how it is possible for a human being to livehappily and joyfully in a complete absence of any synthetic system. 

And yet one feels certain enough that amid the jolts and jars andshocks of actual life even the most idealistic of philosophers leavetheir logic to shift for itself and just drift on as they may in thegroove of traditional usages or the track of temperamental bias. 

It must not, however, be for a moment supposed that the scepticismof Montaigne is identical with the so-called "pragmatism" ofWilliam James or with the "instinct theories" of Bergson. 

Both of these modern attitudes make the assumption that a genuineadvance in our knowledge of "truth" is really possible; thoughpossible along quite different lines from the old absolute dogmaticmetaphysical ones. But the scepticism of Montaigne throws doubtupon every human attempt to get behind the shifting flowing streamof sense impressions. The rough and ready clue which it offers to theconfusions of life is not drawn from any individualistic "pointd'appui" of pseudo-psychological personal vision, as are thesemodern clues to the mystery. It is drawn from nothing morerecondite than the customary traditions, usages, pieties and customsof the generations of humanity; habits of mind and moods of hopewhich have behind them, not so much the psychological insight ofclever individuals--the William Jameses and Bergsons of pastages--as the primitive and permanent emotions of the masses of averagemen and women themselves, confronting the eternal silence. 

What the scepticism of Montaigne does is to clear out of the path allthe individual claims to extraordinary insight of the philosophicgreat men of the world, by means of showing how, under thepressure of obstinate and malicious reality, such explanations of theuniverse break down and such great men collapse and become asblind, helpless, groping and uncertain as all the rest of us. Prophetsand rationalists alike, logicians and soothsayers together, so collapseand fall away; while in their place the long slow patient wisdom ofthe centuries, the old shrewd superstitious wisdom of anonymoushumanity rises up out of the pagan earth, and offers us our onlysolution. 

Not that what we get in this humble way is really a solution at all. Rather is it a modest working substitute for such solutions, a dimlamp flickering in a great darkness, a faint shadow falling on a longuncertain road; a road of which we can see neither the beginning northe end, and along which we have nothing better to guide us thansuch pathetic "omens of the way" as old wives' tales repeat and oldtraditions hand down from mouth to mouth. 

To certain minds the condition of the human race under the burdenof such a twilight may well seem intolerable. To Montaigne it wasnot intolerable. It was his element, his pleasant Arcadia, his naturalhome. He loved the incongruities and inconsistencies of such aworld; its outrageous Rabelaisian jests, its monstrous changes andchances, its huge irrelevancy. He loved its roguish and goblinishrefusal to give up its secret to grave and solemn intellects, takingupon themselves the rôle of prophets. He loved a world that hides itstreasures from the "wise and prudent" and reveals them--or at anyrate all that will ever be revealed of them--to "babes and sucklings. "

Those who read Montaigne with a natural affinity for his peculiarturn of mind, will find themselves in a position to regardvery humorously and lightly the portentous claims of modernphilosophers whether they be rationalists or intuitivists. "There aremore things in Heaven and earth, " they will retort to these scholarlyHoratios in the very vein of that Prince of Denmark who--accordingto reliable critical opinion--was actually modelled on Montaignehimself. 

They will be encouraged to go on, as before, making the best ofwhat the traditional wisdom of the centuries brings them, but nottaking even this with more seriousness than its pathetic weight ofhuman experience demands, and not dreaming that, with even this tohelp them, they are very closely initiated into the ultimate mystery. 

They will be encouraged to go on as before, enjoying the books ofthe writers with a pinch of pleasant salt, but enjoying them withinfinite zest and profit, and, at least, with full _aesthetic_appreciation. 

They will be encouraged to fall back upon the kindly possibilitiesand broad hopeful vistas to which the unsophisticated heart of mannaturally and spontaneously turns. 

They will be encouraged to go to the "highways and hedges" fortheir omens, to the felicitous encounters of the common road fortheir auguries and inspirations. They will listen reverently to thechatter of very simple people, and catch the shadow of the wings offate falling upon very homely heads. The rough earth-wisdom ofploughed fields, heavy with brown sun-lit mud, will be redolent forthem with whispers and hints and intimations of things that nophilosophy can include and no psychology explain. 

Out of the coarse rankness of rude primitive natures strange sweetmysteries will come to light, and upon the sensual lusts of satyrs, gambolling grossly in rain-soaked leafy midnights, the moon oftender purity will shed down her virginal benediction. 

For them the grotesque roots of trees will leer magically from thewayside to meet the uncouth gestures of the labourer and his trull;while in the smoke-thick air of mellow tavern-corners the shamelessmirth of honest revellers philosophising upon the world will have asmack of true divinity. 

They will be encouraged--the people who read Montaigne--to sinkonce more into their own souls and enjoy the rare sensationspermitted to their own physical and psychological susceptibility, asthe great world sweeps by them. 

I sometimes think that the wisdom of Montaigne, with its essentialroots in physiological well-being, is best realised and understoodwhen on some misty autumn morning, full of the smell of leaves, one lies, just newly awakened out of pleasant dreams, and watchesthe sunshine on wall and window and floor, and listens to the trafficof the town or the noises of the village. It is then, with the sweetlanguor of awakening, that one seems conscious of some ineffablespiritual secret to be drawn from the material sensations of thenerves of one's body. 

Montaigne, with all his gravity, is quite shameless in the assumptionthat the details of his bodily habits form an important part, not byany means to be neglected, of the picture he sets out to give ofhimself. 

And those who read Montaigne with sympathetic affinity will findthemselves growing into the habit of making much of the sensationsof their bodies. They will not rush foolishly and stupidly, like dulleconomic machines, from bedroom to "lunch counter" and from"lunch counter" to office. They will savour every moment which canbe called _their own_ and they will endeavour to enlarge suchmoments by any sort of economic or domestic change. 

They will make much of the sensations of waking and bathing andeating and drinking and going to sleep; just as they make much ofthe sensations of reading admirable books. They will cross the roadto the sunny side of the street; they will pause by the toy-shops andthe flower-shops. They will go out into the fields, before breakfast, to look for mushrooms. 

They will miss nothing of the caprices and humours and comedies ofevery day of human life; for they will know that in the final issuenone of us are wiser than the day and what the day brings; none ofus wiser than the wisdom of street and field and market-place; thewisdom of the common people, the wisdom of our mother, the earth. 

In the enjoyment of life spent thus fastidiously in the cultivation ofour own sensations, and thus largely and generously in a broadsympathy with the emotions of the masses of men, there is room formany kinds of love. But of all the love passions which destiny offersus, none lends itself better to the peculiar path we have chosen thanthe passion of friendship. It is the love of an "alter ego, " a secondself, a twin soul, which more than anything else is able to heightenand deepen our consciousness of life. 

The "love of women" has always about it something tragic andcatastrophic. It means the plunging of one's hands into frozen snowor burning fire. It means the crossing of perilous glades in tropicjungles. It means the "sowing of the whirlwind" on the edge of theavalanche and the hunting of the mirage in the desert. The ecstasybrought by it is too blinding to serve as an illumination for our days;and for all the tremulous sweetness of its approach it leaves behindit the poison of disillusion and the scars of rancour and remorse. 

But the passion of friendship for one of one's own sex burns with acalm clear flame. A thousand little subtleties of observation, thatwould mean nothing were we alone, take to themselves a significantand symbolic value and lead us down pleasant and flower-strewnvistas of airy fancy. In the absence of our friend the colour of hisimagination falls like a magical light upon the saddest and dullestscenes; while with him at our side, all the little jerks and jars andjolts and ironical tricks of the hour and the occasion lose theirbrutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense ofhaving some one for whom one's weakest and least effectivemoments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreasonare only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerablein our life easy and light to bear. 

And what a delicious sense, in the midst of the open or hiddenhostilities of our struggle against the world, to feel one has some onenear at hand with whom, crouched in any "corner of the hubbub, "we may "make game of _that_" which makes as much of us!

Love, in the sexual sense, fails us in the bitterest crisis of our daysbecause love, or the person loved, is the chief cause of the misery. Scourged and lacerated by Aphrodite it is of little avail to flee toEros. But friendship--of the noble, rare, _absolute_ kind such asexisted between Montaigne and his sweet Etienne--is the onlyantidote, the only healing ointment, the only anodyne, which canmake it possible for us to endure without complete disintegration"the pangs of despised love" and love's bitter and withering reaction. 

Love too--in the ordinary sense--implies jealousy, exclusiveness, insatiable exactions; whereas friendship, sure of its inviolable rootsin spiritual equality, is ready to look generously and sympatheticallyupon every wandering obsession or passing madness in the friend ofits choice. 

With the exception of the love of a parent for a child this is the onlyhuman love which is outward-looking and centrifugal in its gaze;and even in the case of the love of a mother there is often somethingpossessive and indrawing. 

How beautifully, how finally, Montaigne, in his description of thishigh passion, sweeps aside at one stroke all that selfish emphasisupon "advantage" of which Bacon makes so much, and all thatidealistic anxiety to retain one's "separate identity" in whichEmerson indulges!

"I love him because he is he and he loves me because I am I. " Thisis worthy to be compared with the beautiful and terrible "I _am_Heathcliff" of the heroine in the Brontë novel. 

Emerson speaks as though, having sounded the depths of one'sfriend's soul, one moved off, with a wave of the hand, upon one'slonely quest, having none but God as one's eternal companion. 

This translunar preference for the "Over-soul" over every humanfeeling is not Montaigne's notion of the passion of friendship. He ismore earth-bound in his proclivities. 

"He is he and I am I, " and as long as we are what we are, in our flesh, in our blood, in our bones, nothing, while we live, can sever thebond between us. And in death? Ah! how much nearer to the paganheart of this great mystery is the cry of the son of Jesse over thebody of his beloved than all the Ciceronian rhetoric in theworld--and how much nearer to what that loss means!

Montaigne does not really, as Pater so charmingly hints, break theflexible consistency of his philosophic method when he loves hisfriends in this unbounded manner. He is too great a sceptic to let hisscepticism stand in the way of high adventures of this sort. 

The essence of his unsystematic system is that one should giveoneself freely up to what the gods throw in one's way. And if thegods--in their inescapable predestination--have made him "for me"and me "for him, " to cling fast with cold cautious hands to theanchor of moderation were to be false to the philosophy of the"Eternal Now. "

The whole of life is an enormous accident--a dice-throw of eternityin the vapours of time and space. Why not then, with him we loveby our side, make richer and sweeter the nonchalant gaiety of ouramusement, in the great mad purposeless preposterous show, by the"quips and cranks" of a companionable scepticism; canvassing allthings in earth and heaven, reverencing God and Caesar on _thisside_ of idolatry, relishing the foolish, fooling the wise, and lettingthe world drift on as it will?

"What do I know?" There may be more in life than the moralistsguess, and more in death than the atheists imagine. 

PASCAL

There are certain figures in the history of human thought who in thedeepest sense of the word must be regarded as _tragic_; and this notbecause of any accidental sufferings they have endured, or becauseof any persecution, but because of something inherently _desperate_in their own wrestling with truth. 

Thus Swift, while an eminently tragic figure in regard to hispersonal character and the events of his life, is not tragic in regard tohis thought. 

It is not a question of pessimism. Schopenhauer is generally, andwith reason, regarded as a pessimist; but no one who has read his"World as Will and Idea" can visualise Schopenhauer, even in thesphere of pure thought, as a tragic personality. 

The pre-eminent example in our modern world of the sort ofdesperate thinking which I have in mind as worthy of this title is, ofcourse, Nietzsche; and it is a significant thing that over and overagain in Nietzsche's writings one comes upon passionate andindignant references to Pascal. 

The great iconoclast seemed indeed, as he groped about like a blindSamson in the temple of human faith, to come inevitably upon thefigure of Pascal, as if this latter were one of the main pillars of theformidable edifice. It is interesting to watch this passionateattraction of steel for steel. 

Nietzsche was constantly searching among apologists forChristianity for one who in intellect and imagination was worthy ofhis weapons; and it must be confessed that his search was generallyvain. But in Pascal he did find what he sought. 

His own high mystical spirit with its savage psychological insightwas answered here by something of the same metal. His own"desperate thinking" met in this instance a temper equally"desperate, " and the beauty and cruelty of his merciless imaginationmet here a "will to power" not less abnormal. 

It is seldom that a critic of a great writer has, by the lucky throwingof life's wanton dice, an opportunity of watching the very temper heis describing, close at hand. But it does sometimes happen, evenwhen the subject of one's criticism has been dead two hundred years, that one comes across a modern mind so penetrated with its master'smoods; so coloured, so dyed, so ingrained with that particular spirit, that intercourse with it implies actual contact with its archetype. 

Such an encounter with the subtlest of Christian apologists has beenmy own good fortune in my association with Mr. W. J. Williams, the friend of Loisy and Tyrrel, and the interpreter, for modern piety, of Pascal's deepest thoughts. 

The superiority of Pascal over all other defenders of the faith is to belooked for in the peculiar angle of his approach to the terrificcontroversy--an angle which Newman himself, for all his serpentinesagacity, found it difficult to retain. 

Newman worked in a mental atmosphere singularly unpropitious toformidable intellectual ventures, and one never feels that hisessentially ecclesiastical mind ever really grasped the humanplausibility of natural paganism. But Pascal went straight back toMontaigne, and, like Pater's Marius under the influence ofAristippus, begins his search after truth with a clean acceptance ofabsolute scepticism. 

Newman was sceptical too, but his peculiar kind of intellectual pietylacked the imagination of Pascal. He could play, cleverly enough, with hypothetical infidelity, and refute it, so to say, "in his study"with his eye on the little chapel door; but there was a sort of refinedshrinking from the jagged edges of reality in his somewhatByzantine temperament which throws a certain suspicion of specialpleading over his crafty logic. 

Newman argues like a subtle theologian who has been cleverenough to add to his "repertoire" a certain evasive mist of pragmaticmodernism, under the filmy and wavering vapours of which theinveterate sacerdotalism of his temperament covers its tracks. Butwith Pascal we get clean away from the poison-trail of theobscurantist. 

Pascal was essentially a layman. There was nothing priestly in hismood; nothing scholastic in his reasoning; nothing sacerdotal in hisconclusions. We breathe with him the clear sharp air of mathematics;and his imagination, shaking itself free from all controversialpettifogging, sweeps off into the stark and naked spaces of the trueplanetary situation. 

One feels that Newman under all conceivable circumstances wasbound to be a priest. There was priestliness writ large upon hiscountenance. His manner, his tone, his beautiful style, withsomething at once pleading and threatening, and a kind of feminineattenuation in its vibrant periods, bears witness to this. 

Stripped of his cassock and tossed into the world's "hurly-burly, "Newman would have drawn back into himself in Puritan dismay, and with Puritan narrowness and sourness would have sneered at thefeet of the dancers. There was, at bottom, absolutely nothing inNewman of the clear-eyed human sweetness of the Christ of theGospels; that noble, benignant, tolerant God, full of poeticimagination, whose divine countenance still looks forth from thecanvasses of Titian. 

Newman's piety, at best, was provincial, local, distorted. His Christis the Christ of morbid Seminarists and ascetic undergraduates; notthe Christ that Leonardo da Vinci saw breaking bread with hisdisciples; not the Christ that Paolo Veronese saw moving among thecrowds of the street like a royal uncrowned king. 

It is a mistake to regard Pascal as a Protestant. It is equally a mistaketo press hard upon his Catholicity. He was indeed too tragicallypreoccupied with the far deeper question as to whether faith inChrist is possible at all, to be limited to these lesser disputes. 

His quarrel with the Jesuits was not essentially a theological quarrel. It was the eternal quarrel between the wisdom and caution andcasuistry of the world and the uncompromising vision of the poetand prophet. 

Nietzsche would never have singled out Pascal as his mostformidable enemy if the author of "The Thoughts" had been nothingbut a theological controversialist. What gives an eternal value toPascal's genius, is that it definitely cleared the air. It swept aside allblurring and confusing mental litter, and left the lamentable stage ofthe great dilemma free for the fatal duel. 

Out of the immense darkness of the human situation, that forlornstage rises. The fearful spaces of the godless night are its roof, androw above row, tier above tier in its shadowy enclosure, the troubledcrowds of the tribes of men wait the wavering issue of the contest. Full on the high stage in this tragic theatre of the universe Pascalthrows the merciless searchlight of his imaginative logic, and therhythm of the duality of man's fate is the rhythm of the music of hisimpassioned utterances. 

The more one dreams over the unique position which Pascal hascome to occupy, the more one realises how few writers there arewhose imagination is large enough to grapple with the sublimehorror of being born of the human race into this planetary system. 

They take for granted so many things, these others. They have nopower in them to lift eagle wings and fly over the cold greyboundless expanse of the shadowy waters. 

They take for granted--materialists and mystics alike--so much; somuch, that there is no longer any tragic dilemma left, any sublime"parting of the ways, " any splendid or terrible decision. 

Pascal's essential grandeur consists in the fact hat he tore himselfclear of all those peddling and pitiful compromises, those halfhumorous concessions, those lazy conventionalisms, with whichmost people cover their brains as if with wool, and ballast theirimagination as if with heavy sand. 

He tore himself clear of everything; of his own temperamentalproclivities, of his pride, of his scientific vanity, of his humanaffections, of his lusts, of his innocent enjoyments. He tore himselfclear of everything; so as to envisage the universe in its unmitigatedhorror, so as to look the emptiness of space straight between itsghastly lidless eyes. 

One sees him there, at the edge of the world, silhouetted against thewhite terror of infinity, wrestling desperately in the dawn with theangel of the withheld secret. 

His pride--his pride of sheer intellect--ah! that, as Nietzsche wellknew, was the offering that had the most blood in it, the sacrificethat cried the loudest, as he bound it to the horns of the altar. Thealmost insane howl of suppressed misery which lurks in thescoriating irony of that terrible passage about sprinkling oneself with"holy water" and rendering oneself "stupid, " is an indication of whatI mean. Truly, as his modern representative does not hesitate to hint, the hand of Pascal held Christianity by the hair. 

To certain placid cattle-like minds, the life we have been born into isa thing simple and natural enough. To Pascal it was monstrously andinsolently unnatural. He had that species of grand and terribleimagination which is capable of piercing the world through andthrough; of rising high up above it, and of pulverising it withimpassioned logic. 

The basic incongruities of life yawned for him like bleedingeye-sockets, and never for one moment could he get out of his mindthe appalling nothingness of the stellar spaces. 

Once, after thinking about Pascal, I dreamed I saw him standing, atall dark figure, above a chaotic sea. In his hand he held a giganticwhip, whose long quivering lash seemed, as he cracked it above themoaning waters, to summon the hidden monsters of the depths torise to the surface. I could not see in my dream the face of this figure, for dark clouds kept sweeping across his head; but the sense of hisferocious loneliness took possession of me, and since then I havefound it increasingly difficult to confine his image to mildJansenistic heresies, ironic girdings at Jesuitical opponents, philosophic strolls with evangelical friends. 

What Pascal does is a thing that, curiously enough, is very rarelydone, even by great metaphysical writers; I mean the bringing hometo the mind, without any comfortable illusive softenings of the starkreality, of what life really implies in its trenchant outlines. To do thiswith the more complete efficacy, he goes back to Montaigne anduses the scepticism of Montaigne as his starting point. 

The Christian faith, in order to be a thing of beauty and dignity, must necessarily have something _desperate_ about it, something ofthe terrible sweat and tears of one who wrestles with the ultimateangel. Easy-going Christianity, the Christianity of plump prelatesand argumentative presbyters, is not Christianity at all. It is simplythe "custom of the country" greased with the unction of professionalinterests. 

One remembers how both Schopenhauer and Heine sweep away theHegelian Protestantism of their age and look for the spirit of Christin other quarters. 

That so tremendous a hope, that so sublime a chance should haveappeared at all in the history of the human race is a thing to wonderat; and Pascal, coming upon this chance, this hope, this supremeventure, from the depths of a corrosive all-devouring scepticism, realised it at its true value. 

Hung between the infinitely great and the infinitely little, frozen bythe mockery of two eternities, this "quintessence of dust" which isourselves, cries aloud to be delivered from the body of its livingdeath. 

A reed that thinks! Could there anywhere be found a betterdescription of what we are? Reed-like we bow ourselves to thewinds of the four horizons--reed-like we murmur repetitions of themusic of forest and sea--reed-like we lift our heads among the dyingstalks of those who came before us--reed-like we wither and droopwhen our own hour comes--but with it all, we _think!_

Pascal looking at the face of the world sees evidence on all sides ofthe presence of something blighting and poisonous, somethingdiabolic and malign in the way things are now organised. He tracesthe cause of this to the wilful evil in the heart of man, and he findsthe only cure for it in the acceptance of God's grace. 

There may be something irritating to the pagan mind about thisarbitrary introduction of the idea of "sin" as the cause of thelamentable misery of the world. Among modern writers the idea of"sin" is ridiculed, and the notion of its supernaturalism scouted. Butis this true psychology?

Whatever its extraordinary origin, this thing which we call"conscience" has emerged as a definite and inalienable phenomenonamong us. To be exempt from the power of _remorse_ is still, evenin these modern days, to be something below or above the level ofordinary humanity. If the thing is everywhere present with us, then, as an actual undeniable experience; if we feel it, if we suffer from it, where is the philosophical or human advantage of slurring over itsexistence and refusing to take account of it?

The great artists are wiser in these matters than the philosophers. Are we to suppose that the depths of malignity in an Iago, or the"dark backward and abysm" of remorse in a Macbeth, are thingspurely relative and illusive?

"Hell is murky, " whispers the sleep-walker, and the words touch thenerves of our imagination more closely than all the arguments of theevolutionists. 

We will not follow Pascal through the doctrinal symbols of hisescape from the burden of this consciousness. Where we must stillfeel the grandeur of his imagination is in his recognition of thepresence of "evil" in the world as an objective and palpable thingwhich no easy explanations can get rid of and only a strongerspiritual force can overcome. 

The imagination of Pascal once more makes life terrible, beautifuland dramatic. It pushes back the marble walls of mechanical causeand effect, and opens up the deep places. It makes the universeporous again. It restores to life its strange and mysteriouspossibilities. It throws the human _will_ once more into theforeground, and gives the drama of our days its rightful spaciousnessand breadth. 

The kind of religious faith which lends itself to our sense of thenoble and the tragic is necessarily of this nature. Like the tight-ropedancer in Zarathustra, it balances itself between the upper and thenether gulfs. It makes its choice between eternal issues; it throws thedice upon the cosmic gaming-table; it wagers the safety of the soulagainst the sanity of the intellect. 

And it is pre-eminently the mark of a great religion that it should befounded upon a great scepticism. Anything short of this lacks thetrue tragic note; anything short of this is mere temperamentalcheerfulness, mere conventional assent to custom and tradition. 

The great religion must carve its daring protest against the wholenatural order of the universe upon the flaming ramparts of theworld's uttermost boundary. The great religion must engrave itschallenge to eternity upon the forehead of the Great Sphinx. 

And after all, even supposing that Pascal is wrong; even supposingthat making his grand wager he put his money upon the _wronghorse_, does that diminish the tragedy of his position? Does thatlessen the sublimity of his imagination? Obviously it is the practicalcertainty that he is wrong, and that he did put his money on thewrong horse, which creates the grandeur of the whole desperatebusiness. If he were right, if the universe were really and trulycomposed in the manner he conceived it--why then, so far from hisfigure being a tragic one, he would present himself as a shrewdmagician, who has found the "wonderful lamp" of the world'sAladdin's cave, and has entered upon inestimable treasures whiledisappearing into the darkness. 

The sublimity of Pascal's vision depends upon its being illusive. Thegrandeur of his world-logic depends upon its being false. The beautyof his heroic character depends upon his philosophy being a lie. 

If all that is left of this desperate dicer with eternity is a little dustand a strangely shaped skull, how magnificently dramatic, in thehigh classic sense, was his offering up of his intellect upon the altarof his faith!

In the wise psychology of the future--interesting itself in the historicaberrations of the human mind--it is likely that many chapters willbe devoted to this strange "disease of desperation" full of such wildand fatal beauty. 

The Spectacle of the world will lack much contrasting shadow whenthis thing passes away. A _certain deep crimson upon black_ will bemissing from the tapestry of human consciousness. There will bemore sun-light but less Rembrantian chiaroscuro in the pigments ofthe great Picture. At any rate this is certain; by his tragic gamblingin the darkness of the abyss between the unfathomed spaces, Pascalhas drawn the perilous stuff of the great disease to a dramatic head. The thing can no longer diffuse itself like an attenuated evil humourthrough every vein of the world-body. 

Customary piety, conventional religion, the thin security ofself-satisfied morality, can now no more tease us with their sleekimpertinence. In the presence of a venture of this high distinction, ofa faith of this tragic intensity, such shabby counterfeits of the race'shope dwindle and pale and fade. 

We now perceive what the alternative is, what the voice of "deepcalling unto deep" really utters, as the constellation of Herculesdraws the solar world toward it through the abysmal night. No moreethical foolery; no more pragmatic insolence; no more mysticalrhetoric. 

The prophets of optimism "lie in hell like sheep. " The world yawnsand quivers to its foundations. Jotunheim rushes upon Asgard. Fromthe pleasant fields of sun-lit pagan doubt comes to our ears thepiping of the undying Pan--older than all the "twilights" of all the"gods. "

But for the rest the issue is now plain, the great dilemma clear. Nomore fooling with shadows when faith has lost its substance;no more walking on the road to Emmaus when the Master istransformed to a stream of tendency; no more liberal theology whenSocrates is as divine as Jesus. 

The "Thinking Reed" bows before the wind of the infinite spaces. Itbows. It bends. It is broken. 

Aut Christus aut Nihil!

VOLTAIRE

The immense bulk of Voltaire's writings is profoundly uninterestingto me. I once saw--I think it must have been in Liverpool--awonderful edition of his complete works published during theRevolution and with a duplicate copy of every illustrative print. Icouldn't afford the price of the thing just then, amazingly low thoughit was, but in my devotion to that great name, I swore that, when Imade my library, that noble edition should be in it. 

I have never made any library and never intend to. The sight ofclassical authors in row upon row depresses me beyond words. Public Libraries are still worse. I have no wish to be helped "to geton in the world" by Mr. Carnegie. I resent the association betweenliterature and "public benefactions. " Does he propose to dole out theexquisite taste necessary to appreciate these rare things, on conditionthat our "home town" pay half the cost? Thank Heaven, a feeling forwhat is noble and distinguished in human thought is beyond thereach of any philanthropist. I mean beyond his power of giving ortaking away, and I do not believe that those among the poor whoreally have this feeling are often found in libraries. They probablyhave their "Oxford Book of English Verse"--a gift from theirgentlest acquaintance--just as I have; and, for the rest, they can selltheir school prizes to buy Hardy and Henry James. 

Except for "Candide" and a few excerpts from the "PhilosophicalDictionary, " I must confess I have no wish to turn over another pageof Voltaire. It is simply incredible to me that human beingspossessed of the same senses as ours could find satisfaction for theirimagination in the sterile moralising, stilted sentiment, superficialwit, and tiresome persiflage of that queer generation. I suppose theydidn't really. I suppose they used to go off on the sly, and readRabelais and Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "socialworld" of those days who enjoyed nothing in literature exceptpseudo-classic attitudes and gestures; just as it is only thepreposterous "social world" with us who enjoy nothing but Gaelicmythology and Oriental Mysticism. 

Those pseudo-classic writers of the eighteenth century, in Englandand France, have their admirers still. I confess such admirationexcites in me as much wonder as the works themselves excitedistaste. What can they find in them that is thrilling or exciting orlarge or luminous or magical? I would pile up the whole lot of themalong with those books that are no books--biblia-a-biblia--of whichCharles Lamb speaks so plaintively. Backgammon boards withlettering behind them should be their companions. 

What a relief to turn from contemplation of the works of Voltaire tothat bust of him by Houdon!

Ah! there we have him, there we apprehend him, there we catch hisundying spirit! And what a man he was! As one looks at that facewherein a mockery more trenchant than the world is able to endureleers and wags the tongue, one feels certain that the soul of theeighteenth century was not really contented with its heroicsentimental mask. The look upon that face, with its aristocraticrefinement, its deadly intellect, its beautiful cynicism, is worth allthe sessions of the Academy and all the seasons of the Salons. Itmakes one think somehow of the gardens of Versailles. One seemsto see it as a mocking fragment of heathen marble--some Priapiandeity of shameless irreverence, peering forth in the moonlight fromamong the yew hedges and the fountains; watching the Pierrot of theMinute make love to Columbine, and the generations of men drift bylike falling leaves. 

Voltaire!--He was well advised to choose that name for himself; aname which sounds even now like the call of a trumpet. And a call itis; a call to the clear intelligences and the unclouded brains; a call tothe generous hearts and the unperverted instincts; a call to sanity andsweetness and clarity and noble commonsense; to all that is free andbrave and gay and friendly, to rally to the standard of truecivilisation against the forces of stupidity, brutality andobscurantism!

Voltaire was one of those great men whose thoughts are armies andwhose words are victories in the cause of the liberation of humanity. If we do not read his books, we look at his image and we read hislife. We name his name and we seal ourselves of his tribe; the nameand tribe of such as refuse to bow their knees to Baal, and if theyworship in the house of Rimmon, worship with a large reservation!

Voltaire is much more than a man of letters. He is a prophet of theage to come, when the execrable superstitions of narrow minds shallno longer darken the sunlight, and the infamous compulsion ofhuman manners, human intellects, human tastes, into the pettymould of oppressive public opinion shall be ended forever. 

That bust in the Louvre and the sublime story of his life will outlastall but one of those half a hundred volumes of his which Mr. Carnegie's liberality has put at the disposal of our "home town. "

We too, like the populace of Paris, on the day when he came back tohis own, flock out to see the "saviour of the Calas. " We too, like thepassionate actresses who crowned his image in the greatcomedy-house while--as they say--he bowed his head so low that hisforehead touched the front of his box, acclaim him still as theMessiah of the Liberty of the human intellect. 

How admirable it is to come back to the spirit and temper ofVoltaire from the fussy self-love and neurotic introspections ofour modern egoists. The new fashionable doctrine among the"intellectuals" is that one is to live in one's ivory tower and let theworld go; live in one's ivory tower while brutal and detestablepeople tyrannise over the gentle and sensitive; live in one's ivorytower while the heavy hand of popular ignorance lies like a deadweight upon all that is fine and rare; live in one's ivory tower whilecomplacent well-paid optimism whispers acquiescence in the "bestof all possible worlds. "

The great Voltaire was made in another mould. Few enjoyed thepleasures of life more than he; but the idea of the stupid brutalityand ignorant tyranny from which in this world so many harmlesspeople suffer filled him with fury. The Calas were only one--onlythe best known--of a long list of victims on whose behalf he enteredthe arena. In these campaigns of justice, he was tireless, inexhaustible, insatiable. He flooded Europe with pamphlets onbehalf of his protégés. He defied Church and State in his crusades todefend them. His house at Ferney became a sort of universal refugeand sanctuary for the persecuted persons of the civilised world. 

A great and good man! I sometimes think that of all the heroicchampions of sensitiveness against insensitiveness, of weaknessagainst strength, of the individual against public opinion, I wouldsoonest call up the noble shade of Voltaire and kiss his pontificalhand!

The Pantheistic Carlyle grumbles at his levity and rails against hispersiflage. One hopes there will always be a "persiflage" like that ofVoltaire to clear the human stage of stupid tyranny and drive themud-monsters of obscurantism back into their mid-night caverns. Hewas a queer kind of Apollo--this little great man with hisold-fashioned wig and the fur-cloak "given him by Catherine ofRussia"--but the flame which inspired him was the authentic fire, andthe arrows with which he fought were dipped in the golden light of thesun. 

I said there was one book of Voltaire's to which the souls of honestpeople who love literature must constantly return. This, of course, is"Candide"; a work worthy to be bound up in royal vellum andstained in Tyrian dyes. If it were not for "Candide"--so stiff andstilted was the fashionable spirit of that age--there would be little inVoltaire's huge shelf of volumes, little except stray flashes of hisirrepressible gaiety, to arrest and to hold us. But into the pages of"Candide" he poured the full bright torrent of his immortal wit, andwith this book in our hands we can feel him and savour him as hewas. 

One has only to glance over the face of Europe at this present hourto get the sting and Pythian poison of this planetary irony. It is like aCircean philtre of sweet sunbrewed wine, sparkling with rainbowbubbles and gleaming with the mockery of the deathless gods. Oncefor all in this scandalous and beautiful book, the lying optimism ofthe preachers receives its crushing blow. "Candide" is the final retortof all sane and generous spirits, full of magnanimity and laughter, tothat morbid and shameful propitiation of the destinies which cries"peace when there is no peace. "

One feels when one reads it as if it were written by some wantonand gracious youth, in the marble courts of some happy palaceof Utopia, commenting upon the mad delusions and diseasedhypocrisies of the men of the old time when superstition still reigned. No book in the world has more spontaneous gaiety, more of thetriumphant spirit of human boyishness in its blood. Certainly thegreat Voltaire was to the end of his life--and you can see that verything in the old-young face of the famous bust--inspired by theimmortal flame of youth. He never grew old. To the last his attitudetoward life was the attitude of that exuberant and unbounded energywhich takes nothing seriously and loves the contest with darknessand stupidity for the sake of the divine "sport" of the struggle. Thereis a certain sun-born sanity of _commonsense_ about such naturalyouthfulness, which contradicts all popular fallacies. 

It is the Mercutio spirit, striking up the swords of both Montaguesand Capulets and fooling them all on their grey-haired obsessions. Itcomes into this solemn custom-ridden world, as if from someyounger and gayer star, and makes wanton sport of its pioushypocrisies. It opens its astonished laughing eyes upon the meannessof men and the cruelties of men and the insane superstitions andillusions of men, and it mocks them all with mischievous delight. Itrefuses to bow its head before hoary idols. It refuses to go weepingand penitent and stricken with a sense of "sin" in the presence ofnatural fleshly instincts. It is absolutely irresponsible--what, in aworld like this, should one be responsible for?--and it is shamelesslyfrivolous. Why not? Where the highest sanctities are so lamentablyhuman, and where the phylacteries of the moralists are embroideredwith such earth-spun threads, why go on tip-toe and with forlornvisage? It is outrageously indecent. Why not? Who made thisportentous "decency" to be the rule of free-born life? Who putfig-leaves upon the sweet flesh of the immortals? Decency after all is amere modern barbarism; the evocation of morbid vulgarity and aperverted heart. 

The great classic civilisations included a poetic obscenity with easynonchalance. They had a god to protect its interests, and itssun-burnt youthful wantonness penetrates all their art. This modern cultof "decency"--thrust down the throat of human joy by a set ofCalvins and John Knoxes--is only one of the indications in ourwretched commercialised age of how far we have sunk from thelaughter of the gods and the dancing of the morning stars. 

To sit listening in the forlorn streets of a Puritan city--when for oneday the cheating tradesmen leave their barbarous shops--to thewailing of unlovely hymns, empty of everything except a degradedsentimentality that would make an Athenian or a Roman slave blushwith shame, is enough to cause one to regard the most scandalouslevity of Voltaire as something positively sacred and holy. 

One wonders that scholars are any longer allowed even to readAristophanes--far less translate him. And cannot they see--theseperverts of a purity that insults the sunshine--that _humour, _ decentor indecent, is precisely the thing that puts sex properly in its place?Cannot they see that by substituting morbid sentiment for honestRabelaisianism they are obsessing the minds of every one with amatter which after all is only one aspect of life?

The great terrible Aphrodite--ruler of gods and men--is not to bebanished by conventicle or council. She will find her way back, though she has to tread strange paths, and the punishment for theelimination of natural wantonness is the appearance of hideoushypocrisy. Driven from the haunts of the Muses, expelled from thesymposia of the wise and witty, the spirit of sexual irreverence takesrefuge in the streets; and the scurrilous vulgarities of the tavernbalance the mincing proprieties of the book-shop. 

After all sex _is_ a laughable thing. The tragedies connected with it, the high and thrilling pleasures connected with it, do not obliterateits original absurdity. And Voltaire--this sane sun-born child of theshameless intellect--never permits us for a moment to forget howridiculous in the last resort all this fuss about the matter is. 

Puritanical suppression and neurotic obsession are found invariablytogether. It is precisely in this way that the great goddess revengesherself upon those who disobey her laws. Voltaire, the leastPuritanical of men, is also the least neurotic. The Satyrish laughterof his eternally youthful energy clears the air of the world. 

Humour of all human things is the most transitory and changing inits moods. As a perambulating interpreter of literature, ancient aswell as modern, this has especially been borne in upon me. I havebeen guilty, in that sickening academic way which makes one howlwith shame in one's self-respecting moments, of "trying out" uponpeople the old stock humours of the standard authors. 

I have dragged poor Bottom back to life and made the arms of theCervantian wind-mill turn and the frogs of Aristophanes croak. Butoh, shade of Yorick! how the sap, the ichor, the sharp authentic tang, that really tickles our sensibilities, has thinned out and fallen flatduring the centuries. My hearers have smiled and tittered perhaps--witha pathetic wish to be kind, or a desire to show themselves notquite dull to these classic amenities--and between us we have, in akind of chuckling pedantry, shuffled through the occasion; but it isnot pleasant to recall such moments. 

Of course a sly comedian could make anything amusing; but onecannot help feeling that if the humour of these famous scenes werereally permanent it would force its way even through the frosty airof academic culture into our human nerves. 

"We are not wood; we are not stones, but men"--and being men theessential spirit of outrageous humour ought surely to hit us, howeverpoorly interpreted. And it does; only the proprieties and thedecencies sheer us off from what is permanently appealing!

I recollect on one occasion, how, after making my hearers cry overthe natural and permanent tragedy of Shylock, I asked the fatuousquestion, addressing it, as one does, to the vague air--

"What are we to say about Launcelot Gobbo?"

Now obviously any one but a professional interpreter of literaturewould know that there's _nothing_ to say about this harmless fool. Shakespeare threw him in as "a comic relief" and probably felt hisstrongest appeal to the native genius of the actor who impersonatedhim. But I can recall now, with that sense of humiliation whichwrings one's withers, the sweetly murmured tones of some tactfulwoman who answered--and the last thing one wants is an answer tothese inanities--

"Oh, we must say that Launcelot Gobbo is charming!"

But Gobbo or no Gobbo, the fact remains that humour is one of themost delicate, the most evasive, and the most unstable of humanqualities. I am myself inclined to hold that sheer outrageous ribaldry, especially if graced with an undertone of philosophic irony, is theonly kind of humour which is really permanent. To give permanenceto any human quality in literature, there must be an appeal tosomething which is beyond the power of time and change andfashion and custom and circumstance. And, as a matter of fact, nothing in the world except sex itself answers this requirement. 

The absurdities of men are infinite, but they alter with everygeneration. What never alters or can alter, is the absurdity of being aman at all. 

Where Shakespeare's humour still touches us most nearly isprecisely in those scenes which the superficial custom of our agefinds least endurable. It is not in his Gobbos or in his frolicsomeboy-girls, that his essential spirit must be looked for; but in hisFalstaffs and Mercutios. 

But Shakespeare's humour is largely, after all, a lovely, dreamy, poetical thing. I doubt if it has the weight or the massive solidity ofthe humour of Rabelais. I think the humour of Charles Lamb wearswell; but that is probably because it has a most indisputable flavourof Rabelaisian roguery underlying its whimsical grace. AnatoleFrance has the true classic spirit. His humour will remain freshforever, because it is the humour of the eternal absurdity of sexualdesire. Heine can never lose the sharpness of his bite, for hisirreverence is the eternal irreverence of the soul that neither man norGod can scourge into solemn submission. 

Humour to be really permanent and to outlast the changes of fashionmust go plummet-like to the basic root of things. It is nothing lessthan extraordinary that Voltaire, living in the age of all ages themost obsessed with the modishness of the hour, should have written"Candide, " a book full of the old unalterable laughter. For "Candide"is not only a clever book, a witty book, a wise book. It is a bookpreposterously and outrageously funny. It tickles one's liver andone's gall; it relaxes one's nerves; it vents the suppressed spleen ofyears in a shout of irrepressible amusement. Certain passages init--and, as one would have suspected they are precisely the passagesthat cannot be quoted in a modern book--compel one to laugh aloudas one thinks of them. 

Personally I hold the opinion that "Candide" is the most humorouspiece of human writing in the world. And yet its ribaldry, itsirreverence, is unbounded. It sticks at nothing. It says everything. Itwags the philosophic tongue at every conceivable embodiment ofpopular superstition. 

If the best books are the books which the authors of them have mostenjoyed writing, the books that have the thrill of excellent pleasureon every page, then "Candide" certainly bears away the palm. Onewould like to have watched Voltaire's countenance as he wrote it. The man's superb audacity, his courage, his aplomb, his god-likeshamelessness, appear in every sentence. 

What an indictment of the human race! What an arraignment of the"insolence of office"! What a tract for the philanthropists! What aslap in the face for the philosophers! And all done with suchimperturbable good temper, such magnanimity of fine malice. 

Poor Candide! how loyally he struggled on, with Pangloss as hismaster and his ideal; and what shocks he experienced! I wouldsooner go down to posterity as the author of "Candide" than of anyvolume in the world except Goethe's "Faust. "

There is something extraordinarily reassuring about the book. Itreconciles one to life even at the moment it is piling up life'sextravagant miseries. Its buoyant and resilient energy, full of theunconquerable irreverence and glorious shamelessness of youth, takes life fairly by the throat and mocks it and defies it to its face. Itindicates courageous gaiety as the only victory, and ironicalsubmission to what even gaiety cannot alter as the only wisdom. 

There are few among us, I suppose, who in going to and fro in theworld, have not come upon some much-persecuted, much-batteredCandide, "cultivating his garden" after a thousand disillusions; andholding fast, in spite of all, to the doctrines of some amazingPangloss. Such encounters with such invincible derelicts must put usmost wholesomely to shame. Our neurotic peevishness, ourimaginary grievances, our vanity and our pride, are shown up atsuch moments in their true light. 

If complacent optimism appears an insolent falsifying of life's facts, a helpless pessimism appears a cowardly surrender to life'simpertinence. Neither to gloss over the outrageous reality nor to loseour resistant obstinacy, whatever such reality may do to us, is thelast word of noble commonsense. And it is a noble commonsensewhich, after all, is Voltaire's preeminent gift. 

The Voltairian spirit refuses to be fooled by man or god. Theuniverse may batter it and bruise it, but it cannot break it. Thebrutality of authority, the brutality of public opinion, may crush it tothe earth; but from the earth it mocks still, mocks and mocks andmocks, with the eternal youthfulness of its wicked tongue!

Voltaire took the world as he found it. With the weapons of theworld he fought the world; with the weapons of the world heovercame the world. The neurotic modern vulgarity which, misinterpreting the doctrines of Nietzsche, worships force and bowsdown in the dust before the great unscrupulous man, finds nosupport in Voltaire. Honest people, cultivating their gardens andkeeping the prophets away from their backyards, find in theVoltairian spirit their perpetual refuge. 

The old Horatian wisdom, clear-eyed, cynical and friendly, leaps uponce again from the dust of the centuries, a clean bright flame, andbrings joyousness and sanity back to the earth. 

Voltaire could be kind and generous without calling to his aid the"immensities" and the "eternities. " He could strike fiercely on behalfof the weak and the oppressed without darkening the sunshine byany worship of "sorrow. " He could be thoroughly and most entirely"good, " while spitting forth his ribald irreverences against everypious dogma. He could be long-suffering and considerate andpatient, to a degree hardly ever known among men of genius, whileruling Europe with his indomitable pen. 

The name of Voltaire is more than a trumpet call of liberty for theoppressed artists and thinkers of the world; it is a challenge to theindividual Candides of our harassed generation to rise above theirown weaknesses and introspections and come forth into the sunshine. 

The name of Voltaire is a living indictment of the madness ofpoliticians and the insanity of parties and sects. It brings us back tothe commonsense of honest men, who "care for none of thesethings. "

He was a queer Apollo of light and reason--this lean bewiggedfigure with cane and snuffbox and laced sleeves--but the powers ofdarkness fled from before his wit as they have not fled from beforethe wit of any other; for the wit of Voltaire is in harmony with thespirit of the human race, as it shakes itself free from superstition"and all uncharitableness. "

He was a materialist if you will, for his "deism" meant no more tohim than a distant blue sky giving the world space and perspectiveand free air; but a materialism that renders men kind and courteous, urbane and sweet-tempered, honest and clear-headed, is better than aspirituality that leads to intolerance and madness. 

He was a ribald and a scoffer in the presence of much that the worldholds sacred; but the most sacred thing of all--the _sanity of humanreason_--has never been more splendidly defended. 

He mocked at the traditions of men; but he remains a champion ofman's highest prerogative. He turned the churches into indecentridicule; but wherever an honest man strikes at tyrannoussuperstition, or a solitary "cultivator of his garden" strikes at stupidmob-rule, one stone the more is added to that great "ecclesia" ofcivilisation, which "Deo erexit Voltaire"; which Voltaire built--andbuilds--to God. 

ROUSSEAU

Nothing is more clear than that the enjoyment of art and letters isforbidden, in any rich or subtle degree, to the apprehension of themoralist. It is also forbidden, for quite other reasons, to theapprehension of the extravagantly vicious. 

The moralist is debarred from any free and passionate love ofliterature by the simple fact that all literature is created out of thevices of men of letters. The extravagantly vicious man is debarredfrom such a love by the still simpler fact that his own dominantobsession narrows down his interest to the particular writers whoshare his own vice. 

When I encounter a catholic and impassioned lover of books--ofmany books and many authors--I know two things about him--Iknow that he is the opposite of a moralist, and I know that he is freefrom any maniacal vice. I might go further and say that I know hehas a rooted hatred of moralists and a tolerant curiosity about everyother form of human aberration. 

When I say that literature is created out of the vices of men of letters, I use the word in a large and liberal sense. A vice is a pleasantsensation condemned by Puritans. It is an over-emphasis laid uponsome normal reaction; or it is a perverse and morbid deviation fromthe normal path. 

It would not require any fantastic stretch of psychologicalinterpretation to show how all the great men of letters are drivenforward along their various paths by some demoniac urge, somedynamic impulse, that has its sensual as well as its intellectual origin. The "psychology of genius" is still in its infancy. It seems a pity thatso much of the critical interpretation of the great writers of the worldshould be in the hands of persons who--by the reason of theiracademic profession--are naturally more interested in the effect ofsuch work upon youthful minds than in its intrinsic quality. 

The barbaric vulgarity of our commercial age is largely responsiblefor the invidious slur cast upon any genuine critical psychology;upon any psychology which frankly recognises the enormousinfluence in literature exercised by normal or abnormal sexualimpulses. 

Criticism of literature which has nothing to say about the particularsexual impulse--natural or vicious, as it may happen--which drives awriter forward, becomes as dull and unenlightening as theologywithout the Real Presence. 

Among the influences that obstruct such free criticism among us atpresent may be noted Puritan fanaticism, academic professionalism(with its cult of the "young person"), popular vulgarity, and thatcurious Anglo-Saxon uneasiness and reticence in these things whichwhile in no sense a sign of purity of mind invokes an invincibleprejudice against any sort of straightforward discussion. 

It is for these reasons that the art of criticism in England andAmerica is so childish and pedantic when compared with that ofFrance. In France even the most reactionary of critics--persons likeLéon Bloy, for instance--habitually use the boldest sexualpsychology in elucidating the mysterious caprices of human genius;and one can only wish that the conventional inhibition that renderssuch freedom impossible with us could come to be seen in its truelight, that is to say as itself one of the most curious examples ofsexual morbidity ever produced by unnatural conditions. 

Rousseau is perhaps of all great original geniuses the one mostimpossible to deal with without some sort of recognition of thesexual peculiarities which penetrated his passionate and restlessspirit. No writer who has ever lived had so sensitive, so nervous, sovibrant a physiological constitution. Nothing that he achieved inliterature or in the creation of a new atmosphere of feeling in Europe, can be understood without at least a passing reference to theimpulses which pushed him forward on his wayward road. 

As we watch him in his pleasures, his passions, his pilgrimages, hissavage reactions, it is difficult to avoid the impression that certainkinds of genius are eminently and organically anti-social. 

It is perhaps for this reason at bottom that the political-mindedAnglo-Saxon race, with its sturdy "good citizen" ideals, feels sohostile and suspicious toward these great anarchists of the soul. 

Rousseau is indeed, temperamentally considered, one of the mostpassionately anarchical minds in the history of the race. The citizenof Geneva, the lover of humanity, the advocate of liberty andequality, was so scandalous an individualist that there has come tobreathe from the passage of his personality across the world anintoxicating savour of irresponsible independence. 

The most ingrained pursuer of his own path, the most intransigeant"enemy of the people, " would be able to derive encouragement inhis obstinate loneliness from reading the works of this philanthropistwho detested humanity; this reformer who fled from society; thisadvocate of domesticity who deserted his children; this pietist whoworshipped the god of nature. 

The man's intellect was so dominated by his sensualism that, even atthe moment he is eloquently protesting in favour of a regeneratedhumanity living under enlightened laws, there emanates from themere physical rhythm of his sentences an anti-social passion, amisanthropic self-worship, a panic terror of the crowd, whichremains in the mind when all his social theories are forgotten. 

He is the grand example of a writer whose sub-conscious intimateself contradicts his overt dogmas and creates a spiritual atmospherein which his own reforming schemes wither and vanish. 

Rousseau is, from any moral or social or national point of view, aforce of much more disintegrating power than Nietzsche can ever be. And he is this for the very reason that his sensual and sentimentalnature dominates him so completely. 

From the austere Nietzschean watch-tower, this man's incorrigibleweakness presents itself as intrinsically more dangerous to the racethan any unscrupulous strength. The voluptuous femininity of hisinsidious eloquence lends itself, as Nietzsche saw, to every sort ofcrafty hypocrisy. 

Rousseau's rich, subtle, melodious style--soft as a voice of a choir ofwomen celebrating some Euripidean Dionysus--flows round therevolutionary figure of Liberty with an orgiastic passion worthy ofthe backward flung heads, bared breasts and streaming hair of adance of Bassarids. 

Other symbolic figures besides that of Liberty emerge above thestream of this impassioned "Return to Nature. " The figure of justiceis there and the figure of fraternity; while above them all theshadowy lineaments of some female personification of the Future ofHumanity, crowned with the happy stars of the Age of Gold, looksdown upon the rushing tide. 

"Oh, Liberty!" one can hear the voice of many heroic soulsprotesting, "Oh, Liberty--what things are done in thy name!"

For it is of the essential nature of Rousseau's eloquence, as it is ofthe essential nature of his temperament, that any kind of sensualabandonment, slurred over by rich orchestral litanies of humanfreedom, should be more than tolerated. 

This Religion of Liberty lends itself to strange hypocrisies when thetorrent of his imaginative passion breaks upon the jagged rocks ofreality. That is why--from Robespierre down to very modernpersons--the eloquent use of such vague generalisations as Justice, Virtue, Simplicity, Nature, Humanity, Reason, excites profoundsuspicion in the psychological mind. 

From the antinomian torrent of this voluptuous anarchy the spirits ofEpicurus, of Spinoza, of Goethe, of Nietzsche, turn away in horror. This is indeed an insurrection from the depths; this is indeed abreaking loose of chaos; this is indeed a "return to Nature. " For thereis a perilous intoxication in all this, and, like chemical ingredients insome obsessing drug these great vague names work magically andwantonly upon us, giving scope to all our weaknesses andperversities. 

If I were asked--taking all the great influences which have mouldedhuman history together--what figure, what personality, I would setup as the antipodal antagonist of the influence of Nietzsche, I wouldretort with the name of Rousseau. 

Here is an "immoralism" deeper and far more anti-social than any"beyond good and evil. " Nietzsche hammered furiously at Christianethics; but he did so with the sublime intention of substituting forwhat he destroyed a new ethical construction of his own. 

Rousseau, using with stirring and caressing unction symbol aftersymbol, catch-word after catch-word, from the moral atmosphere ofChristendom, draws us furiously after him, in a mad hystericalabandonment of all that every human symbol covers, toward acataract of limitless and almost inhuman subjectivity. 

To certain types of mind Rousseau appears as a noble prophet ofwhat is permanent in evangelic "truth" and of what is desirable andlovely in the future of humanity. To other types--to the pronouncedclassical or Goethean type, for instance--he must appear as the mostpernicious, the most disintegrating, the most poisonous, the mostunhealthy influence that has ever been brought to bear upon theworld. Such minds--confronting him with a genuine and logicalanarchist, such as Max Stirner--would find him far more dangerous. For Rousseau's anarchy is of an emotional, psychological, femininekind; a kind that carries along upon the surface of its eloquenceevery sort of high-sounding abstraction; while, all the time, thesinuous waters of its world-sapping current filter through all thefloodgates of human institution. 

One cannot but be certain that Rousseau would have been one ofthose irresistible but most injurious persons whom, honorablycrowned with fillets of well-spun wool and fresh-grown myrtle, Plato would have dismissed from the gates of the great Republic. 

One asks oneself the question--and it is a question less often askedthan one would expect--whether it is really possible that a man ofimmense genius and magnetic influence can actually, as the phraseruns, "do more harm than good" to the happiness of the human race. We are so absurdly sheep-like and conventional in these things thatwe permit our old-fashioned belief in a benignant providenceturning all things to good, to transform itself into a vague optimistictrust in evolutionary progress; a progress which can never for onemoment fail to make everything work out to the advantage ofhumanity. 

We have such pathetic trust too in the inherent friendliness of theuniverse that it seems inconceivable to us that a great genius, inspired from hidden cosmic depths, should be actually a power ofevil, dangerous to humanity. And yet, why not? Why should therenot appear sometimes from the secret reservoirs of Being, powerfuland fatal influences that, in the long result, are definitely baleful andmalign in their effect upon the fortunes of the human race?

This was the underlying belief in the Middle Ages, and it led to theabominable persecution of persons who were obviously increasingthe sum of human happiness. But may not there have been behindsuch unpardonable persecution, a legitimate instinct ofself-protection--an instinct for which in these latter days of popularworship of "great names" there is no outlet of expression?

The uneasiness of the modern English-speaking world in thepresence of free discussion of sex is, of course, quite a differentmatter. This objection is a mere childish prejudice reinforced byoutworn superstitions. The religious terror excited by certainformidable free-thinkers and anti-social philosophers in earlier dayswent much deeper than this, and was quite free from that mereprurient itch of perverted sensuality which inspires the Puritans ofour time. 

This religious terror, barbarous and hideous as it was in many of itsmanifestations, may have been a legitimate expression ofsubconscious panic in the presence of something that, at least nowand then, was really antagonistic to the general welfare. 

Why should there not arise sometimes great demonic forces, incarnated in formidable personalities, who are really and truly"humani generis hostes, " enemies of the human race? The weirdmediaeval dream of the anti-Christ, drawn from Apocalypticliterature, symbolises this occult possibility. 

Because a writer has immense genius there is no earthly reason whyhis influence upon the world should be good. There is no reasonwhy it should be for the happiness of the world, putting the moralquestion aside. 

In the classic ages the State regulated literature. In the Middle Ages, the Church regulated it. In our own age it is not regulated at all; it isneglected by ignorance and expurgated by stupidity. The mob in ourdays cringes before great names, the journalist exploits great names, and the school-master dishes them up for the young. No oneseriously criticises them; no one seriously considers their influenceupon the world. 

The business man has a shrewd suspicion that they have noinfluence at all; or certainly none comparable with that of wellplaced advertisements. Meanwhile under the surface, from sensitiveminds to sensitive minds, there run the electric currents of newintellectual ideas, setting in motion those psychic and spiritualforces which still, in spite of all our economic philosophers, upheavethe world. 

Was Rousseau, more than any one, more than Voltaire, more thanDiderot, responsible for the French Revolution? I am inclined tohold that he was, and if so, according to the revolutionary instinctsof all enemies of oppression, we are bound to regard his influence as"good"; unless by chance we are among those who consider thetyranny of the middle-class no less outrageous than the tyranny ofthe aristocracy. But Rousseau's influence--so far stretching is thepower of personal genius--does not stop with the French Revolution. It does not stop with the Commune or with any other outburst ofpopular indignation. It works subterraneanly in a thousand deviousways until the present hour. Wherever, under the impassionedenthusiasm of such words as Justice, Liberty, Equality, Reason, Nature, Love, self-idealising, self-worshipping, self-deceivingprophets of magnetic genius give way to their weaknesses, theirperversities, their anti-social reactions, the vibrant nerves of thegreat citizen of Geneva may still be felt, quivering melodiously;touching us with the tremulousness of their anarchical revolt againsteverything hard and stern and strong. 

Suppose for a moment that Rousseau were the equivocal perniciousinfluence, half-priest, half-pandar, half-charlatan, half-prophet of aworld-disintegrating orgy of sentiment, should I for one, I amtempted to ask, close the gates of our platonic republic against him?

Not so! Let the world look to itself. Let the sheep-like crowd takethe risks of its docility. Let the new bourgeois tyrants cuddle andcosset the serpent that shall bite them, as did the salon ladies of theold regime. 

No! Let the world look to itself and let progress look to itself. 

There seems something exhilarating about this possible appearanceupon the earth of genuinely dangerous writers, of writers whoexploit their vices, lay bare their weaknesses, brew intoxicatingphiltres of sweet poison out of their obsessions and lead humanity tothe edge of the precipice! And there is something peculiarlystimulating to one's psychological intelligence when all this is doneunder the anaesthesia of humanitarian rhetoric and the lullingincantations of pastoral sentiment. 

Rousseau is, in one very important sense, the pioneer of that art ofdelicate egoism in which the wisest epicureans of our day love toindulge. I refer to his mania for solitude, his self-conscious passionfor nature. This feeling for nature was absolutely genuine in him andassociates itself with all his amours and all his boldest speculations. 

The interesting thing about it is that it takes the form of that vague, intimate magical rapport between our human souls and whatevermysterious soul lurks in the world around us, which has become inthese recent days the predominant secret of imaginative poetry. 

Not that Rousseau carries things as far as Wordsworth or Shelley. He is a born prose writer, not a poet. But for the very reason that heis writing prose, and writing it with a sentimental rather than amystical bias, there are aspects of his work which have a simplenatural _personal_ appeal that the sublime imagination of the greatspiritual poets must necessarily lack. 

There is indeed about Rousseau's allusions to places and spots whichhad become dear to him from emotional association a lingeringregretful tenderness, full of wistful memories and a vague tremulousyearning, which leaves upon the mind a feeling unlike that producedby any other writer. The subconscious music of his days seems atthose times to rise from some hidden wells of emotion in him andoverflow the world. 

When he speaks of such places the mere admixture in his tone of thematerial sensuousness of the eighteenth century with something newand thrilling and different has itself an appealing charm. Theblending of a self-conscious artificial, pastoral sentiment, redolent ofthe sophisticated Arcadias of Poussin and Watteau, and suggestiveof the dairy-maid masquerades of Marie Antoinette in the gardens ofVersailles, with a direct passionate simplicity almost worthy ofsome modern Russian, produces a unique and memorable effectupon a sympathetic spirit. 

The mere fact that that incorrigible egoist and introspectiveepicurean, William Hazlitt, whose essays are themselves full of aningratiating and engaging sensuousness, should have takenRousseau as his special master and idealised him into a symbolicfigure, is a proof of the presence in him of something subtle, arresting and unusual. 

I always like to bring these recondite odours and intimations ofdelicate spiritual qualities down to the test of actual experience, andI am able to say that, through the help of Hazlitt's intuitivecommentaries, the idea of Rousseau has twined itself around someof the pleasantest recollections of my life. 

I can see at this moment as I pen these lines, a certain ditch-borderedpath leading to a narrow foot-bridge across a river in Norfolk. I canrecall the indescribable sensations which the purple spikes ofloosestrife and the tall willow-herb, growing with green rushes, produced in my mind on a certain misty morning when the veiledfuture bowed toward me like a vision of promise and the dead pastflew away over the fens like a flight of wild swans. 

The image of Rousseau cherishing so tenderly every rose-tingedmemory and every leafy oasis in his passionate pilgrimage, came tome then, as it comes to me now, a thing that no harsh blows of theworld, no unkind turns of fate, no "coining of my soul for drachmas"can ever quite destroy. 

There is, after all, a sort of spiritual second self, a sort of astralresiduum left behind by a personality of this kind, which to certainnatures becomes more sacred and suggestive than any of thosetedious speculations or literary theories about which the historiansmay argue. 

Most human beings--especially in these "centres of civilisation, "which are more hideous than anything the sun has looked upon sinceit watched the mammoths tusking the frozen earth or theichtheosauruses wallowing in the primeval mud--go through this lifeblindly, mechanically, unconsciously, fulfilling their duties, snatching at their pleasures, and shuddering at the thought of the end. 

Few men and women seem really conscious of what it is to be alive, to be alive and endowed with imagination and memory, upon thistime-battered planet. It needs perhaps the anti-social instincts of atrue "philosophic anarchist" to detach oneself from the absorbingpresent and to win the larger perspective. 

Rousseau was of so fluid, so irresponsible a temperament that henever could be brought to take seriously, to take as anything but assuggestive subjects for eloquent diatribes, the practical and domesticrelations between human beings in organised society. 

He played lightly with these relations, he laughed over them andwept over them, he wrote impassioned and dithyrambic orationsupon them. But they were not his real life. His real life was the lifehe lived with his music and his botany and his love affairs, the lifeof his dreamy wanderings from refuge to refuge among the woodsand chateaux of France; the life of his delicate memories and wistfulregrets; the life of his thrilling indescribable thoughts, half sensualand half spiritual, as he drifted along the lonely roads and under thesilent stars, or sat staring at the fire-light in his Paris attic while thecity roared about him. 

No lonely introspective spirit, withdrawn from the crowd and hatingthe voices of the world, can afford to lose touch with the secret ofRousseau; with what his self-centred and impassioned existencereally meant. 

We need not tease ourselves with his pious speculations, with hisphilanthropic oratory or his educational proposals. These can be leftto those who are interested in such things. What we find arrestingand suggestive in him, after this lapse of years, is a certain quality ofpersonal passion, a certain vein of individual feeling, the touch ofwhich still has a living power. 

How interesting, for example, is that voluptuous desire of his to laybare all his basest and meanest lusts, all his little tricks and devicesand vanities and envies and jealousies. This mania for self-exposure, this frantic passion for self-laceration and self-humiliation is all of apiece with the manner in which he seemed to enjoy being ill-usedand tyrannised over in his singular love-affairs. 

More interesting still, and still more morbid, is that persecutionmania which seized him in his later days--the mania that all theworld loathed him and laughed at him and plotted to make a fool ofhim. Though betrayed into using the popular phrase, "persecutionmania, " I am myself inclined to resent, on Rousseau's behalf and onbehalf of those who temperamentally resemble him, this coolassumption by the normal world that those whom it instinctivelydetests are "mad" when they grow aware of such detestation. 

There seems no doubt that certain human beings appear at intervalson the world stage, whose sentient organisation, attuned to anabnormal receptivity, renders them alien and antagonistic to themasses of mankind. 

They seem like creatures dropped upon the earth from some otherplanet, and, do what they may, they cannot grow "native and enduedunto the element" of our terrestrial system. This difference in themis not only irritating to the normal herd; it is also provocative ofbitter hostility in those among their contemporaries who arethemselves possessed of genius. 

These other wooers of posterity feel outraged and piqued to the limitof their endurance at having to contend in the same arena with anantagonist who seems to obey no human rules. "A conspiracy ofsilence" or of scandalous aspersions is almost instinctively set onfoot. 

Rousseau's so-called mania of persecution can easily be explained. There was morbidity; there was neurotic unwisdom, in the mannerin which he dealt with all these people. But he was probablyperfectly right in assuming that they came to hate him. 

In his Confessions he does his best to make posterity hate him; andin private life he must have been constantly, like one of thosestrange self-lacerating persons in Dostoievsky, bringing to the front, with shameless indecency, his vanities and jealousies, his weaknessand his manias. When he couldn't enjoy the society of some friendlylady--and his friends were nearly always uneasy under theinfliction--he poured forth his childish petulances and his rareimaginations on the bosom, so to speak, of society in general;and society in general flung him back in wondering contempt. 

His clever contemporaries would naturally, under the pressure of themoment, concentrate their critical attention upon the weakest part ofhis genius--that is to say upon his reforming theories and largeworld-shaking speculations--while the portion of him that interestsus now would merely strike them as tiresome and irrelevant. 

He grew more and more lonely as he neared his end. It might be saidthat he deserved this fate; he who refused to accept even theresponsibility of paternity. But one cannot resist a certainsatisfaction in noting how the high-placed society people who cameto visit him as he sat in his attic, copying music for a livelihood, were driven from his door. 

The great Sentimentalist must have had his exquisite memories, even then, as he sat brooding over his dull mechanical work, hewhose burning eloquence about Liberty and Justice and Simplicityand Nature was already sowing the seed of the earthquake. 

Queer memories he must have had of his early tramp life throughthe roads and villages of France; of his conversations with thesceptical Hume among the hills of Derbyshire; of his sweet romanticsojournings in old historic houses, and his strange passions and fatalloves. But the rarest of his memories must have been of those hoursand days when, in the pastoral seclusion of some cherishedhiding-place, he let the world go by and sank, among patient leaves andflowers that could not mock him, into his own soul and the soul ofnature. 

He has been hugely vituperated by evolutionary philosophers for hismania for the "age of gold" and his disbelief in progress. 

One of his favourite themes that civilisation is a curse and not ablessing excited the derision of his best friends. Others said that hestole the idea. But we may be sure that as he copied his daily portionof music with the civilisation of the Salons clamouring unheededaround him, his mind reverted rather to those exquisite momentswhen he had been happy alone, than to all the triumphs of his genius. 

He was just the type that the world would naturally persecute. Devoid of any sparkling wit, devoid of any charm of manner, singularly devoid of the least sense of proportion, he lent himself toevery sort of social rancour. He was one of those persons who takethemselves seriously, and that, in his world as in the world of ourown time, was an unpardonable fault. 

He loved humanity better than men and women. He loved naturebetter than humanity. 

He was a man with little sense of humour and with little interest inother men. He lived for his memories and his dreams, his glimpsesand his visions. 

Turning away from all dogmatic creeds, he yet sought God andprayed to him for his mercy. 

Born into a world whose cleverness he dreaded, whose institutionshe loathed, whose angers he provoked, whose authorities hescandalised, whose crowds he hated, he went aside "botanizing" and"copying music"; every now and then hurling forth from hisinterludes of sentimental journeying a rhythmical torrent of eloquentprophecy in which he himself only half believed and of which, quiteoften, "the idea was stolen. "

In his abnormal receptivity, he was used as a reed for the invisiblepowers to blow their wild tunes through and to trouble the earth. Heproduced one great Revolution, and he may, through the medium ofsouls like his own, produce another; but all the time his realhappiness was in his wanderings by field and hedge and road andlane, by canal side and by river bank, thinking the vague deliciousthoughts of sensuous solitude and dreaming over the dumbquiescence of that mute inanimate background of our days intowhich, with his exasperated human nerves, he longed to sink and beat rest. 

BALZAC

The real value of the creations of men of genius is to make richerand more complicated what might be called the imaginative marginof our normal life. 

We all, as Goethe says, have to bear the burden of humanity--wehave to plunge into the bitter waters of reality, so full of sharp rocksand blinding spray. We have to fight for our own hand. We have toforget that we so much as possess a soul as we tug and strain at theresistant elements out of which we live and help others to live. 

It is nonsense to pretend that the insight of philosophers and theenergy of artists help us very greatly in this bleak wrestling. Theyare there, these men of genius, securely lodged in the Elysian fieldsof large and free thoughts--and we are here, sweating and toiling inthe dust of brutal facts. 

The hollow idealism that pretends that the achievements of literatureand thought enter profoundly into the diurnal necessity which prodsus forward is a plausible and specious lie. We do not learn how todeal craftily and prosperously with the world from the Machiavelsand Talleyrands. We do not learn how to love the world and savourit with exquisite joy from the Whitmans and Emersons. What we dois to struggle on, as best we may; living by custom, by prejudice, byhope, by fear, by envy and jealousy, by ambition, by vanity, by love. 

They call it our "environment, " this patched up and piecemealpanorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither andthither; and they call it our "heredity, " this confused and twistedamalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions, which drives us backward and forward from within. But there ismore in the lives of the most wretched of us than this blind struggle. 

There are those invaluable, unutterable moments, which we have _toourselves, _ free of the weight of the world. There are the moments--thedoor of our bedroom, of our attic, of our ship's cabin, of ourmonastic cell, of our tenement-flat, shut against the intruder--whenwe can enter the company of the great shadows and largely andfreely converse with them to the forgetting of all vexation. 

At such times, it is to the novelists, to the inventors of stories, thatwe most willingly turn for the poppied draught that we crave. Thepoets hurt us with the pang of too dear beauty. They remind us toopitifully of what we have missed. There is too much Rosemarywhich is "for remembrance" about their songs; too many deadviolets between their leaves!

But on the large full tide of a great human romance, we can forgetall our troubles. We can live in the lives of people who resembleourselves and yet are not ourselves. We can put our own misguidedlife into the sweet distance, and see it--it also--as an invented story;a story that may yet have a fortunate ending!

The philosophers and even the poets are too anxious to convert us totheir visions and their fancies. There is the fatal odour of the prophetin their perilous rhetoric, and they would fain lay their most noblefingers upon our personal matters. They want to make us moral orimmoral. They want to thrust their mysticism, their materialism, their free love, or their imprisoned thoughts, down our reluctantthroats. 

But the great novelists are up to no such mischief; they are dreamingof no such outrage. They are telling their stories of the old eternaldilemmas; stories of love and hate and fear and wonder and madness;stories of life and death and strength and weakness and perversion;stories of loyalty and treachery, of angels and devils, of things seenand things unseen. The greatest novelists are not the ones that dealin sociological or ethical problems. They are the ones that make usforget sociological and ethical problems. They are the ones that dealwith the beautiful, mad, capricious, reckless, tyrannous passions, which will outlast all social systems and are beyond the categoriesof all ethical theorising. 

First of all the arts of the world was, they say, the art of dancing. The aboriginal cave-men, we are to believe, footed it in their longtwilights to tunes played on the bones of mammoths. But I like tofancy, I who have no great love for this throwing abroad of legs andarms, that there were a few quiet souls, even in those days, whopreferred to sit on their haunches and listen to some hoary greybeardtell stories, stories I suppose of what it was like in still earlier days, when those lumbering Diplodocuses were still snorting in theremoter marshes. 

It was not, as a matter of fact, in any attic or ship's cabin that I readthe larger number of Balzac's novels. I am not at all disinclined toexplain exactly and precisely where it was, because I cannot helpfeeling that the way we poor slaves of work manage to snatch anhour's pleasure, and the little happy accidents of place andcircumstance accompanying such pleasure, are a noteworthy part ofthe interest of our experience. It was, as it happens, in a cheerfulbow-window in the Oxford High Street that I read most of Balzac;read him in the dreamy half-light of late summer afternoons whilethe coming on of evening seemed delayed by something golden inthe drowsy air which was more than the mere sinking of the sunbehind the historic roofs. 

Oxford is not my Alma Mater. The less courtly atmosphere whichrises above the willows and poplars of the Cam nourished myyouthful dreams; and I shall probably to my dying day never quiteattain the high nonchalant aloofness from the common herd properto a true scholar. 

It was in the humbler capacity of a summer visitor that I foundmyself in those exclusive purlieus, and it amuses me now to recallhow I associated, as one does in reading a great romance, thepersonages of the Human Comedy with what surrounded me then. 

It is a far cry from the city of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater tothe city of Vautrin and Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré andGobsec and Père Goriot and Diane de Maufrigneuse; and the greatBalzacian world has the power of making every other milieu seem alittle faded and pallid. But one got a delicious sense of contrastreading him just there in those golden evenings, and across themargin of one's mind floated rich and thrilling suggestions of thevast vistas of human life. One had the dreamy pleasure that somesequestered seminarist might have, who, on a sunny bench, underhigh monastic walls, reads of the gallantries and adventures of thegreat ungodly world outside. 

Certainly the heavy avalanches of scoriac passion which rend theirway through the pages of the Human Comedy make even thegraceful blasphemies of the Oscar Wilde group, in those fastidiousenclosures, seem a babyish pretence of naughtiness. 

I remember how I used to return after long rambles through thosefields and village lanes which one reads about in "Thyrsis, " andlinger in one of the cavernous book-shops which lie--like littleBodleians of liberal welcome--anywhere between New College andBalliol, hunting for Balzac in the original French. Since then I havenot been able to endure to read him in any edition except in that verycheapest one, in dusty green paper, with the pages always soresistently uncut and tinted with a peculiar brownish tint such as Ihave not seemed to find in any other volumes. What an enormousnumber of that particular issue there must be in Paris, if one can findso many of them still, sun-bleached and weather-stained, in the oldbook-shops of Oxford!

Translations of Balzac, especially in those "editions de luxe" withdreadful interpretative prefaces by English professors, are odious tome. They seem the sort of thing one expects to find underglass-cases in the houses of cultured financiers. They are admirablyadapted for wedding presents. And they have illustrations! That isreally too much. A person who can endure to read Balzac, or anyother great imaginative writer, in an edition with illustrations, is aperson utterly outside the pale. It must be for barbarians of this sortthat the custom has arisen of having handsome young women, representing feminine prettiness in general, put upon the covers ofbooks in the way they put them upon chocolate boxes. I have seeneven "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" prostituted in this manner. It is allon a par with every other aspect of modern life. Indeed it may besaid that what chiefly distinguishes our age from previous ages is itshabit of leaving nothing to the imagination. 

On the whole, Balzac must still be regarded as the greatest novelistthat ever lived. Not to love Balzac is not to love the art of fiction, not to love the huge restorative pleasure of wandering at largethrough a vast region of imaginary characters set in localities andscenes which may be verified and authenticated by contact withoriginal places. 

I would flatly refuse to two classes of persons, at any rate, any claimto be regarded as genuine lovers of fiction. The first class are thosewho want nothing but moral support and encouragement. These arestill under the illusion that Balzac is a wicked writer. The secondclass are those who want nothing but neurotic excitement andtingling sensual thrills. These are under the illusion that Balzac is adull writer. 

There is yet a third class to whom I refuse the name of lovers offiction. These are the intellectual and psychological maniacs whowant nothing but elaborate social and personal problems, theelucidation of which may throw scientific light upon anthropologicalevolution. Well! We have George Eliot to supply the need of thefirst; the author of "Homo Sapiens" to supply the need of the second;and Paul Bourget to deal with the last. 

It is difficult not to extend our refusal of the noble title of realFiction-Lovers to the whole modern generation. The frivolous crazefor short books and short stories is a proof of this. 

The unfortunate illusion which has gone abroad of late that a thingto be "artistic" must be concise and condensed and to the point, encourages this heresy. I would add these "artistic" persons withtheir pedantry of condensation and the "exact phrase" to all theothers who don't really love this large and liberal art. To a genuinefiction-lover a book cannot be too long. What causes such trueamorists of imaginative creation real suffering is when a bookcomes to an end. It can never be enjoyed again with quite the samerelish, with quite the same glow and thrill and ecstasy. 

To listen to certain fanatics of the principle of unity is to get theimpression that these mysterious "artistic qualities" are things thatmay be thrust into a work from outside, after a careful perusal of, shall we say, Flaubert's Letters to Madame Something-or-other, or acourse of studies of the Short Story at Columbia University. Chopthe thing quite clear of all "surplusage and irrelevancy"; chop it clearof all "unnecessary detail"; chop the descriptions and chop theincidents; chop the characters; "chop it and pat it and mark it withT, " as the nursery rhyme says, "and put it in the oven for Baby andme!" It is an impertinence, this theory, and an insult to naturalhuman instincts. 

Art is not a "hole and corner" thing, an affair of professionalpreciosities and discriminations, a set of tiresome rules to be learnedby rote. 

Art is the free play of generous and creative imaginations with thelife-blood of the demiurgic forces of the universe in their veins. There is a large and noble joy in it, a magnanimous nonchalance andaplomb, a sap, an ichor, a surge of resilient suggestion, a richineffable magic, a royal liberality. 

Devoid of the energy of a large and free imagination, art dwindlesinto an epicene odalisque, a faded minion of pleasure in a perfumedgarden. It becomes the initiatory word of an exclusive Rosicrucianorder. It becomes the amulet of an affected superiority, the signetring of a masquerading conspiracy. 

The habitation of the spirit of true art is the natural soul of man, as ithas been from the beginning and as it will be to the end. The soul ofman has depths which can only be fathomed by an art which breaksevery rule of the formalists and transgresses every technical law. 

The mere fact that the kind of scrupulous artistry advocated by thesepedants of "style" is a kind that can be defined in words at all writesits own condemnation upon it. For the magical evocations of truegenius are beyond definition. 

As Goethe says the important thing in all great art is just whatcannot be put in words. Those who would seek so to confine it arethe bunglers who have missed the mark themselves, and "theylike"--the great critic adds malignantly--"they like to be together. "

The so-called rules of technique are nothing when you come toanalyse them but a purely empirical and pragmatic deduction fromthe actual practise of the masters. And every new master creates newlaws and a new taste capable of appreciating these new laws. Thereis no science of art. These modern critics, with their cult of "theunique phrase" and the "sharply defined image, " are just asintolerant as the old judicial authorities whose prestige they scout;just as intolerant and just as unilluminating. 

It is to the _imagination_ we must go for a living appreciation ofgenius, and many quite simple persons possess this, to whom thejargon of the studios is empty chatter. 

No human person has a right to say "Balzac ought to have put moredelicacy, more subtlety into his style, " or to say, "Balzac ought tohave eliminated those long descriptions. " Balzac is Balzac; and thatends it. If you prefer the manner of Henry James, by all means readhim and let the other alone. 

There is such a thing as the mere absence of what the "little masters"call style being itself a quite definite style. 

A certain large and colourless fluidity of manner is often the onlymedium through which a vision of the world can be expressed at all;a vision, that is to say, of a particular kind, with the passion of itcarried to a particular intensity. 

In America, at this present time, the work of Mr. Theodore Dreiseris an admirable example of this sort of thing. Mr. Dreiser, it must beadmitted, goes even beyond Balzac in his contempt for the rules; butjust as none of the literary goldsmiths of France convey to us theflavour of Paris as Balzac does, so none of the clever writers ofAmerica convey to us the flavour of America as Mr. Dreiser does. 

Indeed I am ready to confess that I have derived much light inregard to my feeling for the demonic energy of the great Frenchmanfrom watching the methods of this formidable American. I discern inMr. Dreiser the same obstinate tenacity of purpose, the same occultperception of subterranean forces, the same upheaving, plough-like"drive" through the materials of life and character. 

Balzac is undoubtedly the greatest purely creative genius that hasever dealt with the art of fiction. It is astonishing to realise howentirely the immense teeming world through which he leads us is theproduct of unalloyed imagination. 

Experience has its place in the art of literature; it would be foolish todeny it; but the more one contemplates the career of Balzac the moreevident does it become that his art is the extreme opposite of the artof the document-hunters and the chroniclers. 

The life which he habitually and continually led was the life of theimagination. He lived in Paris. He knew its streets, its tradesmen, itsartists, its adventurers, its aristocratic and its proletarian demimonde. 

He came from the country and he knew the country; its peasants, itsfarmers, its provincial magnates, its village tyrants, its priests, itsdoctors, its gentlemen of leisure. 

But when one comes to calculate the enormous number of hours hespent over his desk, night after night, and day after day, one comesto see that there was really very scant margin left for the consciouscollecting of material. The truth is he lived an abnormally sedentarylife. Had he gone about a little more he would probably have livedmuch longer. The flame of his genius devoured him, powerful andtitanic though his bodily appearance was, and unbounded though hisphysical energy. He _lived by the imagination_ as hardly anotherwriter has ever done and his reward is that, as long as humanimagination interests itself in the panorama of human affairs, hisstories will remain thrilling. How little it really matters whether thisstory or the other rounds itself off in the properly approved way!

Personally I love to regard all the stories of Balzac as one immensenovel--of some forty volumes--dealing with the torrential life of thehuman race itself as it roars and eddies in its huge turbulency withFrance and Paris for a background. I am largely justified in this viewof Balzac's work by his own catholic and comprehensive title--TheHuman Comedy--suggestive certainly of a sort of uniting threadrunning through the whole mass of his productions. I am alsojustified by his trick of introducing again and again the samepersonages; a device which I daresay is profoundly irritating to themodern artistic mind, but which is certainly most pleasing to thenatural human instinct. 

This alone, this habit of introducing the same people in book afterbook, is indicative of how Balzac belongs to the company of thegreat natural story-tellers. A real lover of a story wants it to go onforever; wants nobody in it ever to die; nobody in it ever todisappear; nobody in it ever to round things off or complete his life'sapprenticeship, with a bow to the ethical authorities, in thatannoying way of so many modern writers. 

No wonder Oscar Wilde wept whenever he thought of the death ofLucien de Rubempré. Lucien should have been allowed at least onemore "avatar. " That is one of the things that pleases me so much inthat old ten-penny paper edition published by the great Paris house. We have a list of the characters in the index, with all their otherappearances on the stage; just exactly as if it were real life! It was allreal enough at any rate to Balzac himself, according to that beautifultale of how he turned away from some troublesome piece ofpersonal gossip with the cry:

"Come back to actualities! Come back to my books!"

And in the old ideal platonic sense it _is_ the true reality, thisreproduction of life through the creative energy of the imagination. 

The whole business of novel writing lies in two things; in thecreating of exciting situations and imaginatively suggestivecharacters--and in making these situations and characters _seemreal. _

They need not be dragged directly forth from personal experiences. One grows to resent the modern tendency to reduce everything toautobiographical reminiscence. These histories of free-thinkingyoung men breaking loose from their father's authority and runningamuck among Paris studios and Leicester Square actresses becometedious and banal after a time. Such sordid piling up of meticulousdetail, drawn so obviously from the writer's own adventures, throwsa kind of grey dust over one's interest in the narrative. 

One's feeling simply is that it is all right and all true; that just inthis casual chaotic sort of way the impact of life has struck oneself asone drifted along. But there is no more in it than a clever sort ofintellectual photography, no more in it than a more or less moralisedversion of the ordinary facts of an average person's life-story. 

One is tempted to feel that, after all, there is a certain underlyingjustification for the man in the street's objection to this kind ofso-called "realism. " We have a right after all to demand of artsomething more than a clever reproduction of the experiences wehave undergone. We have a right to demand something creative, something exceptional, something imaginative, something that liftsus out of ourselves and our ordinary environments, something thathas _deep holes_ in it that go down into unfathomable mystery, something that has vistas, horizons, large and noble perspectives, breadth, sweep, and scope. 

The truth is that these grey psychological histories of typical youngpersons, drearily revolting against dreary conventions, are, in a deepand inherent sense, false to the mystery of life. 

One feels certain that even the clever people who write them havemoods and impulses far more vivid and thrilling, far more abnormaland bizarre, than they have the audacity to put into their work. Asort of perverted Puritanism restrains them. They have the diseasedconscience of modern art, and they think that nothing can be truewhich is not draggle-tailed and nothing can be real which is notpetty and unstimulating. And all the while the maddest, beautifulestfantasticalest things are occurring every day, and every day the greatdrunken gods are tossing the crazy orb of our fate from hand to handand making it shine with a thousand iridescent hues! The naturalman takes refuge from these people's drab perversions of theoutrageous reality, in the sham wonders of meretricious romanceswhich are not real at all. 

What we cry out for is something that shall have about it theliberating power of the imagination and yet be able to convince us ofits reality. We need an imaginative realism. We need a romanticismwhich has its roots in the solid earth. We need, in fact, preciselywhat Balzac brings. 

So far from finding anything tedious or irksome in the heavymassing up of animate and inanimate back-grounds which goes onall the while in Balzac's novels, I find these things most germane tothe matter. What I ask from a book is precisely this huge weight offormidable verisimilitude which shall surround me on all sides andgive firm ground for my feet to walk on. I love it when a novel isthick with the solid mass of earth-life, and when its passions springup volcano-like from flaming pits and bleeding craters of torn andconvulsed materials. I demand and must have in a book afour-square sense of life-illusion, a rich field for my imagination towander in at large, a certain quantity of blank space, so to speak, filled with a huge litter of things that are not tiresomely pointing tothe projected issue. 

I hold the view that in the larger aspects of the creative imaginationthere is room for many free margins and for many materials that arenot slavishly symbolic. I protest from my heart against thistyrannous "artistic conscience" which insists that every word"should tell" and every object and person referred to be of "vitalimportance" in the evolution of the "main theme. "

I maintain that in the broad canvas of a nobler, freer art there isample space for every kind of digression and by-issue. I maintainthat the mere absence of this self-conscious vibrating pressure uponone string gives to a book that amplitude, that nonchalance, thathuge friendly discursiveness, which enables us to breathe and loiterand move around and see the characters from all sides--from behindas well as from in front! The constant playing upon that one string ofa symbolic purpose or a philosophical formula seems to me to leadinvariably to a certain attenuation and strain. The imagination growsweary under repeated blows upon the same spot. We long todebouch into some path that leads nowhere. We long to meet someone who is interesting in himself and does nothing to carry anythingalong. 

Art of this tiresomely technical kind can be taught to any one. If thiswere all--if this were the one thing needful--we might well rush offen masse to the lecture-rooms and acquire the complete rules of theShort Story. Luckily for our pleasant hours there is still, in spite ofeverything, a certain place left for what we call genius in themanufacture of books; a place left for that sudden thrilling lift of thewhole thing to a level where the point of the interest is not in themere accidents of one particular plot but in the vast stream of themystery of life itself. 

Among the individual volumes of the Human Comedy, I am inclinedto regard "Lost Illusions"--of which there are two volumes in thatten-penny edition--as the finest of all, and no one who has read thatbook can forget the portentous weight of realistic background withwhich it begins. 

After "Lost Illusions" I would put "Cousin Bette" as Balzac'smaster-piece, and, after that, "A Bachelor's Establishment. " But I layno particular stress upon these preferences. With the exception ofsuch books as "The Wild Ass's Skin" and the "Alkahest" and"Seraphita, " the bulk of his work has a sort of continuous interestwhich one would expect in a single tremendous prose epic dealingwith the France of his age. 

Balzac's most remarkable characteristic is a sort of exultant revelingin every kind of human passion, in every species of desire or greedor ambition or obsession which gives a dignity and a tragic grandeurto otherwise prosaic lives. There is a kind of subterranean torrent ofblind primeval energy running through his books which focussesitself in a thick smouldering fuliginous eruption when the momentor the occasion arises. The "will to power, " or whatever else youmay call it, has never been more terrifically exposed. I cannot butfeel that as a portrayer of such a "will to power" among the obstinate, narrow, savage personages of small provincial towns, no one hasapproached Balzac. 

Here, in his country scenes, he is a supreme master; and the tough, resistant fibre of his slow-moving, massively egotistic provincials, with their backgrounds of old houses full of wicked secrets andhoarded wealth, lends itself especially well to his broodingmaterialistic imagination, ready to kindle under provocation intocrackling and licking flames. 

His imagination has transformed, for me at least, the face of morethan one country-side. Coming in on a windy November evening, through muddy lanes and sombre avenues of the outskirts of anycountry town, how richly, how magically, the lights in the scatteredhigh walled houses and the faces seen at the windows, suggest theinfinite possibilities of human life! The sound of wheels uponcobblestones, as the street begins and as the spire of the church risesover the moaning branches of its leafless elm-trees has a meaningfor me now, since I have read Balzac, different from what it hadbefore. Is that muffled figure in the rumbling cart which passes meso swiftly the country doctor or the village priest, summoned to thedeath-bed of some notorious atheist? Is the slender white handwhich closes those heavy shutters in that gloomy house the hand ofsome heart-broken Eugenie, desolately locking herself up once more, for another lonely night, with her sick hopes and her sacredmemories?

I feel as though no one but Balzac has expressed the peculiarbrutality, thick, impervious, knotted and fibrous like the roots of thetree-trunks at his gate, of the small provincial farmer in England aswell as in France. 

I am certain no one but Balzac--except it be some of the rougher, homelier Dutch painters--has caught the spirit of those mellow, sensual "interiors" of typical country houses, with their mixture ofgrossness and avarice and inveterate conservatism; where an odourof centuries of egotism emanates from every piece of furnitureagainst the wall and from every gesture of every person seated overthe fire! One is plunged indeed into the dim, sweet, brutal heart ofreality here, and the imagination finds starting places for itswanderings from the mere gammons of dried bacon hanging fromthe smoky rafters and the least gross repartee and lewd satyrish jestof the rustic Grangousier and Gargamelle who quaff theiramber-coloured cider under the flickering of candles. 

If he did not pile up his descriptions of old furniture, old warehouses, old barns, old cellars, old shops, old orchards and old gardens, thisthick human atmosphere--overlaid, generation after generation, bythe sensual proclivities of the children of the earth--would neverpossess the unction of verisimilitude which it has. 

If he were all the while fussing about his style in the exhaustingFlaubert manner, the rich dim reek of all this time-mellowedhumanity would never strike our senses as it does. Thus much onecan see quite clearly from reading de Maupassant, Flaubert's pupil, whose stark and savage strokes of clean-cut visualisation neverattain the imaginative atmosphere or Rabelaisian aplomb of Balzac'srural scenes. 

But supreme as he is in his provincial towns and villages, one cannothelp associating him even more intimately with the streets andsquares and river banks of Paris. 

I suppose Balzac has possessed himself of Paris and has ransackedand ravished its rare mysteries more completely than any otherwriter. 

I once stayed in a hotel called the Louis le Grand in the Rue Louis leGrand, and I shall never forget the look of a certain old ParisianBanking-House, now altered into some other building, which wasvisible through the narrow window of my high-placed room. Thatvery house is definitely mentioned somewhere in the HumanComedy; but mentioned or not, its peculiar Balzacian air, crowdedround by sloping roofs and tall white houses, brought all the greatdesperate passionate scenes into my mind. 

I saw old Goriot crying aloud upon his "unkind daughters. " I sawBaron Hulot dragged away from the beseeching eyes and clingingarms of his last little inamorata to the bedside of his much wrongedwife. I saw the Duchesse de Langeais, issuing forth from thechamber of her victim-victor, pale and tragic, and with love anddespair in her heart. 

It is the thing that pleases me most in the stories of Paul Bourget thathe has continued the admirable Balzacian tradition of mentioningthe Paris streets and localities by their historic names, and of givingcircumstantial colour and body to his inventions by thus placingthem in a milieu which one can traverse any hour of the day, recalling the imaginary scenes as if they were not imaginary, andreviving the dramatic issues as if they were those of real people. 

A favourite objection to Balzac among aesthetic critics is that hisaristocratic scenes are lacking in true refinement, lacking in thegenuine air and grace of such fastidious circles. I do not give a figfor that criticism. To try and limit a great imaginative spirit, full ofpassionate fantasy and bizarre inventions, to the precise and pettyreproduction of the tricks of any particular class seems to me a pieceof impertinent pedantry. It might just as well be said thatShakespeare's lords and ladies were not euphuistic enough. I protestagainst this attempt to turn a Napoleonic superman of literature, witha head like that head which Rodin has so admirably recalled for us, into a bourgeois chronicler of bourgeois mediocrities. 

Balzac's characters, to whatever class they belong, bear the royaland passionate stamp of their demiurgic creator. They all have acertain magnificence of gesture, a certain intensity of tone, a certainconcentrated fury of movement. 

There is something tremendous and awe-inspiring about the taskBalzac set himself and the task he achieved. 

One sees him drinking his black coffee in those early hours of themorning, wrapped in his dressing-gown, and with a sort of cloudedVulcanian grandeur about him, hammering at his population ofcolossal figures amid the smouldering images of his cavernous brain. He was wise to work in those hours when the cities of men sleep andthe tides of life run low; at those hours when the sick find it easiestto die and the pulses of the world's heart are scarcely audible. Therewas little at such times to obstruct his imagination. He could work"in the void, " and the spirit of his genius could brood overuntroubled waters. 

There was something formidable and noble in the way he drove alllight and casual loves, the usual recreations of men of literary talent, away from his threshold. Like some primordial Prometheus, makingmen out of mud and fire, he kept the perilous worshippers ofAphrodite far-distant from the smoke of his smithy, and refused tointerrupt his cosmic labour for the sake of dalliance. 

That high imaginative love of his--itself like one of the greatpassions he depicts--which ended, in its unworthy fulfilment, bydragging him down to the earth, was only one other proof of howprofoundly cerebral and psychic that demonic force was whichdrove the immense engine of his energy. 

It is unlikely that, as the world progresses and the generations of theartists follow one another and go their way, there will be anotherlike him. 

Such primal force, capable of evoking a whole world of passionateliving figures, comes only once or twice in the history of a race. There will be thousands of cleverer psychologists, thousands ofmore felicitous stylists, thousands of more exact copiers of reality. 

There will never be another Balzac. 

VICTOR HUGO

My first notions of Victor Hugo were associated with the sea. It wasfrom the old Weymouth harbour that as a child I used to watch thoseChannel-Island steamers with red funnels setting forth on whatseemed to me in those days a wondrous voyage of mystery and peril. I read "The Toilers of the Sea" at my inland school at Mr. Hardy'sSherton Abbas; whither, it may be remembered, poor GilesWinterbourne set off with such trembling anxiety to fetch home hisGrace. 

I read it in what was probably a very quaint sort of translation. Thebook was bound in that old-fashioned "yellow back" style which atthat time was considered in clergymen's families as a symbol of allthat was dissipated and dangerous; and on the outside of the yellowcover was a positively terrifying picture of the monstrous devilfishwith which Gellert wrestled in that terrible sea-cavern. 

Certain scenes in that romance lodged themselves in my brain withdiabolic intensity. That scene, for instance, when the successfulscoundrel, swimming in the water, "feels himself seized by onefoot, " that scene where the man buys the revolver in the littlegunsmith's shop; that appalling scene at the end where Gellertdrowns himself, watching the ship that bears his love away tohappiness in the arms of another--all these held my imagination then, as indeed they hold it still, with the vividness of personal experience. 

It was long after this, not more than five or six years ago in fact, thatI read "Notre Dame de Paris. " This book I secured from the ship'slibrary of some transatlantic liner and the fantastic horrors itcontains, carried to a point of almost intolerable melodrama, harmonised well enough with the nightly thud of the engines and thedaylong staring at the heaving water. 

"Notre Dame" is certainly an amazing book. If it were not for thepresence of genius in it, that ineffable all-redeeming quality, itwould be one of the most outrageous inventions of flagrantsensationalism ever indulged in by the morbidity of man. But geniuspervades it from beginning to end; pervades even its mostimpossible scenes; and on the whole I think it is a much morearresting tale than, say, "The Count of Monte Cristo, " or any ofDumas' works except "The Three Musketeers. "

I have never, even as a child, cared greatly for Dumas, and I discernin the attitude of the persons who persist in preferring him to VictorHugo the presence of a temperamental cult so alien to my own that Iam tempted to regard it as no better than an affected pose. 

Nowhere is Victor Hugo's genius more evident than in his inventionof names. Esmeralda, Quasimodo, Gellert, Cosette, Fantine--they allhave that indescribable ring of genuine romance about them whichmore than anything else restores to us the "long, long thoughts" ofyouth. 

I think that Fantine is the most beautiful and imaginative name evergiven to any woman. It is far more suggestive of wild and delicatemysteries than Fragoletta or Dolores or Charmian or Ianthe. 

I am inclined to maintain that it is in the sphere of pure poeticimagination that Victor Hugo is greatest; though, like so many otherforeigners, I find it difficult to read his formal poetry. It is, I fancy, this poetic imagination of his which makes it possible for him tothrow his isolated scenes into such terrific relief that they lodgethemselves in one's brain with such crushing force. In all his books itis the separate individual scenes of which one finds oneself thinkingas one recalls the progress of this narrative or the other. And whenhe has struck out with a few vivid lightning-like flashes the originallineaments of one of his superb creations, it is rather in separate anddetached scenes that he makes such a person's indeliblecharacteristics gleam forth from the surrounding darkness, than inany continuous psychological process of development. 

His psychology is the psychology of a child; but none the worseperhaps for that; for it is remarkable how often the most exhaustivepsychological analysis misses the real mystery of human character. Victor Hugo goes to work by illuminating flashes. He carries aflaring torch in his hand; and every now and then he plunges it intothe caverns of the human heart, and one is conscious of vaststupendous Shadows, moving from midnight to midnight. 

His method is gnomic, laconic, oracular; never persuasive orplausible. It is "Lo--here" and then again "Lo--there!" and we areeither with him or not with him. There are no half measures, no slowevolutionary disclosures. 

One of his most interesting literary devices, and it is an essentiallypoetic one, is the diffusion through the story of some particularbackground, a background which gathers to itself a sort of broodingpersonality as the tale proceeds, and often becomes before the bookis finished far more arresting and important than any of the humancharacters whose drama it dominates. 

Such is the sea itself, for instance, in "The Toilers. " Such is thehistoric cathedral in "Notre Dame. " Such is the great Revolution--certainly a kind of natural cataclysm--in "Ninety-three. " Such are thegreat sewers of Paris in "Les Misérables. " Such--though it is rather asymbol than a background--is the terrible fixed smile of theunfortunate hero in "L'Homme qui Rit. "

It is one of the most curious and interesting phenomena in thehistory of literature, this turning of a poet into a writer of romances, romances which have at least as much if not more of the poeticquality in them than the orthodox poetry of the same hand. 

One is led to wonder what kind of stories Swinburne would havewritten had he debouched into this territory, or what would havebeen the novels conceived by Tennyson. Thomas Hardy began withpoetry and has returned to poetry; and one cannot help feeling that itis more than anything else the absence of this quality in theautobiographical studies of sex and character which the youngerwriters of our day spin out that makes them after a time seem sosour and flat. 

It is the extravagance of the poetic temper and its lack of proportionwhich leads to some of the most glaring of Victor Hugo's faults; andit is the oracular, prophetic, gnomic tone of his genius which causesthose queer gaps and rents in his work and that fantastic arbitrarinesswhich makes it difficult for him to evoke any rational or organiccontinuity. 

It is an aspect of the poetic temper too, the queer tricks which thehumour of Victor Hugo will condescend to play. I suppose he is bynature the least endowed with a sense of humour of all the men ofgenius who have ever lived. The poet Wordsworth had more. Butlike so many poetic natures, whose vivid imagination lends itself toevery sort of human reaction, even to those not really indigenous, Victor Hugo cannot resist in indulging in freakish sallies ofjocularity which sometimes become extraordinarily strained andforced, and even remind one now and then of the horriblemechanical smile on the countenance of the mutilated man in hisown story. 

Poet-like too is the portentous pedantry of his archaeological vein;the stupendous air of authority with which he raps out his classicalquotations and his historic allusions. He is capable sometimes ofproducing upon the mind the effect of a hilarious school-mastercracking his learned jokes to an audience only too willing toencourage him. At other times, so bizarre and out of all humanproportion are his fantasies, one receives an impression as if one ofthe great granite effigies representing Liberty or Equality or theRights of Man, from the portico of some solemn Palais de Justice, had suddenly yielded to the temptation of drink and was uttering themost amazing levities. Victor Hugo in his lighter vein is really, wemust honestly confess, a somewhat disconcerting companion. Onehas such respect for the sublime imaginations which one knows arelurking behind "that cliff-like brow" that one struggles to find somesort of congruity in these strange gestures. It is as though whenwalking by the side of some revered prophet, one were suddenlyconscious that the man was skipping or putting out his tongue. It is as though we caught Ajax masquerading as a mummer, orAeschylus dressed up in cap and bells. 

There are persons who interest themselves still in Victor Hugo'spolitical attitudes, in his orations on the balcony of the Hotel deVille; in his theatrical visits to the barricades where "he could beshot, but could not shoot"; in his diatribes against Napoleon theThird; in his defence of the Commune from the safe remoteness ofBrussels. There are persons who suffer real disillusion when theydiscover how much of a conservative and a courtier he was in hisyouth. There are persons who are thrilled to recall how he carried hissolemn vengeance against his imperial enemy so far as to rebuke instern language Queen Victoria for her friendliness towards theEmpress. 

I must confess I find it difficult to share these emotions. I seem tosmell the foot-lights of the opera in these heroic declamations, andindeed poor Napoleon the Little was himself so much of an operatichero that to exalt him into a classic tyrant seems little short ofridiculous. 

We derive a much truer picture of Victor Hugo's antagonist fromDisraeli's "Endymion" than we do from the poet's torrentialinvectives. I have a shrewd idea that the Emperor was a good dealmore amiable, if not more philosophical, than his eloquent judge. 

Victor Hugo was an impassioned lover of children. Who can forgetthose scenes in "Les Misérables" about little Cosette and the greatwonderful doll which Valjean gave her? He loved children and--forall his lack of humour; sometimes I think because of it--hethoroughly understood them. He loved children and he was a childhimself. 

No one but a child would have behaved as he did on certainoccasions. The grave naiveté of his attitude to the whole spectacle oflife was like the solemnity of a child who takes very seriously everymovement of the game which he is playing. A child is solemn whenit is pretending to be an engine-driver or a pilot, and Victor Hugowas solemn when he pretended to be a saviour of society. No onebut a person endowed with the perfect genius of childishness couldhave acted toward his mistress and his wife in the way he did, orhave been so serenely blind to the irony of the world. 

There is as little of the sensual in Victor Hugo's temperament asthere is in the temperament of a pure-minded child; but like a childhe finds a shuddering pleasure in approaching the edge of theprecipice; like a child he loves to loiter in melancholy fields wherethe white moon-daisies are queerly stained with the old dark bloodof weird and abnormal memories. 

Irony of any kind, worldly or otherwise, never crossed so much asthe margin of his consciousness. He is shamelessly, indecently, monstrously lacking in the ironic sense. 

"What are we going to do?" he dramatically asked his sons whenthey had established themselves in their island home; and after theyhad each replied according to their respective tastes, "I, " he added, "am going to contemplate the ocean!"

I am ready to confess that I feel a certain shame in thus joining thecompany of the godless and making sport of my childhood's hero. "He was a man, take him for all in all, " and _we_ at any rate shallnot live to see his like again. 

There was something genuinely large and innocent and elemental inVictor Hugo. The austere simplicity of his life may have beenperhaps too self-consciously flung at the world's face; but it was anatural instinct in him. I hesitate to call him a charlatan. Was itGoethe who said "There is something of charlatanism in all genius"?Victor Hugo hardly deserves to have Goethe quoted in his favour, soignorantly did he disparage, in his childish prejudice, the greatGerman's work; but what perhaps the world calls charlatanism inhim is really only the reaction of genius when it comes into conflictwith the brutal obstinacy of real life. 

What is charlatanism? I am almost scared to look up the word in thedictionary for fear of discovering that I am myself no better than thatopprobrious thing. But still, if Victor Hugo was really a charlatan, one can safely say one would sooner be damned with the author of"L'Homme qui Rit" than saved with many who have no charlatanismin them. 

But what is charlatanism? Does it imply false and extravagantclaims to qualities we do not possess? Or is there the spirit of theMountebank in it? If one were a deliberate Machiavel ofdissimulation, if one fooled the people thoroughly and consciously, would one be a charlatan? Or are charlatans simply harmless foolswho are too embarrassed to confess their ignorance and too childishto stop pretending?

There is something nobly patriarchal about the idea of Victor Hugoin his old age. The man's countenance has certainly extraordinarygenius "writ large" there for all men to see. His head is likesomething that has been carved by Michelangelo. Looking at hisface one realises where the secret of his peculiar genius lay. It lay ina certain tragic abandonment to a sublime struggle with the elements. When in his imagination he wrestled with the elements he forgot hispolitics, his prejudices, his moral bravado. 

Whatever this mysterious weakness may have been which we callhis "charlatanism, " it certainly dropped away from him like a maskwhen he confronted the wind or sea or such primitive forms ofhuman tragedy as are elemental in their simple outlines. Probablyfor all his rhetoric Victor Hugo would have made an obstinateinvincible sailor on the high seas. I discern in the shape of his headsomething of the look of weather-beaten mariners. I can fancy himholding fast the rudder of a ship flying before the fury of an Atlanticstorm. 

The sea-scenes in his books are unequalled in all prose literature. Tomatch them you would have to go to the poets--to Shakespeare--toSwinburne. A single line of Hugo has more of the spirit of the sea, more of its savagery, its bitter strength, its tigerish leap and bite, than pages of Pierre Loti. Whether I am prejudiced by my childishassociations I do not know, but no other writer makes me smell thesea-weed, catch the sharp salt tang, feel the buffeting of the waves, as Victor Hugo does. Yes, for all his panoramic evocations ofsea-effects, Pierre Loti does not touch the old eternal mystery of thedeep, with its answer of terror and strange yearning in the heart ofman, in the way this other touches it. The great rhetorician found arhetoric here that put his eloquence to silence and he responded to itwith sentences as sharp, as brief, as broken, as abrupt, as stingingand wind-driven, as the rushing waves themselves pouring over ahalf drowned wreck. 

And just as he deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rainand snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo willthink of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castlein "Ninety-three, " to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland, when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs" escapes from thestorm. 

When one tries to cast one's critical plummet into the secret motiveforces of Hugo's genius, one is continually being baffled by thepresence there of conflicting elements. For instance no one who hasread "Notre Dame" can deny the presence of a certain savage delightin scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No one who has read"Les Misérables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of lovelytenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, woulddegenerate into maudlin sentiment of the most lamentable kind. 

The performances of the diabolical "archdeacon" in "Notre Dame"to the moment when Quasimodo watches him fall from the parapet, are just what one might expect to enjoy in some old-fashionedmelodramatic theatre designed for such among the pure in heart ashave a penchant for ghastliness. But one forgets all this in a momentwhen some extraordinary touch of illuminating imagination getshold of one by the throat. 

I do not think that Victor Hugo will go down to posterity honouredand applauded because of his love for the human race. I suspectthose critics who hold him up as a grand example of democraticprinciples and libertarian ideals of not being great lovers of hisstories. He is a name for them to conjure with and that is all. 

Victor Hugo loved children and he loved the mothers of children, but he was too great a soul to spoil his colossal romance with anyblatant humanitarianism. I do not say he was the high, sad, lonely, social exile he would have liked the world to believe him; for he wasindeed of kind, simple, honest domestic habits and a man who gotmuch happiness from quite little things. But when we come toconsider what will be left of him in the future I feel sure that it willbe rather by his imagination than by his social eloquence that he willtouch our descendants. It is indeed not in the remotest degree as arhetorician that he arrests us in these unique tales. It is by means ofsomething quite different from eloquence. 

His best effects are achieved in sudden striking images which seemto have in them a depth of fantastic diablerie worthy of thewreck-strewn "humming waters" whose secrets he loved to penetrate. 

It is not sufficiently realised how much there was of the "macabre"about Victor Hugo. Like the prophet Ezekiel, he had strange visionsfrom the power he served, and in the primordial valleys of hisimagination there lie, strewn to the bleaching winds, the bones ofmen and of demons and of gods; and the breath that blows uponthem and makes them live--live their weird phantasmal life ofmediaeval goblins in some wild procession of madness--is the breathof the spirit of childhood's fancies. 

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

To read for the first time, one of the short stories of Guy deMaupassant is to receive a staggering enlargement of one's ideas asto what mere literature can do. They hardly seem like literature at all, these blocks from the quarry of life, flung into one's face with sounerring an aim. 

"If you prick them, they bleed. If you tickle them, they laugh. " Therough rain-smelling earth still clings to them; when you take them inyour hands, the mud of the highway comes off upon your fingers. Isit really, one wonders, mere literary craft, mere cunning artfulness, which gives these sentences the weight of a guillotine-bladecrashing down upon the prostrate neck of bound helpless reality?

Is it simply the art of a pupil of the euphonious Flaubert, this powerof making written sentences march full-armed like living men, andfall, when their work is done, with a metallic ring of absolutefinality--"as a dead body falls"?

As one reads Guy de Maupassant one breathes heavily as if it wereoneself and not another upon whom the tension and the sweat of thecrisis has come. One touches with one's naked hand every object hedescribes. One feels the gasping breath of every person he bringsforward. His images slap one's cheeks till they tingle, and hissituations wrestle with one to the ground. 

Not for nothing was he a descendant of that race which, of all racesexcept the Turks, has loved love better than literature and war betterthan love. Words are resounding blows and smacking kisses to Guyde Maupassant. He writes literature as a Norman baron, and when herounds off a sentence it is as if he dug a spur into the flanks of arestless filly. There is nothing like his style in the world. 

They never taught me Tacitus when I was at school. My Latinitystops short at Caesar and Cicero. One is, however, led to supposethat the great executioner of imperial reputations was a mightypruner, in his day, of the "many, too many" words. But I am surethat this other "Great Latin, " as Nietzsche calls him, cleans up hislitter and chops off his surplusage quite as effectively as Tacitus, and I suspect that neither Tacitus nor any other classic writer hits thenail on the head with so straight, so steady, so effective a stroke. 

I suppose it is the usual habit of destiny to rush into literary pathspeople who are essentially dreamers and theorists and Utopians;people who by instinct and temperament shrink away from contactwith brute reality. 

I suppose even the great imaginative writers, like Balzac, live, onthe whole, sedentary and exclusive lives, making a great deal, as faras the materials for their work go, of a very little. Now and then, however, it happens that a man of action, a man of the world, a manof love and war and sport, enters the literary arena; and when thatoccurs, I have an idea that he hits about him with a more trenchant, more resolute, more crushing force than the others. 

The art of literature has become perhaps too completely themonopoly of sedentary people--largely of the bourgeois class--whobring to their work the sedentary sensitiveness, the sedentaryrefinement, the sedentary lack of living experience, which are thenatural characteristics of persons who work all day in studies andstudios. That is why the appearance of a Walt Whitman or a MaximGorki is so wholesome and air-clearing an event. 

But not less salutary is the appearance of a ferocious aristocrat fromthe class which has ridden rough-shod over the fields of submissiveactuality for many tyrannous centuries. 

In the hard shrewd blows of a Maxim Gorki, the monopolising tribesof sedentary dreamers receive their palpable hit, receive it from thefactory and the furrow. In the deadly knocks of a Guy deMaupassant they get their "quietus" from the height, so to speak, ofthe saddle of a sporting gentleman. 

Do what they can to get the sharp bitter tang of reality into theirbooks, the bulk of these people, write they never so cleverly, seemsomehow to miss it. 

The smell of that crafty old skunk--the genuine truth ofthings--draws them forward through the reeds and rushes of the great dimforests' edge, but they seldom touch the hide of the evasive animal;no, not so much as with the end of their barge-pole. 

But Guy de Maupassant plunges into the thickets, gun in hand, andwe soon hear the howl of the hunted. 

A love of literature, a reverence and respect for the dignity of words, does not by any means imply a power of making them plastic beforethe pressure of truth. How often one is conscious of the interventionof "something else, " some alien material, marbly and shiny it maybe, and with a beauty of its own, but obtruding quite opaquelybetween the thing said and the thing felt. 

In reading Guy de Maupassant, it does not seem to be words at allwhich touch us. It seems to be things--things living or dead, thingsin motion or at rest. Words are there indeed; they must be there--butthey are so hammered on the anvil of his hard purpose that they havebecome porous and transparent. Their one rôle now is to getthemselves out of the way; or rather to turn themselves into thin airand clean water, through which the reality beyond can come at uswith unblurred outlines. 

It is a wonderful commentary, when one thinks of it, upon themalleability of human language that it can so take shape and colourfrom the pressure of a single temperament. The words in thedictionary are all there--all at the disposal of every one of us--buthow miraculous a thing to make their choice and their arrangementexpressive of nothing on earth but the peculiar turn of one particularmind!

The whole mystery of life is in this; this power of the unique andsolitary soul to twist the universe into the shape of its vision. 

Without any doubt Guy de Maupassant is the greatest realist thatever lived. All other realists seem idealists in comparison. Many ofthe situations he describes are situations doubtless in which hehimself "had a hand. " Others are situations which he came across, inhis enterprising debouchings here and there, in curious by-alleys, and which he observed with a morose scowl of amusement, fromoutside. A few--very few--are situations which he evoked from themore recondite places of his own turbulent soul. 

But one cannot read a page of him without feeling that he is a writerwho writes from out of his own experiences, from out of the shocksand jolts and rough file-like edges of raw reality. 

It is a huge encouragement to all literary ambitions, this immenseachievement of his. The scope and sweep of a great creativeimagination is given to few among us, and Guy de Maupassant wasnot one of these. His imagination was rigorously earth-bound, andnot only earth-bound but bound to certain obvious and sensualaspects of earth-life. Except when he tore open the bleeding woundsof his own mutilated sensibility and wrote stories of his madnesswith a pen dipped in the evil humours of his diseased blood, he wasa master of a certain brutal and sunburnt objectivity. 

But how cheerful and encouraging it is for those among us who areengaged in literature, to see what this astonishing man was able tomake of experiences which, in some measure, we must all haveshared!

There is never any need to leave one's own town or village or city toget "copy. " There is scarcely any need to leave one's own house. Thephysiological peculiarities of the people who jostle against us in thecommon routine of things will completely suffice. That is the wholepoint of de Maupassant's achievement. 

The same thing, of course, is true of the great imaginative writers. _They_ also are able to derive grist for their mill from the commonoccurrences; they also are free to remain at home. But their sphere isthe sphere of the human soul; his was the sphere of the human body. 

He was pre-eminently the master of physiology--the physiologicalwriter. Bodies, not souls, were his "métier"--or souls only in so faras they are directly affected by bodies. 

But bodies--bodies of men and women are everywhere; living oneson the earth; dead ones under the earth. One need not go to theantipodes to find the nerves and the tissues, the flesh and the blood, of these planetary evocations, of these microcosms of the universe. The great imaginative writers have the soul of man always undertheir hand, and Guy de Maupassant has the body of man alwaysunder his hand. 

It is not the masters who are found journeying to remote regions toget inspiration for their work. Their "America, " as Goethe puts it, lies close to their door. 

It is singularly encouraging to us men of letters to contemplate whatGuy de Maupassant could do with the natural animal instincts andgestures and mutterings and struggles of the bodies of men andwomen as their desires make them skip. 

"Encouraging" did I say? Tantalizing rather, and provocative ofhelpless rage. For just as the spiritual insensitiveness of ourbourgeois tyrants renders them dull and obtuse to the nobleimaginations of great souls, so their moral bigotry and stupidityrenders them obstinately averse to the freedom of the artist indealing with the physical eccentricities of the grotesque humananimal. 

We must not deal at large with the spirit lest we weary the vulgarand the frivolous; we must not deal at large with the body, lest weinfuriate the Puritanical and the squeamish. 

It is absurd to rail at de Maupassant because of his "brutality. " Onecannot help suspecting that those who do so have never recognisedthe absurd comedy of their own bodily activities and desires. 

It is idle to protest against the outrageous excursions of his predatoryhumour. The raw bleeding pieces--each, as one almost feels, with itsown peculiar cry--of the living body of the world, clawed as if bytiger claws, are strange morsels for the taste of some among us. Butfor others, there is an exultant pleasure in this great hunt, with thedeep-mouthed hounds of veracity and sincerity, after the authentictruth. 

One touches here--in this question of the brutality of Guy deMaupassant--upon a very deep matter; the matter namely of whatour pleasure exactly consists, as we watch, in one of his moresavage stories, the flesh of the world's truth thus clawed at. 

I think it is a pleasure composed of several different elements. Thefirst of these is that deep and curious satisfaction which we derivefrom the exhibition in art of the essential grossness andunscrupulousness of life. We revenge ourselves in this way uponwhat makes us suffer. The clear presentation of an outrage, of aninsult, of an indecency, is in itself a sort of vengeance upon thepower that wrought it, and though it may sound ridiculous enough tospeak of being avenged upon Nature, still the basic instinct is there, and we can, if we will, personify the immense malignity of things, and fancy that we are striking back at the gods and causing the godssome degree of perturbation; at least letting them know that we arenot deceived by the illusions they dole out to us!

The quiet gods may well be imagined as quite as indifferent to ourartistic vengeance as Nature herself, but at any rate, like the man inthe Inferno who "makes the fig" at the Almighty, we have foundvent for our human feelings. Another element in it is the pleasure weget--not perhaps a very Christian one, but Literature deviates fromChristianity in several important ways--from having other peoplemade fully aware, as we may be, of the grossness and unscrupulousnessof life. 

These other people may easily be assumed to be fidgety, meticulous, self-complacent purists; and as we read the short stories of Guy deMaupassant, we cannot resist calling up an imaginary company ofsuch poor devils and forcing them to listen to a page of the greatbook of human judgment upon Nature's perversity. 

Finally at the bottom of all there is a much more subtle cause for ourpleasure; nothing less in fact than that old wild dark Dionysianembracing of fate, of fate however monstrous and bizarre, simplybecause it is there--an integral part of the universe--and we ourselveswith something of that ingredient in our own heathen hearts. 

An imaginary symposium of modern writers upon the causes ofhuman pleasure in the grosser elements of art lends itself to veryfree speculation. Personally I must confess to very seriouslimitations in my own capacity for such enjoyment. I have asneaking sympathy with tender nerves. I can relish de Maupassantup to a certain point--and that point is well this side of idolatry--but Ifancy I relish him because I discern in him a certain vibrant nerve ofrevolt against the brutality of things, a certain quivering irony ofsavage protest. When you get the brutality represented without thisrevolt and with a certain unction of sympathetic zest, as you do inthe great eighteenth century novelists in England, I confess itbecomes more than I can endure. 

This is a most grievous limitation and I apologise to the reader mosthumbly for it. It is indeed a lamentable confession of weakness. Butsince the limitations of critics are, consciously or unconsciously, part of their contribution to the problems at issue, I offer minewithout further comment. 

It is an odd thing that while I can relish and even hugely enjoyribaldry in a Latin writer, I cannot so much as tolerate vulgarity inan English or Scotch one. Perhaps it is their own hiddenconsciousness that, if they once let themselves go, they would gounpleasantly far, which gives this morbid uneasiness to the stricturesof the Puritans. Or is it that the English-speaking races are bornbetween the deep sea of undiluted coarseness and the devil of adiseased conscience? Is this the reason why every artist in the worldand every critic of art, feels himself essentially an exile everywhereexcept upon Latin soil?

Guy de Maupassant visualises human life as a thing completely andhelplessly in the grip of animal appetites and instincts. He takeswhat we call lust, and makes of it the main motive force in his vividand terrible sketches. It is perhaps for this very reason that hisstories have such an air of appalling reality. 

But it is not only lust or lechery which he exploits. He turns to hisartistic purpose every kind of physiological desire, every sort ofbodily craving. Many of these are quite innocent and harmless, andthe denial of their satisfaction is in the deepest sense tragic. Perhapsit is in regard to what this word _tragic_ implies that we find thedifference between the brutality of Guy de Maupassant and thecoarseness of the earlier English writers. 

The very savagery in de Maupassant's humour is an indication of aclear intellectual consciousness of something monstrously, grotesquely, wrong; something mad and blind and devilish about thewhole business, which we miss completely in all English writersexcept the great Jonathan Swift. 

Guy de Maupassant had the easy magnanimity of the Latin races inregard to sex matters, but in regard to the sufferings of men and ofanimals from the denial of their right to every sort of natural joy, there smouldered in him a deep black rage--a _saeva indignatio_--which scorches his pages like a deadly acid. 

In his constant preoccupation with the bodies of living creatures, itis natural enough that animals as well as men should come into thecircle of his interest. He was a great huntsman and fisherman. Heloved to wander over the frozen marshes, gun in hand, searching forstrange wildfowl among the reeds and ditches. But though he slewthese things in the savage passion of the chase as his ancestors haddone for ages, between his own fierce senses and theirs there was asingular magnetic sympathy. 

As may be often noticed in other cases, as we go through the world, there was between the primitive earth-instincts of this hunter of wildthings and the desperate creatures he pursued, a far deeper bond ofkinship than exists between sedentary humanitarians and the objectsof their philanthropy. It is good that there should be such a writer asthis in the world. 

In the sophisticated subtleties of our varnished and velvet-carpetedcivilisation, it is well that we should be brought back to the oldessential candours which forever underlie the frills and frippery. It iswell that the stark bones of the aboriginal skeleton with its raw"unaccommodated" flesh should peep out through the embroideries. 

It is, after all, the "thing itself" which matters--the thing which"owes the worm no silk, the cat no perfume. " Forked straddlinganimals are we all, as the mad king says in the play, and it is mereeffeminacy and affectation to cover up the truth. 

Guy de Maupassant is never greater than when appealing to theprimitive link of tragic affiliation that binds us to all living flesh andblood. A horse mercilessly starved in the fields; a wild bird wailingfor its murdered mate; a tramp driven by hunger and primitive desire, and harried by the "insolence of office"; an old man denied the littleluxuries of his senile greed; an old maid torn and rent in the fleshthat is barren and the breasts that never gave suck; these are thenatural subjects of his genius--the sort of "copy" that one certainlyneed not leave one's "home town" to find. 

One is inclined to feel that those who miss the tragic generosity atthe heart of the brutality of Guy de Maupassant, are not really awareof the bitter cry of this mad planet. Let them content themselves, these people, with their pretty little touching stories, their nice blobsof cheerful "local colour" thrown in here and there, and their sweetimpossible endings. Sunday school literature for Sunday schoolchildren; but let there be at least one writer who writes for those whoknow what the world is. 

The question of the legitimacy in art of the kind of realism whichGuy de Maupassant practised, goes incalculably deep. Consideryourself at this moment, gentle reader, lightly turning over--asdoubtless you are doing--the harmless pages of this academic book, as you drink your tea from a well appointed tray in a sunny corner ofsome friendly cake-shop. You are at this moment--come, confessit--hiding up, perhaps from yourself but certainly from the world, someoutrageous annoyance, some grotesque resolution, some fear, somememory, some suspicion, that has--as is natural and proper enough, for your father was a man, your mother a woman--its physiologicalorigin. You turn to this elegant book of mine, with its mild andpersuasive thoughts, as if you turned away from reality into somepleasant arbour of innocent recreation. It is a sort of little lullaby foryou amid the troubles of this rough world. 

But suppose instead of the soothing cadences of this harmlessvolume, you had just perused a short story of Guy de Maupassant;would not your feelings be different? Would you not have thesensation of being fortified in your courage, in your humour, in yourbrave embracing of the fantastic truth? Would you not contemplatethe most grotesque matters lightly, wisely, sanely and with amagnanimous heart?

The perverted moral training to which we have been all of ussubjected, has "sicklied o'er with the pale cast" of a most evilscrupulousness our natural free enjoyment of the absurd contrastsand accidents and chances of life. 

French humour may be savage--all the better--we need a humourwith some gall in it to deal with the humour of the universe. But ourhumour, stopping short so timorously of stripping the world to itssmock, is content to remain vulgar. That is the only definition ofvulgarity that I recognise--a temptation to be coarse without thespiritual courage to be outrageous! Coarseness--our Anglo Saxonpeculiarity--is due to temperamental insensitiveness. Outrageousgrossness--with its ironical, beautiful blasphemy against the greatmother's amazing tricks--is an intellectual and spiritual thing, worthyof all noble souls. The one is the rank breath of a bourgeoisdemocracy, the other is the free laughter of civilised intelligencesthrough all human history. 

English and Americans find it difficult to understand each other'shumour. One can well understand this difficulty. No one finds anyobstacle--except Puritan prejudice--in understanding French humour;because French humour is universal; the humour of the human spiritcontemplating the tragic comedy of the human body. 

One very interesting thing must be noted here in regard to themethod of Guy de Maupassant's writings; I mean the power of theshort story to give a sense of the general stream of life which isdenied to the long story. 

Personally I prefer long stories; but that is only because I have aninsatiable love of the story for its own sake, apart from itsinterpretation of life. I am not in the least ashamed to confess thatwhen I read books, I do so to escape from the pinch of actual facts. Ihave a right to this little peculiarity as much as to any other as longas I don't let it invade the clarity of my reason. But in the shortstory--and I have no scruple about admitting it--one seems to get theflavour of the writer's general philosophy of life more completelythan in any other literary form. 

It is a snatch at the passing procession, a dip into the flowing stream, and one gets from it the sort of sudden illumination that one getsfrom catching a significant gesture under the street lamp, or meetinga swift tale-telling glance beneath a crowded doorway. 

Bitterly inspired as he is by the irony of the physiological tragedy ofhuman life, Guy de Maupassant is at his greatest when he deals withthe bizarre accidents that happen to the body; greatest of all when hedeals with the last bizarre accident of all, the accident of death. 

The appalling grotesqueness of death, its brutal and impious levity, its crushing finality, have never been better written of. The savageferocity with which he tears off the mask which the sentimentalpiety of generations has thrown over the features of their dead is nosign of frivolousness in him. The gravity of the undertaker is not anindication of deep emotion; nor is the jesting of Hamlet, as he standsabove Ophelia's grave, a sign of an inhuman heart. 

The last insult of the scurrilous gods--their flinging us upon oblivionwith so indecent, so lewd a disregard for every sort of seemliness--isanswered in Guy de Maupassant by a ferocious irony almost equalto their own. 

But it would be unfair to let this dark-browed Norman go, without atleast a passing allusion to the large and friendly manner in which herakes up, out of brothel, out of gutter, out of tenement, out ofsweat-shop, out of circus-tent, out of wharf shanty, out of barge cabin, every kind and species of human derelict to immortalise theirvagrant humanity in the amber of his flawless style. 

There is a spacious hospitality about the man's genius which is a raretonic to weary aesthetes, sick of the thin-spun theories of the schools. The sun-burnt humour of many queer tatterdemalions warms us, aswe read him, into a fine indifference to nice points of humandistinction. All manner of ragged nondescripts blink at us out oftheir tragic resignation and hint at a ribald reciprocity of nature, making the whole world kin. 

In his ultimate view of life, he was a drastic pessimist, and what wecall materialism receives from his hands the clinching fiat of aterrific imprimatur. And this is well; this is as it should be. There arealways literary persons to uphold the banners of mysticism andmorality, idealism and good hope. There will always be plenty oftalent "on the side of the angels" in these days, when it has become akind of intellectual cant to cry aloud, "I am no materialist!Materialism has been disproved by the latest scientific thinkers!"

To come back to the old, honest, downright, heathen recognition ofthe midnight, wherein all candles are put out, is quite a salutaryexperience. It is good that there should be a few great geniuses thatare unmitigated materialists, and to whom the visible world isabsolutely all there is. One is rendered more tolerant of theboisterousness of the players when one feels the play ends so finallyand so soon. One is rendered less exacting towards the poorcreatures of the earth when one recognises that their hour is so brief. 

There will always be optimists in the countries where "the standardsof living are high. " There will always be writers--scientific orotherwise--to dispose of materialism. But meanwhile it is well thatthere should be at least one great modern among us for whom that_pulvis et umbra_ is the last word. At least, one, if only for the sakeof those whom we mourn most; so that, beholding their lives, liketorch-flames against black darkness, we shall not stint them of theirremembrance. 

ANATOLE FRANCE

Anatole France is probably the most disillusioned humanintelligence which has ever appeared on the surface of this planet. 

All the great civilised races tend to disillusion. Disillusion is themark of civilised eras as opposed to barbaric ones and if the dreamof the poets is ever realised and the Golden Age returns, such an agewill be the supreme age of happy, triumphant disillusion. 

This was seen long ago by Lucretius, who regarded the fear of thegods as the last illusion of the human race, and looked for itsremoval as the race's entrance into the earthly paradise. 

Nietzsche's noble and austere call to seriousness and spiritualconflict is the sign of a temper quite opposite from this. Zarathustrafrees himself from all other illusions, but he does not free himselffrom the most deadly one of all--the illusion namely, that the freeingoneself from illusion is a high and terrible duty. 

The real disillusioned spirit is not the fierce Nietzschean one whoseglacial laughter is an iconoclastic battle-cry and whose freedom is afreedom achieved anew every day by a strenuous and desperatestruggle. The real disillusioned spirit plays with illusions, puts themon and takes them off, lightly, gaily, indifferently, just as it happens, just as the moment demands. 

One feels that in spite of his cosmic persiflage and radiant attempt toMediterraneanise into "sun-burnt mirth" the souls of the northernnations, Nietzsche was still at heart an ingrained hyperborean, still atheart a splendid and savage Goth. 

As in every other instance, we may take it for granted that anypopular idea which runs the gamut of the idealistic lecture-halls andpulpits of a modern democracy is false through and through. Amongsuch false ideas is the almost universal one that what is called thedecadence of a nation is a sign of something regrettable anddeplorable. On the contrary, it is a sign of something admirable andexcellent. Such "weakness, " in a deeper than a popular sense, is"strength"; such decadence is simply wisdom. 

The new cult of the "will to power" which Nietzsche originated isnothing more than the old demiurgic life-illusion breaking looseagain, as it broke loose in the grave ecstasies of the early Christiansand in the Lutheran reformation. Nietzsche rent and tore at themorality of Christendom, but he did so with the full intention ofsubstituting a morality of his own. One illusion for another illusion. A Roland for an Oliver!

Nietzsche praised with desperate laudation a classical equanimitywhich he was never able to reach. He would have us love fate andlaugh and dance; but there were drops of scorching tears upon thepage of his prophecy and the motif of his challenge was the terriblegravity of his own nature; though the conclusion of his seriousnesswas that we must renounce all seriousness. It is Nietzsche himselfwho teaches us that in estimating the value of a philosopher we haveto consider the psychology of the motive-force which drove him. 

The motive-force that drove Nietzsche was the old savagelife-instinct, penetrated with illusion through and through, and praise ashe might the classical urbanity, no temper that has ever existed wasless urbane than his own. 

The history of the human race upon this planet may be regarded--inso far as its spiritual eruptions are concerned--as the pressureupwards, from the abysmal depths, of one scoriae tempest afteranother, rending and tearing their way from the dark centre fireswhere Demogorgon turns himself over in his sleep, and becoming assoon as they reach the surface and harden into rock, the greatmonumental systems of human thought, the huge fetters of ourimaginations. The central life-fire which thus forces its path atcataclysmic intervals to the devastated surface is certainly noillusion. It is the one terrific cosmic fact. 

Where illusion enters is where we, poor slaves of traditionalratiocination, seek to turn these explosions of eternal lava intoeternal systems. The lava of life pours forth forever, but the systemsbreak and crumble; each one overwhelmed in its allotted time by anew outrushing of abysmal energy. 

The reiterated eruptions from the fathomless depths make up theshifting material with which human civilisations build themselvestheir illusive homes; but the wisest civilisations are the ones thaterect a hard, clear, bright wall of sceptical "suspension ofjudgment, " from the face of which the raging flood of primordialenergy may be flung back before it can petrify into any furthermischief. 

Such a protective wall from the eruptive madness of primordialbarbarism, the scepticism of classical civilisation is foreverpolishing and fortifying. Through the pearl-like glass of itsinviolable security we are able to mock the tempest-driven eaglesand the swirling glacial storms. We can amuse ourselves with theillusions from which we are free. We can give the imaginationunbounded scope and the fancy unrestricted licence. We havebecome happy children of our own self-created kingdom of heaven;the kingdom of heaven which is the kingdom of disillusion. 

And of this kingdom, Anatole France is surely the reigning king. From the Olympian disenchantment of his tolerant urbanity, alleruptive seriousness foams back spray-tossed and scattered. And yetsuch a master of the art of "suspended judgment" was he, that hepermits himself to dally very pleasantly with the most passionateillusions of the human race. He is too deep a sceptic even to remainat the point of taking seriously his own aesthetic epicureanism. 

This is where he differs from Oscar Wilde, from Walter Pater, fromStendhal, from Remy de Gourmont, from Gabriele d'Annunzio. Thisis where he differs from Montaigne. These great men build up anegoism of grave subjectivity out of their suspicion of other people'scults. They laugh at humanity but they do not laugh at themselves. With the help of meta-physic they destroy metaphysic; only tosubstitute for the gravity of idealism the gravity of Epicureanism. 

But Anatole France has no gravity. He respects nothing; least of allhimself. That is why there is something singularly winning abouthim which we miss in these others. There is something which pallsupon us and grows heavy and tiresome after a while about thismassive gravity in the cult of one's own sensations. 

Sensations? Well! We all know how subtle and pleasant they can be;but this perpetual religion of them, this ponderous worship of them, becomes at last something monstrous and inhuman, somethingwhich makes us cry aloud for air and space. Not only does it becomeinhuman and heavy--it becomes comic. 

Every religion, even the religion of sensation, becomes comic whenthe sharp salt breath of intellectual sanity ceases to blow upon it. Itsvotaries seem to be going to and fro wrapped in sheep's wool. Thewool may be stained in Tyrian dyes; but it is wool for all that, and ittends ultimately to impede the steps of the wearer and to dull not afew of his natural perceptions. 

If one imagines a symposium in the Elysian fields between Wildeand Pater and d'Annunzio, and the sudden entrance upon them of thegreat Voltaire, one cannot but believe that after a very short time thisreligion of aestheticism would prove as tiresome to the old ribaldchampion of a free humanity as any other ritual. 

And in this respect Anatole France is with Voltaire. He has toohumorous a soul to endure the solemnity of the cultivated senses. Hewould desert such a group of pious subjectivists to chat with Horaceabout the scandals of the imperial court or with Rabelais about theprice of sausages. 

Sceptical in other matters, egoists of the type I have mentioned areinclined to grow unconscionably grave when questions of sex arebrought forward. This illusion at any rate--the illusion of sexualattraction--they would be most loth to destroy. 

But Anatole France fools sex without stint. It affords him, just as itdid Voltaire and Rabelais, his finest opportunities. He fools it up hilland down dale. He shakes it, he trundles it, he rattles it, he bangs it, he thumps it, he tumbles it in the mud, in the sand, in the earth--justas Diogenes did with his most noble tub. Fooling sex is the grandgame of Anatole France's classic wit. The sport never wearies him. It seems an eternal perennial entertainment. Hardly one of his booksbut has this sex fooling as its principal theme. 

It seems to his detached and speculative mind the most amusing andirresistible jest in the world that men and women should behave asthey do; that matters should be arranged in just this manner. 

What we arrive at once more in Anatole France is that humorousdrawing back from the world, back into some high pitchedobservation-tower of the mind, from the philosophic seclusion ofwhich the world scene can be easily imagined as different from whatit is. Nothing is more salutary in the midst of the mad confusion ofthe world than these retirements. It is to no mere "ivory tower" ofaesthetic superiority that we retreat. It is to a much higher and morespacious eminence. So high indeed do we withdraw that all the ivorytowers of the world seem far beneath us; beneath us, and not moreor less sacred than other secular erections. 

It is from this point of observation that our humour is suddenlymade aware of the startling absurdity of human institution; and notonly of _human_ institution; for it is made aware also of theabsurdity of the whole fantastic scheme of this portentous universe. We regard the world in these high speculative moods much aschildren do when they suddenly enquire of their bewildered parentswhy it is that human beings have two legs and why it is that littlegirls are different from little boys. 

It is one result of these withdrawings to the translunar empyrean thatthe life of a man of action upon this earth does not appear any moreor any less remarkable or important than the life of a man of letters. All human activities from that celestial height are equal; andwhether we plunge into politics or into pleasure, into science or intotheology, seems a mere incidental chance, as indifferent in the greatuncaring solar system as the movements of gnats around a lamp ormidges around a candle. 

The great historic revolutions, the great social reformations, ancientor modern, present themselves from this height as just as important—asjust as unimportant--as the visions of saintly fanatics or theamours of besotted rakes. 

Nothing is important and anything may be important. It is all amatter of the human point of view. It is all a matter of taste. Lookingat the whole mad stream of things from this altitude, we see theworld as if we were peering through an inverted telescope; or rather, shall we say, through an instrument called an "equi-scope"--whosepeculiarity it is to make all things upon which it is turned _little andequal. _

The mental temper of Anatole France is essentially one which isinterested in historic and contemporary events; interested in theoutward actions and movements of men and in the fluctuations ofpolitical life. But it is interested in these things with a certainspacious reservation. It is interested in them simply because they arethere, simply because they illustrate so ironically the weaknessesand caprices of human nature and the dramatic chances ofineluctable fate. It is not interested in them because they areinherently and absolutely important, but because they are importantrelatively and humorously as indicative of the absurd lengths towhich human folly will go. It is interested in these things, as I havesaid, with an ample reservation, but it must emphatically be notedthat it is a great deal more interested in them than in any works of artor letters or in any achievement of philosophy. 

Anatole France seems indeed to take a certain delight in puttinghuman thought into its place as essentially secondary andsubordinate to human will. He delights to indicate, just asMontaigne used to do, the pathetic and laughable discrepanciesbetween human thoughts and human actions. 

He is more concerned with men and women as they actually live andmove in the commerce of the world than in the wayward play oftheir speculative fancies, and it gives him an ironic satisfaction toshow how the most heroic and ideal thoughts are affected by thelittle wanton tricks of circumstances and character. 

This predominant concern with the natural humours and normalanimal instincts of the human race, this refusal ever to leave thebroad and beaten path of human frailty, gives a tone to his writings, even when he is dealing with art and literature, quite different fromother aesthetes'. 

He is not really an aesthete at all; he is too Voltairian for that. As acritic he is learned, scholarly, clear-sighted and acute; but his senseof the humorous inconsistencies of normal flesh and blood is toohabitually present with him to admit of that complete abandonmentto the spirit of his author, which, accompanied by interpretativesubtlety, secures the most striking results. 

His criticisms are wise and interesting, but they necessarily miss thesinuous clairvoyance of a writer like Remy de Gourmont who is ableto give himself up completely and with no ironic reservation to theabnormalities of the temperament he is discussing. Remy deGourmont's own temperament has something in it more receptive, more psychological, more supple than Anatole France's. He is inhimself a far less original genius and for that very reason he canslide more reservedly into the bizarre nooks and crannies ofabnormal minds. 

Anatole France is one of those great men of genius to whom thegods have permitted an un-blurred vision of the eternal normalitiesof human weakness. This vision he can never forget. He takes hisstand upon the ground which it covers, and from that ground henever deviates. 

Man for him is always an amorous and fantastic animal, using hisreason to justify his passions, and his imagination to justify hisillusions. He is always the animal who can laugh, the animal whocan cry, the animal who can beget or bear children. He is only in aquite secondary sense the animal who can philosophise. 

It is because of his constant preoccupation with the normaleccentricities and pathetic follies of our race that he lays so muchstress upon outward action. 

The normal man is rather an animal who wills and acts than ananimal who dreams and thinks; and it is with willing and acting, rather than with dreaming and thinking, that Anatole France isconcerned. One of the main ironic devices of his humour is to showthe active animal led astray by his illusions, and the contemplativeanimal driven into absurdity by his will. 

With his outward-looking gaze fixed upon the eternal and patheticnormalities of the human situation, Anatole France has himself, likeVoltaire, a constant tendency to gravitate towards politics and publicaffairs. 

In this respect his temperament is most obstinately classical. LikeHorace and all the ancient satirists, he feels himself invinciblyattracted to "affairs of state, " even while they excite his derision. One cannot read a page of his writing without becoming aware thatone is in the presence of a mind cast in the true classic mould. 

In the manner of the great classical writers of Athens and Rome heholds himself back from any emotional betrayal of his own feelings. He is the type of character most entirely opposite to what might becalled the Rousseau-type. 

He is un-modern in this and quite alone; for, in one form or another, the Rousseau-type with its enthusiastic neurotic mania forself-revelation dominates the entire literary field. One gets theimpression of something massive and self-possessed, somethingserenely and almost inhumanly sane about him. One feels alwaysthat he is the "Grand Gentleman" of literature with whom noliberties may be taken. His tone is quiet, his manner equable, his airsmiling, urbane, superior. His reserve is the reserve of the greatraces of antiquity. With a calm, inscrutable, benevolent malice, helooks out upon the world. There is a sense of much withheld, muchunsaid, much that nothing would ever induce him to say. 

His point of view is always objective. It might be maintained, though the thing sounds like a paradox, that his very temperament isobjective. Certainly it is a temperament averse to any outbursts ofunbalanced enthusiasm. 

His attitude toward what we call Nature is more classical than theclassics. Virgil shows more vibrant emotion in the presence of thesublimities of the natural elements. His manner when dealing withthe inanimate world is the manner of the Eighteenth Centurytouched with a certain airiness and charm that is perhaps moreHellenic than Latin. As one reads him one almost feels as though thehuman race detached itself from its surroundings and put betweenitself and Nature a certain clear and airy space, untroubled by anymagnetic currents of spiritual reciprocity. One feels as thoughNature were kept decisively and formally in her place and notpermitted to obtrude herself upon the consciousness of civilisedpeople except when they require some pleasant lawn or noble treesor smiling garden of roses to serve as a background for theirmetaphysical discussions or their wanton amorous play. What wehave come to call the "magic" of Nature is never for a momentallowed to interrupt these self-possessed epicurean arguments ofstatesmen, politicians, amorists, theologians, philosophers andproconsuls. 

Individual objects in Nature--a tree, a brook, the seashore, a bunchof flowers, a glade in the forest, a terrace in a garden, --are describedin that clear, laconic, objective manner, which gives one theimpression of being able to touch the thing in question with one'sbare hand. 

The plastic and tactile value of things is always indicated in AnatoleFrance's writings with brief, clear cut, decisive touches, but "themurmurs and scents" of the great waters, the silences of the shadowyforests are not allowed to cross the threshold of his garden ofEpicurus. Each single petal of a rose will have its curves, its colours, its tints; but the mysterious forces of subterranean life which bringthe thing to birth are pushed back into the darkness. The marble-coldresistance of Anatole France's classical mind offers a hard polishedsurface against which the vague elemental energies of the world beatin vain. He walks smilingly and pensively among the olive-trees ofthe Academia, plucking a rose here and an oleander there; but forthe rest, the solemn wizardries of Nature are regarded with anurbane contempt. 

His style is a thing over which the fastidious lovers of humanlanguage may ponder long and deep. The art of it is so restrained, soaristocratic, so exclusive, that even the smallest, simplest, mostunimportant words take to themselves an emphatic significance. 

Anatole France is able to tell us that Monsieur Bergeret made somenaive remark, or the Abbé Jérôme Coignard uttered some unctuoussally, in so large and deliberate and courtly a way that the mere "hesaid" or "he began" falls upon us like a papal benediction or like thegesture of a benignant monarch. 

There is no style in the world so deeply penetrated with the odourand savour of its author's philosophy. And this philosophy, thisatmosphere of mind, is so entirely French that every least idiomaticpeculiarity in his native tongue seems willing to lend itself, to thelast generous drop of the wine of its essential soul, to the tone andmanner of his speech. All the refinements of the most consummatecivilisation in the world, all its airy cynicism, all its laughingurbanity, all its whimsical friendliness, seem to concentratethemselves and reach their climax on every page of his books. 

A delicate odour of incense and mockery, an odour of consecratedwine and a savour of heathen wit, rise up together from everysentence and disarm us with the insidiousness of their pleasantcontrast. His style is so beautiful and characteristic that one cannotread the simplest passage of easy narration from his pen withoutbecoming penetrated with his spirit, without feeling saner, wiser, kindlier, and more disenchanted and more humane. 

I cannot resist quoting from the prologue to "Le Puits de SainteClaire, " a certain passage which seems to me peculiarly adapted tothe illustration of what I have just said. The writer is, or imagineshimself to be, in the city of Siena. 

"Sur la voie blanche, dans ces nuits transparentes, la seule recontreque je faisais était celle du R. P. Adone Doni, qui alors travaillaitcomme moi tout le jour dans l'ancienne académie _degli Intronati. _J'avais tout de suite aimé ce cordelier qui, blanchi dans l'étude, gardait l'humeur riante et facile d'un ignorant. 

"Il causait volontiers. Je goûtais son parler suave, son beau langage, sa pensee docte et naïve, son air de vieux Silène purifié par les eauxbaptismales, son instinct de mime accompli, le jeu de ses passionsvives et fines, le génie étrange et charmant dont il etait possédé. 

"Assidu à la bibliothèque, il fréquentait aussi le marché, s'arrêtant depréférence devant les contadines, qui vendent des pommes d'or, etprêtant l'oreille à leur libres propos. 

Il apprenait d'elles, disait-il, la belle langue toscane. . . . Je crusm'aperçevoir en effet qu'il inclinait aux opinions singulières. Il avaitde la religion et de la science, mais non sans bizarreries. . . . C'estsur le diable qu'il professait des opinions singulières. Il pensait quele diable était mauvais sans l'être absolument et que sonimperfection naturelle l'empêcherait toujours d'atteindre à laperfection du mal. Il croyait aperçevoir quelques signes de bontédans les actions obscures de Satan, et, sans trop l'oser dire, il enaugurait la rédemption finale de l'archange méditatif, après laconsommation des siècles. . . . Assis sur la margelle, les mains dansles manches de sa robe, il contemplait avec un paisible etonnementles choses de la nuit. 

"Et l'ombre qui l'enveloppait laissait deviner encore dans ses yeuxclairs et sur sa face camuse l'expressions d'audace craintive et degrâce moqueuse qui y etait profondement empreinte. Nouséchangions d'abord des souhaits solennels de bonne santé, de paix etde contentement. . . . 

"Tandis qu'il parlait, la lumiere de la lune coulait sur sa barbe enruisseau d'argent. Le grillon accompagnait du bruissement de sesélytres la voix du conteur, et parfois, aux sons de cette bouche, d'oùsortait le plus doux des langages humains, répondait la plainte flutéedu crapaud, qui, de l'autre côté de la route, écoutait, amical etcraintif. "

The beautiful delicacy of that single touch "sur la voie blanche, dansces nuits transparentes" is characteristic of a thousand others of asimilar kind sprinkled among his books, where gentle and whimsicalspirits discourse upon God and the Universe. 

He has a most exquisite genius for these little chance-accompanimentsof such human scenes. "L'Orme du Mail" is full of them; andso is "Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard. "

In "Sur la Pierre Blanche" the impish humour of accidentalencounter brings forward nothing less than the death of Stephen theProto-Martyr, as an irrelevant interruption to the amorous pleasuresof one of his least attractive philosophers. 

Full of malicious interest as he is in all the outward events of nationsand societies, it is always evident that what Anatole France reallyregards as worthy of tender consideration is the conversation ofquaint minds and the "Humeur riante et facile" of wayward andfantastic souls. 

His sense of the fundamental futility of the whole scheme of thingsis so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as theillogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treatwith smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the wholeterrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face ofnothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches incloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpracticaland incompetent persons whose countenances express an "audacecraintive" and a "grâce moqueuse, " and who look with mild wonderand peaceful astonishment at "les choses de la nuit"?

After perusing many volumes of Anatole France, one after another, we come to feel as though nothing in the world were importantexcept the reading of unusual books, the conversation of unusualpeople, and the enjoyment of such philosophical pleasures as may bepermitted by the gods and encouraged by the approbation of afriendly and tolerant conscience. 

One always rises from the savouring of his excellent genius with aconviction that it is only the conversation of one's friends, varied bysuch innocent pleasures of the senses as may be in harmony with thecustom of one's country, which renders in the last resort the madnessof the world endurable. 

He alone, of all modern writers, creates that leisurely atmosphere ofnoble and humorous dignity--familiar enough to lovers of the oldmasters--according to which every gesture and word of the mostsimple human being comes to be endowed with a kind of royaldistinction. By the very presence in his thought of the essentialmeaninglessness of the world, he is enabled to throw into strongerrelief the "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of our pathetichumanity. 

Human words--the words of the most crack-brained among us--taketo themselves a weight and dignity from the presence behind themof this cosmic purposelessness. The less the universe matters, themore humanity matters. The less meaning there is in the macrocosmthe more tenderly and humorously must every microcosm be treated. 

It thus comes about that Anatole France, the most disillusioned andsceptical of writers, is also the writer whose books throw over thefancies and caprices of humanity the most large and liberalbenediction. 

To realise how essentially provincial English and American writersare, one has only to consider for a moment the absoluteimpossibility of such books as "L'Orme du Mail, " "Le Mannequin"or "Monsieur Bergeret à Paris" appearing in either of these countries. 

This amiable and smiling scepticism, this profound scholarship, thissubtle interest in theological problems, this ironical interest inpolitical problems, this detachment of tone, this urbane humanism, make up an "ensemble" which one feels could only possibly appearin the land of Rabelais and Voltaire. 

Think of the emergence of a book in London or New York bearingsuch quotations at the heads of the chapters as those which are to befound in "Le Puits de Sainte Claire"! The mere look of the first pageof the volume, with its beautifully printed Greek sentence about_ta physika kai ta ethika kai ta mathmatika_, lifts one suddenly andwith a delicious thrill of pleasure, as if from the touch of a cool, strong, youthful hand, into that serene atmosphere of largespeculations and unbounded vistas which is the inheritance of thegreat humane tradition: the tradition, older than all the dust ofmodern argument, and making every other mental temper seem, incomparison, vulgar, common, bourgeois and provincial. 

The chapter headed "Saint Satyre" is prefaced by a beautiful hymnfrom the "Breviarum Romanum"; while the story named "GuidoCavalcanti" begins with a long quotation from "Il Decameron diMesser Giovanni Boccaccio. " I take the first instance that comes tomy hand; but all his books are the same. And one who reads AnatoleFrance for the sake of an exciting narrative, or for the sake ofilluminating psychology, or for the sake of some proselytisingtheory, will be hugely disappointed. None of these things will hefind; nor, indeed, anything else that is tiresomely and absurdlymodern. 

What he will find will be the old, sweet, laughing, mellow world ofrich antique wisdom; a world where the poetry of the ancientsblends harmoniously with the mystical learning of the fathers of thechurch; a world where books are loved better than theories andpersons better than books; a world where the humours of thepathetic flesh and blood of the human race are given their true value, as more amusing than any philosophy and as the cause and origin ofall the philosophies that have ever been!

Anatole France is incorrigibly pagan. The pleasures of the senses aredescribed in all his books with a calm smiling assurance thatultimately these are the only things that matter!

I suppose that no author that ever lived is so irritating tostrong-minded idealists. He does not give these people "the ghost of achance. " He serenely assumes that all ideals are of human, toohuman, origin, and that no ideals can stand up long against theshocks of life's ironic caprices. 

And yet while so maliciously introducing, with laconic Voltairiangibes, the wanton pricking of human sensuality, he never forgets thechurch. In nothing is he more French; in nothing is he more civilised, than in his perpetual preoccupation with two things--the beauty andfrailty of women and the beauty and inconsistency of Christianity. 

The clever young men who write books in England and Americaseem possessed by a precisely opposite purpose; the purpose ofshowing that Christianity is played out and the purpose of showingthat women are no longer frail. 

That sort of earnest-minded attempt to establish some kind ofmystical substitute for the religion of our fathers, which one iscontinually meeting in modern books and which has so withering aneffect both upon imagination and humour, is never encountered inAnatole France. He is interested in old tradition and he loves tomock at it. He is interested in human sensuality and he loves tomock at it; but apart from traditional piety struggling with naturalpassion, he finds nothing in the human soul that arrests him verydeeply. 

Man, to Anatole France, is a heathen animal who has been baptised;and the humour of his whole method depends upon our keeping afirm hold upon both these aspects of our mortal life. 

In a world where men propagated themselves like plants or trees andwhere there was no organised religious tradition, the humour ofAnatole France would beat its wings in the void in vain. He requiresthe sting of sensual desire and he requires an elaborate ecclesiasticalsystem whose object is the restraint of sensual desire. With thesetwo chords to play upon he can make sweet music. Take them bothaway and there could be no Anatole France. 

The root of this great writer's genius is _irony. _ His wholephilosophy is summed up in that word, and all the magic of hisunequalled style depends upon it. 

Sometimes as we read him, we are stirred by a dim sense ofindignation against his perpetual tone of smiling, patronising, disenchanted, Olympian pity. The word "pity" is one of his favouritewords, and a certain kind of pity is certainly a profound element inhis mocking heart. 

But it is the pity of an Olympian god, a pity that cares little for whatwe call justice, a pity that refuses to take seriously the objects of hiscommiseration. His clear-sighted intelligence is often pleased to toyvery plausibly with a certain species of revolutionary socialism. But, I suppose few socialists derive much satisfaction from thatdevastating piece of irony, the Isle of the Penguins; whereeverything moves in circles and all ends as it began. 

The glacial smile of the yawning gulf of eternal futility flickersthrough all his pages. Everything is amusing. Nothing is important. Let us eat and drink; let us be urbane and tolerant; let us walk on thesunny side of the road; let us smell the roses on the sepulchres of thedead gods; let us pluck the violets from the sepulchres of our deadloves. All is equal--nothing matters. The wisest are they who playwith illusions which no longer deceive them and with the pity thatno longer hurts them. The wisest are they who answer the brutalityof Nature with the irony of Humanity. The wisest are they who readold books, drink old wine, converse with old friends, and let the restgo. 

And yet--and yet--

There is a poem of Paul Verlaine dedicated to Anatole France whichspeaks like one wounded well nigh past enduring by the voices ofthe scoffers. 

 Ah, les Voix, mourez done, mourantes que vous êtes Sentences, mots en vain, metaphores mal faites, Toute la rhétorique en fuite des péchés, Ah, les Voix, mourez done, mourantes que vous êtes! . . . . Mourez parmi la voix terrible de l'Amour! . . . . 

PAUL VERLAINE

To turn suddenly to the poetry of Paul Verlaine from the mass ofmodern verse is to experience something like that sensation soadmirably described by Thoreau when he came upon a sentence inLatin or in Greek lying like a broken branch of lovely fresh greeneryacross the pages of some modern book. 

Verlaine more than any other European poet is responsible for thehuge revolution in poetry which has taken in recent times so manyand so surprising shapes and has deviated so far from its originator'smethod. 

There is little resemblance between the most striking modernexperiments in what is called "free verse" and the manner in whichVerlaine himself broke with the old tradition; but the spiritanimating these more recent adventures is the spirit which Verlainecalled up from the "vasty deep, " and with all their divergence fromhis original manner these modern rebels have a perfect right to usethe authority of his great name, "car son nom, " as Coppée says, inhis tenderly written preface to his "Choix de Poésies, " "éveilleratoujours le souvenir d'une poésie absolument nouvelle et qui a prisdans les lettres franchises l'importance d'une découverte. "

The pleasure with which one returns to Verlaine from wanderinghere and there among our daring contemporaries is really nothingless than a tribute to the essential nature of all great poetry; I meanto the soul of music in the thing. Some of the most powerful andoriginal of modern poets have been led so far away from thisessential soul of their own great art as to treat the music of theirworks as quite subordinate to its intellectual or visual import. 

As far as I am able to understand the theories of the so-called"imagists, " the idea is to lay the chief stress upon the evocation ofclearly outlined shapes--images clean-cut and sharply defined, and, while personal in their choice, essentially objective in theirrendering--and upon the absence of any traditional "beautiful words"which might blur this direct unvarnished impact of the poet'simmediate vision. 

It might be maintained with some plausibility that Verlaine's poetrytakes its place in the "impressionistic" period, side by side with"impressionistic" work in the plastic arts, and that for this reason itis quite natural that the more modern poets, whose artisticcontemporaries belong to the "post-impressionistic" school, shoulddeviate from him in many essential ways. Personally I am extremelyunwilling to permit Verlaine to be taken possession of by anymodern tendency or made the war-cry of any modern camp. 

Though by reason of his original genius he has become a potentcreative spirit influencing all intelligent people who care aboutpoetry at all, yet, while thus inspiring a whole generation--perhaps, considering the youth of many of our poetic contemporaries, wemight say _two_ generations--he belongs almost as deeply to certaingreat eras of the past. In several aspects of his temperament hecarries us back to François Villon, and his own passionate heart isforever reverting to the Middle Ages as the true golden age of thespirit he represented. 

He thus sweeps aside with a gesture the great seventeenth century somuch admired by Nietzsche. 

 Non. Il fut gallican, ce siècle, et janséniste! C'est vers le Moyen Age énorme et délicat, Qu'il faudrait que mon coeur en panne naviguât, Loin de nos jours d'esprit charnel et de chair triste. 

But whatever may have been the spirit which animated Verlaine, thefact remains that when one takes up once more this "Choix dePoésies, " "avec un portrait de l'auteur par Eugene Carrière, " andglances, in passing, at that suggestive _cinquante-septième mille_indicating how many others besides ourselves have, in the midst ofearthquakes and terrors, assuaged their thirst at this pure fount, onerecognises once more that the thing that we miss in this modernwelter of poetising is simply _music_--music, the first and lastnecessity, music, the only authentic seal of the eternal Muses. 

Directly any theory of poetry puts the chief stress upon anythingexcept music--whether it be the intellectual content of the verses ortheir image-creating vision or their colour or their tone--one has aright to grow suspicious. 

The more subtly penetrated such music is by the magic of the poet'spersonality, the richer it is in deep intimations of universal humanfeeling, the greater will be its appeal. But the music must be there;and since the thing to which it forever appeals is the unchanginghuman sensibility, there must be certain eternal laws of rhythmwhich no original experiments can afford to break without losing theimmortal touch. 

This is all that lovers of poetry need contend for as against thesequaint and interesting modern theories. Let them prove their theories!Let them thrill us in the old authentic manner by their "free verse"and we will acknowledge them as true descendants of Catullus andKeats, of Villon and Verlaine!

But they must remember that the art of poetry is the art ofheightening words by the magic of music. Colour, suggestion, philosophy, revelation, interpretation, realism, impressionism--allthese qualities come and go as the fashion of our taste changes. Onething alone remains, as the essential and undying spirit of all truepoetry; that it should have that "concord of sweet sounds"--let us say, rather, that concord of high, delicate, rare sounds--which melts usand enthralls us and liberates us, whatever the subject and whateverthe manner or the method! Verse which is cramped and harsh andunmelodious may have its place in human history; it may have itsplace in human soothsaying and human interest; it has no place orlot in poetry. Individual phrases may have their magic; individualwords may have their colour; individual thoughts may have theirtruth; individual sentences their noble rhetoric;--all this is well andright and full of profound interest. But all this is only the material, the atmosphere, the medium, the instrument. If the final result doesnot touch us, does not move us, does not rouse us, does not quiet us, as _music_ to our ears and our souls--it may be the voice of theprophet; it may be the voice of the charmer; it is not the voice of theimmortal god. 

Verlaine uses the term _nuance_ in his "ars poetica" to express theevasive quality in poetry which appeals to him most and of which hehimself is certainly one of the most delicate exponents; butremembering the power over us of certain sublime simplicities, remembering the power over us of certain great plangent lines inDante and Milton, where there is no "nuance" at all, one hesitates tomake this a dogmatic doctrine. 

But in what he says of music he is supremely right, and it is for thesake of his passionate authority on this matter--the authority of onewho is certainly no formal traditionalist--that I am led to quotecertain lines. 

They occur in "Jadis et Naguère" and are placed, appropriatelyenough, in the centre of the volume of Selections which I have nowbefore me. 

 De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela préfère l'Impair Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air, Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose. 

 Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise: Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint. 

 Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance! Oh! la nuance seule fiance Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!

 Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine, L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur, Qui font pleurer les yeux de l'Azur, Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!

 Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui sou cou! Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie De rendre un peu la Rime assagie Si Ton n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'où?

 . . . . 

 De la musique encore et toujours! Que ton vers soit la chose envolée Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme allée Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours. 

 Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure Éparse au vent crispé du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym . . . Et tout le reste est littérature. 

Yes; that is the sigh which goes up from one's heart, in these dayswhen there is so much verse and so little poetry;--"et tout le reste estlittérature"!

Clever imagery, humorous realism, philosophical thoughts, bizarrefancies and strange inventions--it is all vivid, all arresting, allremarkable, but it is only literature! This is a fine original image. That is a fine unexpected thought. Here indeed is a rare magicalphrase. Good! We are grateful for these excellent things. But poetry?Ah! that is another matter. 

This music of which I speak is a large and subtle thing. It is not onlythe music of syllables. It is the music of thoughts, of images, ofmemories, of associations, of spiritual intimations and far-drawnearth-murmurs. It is the music which is hidden in reality, in the heartof reality; it is the music which is the secret cause why things are asthey are; the music which is their end and their beginning; it is theold deep Pythagorean mystery; it is the music of the flowing tides, of the drifting leaves, of the breath of the sleepers, of the passionatepulses of the lovers; it is the music of the rhythm of the universe, and its laws are the laws of sun and moon and night and day andbirth and death and good and evil. 

Such music is itself, in a certain deep and true sense, more instinctwith the mystery of existence than any definite image or any definitethought can possibly be. It seems to contain in it the potentiality ofall thoughts, and to stream in upon us from some Platonic"beyond-world" where the high secret archetypes of all created formssleep intheir primordial simplicity. 

The rhythmic cadences of such music seem, if I dare so far to putsuch a matter into words, to exist independently of and previously tothe actual thoughts and images in which they are finally incarnated. 

One has the sense that what the poet first feels is the obscure beautyof this music, rising up wordless and formless from theunfathomable wells of being, and that it is only afterwards, in amood of quiet recollection, that he fits the thing to its correspondingimages and thoughts and words. 

The subject is really nothing. This mysterious music may be said tohave created the subject; just as the subject, when it is itself calledinto existence, creates its images and words and mental atmosphere. Except for the original out-welling of this hidden stream, pouring upfrom unknown depths, there would be no thought, no image, nowords. A beautiful example of this is that poem entitled "PromenadeSentimentale, " which is one of the Paysages Tristes in the "PoèmesSaturniens. "

It is a slight and shadowy thing, of no elaborate construction, --simply a rendering of the impression produced upon the mind bysunset and water; by willows and water-fowl and water-lilies. Aslight thing enough; but in some mysterious way it seems to blendwith all those vague feelings which are half memories and halfintimations of something beyond memory, which float round themargins of all human minds. 

We have seen these shadowy willows, that dying sunset; we haveheard the wail of those melancholy water-fowl; somewhere--farfrom here--in some previous incarnation perhaps, or in the "dimbackward" of pre-natal dreaming. It all comes back to us as we giveourselves up to the whispered cadences of this faint sweet music;while those reiterated syllables about "the great water-lilies amongthe rushes" fall upon us like a dirge, like a requiem, like the wistfulvoice of what we have loved--once--long ago--touching us suddenlywith a pang that is well-nigh more than we can bear. 

 Le couchant dardait ses rayons suprêmes Et le vent berçait les nénuphars blêmes; Les grands nénuphars entre les roseaux Tristement luisaient sur les calmes eaux. Moi, j'errais tout seul, promenant ma plaie Au long de l'étang, parmi la saulaie Où la brume vague évoquait un grand Fantôme laiteux se désespérant Et pleurant avec la voix des sarcelles Qui se rappelaient en battant des ailes Parmi la saulaie où j'errais tout seul Promenant ma plaie; et l'épais linceul Des ténèbres vint noyer les suprêmes Rayons du couchant dans ses ondes blêmes Et des nénuphars parmi les roseaux Des grands nénuphars sur les calmes eaux. 

Verlaine is one of those great original poets the thought of whosewistful evocations coming suddenly upon us when we are troubledand vexed by the howl of life's wolves, becomes an incrediblemandragora of healing music. 

I can remember drifting once, in one of those misty spring twilights, when even the streets of Paris leave one restless, dissatisfied andfeverishly unquiet, into the gardens of the Luxembourg. There is astatue there of Verlaine accentuating all the extravagance of thatextraordinary visage--the visage of a satyr-saint, a "ragamuffinangel, " a tatterdemalion scholar, an inspired derelict, a scaramouchgod, --and I recollect how, in its marble whiteness, the thing leeredand peered at me with a look that seemed to have about it all thefragrance of all the lilac-blossoms in the world, mixed with all thepiety of all our race's children and the wantonness of all old heathendreams. It is like Socrates, that head; and like a gargoyle on thetower of Notre Dame. 

He ought to have been one of those slaves of Joseph of Arimathea, who carried the body of Our Lord from the cross to the rich man'stomb--a slave with the physiognomy of the god Pan--shedding tears, like a broken-hearted child, over the wounded flesh of the Saviour. 

There is an immense gulf--one feels it at once--between PaulVerlaine and all other modern French writers. What with them is anintellectual attitude, a deliberate aesthetic cult, is with him anabsolutely spontaneous emotion. 

His vibrating nerves respond, in a magnetic answer and with equalintensity, to the two great passions of the human race: its passion forbeauty and its passion for God. 

His association with the much more hard and self-possessed andsinister figure of Rimbaud was a mere incident in his life. 

Rimbaud succeeded in breaking up the idyllic harmony of hishalf-domestic, half-arcadian ménage, and dragging him out into theworld. But the influence over him of that formidable inhuman boywas not a deep, organic, predestined thing touching the roots of hisbeing; it was an episode; an episode tragically grotesque indeed andfull of a curious interest, but leaving the main current of his geniusuntouched and unchanged. 

Paul Verlaine's response to the beauty of women is a thing worthy ofthe most patient analysis. Probably there has never lived any humanperson who has been more thrilled by the slightest caress. One isconscious of this in every page of his work. There is a vibrantspirituality, a nervous abandonment, about his poetry of passion, which separates it completely from the confessions of the greatsensualists. 

There was nothing heavy or material about Verlaine's response toerotic appeals. His nervous organisation was so finely strung that, when he loved, he loved with his whole nature, with body, soul andspirit, in a sort of quivering ecstasy of spiritual lust. 

One is reminded here and there of Heine; in other places--a little--ofWilliam Blake; but even these resemblances are too vague to bepressed at all closely. 

His nature was undoubtedly child-like to a degree amounting topositive abnormality. He hardly ever speaks of love without theindication of a relation between himself and the object of his passionwhich has in it an extraordinary resemblance to the perfectly purefeeling of a child for its mother. 

It must have been almost always towards women possessed verystrongly of the maternal instinct that he was attracted; and, in hisattraction, the irresistible ecstasy of the senses seems alwaysmingled with a craving to be petted, comforted, healed, soothed, consoled, assuaged. 

In poem after poem it is the tenderness, the purity, the delicacy ofwomen, which draws and allures him. Their more feline, moreraptorial attributes are only alluded to in the verses where he isobviously objective and impersonal. In the excessive _gentleness_of his eroticism Verlaine becomes, among modern poets, strangelyoriginal; and one reads him with the added pleasure of enjoyingsomething that has disappeared from the love-poetry of the race formany generations. 

"By Gis and by saint Charity, " as the mad girl in the play sings, there is too much violence in modern love! One grows weary of allthis rending and tearing, of all this pantherish pouncing andserpentine clinging. One feels a reaction against this eternalsavagery of earth-lust. It is a relief, like the coming suddenly from ahedge of wild white roses after wandering through tropical jungles, to pass into this tender wistful air full of the freshness of the dew ofthe morning. 

No wonder Verlaine fell frequently into what his conscience toldhim was sin! His "sinning" has about it something so winning, soinnocent, so childish, so entirely free from the predatory mood, thatone can easily believe that his conscience was often betrayed intoslumber. And yet, when it did awaken at last, the tears of hispenitence ran down so pitifully over cheeks still wet with the tearsof his passion, that the two great emotions may be almost said tohave merged themselves in one another--the ecstasy of remorse inthe ecstasy of the sin that caused the remorse. 

The way a man "makes love" is always intimately associated withthe way he approaches his gods, such as they may be; and one neednot be in the least surprised to find that Verlaine's attitude to hisCreator has a marked resemblance to his attitude to thosetoo-exquisite created beings whose beauty and sweet maternaltenderness so often betrayed him. He evidently enjoys a deliciouschildish emotion, almost a babyish emotion, in giving himself upinto the hands of his Maker to be soothed and petted, healed andcomforted. He calls upon his God to punish him just as a child mightcall upon his mother to punish him, in the certain knowledge that histears will soon be kissed away by a tenderness as infinite as it is just. God, Christ, Our Lady, pass through the pages of his poems asthrough the cypress-terraces of some fantastic mediaeval picture. The "douceur" of their sweet pitifulness towards him runs like aquivering magnetic current through all the maddest fancies of hiswayward imagination. 

"De la douceur, de la douceur, de la douceur"! Even in the leastpardonable of light loves he demands this tenderness--demands itfrom some poor "fille de joie" with the same sort of tearful cravingwith which he demands it from the Mother of God. 

He has a pathetic mania for the consoling touch of tender, pitifulhands. All through his poetry we have reference to such hands. Sometimes they are only too human. Sometimes they are divine. Butwhether human or divine they bring with them that magnetic gift ofhealing for which, like a hurt and unhappy infant, he is alwayslonging. 

 Les chères mains qui furent miennes Toutes petites, toutes belles, Après ces méprises mortelles Et toutes ces choses païennes, Après les rades et les grèves, Et les pays et les provinces, Royales mieux qu'au temps des princes Les chères mains m'ouvrent les rêves. 

 . . . . 

 Ment-elle, ma vision chaste, D'affinité spirituelle, De complicité maternelle, D'affection étroite et vaste?

 . . . . 

That collection of passionate cries to God which ends with a sort ofrhapsody of pleading prayer, entitled "Sagesse, " begins--and onedoes not feel that it is in the least inappropriate--with

 Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse, et ces mains pâles Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal. 

It is very curious to note the subtle manner in which, for all hisdeclarations about the Middle Ages, he is attracted irresistibly to thatwonderful artificial fairy-land, associated for us for all time with thegenius of Watteau, wherein pale roses and fountains andyew-hedges are the background for the fatal sweetness of Columbine andthe dancing feet of Arlequino. 

This Garden-of-Versailles cult, with its cold moonlight and its faintmusic has become, with the sad-gay Pierrot as its tutelary deity, oneof the most appealing "motifs" in modern art. 

Almost all of us have worshipped, at some time or another, at thiswistful fairy shrine, and have laid our single white rose on its marblepavement, under the dark trees. 

Yes; Verlaine may boast of his faithful loyalty to the "hautethéologie et solide morale, guidé par la folie unique de la Croix" ofthat "Moyen Age énorme et délicat" which inspires his spirit. Thefact remains that none--none among all the most infatuatedfrequenters of the perverse fairy-land of Watteau's exquisitedreams--gives himself up more wantonly to the artifice within artifice, to themask below mask, of these dancers to tambourines amid the"boulingrins du pare aulique" of mock-classic fantasies. He giveshimself up to this Watteau cult all the more easily because hehimself has so infantile a heart. He is like a child who enters someelaborate masked ball in his own gala dress. It is natural to him to beperverse and wistful and tragically gay. It is natural to him to foot itin the moonlight along with the Marquis of Carabas. 

That Nuit du Walpurgis classique of his, with its "jardin de Lenôtre, correct, ridicule et charmant, " is one of the most delicate evocationsof this _genre. _ One sees these strange figures, "ces spectres agités, "as if they were passing from twilight to twilight through the silverymists of some pale Corot-picture, passing into thin air, into theshadow of a shadow, into the dream of a dream, into nothingnessand oblivion; but passing gaily and wantonly--to the music ofmandolines, to the blowing of fairy horns!

 N'importe! ils vont toujours, les fébriles fantômes, Menant leur ronde vaste et morne, et tressautant Comme dans un rayon de soleil des atomes, Et s'évaporent a l'instant

 Humide et blême où l'aube éteint l'un après l'autre Les cors, en sorte qu'il ne reste absolument Plus rien--absolument--qu'un jardin de Lenôtre Correct, ridicule et charmant. 

In the same vein, full of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter ofdragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in his Fêtes Galantes entitledFantoches. 

 Scaramouche et Pucinella Qu'un mauvais dessein rassembla Gesticulent, noirs sur la lune. 

 Cependant l'excellent docteur Bolonais cueille avec lenteur Des simples parmi l'herbe brune. 

 Lors sa fille, piquant minois Sous la charmille, en tapinois Se glisse demi-nue, en quête

 De son beau pirate espagnol Dont un langoureux rossignol Clame la détresse a tue-tête. 

Is that not worthy of an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley? And yethas it not something more naive, more infantile, than most moderntrifles of that sort? Does not it somehow suggest Grimm's FairyStories?

There is one mood of Paul Verlaine, quite different from this, whichis extremely interesting if only for its introduction into poetry of acertain impish malice which we do not as a rule associate withpoetry at all. 

Such is the poem called Les Indolents, with its ribald refrain, likethe laughter of a light-footed Puck flitting across the moon-lit lawns, of

 Hi! Hi! Hi! les amants bizarres!

 . . . . 

 Eurent l'inexpiable tort D'ajourner une exquise mort. Hi! Hi! Hi! les amants bizarres!

Such also are those extraordinary verses under the title ColloqueSentimental which trouble one's imagination with so penetrating achill of shivering disillusionment. 

For some reason or other my own mind always associates theseterrible lines with a particular corner of a public garden in Halifax, Yorkshire; where I seem to have seen two figures once; seen themwith a glacial pang of pain that was like the stab of a dagger of icefrozen from a poisoned well. 

 Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glacé Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé. 

 Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles. 

 Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glacé Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé. 

 --Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l'espoir! --L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir. 

I have omitted the bitter dialogue--as desolate and hollow in itsfrozen retorts as the echoes of iron heels in a granite sepulchre--butthe whole piece has a petrified forlornness about it which somehowreminds one of certain verses of Mr. Thomas Hardy. 

One of my own favourite poems of Verlaine is one whose weird andstrange beauty will appeal, I fear, to few readers of these sketches;but if I could put into words the indescribable power which itexercises over my own mood I should be doing something tomitigate its remoteness from normal feelings. It is a wild mad thing, this poem--a fantasia upon a melancholy and terrible truth--but it hasthe power of launching one's mind down long and perilous tides ofspeculation. 

It is like a "nocturne" written by a musician who has wanderedthrough all the cities of Europe with a company of beggar-players, playing masques of death to the occupants of all the cemeteries. Henames the poem Grotesques; and it comes among the verses calledEaux-Fortes, dedicated to François Coppée. 

 C'est que, sur leurs aigres guitares Crispant la main des libertés Ils nasillent des chants bizarres, Nostalgiques et révoltés;

 C'est enfin que dans leurs prunelles Rit et pleure--fastidieux-- L'amour des choses éternelles, Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!

 . . . . 

 Les juins brûlent et les décembres Gèlent votre chair jusqu'aux os, Et la fièvre envahit vos membres Qui se déchirent aux roseaux. 

 Tout vous repousse et tout vous navre Et quand la mort viendra pour vous Maigre et froide, votre cadavre Sera dédaigné par les loups!

I cannot resist the feeling that where the inmost essential genius ofVerlaine is to be found is neither in his religious poems nor hislove-poems; no, nor even in his singular fantasies. 

I find it in certain little evasive verses, the fleeting magic of whichevaporates, under any attempt to capture or define it, like theperfume from that broken alabaster box from which the womananointed the feet of the Saviour. Such a poem is that strangelyimaginative one, with a lovely silveriness of tone in its moth-likemovements, and full of a mystery, soft, soothing and gentle, like thewhisper of a child murmuring its happiness in its sleep, which iscalled Impression Fausse for some delicate reason that I, alas! lackthe wit to fathom. 

 Dame souris trotte Noire dans le gris du soir Dame souris trotte Grise dans le noir. 

 On sonne la cloche, Dormez, les bons prisonniers, On sonne la cloche: Faut que vous dormiez, . . . . . 

 Dame souris trotte, Rose dans les rayons bleus, Dame souris trotte Debout, paresseux!

Perhaps of all the poems he ever wrote the one most full of hispeculiar and especial atmosphere--grey and sad and cool and deepand unlike anything else in the world--is that entitled Réversibilities;though here again I am out of my depths as to the full significanceof this title. 

 Entends les pompes qui font Le cri des chats. Des sifflets viennent et vont Comme en pourchas. Ah, dans ces tristes décors Les Déjàs sont les Encors!

 O les vagues Angélus! (Qui viennent d'où) Vois s'allumer les Saluts Du fond d'un trou. Ah, dans ces mornes séjours Les Jamais sont les Toujours!

 Quels rêves épouvantes Vous grands murs blancs! Que de sanglots répétés, Fous ou dolents! Ah, dans ces piteux retraits Les Toujours sont les Jamais!

 Tu meurs doucereusement, Obscurément, Sans qu'on veille, O coeur aimant, Sans testament! Ah, dans ces deuils sans rachats Les Encors sont les Déjàs!

It is perhaps because his essential kingdom is not bound by thetime-limits of any century or age but has its place in that mysteriouscountry beyond the margins of all change, where the dim vaguefeelings of humanity take to themselves shadowy and immortalforms and whisper and murmur of what except in music can neverbe uttered, that he appeals to us so much more than other recentpoets. 

In that twilight-land of delicate mystery, by those pale sea-banksdividing what we feel from what we dream, the silvery willows ofindefinable memory bow themselves more sadly, the white poplarsof faint hope shiver more tenderly, the far-off voices of past andfuture mingle with a more thrilling sweetness, than in the garishdaylight of any circumscribed time or place. 

In the twilight-country over which he rules, this fragile child of theclairvoyant senses, this uncrowned king of beggars and dreams, itmay truly and indeed seem that "les jamais sont les toujours. "

His poetry is the poetry of water-colours. It is water seen throughwater. It is white painted upon white. It is sad with the whispers offalling rain. It is grey with the passage of softly-sliding mists. It iscool and fresh with the dews of morning and of evening. 

Like a leaf whirling down from one of those tremulous poplar-treesthat hang over the Seine between the Pont Neuf and the QuaiVoltaire--whirling lightly and softly down, till it touches the flowingwater and is borne away--each of these delicate filmy verses of hisfalls upon our consciousness; draws up from the depths its strangeindescribable response; and is lost in the shadows. 

One is persuaded by the poetry of Verlaine that the loveliest thingsare the most evasive things, the things which come most lightly andpass most swiftly. One realises from his poetry that the rarestintimations of life's profound secret are just those that can only beexpressed in hints, in gestures, in whispers, in airy touches andfleeting signs. 

One comes to understand from it that the soul of poetry is and wasand must always be no other thing than _music_--music not merelyof the superficial sound of words, but of those deeper significancesand those vaguer associations which words carry with them; musicof the hidden spirit of words, the spirit which originally called themforth from the void and made them vehicles for the inchoatemovements of man's unuttered dreams. 

Paul Verlaine--and not without reason--became a legend even whilehe lived; and now that he is dead he has become more than a legend. A legend and a symbol! Wherever the spirit of art finds itselfmisunderstood, mistrusted, disavowed, disinherited; driven into thetaverns by the stupidity of those who dwell in "homes, " and into thearms of the submerged by the coldness and heartlessness of thosewho walk prosperously upon the surface; the figure of this fantasticchild, this satyr-saint with the Socratic forehead, this tearfulmummer among the armies of the outcasts, will rise up and write hisprophecy upon the wall. 

For the kingdom of art is as the kingdom of heaven. The clever ones, the wise ones, the shrewd ones, the ones that make themselvesfriends with Mammon, and build themselves houses of pleasure fortheir habitation, shall pass away and be forgotten forever. 

The justice of the gods cancels the malice of the righteous, and thedevoted gratitude of humanity tears up the contemptuous libels ofthe world. 

He has come into his own, as all great poets must at last, in defianceof the puritan, in defiance of public opinion, and in spite of allaspersion. He has come into his own; and no one who loves poetrycan afford to pass him by. 

For while others may be more witty, more learned, more elaborate, none can be more melodious. His poetry is touched with the musicthat is beyond all argument. He lives by his sincerity. He lives by hisimagination. 

The things that pertain the deepest to humanity are not its fiercefleshly passions, its feverish ambitions, its proud reasonings, itstumultuous hopes. They are the things that belong to the hours whenthese obsessing forces fade and ebb and sink away. They are thethings that rise up out of the twilight-margins of sleep and death; thethings that come to us on softly stepping feet, like child-motherswith their first-born in their arms; the things that have the whitemists of dawn about them and the cool breath of evening aroundthem; the things that hint at something beyond passion and beyondreason; the things that sound to us like the sound of bells heardthrough clear deep water; for the secret of human life is not in itsactions or its voices or its clamorous desires, but in the intervalsbetween all these--when all these leave it for a moment at rest--andin the depths of the soul itself the music becomes audible, the musicwhich is the silence of eternity. 

REMY DE GOURMONT

The death of Remy de Gourmont is one of the greatest losses thatEuropean literature has suffered since the death of Oscar Wilde. Thesupreme critic is as rare as the supreme artist, and de Gourmont'scritical genius amounted to a miracle of clairvoyance. 

He wrote of everything--from the etymological subtleties of theFrench language down to the chaste reluctances of female moles. Hetouched everything and he touched nothing that he did not adorn. 

In America he is unfortunately far less well known than he deserves, though an admirable translation of "A Night in the Luxembourg, "published in Boston, and a charming and illuminating essay by Mr. Robert Parker, have done something to remove this disgrace. As Mr. Parker truly observes, the essence of de Gourmont's genius is to befound in an insatiable curiosity which the absolute closing of anyvista of knowledge by the final and authoritative discovery of truthwould paralyse and petrify. He does not, as Mr. Parker justly says, seek for truth with any hope or even any particular wish, to find it. Truth found would be truth spoiled. He seeks it from sheer love ofthe pursuit. In this respect he is precisely of the stuff out of whichgreat essayists are made. He is also placed in that special positionfrom which the illusive phenomena of this challenging world arebest caught, best analysed, and best interpreted, as we overtake themin their dreamy passage from mystery to mystery. 

The mere fact of his basic assumption that final truth in anydirection is undiscoverable--possibly undesirable also--sets him withthe wisest and sanest of all the most interesting writers. It sets him"en rapport" with nature, too, in a very close and intimate affiliation. It sets him at one spring at the very parting of the ways where all themysteries meet. Nature loves to reveal the most delicate side-lightsand the most illuminating glimpses to those who take this attitude. Such disinterestedness brings its own reward. 

To love truth for the sake of power or gain or pride or success is acontemptible prostitution; to love it for its own sake is a tragicfoolishness. What is truth--in itself--that it should be loved? But tolove it for the pleasure of pursuing it, that is the temper dear to theimmortal gods. For this is indeed their own temper, the very waythey themselves--the shrewd undying ones--regard the dreamshadows of the great kaleidoscope. 

It is a subtle and hard saying this, that truth must be played withlightly to be freely won, but it has a profound and infinitesignificance. Illuminating thoughts--thoughts with the bloom andgloss and dew of life itself upon them--do not come to the personwho with puritanical austerity has grown lean in his wrestling. Theycome when we have ceased to care whether they come or not. Theycome when from the surface of the tide and under the indifferentstars we are content to drift and listen, without distress, to thehumming waters. 

As Goethe says, it is of little avail that we go forth with our screwsand our levers. Tugged at so and mauled, the magic of the universeslips away from out of our very fingers. It is better to strollnegligently along the highways of the world careless of everythingexcept "the pleasure which there is in life itself, " and then, inGoethe's own phrase, "Such thoughts will come of themselves andcry like happy children--'Here we are. '"

There is indeed required--and herein may be found the secret ofRemy de Gourmont's evasive talent--a certain fundamental_irresponsibility, _ if we are to become clairvoyant critics of life. Assoon as we grow responsible, or become conscious of responsibility, something or other comes between us and the clear object of ourcuriosity, blurring its outline and confusing its colours. Moralscruples, for instance, as to how precisely this new fragment ofknowledge or this new aspect of art is likely to affect theinclinations of the younger generation; religious scruples as towhether this particular angle of cosmic vision will redound to theglory of God or detract from it or diminish it; political or patrioticscruples as to whether this particular "truth" we have come toovertake will have a beneficial or injurious effect upon the fortunesof our nation; domestic scruples as to whether we are justified Inemphasising some aspect of psychological discrimination that maybe dangerous to those stately and ideal illusions upon which themore sacred of human institutions rest. 

Looked at from this point of view it might seem as if it were almostimpossible for a thoroughly responsible or earnest-minded man tobecome an ideal critic. Such a one keeps his mind so closely andgravely fixed upon his ethical "point d'appui, " that when he jumpshe misses the object altogether. In a certain sense every form ofresponsibility is obscurantism. We are concerned with somethingexternal to the actual thing under discussion; something to be gainedor lost or betrayed or guarded; and between the pure image of whatwe are looking at and our own free souls, float a thousand distortingmists. 

The whole philosophical attitude of Remy de Gourmont is full ofinterest and significance for those who are watching the deepermovements of European thought. At one, in a limited sense, withBergson and William James in their protests against final or static"truth, " de Gourmont's writings, when taken as a whole, form a mostsalutary and valuable counterpoise to the popular and vulgarimplications of this modern mysticism. That dangerous andpernicious method of estimating the truth of things according towhat James calls somewhere their "cash-value" receives blow afterblow from his swift and ironic intelligence. 

Things are what they are and their hidden causes are what they are, quite apart from whether they produce a pleasant or unpleasanteffect upon individual lives. The sordid and utilitarian system ofjudging the value of thoughts and ideas in proportion to theirefficiency in the world of practical exigencies does not appeal to thisrational and classical mind. 

The pragmatism of William James and the instinct-doctrines ofBergson have both been pounced upon by every kind of apologistfor supernatural religion and categorical morality; while the methodof appealing to the optimistic prejudices of shallow minds by the useof colloquial and mystical images has of recent years beenintroducing into European thought what might be called "MetaphysicalAmericanism. "

Against this tendency, a tendency peculiarly and especiallyAnglo-Saxon, the ingrained _Latinity_ of de Gourmont's mind indignantlyrevolts. His point of view is entirely and absolutely classical, in theold French sense of that suggestive word and in accordance with thegreat French traditions of Rabelais, Voltaire, Stendhal, Renan, andAnatole France. 

The new pseudo-philosophy, so vague, so popular, so optimistic, sosteeped in mystical morality, which one associates with the writingsof so many modern Americans and which finds a certain degree ofsupport in the work of Maeterlinck and Romain Rolland, leaves theintelligence of Remy de Gourmont entirely untouched. He comes tomodern problems with the free, gay, mocking curiosity of atwentieth century Lucian. Completely out of his vein and remotefrom his method is that grave pedagogic tone which has become sopopular a note in recent ethical writing, and which, for all his slangof the marketplace, underlies the psychological optimism of WilliamJames. 

One has only to read a few pages of Remy de Gourmont to beconscious that one has entered once again the large, spacious, free, irresponsible, _heathen_ atmosphere of the great writers of antiquity. The lapse of time since those classic ages, the superficial changes ofhuman manners and speech, seem abolished, seem reduced tosomething that does not count at all. We have nothing here of thatself-conscious modernity of tone, that fussy desire to be original andpopular, which spoils the charm of so many vigorous writers of ourage. It is as though some pleasant companion of Plato--some wiseand gay Athenian from the side of Agathon or Phaedrus orCharmides--were risen from his tomb by the blue Ionian seas todiscourse to us upon the eternal ironies of nature and human lifeunder the lime trees and chestnuts of the Luxembourg gardens. It isas though some philosophic friend of Catullus or Propertius hadreturned from an age-long holiday within the olive groves of Sirmioto wander with clear-eyed humorous curiosity along the banks of theSeine or among the book-stalls of the Odéon. 

Like a thick miasmic cloud, as we read this great pagan critic, all thefogs and vapours of turgid hyperborean superstition are driven awayfrom the face of the warm sun. Once more what is permanent andinteresting in this mad complicated comedy of human life emergesin bold and sharp relief. 

Artists, novelists, poets, journalists, occultists, abnormalists, essayists, scientists and even theologians, are treated with thathumorous and passionate curiosity, full of a spacious sense of theamplitude of and diversity of life's possibilities, which we associatewith the classic tradition. 

Only in France is the appearance of a writer of this kind possible atall; because France alone of all the nations, and Paris alone of all thecities, of the modern world, has kept in complete and continuoustouch with the "open secret" of the great civilisations. 

There is no writer more required in America at this moment thanRemy de Gourmont, and for that very reason no writer less likely tobe received. Curiously enough, in spite of the huge influx offoreigners into the harbour reigned over by the Statue of Liberty, noteven England itself is more enslaved by the dark fogs of puritanicalsuperstition than the United States; for there is no place in the worldwhere the brutal ignorance and complacent self-righteousness of thecommercial middle classes rampage and revel and trample upondistinction and refinement more savagely than in America. Theblame for this must fall entirely upon the English race and upon thedescendants of the Puritans. Perhaps a time will come when all theseJews and Slavs and Italians will assert their _intellectual_ as they arebeginning to assert their _economic, _ independence, and then nodoubt led by the cities of the West--the ones furthest fromBoston--there will be a Renaissance of European intelligence in this greatdaughter of Europe such as will astonish even Paris itself. But thisevent, as Sir Thomas More says so sadly of his Utopia, is rather tobe hoped for than expected. 

One hears so often from the mouths of middle-class apologists forthe modern industrial system expressions of fear as to the loss ofwhat they call "initiative" under any conceivable socialistic state. One is inclined to ask "initiative towards what"? Towards growingunscrupulously rich, it must be supposed; certainly not towardsintellectual experiments and enterprises; for no possiblerevolutionary regime could be less sympathetic to these things thanthe one under which we live at present. 

The Puritan rulers of America are very anxious to "educate"foreigners in the free "institutions" of their new home. One can onlypray that the persons submitted to this process will find someopportunity of adding to their "education" some cursoryacquaintance with their own classics; so that when the hour arrivesand we wake to find ourselves under the rule of trade-unions orsocialistic bureaucrats, our new authorities will know at leastsomething of the "institution, " as Walt Whitman somewhere calls it, of intellectual toleration. 

Remy de Gourmont himself is very far from being a socialist. Hehas imbibed with certain important differences, due to hisincorrigible Latin temperament, many of the doctrines of Nietzsche;but Nietzsche himself could hardly be more inimical to any kind ofmob-rule than this exponent of "subjective idealism. "

Remy de Gourmont does not interest himself greatly in politicalchanges. He does not interest himself in political revolutions. LikeGoethe, he considers the intellectual freedom of the artist andphilosopher best secured under a government that is stable andlasting; better still under a government that confines itself rigidly toits own sphere and leaves manners and morals to the taste of theindividual; best of all under that Utopian absence of any government, whether of the many or of the few, whereof all free spirits dream. 

Remy de Gourmont has written one immortal philosophical romancein "A Night in the Luxembourg. " He has written some exquisitepoetry full of a voluptuous and ironic charm; full of that remotenessfrom sordid reality which befits a lonely and epicurean spirit, a spiritpursuing its own way on the shadowy side of all human roads wherethe old men dream their most interesting dreams and the youngmaidens dance their most unreserved dances. 

He has written many graceful and lovely prose poems--one hesitatesto call them "short stories"--in which the reader is transported awaybeyond all modern surroundings into that delicate dream world sodear to lovers of Watteau and Poussin, where the nymphs of Arcadiagather, wondering and wistful, about the feet of wandering saints, and where the symbols of Dionysian orgies blend with the symbolsof the redemption of humanity. 

He has written admirable and unsurpassed criticism upon almost allthe contemporary figures of French literature--criticism which inmany cases contains a wisdom and a delicacy of feeling quitebeyond the reach of the particular figure that preoccupies him at themoment. He has done all this and done it as no one else in Europecould have done it. But in the last resort it does not seem as thoughhis reputation would rest either upon his poetry or his prose poetryor even perhaps upon his "masks, " as he calls them, of personalappreciation. 

It rather seems as though his best work--putting "A Night in theLuxembourg" aside--were to be found in that long series ofpsychological studies which he entitles "Promenades Litteraires, ""Promenades Philosophiques" and "Epilogues. " If we add to thesethe volumes called "La culture des Idées, " "Le chemin de Velours, "and "Le Problème du style" we have a body of philosophicalanalysis and speculation the value of which it would be impossibleto overrate in the present condition of European thought. 

What we have offered to us in these illuminating essays is nothingless than an inestimable mass of interpretative suggestion, dealingwith every kind of topic under the sun and throwing light uponevery species of open question and every degree of human mystery. 

When one endeavours to distil from all this erudite mass ofcriticism--of "criticism of life" in the true sense of that phrase--thefundamental and quintessential aspects of thought, one finds theattempt a much easier one than might be expected from the variety, and in many cases from the occasional and transitory nature, of thesubjects discussed. It is this particular tone and temper of minddiffused at large through a discussion of so immense a variety oftopics that in the last resort one feels is the man's real contribution tothe art of living upon the earth. And when in pursuing thetransformations of his protean intelligence through one criticalmetamorphosis after another we finally catch him in his native andoriginal form, it is this form, with the features of the real Remy deGourmont, which will remain in our mind when many of itsincidental embodiments have ceased to interest us. 

The man in his essential quality is precisely what our generation andour race requires as its antipodal corrective. He is the preciseopposite of everything most characteristic of our puritan-souled andcommercial-minded Democracy. He is all that we are not--and weare all that he is not. 

For an average mind evolved by our system and subjected to ourinfluence--the mind and influence of modern English-speakingAmerica--the writings of Remy de Gourmont would be, if apprehendedin any true measure according to their real content andsignificance, the most extreme intellectual and moral outrage thatcould be inflicted upon us. Properly understood, or evensuperficially understood, they would wound and shock and staggerand perplex every one of our most sacred prejudices. They wouldconflict with the whole method and aim of the education which wehave received, an education of which the professed object is to fit usfor an active, successful and energetic life in the sphere of industrialor commercial or technical enterprises, and to make of us moral, socially-minded, conventional and normal persons. Our education, Imean our American education--for they still teach the classics in afew schools in England--is, in true pragmatic manner, subordinate towhat is called one's "life work"; to the turning, as profitably toourselves as possible, of some well-oiled wheel in the industrialmachine. 

Such an education, though it may produce brilliant brokers andinspired financiers, with an efflorescence of preachers and base-ballplayers, certainly cannot produce "humanists" of the old, wiseEpicurean type. 

But it is not only our education which is at fault. Our whole spiritualatmosphere is alien and antagonistic to the spiritual atmosphere ofRemy de Gourmont. He is serious where we are flippant, and we areserious where he is ironical. 

Any young person among us who imbibed the mental and moralattitude of Remy de Gourmont would cause dismay and consternationin the hearts of his friends. He would probably have a library. He might even read Paul Claudel. 

I speak lightly enough, but the point at issue is not a light one. It isindeed nothing less than a parting of the ways between twocivilisations, or, shall we say, between a civilisation which has notlost touch with Athens and Rome and a commercial barbarismbuttressed up with "modern improvements. "

Remy de Gourmont's genius is in its essence an aristocratic one. Hehas the reserve of the aristocrat; the aristocratic contempt for thejudgment of the common herd; the aristocrat's haughty indifferenceto public opinion. Writing easily, urbanely, plausibly upon everyaspect of human life, he continues the great literary tradition of thebeautifully and appropriately named _"humanism"_ of the "Revivalof Letters. "

As Mr. Parker hints, he is one of those who refuse to bow to theintolerable mandate of the dry and sapless spirit of "specialisation. "He refuses to leave art to the artist, science to the scientist, religionto the theologian, or the delicate art of natural casuistry to theprofessional moralist. In the true humanistic temper he claims theright to deal with all these matters, and to deal with them lightly, freely, unscrupulously, irresponsibly, and with no "arrière pensée"but the simple pleasure of the discussion. 

He makes us forget Herbert Spencer and makes us think of Plato. Heis the wise sophist of our own age, unspoiled by any Socratic"conceptualism, " and ready, like Protagoras, to show us how man isthe measure of all things and how the individual is the measure ofman. The ardour of his intellectual curiosity burns with a clearsmokeless flame. He brings back to the touchstone of a sort ofdistinguished common sense, free from every species of superstition, all those great metaphysical and moral problems which have beentoo often monopolised by the acrid and technical pedantry of theschools. 

He reminds one of the old-fashioned "gentleman of leisure" of theeighteenth century, writing shrewdly and wisely upon everyquestion relating to human life, from punctuation and grammar tothe manner in which the monks of the Thebaid worshipped God. Hisattitude is always that of the great amateur, never of the littleprofessional. He writes with suggestive imagination, not withexhaustive authority. He takes up one subject after another that hasbeen, so to speak, closed and locked to the ordinary layman, andopens it up again with some original thrust of wholesome scepticism, and makes it flexible and porous. He indicates change andfluctuation and malleableness and the organic capriciousness of life, where the professors have shut themselves up in logical dilemmas. When it comes to the matter of his actual approach to these things itwill be found that he plunges his hand boldly into the flowingstream, in the way of a true essayist dispensing with all the tediouslogical paraphernalia of a writer of "serious treatises. "

His genius is not only aristocratic in quality; it is essentially whatmight be called, in a liberal use of the term, the genius of asensualist. 

Remy de Gourmont's ultimate contribution to the art of criticism isthe disentangling, from among the more purely rational vehicles ofthought, of what we might regard as the sensual or sensuouselements of human receptivity. No one can read his writings withany degree of intelligence without becoming aware that, in his wayof handling life, ideas become sensations and sensations becomeideas. 

More than any critic that ever lived, Remy de Gourmont has thepower of interesting us in his psychological discoveries with thatsort of thrilling vibrating interest which is almost like a physicaltouch. 

The thing to note in regard to this evocation of a pleasurable shockof mental excitement is that in his case it does not seem produced somuch by the sonority or euphonious fall of the actual words--as inthe case of Oscar Wilde--or even by the subtler spiritual harmony ofrhythmically arranged thought--as in the case of Walter Pater--as bythe use of words to liberate and set free the underlying sensationwhich gives body to the idea, or, if you will, the underlying ideawhich gives soul to the sensation. 

In reading him we seldom pause, as we do with Wilde or Pater, tocaress with the tip of our intellectual tongue the insidious bloom andgloss and magical effluence of the actual phrases he uses. Hisphrases seem, so to speak, to clear themselves out of the way--toefface themselves and to retire in order that the sensational thoughtbeneath them may leap forward unimpeded. 

Words become indeed to this great student of the subtleties ofhuman language mere talismans and entrance keys, by means ofwhich we enter into the purlieus of that psychological borderlandexisting half way between the moving waters of sensibility and thehuman shores of mental appreciation. Playing this part in his work itbecomes necessary that his words should divest themselves, as far asit is humanly possible for them to do so without losing theirintelligible symbolic value, of all merely logical and abstractconnotation. It is necessary that his words should be light-footed andairily winged, swift, sharp and sudden, so that they may throw theattention of the reader away from themselves upon the actualpsychic and psychological thrill produced by each new and excitingidea. They must be fluid and flexible, these words of his, free fromrigid or traditional fetters, and prepared at a moment's notice to takenew colour and shape from some unexpected and original thoughtlooming up in the twilight below. 

They must be quick to turn green, blue, purple, violet--thesewords--like the flowing waters of some sunlit sea, in order that themysterious reflections of the wonderful opalescent fish, swimmingto and fro in the dim depths, may reach the surface unimpeded byany shadows. 

But the chief point about the style of Remy de Gourmont is that itprecisely reflects his main fundamental principle, the principle thatideas should strike us with the pleasurable shock of sensations, andthat sensations should be porous to and penetrated by ideas. 

"En littérature, comme en tout, il faut que cesse la regne des motsabstraits. Une ouvre d'art n'existe que par l'émotion qu'elle nousdonne; il suffira de determiner et de caracteriser la nature de cetteémotion; cela ira de la métaphysique à la sensualité, de l'idée pure auplaisir physique. "

"La métaphysique à la sensualité; l'idée pure au plaisir physique"; itwould be impossible to put more clearly than in those words thepurpose and aim of this great writer's work. 

Contemptuously aloof from the idols of the market-place, contemptuously indifferent to the tyranny of public opinion, with thefixed principle in his mind--almost his only fixed principle--that themajority is always wrong, Remy de Gourmont goes upon his way;passionately tasting, like a great satin-bodied humming bird, everyexquisite flower in the garden of human ideas. The wings of histhoughts, as he hovers, beat so quickly as to be almost invisible; andthus it is that in reading him--great scholar of style as he is--we donot think of his words but only of his thought, or rather only of thesensation which his thought evokes. 

When it comes to the actual philosophy of Remy de Gourmont weindeed arrive at something which may well cause our Puritanobscurants to open their mouths with amazement. He is perhaps theonly perfectly frank and unmitigated "hedonist" which Europeanliterature at this hour offers. 

He advocates pleasure as the legitimate and sole end of man'sendeavours and aspirations upon this earth. Pleasure imaginativelydealt with indeed, and transformed from a purely physical into acerebral emotion; but pleasure frankly, candidly, shamelesslyaccepted at its natural and obvious value. 

Here, then, comes at last upon the scene a writer as free from themoralistic aftermath of two thousand years of criminalising ofhuman instincts as he is free from the supernatural dogmas that havegiven support to this darkening of the sunshine. 

Nietzsche, of course, was before him with his formidablephilosophic hammer; but Nietzsche himself was by temperament toospiritual, too cold, too aloof from the common instincts of humanityto do more than hew out an opening through the gloomy thickets ofthe ascetic forest. He was himself too entirely intellectual, too highand icy and austere and imaginative ever to bring the actual feet ofthe dancers, and the lutes and flutes of the wanton singers into thesunlit path to which he pointed the way. 

His cruel praise of the more predatory and rapacious among theemancipated spirits gives, too, a somewhat harsh and sinister aspectto the whole thing. The natural innocence of genuine pagan delightdraws back instinctively from the savage excesses of theNietzschean "blond beast. " The poor fauns and dryads of the freeancient world hesitate trembling and frightened on the verythreshold of their liberty when this great Zarathustra offers them achoice between frozen Alpine peaks of heroic desolation andbloodstained jungles frequented by Borgian tigers. 

In his own heart Nietzsche was much more of a mediaeval saint thana predatory "higher man, " but the natural human instinct of any saneand sun-loving pagan may well shrink back dismayed from anycontact with this savage "will to power, " which, while destroying thequiet cloistered gardens of monastic seclusion, hurls us into the pathof these new tyrants. The less rigorous "religious orders" of the faithof Christendom would seem to offer to these poor dismayed"revenants" from the ancient world a much quieter and happierhabitation than the mountain tops where blows the frozen wind of"Eternal Recurrence, " or the smouldering desert sands where stalkthe tawny lions of the "higher morality. " The "Rule of Benedict"would in this sense be a refuge for the timorous unbaptised, and the"Weeds of Dominic" a protection for the gentle infidel. 

After reading Remy de Gourmont, with his wise, friendly ironicinterest in every kind of human emotion, one is inclined to feel that, after all, in the large and tolerant courts of some less zealoustraditional "order" there might be more pleasant air to breathe, morepeaceful sunshine, more fresh and dewy rose-gardens, than in aworld dominated by the Eagle and the Serpent of the ZarathustrianOverman. 

Remy de Gourmont would free us from the rule of dogmatist andmoralist, but he would free us from these without plunging us into ayet sterner ascesis. The tone and temper advocated by him is oneeminently sane, peaceful, quiet, friendly and gay. He does not freeus from a dark responsibility to God to plunge us under the yoke ofa darker responsibility to posterity. He would free us from everykind of responsibility. He would reduce our life to a beautifulunrestricted "Abbey of Thelema, " over the gates of which the greatPantagruelian motto "Fay ce que vouldray" would be written inletters of gold. 

What one is brought to feel in reading Remy de Gourmont is that theliberty of the individual to follow his intellectual and psychologicaltastes unimpeded by any sort of external authority is much moreimportant for civilisation at large and much more conducive to theinterests of posterity than any inflexible rules, whether they be laidupon us by ecclesiastical tradition, by puritanical heretics or byprophetic supermen. 

It is really _liberty_--first and last--in the full beautiful meaning ofthat great human word, that Remy de Gourmont claims for us;though he is perfectly aware that such liberty can never be enjoyedexcept by those whose genuine intellectual emancipation rendersthem fit to enjoy it. It is always for the liberty of _man_ as anindividual, never for _men_ as a herd, that he contends; as hisfavourite phrase, "subjective idealism, " constantly insists. 

And, above all, it is perfect and untrammelled liberty for the artistthat he demands. One of his most suggestive and interesting essaysis upon the topic of the influence of the "young girl" uponcontemporary literature. 

This is indeed carrying the war into the enemy's camp; for if the"young girl" has interfered with the freedom of the artist in France, what has she done in England and America? "What are they doinghere?" cried Goethe once, teased and fretted by the presence of thisrestricting influence. "Why don't they keep them in their convents?"

And it is this very cry, the cry of the impatient artist longing to dealfreely and largely with every mortal aspect of human life, that Remyde Gourmont echoes. 

It is indeed a serious and difficult problem; and it is one of theproblems thrust inevitably upon us by the spread of education andthe consequent cheapening and vulgarising of education under theinfluence of democracy. 

But it can have only one answer, the great and memorable answergiven to all scrupulous protectors of virtue by John Milton in his"Areopagitica. " It is better that this or the other person should cometo harm by the bad use of a good book than that the life-blood of animmortal spirit, embalmed in any beautiful work of art, should bewasted upon the dust and never reach the verdict of posterity. 

What are they doing here, these difficult young persons and theirstill more difficult guardians? This--this sacred Elysian garden of thegreat humanistic tradition of classic wisdom and classic art--mustnot be invaded by clamorous babes and agitated elders, must not beprofaned either by the plaudits or the strictures of the unlettered mob. Somewhere in human life, and where should it be if not in thecloistered seclusion of noble literature?--there must be an escapefrom the importunities of such people and from the responsibilitiesof the ignorance they so jealously guard. 

In the days when men wrote for men--and for women of the calibreof Aspasia or Margaret of Navarre--this problem did not emerge. Itwas not wise perhaps at Athens to abuse Cleon, though--heavenknows--that was often enough done; nor in Rome to satirise Caesar, though that too was now and again most prosperously achieved! Itwas dangerous in the time of Rabelais to throw doubt on theauthority of the church. But this new tyranny, this new oppression ofletters, this unfortunate cult of the susceptible "young person, " is farmore deadly to the interests of civilisation than any interference bychurch or state. There was always to be found some wise andclassic-minded cardinal to whom one could appeal, some dilettanteMaecenas to whom one might dedicate one's work. 

But now the flood-gates are open; the dam is up; and the great tideof unmitigated philistinism, hounded on by dreadful protectors ofdreadful "young persons, " invades the very citadel of civilisationitself, and pours its terrible "pure" scum and its popular sentimentalmud over the altars of the defenceless immortals. No one asks thatthese tyrannical young people and their anxious guardians shouldread the classics or should read the works of such far-descendedinheritors of the classical tradition who, like Remy de Gourmont, seek to keep the sacred fire alight. Let them hold their hands off! Letthem go back to their schools and their presbyteries. 

Democracy may be a great improvement upon the past, just asmodern religion may be an improvement upon ancient religion. Butone thing democracy must not be allowed to do; it must not beallowed to substitute the rule of a puritanical middle-class, led bypietistic sentimentalists, for the despotism of a Caesar or a Sforza ora Malatesta in the sphere of the intellect. The intellect of the racemust be held sacred, must be held intact; and its artists and writerspermitted to go their way and follow their "subjective idealism" asthey please, without let or hindrance. 

What would be the use of persecuting genius into absolute sterility ifafter years and years of suppression human instincts were left thesame, only with no subtle criticism or free creative art to give thembeauty, refinement, interpretation and the magic of a noble style?

Remy de Gourmont, like all the profoundest intelligences of our race, like the great Goethe himself, is a spiritual anarchist. 

Standing apart from popular idols and popular catch-words heconverses with the great withdrawn souls of his own and previousages, and hands on to posterity the large, free, urbane atmosphere ofhumanistic wisdom. 

On the whole perhaps it would be well to keep his writings out ofthe New World. They might stir up pessimistic feelings. They mightmake us dissatisfied with lecture rooms and moving picture shows. They might undermine our interest in politics. 

"La métaphysique à la sensualité--l'idée pure au plaisir physique!"Such language has indeed a dangerous sound. 

To be obsessed by a passionate and insatiable curiosity with regardto every sensation known to human senses; to be anxious to give thiscuriosity complete scope, so that nothing, literally nothing, shallescape it; to be endowed with the power of putting the results ofthese investigations into clear fascinating words, words that allure usinto passing through them and beyond and behind them into thesensation of intellectual discovery which they conceal; this indeed, in our democratic age, is to be a very dubious, a very questionablewriter!

For this shameless advocate of pleasure as the legitimate aim of thehuman race, sex and everything connected with sex comes naturallyto be of paramount interest. Sex in every conceivable aspect, andreligion in its best aspect--that is to say in its ritualistic one--are thethings round which the cerebral passion of this versatile humanisthovers most continually. 

In his prose poems and in his poetry these two interests arecontinually appearing, and, more often than not, they appeartogether fatally and indissolubly united. 

"The Book of Litanies" is the title, for instance, he is pleased to giveto one of his most characteristic experiments in verse; the one thatcontains that amazing poem addressed to the rose, with itsmelancholy and sinister refrain which troubles the memory like aswift wicked look from a beautiful countenance that ought to bepure and cold in death. 

And how lovely and significant are those words "The Pilgrim ofSilence, " which is the name he seems to select for his ownwandering and insatiable soul. 

The Pilgrim of Silence! Pilgrim moving, aloof from the clamours ofmen, from garden to garden of melancholy and sweet mystery;pilgrim passing night by night along moon-lit parterres ofimpossible roses; pilgrim seeking "wild sea-banks" wherestrange-leaved glaucous plants whisper their secrets to the sharp saltwind; pilgrim of silence, for whom the gentlest murmur of the troubledsenses of feverish humanity has its absorbing interest, every quiverof those burning eyelids its secret intimation, every sigh of thattremulous breast its burden of delicate confession; pilgrim of silencemoving aloof from the howls of the mob and the raucous voices ofthe preachers, moving from garden to garden, from sea-shore tosea-shore; cannot even you--oh pilgrim of the long, long quest--give usthe word, the clue, the signal, that shall answer the riddle of our days, and make the twilight of our destiny roll back? Pilgrim of silence, have you only silence to offer us at the last, after all your litanies toall the gods living and dead? Is silence your last word too?

Thus we can imagine Simone, the tender companion of ourwanderer, questioning him as they walk together over the deadmemories of all the generations. 

Ah yes! Simone may question her pilgrim--her pilgrim of silence--even as, in his own "Nuit au Luxembourg, " the youth to whom ourLord discoursed so strangely, questioned the Master as to theultimate mystery and received so ambiguous a response. 

And Simone likewise shall receive her answer, as we all--whetherwe be descendants of the Puritans, crossing Boston Common, oraliens of the sweat-shops of New York, crossing Washington Square, or unemployed in Hyde Park, or nursery-maids in the Jardin desPlantes--shall receive ours, as we walk over the dead leaves of thecenturies. 

 Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?

 Quand le pied les écrase, elles pleurent comme des âmes, Elle font un bruit d'ailes ou de robes de femme. 

 Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?

 Viens; nous serons un jour de pauvres feuilles mortes. Viens; déjà la nuit tombe et le vent nous emporte. 

 Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?

"Le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes"--such indeed must be, atthe last, the wisdom of this great harvester of human passions andperversions. 

"Feuilles mortes, " and the sound of feet that go by; that go by andreturn not again!

Remy de Gourmont leaves in us a bitter after-sense that we have notaltogether, or perhaps even nearly, sounded the stops of his mystery. "The rest is silence" not only because he is dead, but because itseems as if he mocked at us--he the Protean critic--until his last hour. 

His remote epicurean life--the life of a passionate scholar of theRenaissance--baffles and evades our curiosity. 

To analyse Remy de Gourmont one would have to be a Remy deGourmont. 

He is full of inconsistencies. Proudly individualistic, an intellectualanarchist free from every scruple, he displays an objective patiencealmost worthy of Goethe himself in his elaborate investigations intothe mysteries of life and the mysteries of the art that expresses life. 

Furiously enamoured of thrilling aesthetic sensations he can yetwander, as those who know his "Promenades" can testify, throughall manner of intricate and technical details. 

Capable in his poetry and prose-poems of giving himself up to everysort of ambiguous and abnormal caprice, he is yet in his calmerhours able to fall back upon a sane, serene and sun-lit wisdom, tolerant towards the superstitions of humanity, and full of the magicof the universe. Never for a single moment in all of his writings arewe allowed to forget the essential wonder and mystery of sex. Sex, in all its caprices and eccentricities, in all its psychological masksand ritualistic symbols, interests him ultimately more than anythingelse. It is this which inspires even his critical work with a sort ofphysiological thrill, as though the encounter with a new creativeintelligence were an encounter between lover and beloved. 

Remy de Gourmont would have sex and sex-emotions put franklyinto the fore-ground of everything, as far as art and letters areconcerned. He would take the timid hyperborean Muse of themodern world and bathe her once more in the sun-lit waters of theHeliconian Spring. He would paganize, Latinize and Mediterraneanizethe genius of Europe. 

Much of his writing will fall into oblivion. It is too occasional, tootopical, too fretted by the necessity of clearing away the half-gods sothat the gods may arrive. But certain of his books will live forever;assured of that smiling and amiable immortality, beyond the reach ofall vulgar malice, which the high invisible ones give to those whohave learnt the sacramental secret that; only through the senses dowe understand the soul, and only through the soul do we understandthe senses. 

WILLIAM BLAKE

The strange and mysterious figure of William Blake seemscontinually to appear at the end of almost every vista of intellectualand aesthetic interest down which we move in these latter days. 

The man's genius must have been of a unique kind; for while writerslike Wordsworth and Byron seem now to have stiffened intodignified statues of venerated and achieved pre-eminence, he--thecontemporary of William Cowper--exercises now, half way throughthe second decade of the twentieth century, an influence as fresh, asliving, as organic, as palpable, as that of authors who have only justfallen upon silence. 

His so-called "Prophetic Books" may be obscure and arbitrary intheir fantastic mythology. I shall leave the interpretation of theseworks to those who are more versed in the occult sciences than I am, or than I should greatly care to be; but a prophet in the most truesense of that distinguished word, Blake certainly was--and to proveit one need not touch these Apocalyptic oracles. 

Writing while Cowper was composing evangelical hymns under theinfluence of the Rev. Dr. Newton, and while Burns was celebratinghis Highland Mary, Blake anticipates many of the profoundestthoughts of Nietzsche, and opens the "charmed magic casements"upon these perilous fairy seas, voyaged over by Verlaine andHauptmann and Maeterlinck and Mallarmé. 

When one considers the fact that he was actually writing poems andengraving pictures before the eighteenth century closed and beforeEdgar Allan Poe was born, it is nothing short of staggering to realisehow, not only in literature but in art, his astounding geniusdominates our modern taste. 

It might almost seem as if every single one of the poets and paintersof our age--all these imagists and post-impressionists and symbolistsand the rest--had done nothing during the sensitive years of their lifebut brood over the work of William Blake. Even in music, even indancing--certainly in the symbolic dancing of Isadora Duncan--evenin the stage decorations of our Little Theatres, one traces themystical impulse he set in motion, and the austere lineaments, notexactly classical or mediaeval, but partaking of the nature of both, ofhis elemental evocations. 

It were, of course, not really possible to suppose that all thesepeople--all the most imaginative and interesting artists of ourday--definitely subjected themselves to the influence of William Blake. The more rational way of accounting for the extraordinaryresemblance is to conceive that Blake, by some premonitoryinspiration of the world-spirit "brooding upon things to come, "anticipated in an age more emotionally alien to our own than that ofApuleius or of St. Anselm, the very "body and pressure" of thedreams that were to dominate the earth. 

When one considers how between the age of Blake and the one inwhich we now live, extend no less than three great epochs ofintellectual taste, the thing becomes almost as strange as one of hisown imaginations. 

The age of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, of Wordsworth andByron, followed immediately upon his. Then we have the age ofThackeray and Tennyson and the great Mid-Victorians. Then finallyat the end of the nineteenth century we have the epoch dominated inart by Aubrey Beardsley, and in literature by Swinburne and OscarWilde. 

Now in our own age--an age that feels as though Wilde himself weregrowing a little old-fashioned--we find ourselves returning toWilliam Blake and discovering him to be more entirely in harmonywith the instincts of our most secret souls than any single genius wecould name actually working in our midst. It is as though to find ourcompletest expression, the passionate and mystical soul of ourmaterialistic age were driven back to an author who lived a hundredyears ago. This phenomenon is by no means unknown in the historyof the pilgrimage of the human spirit; but it has never presenteditself in so emphatic a form as in the case of this extraordinaryperson. 

In the early ages of the world, the result without doubt would besome weird deification of the clairvoyant prophet. William Blakewould become a myth, a legend, an avatar of the divine Being, aBuddha, a Zoroaster, a wandering Dionysus. As it is, we are forcedto confine ourselves to the fascinating pleasure of watching inindividual cases, this or that modern soul, "touched to fine issues, "meeting for the first time, as it may often happen, thiscentury-buried incarnation of their own most evasive dreams. 

I myself, who now jot down these fragmentary notes upon him, hadthe privilege once of witnessing the illumination--I can call it by noother name--produced upon the mind of the greatest novelist ofAmerica and the most incorrigibly realistic, by a chance encounterwith the "Songs of Innocence. "

One of the most obvious characteristics of our age is its cult ofchildren. Here--in the passion of this cult--we separate ourselvesaltogether, both from our mediaeval ancestors who confined theirdevotion to the divine child, and from the classical ages, who keptchildren altogether in the background. 

"When I became a man, " says the apostle, "I put away childishthings, " and this "putting away of childish things" has always been aspecial note of the temper and attitude of orthodox Protestants forwhom these other Biblical words, spoken by a greater than St. Paul, about "becoming as little children, " must seem a sort of piousrhetoric. 

When one considers how this thrice accursed weight of ProtestantPuritanism, the most odious and inhuman of all the pervertedsuperstitions that have darkened man's history, a superstition which, though slowly dying, is not yet, owing to its joyless use as a"business asset, " altogether dead, has, ever since it was spawned inScotland and Geneva, made cruel war upon every childish instinct inus and oppressed with unspeakable dreariness the lives ofgenerations of children, it must be regarded as one of the happiestsigns of the times that the double renaissance of Catholic Faith andPagan Freedom now abroad among us, has brought the "Child in theHouse" into the clear sunlight of an almost religious appreciation. 

Let me not, however, be misunderstood. It would be a grievous andludicrous mistake to associate the child-cult which runs like a threadof filmy star-light through the work of William Blake with thesomewhat strained and fantastic attitude of child-worship whichinspires such poetry as Francis Thompson's "Love in Dian's Lap, "and gives a ridiculous and affected air to so many of our little onesthemselves. The child of Blake's imagination is the immortal andundying child to be found in the heart of every man and everywoman. It is the child spoken of in some of his most beautifulpassages, by Nietzsche himself--the child who will come at the last, when the days of the Camel and the days of the Lion are over, andinaugurate the beginning of the "Great Noon. "

 "And there the lion's ruddy eyes Shall flow with tears of gold And pitying the tender cries And walking round the fold, Saying, 'Wrath by his weakness And by his health sickness Are driven away From our immortal day. '"

Using boldly and freely, and with far more genuine worship thanmany orthodox believers, the figure and idea of Christ; it is notexactly the Christ we know in traditional Catholic piety, to whom inassociation with this image of the man-child, Blake's mind isconstantly turning. 

With a noble blasphemy--dearer, one may hope, to God, than theslavishness of many evangelical pietists--he treats the Christianlegend with the same sort of freedom that the old Greek poets usedin dealing with the gods of Nature. 

The figure of Christ becomes under his hands, as we feel sometimesit does under the hands of the great painters of the Renaissance, agod among other gods; a power among other powers, but onepossessed of a secret drawn from the hidden depths of the universe, which in the end is destined to prevail. So far does Blake stray fromthe barriers of traditional reverence, that we find him boldlyassociating this Christ of his--this man-child who is to redeem therace--with a temper the very opposite of an ascetic one. 

What makes his philosophy so interesting and original is the factthat he entirely disentangles the phenomena of sexual love from anynotion or idea of sin or shame. The man-child whose pitiful heartand whose tenderness toward the weak and unhappy are drawn fromthe Christ-Story, takes almost the form of a Pagan Eros--thefull-grown, soft-limbed Eros of later Greek fancy--when the question ofrestraint or renunciation or ascetic chastity is brought forward. 

What Blake has really done, be it said with all reverence, and farfrom profane ears--is to steal the Christ-child out of his cradle in thechurch of his worshippers and carry him into the chambers of theEast, the chambers of the Sun, into the "Green fields and happygroves" of primitive Arcadian innocence, where the feet of thedancers are light upon the dew of the morning, and where thechildren of passion and of pleasure sport and play, as they did in theGolden Age. 

In that wonderful picture of his representing the sons of God"shouting together" in the primal joy of creation, one has a vision ofthe large and noble harmony he strove after between an emancipatedflesh and a free spirit. William Blake, in his Adamic innocence of"sin, " has something in him that suggests Walt Whitman, but unlikeWhitman he prefers to use the figure of Christ rather than any vague"ensemble" of nature-forces to symbolise the triumphant nuptials ofsoul and body. 

Sometimes in his strange verses one has the impression that one isreading the fragmentary and broken utterances of some great ancientpoet-philosopher--some Pythagoras or Empedocles--through whosegnomic oracles runs the rhythm of the winds and tides, and forwhose ears the stars in their courses have a far-flung harmony. 

He often seems to make use of the Bible and Biblical usages, verymuch as the ancient poets made use of Hesiod or of Homer, treatingsuch writings with reverence, but subordinating what is borrowedfrom them to new and original purpose. 

 "Hear the voice of the Bard, Who present, past and future sees, Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walked among the ancient trees. 

 "Calling the lapsed soul And weeping in the evening dew, That might control The starry pole And fallen, fallen light renew!

 "O Earth, O Earth, return! Arise from out the dewy grass! Night is worn And the Morn Rises from the slumbrous mass. 

 "Turn away no more; Why wilt thou turn away? The starry floor The watery shore Is given thee till break of day. "

If I were asked to name a writer whose work conveys to one's mind, free of any admixture of rhetoric or of any alloy of cleverness, thevery impact and shock of pure inspired genius, I wouldunhesitatingly name William Blake. One is strangely conscious inreading him of the presence of some great unuttered power--somevast demiurgic secret--struggling like a buried Titan just below thesurface of his mind, and never quite finding vocal expression. 

Dim shapes--vast inchoate shadows--like dreams of forgotten worldsand shadows of worlds as yet unborn, seem to pass backwards andforwards over the brooding waters of his spirit. There is no poetperhaps who gives such an impression of primordial creativeforce--force hewing at the roots of the world and weeping and laughingfrom sheer pleasure at the touch of that dream stuff whereof life ismade. Above his head, as he laughs and weeps and sings, thebranches of the trees of the forest of night stir and rustle under theimmense spaces, and, floating above them, the planets and the starsflicker down upon him with friendly mysterious joy. 

No poet gives one the impression of greater strength than WilliamBlake; and this is emphasised by the very simplicity andchildishness of his style. Only out of the strength of a lion couldcome such honeyed gentleness. And if he is one of the strongestamong poets he is also one of the happiest. 

Genuine happiness--happiness that is at the same time intellectualand spontaneous--is far rarer in poetry than one might suppose. Suchhappiness has nothing necessarily to do with an optimisticphilosophy or even with faith in God. It has nothing at all to do withphysical well-being or the mere animal sensations of eating anddrinking and philandering. It is a thing of more mysterious importand of deeper issues than these. It may come lightly and go lightly, but the rhythm of eternity is in the beating of its wings, and deepcalls to deep in the throbbing of its pulses. 

As Blake himself puts it--

 "He who bends to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in Eternity's sun-rise. "

In the welling up, out of the world's depths, of happiness like this, there is a sense of calm, of serenity, of immortal repose andfull-brimmed ecstasy. It is the "energy without disturbance" whichAristotle indicates as the secret of the life of the eternal Beinghimself. It is beyond the ordinary pleasures of sex, as it is beyondthe ordinary difference between good and evil. It is human and yetinhuman. It is the happiness of da Vinci, of Spinoza, of Goethe. It isthe happiness towards which Nietzsche all his life long struggleddesperately, and struggled in vain. 

One touches the fringe of the very mystery of human symbols--ofthe uttermost secret of _words_ in their power to express the soul ofa writer--when one attempts to analyse the child-like simplicity ofWilliam Blake's style. How is it that he manages with so small, solimited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"? Weall have the same words at our command; we all have the samerhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplestsyllables so original, so personal, a shape?

 "What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"

Just because his materials are so simple and so few--and this appliesto his plastic art as well as to his poetry--we are brought to pausemore sharply and startlingly in his case than that of almost any other, before the primordial mystery of human expression and itsmalleableness under the impact of personality. Probably no poetever lived who expressed his meaning by the use of such a limitednumber of words, or of words so simple and childish. It is as thoughWilliam Blake had actually transformed himself into some livingincarnation of his own Virgilian child-saviour, and were stammeringhis oracles to mankind through divine baby-lips. 

What matter? It is the one and the same Urbs Beata, Calliopolis, Utopia, New Rome, New Atlantis, which these child-like syllablesannounce, trumpet heralded by the angels of the Revelation, chantedby the high-souled Mantuan, sung by David the King, or shouted"over the roofs of the world" by Walt Whitman. 

It is the same mystery, the same hope for the human race. 

 "I will not cease from mental strife Nor shall my sword sink from my hand Till I have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant Land!"

One of the most curious and interesting things in Blake's work is thevalue he places upon tears. All his noble mythological figures, gathering in verse after verse, for the great battle against brutalityand materialism, come "weeping" to the help of their outraged littleones. Gods and beasts, lions and lambs, Christ and Lucifer, fairiesand angels, all come "weeping" into the struggle with the forces ofstupidity and tyranny. 

He seems to imply that to have lost the power of shedding tears is tohave dehumanized oneself and put oneself outside the pale. "A tearis an intellectual thing, " and those who still have the power of"weeping" have not quite lost the key to the wisdom of the eternalgods. It is not only the mysterious and foreordained congruity ofrhyme that leads him to associate in poem after poem--until for thevulgar mind, the repetition becomes almost ludicrous--this symbolic"weeping" with the sweet sleep which it guards and which it brings. 

The poet of the veiled child at the heart of the world is naturally apoet of the mystery of tears and the mystery of sleep. And WilliamBlake becomes all this without the least tincture of sentimentality. That is where his genius is most characteristic and admirable. Hecan come chanting his strange gnomic tunes upon tears and uponsleep, upon the loveliness of children, upon life and death, upon thewonder of dews and clouds and rain and the soft petals of flowerswhich these nourish, without--even for one moment--falling intosentiment or pathos. 

All through his strange and turbulent life he was possessed of thepower of splendid and terrible anger. His invectives andvituperations bite and flay like steel whips. The "buyers and sellers"in the temple of his Lord are made to skip and dance. He was afraidof no man living--nor of any man's god. 

Working with his own hands, composing his poems, illustratingthem, engraving them, printing them, and binding them in his ownworkshop, he was in a position to make Gargantuan sport of the"great" and the "little" vulgar. 

He went his own way and lived as he pleased; having somethingabout him of that shrewd, humorous, imperturbable "insouciance"which served Walt Whitman so well, and which is so much wiser, kindlier and more human a shield for an artist's freedom, than thesarcasms of a Whistler or the insolence of a Wilde. 

Careless and nonchalant, he "travelled the open road, " and gave allobscurantists and oppressors to ten million cart-loads of horneddevils!

It is my privilege to live, on the South Coast, not so many milesfrom that village of Felpham where he once saw in his child-likefantasies, a fairy's funeral. That funeral must have been followedafter Blake's death by many others; for there are no fairies inFelpham now. But Blake's cottage is there still--to be seen by anywho care to see it--and the sands by the sea's edge are the "yellowsands, " flecked with white foam and bright green sea-weed ofAriel's song; and on the sea-banks above grow tufts of HomericTamarisk. 

It is astonishing to think that while the laconic George Crabbe, "Nature's sternest painter, " was writing his rough couplets in themetre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was stilltapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buyoysters for his cat, William Blake--in mind and imagination acontemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman--should have beenasserting the artist's right (why should we not say the individual'sright, artist or no artist?) to live as he pleases, according to themorals, manners, tastes, inclination and caprices, of his ownabsolute humour and fancy. 

This was more than one hundred years ago. What would WilliamBlake think of our new world, --would it seem to him to resemble hisNew Jerusalem of child-like happiness and liberty?--our worldwhere young ladies are fined five dollars if they go into the seawithout their stockings? Well! at Felpham they do not tease themwith stockings. 

What makes the genius of William Blake so salutary a revolutionaryinfluence is the fact that while contending so savagely againstpuritanical stupidity, he himself preserves to the end, hisguilelessness and purity of heart. 

There are admirable writers and philosophers, whose work on behalfof the liberation of humanity is rendered less disinterested by thefact that they are fighting for their personal inclinations rather thanfor the happiness of the world at large. This could never be said ofWilliam Blake. A more unselfish devotion to the spiritual interestsof the race than that which inspired him from beginning to end couldhardly be imagined. But he held it as axiomatic that the spiritualinterests of the race can only be genuinely served by means of theintellectual and moral freedom of the individual. And certainly in hisown work we have a beautiful and anarchical freedom. 

No writer or artist ever succeeded in expressing more completely thetexture and colour of his thoughts. Those strange flowing-haired oldmen who reappear so often in his engravings, like the "splendid andsavage old men" of Walt Whitman's fancy, seem to incorporate thevery swing and sweep of his elemental earth-wrestling; while thoselong-limbed youths and maidens, almost suggestive of El Greco inthe way their bodies are made, yearn and leap upwards towards theclear air and the cloudless blue sky, in a passion of tumultuousescape, in an ecstasy of resurrection. 

It is extraordinary how Blake's peculiar use of very simple rhymes, with the same words repeated over and over again, enhances thepower of his poetry--it does more than enhance it--it is the body ofits soul. One approaches here the very mystery of style, in the poeticmedium, and some of its deepest secrets. Just as that "metaphysic insensuality" which is the dominant impulse in the genius of Remy deGourmont expresses itself in constant echoes and reiteratedliturgical repetitions--such as his famous "fleur hypocrite, fleur dusilence"--until one feels that the "refrain" in poetry has become, inan especial sense, his predominant note, so these constantlyrecurring rhymes in the work of Blake, coming at the end of veryshort lines, convey, as nothing else could do, the child-like qualityof the spirit transfused through them. They are childlike; and yetthey could not have been written by any one but a grown man, and aman of formidable strength and character. 

The psychology of the situation is doubtless the same as that whichwe remark in certain very modern artists--the ones whose work ismost of all bewildering to those who, in their utter inability tobecome as "little children, " are as completely shut out from thekingdom of art as they are from the kingdom of heaven. 

The curious spell which these simple and in some cases infantilerhymes cast over us, ought to compel the more fanatical adherents of"free verse" to rearrange their ideas. Those who, without anyprejudice one way or the other, are only anxious to enjoy to the fullevery subtle pleasure which the technique of art is able to give, cannot help finding in the unexpected thrill produced by these sweet, soft vibrations of verbal melody--like the sound of a golden bellrung far down under the humming waters--a direct revelation of thetender, strong soul behind them, for whose hidden passion they finda voice. 

After all, it is in the final impression produced upon our senses andintellect by a great artist, and not in any particular quality of aparticular work of art, that--unless we are pedantic virtuosos--weweigh and judge what we have gained. And what we have gained byWilliam Blake cannot be over-estimated. 

His poems seem to associate themselves with a thousand evanescentmemories of days when we have been happy beyond the power ofcalamity or disappointment. They associate themselves with thosehalf-physical, half-spiritual trances--when, suddenly in the outskirtsof a great city perhaps, or on the banks of some inland river, wehave remembered the long line of breaking surf, and the murmursand the scents of the sea. They associate themselves with the dreamyindescribable moments when crossing the wet grass of secludedmisty meadows, passing the drowsy cattle and the large cool earlymorning shadows thrown by the trees, we have suddenly come uponcuckoo flowers or marigolds, every petal of which seems burdenedwith a mystery almost intolerably sweet. 

Like the delicate pictures of early Italian art, the poems of Blakeindicate and suggest rather than exhaust or satiate. One is neveroppressed by too heavy a weight of natural beauty. A single treeagainst the sky--a single shadow upon the pathway--a single petalfallen on the grass; these are enough to transport us to those fields oflight and "chambers of the sun" where the mystic dance of creationstill goes on; these are enough to lead us to the husheddew-drenched lawns where the Lord God walks in the garden "in the coolof the day. "

One associates the poetry of William Blake, not with the mountainpeaks and gorgeous foliage and rushing torrents of a landscape thatclamours to be admired and would fain overpower us with itspicturesque appeal, but with the quietest, gentlest, softest, leastassuming background to that "going forth" to our work, "and ourlabour until the evening, " which is the normal destiny of man. 

The pleasant fields of Felpham with their hawthorne hedges, thelittle woods of Hertfordshire or Surrey with their patches ofbluebells, were all that he needed to set him among the company ofthe eternal gods. 

For this is the prerogative of imagination, that it can reconcile us tolife where life is simplest and least adorned; and this is thereluctance and timidity of imagination that it shrinks away intotwilight and folds its wings, when the pressure of reality is too heavy, and the materials of beauty too oppressive and tyrannous. 

BYRON

It is in a certain sense a lamentable indictment upon thesheepishness and inertness of the average crowd that a figure likethat of Byron should have been so exceptional in his own day andshould be so exceptional still. For, godlike rascal as he was, he wasmade of quite normal stuff. 

There was nothing about him of that rare magical quality whichseparates such poets as Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe or Paul Verlainefrom the mass of ordinary people. The Byronic type, as it is called, has acquired a certain legendary glamour; but it is nothing, when wecome really to analyse it, but the universal type of vain, impetuous, passionate youth, asserting itself with royal and resplendentinsolence in defiance of the cautious discretion of middle-agedconventions. 

Youth is essentially Byronic when it is natural and fearless andstrong; and it is a melancholy admission of something timid andsluggish in us all that we should speak "with bated breath andwhispering humbleness" of this brilliant figure. A little morecourage, a little less false modesty, a little more sincerity, and thelambs of our democratic age would all show something of thatleonine splendour. 

There is nothing in Byron so far above the commonplace that he isout of the reach of average humanity. He is made of the same clay aswe all are made of. His vanity is our vanity, his pride our pride, hisvices our vices. 

We are on the common earth with him; on the natural ground of ournormal human infirmities; and if he puts us to shame it is onlybecause he has the physical force and the moral courage to behimself more audaciously and frankly than we dare to be. 

His genius is no rare hot-house flower. It is no wild and delicateplant growing in a remote and inhuman soil. It is simply theintensification, to a point of fine poetic fury, of emotions andattitudes and gestures which we all share under the pressure of thespirit of youth. 

It is for this reason--for the reason that he expressed so completelyin his wayward and imperious manner the natural feelings of normalyouthfulness--that he became in his own day so legendary andsymbolic a personage, and that he has become in ours a sort offlaming myth. He would never have become all this; he would neverhave stirred the fancy of the masses of people as he has; if therewere not in his temperament something essentially simple, human, and within the comprehension of quite ordinary minds. 

It might indeed be maintained that what Oscar Wilde is to the rarerand more perverse minority, Byron is to the solid majority ofdownright simple philistines. 

The average British or American "plain blunt man" regards, andalways will regard, such writers as Shelley and Poe and Verlaineand Wilde with a certain uneasy suspicion. These great poets mustalways seem to him a little weird and morbid and apart fromcommon flesh and blood. He will be tempted to the end to use inreference to them the ambiguous word "degenerate. " They strikehim as alien and remote. They seem to have no part or lot in theworld in which he lives. He suspects them of being ingrainedimmoralists and free-lovers. Their names convey to his mindsomething very sinister, something dangerous to the foundations ofsociety. 

But the idea of Byron brings with it quite different associations. Thesins of Byron seem only a splendid and poetic apotheosis ofsuch aperson's own sins. The rebelliousness of Byron seems arebelliousness not so much deliberate and intellectual as instinctiveand impulsive. It seems a normal revolt against normal restrictions. The ordinary man understands it and condones it, remembering thefires of his own youth. 

Besides, Byron was a lord. 

Goethe declared to Eckermann that what irritated many peopleagainst Byron was the power and pride of his personality--the factthat his personality stood out in so splendid and emphatic a way. 

Goethe was right. The brilliance of Byron's personality is a thingwhich causes curious annoyance to certain types of mind. But theseminds are not the normal ones of common intelligence. They areminds possessed of the sort of intellectual temper naturallyantagonistic to reckless youth. They are the Carlyles and theMerediths of that spiritual and philosophical vision to which theimpassioned normality of Byron with his school-boy ribaldry mustalways appear ridiculous. 

I believe it will be found that those to whom the idea of Byron'sbrilliant and wayward personality brings exquisite pleasure are, inthe first place, quite simple minds, and, in the second place, mindsof a disillusioned and un-ethical order who have grown weary of"deep spiritual thinkers, " and are ready to enjoy, as a refreshingreturn to the primitive emotions, this romantic swashbucklerismwhich proves so annoying to earnest modern thought. 

How like a sudden reverberation of the old immortal spirit ofromance, the breath of whose saddest melancholy seems sweeterthan our happiness, is that clear-toned song of passion's exhaustionwhich begins

 "We'll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon"

and which contains that magnificent verse, "For the sword outwears the sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest. "

It is extraordinary the effect which poetry of this kind has upon uswhen we come upon it suddenly, after a long interval, in thecrowded pages, say, of some little anthology. 

I think the pleasure which it gives us is due to the fact that it is soentirely sane and normal and natural; so solidly and massivelywithin the circle of our average apprehension; so expressive of whatthe common flesh and blood of our elemental humanity have cometo feel as permanent in their passions and reactions. It gives us athrilling shock of surprise when we come upon it unexpectedly--thiskind of thing; the more so because the poetry we have grownaccustomed to, in our generation, is so different from this; somystical and subjective, so remote from the crowd, so dim with thetrailing mists of fanciful ambiguity. 

It is very unfortunate that one "learned by heart, " as a child, so muchof Byron's finest poetry. 

I cannot imagine a more exciting experience than a suddendiscovery at this present hour, with a mind quite new and fresh to itsresounding grandeur, of that poem, in the Hebrew Melodies, aboutSennacherib. 

 "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. "

Have not those lines the very wonder and terror and largeness ofancient wars?

 "And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, And thro' it there rolled not the breath of his pride, And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf!"

Our modern poets dare not touch the sublime naïveté of poetry likethat! Their impressionist, imagist, futurist theories make them tooself-conscious. They say to themselves--"Is that word a 'cliché' word?Has that phrase been used several times before? Have I beencarefully and precisely _original_ in this? Is that image clear-cutenough? Have I reverted to the 'magic' of Verlaine and Mallarméand Mr. Yeats? Do I suggest the 'cosmic emotion' of WaltWhitman'?"

It is this terror of what they call "cliché words" which utterlyprevents them from writing poetry which goes straight to our heartlike Byron's; poetry which refreshes our jaded epicurean senses witha fine renaissance of youth. 

Their art destroys them. Their art enslaves them. Their art lames andcripples them with a thousand meticulous scruples. 

Think what it would be, in this age, suddenly to come upon a poetwho could write largely and carelessly, and with a flaming divinefire, about the huge transactions of life; about love and war and thegreat throbbing pulses of the world's historic events! They cannot doit--our poets--they cannot do it; and the reason of their inability istheir over-intellectuality, their heavily burdened artistic conscience. They are sedentary people, too, most unhealthily sedentary, ourmoderns who write verse; sedentary young people, whoseenvironment is the self-conscious Bohemia of artificial LatinQuarters. They are too clever, too artistic, too egotistic. They are tooafraid of one another; too conscious of the derisive flapping of thegoose-wings of the literary journal! They are not proud enough intheir personal individuality to send the critics to the devil and gotheir way with a large contempt. They set themselves to propitiatethe critics by the wit of technical novelty and to propitiate theirfellow craftsmen by avoiding the inspiration of the past. 

They do not write poetry for the pleasure of writing it. They writepoetry in order that they may be called poets. They aim at originalityinstead of sweeping boldly ahead and being content to bethemselves as God made them. 

I am strongly of opinion that much of the admiration lavished onthese versifiers is not due to our enjoyment of the poetry which theywrite--not, I mean, of the sheer poetic elements in it--but to ourinterest in the queer words they dig up out of the archives ofphilological bric-à-brac, to our astonishment at their eroticextravagances, to our satisfaction at being reminded of all thesuperior shibboleths of artistic slang, the use of which and theunderstanding of which prove us to be true initiates in the "creativeworld" and no poor forlorn snakes of outworn tradition. 

Our modern poets cannot get our modern artists out of their heads. The insidious talk of these sly artists confuses the simplicity of theirnatural minds. They are dominated by art; whereas the real sister ofthe muse of poetry is not "art" at all, but music. 

They do not see, these people, that the very carelessness of a greatpoet like Byron is the inevitable concomitant of his genius; I wouldgo so far as to call his carelessness the mother of his genius and itsguardian angel. 

I cannot help thinking, too, that if the artistic self-consciousness ofour generation spoils its free human pleasure in great poetry, thetheories of the academic historians of literature do all they can tomake us leave the poetry of the past in its deep grave. It seems to methat of all futile and uninteresting things what is called "the study ofliterature" is the very worst. 

To meddle with such a preposterous matter at all damns a person, inmy thinking, as a supreme fool. And yet this is, par excellence, thesort of tediousness in which devotees of culture complacentlywallow. As if it mattered where Byron slips in "the greatRenaissance of Wonder"; or where Rossetti drifts by, in theportentous "Pre-Raphaelite Movement"!

It is strange to me how boys and girls, brought up upon this "studyof literature, " can ever endure to see the look of a line of poetryagain! Most of them, it seems, _can_ hardly bear that shock; and beit far from me to blame them. I should surmise that the mere namesof Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, etc. , would fall upon their ears witha dreariness of memory like the tolling of chapel-bells. 

They are queer birds, too, these writers of commentaries uponliterature. 

At one time in my life I myself absorbed such "critical literature"with a morbid avidity, as if it had been a drug; and a drug it is--adrug dulling one to all fine and fresh sensations--a drug from theeffects of which I am only now, at this late hour, beginning slowlyto recover. They set one upon a completely wrong track, bringingforward what is unessential and throwing what is essential intothebackground. Dear heavens! how well I recall those greydiscriminations. Wordsworth was the fellow who hit upon the ideaof the _anima mundi. _ Shelley's "philosophy of life" differed fromWordsworth's in that _his_ universal spirit was a thing of pure Love, whereas the other's was a matter of pure Thought. 

Pure Love! Pure Thought! Was there ever such petrifying of theevasive flame? "Words! Words! Words!" I suspect that the book thesweet Prince was reading when he met Polonius in the passage wasa book of essays on the poets. 

The worst of this historical-comical-philosophical way of going towork is that it leaves one with the feeling that poetry is a sort ofintellectual game, entirely removed from the jostling pressure ofactual life, and that poets when once dead are shoved into theiracademic pigeon-holes to be labelled like things under glass cases. The person who can rattle off such descriptive labels the quickest isthe person of culture. Thus history swallows up poetry; thus the"comparative method" swallows up history; and the whole businessis snatched away from the magical flow of real life and turned intothe dreariness of a mausoleum. How refreshing, how salutary, toturn from all thoughts as to what Byron's "place in literature" was tosuch thrilling poetry as

 "She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes--"

or to such sonorous lines full of the reverberating echoes of pent-uppassion as those which begin

 "There is none of Beauty's daughters. "

One has only to recall the way these simple careless outbursts haveburned themselves in upon one's lips, when one's feelings werestirred to the old tune, to realise how great a poet Byron was. 

 "Fare thee well and, if forever, Still forever fare thee well!"

Can such things ever grow "stale and rung-upon, " however much thechilly hand of a pedantic psychology seeks to brush the bloom awayfrom the wings of the bird of paradise?

Those poems to the mysterious Thyrza, can any modern eroticismequal them, for large and troubled abandonment; natural as gaspinghuman speech and musical as the murmur of deep waters?

Byron is frankly and outrageously the poet of _sentiment. _ This isgood. This is what one craves for in vain in modern verse. Theinfernal seriousness of our grave youngsters and their preciouspsychological irony make them terrified of any approach tosentiment. They leave such matters with supreme contempt to thepoor little devils who write verses for the local newspapers. Theyare too clever to descend to sentiment. It is their affair to show usthe absurdity of sentiment. 

And yet the world is full of this thing. It has the rising sap of athousand springs in its heart. It has the "big rain" of the suppressedtears of a hundred generations in its sobbing music. 

It is easy to say that Byron's sentiment was a pose. 

The precise opposite of this is the truth. It is our poetic cleverness, our subjective imagery and cosmic irony, which is the pose; not hisfrank and boyish expression of direct emotion. 

We write poetry for the sake of writing poetry. He wrote to givevent to the passions of his heart. 

We compose a theme upon "love" and dedicate it to any suitableyoung woman the colour of whose eyes suits the turn of ourmetaphors. He loved first and wrote poetry afterwards--as theoccasion demanded. 

That is why his love-poetry is so full of vibrant sincerity, so rich inblood, so natural, so careless, so sentimental. 

That is why there is a sort of conversational ease about hislove-poetry, and here and there lapses into what, to an artistic sense, might seem bathos, absurdity, or rhetoric. Lovers are always a littleabsurd; and the fear of absurdity is not a sign of deep feeling but ofthe absence of all feeling. 

Every one of Byron's most magnificent love-lyrics has its actualcircumstantial cause and impulse in the adventures of his life. Hedoes not spin out vague wordy platonic rhapsodies upon love-in-general. He addresses a particular person, just as Burns did--just asShakespeare did--and his poems are, so to speak, thrilled with theexcitement of the great moment's tumultuous pulses, scalded withthe heat of its passionate tears. 

These moments pass, of course. One need not be derisively cynicalover that. Infatuation succeeds infatuation. Dream succeeds dream. The loyalty of a life-long love was not his. His life ended indeedbefore youth's desperate experiments were over, before the reactionset in. But the sterner mood had begun. 

 "Tread these reviving passions down, Unworthy manhood. Unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of Beauty be. "

And the lines end--his last--with that stoical resignation in thepresence of a soldier's fate which gives to the close of hisadventurous enterprise on behalf of an oppressed Hellenic worldsuch a gallant dignity. 

 "Then look around and choose thy ground, And take thy rest. "

If these proud personal touches, of which there are so manyscattered through his work, offend our artistic modern sense wemust remember that the same tone, the same individual confessionof quite personal emotion, is to be found in Dante and Milton andGoethe. 

The itching mock-modesty of the intellectual altruist, ashamed tocommit himself to the personal note, is not an indication of a greatnature. It is rather a sign of a fussy self-consciousness under the eyesof impertinent criticism. 

What drives the modern philosopher to jeer at Byron is really a sortof envy of his splendid and irresponsible personality, thatpersonality whose demonic energy is so radiant with the beautifulglamour of youth. 

And what superb strength and high romance there are in certain ofhis verses when the magnificent anger of the moment has its waywith him!

 Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! On Suli's rock and Parga's shore Exists the remnant of a line Such as our Doric mothers bore--

No one can help confessing that poetry of this kind, "simple, sensuous and passionate"--to use the great Miltonic definition--possesses, for all its undeniable _rhetoric, _ a large and high poetic value. 

And at its best, the poetry of Byron is not mere rhetoric. Rhetoricundoubtedly is there. His mind was constantly, like most simpleminds when touched to large issues, betrayed by the sweet treacheryof rhetoric; but I feel confident that any really subtle critic of thedelicate differences between one poetic vein and another, must feel, though he might not be able to express the fineness of the distinction, that there is something here--some breath, some tone, some air, some atmosphere, some royal and golden gesture--which isaltogether beyond the reach of all mere eloquence, and sealed withthe indescribable seal of poetry. 

This real poetic element in Byron--I refer to something over andabove his plangent rhetoric--arrests us with all the greater shock ofsudden possession, for the very reason that it is so carelessly, soinartistically, so recklessly flung out. 

He differs in this, more than in anything else, from our own poeticcontemporaries. Our clever young poets know their business soappallingly well. They know all about the theories of poetry: theyknow what is to be said for Free Verse, for Imagism, forPost-Impressionism: they know how the unrhymed Greek chorus lendsitself to the lyrical exigencies of certain moods: they know howwonderful the Japanese are, and how interesting certain Indiancadences may be: they know the importance of expressing the Idealof Democracy, of Femininity, of Evolution, of Internationalism. There really is nothing in the whole field of poetic criticism whichthey do not know--except the way to persuade the gods to give usgenius, when genius has been refused!

Byron, on the contrary, knows absolutely nothing of any of thesethings. "When he thinks he is a child"; when he criticises he is achild; when he philosophises, theorises, _mysticizes, _ he is ahopeless child. A vast amount of his poetry, for all its swing anddash and rush, might have been written by a lamentably inferiorhand. 

We come across such stuff to-day; not among the literary circles, butin the poets' corners of provincial magazines. What is called"Byronic sentiment, " so derided now by the clever youngpsychologists who terrorise our literature, has become the refuge oftimid old-fashioned people, quite bewildered and staggered by newdevelopments. 

I sympathise with such old-fashioned people. The patheticearnestness of an elderly commercial traveller I once met on thePère Marquette Railway who assured me that Byron was "somepoet" remains in my mind as a much more touching tribute to thelordly roué than all the praise of your Arnolds and Swinburnes. 

He is indeed "some poet. " He is the poet for people who feel themagic of music and the grandeur of imagination, without being ableto lay their finger on the more recondite nuances of "creative work, "without so much as ever having heard of "imagism. "

I have spent whole evenings in passionate readings of "ChildeHarold" and the "Poems to Thyrza" with gentle Quaker ladies anddemure old maids descended from the Pilgrim Fathers, and I havealways left such Apollonian prayer-meetings with a mind purgedfrom the cant of cleverness; washed and refreshed in the authenticsprings of the Muses. 

So few lords--when you come to think of it--write poetry at all, thatit is interesting to note the effect of aristocratic blood upon the styleof a writer. 

Personally I think its chief effect is to produce a certainmagnanimous indifference to the meticulous niceties of the art. Wesay "drunk as a lord"; well--it is something to see what a person willdo, who is descended from Robert Bruce's Douglas, when it is aquestion of this more heavenly intoxication. Aristocratic bloodshows itself in poetry by a kind of unscrupulous contempt forgravity. It refuses to take seriously the art which it practises. 

It plays the part of the grand amateur. It is free from bourgeoisearnestness. It is this, I suppose, which is so irritating to theprofessional critic. If you can write poetry, so to speak, with yourleft hand, in intervals of war and love and adventure, betweenrescuing girls from sacks destined for the waters of the Bosphorusand swimming the length of the Venetian Grand Canal andrecruiting people to fight for Hellenic freedom, you are doingsomething that ought not to be allowed. If other men of action, ifother sportsmen and pleasure-seekers and travellers and wanderingfree-lances were able to sit down in any cosmopolitan cafe in Cairoor Stamboul and knock off immortal verses in the style of Byron--verses with no "philosophy" for us to expound, no technique for usto analyse, no "message" for us to interpret, no aesthetic subtletiesfor us to unravel, no mystical orientation for us to track out, what isthere left for a poor sedentary critic to do? Our occupation is gone. We must either enjoy romance for its own sake in a frank, honest, simple manner; confessing that Byron was "some poet" and letting itgo at that; or we must explain to the world, as many of us do, thatByron was a thoroughly bad writer. A third way of dealing with thisunconscionable boy, who scoffed at Wordsworth and Southey andinsisted that Pope was a great genius, is the way some poorcamp-followers of the Moral Ideal have been driven to follow; the way, namely, of making him out to be a great leader in the war of theliberation of humanity, and a great interpreter of the wild magic ofnature. 

I must confess I cannot see Byron in either of these lights. He scoffsat kings and priests, certainly; he scoffs at Napoleon; he scoffs at thepompous self-righteousness of his own race; he scoffs at religionand sex and morality in that humorous, careless, indifferent"public-school" way which is so salutary and refreshing; but when you askfor any serious devotion to the cause of Liberty, for any definiteUtopian outlines of what is to be built up in the world's future, youget little or nothing, except resounding generalities and conventionalrhetoric. 

Nor are those critics very wise who insist on laying stress uponByron's contributions to the interpretation of Nature. 

He could write "How the big rain comes dancing to the earth!" andhis flashing, fitful, sun-smouldering pictures of European rivers andplains and hills and historic cities have their large and generouscharm. 

But beyond this essentially human and romantic, attitude to Naturethere is just nothing at all. 

 "Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue Ocean, roll!"

I confess I caught a keener thrill of pleasure from that all-too-famousline when I suddenly heard it uttered by one of those garrulousghosts in Mr. Masters's Spoon River cemetery, than I everdid when in childhood they made me learn it. 

But, for all that, though it is not an easy thing to put into words, there is a certain grandiose and sonorous beauty, fresh and free andutterly unaffected, about these verses, and many others in "ChildeHarold. "

As for those long plays of Byron's, and those still longer narrativepoems, nothing will induce me to read a line of them again. Theyhave a singularly dusty smell to me; and when I think of them even, I suffer just such a withering sensation of ineffable boredom as Iused to experience waiting in a certain ante-room in TunbridgeWells where lived an aged retired general. I associate them withillustrated travels in Palestine. 

How Goethe could read "Manfred" with any pleasure passes mycomprehension. "Cain" has a certain charm, I admit; but of all formsof all literature the thing which is called Poetic Drama seems to methe most dreary. If poets cannot write for the stage they had betterconfine themselves to honest straightforward odes and lyrics. 

But it is no use complaining. There is a sort of fate which drivespeople into this arid path. I sometimes feel as though bothImagination and Humour fled away from the earth when a modernpoet takes pen to compose Poetic Drama!

The thing is a refuge for those to whom the gods have given a"talent for literature, " and have stopped with that gift. The PoeticDrama flourishes in Anglo-Saxon Democracies. It lends itself to thebabbling of extreme youth and to the pompous moralising ofextreme middle-age. 

The odious thing is an essentially modern creation; created, as it is, out of thin vapour, and moulded by melancholy rules of thumb. Drama was Religion to the Greeks, and in the old Elizabethan daysgreat playwrights wrote great poetry. 

I suppose if, by some fairy-miracle, _sheep_--the most modern ofanimals--were suddenly endowed with the privileges of culture, theywould browse upon nothing else than Poetic Drama, from All Fools'Day to Candlemas. 

But even Manfred cannot be blamed for this withering sterility, thisdead-sea of ineptitude. There must be some form of literature found, loose and lax enough to express the Moral Idealism of thesecond-rate mind; and Poetic Drama lends itself beautifully to this. 

Putting aside a few descriptive passages in "Childe Harold" andsome score of superb lyrics sprinkled through the whole of thevolume, what really is there in Byron at this hour--beyond theirresistible _idea_ of his slashing and crimson-blooded figure--toarrest us and hold us, who can read over and over again ChristopherMarlowe and John Keats? Very little--singularly little--almostnothing. 

Nothing--except "Don Juan"! This indeed is something of a poem. This indeed has the old authentic fire about it and the sweet devilryof reckless youth. 

How does one account for the power and authority over certainminds exercised by this surprising production? I do not think it isexactly the wit in it. The wit is often entirely superficial--a meretricky playing with light resemblances and wordy jingles. I do notfeel as though it were the humour in it; for Byron is not really ahumorist at all. I think it is something deeper than the merejuxtaposition of burlesque-show jests with Sunday-eveningsentimentality. I think it is the downright lashing out, left and right, up and down, of a powerful reckless spirit able "to lash out" for themere pleasure of doing so. I think it is the pleasure we get from thespectacle of mere splendid energy and devil-may-care animal spiritslet loose to run amuck as they please; while genius, like a lovelycamp-follower tossed to and fro from hand to hand, throws aredeeming enchantment over the most ribald proceedings. 

The people--I speak now of intelligent people--who love Don Juan, are those who, while timid and shrinking themselves, love tocontemplate emphatic gestures, scandalous advances, Rabelaisianfoolings, clownish tricks; those who love to watch the madhurly-burly of life and see the resplendent fire-works go bang; those wholove all huge jests, vituperative cursings, moonlit philanderings, scoffing mockeries, honest scurrilities, great rolling barrels ofvulgarity, tuns and vats of ribaldry, and lovely, tender, gondola-songs upon sleeping waters. 

The pleasure which such persons derive from Byron is the pleasurewhich the civilised Greeks derived from Aristophanes, the pleasureof seeing everything which we are wont to treat reverently treatedirreverently, the pleasure, most especially, of seeing the pompousgreat ones of the world made to dance and skip like drunk puppets. The literary temperament is so fatally inclined to fall into a sort ofaesthetic gravity, taking its "philosophy" and its "art" with suchportentous self-respect, that it is extremely pleasant when a recklessyoung Alcibiades of a Byron breaks into the enchanted circle andclears the air with a few resounding blasts from his profane bassoon. 

What happens really in this pantomimic history of Don Juan, withits huge nonchalance and audacious cynicism, is the invasion of theliterary field by the godless rabble, the rabble who take no stock ofthe preserves of art, and go picnicking and rollicking and scatteringtheir beer-bottles and their orange-peel in the very glades of theimmortals. It is in fact the invasion of Parnassus by a horde of mostunmitigated proletarians. But these sweet scamps are led by a reallord, a lord who, like most lords, is ready to out-philistine thephilistines and out-blaspheme the blasphemers. 

Don Juan would be a hotch-potch of indecency and sentimentality, ifit were not for the presence of genius there, of genius which, like alovely flood of shining sunlight, irradiates the whole thing. 

It is nonsense to talk of the "Byronic pose" either with regard to theoutrageousness of his cynical wit or with regard to his sentimentalSatanism. 

Blasphemous wit and Satanic sentiment are the natural reactions ofall healthy youthfulness in the presence of the sickening contrastsand diabolic ironies of life. 

Such a mood is not by any means a sign of degeneracy. Byron wasas far from being a degenerate as he was far from being a saint. It isa sign of sturdy sanity and vigorous strength. 

Not to relish the gay brutality of Byron is an indication of somethingdegenerate in ourselves. There is a certain type of person--perhapsthe most prurient and disagreeable of all human animals--who isaccustomed to indulge in a kind of holy leer of disgust when"brought up sharp" by the Aristophanic lapses of gay and gracelessyouth. Such a person's mind would be a fruitful study for Herr Freud;but the thought of its simmering cauldron of furtive naughtiness isnot a pleasant thing to dwell on, for any but pathologicalphilosophers. 

After reading Don Juan one is compelled to recognise that Byron'smind must have been abnormally sane and sound. No one who jestsquite at this rate could possibly be a bad man. The bad men--a wordto the wise--are those from whose mouth the gay wantonness of theyouth of the world is condemned as evil. Such persons ought to besent for a rest-cure to Cairo or Morocco or Pekin. 

The innocence of youth should be protected from a morality whichis far more morbid than the maddest Dionysian revel. 

It is, to confess it freely, not the satyrishness of Byron at all, but hishard brutality, which, for myself, I find difficult to enjoy. 

I seem to require something more mellow, more ironical, moresubtle, more humane, in my literature of irreverence. But no doubtthis is a racial prejudice. Some obstinate drop of Latin--or, for all Iknow, --Carthaginian blood in me, makes me reluctant to give myselfup to the tough, sane, sturdy brutality of your Anglo-Scot. 

I can relish every word of Rabelais and I am not in the leastdismayed by Heine's impishness, but I have always found Fielding'sand Smollett's grosser scenes difficult mouthfuls to swallow. 

They tell me there is a magnanimous generosity and a large earthysanity about these humorists. But to me there is too much horse-play, too much ruffianism and "bully-ragging. " And something of thesame quality offends me in Byron. I lack the steadiness of nerves todeal with a coarseness which hits you across the head, much as theold English clowns hit one another with strings of sausages. 

But because I suffer from this psychological limitation; because Iprefer Sterne to Fielding, and Lamb to Dickens; I should condemnmyself as an un-catholic fanatic if I presumed to turn my personallack of youthful aplomb and gallant insouciance into a grave artisticprinciple. 

Live and let live! That must be our motto in literary criticism as it isour motto in other things. I am not going to let myself call Byron ablackguard because of something a little hard and insensitive in himwhich happens to get upon my own nerves. He was a fine genius. Hewrote noble verses. He has a beautiful face. 

Women are, as a rule, less sensitive than men in these matters ofsexual brutality. It may be that they have learned by bitterexperience that the Byrons of this world are not their worst enemies. Or perhaps they feel towards them a certain maternal tenderness;condoning, as mothers will do, with an understanding beyond thecomprehension of any neurotic critic, these roughnesses andinsensitivenesses in their darlings. 

Yes--let us leave the reputation of this great man, as far as his sexuallapses are concerned, to the commonsense and tact of women. 

He was the kind of man that women naturally love. Perhaps we whocriticise him are not altogether forgetful of that fact when we put ourfinger upon his aristocratic selfishness and his garish brilliance. 

And perhaps the women are right. 

It is pleasant at any rate to think so; pleasant to think that one'srefined and gentle aunts, living noble lives in cathedral close andcountry vicarage, still regard this great wayward poet as a dear spoiltchild and feel nothing of that instinctive suspicion of him which theyfeel toward so many "Byrons de nos jours. "

When I recall the peculiarly tender look that came into the face ofone beautiful old lady--a true "grande dame" of the old-fashionedgeneration--to whom I mentioned his name, and associate it with thelook of weary distaste with which she listened to my discoursesupon more modern and more subtle rebels, I am tempted to concludethat what womanly women really admire in a man is a certainenergy of action, a certain drastic force, brilliance and hardness, which is the very opposite of the nervous sensitiveness and receptiveweakness which is the characteristic of most of us men of letters. Iam tempted to go so far as to maintain that a profound atavisticinstinct in normal women makes them really contemptuous in theirhearts of any purely aesthetic or intellectual type. They prefer poetswho are also men of action and men of the world. They prefer poetswho "when they think are children. " It is not hardness or selfishnessor brutality which really alarms them. It is intellect, it is subtlety, itis, above all, _irony. _ Byron's unique achievement as a poet is tohave flung into poetry the essential brutality and the essentialsentiment of the typical male animal, and, in so far as he has donethis, all his large carelessness, all his cheap and superficial rhetoric, all his scornful cynicism, cannot hide from us something primitiveand appealing about him which harmonises well enough with hisbeautiful face and his dramatic career. 

Perhaps, as a matter of fact, our literary point of view in these laterdays has been at once over-subtilized and underfed. Perhaps wehave grown morbidly fastidious in the matter of delicacies of style, and shrinkingly averse to the slashing energy of hard-hitting, action-loving, self-assertive worldliness. 

It may be so; and yet, I am not sure. I can find it in me to dally withthe morbid and very modern fancy that, after all, Byron has been agood deal overrated; that, after all, when we forget his personalityand think only of his actual work, he cannot be compared for amoment, as an original genius, with such persons--so much lessappealing to the world-obsessed feminine mind--as William Blakeor Paul Verlaine!

Yes; let the truth be blurted out--even though it be a confessioncausing suffering to one's pride--and the truth is that I, for one, though I can sit down and read Matthew Arnold and Remy deGourmont and Paul Verlaine, for hours and hours, and though it isonly because I have them all so thoroughly by heart that I don't readthe great Odes of Keats any more, shall _never again, _ not even forthe space of a quarter of an hour, not even as a psychologicalexperiment, turn over the pages of a volume of Byron's PoeticalWorks!

I think I discern what this reluctance means. It means that primarilyand intrinsically what Byron did for the world was to bring intoprominence and render beautiful and appealing a certain fiercerebellion against unctuous domesticity and solemn puritanism. Hispolitical propagandism of Liberty amounts to nothing now. Whatamounts to a great deal is that he magnificently and in an engaging, though somewhat brutal manner, broke the rules of a bourgeoissocial code. 

As a meteoric rebel against the degrading servility of what we havecome to call the "Nonconformist Conscience" Byron must alwayshave his place in the tragically slow emancipation of the humanspirit. The reluctance of an ordinary sensitive modern person, genuinely devoted to poetry, to spend any more time with Byron'sverses than what those great familiar lyrics printed in all theanthologies exact, is merely a proof that he is not the poet thatShelley, for instance, is. 

It is a melancholy commentary upon the "immortality of genius" andthat "perishing only with the English language" of whichconventional orators make so much, that the case should be so; but itis more important to be honest in the admission of our real feelingsthan to flatter the pride of the human race. 

The world moves on. Manners, customs, habits, moralities, ideals, all change with changing of the times. 

_Style alone, _ the imaginative rendering in monumental words ofthe most personal secrets of our individuality, gives undying interestto what men write. Sappho and Catullus, Villon and Marlowe, are asvivid and fresh to-day as are Walter de la Mare or Edgar LeeMasters. 

If Byron can only thrill us with half-a-dozen little songs hisglory-loving ghost ought to be quite content. 

To last in any form at all, as the generations pass and the face of theplanet alters, is a great and lucky accident. To last so that men notonly read you but love you when a century's dust covers your ashesis a high and royal privilege. 

To leave a name which, whether men read your work or not, whether men love your memory or not, still conjures up an image ofstrength and joy and courage and beauty, is a great reward. 

To leave a name which must be associated for all time with thehuman struggle to free itself from false idealism and false moralityis something beyond any reward. It is to have entered into thecreative forces of Nature herself. It is to have become a fatality. It isto have merged your human, individual, personal voice with thevoices of _the elements which are beyond the elements. _ It is tohave become an eternally living portion of that unutterable centralflame which, though the smoke of its burning may roll back upon usand darken our path, is forever recreating the world. 

Much of Byron's work, while he lived, was of necessity destructive. Such destruction is part of the secret of life. In the world of moralideals destroyers have their place side by side with creators. Thedestroyers of human thoughts are the winged ministers of thethoughts of Nature. Out of the graves of ideals something riseswhich is beyond any ideal. We are tossed to and fro, poets and menof action alike, by powers whose intentions are dark, by unknownforces whose faces no man may ever see. From darkness to darknesswe stagger across a twilight-stage. 

With no beginning that we can imagine, with no end that we canconceive, the mad procession moves forward. Only sometimes, atmoments far, far apart, and in strange places, do we seem to catchthe emergence, out of the storm in which we struggle, of somethingthat no poet nor artist nor any other human voice has ever uttered, something that is as far beyond our virtue as it is beyond our evil, something terrible, beautiful, irrational, _mad_--which is the secretof the universe!

EMILY BRONTË

The name of Emily Brontë--why does it produce in one's mind sostrange and startling a feeling, unlike that produced by any otherfamous writer?

It is not easy to answer such a question. Certain great souls seem togather to themselves, as their work accumulates its destinedmomentum in its voyage down the years, a power of arousing ourimagination to issues that seem larger than those which can naturallybe explained as proceeding inevitably from their tangible work. 

Our imagination is roused and our deepest soul stirred by themention of such names without any palpable accompaniment oflogical analysis, without any well-weighed or rational justification. 

Such names touch some response in us which goes deeper than ourcritical faculties, however desperately they may struggle. Instincttakes the place of reason; and our soul, as if answering the appeal ofsome translunar chord of subliminal music, vibrates in response to amood that baffles all analysis. 

We all know the work of Emily's sister Charlotte; we know it andcan return to it at will, fathoming easily and at leisure the finequalities of it and its impassioned and romantic effect upon us. 

But though we may have read over and over again that one amazingstory--"Wuthering Heights"--and that handful of unforgettablepoems which are all that Emily Brontë has bequeathed to the world, which of us can say that the full significance of these things hasbeen ransacked and combed out by our conscious reason; which ofus can say that we understand to the full all the mysterious stir andferment, all the far-reaching and magical reactions, which suchthings have produced within us?

Who can put into words the secret of this extraordinary girl? Whocan define, in the suave and plausible language of academic culture, the flitting shadows thrown from deep to deep in the unfathomablegenius of her vision?

Perhaps not since Sappho has there been such a person. Certainlyshe makes the ghosts of de Staël and Georges Sand, of Eliot and Mrs. Browning, look singularly homely and sentimental. 

I am inclined to think that the huge mystery of Emily Brontë's powerlies in the fact that she expresses in her work--just as the Lesbian, did--the very soul of womanhood. It is not an easy thing to achieve, this. Women writers, clever and lively and subtle, abound in ourtime, as they have abounded in times past; but for some inscrutablereason they lack the demonic energy, the occult spiritual force, theinstinctive fire, wherewith to give expression to the ultimate mysteryof their own sex. 

I am inclined to think that, of all poets, Walt Whitman is the onlyone who has drawn his reckless and chaotic inspiration straight fromthe uttermost spiritual depths of the sex-instincts of the male animal;and Emily Brontë has done for her sex what Walt Whitman did forhis. 

It is a strange and startling commentary upon the real significance ofour sexual impulses that, when it comes to the final issue, it is notthe beautiful ruffianism of a Byron, full of normal sex-instinctthough that may be, or the eloquent sentiment of a Georges Sand, penetrated with passionate sensuality as that is, which really touchthe indefinable secret. Emily Brontë, like Walt Whitman, sweeps us, by sheer force of inspired genius, into a realm where the mere_animalism_ of sexuality, its voluptuousness, its lust, its lechery, areabsolutely merged, lost, forgotten; fused by that burning flame ofspiritual passion into something which is beyond all earthly desire. 

Emily Brontë--and this is indicative of the difference betweenwoman and man--goes even further than Walt Whitman in thespiritualising of this flame. In Whitman there is, as we all know, avast mass of work, wherein, true and magical though it is, theearthly and bodily elements of the great passion are given enormousemphasis. It is only at rare moments--as happens with ordinary menin the normal experience of the world--that he is swept away beyondthe reach of lust and voluptuousness. But Emily Brontë seems todwell by natural predilection upon these high summits and in theseunsounded depths. The flame of the passion in her burns at suchquivering vibrant pressure that the fuel of it--the debris and rubble ofour earth-instincts--is entirely absorbed and devoured. In her workthe fire of life licks up, with its consuming tongue, every vestige ofmateriality in the thing upon which it feeds, and the lofty tremulousspires of its radiant burning ascend into the illimitable void. 

It is of extraordinary interest, as a mere psychological phenomenon, to note the fact that when the passion of sex is driven forward by theflame of its conquering impulse beyond a certain point it becomesitself transmuted and loses the earthy texture of its original character. 

Sex-passion when carried to a certain pitch of intensity loses itssexuality. It becomes pure flame; immaterial, unearthly, and with nosensual dross left in it. 

It may even be said, by an enormous paradox, to become sexless. And this is precisely what one feels about the work of Emily Brontë. Sex-passion in her has been driven so far that it has come round "fullcircle" and has become sexless passion. It has become passiondisembodied, passion absolute, passion divested of all humanweakness. The "muddy vesture of decay" which "grossly closes in"our diviner principle has been burnt up and absorbed. It has beenreduced to nothing; and in its place quivers up to heaven the clearwhite flame of the secret fountain of life. 

But there is more in the matter than that. Emily Brontë's genius, byits abandonment to the passion of which I have been speaking, doesnot only burn up and destroy all the elements of clay in what, so tospeak, is above the earth and on its surface; but it also, burningdownwards, destroys and annihilates all dubious and obscurematerials which surround the original and primordial human will. Round and about this lonely and inalienable will it makes a scorchedand blackened plain of ashes and cinders. Ambiguous feelings areturned to ashes there; and so are doubts, hesitations, timidities, trepidations, cowardices. The aboriginal will of man, of theunconquerable individual, stands alone there in the twilight, underthe grey desolate rain of the outer spaces. Four-square it stands, upon adamantine foundations, and nothing in heaven or earth is ableto shake it or disquiet it. 

It is this isolation, in desolate and forlorn integrity, of the individualhuman will, which is the deepest element in Emily Brontë's genius. Upon this all depends, and to this all returns. Between the will andthe spirit deep and strange nuptials are celebrated; and from theimmortality of the spirit a certain breath of life passes over into themortality of the will, drawing it up into the celestial and invisibleregion which is beyond chance and change. 

From this abysmal fusion of the "creator spiritus" with the humanwill rises that adamantine courage with which Emily Brontë wasable to face the jagged edges of that crushing wheel of destinywhich the malign powers of nature drive remorselessly over ourpoor flesh and blood. The uttermost spirit of the universe became inthis manner _her_ spirit, and the integral identity of the soul withinher breast hardened into an undying resistance to all that wouldundermine it. 

Thus she was able to endure tragedy upon tragedy without flinching. Thus she was able to assert herself against the power of pain as onewrestling invincibly with an exhausted giant. 

Calamity after calamity fell upon her house, and the stark desolationof those melancholy Yorkshire hills became a suitable andcongruous background for the loneliness of her strange life; butagainst all the pain which came upon her, against all the achingpangs of remorseless fate, this indomitable girl held grimly to hersupreme vision. 

No poet, no novelist who has ever lived has been so profoundlyaffected by the conditions of his life as was this invincible woman. But the conditions of her life--the scenery of sombre terror whichsurrounded her--only touched and affected the outward colour andrhythm of her unique style. In her deepest soul, in the courage of hertremendous vision, she possessed something that was not boundedby Yorkshire hills, or any other hills; something that was inhuman, eternal and universal, something that was outside the power of bothtime and space. 

By that singular and forlorn scenery--the scenery of the Yorkshiremoors round about her home--she was, however, in the moreflexible portion of her curious nature inveterately influenced. Shedoes not precisely describe this scenery--not at any rate at anylength--either in her poems or in "Wuthering Heights"; but it sank sodeeply into her that whatever she wrote was affected by it and bearsits desolate and imaginative imprint. 

It is impossible to read Emily Brontë anywhere without beingtransported to those Yorkshire moors. One smells the smell ofburning furze, one tastes the resinous breath of pine-trees, one feelsbeneath one's feet the tough fibrous stalks of the ling and theresistant stems and crumpled leaves of the bracken. 

Dark against that pallid greenish light of a dead sunset, which ismore than anything else characteristic of those unharvested fells, one can perceive always, as one reads her, the sombre form of somegigantic Scotch-fir stretching out its arms across the sky; while aflight of rooks, like enormous black leaves drifting on the wind, sailaway into the sunset at our approach. 

One is conscious, as one reads her, of lonely marsh-pools turningempty faces towards a grey heaven, while drop by drop upon theirmurky waters the autumn rain falls, sadly, wearily, without aim orpurpose. 

And most of all is one made aware of the terrible desolation--desolation only rendered more desolate by the presence ofhumanity--of those half-ruined farm-houses, approached by windypaths or deep-cut lanes, which seem to rise, like huge fungoid things, here and there over that sad land. 

It is difficult to conceive they have not sprung--these dwellings ofthese Earnshaws and Lintons--actually out of the very soil, in sloworganic growth leading to slow organic decay. One cannot conceivethe human hands which _built_ them; any more than one canconceive the human hands which planted those sombre hedgeswhich have now become so completely part of the scenery that onethinks of them as quite as aboriginal to the place as the pine-trees orthe gorse-bushes. 

Of all shapes of all trees I think the shape of an old and twistedthorn-tree harmonises best with one's impression of the "milieu" ofEmily Brontë's single tragic story; a thorn-tree distorted by the windblowing from one particular quarter, and with its trunk blackenedand hollowed; and in the hollow of it a little pool of rain-water and afew dead soaked leaves. 

The extraordinary thing is that she can produce these impressionsincidentally, and, as it were, unconsciously. They are so blent withher spirit, these things, that they convey themselves to one's mindindirectly and through a medium far more subtle than any eloquentdescription. 

I cannot think of Emily Brontë's work without thinking of a certaintree I once saw against a pallid sky. A long way from Yorkshire itwas where I saw this tree, and there were no limestone bouldersscattered at its feet; but something in the impression it producedupon me--an impression I shall not lightly forget--weaves itselfstrangely in with all I feel about her, so that the peculiar look ofwintry boughs, sad and silent against a fading west, accompanied bythat natural human longing of people who are tired to be safelyburied under the friendly earth and "free among the dead, " has cometo be most indelibly and deeply associated with her tragic figure. 

Those who know those Yorkshire moors know the mysterious wayin which the quiet country lanes suddenly emerge upon wide anddesolate expanses; know how they lead us on, past ruined factoriesand deserted quarries, up the barren slopes of forlorn hills; knowhow, as one sees in front of one the long white road vanishing overthe hill-top and losing itself in the grey sky, there comes across one'smind a strange, sad, exquisite feeling unlike any other feeling in theworld; and we who love Emily Brontë know that this is the feeling, the mood, the atmosphere of the soul, into which her writings throwus. 

The power of her great single story, "Wuthering Heights, " is in aprimary sense the power of romance, and none can care for thisbook for whom romance means nothing. 

What is romance? I think it is the instinctive recognition of a certainpoetic glamour which an especial kind of grouping of persons andthings--of persons and things seen under a particular light--is able toproduce. It does not always accompany the expression of passionateemotion or the narration of thrilling incidents. These may arrest andentertain us when there is no romance, in my sense at any rate ofthat great word, overshadowing the picture. 

I think this quality of romance can only be evoked when thebackground of the story is heavily laden with old, rich, dim, pathetic, human associations. I think it can only emerge when there is animplication of thickly mingled traditions, full of sombre and terribleand beautiful suggestiveness, stimulating to the imagination like adraught of heavy red wine. I think there must be, in a story of whichthe flavour has the true romantic magic, something darkly andinexplicably fatal. I think it is necessary that one should hear therush of the flight of the Valkyries and the wailing upon the wind ofthe voices of the Eumenides. 

Fate--in such a story--must assume a half-human, half-personalshape, and must brood, obscurely and sombrely, over the incidentsand the characters. 

The characters themselves must be swayed and dominated by Fate;and not only by Fate. They must be penetrated through and throughby the scenery which surrounds them and by the traditions, old anddark and superstitious and malign, of some particular spot upon theearth's surface. 

The scenery which is the background of a tale which has the trueromantic quality must gather itself together and concentrate itself insome kind of symbolic unity; and this symbolic unity--wherein thevarious elements of grandeur and mystery are merged--must presentitself as something almost personal and as a dynamic "motif" in thedevelopment of the plot. 

There can be no romance without some sort of appeal to thatlong-inherited and atavistic feeling in ordinary human hearts which isresponsive to the spell and influence of old, unhappy, lovely, ancientthings; things faded and falling, but with the mellowness of thecenturies upon their faces. 

In other words, nothing can be romantic which is _new. _ Romanceimplies, above everything else, a long association with the humanfeelings of many generations. It implies an appeal to thatbackground of our minds which is stirred to reciprocity bysuggestions dealing with those old, dark, mysterious memorieswhich belong, not so much to us as individuals, as to us as links in agreat chain. 

There are certain emotions in all of us which go much further anddeeper than our mere personal feelings. Such are the emotionsroused in us by contact with the mysterious forces of life and deathand birth and the movements of the seasons; with the rising andsetting of the sun, and the primordial labour of tilling the earth andgathering in the harvest. These things have been so long associatedwith our human hopes and fears, with the nerves and fibres of ourinmost being, that any powerful presentment of them brings to thesurface the accumulated feelings of hundreds of centuries. 

New problems, new adventures, new social groupings, newphilosophical catchwords, may all have their vivid and excitinginterest. They cannot carry with them that sad, sweet breath ofplanetary romance which touches what might be called the"imagination of the race" in individual men and women. 

"Wuthering Heights" is a great book, not only because of theintensity of the passions in it, but because these passions arepenetrated so profoundly with the long, bitter, tragic, humanassociations of persons who have lived for generations upon thesame spot and have behind them the weight of the burden of thesorrows of the dead. 

It is a great book because the romance of it emerges into undisturbedamplitude of space, and asserts itself in large, grand, primitive formsunfretted by teasing irrelevancies. 

The genius of a romantic novelist--indeed, the genius of all writersprimarily concerned with the mystery of human character--consistsin letting the basic differences between man and man, between manand woman, rise up, unimpeded by frivolous detail, from thefathomless depths of life itself. 

The solitude in which Emily Brontë lived, and the austere simplicityof her granite-moulded character, made it possible for her toenvisage life in larger, simpler, less blurred outlines than most of usare able to do. Thus her art has something of that mysterious andawe-inspiring simplicity that characterises the work of Michelangeloor William Blake. 

No one who has ever read "Wuthering Heights" can forget the placeand the time when he read it. As I write its name now, every readerof this page will recall, with a sudden heavy sigh at the passing ofyouth, the moment when the sweet tragic power of its deadly geniusfirst took him by the throat. 

For me the shadow of an old bowed acacia-tree, held together byiron bands, was over the history of Heathcliff; but the forms andshapes of that mad drama gathered to themselves the lineaments ofall my wildest dreams. 

I can well remember, too, how on a certain long straight roadbetween Heathfield and Burwash, the eastern district of Sussex, mycompanion--the last of our English theologians--turned suddenlyfrom his exposition of St. Thomas, and began quoting, as the whitedust rose round us at the passing of a flock of sheep, the "vain arethe thousand creeds--unutterably vain!" of that grand and absolutedefiance, that last challenge of the unconquerable soul, which endswith the sublime cry to the eternal spark of godhead in us all--

 "Thou, thou art being and breath; And what thou art can never be destroyed!"

The art of Emily Brontë--if it can be called art, this spontaneousprojection, in a shape rugged and savage, torn with the storms offate, of her inmost identity--can be appreciated best if we realisewith what skill we are plunged into the dark stream of the destiny ofthese people through the mediatory intervention of a comparativestranger. By this method, and also by the crafty manner in which shemakes the old devoted servant of the house of Earnshaw utter a sortof Sophoclean commentary upon the events which take place, weare permitted to feel the magnitude of the thing in true relief andperspective. 

By these devices we have borne in upon us, as in no other way couldbe done, the convincing sense which we require, to give weight andmass to the story, of the real continuity of life in those savage places. 

By this method of narration we have the illusion of being suddenlyinitiated into a stream of events which are not merely imaginary. Wehave the illusion that these Earnshaws and Lintons are really, actually, palpably, undeniably, living--living somewhere, in theirterrible isolation, as they have always lived--and that it is only bysome lucky chance of casual discovery that we have been plungedinto the mystery of their days. 

One cannot help feeling aware, as we follow the story of Heathcliff, how Emily Brontë has torn and rent at her own soul in the creationof this appalling figure. Heathcliff, without father or mother, withouteven a Christian name, becomes for us a sort of personalembodiment of the suppressed fury of Emily Brontë's own soul. Thecautious prudence and hypocritical reserves of the discreet world oftimid, kindly, compromising human beings has got upon the nervesof this formidable girl, and, as she goes tearing and rending at all themasks which cover our loves and our hates, she seems to utter wilddiscordant cries, cries like those of some she-wolf rushing throughthe herd of normal human sheep. 

Heathcliff and Cathy, what a pair they are! What terrifying lovers!They seem to have arisen from some remote unfathomed past of theworld's earlier and less civilised passions. And yet, one occasionallycatches, as one goes through the world, the Heathcliff look upon theface of a man and the Cathy look upon the face of a woman. 

In a writer of less genius than Emily Brontë Heathcliff would neverhave found his match; would never have found his mate, his equal, his twin-soul. 

It needed the imagination of one who had both Heathcliff and Cathyin her to dig them both out of the same granite rock, covered withyellow gorse and purple ling, and to hurl them into one another'sarms. 

From the moment when they inscribed their initials upon the wallsof that melancholy room, to the moment when, with a howl like amadman, Heathcliff drags her from her grave, their affiliation isdesperate and absolute. 

This is a love which passes far beyond all sensuality, far beyond allvoluptuous pleasure. They get little good of their love, thesetwo--little solace and small comfort. 

But one cannot conceive their wishing to change their lot with anyhappier lovers. They are what they are, and they are prepared toendure what fate shall send them. 

When Cathy admits to the old servant that she intends to marryLinton because Heathcliff was unworthy of her and would drag herdown, "I love Linton, " she says--"but _I am_ Heathcliff!" And this_"I am_ Heathcliff" rings in our ears as the final challenge to achaotic pluralistic world full of cynical disillusionment, of thedesperate spirit of which Emily Brontë was made. 

The wild madness of such love--passing the love of men andwomen--may seem to many readers the mere folly of an insanedream. 

Emily Brontë--as she was bound to do--tosses them forth, thatinhuman pair, upon the voyaging homeless wind; tosses them forth, free of their desperation, to wander at large, ghosts of their ownundying passions, over the face of the rainswept moors. But to mostquiet and sceptical souls such an issue of the drama contradicts thelaws of nature. To most patient slaves of destiny the end of the ashesof these fierce flames is to mingle placidly with the dark earth ofthose misty hills and find their release in nothing more tragic thanthe giving to the roots of the heather and the bracken a richer soilwherein to grow. 

None of us know! None of us can ever know! It is enough that inthis extraordinary story the wild strange link which once and againin the history of a generation binds so strangely two persons together, almost as though their association were the result of some aeon-oldeverlasting Recurrence, is once more thrown into tragic relief andgiven the tender beauty of an austere imagination. 

Not every one can feel the spell of Emily Brontë or care for herwork. To some she must always remain too ungracious, too savage, too uncompromising. But for those who have come to care for her, she is a wonderful and a lovely figure; a figure whose fullsignificance has not even yet been sounded, a figure with whom wemust come more and more to associate that liberation of what wecall love from the mere animalism of sexual passion, which we feelsometimes, and in our rarer moments, to be one of the richesttriumphs of the spirit over the flesh. 

It may be that Emily Brontë is right. It may be that a point can bereached--perhaps is already being reached in the lives of certainindividuals--where sexual passion is thus surpassed and transcendedby the burning of a flame more intense than any which lust canproduce. 

It may be that the human race, as time goes on, will follow closerand closer this ferocious and spiritual girl in tearing aside thecompromises of our hesitating timidity and plunging into theice-cold waters of passions so keen and translunar as to have becomechaste. It may be so--and, on the other hand, it may be that the oldsly earth-gods will hold their indelible sway over us until the"baseless fabric" of this vision leaves "not a rack behind"! In anycase, for our present purpose, the reading of Emily Brontëstrengthens us in our recognition that the only wisdom of lifeconsists in leaving all the doors of the universe open. 

Cursed be they who close any doors! Let that be our literary as it isour philosophical motto. 

Little have we gained from books, little from our passionatefollowing in the steps of the great masters, if, after all, we onlyreturn once more to the narrow prejudices of our obstinate personalconvictions. 

From ourselves we cannot escape; but we can, unfortunately, hideourselves from ourselves. We can hide ourselves "full-fathom-five"under our convictions and our principles. We can hide ourselvesunder our theories and our philosophies. It is only now and again, when, by some sudden devastating flash, some terrific burst of thethunder of the great gods, the real lineaments of what we are showup clearly for a moment in the dark mirror of our shakenconsciousness. 

It is well not to let the memory of those moments pass altogetheraway. 

The reading of the great authors will have been a mere epicureanpastime if it has not made us recognise that what is important in ourlife is something that belongs more closely to us than any opinionwe have inherited or any theory we have gained or any principle wehave struggled for. 

It will have been wasted if it has not made us recognise that in themoments when these outward things fall away, and the true self, beyond the power of these outward things, looks forth defiantly, tenderly, pitifully upon this huge strange world, there are intimationsand whispers of something beyond all that the philosophers haveever dreamed, hidden in the reservoirs of being and ready to touchus with their breath. 

Our reading of these noble writings will have been no more than agracious entertainment if we have not come to see that the enormousdifferences of their verdicts prove conclusively that no one theory, no one principle, can cover the tremendous field. But such readingwill have had but a poor effect if because of this radical oppositionin the voices reaching us we give up our interest in the great quest. 

For it is upon our retaining our interest that the birthright of ourhumanity depends. 

We shall never find what we seek; that is certain enough. We shouldbe gods, not men, if we found it. But we should be less than men, and beasts--if we gave up the interest of the search, the tremulousvibrating interest, which, like little waves of ether, hovers over thecross-roads where all the great ways part. 

Something outside ourselves drives us on to seek it--this evasivesolution of a riddle that seems eternal--and when, weary with theeffort of refusing this or the other premature solution, weary withthe effort of suspending our judgment and standing erect at thatparting of the ways, we long in our hearts to drift at leisure downone of the many soothing streams, it is only the knowledge that it isnot our intrinsic inmost self that so collapses and yields up the highprerogative of doubt, but some lesser self in us, some tiredsuperficial self, which keeps us back from that betrayal. 

The courage with which Emily Brontë faced life, the equanimitywith which she faced death, were in her case closely associated withthe quiet desolate landscape which surrounded her. 

As my American poet says, it is only in the country that we can lookupon these fatal necessities and see them as they are. To be born andto die fall into their place when we are living where the smell of theearth can reach us. 

There will always be a difference between those who come from thecountry and those who come from the town; and if a time everarrives when the cities of men so cover the earth that there will beroom no longer for any country-bred persons in our midst, something will in that hour pass away forever from art and literature, and, I suspect, from philosophy too. 

For you cannot acquire this quality by any pleasant trips throughpicturesque scenery. It is either in you or it is not in you. You eitherhave the slow, tenacious, humorous, patient, imaginative instincts ofthe country-born; or you have the smart, quick, clever, witty, fanciful, lively, receptive, caustic turn of mind of those bred in thegreat cities. 

We all come to the town, "some in rags and some in jags and somein velvet gowns"; but the country-born always recognises thecountry-born, and there is a natural affinity between them. 

I suspect that those who have behind them no local, provincialtraditions will find it difficult to understand Emily Brontë. 

She did not deal in elaborate description; but the earth-mould smellssweet, and the roots of the reeds of the pond-rushes show waveringand dim in the dark water, and "through the hawthorn blows the coldwind, " and the white moon drifts over the sombre furze-coveredhills; and all these things have passed into her style and have formedher style, and all these things are behind the tenacity with which sheendures life, and behind the immense mysterious hope with which, while regarding all human creeds as "unutterably vain, " she fallsback so fiercely upon that "amor intellectualis Dei" which is theburning fire in her own soul. 

 --"Thou, thou art being and breath; And what thou art can never be destroyed!"

JOSEPH CONRAD

The inherent genius of a writer is usually a deeper and moreingrained thing than the obvious qualities for which the worldcommends him, and this is true in a very profound sense in Conrad'scase. 

We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say that hehas possessed himself of the secret of the sea more completely thanany who write in English except Shakespeare and Swinburne. 

We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say he hassounded the ambiguous stops of that mysterious instrument, theheart of the white man exiled from his kind in the darkness oftropical solitudes. 

These things are of immense interest, but the essence of Conrad'sgenius lies behind and beyond them; lies, in fact, if I am notmistaken, in a region where he has hardly a single rival. 

This region is nothing more nor less than that strange margin of ourminds, where memories gather which are deeper than memories, andwhere emotions float by and waver and hover and alight, like wildmarsh-birds upon desolate sea-banks. 

Conrad's genius, like the genius of all great writers who appeal towhat is common and universal in us, to what unites the clever andthe simple, the experienced and the inexperienced, is revealed insomething much less accidental and arbitrary than the selection ofany striking background, however significant, of ocean-mystery orjungle solitude. 

The margin of the mind! Margin, mid-way between the known andthe unknown! Do not the obscure images, called up by the feelingssuch words suggest, indicate far more intimately than anydescription of tropical rivers or Malay seas, the sort of spiritualatmosphere in which he darkly gives us many strange clues?

I seem to see this shadowy borderland, lying on the extreme "bankand shoal" of our human consciousness, as a place like that acrosswhich Childe Roland moved when he came to the "dark tower. "

I seem to visualise it as a sort of dim marshland, full of waving reedsand deep black pools. I seem to see it as a place where patches ofdead grass whistle in a melancholy wind, and where half-buriedtrunks of rain-soaked trees lift distorted and menacing arms. 

Others may image it in a different way, perhaps with happiersymbols; but the region I have in my mind, crossed by the obscureshapes of dimly beckoning memories, is common to us all. 

You can, if you like, call this region of faint rumours and mistyintimations the proper sphere and true hunting-ground of the newpsychology. As a matter of fact, psychologists rarely approach itwith any clairvoyant intelligence. And the reason of that is, it ismuch further removed from the material reactions of the nerves andthe senses than the favourite soil of these people's explorations. 

So thin and shadowy indeed is the link between the vague feelingswhich flit to and fro in this region and any actual sensual impression, that it almost seems as though this subconscious borderland were incontact with some animistic inner world--not exactly a supernaturalworld, but a world removed several stages back from the materialone wherein our nerves and our senses function; a world wherein wemight be permitted to fancy the platonic archetypes dwelling, archetypes of all material forms; or, if you will, the inherent "souls"of such forms, living their own strange inner life upon a plane ofexistence beyond our rational apprehension. 

It is certain that there are many moments in the most naive people'sexperience when, as they walk in solitude along some commonhighway, the shape of a certain tree or the look of a certain hovel, orthe indescribable melancholy of a certain road-side pool, or the waythe light happens to fall upon a heap of dead leaves, or the particularmanner in which some knotted and twisted root protrudes itself fromthe bank, awakes quite suddenly, in this margin of the mind ofwhich I speak, the strangest and subtlest feelings. 

It is as though something in the material thing before us--someinexplicable "soul" of the inanimate--rushed forth to meet our soul, as if it had been _waiting_ for us for long, long years. 

I am moving, in this matter of the essential secret of Conrad, through a vague and obscure twilight. It is not easy to express thesethings; but what I have in my thoughts is certainly no mere fancy ofmystical idealism, but a quite definite and actual experience, orseries of experiences, in the "great valley" of the mind. 

When Almayer, for instance, stares hopelessly and blankly at afloating log in his gloomy river; when the honest fellow in "Chance"who is relating the story watches the mud of the road outside thehotel where Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral are making theirdesperate arrangements; you get the sort of subconscious"expectancy" which is part of this strange phenomenon, and thatcurious sudden thrill, "I have been here before! I have seen andheard all this before!" which gives to so many scenes in Conrad thatundertone of unfathomable mystery which is so true an aspect of life. 

So often are we conscious of it as we read him! We are conscious ofit--to give another instance--when Heyst and Lena are talkingtogether in the loneliness of their island of escape, before the unseenenemies descend on them. 

The same insight in him and the same extraordinary power ofmaking words malleable to his purpose in dealing with these hiddenthings may be remarked in all those scenes in his books where menand women are drawn together by love. 

Conrad takes no interest in social problems. His interest is onlystirred by what is permanent and undying in the relations betweenmen and women. These extraordinary scenes, where Gould and hiswife, where Antonia Avellanos and her friend, where Willem andAissa, where Nina and her Malay chief, where Flora and Anthony, Heyst and Lena, and many other lovers, meet and peer into thesecret depths of one another's beings, are all scenes possessing thatuniversal human element which no change or reform or revolutionor improvement can touch or alter. 

Without any theory about their "emancipation, " Conrad hasachieved for women, in these stories of his, an extraordinarytriumph. Well does he name his latest book "Victory. " The victoryof women over force, over cunning, over stupidity, over brutality, isone of the main threads running through all his work. 

And what women they are! I do not recall any that resemble them inall literature. 

Less passionate than the women of Dostoievsky, less sentimentalthan the women of Balzac, less sensual than the women of deMaupassant, Conrad's women have a quality entirely their own, aquality which holds us spell-bound. It is much easier to feel thisquality than to describe it. Something of the same element--and it isa thing the positivity of which we have to search out among manycrafty negations--may be discerned in some of the women ofShakespeare and, in a lesser degree, in one or two of the young girlsin the stories of Turgenief. 

I think the secret of it is to be looked for in the amazing poise andself-possession of these women; a self-possession which is indicatedin their moments of withdrawn and reserved silence. 

They seem at these times to sink down into the very depths of theirfemininity, into the depths of some strange sex-secret of which theyare themselves only dreamily conscious. 

They seem to withdraw themselves from their own love, from theirown drama, from their own personality, and to lie back upon life, upon the universal mystery of life and womanhood. This they dowithout, it might seem, knowing what they are doing. 

They all, in these strange world-deep silences of theirs, carry upontheir intent and sibylline faces something of that mysterious charm--expectant, consecrated, and holy--which the early painters havecaught the shadow of in their pictures of the Annunciation. 

There is something about them which makes us vaguely dream ofthe far-distant youth of the world; something that recalls thesymbolic and poetic figures of Biblical and Mythological legend. 

They tease and baffle us with the mystery of their emotions, with themagical and evasive depths of the feminine secret in them. Theymake us think of Rebecca at the well and Ruth in the corn-field; ofAndromache on the walls of Troy and of Calypso, Brunhilda, Gwenevere, Iphigeneia, Medea, Salome, Lilith. 

And all this is achieved by the most subtle and yet by the mostsimple means. It is brought about partly by an art of descriptionwhich is unique among English novelists, an art of descriptionwhich by a few fastidious and delicate touches can make the bodilyappearance indicative of the hidden soul; and partly by the cunninginsertion of long, treacherous, pregnant silences which reveal insome occult indirect manner the very integral quality of the soul thusbetrayed. 

The more voluble women of other novelists seem, even while theyare expressing their most violent emotions, rather to blur andconfuse the mysterious depths of their sex-life than to reveal it. Conrad's women, in a few broken words, in a stammered sentence, in a significant silence, have the power of revealing something morethan the tragic emotion of one person. They have the power ofrevealing what might be called the subliminal sex-consciousness ofthe race itself. They have the power of merging the individuality ofthe particular speaker into something deeper and larger and wider, into something universal. 

Reserve is the grand device by means of which this subconsciouselement is made evident, is hinted at and glimpsed so magically. When everything is expressed, nothing is expressed. A look, agesture, a sigh, a whisper, in Conrad, is more significant of theocean-deep mysteries of the soul than pages of eloquent psychology. 

The deepest psychology--that is what one comes at last to feel--canonly be expressed indirectly and by means of movements, pictures, symbols, signs. It can be revealed in words; but the words revealingit must ostensibly be concerned with something else. 

For it is with the deepest things in human life as with the deepestthings in nature; their way must be prepared for them, the mind mustbe alert to receive them, but they must not be snatched at in anydirect attack. They will come; suddenly, sharply, crushingly, orsoftly as feathers on the wind; but they will only come if we turnaway our faces. They will only come if we treat them with thereverence with which the ancients treated the mysterious fates, calling them "The Eumenides"; or the ultimate secret of the universe, calling it Demogorgon; with the reverence which wears the mask ofsuperstition. 

The reason why Conrad holds us all--old and young, subtle andsimple--with so irresistible a spell, is because he has a clairvoyantintuition for the things which make up the hidden substratum of allour human days--the things which cause us those moments of sharpsweet happiness which come and go on sudden mysterious wings. 

His style is a rare achievement; and it is so because he treats thelanguage he uses with such scrupulous and austere reverence. 

The mere fact that English was a foreign tongue to him seems tohave intensified this quality; as though the hardness and steepness ofits challenge forced the latent scholarship in him to stiffen its fibresto encounter it. 

When he writes of ships he does not tease us with the pedantry oftechnical terms. He undertakes the much more human and the muchmore difficult task of conveying to us the thousand and one vagueand delicate associations which bind the souls of seafarers to thevessels that carry them. 

His fine imaginative mind--loving with a large receptive wisdom allthe quaint idiosyncrasy of lonely and reserved people--naturallyturns with a certain scornful contempt from modern steamships. That bastard romance, full of vulgar acclamation over mechanicalachievements, which makes so much of the mere size and speed of atrans-Atlantic liner, is waved aside contemptuously by Conrad. 

Like all great imaginative spirits, he realizes that for any inanimateobject to wear the rich magic of the deep poetic things, it isnecessary for it to have existed in the world long enough to havebecome intimately associated with the hopes and fears, the fanciesand terrors, of many generations. 

It is simply and solely their newness to human experience whichmakes it impossible for any of these modern inventions, howeverstriking and sensational, to affect our imagination with the sense ofintrinsic beauty in the way a sailing-ship does. 

And it is not only--as one soon comes to feel in reading Conrad--thatthese old-fashioned ships, with their legendary associations carryingone back over the centuries, are beautiful in themselves. Theydiffuse the beauty of their identity through every detail of the livesof those who are connected with them. They bring the mystery andterror of the sea into every harbour where they anchor and into everyport. 

No great modern landing-stage for huge liners, from which thefeverish crowds of fashionable tourists or bewildered immigrantsdisembark, can compare in poetic and imaginative suggestiveness, with any ramshackle dock, east or west, where brigs and schoonersand trawlers put in; and real sailors--sailors who _sail_ theirships--enter the little smoky taverns or drift homeward down the narrowstreets. 

The shallow, popular, journalistic writers whose vulgar superficialminds are impressed by the mere portentousness of machinery, areonly making once more the old familiar blunder of mistaking sizefor dignity, and brutal energy for noble strength. 

Conrad has done well in his treatment of ships and sailors to reducethese startling modern inventions to their proper place of emotionalinsignificance compared with the true seafaring tradition. What onethinks of when any allusion is made to a ship in Conrad's works isalways a sailing-ship, a merchant ship, a ship about which from thevery beginning there is something human, mellow, rich, traditional, idiosyncratic, characteristic, full of imaginative wistfulness and withan integral soul. 

One always feels that a ship in Conrad has a _figure-head;_ and is itpossible to imagine a White Star liner, or a North German Lloydsteamer, with such an honourable and beautiful adornment? Linersare things entirely without souls. One only knows them apart bytheir paint, their tonnage, or the name of the particular set offinanciers who monopolise them. 

"Floating hotels" is the proud and inspiring term with which theawed journalistic mind contemplates these wonders. 

Well! In Conrad's books we are not teased with "floating hotels. " Ifa certain type of machine-loving person derives satisfaction fromthinking how wonderfully these monsters have conquered the sea, let it be remembered that the sea has its _poetic_ revenge upon themby absolutely concealing from those who travel in this way the realmagic of its secret. 

No one knows the sea--that, at any rate, Conrad makes quiteclear--who has not voyaged over its waves in a sailing vessel. 

Of the books which Mr. Conrad has so far written--one hopes thatfor many years each new Spring will bring a new work from hispen--my own favourites are "Chance" and "Lord Jim, " and, afterthose two, "Victory. "

I think the figure of Flora de Barral in "Chance" is one of the mostarresting figures in all fiction. I cannot get that girl out of my mind. Her pale flesh, her peculiarly dark-tinted blue eyes, her white cheeksand scarlet mouth; above all, her broken pride, her deep humiliation, her shadowy and abysmal reserve--haunt me like a figure seen andloved in some previous incarnation. 

I like to fancy that in the case of Flora, as in the case of Antonia andNina and Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, bymeans of an art far subtler than appears on the surface, a strangerevival, in the case of every person who reads the book, of theintangible memories of the sweetness and mystery of such a person'sfirst love. 

I believe half the secret of this wonderful art of his, by which we arethus reminded of our first love, is the absolute elimination of the_sensual_ from these evasive portraits. And not only of the sensual;of the sentimental as well. In the average popular books about lovewe have nowadays a sickening revel of sentimentality. Then again, as opposed to this vulgar sentimentality, with its false idealisation ofwomen, we have the realistic sensuality of the younger clevererwriters playing upon every kind of neurotic obsession. I think thegreatness of Conrad is to be found in the fact that he refuses tosacrifice the mysterious truth of passion either to sentiment or tosensuality. He keeps this great clear well of natural human feelingfree from both these turbid and morbid streams. 

A very curious psychological blunder made by many of our youngerwriters is the attributing to women of the particular kind of sexemotion which belongs essentially to men, an emotion penetrated bylust and darkened by feverish restlessness. From this blunder Conradis most strangely free. His women love like women, not like viciousboys with the faces of women. They love like women and they hatelike women; and they are most especially and most entirelywomanlike in the extreme difficulty they evidently alwaysexperience in the defining with any clearness--even to themselves--of their own emotions. 

It is just this mysterious inability to define their own emotions whichrenders women at once so annoying and so attractive; and the merepresence of something in them which refuses definition is a proofthat they are beyond both sentiment and sensuality. For sentimentand sensuality lend themselves very willingly to the most exact andlogical analysis. Sensualists love nothing better than the epicureanpleasure of dissecting their own emotions as soon as they are onceassured of a discreet and sympathetic listener. The same is doublytrue of sentimentalists. The women of Conrad--like the women ofShakespeare--while they may be garrulous enough and witty enoughon other matters, grow tongue-tied and dumb when their greatemotions call for overt expression. 

It seems to me quite a natural thing that the writer who, of all others, has caught the mystery of ships should be the writer who, of allmoderns, has caught the mystery of women. Women are very likeships: ships sailing over waters of whose depths they themselvesknow nothing; ships upon whose masts strange wild birds--thoughtswandering from island to island of remote enchantment--settle for amoment and then fly off forever; ships that can ride the maddest andmost tragical storms in safety; ships that some hidden rock, unmarked on any earthly chart, may sink to the bottom withoutwarning and without mercy!

Conrad reveals to us the significant fact that what the deepest loveof women suffers from--the kind of storm which shakes it andtroubles it--is not sensuality of any sort but a species of blind andfatal fury, hardly conscious of any definite cause, but directeddesperately and passionately against the very object of this loveitself. Conrad seems to indicate, if I read him correctly, that this mad, wild, desperate fury with which women hurl themselves againstwhat they love best in a blind desire to hurt it, is nothing less than asavage protest against that deep and inviolable gulf which isolatesevery human being from every other human being. 

Such a gulf men--in a measure--pass, or dream they pass, on theswift torrent of animal desire; but women are more clairvoyant inthese things, and their love being more diffused, and, in a sense, more spiritual, is not so easily satisfied by mere physical possession. 

They want to possess more. They want to possess body, soul andspirit. They want to share every thought of their beloved, everyinstinct, every wish, every ambition, every vision, every remotestdream. 

That they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound lawof nature excites their savage fury, and they blindly wreak theiranger upon the innocent cause of their bewildered un-happiness. 

It is their maternal instinct which thus desires to take complete andabsolute possession of the object of their love. The maternal instinctis always--as Conrad makes quite clear--at the bottom of thelove-passion in the most normal types of women; and the maternalinstinct is driven on by a mad relentless force to seek to destroyevery vestige of separate independence, bodily, mental or spiritual, in the person it pursues. 

Conrad shows with extraordinary subtlety how this basic craving inwomen, resulting in this irrational and, apparently, inexplicableanger, is invariably driven to cover its tracks by every kind ofcunning subterfuge. 

This loving anger of women will blaze up into flame at a thousandquite trivial causes. It may take the form of jealousy; but it is inreality much deeper than jealousy. It may take the form of protestagainst man's stupidity, man's greed, man's vanity, man's lust, man'sthick-skinned selfishness; but it is in reality a protest against the lawof nature which makes it impossible for a woman to share thisstupidity, this vanity, this lust, this greed, and which holds her socruelly confined to a selfishness which is her own and quite differentfrom the selfishness of man. 

One would only have to carry the psychological imagination ofConrad a very little further to recognise the fact that while man isinherently and completely satisfied with the difference between manand woman; satisfied with it and deriving his most thrilling pleasurefrom it; woman is always feverishly and frantically endeavouring toovercome and overreach this difference, endeavouring, in fact, tofeel her way into every nerve and fibre of man's sensibility, so thathe shall have nothing left that is a secret from her. That he shouldhave any such secrets--that such secrets should be an inalienable andinevitable part of his essential difference from herself--excites in herunmitigated fury; and this is the hidden cause of those mysteriousoutbursts of apparently quite irrational anger which have fallen uponall lovers of women since the beginning of the world. 

Man wishes woman to remain different from himself. It interestshim that she should be different. He loves her for being different. His sensuality and his sentiment feed upon this difference anddelight to accentuate it. Women seem in some subtle way to resentthe division of the race into two sexes and to be alwaysendeavouring to get rid of this division by possessing themselves ofevery thought and feeling and mood and gesture of the man theylove. And when confronted by the impassable gulf, which love itselfis incapable of bridging, a blind mad anger, like the anger of acreative deity balked of his purpose, possesses them body and soul. 

Mr. Wilson Follet in his superb brochure upon Conrad, written in amanner so profoundly influenced by Henry James that as one readsit one feels that Henry James himself, writing upon Conrad, couldnot possibly have done better, lays great stress upon Conrad'scomplicated and elaborate manner of building up his stories. 

Mr. Follet points out, for instance, how in "Chance" we have onelayer of personal receptivity after another; each one, as in a sort ofrich palimpsest of overlaid impressions, making the material underour hands thicker, fuller, more significant, more symbolic, moreunderscored and overscored with interesting personal values. 

This is perfectly true, and it is a fine arresting method and worthy ofall attention. 

But for myself I am not in the least ashamed to say that I prefer theart of Conrad at those moments when the narrative becomes quitedirect and when there is no waylaying medium, however interesting, between our magnetised minds and the clear straightforward story. 

I like his manner best, and I do not scruple to admit it, when hisAlmayers and Ninas, his Anthonys and Floras, his Heysts and Lenas, are brought face to face in clear uncomplicated visualisation. I thinkhe is always at his best when two passionate and troublednatures--not necessarily those of a man and woman; sometimes those of aman and man, like Lingard and Willem--are brought together indirect and tragic conflict. At such moments as these we get that trueauthentic thrill of immemorial romance--romance as old as the firststories ever told or sung--of the encounter of protagonist andantagonist; and from the hidden depths of life rise up, clear andterrible and strong, the austere voices of the adamantine fates. 

But though he is at his greatest in these direct uncomplicatedpassionate scenes, I am quite at one with Mr. Wilson Follet intreasuring up as of incalculable value in the final effect of his art allthose elaborate by-issues and thickly woven implications which giveto the main threads of his dramas so rich, so suggestive, so mellow abackground. 

Except for a few insignificant passages when that sly old marinerMarlowe, of whom Conrad seems perhaps unduly fond, lights hispipe and passes the beer and utters breezy and bracing sentiments, Ican enjoy with unmitigated delight all the convolutions andoverlappings of his inverted method of narration--of those rambling"advances, " as Mr. Follet calls them, to already consummated"conclusions. " In the few occasional passages where Marloweassumes a moralising tone and becomes bracing and strenuous Ifancy I detect the influence of certain muscular, healthy-minded, worthy men, among our modern writers, who I daresay appeal to theSlavonic soul of this great Pole as something quite wonderfully andpathetically English. 

With these exceptions I am unwavering in my adherence to hiscurious and intricate method. I love the way he pours his mainnarrative, like so much fruity port-wine, first through the sieve ofone quaint person's mind and then of another; each one adding somenew flavour, some new vein of body or bouquet or taste, to theoriginal stream, until it becomes thick with all the juices of all theliving fermentations in the world. 

I think the pleasure I derive from Conrad is largely due to the factthat while he liberates us with a magnificent jerk from the tiresomemonotonous sedentary life of ordinary civilised people, he does sowithout assuming that banal and bullying air of the adventurousswashbuckler, which is so exhausting; without letting his intellectualinterests be swamped by these physiological violences and by thesewanderings into savage regions. 

Most of our English writers, so it appears to me, who leave the quiethaunts of unadventurous people and set off for remote continents, leave behind them, when they embark, all the fineness and subtletyof their intelligence, and become drastic and crude and journalisticand vulgar. They pile up local colour till your brain reels, and theyassume a sort of man-of-the-wide-world "knowingness" which isextremely unpleasant. 

Conrad may follow his tropical rivers into the dim dark heart of hisMalay jungles, but he never forgets to carry with him hissensitiveness, his metaphysical subtlety, his delicate and elaborateart. 

What gives one such extraordinary pleasure in his books is the factthat while he is writing of frontier-explorers and backwoods-peddlers, of ivory-traffickers and marooned seafarers, he never forgets thathe is a philosopher and a psychologist. 

This is the kind of writer one has been secretly craving for, for yearsand years; a writer who can liberate us from the outworn restrictionsof civilised life, a writer who can initiate us into all the magicalmysteries of dark continents and secret southern islands, withoutteasing us with the harsh sterilities of a brain devoid of all finerfeelings. 

This is the sort of writer one hardly dared to hope could ever appear;a writer capable of describing sheer physical beauty and savageelemental strength while remaining a subtle European philosopher. Isuppose it would be impossible for a writer of English blood toattain such a distinction--to be as crafty as a Henry James, movingon velvety feline paws through the drawing-rooms of London andthe gardens of Paris; and yet to be leading us through the shadows ofprimordial forests, cheek by jowl with monstrous idolatries andheathen passions. 

But what renders the work of Conrad so extraordinarily rich inhuman value is not only that he can remain a philosopher in thedeserted outposts of South-Pacific Islands, but that he can remain atender and mellow lover of the innumerable little things, little straymemories and associations, which bind every wanderer from Europe, however far he may voyage, to the familiar places he has left behindin the land of his birth. 

Here he is a true Slav, a true continental European. Here he is ratherRussian--or French, shall I say--than an adopted child of Britain; forthe colonising instinct of the British race renders its sentimentaldevotion to the country of its engendering less burdened with thepassionate intimate sorrows of the exile than the nostalgia of theother races. 

Conrad has indeed to a very high degree that tender imaginativefeeling for the little casual associations of a person's birthplace intown or country, which seems to be a peculiar inheritance of theSlavonic and Latin races, and which for all their sentimental playwith the word "home" is not really natural to the tougher-mindedEnglishman or Scotchman. 

One is conscious, all the while one reads of these luckless wanderersin forlorn places, of the very smell of the lanes and the very look ofthe fields and the actual sounds and stir of the quaint narrow streetsand the warm interiors of little friendly taverns by wharfside and byharbour-mouth, of the far-off European homes where these peoplewere born. 

No modern English writer, except the great, the unequalled Mr. Hardy, has the power which Conrad has, of conveying to the mindthat close indescribable intimacy between humanity's passions andthe little inanimate things which have surrounded us from childhood. 

Conrad can convey this "home-feeling, " this warm secure turning ofthe human animal to the lair which it has made for itself, even intothe heart of the tempestuous ocean. He can give us that curioushalf-psychic and half-physical thrill of being in mellow harmony withour material surroundings, even in the little cabin of someweather-battered captain of a storm-tossed merchant-ship; and not asailor, in his books, and not a single ship in which his sailors voyage, but has a sort of dim background of long rests from toil in ancientharbourback-waters where the cobblestones on the wharf-edge are thickwith weeds and moss, and where the November rain beats mistilyand greyly, as in Russia and in England, upon the tiled roofs and thelamplit streets. 

It is nothing less than just this human imagination in him, broodingso carefully over the intimate and sacred relations between our frailmortality and its material surroundings, that makes it possible forhim to treat with such delicate reverence the ways and customs, theusages and legendary pieties, of the various half-savage tribesamong whom his exiled Europeans wander. 

I am not ashamed to admit that I find the emphasis laid in Conrad'sbooks upon sheer physical violence a little hurtful to my pleasure inreading him. What is the cause of this mania for violence? It surelydetracts from the charm of his writing, and it is difficult to see, fromany psychological point of view, where the artistic necessity of itlies. I do not feel that the thing is an erotic perversion. There is adownright brutality in it which militates against any subtlyvoluptuous explanation. Can it be that he is simply and solelyappealing here to what he is led to believe is the taste of hisAnglo-Saxon readers? No--that, surely, were unworthy of him. That surelymust be considered unthinkable! Is it that, being himself of anabnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces himself bya kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the pricks of aphysiological brutality as the sort of penance a conscientious writerhas to pay; has to pay to the merciless cruelty of truth?

No; that does not seem to me quite to cover the case. It is an obscurematter, and I think, in our search for the true solution, we may easilystumble upon very interesting and deeply hidden aspects, not only ofConrad's temperament, but of the temperament of a great manyartists and scholars. In all artistic work there is so much that goes onin the darkness, so much secret exploitation of the hidden forces ofone's nature, that it is extremely difficult to put one's finger upon thereal cause of any particular flaming outbreak. 

I have observed this sudden and tempestuous "obsession ofviolence" in the moods of certain highly-strung and exquisitelywrought-upon women; and it is possible that the heavy, dull, thick, self-complacent brutality of Nature and average human nature isitself so hurting and rending a thing to the poignant susceptibilitiesof a noble spirit, that, out of a kind of desperate revenge upon it, itgoes to the extreme limit itself and, so to speak, out-TamberlainesTamberlaine in bloody massacre. 

What, however, really arrests and holds us in Conrad is not themelodramatic violence of these tempestuous scenes, but the remotepsychological impulses at work behind them. 

Where, in my opinion, he is supremely great, apart from hisworld-deep revelations of direct human feeling, is in his imaginativefusion of some particular spiritual or material motif through the wholefabric of a story. 

Thus the desolate "hope against hope" of poor Almayer becomes athing of almost bodily presence in that book; a thing built up, fragment by fragment, piece by piece, out of the very forlornness ofhis surroundings, out of the débris and litter of his half-ruineddwelling, out of the rotting branches of the dim misty forest, out ofthe stakes and piles of his broken-down wharf, out of the livid mudof his melancholy river. 

Thus the sombre and tragic philosophy of Heyst's father--thatfatalism which is beyond hope and beyond pity--overshadows, like aghastly image of doom seated upon a remote throne in the chilltwilight of some far Ultima Thule, all the events, so curious, soironic, so devastating, which happen to his lethargic and phlegmaticson. It is this imaginative element in his work which, in the finalissue, really and truly counts. For it is a matter of small significancewhether the scene of a writer's choice be the uplands of Wessex orthe jungles of the tropics, as long as that ironic and passionateconsciousness of the astounding drama--of men and women beingthe baffled and broken things they are--rises into unmitigatedrelief and holds us spell-bound. And beyond and above thisovershadowing in his stories of man's fate by some particular burdenof symbolic implication, Conrad flings the passionate flame of hisimagination into the words of every single sentence. 

That is why his style is a thing of such curious attraction. That iswhy it has such sudden surprises for us, such sharp revelations, suchrare undertones. That is why after reading Conrad it is difficult toreturn to the younger English writers of the realistic school. 

One enjoys, in savouring the style of Conrad, a delicious ravishingthrill in the mere look of the words, as we see them so carefully, soscrupulously laid side by side, each with its own burden ofintellectual perfume, like precious vases full of incense on the stepsof a marble altar. To write as delicately, as laboriously, asexquisitely as this, upon the stark, rough, raw materials of murderand suicide and madness and avarice and terror and desperation; towrite as elaborately and richly as this, when dealing with the wildsecrets of drunken sailors and the mad revenges of half-bestialsavages, is great mastery. And it is more than mastery. It is aspiritual triumph. It is a proof that the soul of man, confronting theworst terrors that can come upon it, is still capable of turning allthings into grist for its mill. 

For Conrad, while he finds nothing except meaningless andpurposeless chance in the ways of Nature, is inspired by a splendidtenacity of courage in resisting any desperate betrayal of human joy. 

Like that amazing character in "Lord Jim, " who collects butterfliesand keeps his affections simple and sweet in the presence of tragedyupon tragedy, he seems to indicate to us, in these stark and woefulstories, that since there is no help in heaven or earth for thepersecuted child of man, it is the more necessary that in defiance ofthe elements, in defiance of chance, yea! in defiance of fate itself, man should sink into his own soul and find in the strength of hisown isolated and exiled spirit a courage equal to all that can be laidupon it. Even this would be but a barren comfort if what we foundwhen we sank down thus into ourselves were courage, and courageonly. What one comes to feel from the reading of Conrad is thatthere is nothing in the world which has enduring value--nothing inthe world which gives the mad convoluted hurly-burly any kind ofdignity or beauty--except only love. And love like this, which is theforlorn hope of the race, is as far from lust as it is far from sentimentor indolent pity. It is the "high old Roman virtue. " It is the spirit ofcomradeship defiant still, under the tottering pillars of a shaken earth. 

 "Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all. "

 . . . . . 

 "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, The gods themselves throw incense. "

HENRY JAMES

The greatness of a writer can be estimated by the gap which wouldyawn in our interpretation of life if we conceived for a moment theexpurgation of his whole body of work from our minds. 

And what a hole there would be, what a jagged, bleeding, horriblehole, if the books of Henry James--and it is a continuous satisfactionto a lover of literature to think how many of them there are--wereflung upon oblivion. 

How often as the days of our life drift by, growing constantly morecrowded and difficult, do we find ourselves exclaiming, "OnlyHenry James could describe this! What a situation for HenryJames!"

The man has come to get himself associated more--oh, far more--than any other writer of our day, with the actual stir and pressure ofenvironment in which we habitually move. I say "we. " By this Imean the great mass of educated people in Europe, England andAmerica. Of the "Masses, " as they are called; of the persons bywhose labours our middle-class and upper-class life, with itscomparative leisure and comfort, is made possible, Henry James haslittle to say. 

He never or very rarely deals, as Balzac and de Maupassant andHardy do, with the farmers and farm labourers on the land. He neveror very rarely deals with the slums of our great cities, as did Dickensand Victor Hugo. He confines himself more rigorously than anyother novelist of equal power to the ways and manners andentanglements of people who are "in society, " or who could be insociety if they wanted to, or are on the verge and edge of society. 

When the "lower classes"--I use the convenient term; doubtless inthe eyes of celestial hierarchies the situation is reversed--enter at allinto the circle of Mr. James' consciousness, they enter, either asinteresting anarchists, like young Hyacinth, or as servants. Servants--especially butlers and valets--play a considerable part, and sodo poor relations and impecunious dependents. For these latter of bothsexes the great urbane author has a peculiar and tender consideration. It is not in the least that he is snobbish. Of that personal uneasinessin the presence of worldly greatness so unpleasantly prominent inThackeray there is absolutely nothing. It is only that, conscientiousartist as he is, he is unwilling to risk any sort of aesthetic "faux pas"by adventuring outside his natural sphere, the sphere to which hewas born. Of gentlefolk who are poor and of artists and writers whoare poor there are innumerable types strewn throughout his works. 

It were quite unfair to say that he only writes of the idle rich. Whathe actually does is--as I have said--to write of our upper middleclass life, with its aristocrats at the top and its luckless governessesand tutors and journalists at the bottom; as we, who are in it, know itand feel it and suffer from it, every day of our existence. 

And, curiously enough, this is a very rare achievement. Of coursethere is a horde of second-rate writers, cheap hucksters of glitteringsentimental wares for the half-educated, who write voluminously ofthe life of which I am speaking. There are others, more cultivatedbut endowed with less vivacity, who crowd their pages with gravepersonages from what are called "liberal professions. " But the moreimaginative writers of our day are not to be looked for in thedrawing-rooms of their wives and daughters. 

Mr. Hardy confines himself to the meadows of Blackmoor and thehighways and hedges of Dorset Uplands. Mr. Conrad sails downtropical rivers and among the islands of Southern seas. TheAmerican Mr. Dreiser ploughs his earth-upheaving path through theworkshops of Chicago and the warehouses of Manhattan. 

It is Henry James and Henry James alone, who unravels for us thetangled skein of our actual normal-abnormal life, as the destiniestwist and knot it in the civilised chambers of our natural sojourning. 

The curious thing is that even among our younger and most modernwriters, no one, except John Galsworthy, really deals with the sort oflife that I have in mind when I speak of the European "upperclasses"; and one knows how Mr. Galsworthy's noble and chivalrousinterest in social questions militates against the intellectualdetachment of his curiosity. 

The cleverer authors among our younger school almost invariablyrestrict their scope to what one feels are autobiographical historiesof their own wanderings through the pseudo-Latin quarters ofLondon and Paris. They flood their pages with struggling artists, emancipated seamstresses, demi-mondaine actresses, socialreformers, and all the rag-tag and bob-tail of suburban semi-culture;whereas in some mysterious way--probably by reason of their notpossessing imaginations strong enough to sweep them out of thecircle of their own experiences--the more normal tide of ordinary"upper-class" civilisation passes them untouched. 

It is imagination which is lacking, imagination which, as in the caseof Balzac and Dostoievsky, can carry a writer beyond the sphere ofhis own personal adventures, into the great tides and currents of thehuman comedy, and into the larger air of the permanent life-forces. It is the universal element which one misses in these clever andinteresting books, that universal element which in the work of HenryJames is never absent, however slight and frivolous his immediatesubject or however commonplace and conventional his characters. 

Is it, after all, not they, --these younger philosophical realists--but he, the great urbane humanist, who restricts his scope, narrowing itdown to oft-repeated types and familiar scenes, which, as the worldswings forward, seem to present themselves over and over again asan integral and classic embodiment of the permanent forces of life?It might seem so sometimes; especially when one considers howlittle new or startling "action" there is in Henry James, how fewromantic or outstanding figures there are to arrest us with the shockof sensational surprise. Or is it, when we get to the bottom of thedifference--this difference which separates Henry James from thebulk of our younger novelists--not a matter of subject at all, butpurely a matter of method and mental atmosphere?

May it not, perhaps, turn out that all those younger men arepreoccupied with some purely personal philosophy of life, somedefinite scheme of things--like the pattern idea in "HumanBondage"--to which they are anxious to sacrifice their experiencesand subordinate their imaginations? Are they not all, as a matter offact, interested more deeply in hitting home some originalphilosophical nail, than in letting the vast human tragedy strike themout of a clear sky? But it matters little which way it is. The fact thatconcerns us now is to note that Henry James has still no rival, noranything approaching a rival, in his universal treatment of EuropeanSociety. None, even among our most cynical and disillusionedyounger writers, are able to get as completely rid as he of any "apriori" system or able to envisage, as he did, in passionate colourlesscuriosity, the panorama of human characters drawn out along thecommon road of ordinary civilised life. 

Putting Flaubert aside, Henry James is the only one of the greatmodern novelists to be absolutely free from any philosophicalsystem. Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Hardy, de Maupassant, D'Annunzio--they all have their metaphysical or anti-metaphysicalbias, their gesture of faith or denial. 

Even Flaubert himself makes a kind of philosophic attitude out ofhis loathing for the common-place. Henry James alone confronts theuniverse with only one passion, with only one purpose, with onlyone obsession--the passion and the purpose of satisfying hisinsatiable curiosity upon the procession of human motives and thestream of human psychological reactions, which pass him by in theireternal flux. 

This cold, calm, detached intellectual curiosity, free from any moralalloy, renders him an extraordinary and unique figure; a figure thatwould be almost inhuman, if it were not that the fury of his researchis softened and mitigated by a deep and tender pity for every sortand condition of frail human creature subjected to his unweariedscrutiny. 

This is one of the basic contradictions of Mr. James' fascinatingpersonality, that he is able to retain the clear and Olympiandetachment of his purely aesthetic curiosity and yet to betray atenderness--why should one not say, in the best meaning of thatexcellent word, a goodness of heart?--in his relations with hischaracters, and with us, his unknown readers, who so easily mightbe his characters. 

It is one of the profoundest secrets of art itself, this contradiction, and it reveals the fact that however carefully a great spirit maydivest itself of philosophy and system there is a residuum ofpersonal character left behind--of personal predilection andtaste--which all the artistic objectivity in the world cannot overcome. 

I am myself inclined to think that it is this very tenderness andfriendliness in Henry James, this natural amiability of dispositionwhich all his detachment and curiosity cannot kill, that makes himso much more attractive a figure than the sombre Flaubert whosepassion for literary objectivism is touched by no such charm. 

It is a matter of great interest to watch the little tricks and devices ofa genius of this kind preparing the ground, as one might put it, forthe peculiar harvest of impressions. 

What Henry James aims at is a clear field for the psychologicalemotions of people who have, so to speak, time and leisure toindulge themselves in all the secondary reactions and subtleramifications of their peculiar feelings. 

The crude and intrusive details of any business or profession, theenergy-absorbing toil of manual or otherwise exhausting labour, prevent, quite naturally, any constant preoccupation with one'semotional experiences. A Maxim Gorky or a Thomas Hardy willturn the technical labours of his emotionally-stricken people intotragic accomplices of the human drama, making field or factory, asit may happen, dumb but significant participators in the fatal issue. But in their case, and in the case of so many other powerful modernwriters, the emotions required are simple and direct, such asharmonise well with the work of men's hands and the old eternalstruggle with the elements. 

It may be said, and with a great deal of plausibility, that this naturaland simple toil adds a dignity and a grandeur to human emotionswhich must necessarily vanish with the vanishing of its heavyburdens. It may be said that the mere existence of an upper classmore or less liberated from such labours and permitted the leisure tomake so much of its passing sensations, is itself a grievousindictment of our present system. This also is a contention full ofconvincing force. 

Oscar Wilde himself--the most sophisticated of hedonists--declaresin his "Soul of Man" that the inequality of the present system, whenone considers aesthetic values alone, is as injurious to the rich as itis pernicious to the poor. Almost every one of the great modernwriters, not excluding even the courtly Turgenief, utters bitter andeloquent protests against the injustice of this difference. 

Nietzsche alone maintains the necessity of a slave caste in order thatthe masters of civilisation may live largely, freely, nobly, as did theancient aristocracies of the classic ages, without contact with theburden and tediousness of labour. And in this--in his habitual andarbitrary neglect of the toiling masses--Henry James is more inharmony with the Nietzschean doctrine than any other great novelistof our age. He is indeed, the only one--except perhaps Paul Bourget, and Bourget cannot in any sense be regarded as his intellectualequal--who relentlessly and unscrupulously rules out of his workevery aspect of "the spirit of the revolution. "

There is something almost terrifying and inhuman about thisimperturbable stolidity of indifference to the sufferings andaspirations of the many too many. One could imagine anyintellectual proletarian rising up from his perusal of thesevoluminous books with a howl of indignation against their urbaneand incorrigible author. 

I do not blush to confess that I have myself sometimes shared thisrighteous astonishment. Is it possible that the aloofness of thistenderhearted man from the burden of his age, is due to hisAmerican antecedents?

Rich people in America are far less responsible in their attitudetowards the working classes, and far less troubled by pricks ofconscience than in older countries, where some remote traces of thefeudal system still do something towards bridging the gulf betweenclass and class. 

One must remember too that, after all, Henry James is a great_déraciné, _ a passionate pilgrim from the new world makingamorous advances toward the old. It is always difficult, in a countrywhich is not one's own, to feel the sting of conscience with regard tosocial injustices as sharply as one feels it at home. Travelling inEgypt or Morocco, one seems to take it carelessly for granted thatthere should be scenes of miserable poverty sprinkled around thepicturesque objects of our aesthetic tour. 

Well! England and France and Italy are to Henry James like Egyptand Morocco; and as long as he finds us picturesquely andcharmingly ourselves; set that is, in our proper setting, and with thepicturesque background of local colour behind us--he naturally doesnot feel it incumbent upon him to worry himself very greatly overour social inequalities. 

But there is probably more in it than that. These things--the presenceor the absence of the revolutionary conscience--are matters, whenone gets to the bottom of it, of individual temperament, and James, the kindest and most charitable of men in his personal life, wassimply untouched by that particular spark of "saeva indignatio. "

It was not out of stupidity or any lack of sensitiveness that he let italone. Perhaps--who can tell?--he, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, overcame "the temptation of pity, " and deliberately turned asidefrom the "ugliest man's" cries. 

One feels in one's more ardent moments, when the wish to smite thisaccursed economic system some shattering blow becomes red-hot, alittle chilled, it must be confessed, when one recalls that immensebrow, heavy with brooding intellect, and those dreamy, full-orbedShakespearian eyes. Was the man, one is tempted to wonder then, too great, too lonely, too wise, to believe in any beautiful desperatechange in the tragic "pathos of distance" between man and man?Was indeed the whole mortal business of human life a sort of grandtour of "Egypt and Morocco" to him; a mere long-drawn-out searchafter aesthetic sensations and a patient satisfying of Olympiancuriosity?

No novelist that has ever lived "shows his hand" so little, in thesense of coming before the foot-lights and making gestures to thecrowd; but in a deeper implication, none shows it more constantly. 

To have a style so marked and sealed, so stamped and dyed for one'sown in the integral way James has it, a style so personal and uniquethat its peculiar flavour rises from every single sentence on the page, is indeed, in a deep sense, to betray one's hidden soul to the world. 

This, at any rate, is the only kind of betrayal that we--the generalpublic--are permitted to surprise him in; unless one counts as apersonal revelation the grave portentous solemnity of his technicalprefaces. Like that amiable girl in Wilhelm Meister who, whenasked whether she had ever loved, replied "Never--or always!"Henry James may be said to have never "coined his soul" or alwaysto have coined it. 

This style of his--so dyed and ingrained with personality--becomesin his later books, a stumbling-block to many readers; to the readerswho want their "story" and have no wish to be teased and distracted"en route. " Certainly his style thickens and gathers in fuller intensityas well as diffuses itself in wider atmospheric attenuation as his latermanner grows upon him. The thing becomes at once richer and moreevasive. But this implies no violent or sudden change, such as mightexcite suspicion of any arbitrary "tour-de-force. " The characteristicelements are there from the beginning. They are only emphasizedand drawn out to their logical issues by the process of hisdevelopment. 

From the very start he possesses a style which has its own flavour. Itis only that the perfume of it diffuses itself more insidiously, inproportion as its petals, so to speak, warmed by the sun of maturerexperience and subtler imagination, open to the air. 

The result of this natural and organic development is precisely whatone would have anticipated. Lovers of simple story-telling prefer theearlier work with its Daisy Miller, Roderick Hudson, and ThePortrait of a Lady. 

Virtuosos of rare psychological achievements and of strangeaesthetic experiments prefer his very latest writings, including sucha difficult and complicated book as "The Golden Bowl" or the shortstories in "The Finer Grain. "

On the other hand, those among us who are concerned with sheerbeauty of form apart both from exciting subjects and psychologicalcuriosities, hold by the intermediate period--the period extending, letus say, from the beginning of the last five years of the Nineteenth tothe end of the first five years of the Twentieth century. 

As a matter of fact, "The Golden Bowl, " one of his most elaborateand exhaustive masterpieces, was published in November, 1904; and"The Sacred Fount, " perhaps the most difficult as it is certainly oneof the most characteristic of all his stories, appeared very muchearlier. But taking his works as a whole, that epoch--from 1895 to1905--may be regarded as his apogee, as his "Great Noon. "

"The Awkward Age, " for instance, the book of all others for whichinitiated admirers have an insistent devotion, appeared in 1899, while the collection of stories entitled "The Better Sort, " whichincludes that masterpiece of tenderhearted malice "The BeldonaldHolbein, " came out in 1903. 

As I have hinted, the whole question of selecting the period of agreat artist's manner which contains his most significant work islargely a matter of taste; and the thing--as we have seen--iscomplicated by all sorts of overlappings, reversions, anticipations;but if I were myself pressed to suggest a brief list of books, whichmight be found to contain the quintessential qualities both of HenryJames' attitude and his method, I should certainly include "TheTragic Muse, " "The Spoils of Poynton, " "What Maisie Knew, " "TheAmbassadors, " "The Private Life" and "The Soft Side, " whateverelse it were difficult to omit. 

Putting everything he wrote together, and letting thesemany-coloured opals and amethysts of intellectual imagination slidethrough our passionate fingers, I would perhaps select "The GreatGood Place" as the best of all his short stories, and "The TragicMuse" as the best of all his longer ones. 

One sometimes, at unfortunately rare intervals, comes across aperson who has really "collected" Henry James from the verybeginning. Such persons are greatly to be envied. I think perhaps, they are the only bibliophiles for whom I have a tenderness; for theyprove themselves so much more than bibliophiles; they provethemselves wise and prudent anticipators of the verdict of posterity. 

It is impossible to enjoy the reprinted editions, in their tiresomemonotony of luxurious bindings, as delicately as one enjoyed thesefirst flowers of the author's genius, dewy with his authentic blessing. I am myself proud to recall the fact that, before the nineteenthcentury closed, I had secured a whole shelf of these sibyllinevolumes; buying most of them--I can recall the occasion--in onehuge derelict pile from a certain friendly book-shop in Brighton; andleaving the precious parcel, promise of more than royal delights, insome little waiting-room on the sun-bathed Georgian front, while Iwalked the beach like a Grand Vizier who has received a presentfrom the Sultan. 

The only people who are to be more envied than those who havecollected Henry James from the beginning--and these alas! are mostof them grey-headed now--are the people who, possessed of the trueinterior unction, have by some accident of obstructing circumstancebeen debarred from this voluptuous pleasure until late in theirexperience. What ecstasies such persons have in store for them, what "linked sweetness long-drawn out" of sybaritish enjoyment!

But I was speaking of those secret and interesting preparations thatevery great artist makes before he gets to work; those clearings ofhis selected field of operations from the alien and irrelevant growths. 

What Henry James requires before he can set his psychologicalmachinery in motion is uninterrupted leisure for the persons of hisemotional dramas. Leisure first, and after leisure a certain pleasantcongruity of background. 

Henry James is indeed the author "par excellence" of a leisuredupper class who have time to think and feel, and to dwell at largeupon their thoughts and feelings, undisturbed by the spade, theplough, the sword, the counter, the wheels of factories or the roar oftraffic. It is amusing to watch the thousand and one devices bywhich he disentangles his people from the intrusive irrelevancy ofwork. They are either rich themselves--and it cannot be concealedthat money, though not over-emphasised, is never quite eliminatedfrom the field of action--or they are dependent upon rich relativesand friends. 

It is for this reason perhaps that there are so few professional peoplein his books. The absence of lawyers is quite striking; so is theabsence of doctors, --though a charming example of the latterprofession does certainly appear in "The Wings of a Dove" as themedical attendant upon the dying girl in Venice. I cannot at thismoment recall a single clergyman or priest. Is this because thesespiritual guides of our race are too poor or too over-worked to servehis purpose, or do we perhaps, --in this regrettable "lacuna"--stumbleupon one of the little smiling prejudices of our great conformist? Hemust have met some black coats, we are compelled to suppose, inthe drawing-rooms of his country houses. Did he perhaps, like somany of his discreet and cautious young men, "conform" without"committing himself, " in these high places?

If I were asked what types of character--among men I mean--emergeas most characteristic of his interest and as best lending themselvesto his method, I should put my finger upon those patheticmiddle-aged persons, like Mr. Verver in "The Golden Bowl, " or Mr. Longdon in "The Awkward Age, " who, full of riches and sadexperience, have retired completely from active life, only to exercisefrom the depths of their sumptuous houses and secluded gardens, asort of fairy influence upon the fortunes of their younger friends. 

In the second place, I would indicate, as characteristic of this author, those wealthy and amiable young men who, as a general rule fromAmerica, but sometimes from the country-houses of England, wander at large and with genial "artistic" sympathies through thepicturesque cities of Europe, carrying their susceptible hearts andsound moral principles into "pension" and "studio" where they arepermitted to encounter those other favourite "subjects" of thiscosmopolitan author, the wandering poverty-stricken gentlewomanwith her engaging daughters, or the ambiguous adventuress with hershadowy past. The only persons who seem allowed to work at theirtrade in Henry James, are the writers and artists. These labourcontinually and with most interesting results. Indeed no greatnovelist, not even Balzac himself, has written so well about authorsand painters. Paul Bourget attempts it, but there is a certain pedanticair of a craftsman writing about craftsmen, a connoisseur writingabout connoisseurs, in his treatment of such things, which detractsfrom the human interest. Paul Bourget lacks, too, that fine malice, that sly arch humour, which saves Henry James from ever makinghis artists "professional" or his writers prolix. 

But if he describes fellow-labourers thus sympathetically, it mustnot be forgotten that by far the most fascinating "artistic" person inall his books, is that astonishing Gabriel Nash in "The Tragic Muse. "And the rôle of Gabriel Nash is to do nothing at all. To do nothing;but to be perpetually and insidiously enticing others, out of thesphere of all practical duties, responsibilities and undertakings, to renounce everything for art. Anything more charming orcharacteristic than Gabriel Nash's final departure from the scene, itwould be impossible to find. He does not depart. He "goes up"--and"out. " He melts into thin air. He dissolves like an iridescent vapour. He is--and then again, he is not. 

I sometimes seem to see the portentous Henry James himself, withhis soft plump hands, heavy forehead and drooping-lidded eyes, flitting to and fro through the drawing-rooms of our fantasticcivilisation, like some huge feathery-winged moth-owl, murmuring, just as Gabriel Nash used to do, wistful and whimsical protestsagainst all this tiresome "business of life" which distracts peoplefrom psychology and beauty and amiable conversation!

Alas! he too has now "passed away"; vanishing as lightly andswiftly as this other, leaving behind him as the one drastic andspectacular action in a life of pure aesthetic creation, his definiterenunciation of the world of his engendering and his formalreception into the more leisured atmosphere of the traditions of hisadoption. 

That he--of all men the most peaceful--should have taken such a stepin the mid-torrent of the war, is a clinching proof of the value whichhe placed upon the sacred shrines of his passionate pilgrimage. 

When we come to take up the actual threads of his peculiar style, and to examine them one by one, we cannot fail to note certainmarked characteristics, which separate him entirely from otherwriters of our age. 

One of the most interesting of these is his way of handling thoseinnumerable colloquialisms and light "short-cuts" of speech, which--especially in their use by super-refined people--have a grace andcharm quite their own. The literary value of the colloquialisms ofupper-class people has never, except here and there in the plays ofOscar Wilde, been exploited as delightfully and effectively as inHenry James. 

Just as Charles Lamb will make use of Milton or Sir ThomasBrowne or the "Anatomy of Melancholy"; and endow his thefts withan originality all his own, making them seem different in thetransposition, and in some mysterious way richer, so Henry Jameswill take the airy levities of his aristocratic youths and the littleprovocative ejaculations of his well-bred maidens, and out of theseweave a filmy, evasive, delicate essence, light as a gossamer-seedand bitter as coloquintida, which, mingled with his own graver andmellower tones, becomes an absolutely new medium in the historyof human style. 

The interesting thing to observe about all this is that the argot that hemakes use of is not the slang of his own America, far less is it themore fantastic colloquialism of the English Public Schools. It isreally a sort of sublimated and apotheosized "argot, " an "argot" of akind of platonic archetypal drawing-room; such a drawing-room ashas never existed perhaps, but to which all drawing-rooms or salons, if you will, of elegant conversation, perpetually approximate. It isindeed the light and airy speech, eminently natural and spontaneous, but at the same time profoundly sophisticated, of a sort of Utopianaristocracy, that will, in some such delicious hesitations, innuendoesand stammerings, express their "superficiality out of profundity, " inthe gay, subtle, epicurean days which are to come. 

It is only offensive to tiresome realistic people, void of humour asthey are void of imagination, this sweet psychological persiflage. Tosuch persons it may even seem a little ridiculous that _everybody_--from retired American Millionaires down to the quaintest ofHertfordshire old maids--should utter their sentiments in this samemanner. But such objectors are too pig-headed and stupid tounderstand the rudimentary conventions of art, or those felicitous"illusions, " which, as Charles Lamb reminds us in speaking of somesophisticated old English actors, are a kind of pleasant challengefrom the intelligent comedian to his intelligent audience. 

One very delicate and dainty device of Henry James is his trick ofplacing "inverted commas" round even the most harmless ofcolloquialisms. This has a curiously distinguished and refined effect. It seems constantly to say to his readers. --"one knows very well, _we_ know very well, how ridiculous and vulgar all this is; but thereare certain things that cannot be otherwise expressed!" It creates asort of scholarly "rapport"--this use of commas--between thegentility of the author and the assumed gentility of the reader, takingthe latter into a kind of amiable partnership in ironic superiority. 

I say "gentility"--but that is not exactly the word; for there is not theremotest trace of snobbishness in Henry James. It is rather that heindicates to a small inner circle of intellectually detached persons, his recognition of their fastidiousness and their prejudices, and hissly humorous consciousness of the gulf between their classical modeof speech and the casual lapses of ordinary human conversation. 

In spite of all his detachment no novelist diffuses his personaltemperament so completely through his work as Henry James does. In this sense--in the sense of temperamental style--he is far morepersonal than Balzac and incomparably more so than Turgenief. 

One does not, in reading these great authors, savour the actual styleon every page, in every sentence. We have large blank spaces, so tospeak, of straightforward colourless narrative. But there are no"blank spaces" in Henry James. Every sentence is penetrated andheavy with the fragrance of his peculiar grace. One might almostsay--so strong is this subjective element in the great objectiveaesthete--that James writes novels like an essayist, like someepicurean Walter Pater, suddenly grown interested in commonhumanity, and finding in the psychology of ordinary people aprovocation and a stimulus as insidious and suggestive as in thelines and colours of mediaeval art. This _essayist attitude_ accountslargely for those superior "inverted commas" which throw such aclear space of ironic detachment round his characters and his scenes. 

On the other hand, what a man he is for concealing his _opinions!_Who can lay his finger on a single formal announcement of moral orphilosophical partizanship in Henry James? Who can catch him for amoment declaring himself a conservative, a liberal, a Christian, apagan, a pantheist, a pluralist, a socialist, a reactionary, a singletaxer, a realist, a symbolist, an empiricist, a believer in ideals, amaterialist, an advocate of New Thought, an esoteric Buddhist, anHegelian, a Pragmatist, a Free Lover?

It would be possible to go over this formidable list of angles ofhuman vision, and find evidence somewhere in his books sufficientto make him out an adherent of every one of them. Consider his useof the supernatural for instance. Hardly any modern writer makes soconstant, so artistic a use of the machinery of the invisible world;and yet who would have the temerity to say that Henry Jamesbelieved even so much as in ghosts?

I know nothing of Mr. James' formal religious views, or to whatpious communion, if any, that brooding forehead and disillusionedeyes were wont to drift on days of devotion. But I cannot resist asecret fancy that it was to some old-fashioned and not too ritualisticAnglican church that he sometimes may have been met proceeding, in silk hat and well-polished shoes, at the close of a long Autumnafternoon, across the fallen leaves of Hyde Park!

There is an unction, a dreamy thrill about some of those descriptionsof town and country churches in conventional England which wouldsuggest that he had no secularistic aversion to these modest usages. Perhaps, like Charles Darwin, he would have answered impertinentquestions about his faith by pointing to just such patient unexcludingshrines of drowsy controversy-hating piety. 

I cannot see him listening to modernistic rhetoric. I cannot see himprostrated before ritualistic revivals. But I can see him sitting placidand still, like a great well-groomed visitor in "Egypt and Morocco, "listening pensively to some old-fashioned clergyman, whosegoodness of heart redeems the innocence of his brain; while themellow sunshine falls through the high windows upon the fair hairof Nanda or Aggie, or Mamie or Nina or Maud, thinking quietthoughts in front of him. 

It is strange how difficult it is to forget the personal appearance ofthis great man when one reads his works. What a head he had; whatweight of massive brooding bulk! When one thinks of the head ofHenry James and the head of Oscar Wilde--both of them withsomething that suggests the classical ages in their flesh-heavycontours--one is inclined to agree with Shakespeare's Caesar in hissuspicion of "lean men. "

Think of the harassed and rat-like physiognomy of nearly all theyounger writers of our day! Do their countenances suggest, as theseof James and Wilde, that their pens will "drop fatness"? Can one notdiscern the envious eye, the serpent's tongue, the scowl of theaggressive dissenter, the leer of the street urchin?

How excellent it is, in this modern world, to come upon the"equinimitas" of the great ages! After all, in the confused noises ofour human arena, it is something to encounter an author whopreserves restraint and dignity and urbanity. It is something more toencounter one who has, in the very depths of his soul, the ancientvirtue of magnanimity. 

This American visitor to Europe brings back to us those "goodmanners of the soul" which we were in danger of forgetting; and themore we read the writings of Henry James, the more fully webecome aware that there is only one origin of this spiritual charm, this aristocratic grace; and that is a sensitive and noble heart. 

The movement of literature at the present time is all towards actionand adventure. This is right and proper in its place, and a goodantidote to the tedious moralising of the past generation. 

The influence of Nietzsche upon the spiritual plane, and that of thewar upon the emotional plane, have thrown us violently out of thesphere of aesthetic receptivity into the sphere of heroic and laconicwrestling. 

Short stories, short poems, short speeches, short questions, shortanswers, short pity and short shrift, are the order of the day. Far andfar have we been tossed from the dreamy purlieus of his "great goodplace, " with its long sunny hours under misty trees, and itsinterminable conversations upon smooth-cut lawns! The sweetpsychology of terrace-walks is scattered, and the noise of thechariots and the horsemen breaks the magical stillness where loversphilosophised and philosophers loved. 

But let none of the strenuous gentlemen, whose abrupt ways seemencouraged by this earthquake, congratulate themselves thatrefinement and beauty and distinction and toleration have left theworld forever, for them to "bustle in. " It is not for long. The sundoes not stop shining or the dew cease falling or the fountains ofrain dry up because of the cruelty of men. It is not for long. The"humanism" of Henry James, with its "still small voice, " is bound toreturn. The stars in their courses fight for it. It is the pleasure of theconsciousness of life itself; of the life that, whether with WashingtonSquare, or Kensington Park, or the rosy campaniles of the Giudecca, or the minarets of Sacré-Coeur, or the roofs of Montmartre, or theherbaceous borders and shadowy terraces of English gardens, as itsbackground, must flow and flow and flow, with its tenderequivocations and its suppliance of wistful mystery, as long as menand women have any leisure to love or any intelligence to analysetheir love!

He is an aristocrat, and he writes--better than any--of the aristocracy;and yet, in the long result, is it of his well-bred levities and of hispleasantly-housed, lightly-living people, that one comes to think? Isit not rather of those tragic and faded figures, figures of sensitivemen and sensitive women for whom the world has no place, and ofwhom few--even among artists--speak or care to speak, withsympathy and understanding?

He has, just here, and in his own way, something of that sheerhuman pity for desolate and derelict spirits which breaks forth sosavagely sometimes, and with so unexpected a passion, from amidthe brutalities and sensualities of Guy de Maupassant. 

No one who has ever lived has written more tenderly or beautifullyof what Charles Lamb would call "superannuated people. " Oldbachelors, living in a sort of romantic exile, among mementoes of aremote past; old maids, living in an attenuated dream of "what mighthave been, " and playing heart-breaking tricks with their forlornfancies; no one has dealt more generously, more imaginatively withsuch as these. He is a little cruel to them sometimes, but with a finecaressing cruelty which is a far greater tribute than indifference; andis there not, after all, a certain element of cruelty in every species oftender love?

Though more than any one capable of discerning rare andcomplicated issues, where to the vulgar mind all would seem greyand dull and profitless, Henry James has, and it is absurd not toadmit it, a "penchant" for the abnormal and the bizarre. This elementappears more often in the short stories than the longer ones, but it isnever very far away. 

I sometimes think that many of the gentle and pure-souled peoplewho read this amiable writer go on their way through his pageswithout discerning this quiver, this ripple, this vibration, of "michingmallecho. " On softly-stepping feline feet, the great sleek panther ofpsychological curiosity glides into very perverse, very dubious paths. The exquisite tenuity and flexibility of his style, light as the flutterof a feather through the air, enable him to wander freely and at largewhere almost every other writer would trip and stumble in the mud. It is one of the most interesting phenomena in literature, this sly, quiet, half ironic dalliance with equivocal matters. 

Henry James can say things that no one else could say, and approachsubjects that no one else could approach, simply by reason of thegrave whimsical playfulness of his manner and the extraordinarymalleableness of his evasive style. It is because his style can be assimple and clear as sunlight, and yet as airy and impalpable as theinvisible wind, that he manages to achieve these results. He useslittle words, little harmless innocent words, but by the connotationhe gives them, and the way in which he softly flings them out, oneby one, like dandelion seeds upon swiftly-sliding water, one is beingcontinually startled into sharp arrested attention, as if--in the silencethat follows their utterance--somebody, as the phrase goes, "steppedover one's grave. "

How dearly one grows to love all his dainty tricks of speech! Thatconstant repetition of the word "wonderful"--of the word"beautiful"--how beautifully and wonderfully he works it up into asort of tender chorus of little caressing cries over the astoundingtapestry woven by the invisible fates! The charming way his people"drop" their little equivocal innocent-wicked retorts; "drop" themand "fling them out, " and "sweetly hazard" them and "wonderfullywail" them, produces the same effect of balanced expectancy andsuspended judgment that one derives from those ambiguous "so itmight seems" of the wavering Platonic Dialogue. 

The final impression left upon the mind after one closes one of thesefascinating volumes is, it must be confessed, a little sad. So muchambiguity in human life--so much unnecessary suffering--so manymad, blind, wilful misunderstandings! A little sad--and yet, on theother hand, we remain fortified and sustained with a certain interiordetachment. 

After all, it is soon over--the whole motley farce--and, while it lasts, nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough todisturb our amusement, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothingmatters so very greatly. And yet everything--each of us, as we try tomake our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our hidden souls, and each of these meanings themselves as we stammer them forth toone another--matters so "wonderfully, " so "beautifully"!

The tangled thread of our days may be knotted and twisted; but, after all, if we have the magnanimity to let off lightly those "whotrespass against us" we have not learnt our aesthetic lesson ofregarding the whole business of life as a complicated Henry Jamesstory, altogether in vain. 

We have come to regard the world as a more or less amusingSpectacle, without forgetting to be decently considerate of the othershadows in the gilt-framed mirror!

Perhaps, in our final estimate of him, what emerges most definitelyas Henry James' _doctrine_ is the height and depth and breadth ofthe gulf which separates those who have taste and sensitivenessfrom those who have none. That is the "motif" of the "Spoils ofPoynton, " and I do not know any one of all his books more instinctwith his peculiar spiritual essence. 

Below every other controversy and struggle in the world is thecontroversy between those who possess this secret of "The FinerGrain" and those who have it not. There can be no reconciliation, notruce, no "rapport" between these. At best there can be onlymitigated hostility on the one side, and ironical submission on theother. The world is made after this fashion and after no other, andthe best policy is to follow our great artists and turn the contrastbetween the two into a cause of aesthetic entertainment. 

Duality rules the universe. If it were not for the fools there would beno wisdom. If it were not for those who could never understand him, there could be no Henry James. 

One comes at any rate to see, from the exquisite success upon us ofthis author's method, how futile it is, in this world whereof thebeginning and the end are dreams, to bind an artist down to tediousand photographic reality. 

People do not and perhaps never will--even in archetypal Platonicdrawing-rooms--converse with one another quite so goldenly; or tellthe amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite sofelicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine andgreat art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, newand impossible worlds for our enjoyment. 

And the world created by Henry James is like some classic Arcadiaof psychological beauty--some universal Garden of Versaillesunprofaned by the noises of the crowd--where among the terracesand fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper andmake love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted withthe shadows of passions and misty with the rain of tender regrets;human figures without name or place. For who remembers thenames of these sweet phantoms or the titles of their "great goodplaces" in this hospitable fairy-land of the harassed sensitive ones ofthe earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good tastethe only moral code?

OSCAR WILDE

The words he once used about himself--"I am a symbolic figure"--remain to this day the most significant thing that can be said ofOscar Wilde. 

It is given to very few men of talent, this peculiar privilege--thisprivilege of being greater in what might be called the _shadow oftheir personality_ than in any actual literary or artistic achievement--and Wilde possesses it in a degree second to none. 

"My genius is in my life, " he said on another occasion, and thewords are literally and most fatally true. 

In the confused controversies of the present age it is difficult todisentangle the main issues; but it seems certain that side by sidewith political and economic divisions, there is a gulf growing widerand wider every day between the adherents of what might be calledthe Hellenic Renaissance and the inert, suspicious, unintelligent mob;that mob the mud of whose heavy traditions is capable of breeding, at one and the same time, the most crafty hypocrisy and the moststupid brutality. 

It would be hardly a true statement to say that the Renaissancereferred to--this modern Renaissance, not less formidable than thehistoric revolt which bears that name--is an insurrection of freespirits against Christianity. It is much rather a reversion to a humaneand classic reasonableness as opposed to mob-stupidity andmiddle-class philistinism--things which only the blundering of centuries ofpopular misapprehension could associate with the sublime and theimaginative figure of Christ. 

It is altogether a mistake to assume that in "De Profundis" Wilderetracted his classic protest and bowed his head once more in thehouse of Rimmon. 

What he did was to salute, in the name of the aesthetic freedom herepresented, those enduring elements of human loveliness andbeauty in that figure which three hundred years of hypocriticalpuritanism have proved unable to tarnish. What creates the peculiarsavagery of hatred which his name has still the power to conjure upamong the enemies of civilisation has little to do with the ambiguouscauses of his final downfall. These, of course, gave him up, boundhand and foot, into their hands. But these, though the overt excuse oftheir rancour, are far from being its real motive-force. To reach thatwe must look to the nature of the formidable weapon which it washis habit, in season and out of season, to use against this mob-rule--Imean his sense of humour. 

The stupid middle-class obscurantism, so alien to all humanereasonableness, which, in our Anglo-Saxon communities, masqueradesunder the cloak of a passionate and imaginative religion, is more sensitive to ridicule than to any other form of attack, and Wilde attacked it mercilessly with a ridicule that cut to the bone. 

They are not by any means of equal value, these epigrams of his, with which he defended intelligence against stupidity and classicallight against Gothic darkness. 

They are not as humorous as Voltaire's. They are not asphilosophical as Goethe's. Compared with the aphorisms of thesemasters they are light and frivolous. But for this very reason perhaps, they serve the great cause--the cause of humane and enlightenedcivilisation--better in our age of vulgar mob-rule than morerecondite "logoi. "

They pierce the hide of the thickest and dullest; they startle andbewilder the brains of the most crass and the most insensitive. And itis just because they do this that Wilde is so cordially feared andhated. It was, one cannot help feeling, the presence in him of ashrewd vein of sheer boyish bravado, mingled--one might go evenas far as that--with a dash of incorrigible worldliness in his owntemper, that made his hits so effective and wounding. 

It is interesting, with this in mind, to compare Wilde's witticismswith those of Matthew Arnold or Bernard Shaw. The reason thatWilde's lash cuts deeper than either of these other champions ofrational humanism, is that he goes, with more classical clearness, straight to the root of the matter. 

The author of "Thyrsis" was not himself free from a certainmelancholy hankering after "categorical imperatives, " and beneaththe cap and bells of his theological fooling, Shaw is, of course, asgravely moralistic as any puritan could wish. 

Neither of these--neither the ironical schoolmaster nor the farcicalclown of our Renaissance of intelligence--could exchange ideas withPericles, say, or Caesar, without betraying a puritanical fussinessthat would grievously bewilder the lucid minds of those great men. 

The philosophy of Wilde's aesthetic revolt against our degradedmob-ridden conscience was borrowed from Walter Pater, butwhereas that shy and subtle spirit moved darkly and mysteriouslyaside from all contact with the vulgar herd, Wilde, full of gay andwanton pride in his sacred mission, lost no opportunity of flauntinghis classic orthodoxy in the face of the heretical mob. 

Since the death of Wilde, the brunt of the battle for the spiritualliberties of the race has been borne by the sterner and moreformidable figure of Nietzsche; but the vein of high and terribleimagination in this great poet of the Superman sets him much closerto the company of the saints and mystics than to that of theinstinctive children of the pagan ideal. 

Oscar Wilde's name has become a sort of rallying cry to all thosewriters and artists who suffer, in one degree or another, from thepersecution of the mob--of the mob goaded on to blind brutality bythe crafty incentives of those conspirators of reaction whose interestlies in keeping the people enslaved. This has come about, in a largemeasure, as much by the renown of his defects as by reason of hisfine quality. 

The majority of men of talent lack the spirit and the gall to defy theenemy on equal terms. But Wilde while possessing nobler facultieshad an undeniable vein in him of sheer youthful insolence. To theimpertinence of society he could oppose the impertinence of theartist, and to the effrontery of the world he could offer the effronteryof genius. 

The power of personality, transcending any actual literaryachievement, is what remains in the mind when one has donereading him, and this very faculty--of communicating to us, whonever saw him or heard him speak, the vivid impact of hisoverbearing presence--is itself evidence of a rare kind of genius. It iseven a little ironical that he, above all men the punctilious andprecious literary craftsman, should ultimately dominate us not somuch by the magic of his art as by the spell of his wilful and wantonindividuality, and the situation is heightened still further by theextraordinary variety of his works and their amazing perfection intheir different spheres. 

One might easily conceive an artist capable of producing soclean-cut and crystalline a comedy as "The Importance of Being Earnest, "and so finished and flawless a tragedy as "Salome, " disappearingquite out of sight, in the manner so commended by Flaubert, behindthe shining objectivity of his flawless creations. But so far fromdisappearing, Oscar Wilde manages to emphasise himself and hisimposing presence only the more startlingly and flagrantly, the morethe gem-like images he projects harden and glitter. 

Astoundingly versatile as he was--capable of producing in "ReadingGaol" the best tragic ballad since "The Ancient Mariner, " and in"Intentions" one of the best critical expositions of the open secret ofart ever written at all--he never permits us for a second to lose touchwith the wayward and resplendent figure, so full, for all its bravado, of a certain disarming childishness, of his own defiant personality. 

And the fact remains that, perfect in their various kinds though theseworks of his are, they would never appeal to us as they do, andOscar Wilde would never be to us what he is, if it were not for thepredominance of this personal touch. 

I sometimes catch myself wondering what my own feeling would beas to the value of these things--of the "Soul of Man, " for instance, or"Intentions, " or the Comedies, or the Poems--if the unthinkablething could be done, and the emergence of this irresistible figurefrom behind it all could be drastically eliminated. I find myselfconscious, at these times, of a faint disturbing doubt; as though afterall, in spite of their jewel-like perfection, these wonderful and variedachievements were not quite the real thing, were not altogether inthe "supreme manner. " There seems to me--at the moments whenthis doubt arises--something too self-consciously (how shall I put it?)_artistic_ about these performances, something strained and forcedand far-fetched, which separates them from the large inevitableutterances of classic genius. 

I am ready to confess that I am not sure that this feeling is a matterof personal predilection or whether it has the larger and graverweight behind it of the traditional instincts of humanity, instincts outof which spring our only permanent judgments. What I feel at anyrate is this: that there is an absence in Wilde's writings of that largecool spaciousness, produced by the magical influence of earth andsky and sea, of which one is always conscious in the greater masters. 

"No gentleman, " he is said to have remarked once, "ever looks outof the window"; and it is precisely this "never looking out of thewindow" that produces his most serious limitations. 

In one respect I must acknowledge myself grateful to Wilde, evenfor this very avoidance of what might be called the "magical"element in things. His clear-cut palpable images, carved, as one sooften feels, in ebony or ivory or gold, offer an admirable relief, likethe laying of one's hand upon pieces of Hellenic statuary, afterwandering among the vague mists and "beached margents. "

Certainly if all that one saw when one "looked out of the window"were Irish fairies with dim hair drifting down pallid rivers, therewould be some reason for drawing the curtains close and toying inthe lamp-light with cameo-carved profiles of Antinous andCleopatra!

But nature has more to give us than the elfish fantasies, charming asthese may be, of Celtic legend--more to give us than those "brownfauns" and "hoofed Centaurs" and milk-white peacocks, whichWilde loves to paint with his Tiepolo-like brush. The dew of themorning does not fall less lightly because real autumns bring it, nordoes the "wide aerial landscape" of our human wayfaring show lessfair, or its ancient antagonist the "salt estranging sea" less terrible, because these require no legendary art to endow them with mystery. 

Plausible and full of significance as these honeyed arguments in"Intentions" are--and fruitful as they are in affording us weaponswherewith to defend ourselves from the mob--it is still well, it is stillnecessary, to place against them the great Da Vinci saying, "Natureis the Mistress of the higher intelligences. "

Wilde must be held responsible--along with others of his epoch--forthe encouragement of that deplorable modern heresy which finds inbric-à-brac and what are called "objets d'art" a disproportionatemonopoly of the beauty and wonder of the world. One turns a littlewearily at last from the silver mirrors and purple masks. One turnsto the great winds that issue forth out of the caverns of the night. One turns to the sun and to the rain, which fall upon the commongrass. 

However! It is not a wise procedure to demand from a writer virtuesand qualities completely out of his rôle. In our particular race thereis far more danger of the beauty and significance of art--togetherwith all its subtler and less normal symbols--perishing under crudeand sentimental Nature-worship, than of their being granted toolarge a place in our crowded house of thought. 

After all, the art which Wilde assures us adds so richly to Nature, "isan art which Nature makes. " They are not lovers of what is rarestand finest in our human civilisation who would suppress everythingwhich deviates from the common track. 

Who has given these people--these middle-class minds with theirdull intelligences--the right to decide what is natural or unnatural inthe presence of the vast tumultuous forces, wonderful and terrible, of the life-stream which surrounds us?

The mad smouldering lust which gives a sort of under-song ofsurging passion to the sophisticated sensuality of "Salome" is asmuch an evocation of Nature as the sad sweet wisdom of thatsentence in "De Profundis"--"Behind joy and laughter there may bea temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there isalways sorrow. "

What, beneath all his bravado and his paradoxes, Wilde reallysought, was the enjoyment of passionate and absorbing emotion, andno one who hungers and thirsts after this--be he "as sensual as thebrutish sting itself"--can fail in the end to touch, if only fleetinglywith his lips, the waters of that river of passion which, by a miracleof faith if not by a supreme creation of art, Humanity has caused toissue forth from the wounded flesh of the ideal. 

It is in his "Soul of Man"--perhaps the wisest and most eloquentrevolutionary tract ever written--that Wilde frees himself mostcompletely from the superficial eccentricities of his aesthetic pose, and indicates his recognition of a beauty in life, far transcendingTyrian dyes and carved cameos and frankincense and satin-woodand moon-stones and "Silks from Samarcand. "

It is impossible to read this noble defence of the natural distinctionand high dignity of our human days when freed from the slavery ofwhat is called "working for a living, " without feeling that the boyishbravado of his insolent wit is based upon a deep and universalemotion. What we note here is an affiliation in revolt between theartist and the masses. And this affiliation indicates that thehideousness of our industrial system is far more offensive than anyancient despotism or slave-owning tyranny to the natural passion forlight and air and leisure and freedom in the heart of man. 

That Oscar Wilde, the most extreme of individualists, the mostunscrupulous of self-asserters, the pampered darling of every kind ofsophisticated luxury, should thus lift up his voice on behalf of thewage-earners, is an indication that a state of society which seemsproper and inevitable to dull and narrow minds is, when confronted, not with any mere abstract theory of Justice or Political rights, butwith the natural human craving for life and beauty, found to be anoutrage and an insult. 

Oscar Wilde by pointing his derisive finger at what the grossintelligence of our commercial mob calls the "honourableness ofwork" has done more to clear our minds of cant than manyrevolutionary speeches. 

An age which breeds a world of uninteresting people whose onlypurpose in life is working for their living is condemned on the faceof it. And it is just here that the association between your artist andyour "labouring man" becomes physiologically evident. Thelabourer shows quite clearly that he regards his labour as adegradation, a burden, an interruption to life, a necessary evil. 

The rôle of the capitalist-hired preacher is to condemn him for thisand to regret the departure from the scene of that imaginary andextremely ridiculous figure, the worker who "took pleasure in hiswork. " If there ever have been such people, they ought, as Wildesays, to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Any person whoenjoys being turned into a machine for the best part of his days andregards it with pride, is no better than a blackleg or a scab--not a"scab" in regard to a little company of strikers, but a "scab" in regardto the human race; for he is one who denies that life in itself, lifewith all its emotional, intellectual and imaginative possibilities, canbe endured without the gross, coarsening, dulling "anaesthetic" ofmoney-making toil. 

This is the word that the social revolution wanted--the word so muchmore to the point than discourses upon justice and equality andcharity. And it is precisely here that the wage-earners of our presentsystem are in harmony with the "intellectuals. "

The "wage-earners, " or those among them who have in themsomething more than the souls of scabs, despise and loathe theirenforced labour. The artist also despises the second-rate tasks sethim by the stupidity and bad taste of his middle-class masters. 

The only persons in the community who are really happy in theirlife's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial_ruffians_ whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenancesone is swamped by--as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity--inthe streets of all our modern cities. 

Oscar Wilde is perfectly right. We are living in an age when theworld for the first time in its history is literally under the rule ofthe stupidest, dullest, least intelligent and least admirable of allthe classes in the community. Wilde's "Soul of Man" is thecondemnation--let us hope the effective condemnation--of thisepoch in the journey of the race. 

The odium which France--always the protector of civilisation--hasstamped upon the word "bourgeois" is no mere passing levity of anirresponsible Latin Quarter. It is the judgment of classic taste--thetaste of the great artists and poets of all ages--upon the worst type ofperson, the type most pernicious to true human happiness, that hasever yet appeared upon the planet. And it is this type, thecommercial type, the type that loves the money-making toil it isengaged upon, which rules over us now with an absolute authority, and creates our religion, our morality, our pleasures, our pastimes, our literature and our art. 

Oscar Wilde must be forgiven everything in his gay impertinencewhich may jar upon our more sensitive moments, when oneconsiders what he has done in dragging this great issue into the lightand making it clear. He shows that what we have against us is not somuch a system of society or a set of laws, as a definite andcontemptible type of human character. 

Democracy may well appear the most hopeless and lamentablefailure in the government of men that history has ever known--butthis is only due to the fact that the working classes have until nowmeekly and mildly received from the commercial classes theirnotions as to what democracy means. 

No one could suppose for a moment that such a thing as thepuritanical censorship of art and letters which now hangs, like aleaden weight, round the neck of every writer of original power, would be thrust upon us by the victims of sweatshops and factories. It is thrust upon us, like everything else which is degrading anduncivilised in our present system, by the obstinate stupidity and sillysentiment of the self-righteous middle class, the opponents ofeverything that is joyous and interesting and subtle and imaginative. It is devoutly to be hoped that, when the revolution arrives, thehuman persons who force their way to the top and guide thevolcanic eruption will be such persons as are absolutely free fromevery kind of middle-class scruple. 

There are among us to-day vigorous and indignant minds who findin the ugliness and moral squalor of our situation, the unhappyinfluence of Christ and his saints. They are wrong. The history ofOscar Wilde's writings shows that they are wrong. 

It is the self-satisfied moralist who stands in the way, not the mysticor the visionary. They spoil everything they touch, these people. They turn religion into a set of sentimental inhibitions that wouldmake Marcus Aurelius blush. They turn faith into pietism, sanctityinto morality, and righteousness into a reeking prurience. 

After all, it is not on the strength of his opinions, wise and sound asthese may be, that Wilde's reputation rests. It rests on the beauty, inits own way never equalled, of the style in which he wrote. His style, as he himself points out, is one which seems to compel its readers toutter its syllables aloud. Of that deeper and more recondite charmwhich lies, in a sense, outside the sphere of vocal articulation, of thatrhythm of the very movements of thought itself which lovers ofWalter Pater catch, or dream they catch, in those elaborate delicatelymodulated sentences, Wilde has little or nothing. 

What he achieves is a certain crystalline lucidity, clear and pure asthe ring of glass upon glass, and with a mellifluous after-tone orecho of vibration, which dies away upon the ear in a lingeringfall--melancholy and voluptuous, or light and tender as the hour and themoment lead. 

He is at his best, or at any rate his style shows itself at its best, notin the utterances of those golden epigrams, the gold of which, as dayspass, comes in certain cases to look lamentably like gilt, but in hisuse of those far-descended legendary images gathered up into poetryand art again and again till they have acquired the very tone of timeitself, and a lovely magic, sudden, swift and arresting, like the odourof "myrrh, aloes, and cassia. "

The style of Wilde is one of the simplest in existence, but itssimplicity is the very apex and consummation of the artificial. Heuses Biblical language with that self-conscious preciosity--like themovements of a person walking on tiptoe in the presence of thedead--which is so different from the sturdy directness of Bunyan orthe restrained rhetoric of the Church of England prayers. Therecome moments when this premeditated innocence of tone--thislisping in liturgical monosyllables--irritates and annoys one. At suchtimes the delicate unction of his naïveté strikes one, in despite of itsgravity, as something a little comic; as though some verysophisticated and experienced person suddenly joined in a children'sgame and began singing in a plaintive tenderly pitched voice--

 "This is the way we wash our hands, wash our hands, wash our hands-- This is the way we wash our hands, On a cold and frosty morning!"

But it were absurd to press this point too far. Sophisticated thoughthe simplicity of Wilde is, it does actually spring with all itsritualistic tiptoeing straight out of his natural character. He was bornartificial, and he was born with more childishness than the greatmajority of children. 

I like to picture him as a great Uranian baby, full of querulousnessand peevishness, and eating greedily, with a sort of guileless wonderthat anyone should scold him for it, every species of forbidden fruitthat grows in the garden of life! How infantile really, when onethinks of it, and how humorously solemn the man's inordinategravity over the touch of soft fabrics and the odour of rare perfumes!One seems to see him, a languid-limbed "revenant, " withheavy-lidded drowsy eyes and voluptuous lips, emerging all swathed andwrapped in costly cerements out of the tomb of some Babylonianking. 

After all, it remains a tremendous triumph of personality, themanner in which this portly modern Antinous has taken captive ourimagination. His influence is everywhere, like an odour, like anatmosphere, like a diffused flame. We cannot escape from him. 

In those ridiculous wit-contests with Whistler, from which healways emerged defeated, how much more generous and carelessand noble he appears than the wasp-like artist who could rap out sosmartly the appropriate retort! He seems like a great lazy king, atsuch times, caught off his guard by some skipping and clever knaveof his spoilt retinue. Perhaps even now no small a portion of theamused and astonished wonder he excites is due to the fact that hereally had, what so few of us have, a veritable passion for preciousstuffs and woven fabrics and ivory and cedar wood and beads ofamber and orchid-petals and pearl-tinted shells and lapis-lazuli andattar of roses. 

It is open to doubt whether even among artists, there are many whoshare Wilde's Hellenic ecstasy in these things. This at any rate wasno pose. He posed as a man of the world. He posed as an immoralist. He posed as a paradoxist. He posed in a thousand perversedirections. But when it comes to the colour and texture and odourand shape of beautiful and rare things--there, in his voluptuousdelight in these, he was undeniably sincere. 

He was of course no learned virtuoso. But what does that matter?The real artist is seldom a patient collector or an encyclopedicauthority. That is the rôle of Museum people and of compilers ofhand-books. Many thoroughly uninteresting minds know more aboutAssyrian pottery and Chinese pictures than Oscar Wilde knew aboutwild flowers. 

Knowledge, as he teaches us himself, and it is one of theprofoundest of his doctrines, is nothing. Knowledge is external andincidental. The important thing is that one's senses should bepassionately alive and one's imagination fearlessly far-reaching. 

We can embrace all the treasures of the Herods and all the riches ofthe Caesars as we lay our fingers upon a little silver coin, if thedivine flame is within us, and, if not, we may excavate a thousandburied cities and return learned and lean and empty. Well, peoplemust make their own choice and go their own way. The world iswide, and Nature has at least this in common with Heaven, that ithas many mansions. 

The feverish passion for fair things which obsessed Oscar Wilde andcarried him so far is not for all the sons of men; nor even, in everyhour of their lives, for those who most ardently answer to it. Thatfeverishness burns itself out; that smouldering fire turns to coldashes. Life flows on, though Salome, daughter of Herodias, liescrushed under the piled-up shields, and though in all the prisons ofthe world "the damned grotesques make arabesques, like the windupon the sand. "

Life flows on, and the quips and merry jests of Oscar Wilde, hisartful artlessness, his insolence, his self-pity, his loyalty andfickleness, his sensuality and tenderness, only fill after all a smallspace in the heart's chamber of those who read him and stare at hisplays and let him go. 

But there are a few for whom the tragic wantonness of that strangecountenance, with the heavy eyelids and pouting mouth, meanssomething not easily forgotten, not easily put by. 

To have seen Oscar Wilde and talked with him gives to such personsa strange significance, an almost religious value. One looks long atthem, as if to catch some far-off reflection from the wit of the deadman. They do not seem to us quite like the rest. They have seenOscar Wilde, and "They know what they have seen. " For when allhas been said against him that can be said it remains that OscarWilde, for good and for evil, in innocence and in excess, inorthodoxy and in rebellion, is a "symbolic figure. "

It is indeed easy enough, when one is under the spell of the goldengaiety of his wit, to forget the essential and irresistible truth of somany of his utterances. 

That profound association between the "Sorrow that endurethforever" and the "Pleasure that abideth for a moment, " which hesymbolises under the parable of the Image of Bronze, has its placethroughout all his work. 

It is a mistake to regard De Profundis as a recantation. It is afulfilment, a completion, a rounding off. Like a black and a scarletthread running through the whole tapestry of his tragic story are thetwo parallel "motifs, " the passion of the beauty which leads todestruction and the passion of the beauty which leads to life. 

It matters little whether he was or was not received into the Churchbefore he died. In the larger sense he was always within thoseunexcluding walls, those spacious courts of the Ecclesia of humanity. There was no trace in him, for all his caprices, of that puritanism ofdenial which breaks the altars and shatters the idols at the bidding ofscientific iconoclasm. 

What the anonymous instinct of humanity has rendered beautiful bybuilding into it the golden monuments of forlorn hopes and washingit with the salt tears of desperate chances remained beautiful to him. From the narcissus-flowers growing on the marble ledges ofParnassus, where Apollo still weeps for the death of Hyacinth andPan still mourns the vanishing of Syrinx, to the passion-flowersgrowing on the slopes of Calvary, he, this lover of eidola and images, worships the white feet of the bearers of dead beauty, and finds inthe tears of all the lovers of all the lost a revivifying rain that even inthe midst of the dust of our degeneracy makes bloom once more, fullof freshness and promise, the mystical red rose of the world's desire. 

The wit of his "Golden lads and girls" in those superb comedies maysoon fall a little faint and thin upon our ears. To the next generationit may seem as faded and old-fashioned as the wit of Congreve orSheridan. Fashions of humour change more quickly than thefashions of manner or of dress. The only thing that givesimmortality to human writing is the "eternal bronze" of a noble andimaginative style. Out of such divine material, with all hispetulances and perversities, Oscar Wilde's style was hammered andbeaten. For there is only one quarry of this most precious metal, andthe same hand that shapes from it the "Sorrow that endureth forever"must shape from it the "Pleasure that abideth for a moment, " and theidentity of these two with that immortal bronze is the symbol of themystery of our life. 

The senses that are quickened by the knowledge of this mystery arenot far from the ultimate secret. As with the thing sculptured, sowith the sculptor. 

Oscar Wilde is a symbolic figure. 

SUSPENDED JUDGMENT

The conclusion of any book which has tried to throw intomomentary relief the great shadowy figures who have led andmisled humanity must necessarily be no more than a new suspensionof judgment; of judgment drawing its interest from the colour of themind of the individual making it, of judgment guarded from theimpertinence of judicial decision by its confessed implication ofradical subjectivity. 

The conclusion of any critical essay must in large measure be lameand halting; must indeed be a whispered warning to the reader totake what has gone before, however ardently expressed, with thatwise pinch of true Attic salt which mitigates even a relative finalityin these high things. 

One comes to feel more and more, as one reads many books, thatjudicial decisions are laughable and useless in this rare atmosphere, and that the mere utterance of such platitudinous decrees sets thepronouncer of them outside the inner and exclusive pale. 

One comes to feel more and more that all that any of us has a rightto do is to set down as patiently and tenderly as he may theparticular response, here or there, from this side or the other, as itchances to happen, that is aroused in his own soul by those historicworks of art, which, whatever principle of selection it is that placesthem in our hands, have fallen somehow across our path. 

It might seem that a direct, natural and spontaneous response, of thekind I have in my mind, to these famous works, were easy enough ofattainment. Nothing, on the contrary, is more difficult to secure ormore seldom secured. 

One might almost hazard the paradox that the real art of criticismonly begins when we shake ourselves free of all books and winaccess to that locked and sealed and uncut volume which is the bookof our own feelings. 

The art of self-culture--one learns just that when youth'soutward-looking curiosity and passion begin to ebb--is the art of freeingoneself from the influence of books so that one may enjoy what oneis destined to enjoy without pedantry or scruple. And yet, by theprofound law of the system of things, when one has thus freedoneself from the tyranny of literary catchwords and the dead weightof cultivated public opinion, one comes back to the world of bookswith an added zest. It is then, and only then, that one reads with realunscrupulousness, thinking solely of the pleasure, and nothing of therectitude or propriety or adequacy of what we take up. 

And it is then that the great figures of the master-writers appear intheir true light; the light--that is to say--in which we, and not another, have visualised them, felt them, and reacted from them. 

It is wonderful what thrilling pleasures there are in store for us inliterature when once we have cut ourselves adrift from all thissuperfluity of cultured opinion, and have given ourselves completeleave to love what we like and hate what we like and be indifferentto what we like, as the world swings round!

I think the secret of making an exquisite use of literature so that itshall colour and penetrate our days is only a small part of what thewisest epicureans among us are concerned with attaining. I think itis one of the most precious benefits conferred on us by every newwriter that he flings us back more deeply than ever upon ourselves. We draw out of him his vision, his peculiar atmosphere, his especialquality of mental and emotional tone. We savour this and assimilateit and store it up, as something which we have made our own andwhich is there to fall back upon when we want it. But beyond ourenjoyment of this new increment to our treasury of feeling, we aredriven inwards once more in a kind of intellectual rivalry with thevery thing we have just acquired, and in precise proportion as it hasseemed to us exciting and original we are roused in the depths of ourmind to substitute something else for it; and this something else isnothing less than the evocation of our own originality, called up outof the hidden caverns of our being to claim its own creative place inthe communion between our soul and the world. 

I can only speak for myself; but my own preference among writerswill always be for those whose genius consists rather in creating acertain mental atmosphere than in hammering out isolated works ofart, rounded and complete. 

For a flawless work of art is a thing for a moment, while that morepenetrating projection of an original personality which one calls amental or aesthetic atmosphere, is a thing that floats and flows anddrifts and wavers, far beyond the boundaries of any limited creation. Such an atmosphere, such a vague intellectual music, in the air aboutus, is the thing that really challenges the responsive spirit inourselves; challenges it and rouses it to take the part which it has aright to take, the part which it alone _can_ take, in recreating theworld for us in accordance with our natural fatality. 

It is only by the process of gradual disillusionment that we come atlast to recognise what we ourselves--undistracted now by anyexternal authority--need and require from the genius of the past. Formy own part, looking over the great names included in the foregoingessays, I am at this moment drawn instinctively only to two amongthem all--to William Blake and to Paul Verlaine; and this is anindication to me that what my own soul requires is not philosophy orpsychology or wit or sublimity, but a certain delicate transmutationof the little casual things that cross my way, and a certain faint, low, sweet music, rumouring from indistinguishable horizons, andbringing me vague rare thoughts, cool and quiet and deep andmagical, such as have no concern with the clamour and brutality ofthe crowd. 

The greater number of the writers who have dominated us, in thepages that go before, belong to the Latin race, and I cannot but feelthat it is to this race that civilisation must come more and more toreturn in its search for the grandeur and pathos, the humanity andirony of that attitude of mind which serves our spirits best as westruggle on through the confusions and bewilderments of our way. 

There is a tendency observable here and there--though the genuinelygreat minds who give their adherence to it are few and far between--to speak as though the race-element in literature were a thing betteraway, a thing whose place might be taken by a sort of attenuatedidealistic amalgam of all the race-elements in the world, or bysomething which has no race-element in it at all--somethinginter-national, inter-racial, humanitarian and cosmopolitan. 

People to whom this thin thing appeals often speak quite lightly ofblending the traditions of East and West, of Saxon and Celt, of Latinand Teuton, of Scandinavian and Slav. 

They do not see that you might as well speak of blending thetemperaments of two opposite types of human personality. They donot see that the whole interest of life depends upon these contrasts. You cannot blend traditions in this academic way, any more thanyou can blend two human souls that are diametrically different, ortwo soils or climates which are mutually excluding. This ideal of acosmopolitan literature that shall include all the local traditions andracial instincts is the sort of thing that appeals to the type of mindwhich remains essentially dull to the high qualities of a noble style. 

No; it is not cosmopolitan literature that we want. It was not ofcosmopolitan literature that Goethe was thinking when he used thatterm "I am a good European, " which Nietzsche found so suggestive;it was of classical literature, of literature which, whatever its racialquality, has not lost touch with the civilised traditions of Athens andRome. 

In art, as in everything else, we must "worship our dead"; and theattempt to substitute a vague idealised cosmopolitanism for theliving passionate localised traditions that spring like trees andflowers out of a particular soil, out of a soil made dear to us by theashes of our fathers and consecrated by a thousand pious usages, isan attempt that can result in no great magical works. 

Walt Whitman, for all his celebrations of the huge "ensemble" of theworld, remains and must always remain profoundly and entirelyAmerican. 

When Romain Rolland, the author of "Jean Christophe, "--the bookof all books most penetrated by the spirit of race distinctions--appalledby the atrocity of the war, calls upon us to substitute theIdeal of Humanity for the ideas of the various tribes of men, he isreally (in re-action from the dreadful scenes around him) renouncingthose flashes of prophetic insight which gave him such livingvisions of the diverse souls of the great races. Romain Rolland mayspeak rhetorically of the "Ideal of Humanity" to be realised in artand letters. The thing is a word, a name, a phrase, an illusion. Whatwe actually have are individuals--individual artists, individualraces--each with its own beautiful and tragical fatality. 

And what is true of races is true of persons both in life and incriticism. All that is really interesting in us springs in the first placefrom the traditions of the race to which we belong, springs from thesoil that gave us birth and from our sacred dead and the usages andcustoms and habits which bind us to the past; and in the secondplace from what is uniquely and peculiarly personal to ourselves, belonging to our intrinsic and integral character and refusing to beswamped by any vague cult of "humanity in general. "

To talk of literature becoming universal and planetary, becoming alogical synthesis of the traditions of races and the visions ofindividuals, is to talk of something that in its inherent nature iscontrary to the fundamental spirit of art. It implies a confusionbetween the spheres of art and philosophy. The function ofphilosophy is to synthesise and unite. The function of art is todifferentiate and distinguish. Philosophy and ethics are perfectlyjustified in concerning themselves with a "regenerated humanity" inwhich race-instincts and race-traditions are blotted out. Let themproduce such a humanity if they can! But while there are any artistsleft in the world, or any lovers of art, it will always be to the oldinalienable traditions that they will turn; to the old local customs, local pieties, local habits, local altars, and local gods. 

To talk vaguely of cosmopolitan art uniting the nations, is to talkfoolishly, and it is to talk irreverently. The people who deal in suchtheories are endeavouring to betray the dead of their own race andthe noble pieties and desperate courage of those who made themwhat they are. It is a sacrilege, this speculation, and a sacrifice ofbeauty upon the altar of a logical morality. 

What one comes more and more to feel is that everything whichbelongs to poetry and art belongs to the individual, to the individualnation and the individual person. The great modern democracies, with their cult of the average man and their suspicion of theexceptional man, are naturally only too ready to hail as ideal andwonderful any doctrine about literature which flatters their pride. 

One of the most plausible forms of rhetorical cant is the cant aboutthe soul of average humanity expressing itself in art, in an art whichhas sloughed off like an outworn skin all ancient race-instincts andall individual egoism. 

There has never been such art in the history of the world as thisaverage man's art, free from tradition and free from personal colour. 

There will never be such art, unless it be the great, idealistic, humanitarian, cosmopolitan art of the Moving Picture Show. 

But the idea sounds well in popular oratory, and it has a mostsoothing ointment for the souls of such artists as have neitherreverence nor imagination. 

It is quite possible that for the general comfort of the race at large--even if not for its happiness--it would be a good thing ifphilosophers and moralists between them could get rid of theimagination of races as well as the imagination of individuals. 

The common crowd are naturally suspicious of imagination of anykind, as they are suspicious of genius of any kind; and this newdoctrine of a literature largely and purely "human, " wherein thegeneral soul of humanity may find its expression, free from thecolour of race-feeling and free from the waywardness of individualmen of genius, is just the sort of thing to flatter the unthinking mob. 

Why not have art and literature harnessed once and for all to thegreat rolling chariot of popular public opinion? Why not abolish allindividualism at one stroke as a thing dangerous to the publicwelfare--a thing uncomfortable, undesirable, upsetting?

The same desperate, irrational, immoral imagination which inspiresraces with a strange madness, inspires individuals too with a strangemadness. 

Art and Literature are, after all, and there is little use denying it, thelast refuge and sanctuary, in a world ruled by machinery andsentiment, of the free, wild, reckless, irresponsible, anarchicalimagination of such as refuse to sacrifice their own dreams for thedreams--not less illusive--of the general herd. 

We have to face the fact--bitter and melancholy though it maybe--that in our great bourgeois-dominated democracies the majority ofpeople would like to trample out the flame of genius altogether;trample it out as something inimical to their peace. 

Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, were all completely aware ofthis instinctive hatred with which the mob of men regard what isexceptional and rare. The Hamlet-spirit of the author of Coriolanusmust chuckle bitterly in that grave in Stratford-on-Avon when helearns that the new ideal is the ideal of cosmopolitan literatureexpressing the soul of the average man. 

The clash is bound to come sooner or later between public opinion, concerned to preserve the comfort of its illusions, and the art of theindividual artist playing, in noble irresponsibility, with all illusions. 

It was his consciousness of this--of the natural antagonism of themob and its leaders to all great literature--that made Goethe drawback so coldly and proudly from the popular tendencies of his time, and seek refuge among the great individualistic spirits of the classiccivilisations. And what Goethe--the good European--did in his hour, the more classical among European writers of our own day do still. 

The great style--the style which is like gold and bronze in an age ofclay and rubble--remains as the only sure refuge we have from thehowling vulgarities of our generation. If books were taken fromus--the high, calm, beautiful, ironical books of classic tradition--how, inthis age, could the more sensitive among us endure to live at all?

With brutality and insanity and ruffianism, with complacency andstupidity and sentimentalism, jostling us and hustling us on all sides, how could we live, if it were not for the great, calm, scornfulanarchists of the soul, whose high inviolable imaginationsperpetually refresh and re-create the world?

And we who find this refuge, we who have to win our liberty everyday anew by bathing in these classic streams, we too will do well toremember that the most precious things in life are the things that theworld can neither give nor take away. 

We too--encouraged by these great individualists--have a right tofall back upon whatever individuality may have been left to us; and, resting upon that, sinking into the soul of that, to defy all that publicopinion and the voice of the majority may be able to do. 

And we shall be wise also if we recognise, before it is too late, thatwhat is most intrinsic and inalienable in ourselves is just that veryportion of us which has nothing to do with our work in life, nothingto do with our duty to the community. 

We shall be wise if we recognise, before it is too late, that the thingmost sacred in us is that strange margin of unoccupied receptivity, upon which settle, in their flight over land and sea, the beautifulwild birds of unsolicited dreams. 

We shall be wise if, before we die, we learn a little of the art ofsuspending our judgment--the art of "waiting upon the spirit. "

For it is only when we have suspended our judgment; it is only whenwe have suspended our convictions, our principles, our ideals, ourmoralities, that "the still small voice" of the music of the universe, sad and sweet and terrible and tender, drifts in upon us, over the faceof the waters of the soul. 

The essence of us, the hidden reality of us, is too rare and delicate athing to bear the crude weight of these sturdy opinions, thesevigorous convictions, these social ardours, without growing dulledand hardened. 

We all have to bear the burden of humanity; and the artists among usmay be thankful that the predatory curse resting upon the rich isvery seldom ours: but the burden of humanity must not be allowedto press all joy, all originality, all waywardness, all interest, allimagination out of our lives. 

It is not for long, at best or worst, that we know what it is to beconscious of being living children of the human race upon thisstrange planet. 

The days pass quickly, and the seasons and the years. From thegraves of the darlings of our souls there comes a voice and a cry. Avoice bidding us sink into our own true selves before we too arenumbered with the dead; a cry bidding us sacrifice everything beforewe sacrifice the prerogative of our inmost identity, the right to feeland think and dream as persons born into a high inheritance, theinheritance of the mind that has the right to question all things and tohold fast what pleases it in defiance of opinion and logic andprobability and argument. 

For it is only when we suspend our judgments and leave arguing andcriticising, that the quiet gods of the moonlit shores of the worldmurmur their secrets in our ears. 

They come without our seeking for them, these rare intimations;without our seeking for them, and, sometimes, without our desiringthem; but when they come they come as revelations of somethingdeeper in us than any mere soul of humanity. They come from aregion that is as far beyond humanity as it is beyond nature. Theycome from the fairy-land of that mysterious country wherein dwellthe dreams and the fancies of those lonely ones among the sons ofmen who have been possessed by imagination. They come from theunknown land where those inhabit who are, as the Psalmist says, "free among the dead. " They come from the land which we leftwhen we were born, and to which we return when we die. Andwhether this is a land of nothingness and oblivion none knoweth; fornone hath returned to tell us. Meanwhile we can imagine what wewill; and we can suspend our last judgment until we ourselves arejudged.