ASPECTS OFLITERATURE

J. MIDDLETON MURRY

NEW YORK:ALFRED A. KNOPFMCMXX

Copyright, 1920

_Printed in Great Britain_

TOBRUCE RICHMONDTO WHOSE GENEROUS ENCOURAGEMENTI OWE SO MUCH

_Preface_

Two of these essays, 'The Function of Criticism' and 'The Religion ofRousseau, ' were contributed to the _Times Literary Supplement_; that on'The Poetry of Edward Thomas' in the _Nation_; all the rest save onehave appeared in the _Athenæum_. 

The essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, withtwo exceptions. The second part of the essay on Tchehov has been placedwith the first for convenience, although in order of thought it shouldfollow the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness. ' More important, I haveplaced 'The Function of Criticism' first although it was written last, because it treats of the broad problem of literary criticism, suggests astandard of values implicit elsewhere in the book, and thus to somedegree affords an introduction to the remaining essays. 

But the degree is not great, as the critical reader will quicklydiscover for himself. I ask him not to indulge the temptation ofconvicting me out of my own mouth. I am aware that my practice is ofteninconsistent with my professions; and I ask the reader to remember thatthe professions were made after the practice and to a considerableextent as the result of it. The practice came first, and if I couldreasonably expect so much of the reader I would ask him to read 'TheFunction of Criticism' once more when he has reached the end of thebook. 

I make no apology for not having rewritten the essays. As a critic Ienjoy nothing more than to trace the development of a writer's attitudethrough its various phases; I could do no less than afford my readersthe opportunity of a similar enjoyment in my own case. They may beassured that none of the essays have suffered any substantialalteration, even where, for instance in the case of the incidental and(I am now persuaded) quite inadequate estimate of Chaucer in 'TheNostalgia of Mr Masefield, ' my view has since completely changed. Hereand there I have recast expressions which, though not sufficientlyconveying my meaning, had been passed in the haste of journalisticproduction. But I have nowhere tried to adjust earlier to later pointsof view. I am aware that these points of view are often difficult toreconcile; that, for instance, 'æsthetic' in the essay on Tchehov has amuch narrower meaning than it bears in 'The Function of Criticism'; thatthe essay on 'The Religion of Rousseau' is criticism of a kind which Ideprecate as insufficient in the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness, 'because it lacks that reference to life as a whole which I have come toregard as essential to criticism; and that in this latter essay I usethe word 'moral' (for instance in the phrase 'The values of literatureare in the last resort moral') in a sense which is never exactlydefined. The key to most of these discrepancies will, I hope, be foundin the introductory essay on 'The Function of Criticism. '

_May_, 1920. 

_Contents_

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 1

THE RELIGION OF ROUSSEAU 15

THE POETRY OF EDWARD THOMAS 29

MR YEATS'S SWAN SONG 39

THE WISDOM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 46

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 52

THE PROBLEM OF KEATS 62

THOUGHTS ON TCHEHOV 76

AMERICAN POETRY 91

RONSARD 99

SAMUEL BUTLER 107

THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY 121

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ENGLISH POETRY 139

THE NOSTALGIA OF MR MASEFIELD 150

THE LOST LEGIONS 157

THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS 167

POETRY AND CRITICISM 176

COLERIDGE'S CRITICISM 184

SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM 194

_The Function of Criticism_

It is curious and interesting to find our younger men of lettersactively concerned with the present condition of literary criticism. This is a novel preoccupation for them and one which is, we believe, symptomatic of a general hesitancy and expectation. In the world ofletters everything is a little up in the air, volatile anduncrystallised. It is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite ofoutward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half adozen years ago. Then one had a tolerable certainty that the new star, if the new star was to appear, would burst upon our vision in the shapeof a novel. To-day we feel it might be anything. The cloud no biggerthan a man's hand might even be, like Trigorin's in 'The Sea-gull, ' likea piano; it has no predetermined form. 

This sense of incalculability, which has been aroused by the prodigiousliterary efflorescence of late years, reacts upon its cause; and thereaction tends by many different paths to express itself finally in theventilation of problems that hinge about criticism. There is a generalfeeling that the growth of the young plant has been too luxuriant; adesire to have it vigorously pruned by a capable gardener, in order thatits strength may be gathered together to produce a more perfect fruit. There is also a sense that if the _lusus naturæ_, the writer of genius, were to appear, there ought to be a person or an organisation capable ofrecognising him, however unexpected his scent or the shape of hisleaves. Both these tasks fall upon criticism. The younger generationlooks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a gardener whomit can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that there isnone. 

There is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we havelearned to respect. There are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but nocritics, says another disrespectful young man. Oh, for some more ScotchReviewers to settle the hash of our English bards, sighs a third. Andthe _London Mercury_, after whetting our appetite by announcing that itproposed to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, stillleaves us a little in the dark as to what these standards are. Mr T. S. Eliot deals more kindly, if more frigidly, with us in the _MonthlyChapbook_. There are, he says, three kinds of criticism--the historical, the philosophic, and the purely literary. 

 'Every form of genuine criticism is directed towards creation. The historical or philosophic critic of poetry is criticising poetry in order to create a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is criticising poetry in order to create poetry. '

These separate and distinct kinds, he considers, are but rarely foundto-day, even in a fragmentary form; where they do exist, they are almostinvariably mingled in an inextricable confusion. 

Whether we agree or not with the general condemnation of reviewingimplicit in this survey of the situation, or with the division ofcriticism itself, we have every reason to be grateful to Mr Eliot fordisentangling the problem for us. The question of criticism has becomerather like Glaucus the sea-god, encrusted with shells and hung withweed till his lineaments are hardly discernible. We have at least clearsight of him now, and we are able to decide whether we will accept MrEliot's description of him. Let us see. 

We have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism ofliterature is a kind apart. The historical critic approaches literatureas the manifestation of an evolutionary process in which all the phasesare of equal value. Essentially, he has no concern with the greater orless literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces--theirexistence is alone sufficient for him; a bad book is as important as agood one, and much more important than a good one if it exercised, asbad books have a way of doing, a real influence on the course ofliterature. In practice, it is true, the historical critic generallyfails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity. He either begins bymaking judgments of value for himself, or accepts those judgments whichhave been endorsed by tradition. He fastens upon a number of outstandingfigures and more or less deliberately represents the process as fromculmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitraryforeshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phaseswhich he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of thegroup of writers which it includes. The individuality, the quintessence, of a writer lies completely outside his view. 

We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least intheory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as theauthor of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can weisolate the philosophic critic in the same way? And what exactly _is_ aphilosophic critic? Is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in whichart and literature have their places, a critic who therefore approachesliterature with a definite conception of it as one among many parallelmanifestations of the human spirit, and with a system of values derivedfrom his metaphysical scheme? Hegel and Croce are philosophical criticsin this sense, and Aristotle is not, as far as we can judge from thePoetics, wherein he considers the literary work of Greece as an isolatedphenomenon, and examines it in and for itself. But for the moment, andwith the uneasy sense that we have not thoroughly laid the ghost ofphilosophic criticism, we will assume that we have isolated him, andpass to the consideration of the pure literary critic, if indeed we canfind him. 

What does he do? How shall we recognise him? Mr Eliot puts before usColeridge and Aristotle and Dryden as literary critics _par excellence_arranged in an ascending scale of purity. The concatenation is curious, for these were men possessed of very different interests and facultiesof mind; and it would occur to few to place Dryden, as a critic, attheir head. The living centre of Aristotle's criticism is a conceptionof art as a means to a good life. As an activity, poetry 'is morephilosophic than history, ' a nearer approach to the universal truth inappearances; and as a more active influence, drama refines our spiritualbeing by a purgation of pity and terror. Indeed, it would not be anexaggeration to say that the very pith and marrow of Aristotle'sliterary criticism is a system of moral values derived from hiscontemplation of life. It was necessary that this relation should exist, because for Aristotle literature was, essentially, an imitation of lifethough we must remember to understand imitation according to our finalsense of the theme which is the golden, persistent thread throughout thePoetics. The imitation of life in literature was for Aristotle, thecreative revelation of the ideal actively at work in human life. Thetragic hero failed because his composition was less than ideal; but hecould only be a tragic hero if the ideal was implicit in him and hevisibly approximated to it. It is this constant reference to the idealwhich makes of 'imitation' a truly creative principle and the one which, properly understood, is the most permanently valid and pregnant of all;it is also one which has been constantly misunderstood. Its importanceis, nevertheless, so central that adequate recognition of it mightconceivably be taken as the distinguishing mark of all fruitfulcriticism. 

To his sympathetic understanding of this principle Coleridge owed agreat debt. It is true that his efforts to refine upon it were not onlyunsuccessful, but a trifle ludicrous; his effort to graft the vaguetranscendentalism of Germany on to the rigour and clarity of Aristotlewas, from the outset, unfortunately conceived. But the root of thematter was there, and in Coleridge's fertile mind the Aristoteliantheory of imitation flowered into a magnificent conception of thevalidity and process of the poetic imagination. And partly because thefoundation was truly Aristotelian, partly because Coleridge had knownwhat it was to be a great poet, the reference to life pervades thewhole of what is permanently valuable in Coleridge's criticism. In him, too, there is a strict and mutually fertilising relation between themoral and the æsthetic values. This is the firm ground beneath his feetwhen he--too seldom--proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisiteæsthetic discrimination. 

In Dryden, however, there was no such organic interpenetration. Dryden, too, had a fine sensibility, though less exquisite, by far, than that ofColeridge; but his theoretical system was not merely alien to him--itwas in itself false and mistaken. _Corruptio optimi pessima_. He tookover from France the sterilised and lifeless Aristotelianism which hasbeen the plague of criticism for centuries; he used it no worse than hisFrench exemplars, but he used it very little better than they. It was inhis hands, as in theirs, a dead mechanical framework of rules about theunities. Dryden, we can see in his critical writing, was constantlychafed by it. He behaves like a fine horse with a bearing rein: he iscontinually tossing his head after a minute or two of 'good manners andaction, ' and saying, 'Shakespeare was the best of them, anyhow';'Chaucer beats Ovid to a standstill. ' It is a gesture with which alldecent people sympathise and when it is made in language so supple asDryden's prose it has a lasting charm. Dryden's heart was in the rightplace, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him acritic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company ofAristotle and Coleridge. 

Our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous. We haveseen that there is a sense in which Dryden is a purer literary criticthan either Coleridge or Aristotle; but we have also seen that it isprecisely by reason of the 'pureness' in him that he is to be relegatedinto a rank inferior to theirs. It looks as though we might have topronounce that the true literary critic is the philosophic critic. Yetthe pronouncement must not be prematurely made; for there is a real andvital difference between those for whom we have accepted the designationof philosophic critics, Hegel or Croce, and Aristotle or Coleridge. Yetthree of these (and it might be wise to include Coleridge as a fourth)were professional philosophers. It is evidently not the philosophy assuch that makes the difference. 

The difference depends, we believe, upon the nature of the philosophy. The secret lies in Aristotle. The true literary critic must have ahumanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, subject to anintimate, organic governance, by an ideal of the good life. He is notthe mere investigator of facts; existence is never for him synonymouswith value, and it is of the utmost importance that he should never bedeluded into believing that it is. He will not accept from Hegel thethesis that all the events of human history, all man's spiritualactivities, are equally authentic manifestations of Spirit; he will noteven recognise the existence of Spirit. He may accept from Croce thethesis that art is the expression of intuitions, but he will not beextravagantly grateful, because his duty as a critic is to distinguishbetween intuitions and to decide that one is more significant thananother. A philosophy of art that lends him no aid in this and affordsno indication why the expression of one intuition should be preferred tothe expression of another is of little value to him. He will incline tosay that Hegel and Croce are the scientists of art rather than itsphilosophers. 

Here, then, is the opposition: between the philosophy that borrows itsvalues from science and the philosophy which shares its values with art. We may put it with more cogency and truth: the opposition lies between aphilosophy without values and a philosophy based upon them. For valuesare human, anthropocentric. Shut them out once and you shut them out forever. You do not get them back, as some believe, by declaring that suchand such a thing is true. Nothing is precious because it is true save toa mind which has, consciously or unconsciously, decided that it is goodto know the truth. And the making of that single decision is a mostmomentous judgment of value. If the scientist appeals to it, as indeedhe invariably does, he too is at bottom, though he may deny it, ahumanist. He would do better to confess it, and to confess that he toois in search of the good life. Then he might become aware that to searchfor the good life is in fact impossible, unless he has an ideal of itbefore his mind's eye. 

An ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence andthe organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably be æsthetic_. Thereis no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine orconceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms. We say, forinstance, the good life is that in which man has achieved a harmony ofthe diverse elements in his soul. For the good life, we knowinstinctively, is one of our human absolutes. It is not good withreference to any end outside itself. A man does not live the good lifebecause he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen because he livesthe good life. And here we touch the secret of the most magnificentlyhuman of all books that has ever been written--Plato's _Republic_. Inthe _Republic_ the good life and the life of the good citizen areidentified; but the citizenship is not of an earthly but of an idealcity, whose proportions, like the duties of its citizens, are determinedby the æsthetic intuition. Plato's philosophy is æsthetic through andthrough, and because it is æsthetic it is the most human, the mostpermanently pregnant of all philosophies. Much labour has been spent onthe examination of the identity which Plato established between the goodand the beautiful. It is labour lost, for that identity is axiomatic, absolute, irreducible. The Greeks knew by instinct that it is so, and intheir common speech the word for a gentleman was the _kalos kagathos_, the beautiful-good. 

This is why we have to go back to the Greeks for the principles of artand criticism, and why only those critics who have returned to bathethemselves in the life-giving source have made enduring contributions tocriticism. They alone are--let us not say philosophic criticsbut--critics indeed. Their approach to life and their approach to artare the same; to them, and to them alone, life and art are one. Theinterpenetration is complete; the standards by which life and art arejudged the same. If we may use a metaphor, in the Greek view art is theconsciousness of life. Poetry is more philosophic and more highlyserious than history, just as the mind of a man is more significant thanhis outward gestures. To make those gestures significant the art of theactor must be called into play. So to make the outward event of historysignificant the poet's art is needed. Therefore a criticism which isbased on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the placeof sovereignty in its scheme of values. That Plato himself did not dothis was due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of'imitation' in which art consists; but only the superficial readers ofPlato--and a good many readers deserve no better name--will concludefrom the fact that he rejected art that his attitude was notfundamentally æsthetic. Not only is the _Republic_ itself one of thegreatest 'imitations, ' one of the most subtle and profound works of artever created, but it would also be true to say that Plato cleared theway for a true conception of art. In reality he rejected not art, butfalse art; and it only remained for Aristotle to discern the nature ofthe relation between artistic 'imitation' and the ideal for the Platonicsystem to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and aneverlasting foundation for art and the criticism of art. 

Art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life. As the ideal isactive and organic so must art itself be. The ideal is never achieved, therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense ofthe word. More than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can manappreciate or imagine the ideal at all. To discern it is essentially thework of divination or intuition. The artist divines the end at whichhuman life is aiming; he makes men who are his characters completelyexpressive of themselves, which no actual man ever has been. If he workson a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive ofhimself. That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresseshimself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation. He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may betolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, whichare so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ ofhimself would inevitably end in confusion. That is why the great poeticgenius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as oftenas not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical. 

Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act inthe world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation tothe absolute ideal. In subordinating its particular intuitions to theabsolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereignautonomy. True criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activityof art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and notthe imposition of an alien. To use our previous metaphor, as art is theconsciousness of life, criticism is the consciousness of art. Theessential activity of true criticism is the harmonious control of art byart. This is at the root of a confusion in the thought of Mr. Eliot, who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of art, pronouncesthat the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle theanomalous Aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that 'he wrotewell about everything, ' and has, moreover, to elevate Dryden to a purplewhich he is quite unfitted to wear. No, what distinguishes the truecritic of poetry is a truly æsthetic philosophy. In the present stateof society it is extremely probable that only the poet or the artistwill possess this, for art and poetry were never more profoundlydivorced from the ordinary life of society than they are at the presentday. But the poet who would be a critic has to make his æstheticphilosophy conscious to himself; to him as a poet it may be unconscious. This necessary change from unconsciousness to consciousness is by nomeans easy, and we should do well to insist upon its difficulty, forquite as much nonsense is talked about poetry by poets and by artistsabout art as by the profane about either. Moreover, it is important toremember that in proportion as society approaches the ideal--there is nocontinual progress towards the ideal; at present society is as farremoved from it as it has ever been--the chance of the philosopher, ofthe scientist even, becoming a true critic of art grows greater. Whenthe æsthetic basis of all humane activity is familiarly recognised, thevalues of the philosopher, the scientist, and the artist becomeconsciously the same, and therefore interchangeable. 

Still, the ideal society is sufficiently remote for us to disregard it, and we shall say that the principle of art for art's sake contains anelement of truth when it is opposed to those who would inflict upon artthe values of science, of metaphysics, or of a morality of mereconvention. We shall also say that the principle of art for art's sakeneeds to be understood and interpreted very differently. Itsimplications are tremendous. Art is autonomous, and to be pursued forits own sake, precisely because it comprehends the whole of human life;because it has reference to a more perfectly human morality than otheractivity of man; because, in so far as it is truly art, it is indicativeof a more comprehensive and unchallengeable harmony in the spirit ofman. It does not demand impossibilities, that man should be at one withthe universe or in tune with the infinite; but it does envisage thehighest of all attainable ideals, that man should be at one withhimself, obedient to his own most musical law. 

Thus art reveals to us the principle of its own governance. The functionof criticism is to apply it. Obviously it can be applied only by him whohas achieved, if not the actual æsthetic ideal in life, at least avision and a sense of it. He alone will know that the principle he hasto elucidate and apply is living, organic. It is indeed the veryprinciple of artistic creation itself. Therefore he will approach whatclaims to be a work of art first as a thing in itself, and seek with itthe most intimate and immediate contact in order that he may decidewhether it too is organic and living. He will be untiring in his effortto refine his power of discrimination by the frequentation of the finestwork of the past, so that he may be sure of himself when he decides, ashe must, whether the object before him is the expression of an æstheticintuition at all. At the best he is likely to find that it is mixed andvarious; that fragments of æsthetic vision jostle with unsubordinatedintellectual judgments. 

But, in regarding the work of art as a thing in itself, he will neverforget the hierarchy of comprehension, that the active ideal of art isindeed to see life steadily and see it whole, and that only he has aclaim to the title of a great artist whose work manifests an incessantgrowth from a merely personal immediacy to a coherent andall-comprehending attitude to life. The great artist's work is in allits parts a revelation of the ideal as a principle of activity in humanlife. As the apprehension of the ideal is more or less perfect, theartist's comprehension will be greater or less. The critic has notmerely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and Shakespeare, between Dante and Milton, between Cezanne and Michelangelo, Beethovenand Mozart. If the foundations of his criticism are truly æsthetic, heis compelled to believe and to show that among would-be artists some aretrue artists and some are not, and that among true artists some aregreater than others. That what has generally passed under the name ofæsthetic criticism assumes as an axiom that every true work of art isunique and incomparable is merely the paradox which betrays theunworthiness of such criticism to bear the name it has arrogated toitself. The function of true criticism is to establish a definitehierarchy among the great artists of the past, as well as to test theproduction of the present; by the combination of these activities itasserts the organic unity of all art. It cannot honestly be said thatour present criticism is adequate to either task. 

[APRIL, 1920. 

_The Religion of Rousseau_

These are times when men have need of the great solitaries; for each mannow in his moment is a prey to the conviction that the world and hisdeepest aspirations are incommensurable. He is shaken by a presentimentthat the lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human mindsput out in a conflict for something which never can be won in the clashof material arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as achild pitifully wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoesthe strange word 'Peace. ' Therefore he too wanders pitifully like thatchild, seeking peace, and men are become the symbols of mankind. Thetragic paradox of human life which slumbers in the soul in years ofpeace is awakened again. When we would be solitary and cannot, we aremade sensible of the depth and validity of the impulse which moved thesolitaries of the past. 

The paradox is apparent now on every hand. It appears in the death ofthe author of _La Formation Réligieuse de J. J. Rousseau_. [1] One of themost distinguished of the younger generation of French scholar-critics, M. Masson met a soldier's death before the book to which he had devotedten years of his life was published. He had prepared it for the press inthe leisure hours of the trenches. There he had communed with theunquiet spirit of the man who once thrilled the heart of Europe bystammering forgotten secrets, and whispered to an age flushed andconfident with material triumphs that the battle had been won in vain. Rousseau, rightly understood is no consoling companion for a soldier. What if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenarybeatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the Lake ofBienne? What if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free butis everywhere in chains? Let us hope that the dead author was not tookeenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice. Hisdeath would have been bitter. 

 [Footnote 1: _La Formation Réligieuse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau_. Par Pierre Maurice Masson. (Paris: Hachette. Three volumes. )]

From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. His method would speakagainst it. Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one ofthe last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequateto the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made. He had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense noreal history can be written. Chronology was meaningless to him becausehe could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. With him endswere beginnings. In the third _Dialogue_ he tell us--and it is nothingless than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well--that hisworks must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those whowould understand him. Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense thanis imagined by those who take the parable called the _Contrat Social_for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie tohistory. In himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grewyounger with years. He might be known as the man of the second childhood_par excellence_. To the eye of history the effort of his soul was aneffort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for aperspective of progress. On his after-dinner journey to Diderot atVincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that thatprogress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived solong was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld the soul of man _subspecie æternitatis_. In his vision history and institutions dissolvedaway. His second childhood had begun. 

On such a man the historical method can have no grip. There is, as theFrench say, no _engrenage_. It points to a certain lack of the subtlerkind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly, perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years beenimported into French criticism from Germany. The Sorbonne has not, weknow, gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation'ssake. M. Masson's three volumes leave us with the sense that theirauthor had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight ofthe momentous question whether Jean-Jacques was a person to whom itmight be applied with a prospect of discovery. No one who read Rousseauwith a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter. Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point. The Savoyard Vicar wasspeaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession offaith with the words:--

 'Je ne veux argumenter avec vous, ni même de tenter vous convaincre; il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicité de mon coeur. Consultez le vôtre pendant mon discours; c'est tout ce que je vous demande. '

To the extent, therefore, that M. Masson did not respond to this appealand filled his volumes with information concerning the booksJean-Jacques might have read and a hundred other interesting but onlypartly relevant things, he did the citizen of Geneva a wrong. Theulterior motive is there, and the faint taste of a thesis in the mostmodern manner. But the method is saved by the perception which, thoughit sometimes lacks the perfect keenness of complete understanding, isexquisite enough to suggest the answer to the questions it does notsatisfy. Though the environment is lavish the man is not lost. 

It is but common piety to seek to understand Jean-Jacques in the way inwhich he pleaded so hard to be understood. Yet it is now over fortyyears since a voice of authority told England how it was to regard him. Lord Morley was magisterial and severe, and England obeyed. One feelsalmost that Jean-Jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive. He would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was 'a ragof metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism, ' and he wouldhave whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his_Dialogues_ described as the outpourings of a man with persecutionmania, he might have rebelled and muttered silently an _Eppur si muove_. We see now that it was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, andthat precisely those _Dialogues_ which the then Mr Morley so powerfullydismissed contain his plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction. Tohis contention that he wrote his books to ease his own soul it might bereplied that their publication was a social act which had vast socialconsequences. But Jean-Jacques might well retort that the fact that hiscontemporaries and the generation which followed read and judged him inthe letter and not in the spirit is no reason why we, at nearly twocenturies remove, should do the same. 

A great man may justly claim our deference, if Jean-Jacques asks thathis last work shall be read first we are bound, even if we consider itonly a quixotic humour, to indulge it. But to those who read theneglected _Dialogues_ it will appear a humour no longer. Here is a manwho at the end of his days is filled to overflowing with bitterness atthe thought that he has been misread and misunderstood. He says tohimself: Either he is at bottom of the same nature as other men or he isdifferent. If he is of the same nature, then there must be a malignantplot at work. He has revealed his heart with labour and good faith; notto hear him his fellow-men must have stopped their ears. If he is ofanother kind than his fellows, then--but he cannot bear the thought. Indeed it is a thought that no man can bear. They are blind because theywill not see. He has not asked them to believe that what he says istrue; he asks only that they shall believe that he is sincere, sincerein what he says, sincere, above all, when he implores that they shouldlisten to the undertone. He has been 'the painter of nature and thehistorian of the human heart. '

His critics might have paused to consider why Jean-Jacques, certainlynot niggard of self-praise in the _Dialogues_, should have claimed nomore for himself than this. He might have claimed, with what in theireyes at least must be good right, to have been pre-eminent in hiscentury as a political philosopher, a novelist, and a theorist ofeducation. Yet to himself he is no more than 'the painter of nature andthe historian of the human heart. ' Those who would make him more makehim less, because they make him other than he declares himself to be. His whole life has been an attempt to be himself and nothing elsebesides; and all his works have been nothing more and nothing less thanhis attempt to make his own nature plain to men. Now at the end of hislife he has to swallow the bitterness of failure. He has been acclaimedthe genius of his age; kings have delighted to honour him, but they havehonoured another man. They have not known the true Jean-Jacques. Theyhave taken his parables for literal truth, and he knows why. 

 'Des êtres si singulièrement constitués doivent nécessairement s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. Il est impossible qu'avec des âmes si différemment modifiés ils ne portent pas dans l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idées l'empreinte de ces modifications. Si cette empreinte échappe à ceux qui n'ont aucune notion de cette manière d'être, elle ne peut échapper à ceux qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectés eux-mêmes. C'est une signe caracteristique auquel les initiés se reconnoissent entre eux; et ce qui donne un grand prix à ce signe, c'est qu'il ne peut se contrefaire, que jamais il n'agit qu'au niveau de sa source, et que, quand il ne part pas du coeur de ceux qui l'imitent, il n'arrive pas non plus aux coeurs faits pour le distinguer; mais sitôt qu'il y parvient, on ne sauroit s'y méprendre; il est vrai dès qu'il est senti. '

At the end of his days he felt that the great labour of his life whichhad been to express an intuitive certainty in words which would carryintellectual conviction, had been in vain, and his last words are: 'Itis true so soon as it is felt. '

Three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his 'religiousformation' as three volumes. At Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens, as aboy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul. In Paris, amid theintellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the Encyclopædists, thememory of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience. Hisboyish unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticismof the great pioneers of enlightenment and progress. Yet when all hadbeen destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied. Underneathhis passionate admiration for Diderot smouldered a spark of resentmentthat he was not understood. They had torn down the fabric of expressioninto which he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty as aboy; sometimes with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart hesurveyed the ruins. But the certainty that he had once been certain, thememory and the desire of the past peace--this they could not destroy. They could hardly even weaken this element within him, for they did notknow that it existed, they were unable to conceive that it could exist. Jean-Jacques himself could give them no clue to its existence; he hadno words, and he was still under the spell of the intellectual dogma ofhis age that words must express definite things. In common with his agehe had lost the secret of the infinite persuasion of poetry. So theconsciousness that he was different from those who surrounded him, andfrom those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. He was afraid ofhis own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge oftheir own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. Thepathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge isapparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman. ' In thenote which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses tothis ideal. If only he could become 'one of them, ' indistinguishablewithout and within, he might be delivered from that disquieting sense oftongue-tied queerness in a normal world. 

If he cheated himself at all, the deception was brief. The poignantmemory of Les Charmettes whispered to him that there was a state ofgrace in which the hard things were made clear. But he had not yet thecourage of his destiny. His consciousness of his separation from hisfellows had still to harden into a consciousness of superiority beforethat courage would come. On the road to Vincennes on an October eveningin 1749--M. Masson has fixed the date for us--he read in a news-sheetthe question of the Dijon Academy: 'Si le rétablissement des arts et dessciences a contribué à épurer les moeurs?' The scales dropped from hiseyes and the weight was removed from his tongue. There is no mysteryabout this 'revelation. ' For the first time the question had been putin terms which struck him squarely in the heart. Jean-Jacques made hisreply with the stammering honesty of a man of genius wandering in age oftalent. 

The First Discourse seems to many rhetorical and extravagant. In afterdays it appeared so to Rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for itthan that he had tried to tell the truth. Before he learned that he hadwon the Dijon prize and that his work had taken Paris by storm, he wassurely a prey to terrors lest his Vincennes vision of the non-existenceof progress should have been mere madness. The success reassured him. 'Cette faveur du public, nullement brigué, et pour un auteur inconnu, medonna la première assurance véritable de mon talent. ' He was, in fact, not 'queer, ' but right; and he had seemed to be queer precisely becausehe was right. Now he had the courage. 'Je suis grossier, ' he wrote inthe preface to _Narcisse_, 'maussade, impoli par principes; je me fousde tous vous autres gens de cour; je suis un barbare. ' There is a touchof exaggeration and bravado in it all. He was still something of thechild hallooing in the dark to give himself heart. He clutched hold ofmaterial symbols of the freedom he had won, round wig, black stockings, and a living gained by copying music at so much a line. But he did notbreak with his friends; the 'bear' suffered himself to be made a lion. He had still a foot in either camp, for though he had the convictionthat he was right, he was still fumbling for his words. The memoirs ofMadame d'Epinay tell us how in 1754, at dinner at Mlle Quinault's, impotent to reply to the polite atheistical persiflage of the company, he broke out: 'Et moi, messieurs, je crois en Dieu. Je sors si vousdites un mot de plus. ' That was not what he meant; neither was the FirstDiscourse what he meant. He had still to find his language, and to findhis language he had to find his peace. He was like a twig whirled aboutin an eddy of a stream. Suddenly the stream bore him to Geneva, where hereturned to the church which he had left at Confignon. That, too, wasnot what he meant. When he returned from Geneva, Madame d'Epinay hadbuilt him the Ermitage. 

In the _Rêveries_, which are mellow with the golden calm of hisdiscovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which hehad set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitageto inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once forall his opinions and his principles. In the exquisite third _Rêverie_two phrases occur continually. His purpose was 'to find firmground'--'prendre une assiette, '--and his means to this discovery was'spiritual honesty'--'bonne foi. ' Rousseau's deep concern was toelucidate the anatomy of his own soul, but, since he was sincere, heregarded it as a type of the soul of man. Looking into himself, he sawthat, in spite of all his follies, his weaknesses, his faintings by theway, his blasphemies against the spirit, he was good. Therefore hedeclared: Man is born good. Looking into himself he saw that he was freeto work out his own salvation, and to find that solid foundation ofpeace which he so fervently desired. Therefore he declared: Man is bornfree. To the whisper of les Charmettes that there was a condition ofgrace had been added the sterner voice of remorse for his abandonedchildren, telling him that he had fallen from his high estate. 

 'J'ai fui en vain; partout j'ai retrouvé la Loi. Il faut céder enfin! ô porte, il faut admettre L'hôte; coeur frémissant, il faut subir le maître, Quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-même que moi. '

The noble verse of M. Claudel contains the final secret of Jean-Jacques. He found in himself something more him than himself. Therefore hedeclared: There is a God. But he sought to work out a logical foundationfor these pinnacles of truth. He must translate these luminousconvictions of his soul into arguments and conclusions. He could not, even to himself, admit that they were only intuitions; and in the_Contrat Social_ he turned the reason to the service of a certainty nother own. 

This unremitting endeavour to express an intuitive certainty inintellectual terms lies at the root of the many superficialcontradictions in his work, and of the deeper contradiction which forms, as it were, the inward rhythm of his three great books. He seems tosurge upwards on a passionate wave of revolutionary ideas, only to sinkback into the calm of conservative or quietist conclusions. M. Massonhas certainly observed it well. 

 'Le premier _Discours_ anathématise les sciences et les arts, et ne voit le salut que dans les académies; le _Discours sur l'Inégalité_ paraît détruire tout autorité, et recommande pourtant "l'obéissance scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs": la _Nouvelle Héloïse_ prêche d'abord l'émancipation sentimentale, et proclame la suprématie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit à exalter la fidelité conjugale, à consolider les grands devoirs familiaux et sociaux. Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la même surprise. '

To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary;to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only aman stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi, ' and, like many men devouredby the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed inhis similitude to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tièdes, ' he wroteto Madame Latour in 1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'estpas digne de moi. ' There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds moreplainly still in the _Dialogues_. He, too, was persecuted forrighteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom ofheaven was within men. 

And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification andthe peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preservingconclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt torecord truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of themarket-place. The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the manso that he writes believing that all men will understand. He wakes inthe morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth hedoes not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. Theywill read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes willsee the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. The_mystique_ as Péguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_. To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseauturns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hardsaying, that the things which are Cæsar's shall be rendered unto Cæsar. 

In the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which havebeen discovered in Rousseau's work fade away. That famous confusionconcerning 'the natural man, ' whom he presents to us now as a historicfact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques, but in the minds of his critics. The _Contrat Social_ is a parable ofthe soul of man, like the _Republic_ of Plato. The truth of the humansoul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history isirrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal. And as for thenature of this truth, 'it is true so soon as it is felt. ' When theSavoyard Vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism ofreligious dogma, turned to the Gospel story with the immortal 'Ce n'estpas ainsi qu'on invente, ' he was only anticipating what Jean-Jacques wasto say of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his workwhich could not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of itssource. We may call Jean-Jacques religious because we have no otherword; but the word would be more truly applied to the reverence felttowards such a man than to his own emotion. He was driven to speak ofGod by the habit of his childhood and the deficiency of a languageshaped by the intellect and not by the soul. But his deity was one whomneither the Catholic nor the Reformed Church could accept, for He wastruly a God who does not dwell in temples made with hands. The respecthe owed to God, said the Vicar, was such that he could affirm nothing ofHim. And, again, still more profoundly, he said, 'He is to our soulswhat our soul is to our body. ' That is the mystical utterance of a manwho was no mystic, but of one who found his full communion in thebeatific _dolce far niente_ of the Lake of Bienne. Jean-Jacques was setapart from his generation, because, like Malvolio, he thought highly ofthe soul and in nowise approved the conclusions of his fellows; and hewas fortunate to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call hismadness (which was indeed only his flaming and uncomprehendingindignation at the persecution inevitably meted out by those who haveonly a half truth to one who has the whole), because he enjoyed thecertainty that his high appraisement of the soul was justified. 

[MARCH, 1918. 

_The Poetry of Edward Thomas_

We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruinswith which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life whichdisaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of EdwardThomas. [2] They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of apalimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness moreresonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be likea phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city. Therewill be the triumphal arch standing proudly; the very tombs of the deadwill seem to share its monumental magnificence. Yet we will turn fromthem all, from the victory and sorrow alike, to this faintly gleamingbubble of glass that will hold captive the phantasm of a fragrance ofthe soul. By it some dumb and doubtful knowledge will be evoked totremble on the edge of our minds. We shall reach back, under its spell, beyond the larger impulses of a resolution and a resignation which willhave become a part of history, to something less solid and morepermanent over which they passed and which they could not disturb. 

 [Footnote 2: _Last Poems_. By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount. )]

Our consciousness will have its record. The tradition of England inbattle has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will becompassed about by a crowd of witnesses. But it might so nearly havebeen in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at theconclusions of our consciousness. The subtler faiths might so easilyhave fled through our harsh fingers. When the sound of the bugles died, having crowned reveillé with the equal challenge of the last post, howeasily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if therehad not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the windsand trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make usfirst doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses ofwhich it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinessesand immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound ofspeech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itselfcrumbles into dust--this very texture of the life of the soul might havebeen a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheedinghad not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which itappears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the moregorgeous woof. 

The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away. To exacter knowledge lesscharted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow wecannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange masteryover us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human butonly humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard;beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel oursouls. So the sedge-warbler's

 'Song that lacks all words, all melody, All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words. '

Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this deadpoet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been, both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. Becausehe was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They madethe soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind'sideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but tosomething beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, orby some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns. But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmlyinto 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternalpresent on whose pinnacle we stand. 

 'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing; Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember. No garden appears, no path, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end. '

So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. We come no longertrailing clouds of glory. We are that which we are, less and more thanour strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend fromon high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. Yet our chosen spiritis not wholly secure in his courage. He longs not merely to know in whatundifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover itbeautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of thetruth; the truth must wear a familiar colour. 

 'This heart, some fraction of me, happily Floats through the window even now to a tree Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale, Not like a peewit that returns to wail For something it has lost, but like a dove That slants unswerving to its home and love. There I find my rest, and through the dark air Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there. '

Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence withthe truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger farthan the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty ofman's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay. Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is homeindeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. Thatwhich we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not deludeourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any morethan we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the otherstars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of theuniverse; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate. '

And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common propertyof the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and fromwhat will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; andthat the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which thisknowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among hiscontemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in thehinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of theline which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscioussubtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden andfamiliar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps mostapparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and hishome no home at all. 

 'This is my grief. That land, My home, I have never seen. No traveller tells of it, However far he has been. 

 'And could I discover it I fear my happiness there, Or my pain, might be dreams of return To the things that were. '

Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to hisdestiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows ofnecessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men mayknow more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from themagnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The knowntruth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of thetruth stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universegrows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his littlelamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a darkforest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all. Yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he mustat each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognisewhat is and celebrate it as what must be. Thus he regains, by anotherpath, the supremacy which he has forsaken. 

Edward Thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. It may besaid that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe ofthe past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. It is, evenin material fact, but half true. None more closely than he regarded theliving things of earth in all their quarters. 'After Rain' is, forinstance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment, freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves

 '. . . Thinly spread In the road, like little black fish, inlaid As if they played. '

But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of themore profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There hediscovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddyin the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, consciousof perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of whichonly the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the wakingmind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimesin the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, andirrecoverable. 

 'The simple lack Of her is more to me Than other's presence, Whether life splendid be Or utter black. 

 'I have not seen, I have no news of her; I can tell only She is not here, but there She might have been. 

 'She is to be kissed Only perhaps by me; She may be seeking Me and no other; she May not exist. '

That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register itswistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on. If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas's poetical quest, he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reachesfurther. In the verses on his 'home, ' which we have already quoted, hepasses beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experienceof the soul fronting its own infinity:--

 'So memory made Parting to-day a double pain: First because it was parting; next Because the ill it ended vexed And mocked me from the past again. Not as what had been remedied Had I gone on, --not that, ah no! But as itself no longer woe. '

There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those whohave been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessantnot-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest themovement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it wasthat the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity ofbecoming haunted and held him most. 

 'Often I had gone this way before, But now it seemed I never could be And never had been anywhere else. '

To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we striveto cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something thatwas not instantly engulfed--

 'In the undefined Abyss of what can never be again. '

Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have feltas the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with noneof the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he graspedat the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word, ' repeatedevery spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was oldwhen the gods were young, ' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'ANew House. '

 'All was foretold me; naught Could I foresee; But I learned how the wind would sound After these things should be. '

But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in theenduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soulitself. The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this bookis that entitled 'The Other, ' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal, shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to createthe myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating theunknown of his emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use ofthis instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other'tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul. 

 'And now I dare not follow after Too close. I try to keep in sight, Dreading his frown and worse his laughter, I steal out of the wood to light; I see the swift shoot from the rafter By the window: ere I alight I wait and hear the starlings wheeze And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight. He goes: I follow: no release Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease. '

No; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest isread with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one whohad many (and among them the chief) of the qualities of a great poet. Edward Thomas was like a musician who noted down themes that summon upforgotten expectations. Whether the genius to work them out to thelimits of their scope and implication was in him we do not know. Thelife of literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunityhe would eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. But, ifhis compositions do not, his themes will never fail--of so much we aresure--to awaken unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds. 

[JANUARY 1919. 

_Mr Yeats's Swan Song_

In the preface to _The Wild Swans at Coole_, [3] Mr W. B. Yeats speaks of'the phantasmagoria through which alone I can express my convictionsabout the world. ' The challenge could hardly be more direct. At thethreshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which givesus the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enterin. There are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verseswritten in the seeming-strong vernacular of literary Dublin, as it werea hospitable bench placed outside the door. They are indeed inside thehouse, but by accident or for temporary shelter. They do not, as thephrase goes, belong to the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions ofthe common reality, whether found in the sensible world or the emotionof the mind. They are, from Mr Yeats's angle of vision (as indeed fromour own), essentially _vers d'occasion. _

 [Footnote 3: _The Wild Swans at Coole_. By W. B. Yeats. (Macmillan. )]

The poet's high and passionate argument must be sought elsewhere, andprecisely in his expression of his convictions about the world. Andhere, on the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall findphantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwiseconveyed, at least by Mr Yeats. To this, in itself, we make no demur. The poet, if he is a true poet, is driven to approach the highestreality he can apprehend. He cannot transcribe it simply because he doesnot possess the necessary apparatus of knowledge, and because if he didpossess it his passion would flag. It is not often that Spinoza candisengage himself to write as he does at the beginning of the third bookof the Ethics, nor could Lucretius often kindle so great a fire in hissoul as that which made his material incandescent in _Æneadum genetrix_. Therefore the poet turns to myth as a foundation upon which he canexplicate his imagination. He may take his myth from legend or familiarhistory, or he may create one for himself anew, but the function itfulfils is always the same. It supplies the elements with which he canbuild the structure of his parable, upon which he can make it elaborateenough to convey the multitudinous reactions of his soul to the world. 

But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. Thestructural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility. The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain willrise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience. . . . 'And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his ownmyth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to becondemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantasticshapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfectembodiment, the discipline of the common perception. The phantoms of theindividual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity andbecome like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms theyshould be. For the poet himself must move securely among his visions;they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are. To anchorthem he needs intelligible myth. Nothing less than a supremely greatgenius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmarkvisible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great geniusand was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his passion gavestability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes becausethey are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite workthere is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognisethe austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria of thedreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. LikeJacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel andwould not let him go. 

The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman;yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which apoet may plunge into the world of phantasms. Mr Yeats has too little ofthe power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. Heknows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. But the veryterms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense ofimpotence:--

 Hands, do what you're bid; Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed. 

The languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poethas failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression ofan ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness tothe poet's minor probity. He remains an artist by determination, eventhough he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry. We were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majesticisolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit. Subsequently they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty. Although ithas little mysterious and haunting beauty, _The Wild Swans at Coole_ isindeed a swan song. It is eloquent of final defeat; the following of alonely path has ended in the poet's sinking exhausted in a wilderness ofgray. Not even the regret is passionate; it is pitiful. 

 'I am worn out with dreams, A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams; And all day long I look Upon this lady's beauty As though I had found in book A pictured beauty, Pleased to have filled the eyes Or the discerning ears, Delighted to be but wise, For men improve with the years; And yet, and yet Is this my dream, or the truth? O would that we had met When I had my burning youth; But I grow old among dreams, A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams. '

It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poetmistakes the cause of his sorrow. He is worn out not with dreams, butwith the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creativeenergy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he hasmerely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew. Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road thatvanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there isno way back to the past. 

 'My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor; No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. '

It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We donot know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only inand for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whosecreative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demandsupon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enrichinghis vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverishment, asof all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware. 

 'I would find by the edge of that water The collar-bone of a hare, Worn thin by the lapping of the water, And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare At the old bitter world where they marry in churches, And laugh over the untroubled water At all who marry in churches, Through the white thin bone of a hare. '

Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all itsbitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet worldof imagination. Mr Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that tocontemplate it was sufficient. Had he been a great poet he would havemade it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech. Byre-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have builtlandmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his lastdiscovery had ended. But now there remains nothing but a handful of thesymbols with which he was content:--

 'A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest; And right between these two a girl at play. '

These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and, alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live. 

Whether Mr Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria forthe product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we prefer tobelieve) he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose andfailed, we cannot certainly say. Of this, however, we are certain, thatsomehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He hasthe apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forcedto fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him. That it is an insufficient reserve let this passage show:--

 'For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence, And should they paint or write still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade. The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality. . . . '

Mr Yeats is neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist. He is by structureand impulse an artist. But structure and impulse are not enough. Passionate apprehension must be added to them. Because this is lackingin Mr Yeats those lines, concerned though they are with things he holdsmost dear, are prose and not poetry. 

[APRIL, 1919. 

_The Wisdom of Anatole France_

How few are the wise writers who remain to us? They are so few that itseems, at moments, that wisdom, like justice of old, is withdrawing fromthe world, and that when their fullness of years is accomplished, as, alas! it soon must be, the wise men who will leave us will have been thelast of their kind. It is true that something akin to wisdom, or rathera quality whose outward resemblance to wisdom can deceive all but theelect, will emerge from the ruins of war; but true wisdom is not createdout of the catastrophic shock of disillusionment. An unexpected disasteris always held to be in some sort undeserved. Yet the impulse to rail atdestiny, be it never so human, is not wise. Wisdom is not bitter; atworst it is bitter-sweet, and bitter-sweet is the most subtle andlingering savour of all. 

Let us not say in our haste, that without wisdom we are lost. Wisdom is, after all, but one attitude to life among many. It happens to be the onewhich will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for allill-usage. But hard wear is not the only purpose which an attitude mayserve. We may demand of an attitude that it should enable us to exactthe utmost from ourselves. To refuse to accommodate oneself to theangularities of life or to make provision beforehand for itscatastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly. It is, atall events, a folly to which poets incline. But poets are not wise;indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best, be but dimly imagined. Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largestinkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by anaptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of noaccount. To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not tohave acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with animagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when noecstasy remains, one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublimeself-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side ofdestiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers whichhave overwhelmed us. 

Whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do notknow. We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. It istoo conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. Some may seekthat ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others, who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, maytry to shake the dust of life from off their feet. Neither will be wise. But precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company ofwise men. Their own attitude will not wear. The ecstasy will fail, thewill to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one toescape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and thecell. Then they will turn to the wise men. They will find comfort in thesmile to which they could not frame their own lips, and discover in itmore sympathy than they could hope for. 

Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be AnatoleFrance. His company is constant; his attitude durable. There is noundertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant andhaunting beauty to Tchehov. He has never suffered himself to be soinvolved in life as to be maimed by it. But the price he has paid forhis safety has been a renunciation of experience. Only by being involvedin life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained thatbitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. Not that AnatoleFrance made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would ofhis own will turn aside. It was instinct which guided him into asequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternateexaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel. Therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, butnever face to face. Their runnings, their stumblings and theirgesticulations are a tumultuous portion of the landscape rather thansymbols of an intimate and personal possibility. They lend a baroqueenchantment to the scene. 

So it is that in all the characters of Anatole France's work which arenot closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of themarionette. They are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack acertain logic, but it is not the logic of personality. They are embodiedcomments upon life, but they do not live. And there is for AnatoleFrance, while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, noreason why they should live. For living, in the accepted sense, is anactivity impossible without indulging many illusions; and fervently tosympathise with characters engaged in the activity demands that theirauthor should participate in the illusions. He, too, must be surprisedat the disaster which he himself has proved inevitable. It is not enoughthat he should pity them; he must share in their effort, and bediscomfited at their discomfiture. 

Such exercises of the soul are impossible to a real acquiescence, whichcannot even permit itself the inspiration of the final illusion that thewreck of human hopes, being ordained, is beautiful. The man whoacquiesces is condemned to stand apart and contemplate a puppet-showwith which he can never really sympathise. 

 'De toutes les définitions de l'homme la plus mauvaise me paraît celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable. Je ne me vante pas excessivement en me donnant pour doué de plus de raison que la plupart de ceux de mes semblables que j'ai vus de près ou dont j'ai connu l'histoire. La raison habite rarement les âmes communes, et bien plus rarement encore les grands esprits. . . . J'appelle raisonnable celui qui accorde sa raison particulière avec la raison universelle, de manière à n'être jamais trop surpris de ce qui arrive et à s'y accommoder tant bien que mal; j'appelle raisonnable celui qui, observant le désordre de la nature et la folie humaine, ne s'obstine point à y voir de l'ordre et de la sagesse; j'appelle raisonnable enfin celui qui ne s'efforce pas de l'être. '

The chasm between living and being wise (which is to be _raisonnable_)is manifest. The condition of living is to be perpetually surprised, incessantly indignant or exultant, at what happens. To bridge the chasmthere is for the wise man only one way. He must cast back in his memoryto the time when he, too, was surprised and indignant. No man is, afterall, born wise, though he may be born with an instinct for wisdom. ThusAnatole France touches us most nearly when he describes his childhood. The innocent, wayward, positive, romantic little Pierre Nozière[4] is ahuman being to a degree to which no other figures in the master's comedyof unreason are. And it is evident that Anatole France himself finds himby far the most attractive of them all. He can almost persuade himself, at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite storyof how, when he had been to a truly royal chocolate shop, he attemptedto reproduce its splendours in play. At one point his invention and hismemory failed him, and he turned to his mother to ask: 'Est-ce celui quivend ou celui qui achète qui donne de l'argent?'

 'Je ne devais jamais connaître le prix de l'argent. Tel j'étais à trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapissé de boutons de roses, tel je restai jusqu'à la vieillesse, qui m'est légère, comme elle l'est à toutes les âmes exemptes d'avarice et d'orgueil. Non, maman, je n'ai jamais connu le prix de l'argent. Je ne le connais pas encore, ou plutôt je le connais trop bien. '

 [Footnote 4: _Le Petit Pierre_. Par Anatole France. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy. )]

To know a thing too well is by worlds removed from not to know it atall, and Anatole France does not elsewhere similarly attempt to indulgethe illusion of unbroken innocence. He who refused to put a mark ofinterrogation after 'What is God, ' in defiance of his mother, because heknew, now has to restrain himself from putting one after everything hewrites or thinks. 'Ma pauvre mère, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-êtreque maintenant j'en mets trop. ' Yes, Anatole France is wise, and farremoved from childish follies. And, perhaps, it is precisely because ofhis wisdom that he can so exactly discern the enchantment of hischildhood. So few men grow up. The majority remain hobbledehoysthroughout life; all the disabilities and none of the unique capacitiesof childhood remain. There are a few who, in spite of all experience, retain both; they are the poets and the _grands esprits_. There arefewer still who learn utterly to renounce childish things; and they arethe wise men. 

 'Je suis une autre personne que l'enfant dont je parle. Nous n'avons plus en commun, lui et moi, un atome de substance ni de pensée. Maintenant qu'il m'est devenu tout à fait étranger, je puis en sa compagnie me distraire de la mienne. Je l'aime, moi qui ne m'aime ni ne me haïs. Il m'est doux de vivre en pensée les jours qu'il vivait et je souffre de respirer l'air du temps où nous sommes. '

Not otherwise is it with us and Anatole France. We may have little incommon with his thought--the community we often imagine comes ofself-deception--but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while. His touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers. 

[APRIL, 1919. 

_Gerard Manley Hopkins_

Modern poetry, like the modern consciousness of which it is the epitome, seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. It is hardlyconscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itselfby insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. Thevalue of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receivesand renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper ofthe mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to beepic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a fewconspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poetmay assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest ahundred influences, or he may work a single sham personality threadbareor render piecemeal an undigested influence. What he may not do, or doonly at the risk of being unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call, for the lack of a better word, the logical progression of an _oeuvre_. One has no sense of the rhythm of an achievement. There is an output ofscraps, which are scraps, not because they are small, but because onescrap stands in no organic relation to another in the poet's work. Instead of lending each other strength, they betray each other'sweakness. 

Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is notpeculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. If it were, we might beaccused of mere querulousness. The rhythm of personality is hard, indeed, to achieve. The simple mind and the single outlook are now toorare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of temperinga mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easyone. The desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life wereprobably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is alittle preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to seelife steadily and see it whole. We happen to have been born into an agewithout perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet andprose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age. But another rhythm is possible. No doubt it would be mistaken toconsider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm ofpersonality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personalcoherence in its possessor. For critical purposes, however, they aredistinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technicalprogression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate artisticintention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. WhenVerlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose, ' we know where weare. And we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse tobe predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring totake a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose. '

It is the 'avant toute chose' that matters, not as a profession offaith--we do not greatly like professions of faith--but as the guaranteeof the universal in the particular, of the _dianoia_ in the episode. Itis the 'avant toute chose' that we chiefly miss in modern poetry andmodern society and in their quaint concatenations. It is the 'avanttoute chose' that leads us to respect both Mr Hardy and Mr Bridges, though we give all our affection to one of them. It is the 'avant toutechose' that compels us to admire the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins[5];it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, wouldhave condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not (after many years)had Mr Bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the OxfordUniversity Press to stand the racket. Apparently Mr Bridges himself issomething of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on adisdainful note:--

 'Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!'

 [Footnote 5: _Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins_. Edited with notes by Robert Bridges. (Oxford: University Press. )]

It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take themost concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet'sexplanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in atechnical language peculiar to himself. Moreover, its scope is small;the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages. 

 'O then if in my lagging lines you miss The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation. . . . '

There is his 'avant toute chose. ' Perhaps it seems very like 'de lamusique. ' But it tells us more about Hopkins's music than Verlaine'sline told us about his. This music is of a particular kind, not the'sanglots du violon, ' but pre-eminently the music of song, the musicmost proper to lyrical verse. If one were to seek in English the lyricalpoem to which Hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, onewould find Shelley's 'Skylark. ' A technical progression onwards from the'Skylark' is accordingly the main line of Hopkins's poetical evolution. There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief. Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered, appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was hiscontemporary. There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echoin 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charmèd'; there is an aspiration afterMilton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and themost lucid of the fragments, 'Epithalamion. ' But the central point ofdeparture is the 'Skylark. ' The 'May Magnificat' is evidence ofHopkins's achievement in the direct line:--

 'Ask of her, the mighty mother: Her reply puts this other Question: What is Spring?-- Growth in everything--

 Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and greenworld all together; Star-eyed strawberry-breasted Throstle above her nested Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within. . . . 

 . . . When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple Bloom lights the orchard-apple, And thicket and thorp are merry With silver-surfèd cherry, And azuring-over graybell makes Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes, And magic cuckoo-call Caps, clears, and clinches all. . . . '

That is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, mostrecognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms. But a melody sosimple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the English languageis capable without the obscurity which comes of the drowning of sense insound, did not satisfy Hopkins. He aimed at complex internal harmonies, at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined anexpressive word of his own:--

 'But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling _inscape_ is what I above all aim at in poetry. '

Here, then, in so many words, is Hopkins's 'avant toute chose' at ahigher level of elaboration. 'Inscape' is still, in spite of theapparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems tohave entered with the specific designation. With formalism comesrigidity; and in this case the rigidity is bound to overwhelm the sense. For the relative constant in the composition of poetry is the law oflanguage which admits only a certain amount of adaptation. Musicaldesign must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be aware that evenin speaking of musical design he is indulging a metaphor. Hopkinsadmitted this, if we may judge by his practice, only towards the end ofhis life. There is no escape by sound from the meaning of the posthumoussonnets, though we may hesitate to pronounce whether this directness wasdue to a modification of his poetical principles or to the urgency ofthe content of the sonnets, which, concerned with a matter of life anddeath, would permit no obscuring of their sense for musical reasons. 

 'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must in yet longer light's delay. With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives, alas! away. '

There is compression, but not beyond immediate comprehension; music, buta music of overtones; rhythm, but a rhythm which explicates meaning andmakes it more intense. 

Between the 'May Magnificat' and these sonnets is the bulk of Hopkins'spoetical work and his peculiar achievement. Perhaps it could be regardedas a phase in his evolution towards the 'more balanced and Miltonicstyle' which he hoped for, and of which the posthumous sonnets areprecursors; but the attempt to see him from this angle would beperverse. Hopkins was not the man to feel, save on exceptionaloccasions, that urgency of content of which we have spoken. Thecommunication of thought was seldom the dominant impulse of his creativemoment, and it is curious how simple his thought often proves to be whenthe obscurity of his language has been penetrated. Musical elaborationis the chief characteristic of his work, and for this reason what seemto be the strangest of his experiments are his most essentialachievement So, for instance, 'The Golden Echo':--

 'Spare! There is one, yes, I have one (Hush there!); Only not within seeing of sun, Not within the singeing of the strong sun, Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air, Somewhere else where there is, ah, well, where! one, One. Yes, I can tell such a key, I do know such a place, Where, whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone, Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet clearly and dangerously sweet Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face, The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet, Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth To its own best being and its loveliness of youth. . . . '

Than this, Hopkins truly wrote, 'I never did anything more musical. ' Byhis own verdict and his own standards it is therefore the finest thingthat Hopkins did. Yet even here, where the general beauty is undoubted, is not the music too obvious? Is it not always on the point ofdegenerating into a jingle--as much an exhibition of the limitations ofa poetical theory as of its capabilities? The tyranny of the 'avanttoute chose' upon a mind in which the other things were not stubborn andself-assertive is apparent. Hopkins's mind was irresolute concerning thequality of his own poetical ideal. A coarse and clumsy assonance seldomspread its snare in vain. Exquisite openings are involved in disaster:--

 'When will you ever, Peace, wild wood dove, shy wings shut, Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace. . . . '

And the more wonderful opening of 'Windhover' likewise sinks, far lessdisastrously, but still perceptibly:--

 'I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, --the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'

We have no doubt that 'stirred for a bird' was an added excellence tothe poet's ear; to our sense it is a serious blemish on lines which have'the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation. '

There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens ofthe poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. Theobscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear;and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men whopush on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whetherthe failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation ofexperience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vicein his poetical endeavour. For ourselves we believe that the former wasthe true cause. His 'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritualvacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, andstrengthen it. Hopkins told the truth of himself--the reason why hemust remain a poets' poet:--

 I want the one rapture of an inspiration. O then if in my lagging lines you miss The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation, My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation. '

[JUNE, 1919. 

_The Problem of Keats_

It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir SidneyColvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first, because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because allevidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and sogreatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassionedand intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by aportion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of theconsciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is withus; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin'smind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in anolder generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision ofat least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a youngerrace which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets. Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciateKeats, Sir Sidney writes:--

 'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion, --that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and acutely sensitive. '

 [Footnote 6: _John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-fame_. By Sidney Colvin. Second edition. (Macmillan. )]

We believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindicationmight be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimelydead; but we desire, not to enlist Sir Sidney in a cause, but only tomake apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitabledifferences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring. It may bethat we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with Keats that wefeel to Sir Sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunchfriend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so. We are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and foritself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow onlywhen the critical honesty, the determination to let Keats be valid asKeats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costsSir Sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us. 

It is rather by this than by Sir Sidney's particular contributions toour knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. This assured, weaccept his patient exposition of the theme of 'Endymion' with a friendlyinterest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claimupon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minuteinvestigation of the pictorial and plastic material of Keats'simagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the formermistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when SirSidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellerswho at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantryare, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and findthemselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportantand unknown to them--the price of land, and the points of a pedigreebull--so we follow with an intense and intelligent absorption a subtleargument in 'Endymion' in which at no moment we really believe. On thecontrary, we are convinced (when we are free from our author's friendlyspell) that Keats wrote 'Endymion' at all adventure. The words of thecancelled preface: 'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able tofinish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain, ' were, we aresure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of hislack of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapableof or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'--he had an understanding morerobust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast uponexperience, than any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth notexcepted--but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concernedwith understanding. 'Endymion' is not a record or sublimation ofexperience; it is itself an experience. It was the liberation of averbal inhibition, and the magic word of freedom was Beauty. The storyof Endymion was to Keats a road to the unknown, in her course alongwhich his imagination might 'paw up against the sky. '

A refusal to admit that Keats built 'Endymion' upon any structure ofargument, however obscure--even Sir Sidney would acknowledge that theargument he discovers is _very_ obscure--is so far from being aderogation from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a fullappreciation of his idiosyncrasy. It is customary to regard the Odes asthe pinnacle of his achievement and to trace a poetical progression tothat point and a subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of thisdecline in the revised Induction to 'Hyperion. ' As far as an absolutepoetical perfection is concerned there can be no serious objection tothe view. But the case of Keats is eminently one to be considered initself as well as objectively. There is no danger that Keats's poetrywill not be appreciated; the danger is that Keats may not be understood. And precisely this moment is opportune for understanding him. As Mr T. S. Eliot has lately pointed out, the development of English poetry sincethe early nineteenth century was largely based on the achievement of twopoets of genius, Keats and Shelley, who never reached maturity. Theywere made gods; and rightly, had not poets themselves bowed down tothem. That was ridiculous; there is something even pitiful in thespectacle of Rossetti and Morris finding the culmination of poetry, theone in 'The Eve of St Agnes, ' the other in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci. 'And this undiscriminating submission of a century to the influence ofhypostatised phases in the development of a poet of sanity and genius isperhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious, and for the mostpart far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at work inmodern poetry. 

A sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, thatwhat has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundredyears is only a _cul de sac_. Somewhere there has been a substitution. In the resulting chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, andthe critically minded have the grim amusement of watching verse-writersgain eminence by imitating Coventry Patmore! The bolder spirits declarethat there never was such a thing as a tradition, that it is no uselearning, because there is nothing to learn. But they are a littlenervous for all their boldness, and they prefer to hunt in packs, ofwhich the only condition of membership is that no one should ask what itis. 

At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no lessimportance to understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. Theculmination of the achievement of the Keats to be understood is not theOdes, perfect as they are, nor the tales--a heresy even for objectivecriticism--nor 'Hyperion'; but precisely that revised Induction to'Hyperion' which on the other argument is held to indicate how thepoet's powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfiedlove. On the technical side alone the Induction is of extraordinaryinterest. Keats's natural and proper revulsion from the Miltonic style, the deliberate art of which he had handled like an almost master, isevident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge that the virusis in his blood. The creative effort of the Induction was infinitelygreater than is immediately apparent. Keats is engaged in a war on twofronts: he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and strugglingalso to deal with an unfamiliar content. The whole direction of hispoetic purpose had shifted since he wrote 'Hyperion. ' 'Hyperion, ' thoughfar finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the sameas 'Endymion'; it was an exercise in a manner. Keats desired to prove tohimself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, thathe was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur. It was, moststrictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. He haddrunk, as deeply as any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; heneeded to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he couldemploy a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of thepast, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at thepoint where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them. These necessities were not present in this form to Keats's mind when hebegan 'Hyperion'; most probably he began merely with the idea of holdinghis own with Milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme. Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed areincident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not bythe intellect, but by the being. 

He dropped 'Hyperion' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. Hewas weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between himand that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself. 

 'I have given up "Hyperion"--there were too many Miltonic inversions in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather artist's, humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from "Hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of feeling. . . . '--(Letter to J. H. Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819. )

That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications. 'English ought to be kept up' meant, on Keats's lips, a very great deal. But there is other and more definite authority for the positivedirection in which he was turning. To his brother George he wrote, atthe same time:--

 'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone. '

More definite still is the letter of November 17, 1819, to his friendand publisher, John Taylor:--

 'I have come to a determination not to publish anything I have now ready written; but for all that to publish a poem before long and that I hope to make a fine one. As the marvellous is the most enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let her manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all. Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and Women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a Drama, would, I think, be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes Eve throughout a poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest ambition--when I do feel ambitious. . . . '

No letter could be saner, nor more indicative of calm resolve. Yet theprecise determination is that nothing that went to make the 1820 volumeshould be published, neither Odes, nor Tales, nor 'Hyperion. ' This isthat mood of Keats which Sir Sidney Colvin, in his comment upon apassage in the revised Induction, calls one of 'fierce injustice to hisown achievements and their value. ' But a poet, if he is a real one, judges his own achievements not by those of his contemporaries, but bythe standard of his own intention. 

The evidence that Keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which itcould be satisfied by the poems of the 1820 volume is overwhelming. Hisletters to George of April, 1819, show that he was naturally evolvingtowards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive thancould be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspirationand emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that hadinvaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to thenew poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find themethod. The letters we have quoted to show his reaction from theMiltonic influence display the more narrowly 'artistic' aspect of thesame evolution. A technique more responsive to the felt reality ofexperience must be found--'English ought to be kept up'--the apparatusof Romantic story must be abandoned--'Wonders are no wonders to me'--yetthe Romantic colour must be kept to restore to a realistic psychologythe vividness and richly various quality that are too often lost byanalysis We do not believe that we have in any respect forced theinterpretation of the letters; the terminology of that age needs to betranslated to be understood 'Men and Women . . . Characters andSentiments' are called, for better or worse, 'psychology' nowadays. Andour translation has this merit, that some of our ultra-moderns willlisten to the word 'psychology, ' where they would be bat-blind to'Characters' and stone-deaf to 'Sentiments. '

Modern poetry is still faced with the same problem; but very few of itsadepts have reached so far as to be able to formulate it even with theprecision of Keats's scattered allusions. Keats himself was struck downat the moment when he was striving (against disease and against adevouring, hopeless love-passion) to face it squarely. The revisedInduction reveals him in the effort to shape the traditional (andperhaps still necessary) apparatus of myth to an instrument of hisattitude. The meaning of the Induction is not difficult to discover; butcurrent criticism has the habit of regarding it dubiously. Therefore wemay be forgiven for attempting, with the brevity imposed upon us, tomake its elements clear. The first eighteen lines, which Sir SidneyColvin on objective grounds regrets are, we think, vital. 

 'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave A paradise for a sect; the savage, too, From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at heaven; pity these have not Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf The shadows of melodious utterance, But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die; For poesy alone can tell her dreams, -- With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable chain And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, 'Thou art no poet--mays't not tell thy dreams'? Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions and would speak, if he had loved, And been well-nurtured in his mother-tongue. Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse Be poet's or fanatic's will be known When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave. '

We may admit that the form of these lines is unfortunate; but we cannotwish them away. They bear most closely upon the innermost argument ofthe poem as Keats endeavoured to reshape it. All men, says Keats, havetheir visions of reality; but the poet alone can express his, and thepoet himself may at the last prove to have been a fanatic, one who hasimagined 'a paradise for a sect' instead of a heaven for all humanity. 

This discovery marks the point of crisis in Keats's development. He isno longer content to be the singer; his poetry must be adequate to allexperience. No wonder then that the whole of the new Induction centresabout this thought. He describes his effort to fight against an invadingdeath and to reach the altar in the mighty dream palace. As his foottouches the altar-step life returns, and the prophetic voice of theveiled goddess reveals to him that he has been saved by his power 'todie and live again before Thy fated hour. '

 '"None can usurp this height, " return'd that shade. "But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery and will not let them rest. All else who find a haven in the world Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, If by a chance into this fane they come, Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half. "'

Because he has been mindful of the pain in the world, the poet has beensaved. But the true lovers of humanity, --

 'Who love their fellows even to the death, Who feel the giant agony of the world, '

are greater than the poets; 'they are no dreamers weak. '

 'They come not here, they have no thought to come, And thou art here for thou are less than they. '

It is a higher thing to mitigate the pain of the world than to broodupon the problem of it. And not only the lover of mankind, but man theanimal is pre-eminent above the poet-dreamer. His joy is joy; his pain, pain. 'Only the dreamer venoms _all_ his days. ' Yet the poet has hisreward; it is given to him to partake of the vision of the veiledGoddess--memory, Moneta, Mnemosyne, the spirit of the eternal realitymade visible. 

 'Then saw I a wan face Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd By an immortal sickness which kills not; It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had past The lily and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face. But for her eyes I should have fled away; They held me back with a benignant light Soft, mitigated by divinest lids Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed Of all external things; they saw me not, But in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast. . . . '

This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. Itstands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regardedas obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discoveredspirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. Inher, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, visionand blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Ideaif you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poetis impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, butbelow them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is theprey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of hisvictory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph. 

Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big toexpress, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him;few have been so far. Of the poetry that might have been constructed onthe basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture, each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse'of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which itwould have been saturated, the calm and various light of unitedcontraries. 

We fear that Sir Sidney Colvin will not agree with our view. The anglesof observation are different. The angle at which we have placedourselves is not wholly advantageous--from it Sir Sidney's book couldnot have been written--but it has this advantage, that from it we canread his book with a heightened interest. As we look out from it, somethings are increased and some diminished with the change ofperspective; and among those which are increased is our gratitude to SirSidney. In the clear mirror of his sympathy and sanity nothing isobscured. We are shown the Keats who wrote the perfect poems that willlast with the English language, and in the few places where Sir Sidneyfalls short of the spirit of complete acceptance, we discern behind thewords of rebuke and regret only the idealisation of a love which we areproud to share. 

[JULY, 1919. 

_Thoughts on Tchehov_

We do not know if the stories collected in this volume[7] stand togetherin the Russian edition of Tchehov's works, or if the selection is due toMrs Constance Garnett. It is also possible that the juxtaposition isfortuitous. But the stories are united by a similarity of material. Whereas in the former volumes of this admirable series Tchehov is shownas preoccupied chiefly with the life of the _intelligentsia_, here hefinds his subjects in priests and peasants, or (in the story _Uprooted_)in the half-educated. 

 [Footnote 7: _The Bishop; and Other Stories_. By Anton Tchehov. Translated by Constance Garnett. (Chatto & Windus. )]

Such a distinction is, indeed, irrelevant. As Tchehov presents them toour minds, the life of the country and the life of the town produce thesame final impression, arouse in us an awareness of an identicalquality; and thus, the distinction, by its very irrelevance, points usthe more quickly to what is essential in Tchehov. It is that hisattitude, to which he persuades us, is complete, not partial. Hiscomprehension radiates from a steady centre, and is not capriciouslykindled by a thousand accidental contacts. In other words, Tchehov isnot what he is so often assumed to be, an impressionist. Consciously orunconsciously he had taken the step--the veritable _salto mortale_--bywhich the great literary artist moves out of the ranks of the minorwriters. He had slowly shifted his angle of vision until he coulddiscern a unity in multiplicity. Unity of this rare kind cannot beimposed as, for instance, Zola attempted to impose it. It is anemanation from life which can be distinguished only by the mostsensitive contemplation. 

The problem is to define this unity in the case of each great writer inwhom it appears. To apprehend it is not so difficult. The mere sense ofunity is so singular and compelling that it leaves room for fewhesitations. The majority of writers, however excellent in theirpeculiar virtues, are not concerned with it: at one moment theyrepresent, at another they may philosophise, but the two activities haveno organic connection, and their work, if it displays any evolution atall, displays it only in the minor accidents of the craft, such as stylein the narrower and technical sense, or the obvious economy ofconstruction. There is no danger of mistaking these for great writers. Nor, in the more peculiar case of writers who attempt to impose theillusion of unity, is the danger serious. The apparatus is alwaysvisible; they cannot afford to do without the paraphernalia of argumentwhich supplies the place of what is lacking in their presentation. Theobvious instance of this legerdemain is Zola; a less obvious, andtherefore more interesting example is Balzac. 

To attempt the more difficult problem. What is most peculiar toTchehov's unity is that it is far more nakedly æsthetic than that ofmost of the great writers before him. Other writers of a rank equal tohis--and there are not so very many--have felt the need to shift theirangle of vision until they could perceive an all-embracing unity; butthey were not satisfied with this. They felt, and obeyed, the furtherneed of taking an attitude towards the unity they saw They approved ordisapproved, accepted or rejected it. It would be perhaps more accurateto say that they gave or refused their endorsement. They appealed tosome other element than their own sense of beauty for the final verdicton their discovery; they asked whether it was just or good. 

The distinguishing mark of Tchehov is that he is satisfied with theunity he discovers. Its uniqueness is sufficient for him. It does notoccur to him to demand that it should be otherwise or better. The act ofcomprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance. Heis like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work ofcreation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment ofhis vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and thearbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural, and beautiful than the flowering of a plant. Not that Tchehov is agreater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely morewholly an artist, which is a very different thing. There is in him lessadmixture of preoccupations that are not purely æsthetic, and probablyfor this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist ofequal rank. It seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees, need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in orderto be very vigorous and very fruitful. Tchehov has the virtues and theshortcomings of the pure case. 

I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestationof _l'art pour l'art_, because in any commonly accepted sense of thatphrase, he is not. Still, he might be considered as an exemplificationof what the phrase might be made to mean. But instead of being divertedinto a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bringinto prominence an aspect of Tchehov which has an immediateinterest--his modernity. Again, the word is awkward. It suggests that heis fashionable, or up to date. Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phasesin advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art ofliterature. The artistic problem which he faced and solved is one thatis, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modernwriter--to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with thegreatest possible unity of æsthetic impression. Diversity of content weare beginning to find in profusion--Miss May Sinclair's latestexperiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with asettled manner and a fixed reputation--but how rarely do we see even aglimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified æstheticimpression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or hasbeen, present to consciousness is _ipso facto_ unified æsthetically. Theresult of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both oflanguage and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classicalmethod. 

The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving æsthetic unityby a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to anarbitrary (because non-æsthetic) argument. This argument was let downlike a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until aunified crystalline structure congregated about it. Of all great artistsof the past Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from thismethod. How much deliberate artistic purpose there was in hisemployment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentallydifferent from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too bigfor a parenthesis. But he, too, is at bottom a classic artist. Themodern problem--it has not yet been sufficiently solved for us to speakof a modern method--arises from a sense that the classical methodproduces over-simplification. It does not permit of a sufficient senseof multiplicity. One can think of a dozen semi-treatments of the problemfrom Balzac to Dostoevsky, but they were all on the old lines. Theymight be called Shakespearean modifications of the classical method. 

Tchehov, we believe, attempted a treatment radically new. To make useagain of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a differentstring to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. In asense he began at the other end. He had decided on the quality ofæsthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision, but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of lifewhich he had achieved. The essential quality he discerned and desired torepresent was his argument, his string. Everything that heightened andcompleted this quality accumulated about it, quite independently ofwhether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot andargument. There is a magnificent example of his method in the longeststory in this volume, 'The Steppe. ' The quality is dominant throughout, and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it isreinforced by the incident. Tiny events--the peasant who eats minnowsalive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousandroubles--take on a character of portent, except that the word is tooharsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is asense of incalculability that haunts us. The emphases have all beenslightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. It is notwhile we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so muchsignificance could attach to a little boy's questions in a remotevillage shop:--

 '"How much are these cakes?'

 '"Two for a farthing. '

 'Yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before by the Jewess and asked him:--

 '"And how much do you charge for cakes like this?'

 'The shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all sides, and raised one eyebrow. 

 '"Like that?' he asked. 

 'Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:--

 '"Two for three farthings. . . . "'

It is foolish to quote it. It is like a golden pebble from the bed of astream. The stream that flows over Tchehov's innumerable pebbles, infinitely diverse and heterogeneous, is the stream of a deliberatelysublimated quality. The figure is inexact, as figures are. Not everypebble could be thus transmuted. But how they are chosen, what is thereal nature of the relation which unites them, as we feel it does, is asecret which modern English writers need to explore. Till they haveexplored and mastered it Tchehov will remain a master in advance ofthem. 

[AUGUST, 1919. 

 * * * * *

The case of Tchehov is one to be investigated again and again because heis the only great modern artist in prose. Tolstoy was living throughoutTchehov's life, as Hardy has lived throughout our own, and these aregreat among the greatest. But they are not modern. It is an essentialpart of their greatness that they could not be; they have a simplicityand scope that manifestly belongs to all time rather than to this. Tchehov looked towards Tolstoy as we to Hardy. He saw in him a Colossus, one whose achievement was of another and a greater kind than his own. 

 'I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. If he were to die there would be a big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never loved any man as much as him. . . . Secondly, while Tolstoy is in literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even recognising that one has done nothing and never will do anything is not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand; he has an immense authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the shade. . . . '--(January, 1900. )

Tchehov was aware of the gulf that separated him from the great menbefore him, and he knew that it yawned so deep that it could not becrossed. He belonged to a new generation, and he alone perhaps was fullyconscious of it. 'We are lemonade, ' he wrote in 1892. 

 'Tell me honestly who of my contemporaries--that is, men between thirty and forty-five--have given the world one single drop of alcohol?. . . Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull time. . . . The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something, " that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic: they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. . . . And we? We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that--nothing at all. . . . Flog us and we can do more! We have neither immediate nor remote aims, and in our soul there is a great empty space. We have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing cannot be an artist. . . . 

 '. . . You think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not to conceal from myself my disease and not to deceive myself, and not to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the ideas of the 'sixties and so on. '

That was written in 1892. When we remember all the strange literaryeffort gathered round about that year in the West--Symbolism, the_Yellow Book_, Art for Art's sake--and the limbo into which it has beenthrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his owndespite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature wasplunging with enthusiasm into one _cul de sac_ after another, incapableof diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West, had achieved a clear vision and a sense of perspective. 

To-day we begin to feel how intimately Tchehov belongs to us; to-morrowwe may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. A genius willalways be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned withthe genius of Tchehov we must accept the inevitable. We must analyse andseek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that sinceTchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, avast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable. Writers who would be modern and ignore Tchehov's achievement are, however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists, merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of aprofession like any other; for Tchehov is a standard by which modernliterary effort must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry whois not sufficiently single-minded to apply the standard to himself is ofno particular account. 

Though Tchehov's genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves amuch exacter study than it has yet received. The publication of thisvolume of his letters[8] hardly affords the occasion for that; but itdoes afford an opportunity for the examination of some of the chiefconstituents of his perfect art. These touch us nearly because--weinsist again--the supreme interest of Tchehov is that he is the onlygreat modern artist in prose. He belongs, as we have said, to us. If heis great, then he is great not least in virtue of qualities which we mayaspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an ideal to which we canrefer ourselves, He had been saturated in all the disillusions which weregard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive ofthe epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected inhim--and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. He did not rubhis cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not professbeliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation foruniversal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of amillennium which he alone had the ability to control. He was and wantedto be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his, we feel gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was ahero--more than that, _the_ hero of our time. 

 [Footnote 8: _Letters of Anton Tchehov_. Translated by Constance Garnett (Chatto & Windus). ]

It is significant that, in reading Tchehov's letters, we do notconsider him under the aspect of an artist. We are inevitably fascinatedby his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have mostfrequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on theinfinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it inhimself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing. He did not throwin his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly forrefuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he riskedeverything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in revolution andsaying so. In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in hisletters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our greatexemplar, by us. He refused to march under any political banner--athing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in hiscountry; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his politicalindifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing activegood to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalismand social reform. He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalinin 1890 to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 hespent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measuresagainst the cholera in the country district where he lived, and, although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, herefused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence ofaction; in another year he was the leading spirit in organisingpractical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod. From hischildhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family. Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly asaint. His self-devotion was boundless. 

Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself whenhe wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent. ' Tchehov was indifferent;but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropieswill show, was of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, anaxiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. Since life is what it is andmen are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends uponthe individual. The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love iswithin the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. In one ofhis earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of hisbrother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he said, respecthuman personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only;they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; theyare sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselvesto arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talentthey respect it; they develop the æsthetic feeling in themselves . . . They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexualinstinct. The letter from which these chief points are taken istremulous with sympathy and wit. Tchehov was twenty-six when he wroteit. He concludes with the words: 'What is needed is constant work dayand night, constant reading, study, will. Every hour is precious forit. '

In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man. He sethimself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. The indifferenceupon which Tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moralindifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of thefact that life itself is indifferent. To that he held fast to the end. But the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made noparticular difference what any one did, but that the attitude andcharacter of the individual were all-important. There was, indeed, nopanacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but therecould be a mitigation in men's souls. But the new asceticism must not benegative. It must not cast away the goods of civilisation becausecivilisation is largely a sham. 

 'Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!'

Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarilyendured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of serviceto his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned withpluses alone. ' Since life is what it is, its amenities are doublyprecious. Only they must be amenities without humbug. 

 'Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation. . . . That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist. '

What 'the most absolute freedom' meant to Tchehov his whole life iswitness. It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is, achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline andself-refinement. In one letter he says he is going to write a storyabout the son of a serf--Tchehov was the son of a serf--who 'squeezedthe slave out of himself. ' Whether the story was ever written we do notknow, but the process is one to which Tchehov applied himself all hislife long. He waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soulin himself, and by necessary implication in others also. 

He was, thus, in all things a humanist. He faced the universe, but hedid not deny his own soul. There could be for him no antagonism betweenscience and literature, or science and humanity. They were all pluses;it was men who quarrelled among themselves. If men would only develop alittle more loving-kindness, things would be better. The first duty ofthe artist was to be a decent man. 

 'Solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary. . . . We cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely hooked. . . . And is there any need for it? No, in order to help a colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as simply a man. . . . Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up solidarity. '

It seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty ofTchehov's, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strikeus as more than strange. One predominant impression remains: it is thatof Tchehov's candour of soul. Somehow he has achieved with open eyes themystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse itfurther, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his presentimportance to ourselves. 

[MARCH, 1920. 

_American Poetry_

We are not yet immune from the weakness of looking into the back pagesto see what the other men have said; and on this occasion we received asalutary shock from the critic of the _Detroit News_, who informs usthat Mr Aiken, 'despite the fact that he is one of the youngest and thenewest, having made his debut less than four years ago, . . . Demonstrates. . . That he is eminently capable of taking a solo part with Edgar LeeMasters, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim, Vachel Lindsay, and EdwinArlington Robinson. ' The shock is two-fold. In a single sentence we arein danger of being convicted of ignorance, and, where we can claim alittle knowledge, we plead guilty; we know nothing of either MrOppenheim or Mr Robinson. This very ignorance makes us cautious where wehave a little knowledge We know something of Mr Lindsay, something of MrMasters, and a good deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiarfigure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on whatprinciple they are assembled together. Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded, a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write whichshe teases out into stupid 'originalities. ' Of the other two gentlemenwe have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but alsonothing which convinces us that they may not be. 

Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them. Allthree have in common what we may call creative energy. They are allfacile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at allobvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction thatwhatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways. Not one of themproduces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or thathe has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom 'thusand not otherwise' engraved upon their substance; not one has provedthat he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem ofpoetry, no matter what technique be employed--how to achieve aconcentrated unity of æsthetic impression. They are all diffuse; theyseem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality atonce rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue;they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod--and they are allinteresting. 

They are extremely interesting. For one thing, they have all achievedwhat is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success. Very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened Mr Lindsay's'Congo' or Mr Masters's 'Spoon River Anthology' or Mr Aiken's 'Jig ofForslin' without being impelled to read on to the end. That does notvery often happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetrysave in the case of the thronging admirers of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and their similars. There is, however, another case more exactly inpoint, namely, that of Mr Kipling. With Mr Kipling our three Americanpoets have much in common, though the community must not be undulypressed. Their most obvious similarity is the prominence into whichthey throw the novel interest in their verse. They are, or at momentsthey seem to be, primarily tellers of stories. We will not dogmatise andsay that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell astory in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task. It would indeedbe doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell verydifferent stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotionalsubtleties which Mr Aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable ofbeing exactly expressed in prose. 

Since Mr Aiken is the _corpus vile_ before us we will henceforwardconfine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his verysufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worthattention in modern American poetry. Proceeding then, we find anotherpoint of contact between him and Mr Kipling, more important perhaps thanthe former, and certainly more dangerous. Both find it apparentlyimpossible to stem the uprush of rhetoric. Perhaps they do not try to;but we will be charitable--after all, there is enough good in either ofthem to justify charity--and assume that the willingness of the spiritgives way to the weakness of the flesh. Of course we all know about MrKipling's rhetoric; it is a kind of emanation of the spatial immensitieswith which he deals--Empires, the Seven Seas, from Dublin to Diarbekir. Mr Aiken has taken quite another province for his own; he is anintrospective psychologist. But like Mr Kipling he prefers big business. His inward eye roves over immensities at least as vast as Mr Kipling'soutward. In 'The Charnel Rose and Other Poems' this appetite for theillimitable inane of introspection seems to have gained upon him. Thereis much writing of this kind:--

 'Dusk, withdrawing to a single lamplight At the end of an infinite street-- He saw his ghost walk down that street for ever, And heard the eternal rhythm of his feet. And if he should reach at last that final gutter, To-day, or to-morrow, Or, maybe, after the death of himself and time; And stand at the ultimate curbstone by the stars, Above dead matches, and smears of paper, and slime; Would the secret of his desire Blossom out of the dark with a burst of fire? Or would he hear the eternal arc-lamps sputter, Only that; and see old shadows crawl; And find the stars were street lamps after all?

 Music, quivering to a point of silence, Drew his heart down over the edge of the world. . . . '

It is dangerous for a poet to conjure up infinities unless he has madeadequate preparation for keeping them in control when they appear. Weare afraid that Mr Aiken is almost a slave of the spirits he has evoked. Dostoevsky's devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probablymanaging-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week. MrAiken's incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is proteanand unsatisfactory. 

 'I am confused in webs and knots of scarlet Spun from the darkness; Or shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders. 

 Madness for red! I devour the leaves of autumn. I tire of the green of the world. I am myself a mouth for blood. . . . '

Perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar thingsmean, exactly, anything? Mr Aiken warns us that his intention has beento use the idea--'the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal toanother, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some newand subtler fiction'--'as a theme upon which one might wilfully build akind of absolute music. ' But having given us so much instruction, heshould have given more; he should have told us in what province of musiche has been working. Are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or fora musical elaboration of an intellectual theme? We infer, partly fromthe assurance that 'the analogy to a musical symphony is close, ' morefrom the absence of verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaborationof a theme. In that case the fact that we have a more definite grasp ofthe theme in the programme-introduction than anywhere in the poem itselfpoints to failure. In the poem 'stars rush up and whirl and set, ''skeletons whizz before and whistle behind, ' 'sands bubble and rosesshoot soft fire, ' and we wonder what all the commotion is about. Whenthere is a lull in the pandemonium we have a glimpse, not of eternity, but precisely of 1890:--

 'And he saw red roses drop apart, Each to disclose a charnel heart. . . . 

We are far from saying that Mr Aiken's poetry is merely a chemicalcompound of the 'nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but wedo think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments intothose elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequencyin the poem called 'The Charnel Rose. ' 'Senlin' resists disruptionlonger. But the same elements are there. They are better but notsufficiently fused. The rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion inrhetoric. We have the sense that Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to hisown idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by aviolent clashing of the cymbals where a quiet recitative was what thetheme demanded and his art could not ensure. 

 'Death himself in the rain . . . Death himself . . . Death in the savage sunlight . . . Skeletal death . . . I hear the clack of his feet, Clearly on stones, softly in dust, Speeding among the trees with whistling breath, Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves . . . Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!. . . '

We are persuaded that Mr Aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted tosay something much subtler. But to find exactly what he wanted mighthave taken him many months. He could not wait. Up rushed the rhetoric;bang went the cymbals: another page, another book. And we, who have seengreat promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequatefragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poorexpedients of the moment. For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate. Hefeels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:--

 'Has no one, in a great autumnal forest, When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone, Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?'

So he descends to a poetaster's padding. He does not stop to considerwhether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or, if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interferenceoccurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoricand the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than thethematic outline itself emerges. 

In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust. We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on thewhole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, moreirrevocably itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses atthe swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us inpoetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance hehas to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he mustperform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonistin verse. It is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote thelabour. His fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of itsquality. We can only express our hope that he will, and our convictionthat if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would bewell requited. 

[SEPTEMBER, 1919. 

_Ronsard_

Ronsard is _rangé_ now; but he has not been in that position for so verylong, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of theElizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us. Sainte-Beuve was verytentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious, half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm. And, even now, itcan hardly be said that French critical opinion about him hascrystallised; the late George Wyndham's essay shows a more convinced andbetter documented appreciation than any that we have read in French, based as it is on the instinctive sympathy which one landed gentlemanwho dabbles in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself tothem--an admiration which does not exclude familiarity. 

Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as anamateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach himmore closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. There issomething churlish in the determination to be most on one's guardagainst the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behavinglike the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large. One mustregard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a greathistorical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet; andthe third aspect has a chance of being the most important. 

Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. There is nothingmysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptiblethread of development in either. They are equable, constantimperturbable, like the bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of asafe batsman. The accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment. Thenerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, aresteady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a lesswell-appointed spectator. He will never let himself down, or givehimself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent surerestraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain. All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it. 

Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, forRonsard a game. There was plenty of game in it; _l'art de bienpétrarquiser_ was all he claimed for himself. But the game would havewearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfiedand expressed by it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tireof him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced bysome of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No onereading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hardto find in the whole of M. Van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'LesAmours'[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto. When you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particularkind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon too closelythe chances of a shock of surprise. 

 [Footnote 9: _Les Amours_. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte établi par Ad. Van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Crès. )]

With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsardis generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equaltenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardlycapable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his owndelight in 'Petrarchising. ' He is perpetually in love with making; hedisports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There aremoments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naivewonder that words exist and are manipulable. 

 'Dous fut le trait, qu'Amour hors de sa trousse Pour me tuer, me tira doucement, Quand je fus pris au dous commencement D'une douceur si doucettement douce. . . . '

Ronsard is here a boy playing knucklebones with language; and some ofhis characteristic excellences are little more than a development ofthis aptitude, with its more striking incongruities abated. A modern earcan be intoxicated by the charming jingle of

 'Petite Nimfe folastre, Nimfette que j'idolastre. . . . '

One does not pause to think how incredibly naive it is compared withVillon, who had not a fraction of Ronsard's scholarship, or even withClement Marot; naive both in thought and art. As for the stature of theartist, we are back with Charles of Orleans. It would be idle tospeculate what exactly Villon would have made of the atomic theory hadhe read Lucretius; but we are certain that he would have done somethingvery different from Ronsard's

 'Les petits cors, culbutant de travers, Parmi leur cheute en biais vagabonde, Heurtés ensemble ont composé le monde, S'entr'acrochant d'acrochemens divers. . . . '

For this is not grown-up; the cut to simplicity has been too short. Somany of Ronsard's verses flow over the mind, without disturbing it; fallcharmingly on the ear, and leave no echoes. But for the moment we sharehis enjoyment. 

The second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtlessallied to the first; it is a _naïveté_ of a particular kind, whichdiffers from the profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by thefact that it is employed deliberately. Conscious simplicity is art, andif it is successful art of no mean order, Ronsard's method of admittingus, as it were, to his conversation with himself is definitely his own. His interruptions of a verse with 'Hà' or 'Hé'; his 'Mon Dieu, quej'aime!' or 'Hé, que ne suis-je puce?' (the difference between Ronsard'sflea and Donne's would be worth examination) have in them an element ofirresistible _bonhomie_. We feel that he is making us his confidant. Hedoes not have to tear agonies out of himself, so that what he confideshas no chance of making explicit any secrets of our own. There isnothing dangerous about him; we know that he is as safe as we are. Weare in conversation, not communion. But how effective and engaging itis!

 'Vous ne le voulez pas? Eh bien, je suis contant . . . '

 'Hé, Dieu du ciel, je n'eusse pas pensé Qu'un seul départ eust causé tant de peine!. . . '

or the still more casual

 'Un joïeus deplaisir qui douteus l'épointelle, Quoi l'épointelle! ainçois le genne et le martelle . . . '

Of this device of style our own Elizabethans were to make moreprofitable use than Ronsard. At their best they packed an intensity ofdramatic significance into conversational language, of which Ronsard hadno inkling; and even a strict contemporary of his, like Wyatt, couldtouch cords more intimate by the same means. But, on the other hand, Ronsard never fails of his own effect, which is not to convince usemotionally, but to compel us to listen. His unexpected address tohimself or to us is a new ornament for us to admire, not a new methodfor him to express a new thing; and the suggestion of new rhythms thatmight thus be attained is never fully worked out. 

 'Mais tu ne seras plus? Et puis?. . . Quand la paleur Qui blemist nôtre corps sans chaleur ne lumière Nous perd le sentiment?. . . 

The ampleness of that reverberance is almost isolated. 

Ronsard's resources are indeed few. But he needed few. His simple mindwas at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasantimpression of one to whom commonplaces are real. He felt them all overagain. One imagines him reading the classics--the Iliad in three days, or his beloved companion 'sous le bois amoureux, ' Tibullus--with anunfailing delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foistedon to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus. One might almostsay that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were itnot that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and thatthe artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with thehonesty of such a natural man. But apart from a few particulars thatwould find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it todistinguish Cassandre from Hélène. What charming things Ronsard has tosay of either might be said of any charming woman--'le mignardembonpoint de ce sein, '--

 'Petit nombril, que mon penser adore, Non pas mon oeil, qui n'eut oncques ce bien . . . '

And though he assures Hélène that she has turned him from his graveearly style, 'qui pour chanter si bas n'est point ordonné, ' thedifference is too hard to detect; one is forced to conclude that it isprecisely the difference between a court lady and an inn-keeper'sdaughter. As far as art is concerned the most definite and distinctivething that Ronsard had to say of any of his ladies is said of one towhom he put forward none of his usually engrossing pretensions. It wasthe complexion of Marguerite of Navarre of which he wrote:--

 'De vif cinabre estoit faicte sa joue, Pareille au teint d'un rougissant oeillet, Ou d'une fraize, alors que dans de laict Dessus le hault de la cresme se joue. '

That is, whether it belonged to Marguerite or not, a divine complexion. It is the kind of thing that cannot be said about two ladies; the imageis too precise to be interchangeable. This may be a reason why it wasapplied to a lady _hors concours_ for Ronsard. 

But we need, in fact, seek no reason other than the circumscription ofRonsard's poetical gifts. They reduce to only two--the gift of convincedcommonplace, and the gift of simple melody. His commonplace is genuinecommonplace, quite distinct from the tense and pregnant condensation ofa lifetime of impassioned experience in Dante or Shakespeare; thingsthat would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinnerconversation, the sentiments that such a rare and amiable person wouldunderscore in his Horace. (From a not unimportant angle Ronsard is aminor Horace. ) These things are the warp of his poetry; they range fromthe familiar 'Le temps s'en va' to the masterly straightforwardness of

 'plus heureus celui qui la fera Et femme et mère, en lieu d'une pucelle. '

His melody, likewise, is genuine melody; it is irrepressible. It led himto belie his own professed seriousness. He could not stop his sonnetsfrom rippling even when he pretended to passionate argument. Life cameeasily to him; he was never weary of it, at the most he acknowledgedthat he was 'saoûl de la vie. ' It is not surprising, therefore, that hisremonstrances as the tortured lover have a trick of opening to adelightful tune:--

 'Rens-moi mon coeur, rens-moi mon coeur pillarde. . . . '

In another form this melody more closely recalls Thomas Campion:--

 'Seule je l'ai veue, aussi je meurs pour elle. . . . '

But to compare Ronsard's sonnet with 'Follow your saint' is to see howinfinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music was the Elizabethanthan the great French lyrist of the Renaissance. From first to lastRonsard was an amateur. 

[SEPTEMBER, 1919. 

_Samuel Butler_

The appearance of a new impression of _The Way of all Flesh_[10] in MrFifield's edition of Samuel Butler's works gives us an occasion toconsider more calmly the merits and the failings of that entertainingstory. Like all unique works of authors who stand, even to the mostobvious apprehension, aside from the general path, it has beenoverwhelmed with superlatives. The case is familiar enough and theexplanation is simple and brutal. It is hardly worth while to give it. The truth is that although there is no inherent reason why the isolatednovel of an author who devotes himself to other forms should not be 'oneof the great novels of the world, ' the probabilities tell heavilyagainst it. On the other hand, an isolated novel makes a good stick tobeat the age. It is fairly certain to have something sufficiently uniqueabout it to be useful for the purpose. Even its blemishes have a knackof being _sui generis_. To elevate it is, therefore, bound to imply thediminution of its contemporaries. 

 [Footnote 10: _The Way of all Flesh_. By Samuel Butler, 11th impression of 2nd edition. (Fifield. )]

Yet, apart from the general argument, there are particular reasons whythe praise of _The Way of all Flesh_ should be circumspect. SamuelButler knew extraordinarily well what he was about. His novel waswritten intermittently between 1872 and 1884 when he abandoned it. Inthe twenty remaining years of his life he did nothing to it, and we haveMr Streatfeild's word for it that 'he professed himself dissatisfiedwith it as a whole, and always intended to rewrite, or at any rate, torevise it. ' We could have deduced as much from his refusal to publishthe book. The certainty of commercial failure never deterred Butler frompublication; he was in the happy situation of being able to publish athis own expense a book of whose merit he was himself satisfied. His onlyreason for abandoning _The Way of all Flesh_ was his own dissatisfactionwith it. His instruction that it should be published in its present formafter his death proves nothing against his own estimate. Butler knew, atleast as well as we, that the good things in his book were legion. Hedid not wish the world or his own reputation to lose the benefit ofthem. 

But there are differences between a novel which contains innumerablegood things and a great novel. The most important is that a great noveldoes not contain innumerable good things. You may not pick out theplums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do. In _The Way of allFlesh_, however, a _compère_ is always present whose business it is tosay good things. His perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because theasides are piquant and, in their way, to the point. Butler's mind, beinga good mind, had a predilection for the object, and his detestation ofthe rotunder platitudes of a Greek chorus, if nothing else, had taughthim that a corner-man should have something to say on the subject inhand. His arguments are designed to assist his narrative; moreover, theyare sympathetic to the modern mind. An enlightened hedonism is about allthat is left to us, and Butler's hatred of humbug is, though a littlemore placid, like our own. We share his ethical likes and dislikes. Asan audience we are ready to laugh at his asides, and, on the first nightat least, to laugh at them even when they interrupt the play. 

But our liking for the theses cannot alter the fact that _The Way of allFlesh_ is a _roman à thèses_. Not that there is anything wrong with the_roman à thèses_, if the theses emerge from the narrative without itshaving to be obviously doctored. Nor does it matter very much that a_compère_ should be present all the while, provided that he does nottake upon himself to replace the demonstration the narrative mustafford, by arguments outside it. But what happens in _The Way of allFlesh_? We may leave aside the minor thesis of heredity, for it emerges, gently enough, from the story; besides, we are not quite sure what itis. We have no doubt, on the other hand, about the major thesis; it isblazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious quotation from StPaul to the Romans. 'We know that all things work together for good tothem that love God. ' The necessary gloss on this text is given inChapter LXVIII, where Ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:--

 'He had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were gone for a very long time, if not for ever; but there was something else also that had taken its flight along with these. I mean the fear of that which man could do unto him. _Cantabit vacuus_. Who could hurt him more than he had been hurt already? Let him but be able to earn his bread, and he knew of nothing which he dared not venture if it would make the world a happier place for those who were young and lovable. Herein he found so much comfort that he almost wished he had lost his reputation even more completely--for he saw that it was like a man's life which may be found of them that lose it and lost of them that would find it. He should not have had the courage to give up all for Christ's sake, but now Christ had mercifully taken all, and lo! it seemed as though all were found. 

 'As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names--not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. . . . '

With this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'Allexperience does a gentleman good. ' It is the kind of thing we shouldlike very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held withpassion and vehemence by Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word'gentleman' was for him very different from the connotation it had forButler. (Butler's gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very muchthe ideal of a period, and not at all _quod semper, quod ubique_; a veryVictorian anti-Victorianism. ) Dostoevsky worked his thesis out with aruthless devotion to realistic probability. He emptied the cornucopia ofmisery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; andthen had the audacity to challenge the world to say that they were notbetter, more human, and more lovable for the disaster in which they wereinevitably overwhelmed. And, though it is hard to say 'Yes' to hischallenge, it is harder still to say 'No. '

In the case of Ernest Pontifex, however, we do not care to respond tothe challenge at all. The experiment is faked and proves nothing. It ismere humbug to declare that a man has been thrown into the waters oflife to sink or swim, when there is an anxious but cool-headed friend onthe bank with a £70, 000 life-belt to throw after him the moment his headgoes under. That is neither danger nor experience. Even if ErnestPontifex knew nothing of the future awaiting him (as we are assured hedid not) it makes no difference. _We_ know he cannot sink; he is a layfigure with a pneumatic body. Whether he became a lay figure for Butleralso we cannot say; we can merely register the fact that the book breaksdown after Ernest's misadventure with Miss Maitland, a deplorablyunsubstantial episode to be the crisis of a piece of writing so firm intexture and solid in values as the preceding chapters. Ernest as a manhas an intense non-existence. 

After all, as far as the positive side of _The Way of all Flesh_' isconcerned, Butler's eggs are all in one basket. If the adult Ernest doesnot materialise, the book hangs in empty air. Whatever it may be insteadit is not a great novel, nor even a good one. So much established, wemay begin to collect the good things. Christina is the best of them. Sheis, by any standard, a remarkable creation. Butler was 'all round'Christina. Both by analysis and synthesis she is wholly his. He canproduce her in either way. She lives as flesh and blood and has not alittle of our affection; she is also constructed by definition, 'If itwere not too awful a thing to say of anybody, she meant well'--the wholephrase gives exactly Christina's stature. Alethea Pontifex is really abluff; but the bluff succeeds, largely because, having experience ofChristina, we dare not call it. Mrs Jupp is triumphantly complete; thereare even moments when she seems as great as Mrs Quickly. The novels thatcontain three such women (or two if we reckon the uncertain Alethea, whois really only a vehicle for Butler's very best sayings, as cancelled bythe non-existent Ellen) can be counted, we suppose, on our ten fingers. 

Of the men, Theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word). But we know little of what went on inside him. We can fill out Christinawith her inimitable day-dreams; Theobald remains something of askeleton, whereas we have no difficulty at all with Dr Skinner, ofRoughborough. We have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling theshelves with volumes of Skinner, and we know how it was done. When hereappears we assume the continuity of his existence without demur. Theglimpse of George Pontifex is also satisfying; after the christeningparty we know him for a solid reality. Pryer was half-created when hisname was chosen. Butler did the rest in a single paragraph whichcontains a perfect delineation of 'the Oxford manner' twenty yearsbefore it had become a disease known to ordinary diagnosis. The curiousmay find this towards the beginning of Chapter LI. But Ernest, upon whomso much depends, is a phantom--a dream-child waiting the incarnationwhich Butler refused him for twenty years. Was it laziness, was it afelt incapacity? We do not know; but in the case of a novelist it is ourduty to believe the worst. The particularity of our attitude to Butlerappears in the fact that we are disappointed, not with him, but withErnest. We are even angry with that young man. If it had not been forhim, we believe, _The Way of all Flesh_ might have appeared in 1882; itmight have short-circuited _Robert Elsmere_. 

[JUNE, 1919. 

 * * * * *

We approach the biography of an author whom we respect, and thereforehave thought about, with contradictory feelings. We are excited at thethought of finding our conclusions reinforced, and apprehensive less thecompact and definite figure which our imaginations have gradually shapedshould become vague and incoherent and dull. It is a pity to purchaseenlightenment at the cost of definition; and it is more important thatwe should have a clear notion of the final shape of a man in whom we areinterested than an exact record of his phases. 

The essential quality of great artists is incommensurable withbiography; they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasionof the event. All that piety can do for them is beside the mark. Theirwilful spirit is fled before the last stone of the mausoleum can be gotin place, and as it flies it jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and hislibation is spilt idly upon the ground. Although it would be too muchand too ungrateful to say that the monumental piety of Mr Festing Joneshas been similarly turned to derision--after all, Butler was not agreat man--we feel that something analogous has happened. This laboriousbuilding is a great deal too large for him to dwell in. He had madehimself a cosy habitation in the _Note-Books_, with the fire in theright place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of criticism. In a two-volume memoir[11] he shivers perceptibly, and at moments helooks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic. 

 [Footnote 11: _Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon'_ (1835-1902): _a Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. 2 vols. (Macmillan. )]

And if it be said that a biography should make no difference to ourestimate of the man who lives and has his being in his published works, we reply that it shifts the emphasis. An amusingly wrong-headed bookabout Homer is a peccadillo; ten years of life lavished upon it issomething a good deal more serious. And even _The Way of all Flesh_, which as an experimental novel is a very considerable achievement, becomes something different when we have to regard it as a laborious andinfinitely careful record of experienced fact. Further still, even theedge of the perfected inconsequence of certain of the 'Notes' issomewhat dulled when we see the trick of it being exercised. The originof the amusing remark on Blake, who 'was no good because he learntItalian at over 60 in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no goodbecause he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good becauseTennyson ran him--well, Tennyson goes without saying, ' is to be found in'No, I don't like Lamb. You see, Canon Ainger writes about him, andCanon Ainger goes to tea with my aunts. ' Repeated, it becomes merely aclever way of being stupid, as we should be if we were tempted to saywe couldn't bear Handel, because Butler was mad on him, and Butler wasno good because he was run by Mr Jones, and, well, Mr Jones goes withoutsaying. 

Nevertheless, though Butler lives with much discomfort and some dangerin Mr Jones's tabernacle, he does continue to live. What his head losesby the inquisition of a biography his heart gains, though we wonderwhether Butler himself would have smiled upon the exchange. Butler losesalmost the last vestige of a title to be considered a creative artistwhen the incredible fact is revealed that the letters of Theobald andChristina in _The Way of all Flesh_ are merely reproduced from thosewhich his father and mother sent him. Nor was Butler, even as a copyist, always adequate to his originals. The brilliantly witty letters of MissSavage, by which the first volume is made precious, seem to us toindicate a real woman upon whom something more substantial might havebeen modelled than the delightful but evanescent picture of AletheaPontifex. Here, at least, is a picture of Miss Savage and Butlertogether which, to our sense, gives some common element in both whichescaped the expression of the author of _The Way of all Flesh_:--

 'I like the cherry-eating scene, too [Miss Savage wrote after reading the MS. Of _Alps and Sanctuaries_], because it reminded me of your eating cherries when I first knew you. One day when I was going to the gallery, a very hot day I remember, I met you on the shady side of Berners Street, eating cherries out of a basket. Like your Italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and you handed the basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word. I pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying a word either. I had not before perceived you to be different from any one else. I was like Peter Bell and the primrose with the yellow brim. As I went away to France a day or two after that and did not see you again for months, the recollection of you as you were eating cherries in Berners Street abode with me and pleased me greatly. '

Again, we feel that the unsubstantial Towneley of the novel should havebeen more like flesh and blood when we learn that he too was drawn fromthe life, and from a life which was intimately connected with Butler's. Here, most evidently, the heart gains what the head loses, for the storyof Butler's long-suffering generosity to Charles Paine Pauli is almostbeyond belief and comprehension. Butler had met Pauli, who was two yearshis junior, in New Zealand, and had conceived a passionate admirationfor him. Learning that he desired to read for the bar, Butler, who hadmade an unexpected success of his sheep-farming, offered to lend him£100 to get to England and £200 a year until he was called. Very shortlyafter they both arrived in England, Pauli separated from Butler, refusing even to let him know his address, and thenceforward paid himone brief visit every day. He continued, however, to draw his allowanceregularly until his death all through the period when, owing to thefailure of Butler's investments, £200 seems to have been a good dealmore than one-half Butler's income. At Pauli's death in 1897 Butlerdiscovered what he must surely at moments have suspected, that Pauli hadbeen making between £500 and £800 at the bar, and had left about£9000--not to Butler. Butler wrote an account of the affair afterPauli's death which is strangely self-revealing:--

 '. . . Everything that he had was good, and he was such a fine handsome fellow, with such an attractive manner that to me he seemed everything I should like myself to be, but knew very well that I was not. . . . 

 'I had felt from the very beginning that my intimacy with Pauli was only superficial, and I also perceived more and more that I bored him. . . . He liked society and I hated it. Moreover, he was at times very irritable and would find continual fault with me; often, I have no doubt, justly, but often, as it seemed to me, unreasonably. Devoted to him as I continued to be for many years, those years were very unhappy as well as very happy ones. 

 'I set down a great deal to his ill-health, no doubt truly; a great deal more, I was sure, was my own fault--and I am so still; I excused much on the score of his poverty and his dependence on myself--for his father and mother, when it came to the point, could do nothing for him; I was his host and was bound to forbear on that ground if on no other. I always hoped that, as time went on, and he saw how absolutely devoted to him I was, and what unbounded confidence I had in him, and how I forgave him over and over again for treatment which I would not have stood for a moment from any one else--I always hoped that he would soften and deal as frankly and unreservedly with me as I with him; but, though for some fifteen years I hoped this, in the end I gave it up, and settled down into a resolve from which I never departed--to do all I could for him, to avoid friction of every kind, and to make the best of things for him and myself that circumstances would allow. '

In love such as this there is a feminine tenderness and devotion whichpositively illuminates what otherwise appears to be a streak ofperversity in Butler; and the illumination becomes still more certainwhen we read Butler's letters to the young Swiss, Hans Faesch, to whom_Out into the Night_ was written. Faesch had departed for Singapore. 

 'The sooner we all of us, ' wrote Butler, 'as men of sense and sober reason, get through the very acute, poignant sorrow which we now feel, the better for us all. There is no fear of any of us forgetting when the acute stage is passed. I should be ashamed of myself for having felt as keenly and spoken with as little reserve as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any length to which grief can take me when it is about you. I can call to mind no word which ever passed between us three which had been better unspoken: no syllable of irritation or unkindness; nothing but goodness and kindness ever came out of you, and such as our best was we gave it to you as you gave yours to us. Who may not well be plunged up to the lips in sorrow at parting from one of whom he can say this in all soberness and truth? I feel as though I had lost an only son with no hope of another. . . . '

The love is almost pathetically lavish. Letters like these reveal to usa man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrierand defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was _rentrée_, probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indicationhelps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with whichhe behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favouredweapon. The most threatening danger for such a man is to take theprofessions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himselfonly by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hungerto love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler itreached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions ofthe world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the _Note-Books_ in_The Athenæum_ recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositionson their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely toscientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to theconverse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast majority whomeant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority whowere sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland casesescaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regardall his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like andadmire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken andwrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this anglethe curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnettof the British Museum are of uncommon interest. They afford a strangeexample of mutual mystification. 

Thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does notgreatly matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as withthe whole) but of thought, was closed to him. Most of the poetry, themusic, and the art of the world was humbug to him, and it was only byinsisting that Homer and Shakespeare were exactly like himself that hemanaged to except them from his natural aversion. So, in the lastresort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined themajority of men were engaged in humbugging him. If his standard of truthwas higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few. There is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats ismerely clumsy and inopportune. In the slow meanderings of this _Memoir_we too often catch a glimpse of Butler measuring giants with theimpertinent foot-rule of his common sense. One does not like him theless for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting jokes withwhich it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation. Persistently there emerges from the record the impression of somethingchildish, whether in petulance or _gaminerie_, a crudeness as well as ashrewdness of judgment and ideal. Where Butler thought himself complete, he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he wascomplete. To himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of Pauli; tous he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of Miss Savage. 

[OCTOBER, 1919. 

_The Poetry of Mr Hardy_

One meets fairly often with the critical opinion that Mr Hardy's poetryis incidental. It is admitted on all sides that his poetry has curiousmerits of its own, but it is held to be completely subordinate to hisnovels, and those who maintain that it must be considered as havingequal standing with his prose, are not seldom treated as guilty ofparadox and preciousness. 

We are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those ofthe contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressedprimarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man's chief work mustnecessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some suchsupposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visiblereluctance to allow Mr Hardy's poetry a clean impact upon the criticalconsciousness. It is true that we have ranged against us critics ofdistinction, such as Mr Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr Robert Lynd, andthat it may savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could havebeen unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressedthemselves to Mr Hardy's poetry. Nevertheless, we find some significancein the fact that both these critics are of such an age that when theycame to years of discretion the Wessex Novels were in existence as a_corpus_. There, before their eyes, was a monument of literary workhaving a unity unlike that of any contemporary author. The poems becamepublic only after they had laid the foundations of their judgment. Forthem Mr Hardy's work was done. Whatever he might subsequently producewas an interesting, but to their criticism an otiose appendix to hisprose achievement. 

It happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspectivemay be different. By the accident of years it would appear to him thatMr Hardy's poetry was no less a _corpus_ than his prose. They would beextended equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embarkupon voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and hemight find, in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that thepoetry would yield up to him a quality of perfume not less essentialthan any that he could extract from the prose. 

This is, as we see it, the case with ourselves. We discover all that ourelders discover in Mr Hardy's novels; we see more than they in hispoetry. To our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is notlifted into significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels. They also are complete in themselves. We recognise the relation betweenthe achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind;but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. Theone is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline, therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to usthe most important sentence in _Who's Who?_--namely, that in which MrHardy confesses that in 1868 he was compelled--that is his own word--togive up writing poetry for prose. 

For Mr Hardy's poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. In thevolume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with theexception of 'The Dynasts, '[12] are pieces bearing the date 1866 whichdisplay an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of theessential content of great poetry. Nor are such pieces exceptional. Granted that Mr Hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry, still there are a dozen poems of 1866-7 which belong either entirely orin part to the category of major poetry. Take, for instance, 'NeutralTones':--

 'We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod; --They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. 

 'Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove Over tedious riddles long ago; And some winds played between us to and fro On which lost the more by our love. 

 'The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing Alive enough to have strength to die; And a grin of bitterness swept thereby Like an ominous bird a-wing. . . . 

 'Since then keen lessons that love deceives And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree And a pond edged with grayish leaves. '

 [Footnote 12: _Collected. Poems of Thomas Hardy_. Vol. I. (Macmillan. )]

That was written in 1867. The date of _Desperate Remedies_, Mr Hardy'sfirst novel, was 1871. _Desperate Remedies_ may have been written someyears before. It makes no difference to the astonishing contrast betweenthe immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. It is surelyimpossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that MrHardy's poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curioussimulacrum of his prose. 

These early poems have other points of deep interest, of which one ofthe chief is in a sense technical. One can trace a quite definiteinfluence of Shakespeare's sonnets in his language and imagery. The foursonnets, 'She to Him' (1866), are full of echoes, as:--

 'Numb as a vane that cankers on its point True to the wind that kissed ere canker came. '

or this from another sonnet of the same year:--

 'As common chests encasing wares of price Are borne with tenderness through halls of state. '

Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark theimpress of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curiousand impressive in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringingsome physical compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to saysomething that he does not want to say. Of course, it is merely acurious tweak of the fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as thefollowing an insistent vision of two youths of an age the onemasterful, the other indulgent, and carrying out his companion's firmsuggestion:--

 'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame That Sportsman Time rears but his brood to kill, Knowing me in my soul the very same-- One who would die to spare you touch of ill!-- Will you not grant to old affection's claim The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?'

But, fancies aside, the effect of these early poems is twofold. Theirattitude is definite:--

 'Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain And dicing time for gladness calls a moan . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily thrown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. '

and the technique has the mark of mastery, a complete economy ofstatement which produces the conviction that the words are saying onlywhat poet ordained they should say, neither less nor more. 

The early years were followed by the long period of the novels, inwhich, we are prepared to admit, poetry was actually if not in intentionincidental. It is the grim truth that poetry cannot be written inbetween times; and, though we have hardly any dates on which to rely, weare willing to believe that few of Mr Hardy's characteristic poems werewritten between the appearance of _Desperate Remedies_ and his farewellto the activity of novel-writing with _The Well-Beloved_ (1897). But thefew dates which we have tell us that 'Thoughts of Phena, ' the beautifulpoem beginning:--

 'Not a line of her writing have I, Not a thread of her hair. . . . '

which reaches forward to the love poems of 1912-13, was written in 1890. 

Whether the development of Mr Hardy's poetry was concealed or visibleduring the period of the novels, development there was into a maturityso overwhelming that by its touchstone the poetical work of his famouscontemporaries appears singularly jejune and false. But, though by theaccident of social conditions--for that Mr Hardy waited till 1898 topublish his first volume of poems is more a social than an artisticfact--it is impossible to follow out the phases of his poetical progressin the detail we would desire, it is impossible not to recognise thatthe mature poet, Mr Hardy, is of the same poetical substance as theyoung poet of the 'sixties. The attitude is unchanged; the modificationsof the theme of 'crass casualty' leave its central asseverationunchanged. There are restatements, enlargements of perspective, a slowand forceful expansion of the personal into the universal, but the truthonce recognised is never suffered for a moment to be hidden ormollified. Only a superficial logic would point, for instance, to his

 'Wonder if Man's consciousness Was a mistake of God's, '

as a denial of 'casualty. ' To envisage an accepted truth from a newangle, to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope offinding some aspect which might accord with a large and general view isthe inevitable movement of any mind that is alive and not dead. To saythat Mr Hardy has finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it istrue. The harmony of the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher orthe philosopher. Neither would grant, neither would understand theprofound acquiescence that lies behind 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to theGrecian Urn. ' Such acquiescence has no moral quality, as morality iseven now understood, nor any logical compulsion. It does not stifleanger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling face upon unsmiling things;it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile heroics. It accepts thethings that are as the necessary basis of artistic creation. This unitywhich comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to denyexperience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which isnot denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy's mature poetry. It gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what iscalled the impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense ofbackground, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but theculmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is theculmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seemsto record. 

At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacyto all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation ordismay. Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famouslines: 'There is some corner of a foreign field . . . ' and Mr Hardy's'Drummer Hodge':--

 'Yet portion of that unknown plain Will Hodge for ever be; His homely Northern heart and brain Grow to some Southern tree, And strange-eyed constellations reign His stars eternally. '

We know which is the truer. Which is the more beautiful? Is it not MrHardy? And which (strange question) is the more consoling, the moresatisfying, the more acceptable? Is it not Mr Hardy? There is sorrow, but it is the sorrow of the spheres. And this, not the apparent angerand dismay of a self's discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in MrHardy's poetry. The Mr Hardy of the love poems of 1912-13 is not a mangiving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry ofthe universe. A vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weighteach syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into amoment of time with a vista of years:--

 'Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see, The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily, Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me, For the stars close their shutters and the Dawn whitens hazily. Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again! I am just the same as when Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers. '

[NOVEMBER, 1919. 

We have read these poems of Thomas Hardy, read them not once, but manytimes. Many of them have already become part of our being; theirindelible impress has given shape to dumb and striving elements in oursoul; they have set free and purged mute, heart-devouring regrets. Andyet, though this is so, the reading of them in a single volume, thesubmission to their movement with a like unbroken motion of the mind, gathers their greatness, their poignancy and passion, into one stream, submerging us and leaving us patient and purified. 

There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets ofsure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has thiscompulsive power. The secret is not hard to find. Not one of them isadequate to what we know and have suffered. We have in our own hearts anew touchstone of poetic greatness. We have learned too much to bewholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and acomplete acknowledgment of experience. 'Give us the whole, ' we cry, 'give us the truth. ' Unless we can catch the undertone of thisacknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than soundingbrass or a tinkling cymbal. 

Therefore we turn--some by instinct and some by deliberate choice--tothe greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these. Whatthey have, he has, and has in their degree--a plenary vision of life. Heis the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in, modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individualpoems of which they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment ofa whole--not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unitywhich implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster andcompletely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind andwithin it a reaction to the universe. An overwhelming endorsementdescends upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, andstraightway they are graven in stone. 

Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart inkind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries. These may beperfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by Mr Hardy is oftenperfect in a higher sense. As the lines of a diagram may be produced inimagination to contain within themselves all space, one of Mr Hardy'smost characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience. In it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself--thedominant theme that gives individuation to the ripple of fragmentaryjoys and sorrows. Take 'The Broken Appointment':--

 'You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. -- Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, You did not come. 

 'You love not me, And love alone can lend you loyalty --I know and knew it. But, unto the store Of human deeds divine in all but name, Was it not worth a little hour or more To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be You love not me?'

On such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visibleendorsement of the universe. The hopes not of a lover but of humanityare crushed beneath its rhythm. The ruthlessness of the event isintensified in the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad ofdestiny, and a moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain ofintense attention it seems to have been written by the destiny itrecords. 

What is the secret of poetic power like this? We do not look for it intechnique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. But thetechnique of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind thatwe know as we read that it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. For amoment it startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words isreverberant with accumulated purpose. They are pitiless as the poem; thesign of an ultimate obedience is upon them. Whence came the power thatcompelled it? Can the source be defined or indicated? We believe it canbe indicated, though not defined. We can show where to look for themystery, that in spite of our regard remains a mystery still. We arepersuaded that almost on the instant that it was felt the originalemotion of the poem was endorsed Perhaps it came to the poet as the painof a particular and personal experience; but in a little or a longwhile--creative time is not measured by days or years--it became, forhim, a part of the texture of the general life. It became amanifestation of life, almost, nay wholly, in the sacramental sense, averitable epiphany. The manifold and inexhaustible quality of life wasfocused into a single revelation. A critic's words do not lendthemselves to the necessary precision. We should need to write withexactly the same power as Mr Hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour strokedits sum, ' to make our meaning likewise inevitable. The word 'revelation'is fertile in false suggestion; the creative act of power which we seekto elucidate is an act of plenary apprehension, by which onemanifestation, one form of life, one experience is seen in its rigorousrelation to all other and to all possible manifestations, forms, andexperiences. It is, we believe, the act which Mr Hardy himself has triedto formulate in the phrase which is the title of one of his books ofpoems--_Moments of Vision_. 

Only those who do not read Mr Hardy could make the mistake of supposingthat on his lips such a phrase had a mystical implication. Betweenbelief and logic lies a third kingdom, which the mystics and thephilosophers alike are too eager to forget--the kingdom of art, no lessthe residence of truth than the two other realms, and to some, perhaps, more authentic even than they. Therefore when we expand the word'vision' in the phrase to 'æsthetic vision' we mean, not the perceptionof beauty, at least in the ordinary sense of that ill-used word, but theapprehension of truth, the recognition of a complete system of validrelations incapable of logical statement. Such are the acts of uniqueapprehension which Mr Hardy, we believe, implied by his title. In a'moment of vision' the poet recognises in a single separate incident oflife, life's essential quality. The uniqueness of the whole, theinfinite multiplicity and variety of its elements, are manifested andapprehended in a part. Since we are here at work on the confines ofintelligible statement, it is better, even at the cost of brutalising apoem, to choose an example from the book that bears the mysterious name. The verses that follow come from 'Near Lanivet, 1872. ' We choose them asan example of Mr Hardy's method at less than its best, at a point atwhich the scaffolding of his process is just visible. 

 'There was a stunted hand-post just on the crest. Only a few feet high: She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest, At the crossways close thereby. 

 'She leant back, being so weary, against its stem, And laid her arms on its own, Each open palm stretched out to each end of them, Her sad face sideways thrown. 

 'Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day Made her look as one crucified In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way, And hurriedly "Don't, " I cried. 

 'I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said, As she stepped forth ready to go, "I am rested now. --Something strange came into my head; I wish I had not leant so!'. . . 

 'And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see In the running of Time's far glass Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be Some day. --Alas, alas!'

Superstition and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert theorder of the creative process. The poet's act of apprehension is whollydifferent from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension thechance-shaped crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. Theconcentration of life's vicissitude upon that white-clothed form wasfirst recognised by a sovereign act of æsthetic understanding orintuition; the seeming crucifix supplied a scaffolding for itsexpression; it afforded a clue to the method of transposition into wordswhich might convey the truth thus apprehended; it suggested anequivalence. The distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but we believethat it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to anunderstanding of Mr Hardy's poetry in particular. Indeed, in it must besought the meaning of another of his titles, 'Satires of Circumstance, 'where the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, buta symbol necessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality inlife more largely and variously apprehended by the poet. At the risk ofappearing fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate ourmeaning. The poetic process is, we believe, twofold. The one part, thediscovery of the symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what wemay call poetic method. It is concerned with the transposition andcommunication of emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for topoetic method the emotional material is, strictly, indifferent. Theother part is an esthetic apprehension of significance, the recognitionof the all in the one. This is a specifically poetic act, or rather thesupreme poetic act. Yet it may be absent from poetry. For there is nonecessary connection between poetic apprehension and poetic method. Poetic method frequently exists without poetic apprehension; and thereis no reason to suppose that the reverse is not also true, for therecognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the peculiarprivilege of great poets. We have here, at least a principle of divisionbetween major and minor poetry. 

Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and askwhat it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act ofapprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality ofthe one. We believe that the answer is simple. The great poet knows whathe is looking for. Once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely, being compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describewhat is being done in the kingdom of art. The poet, we say, knows thequality for which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a conditionthan a possession of soul. It is a state of responsiveness rather than aknowledge of that to which he will respond. But it is knowledge inasmuchas the choice of that to which he will respond is determined by thecondition of his soul. On the purity of that condition depends hisgreatness as a poet, and that purity in its turn depends upon hisdenying no element of his profound experience. If he denies or forgets, the synthesis--again the word is a metaphor--which must establish itselfwithin him is fragmentary and false. The new event can wake but partialechoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received into, norcan it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable fromlimbo into forgetfulness. 

Mr Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberatepurity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the world's slow stainhas not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the generalconspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professionaloptimists take a part. Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence andstrangeness of their own:--

 'It will have been: Nor God nor Demon can undo the done, Unsight the seen Make muted music be as unbegun Though things terrene Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene. '

What neither God nor Demon can do, men are incessantly at work toaccomplish. Life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for shescatters her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns. But the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond hispower to remember them otherwise than together. 

It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardyshould have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series oflove poems that are unique for power and passion in even the Englishlanguage. This late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; ithas sprung straight from the main stem of Mr Hardy's poetic growth. Into'Veteris Vestigia Flammas' is distilled the quintessence of the powerthat created the Wessex Novels and 'The Dynasts'; all that Mr Hardy hasto tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, isin these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or toldus more. _Sunt lacrimæ rerum_. 

[NOVEMBER, 1919. 

 * * * * *

POSTSCRIPT

Three months after this essay was written the first volume of the longawaited definitive edition of Mr Hardy's works (the Mellstock Edition)appeared. It was with no common thrill that we read in the preciouspages of introduction the following words confirming the theory uponwhich the first part of the essay is largely based. 

 'Turning now to my verse--to myself the more individual part of my literary fruitage--I would say that, unlike some of the fiction, nothing interfered with the writer's freedom in respect of its form or content. Several of the poems--indeed many--were produced before novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the light till all the novels had been published. . . . 

 'The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty years. One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose. '

_Present Condition of English Poetry_

Shall we, or shall we not, be serious? To be serious nowadays is to beill-mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter? We have ouropinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in theGeorgian book, a little in _Wheels_. [13] We know that there is much badpoetry in the Georgian book, and less in _Wheels_. We know that there isone poem in _Wheels_ beside the intense and sombre imagination of whicheven the good poetry of the Georgian book pales for a moment. We thinkwe know more than this. What does it matter? Pick out the good things, and let the rest go. 

 [Footnote 13: _Georgian Poetry_, 1918-1919. Edited by E. M. (The Poetry Bookshop. )

 _Wheels_. Fourth Cycle. (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell. )]

And yet, somehow, this question of modern English poetry has becomeimportant for us, as important as the war, important in the same way asthe war. We can even analogise. _Georgian Poetry_ is like the CoalitionGovernment; _Wheels_ is like the Radical opposition. Out of the onethere issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuousredolence of _union sacrée_; out of the other, some acidulation ofperversity. In the coalition poets we find the larger number of goodmen, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we findno bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalitiongoodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent, passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life. 

On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on bothsides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almostwholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that wefind intensely disagreeable. In the coalition we find it noxious, in theopposition no worse than irritating. No doubt this is because werecognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while theopposition is held to be ridiculous. But both the coalition and theopposition--we use both terms in their corporate sense--are unmistakablythe product of the present age. In that sense they are trulyrepresentative and complementary each to the other; they are a fairsample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which welive; they are still more remarkable as an index of the completeconfusion of æsthetic values that prevails to-day. 

The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. Of thenineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom weexcept absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, andMr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, MrAbercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the restthere are varying degrees of saturation. This false simplicity can bequite subtle. It is compounded of worship of trees and birds andcontemporary poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over attimes with a quite perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other timeswith what looks to be technical skill, but generally proves to be afairly clumsy reminiscence of somebody else's technical skill. Thenegative qualities of this _simplesse_ are, however, the most obvious;the poems imbued with it are devoid of any emotional significancewhatever. If they have an idea it leaves you with the queer feeling thatit is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn smooth by therippling of innumerable minds. Then, spread in a luminous haze overthese compounded elements, is a fundamental right-mindedness; you feel, somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are verygood. There is nothing disturbing about them; _ils peuvent être mis danstoutes les mains_; they are kind, generous, even noble. They sympathisewith animate and inanimate nature. They have shining foreheads with bigbumps of benevolence, like Flora Casby's father, and one inclines tobelieve that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear, if only because their vision is blurred. They are fond of lists of nameswhich never suggest things; they are sparing of similes. If they usethem they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definitesimile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certaintest of reality. 

But it is impossible to be serious about them. The more stupid of themsupply the matter for a good laugh; the more clever the stuff of a morerecondite amazement. What _is_ one to do when Mr Monro apostrophises theforce of Gravity in such words as these?--

 'By leave of you man places stone on stone; He scatters seed: you are at once the prop Among the long roots of his fragile crop You manufacture for him, and insure House, harvest, implement, and furniture, And hold them all secure. '

We are not surprised to learn further that

 'I rest my body on your grass, And let my brain repose in you. '

All that remains to be said is that Mr Monro is fond of dogs ('Can yousmell the rose?' he says to Dog: 'ah, no!') and inclined to fish--bothof which are Georgian inclinations. 

Then there is Mr Drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man formoonlit apples--'moon-washed apples of wonder'--and the righteous man'ssense of robust rhythm in this chorus from 'Lincoln':--

 'You who know the tenderness Of old men at eve-tide, Coming from the hedgerows, Coming from the plough, And the wandering caress Of winds upon the woodside, When the crying yaffle goes Underneath the bough. '

Mr Drinkwater, though he cannot write good doggerel, is a very good man. In this poem he refers to the Sermon on the Mount as 'the words of lightFrom the mountain-way. '

Mr Squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make anexcellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity. Hewould repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in thesame way as, we suppose, he deceives himself. His poem 'Rivers' seems tous a very curious example of the _faux bon_. Not only is the ideaderivative, but the rhythmical treatment also. Here is Mr de la Mare:--

 'Sweet is the music of Arabia In my heart, when out of dreams I still in the thin clear murk of dawn Descry her gliding streams; Hear her strange lutes on the green banks Ring loud with the grief and delight Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians In the brooding silence of night. They haunt me--her lutes and her forests; No beauty on earth I see But shadowed with that dream recalls Her loveliness to me: Still eyes look coldly upon me, Cold voices whisper and say-- "He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia, They have stolen his wits away. "'

And here is a verse from Mr Squire:--

 'For whatever stream I stand by, And whatever river I dream of, There is something still in the back of my mind From very far away; There is something I saw and see not, A country full of rivers That stirs in my heart and speaks to me More sure, more dear than they. 

 'And always I ask and wonder (Though often I do not know it) Why does this water not smell like water?. . . '

To leave the question of reminiscence aside, how the delicate vision ofMr de la Mare has been coarsened, how commonplace his exquisitetechnique has become in the hands of even a first-rate ability! Itremains to be added that Mr Squire is an amateur of nature, --

 'And skimming, fork-tailed in the evening air, When man first was were not the martens there?'--

and a lover of dogs. 

Mr Shanks, Mr W. J. Turner, and Mr Freeman belong to the same order. Theyhave considerable technical accomplishment of the straightforwardkind--and no emotional content. One can find examples of the disastroussimile in them all. They are all in their degree pseudo-naïves. MrTurner wonders in this way:--

 'It is strange that a little mud Should echo with sounds, syllables, and letters, Should rise up and call a mountain Popocatapetl, And a green-leafed wood Oleander. '

Of course Mr Turner does not really wonder; those four lines are proofpositive of that. But what matters is not so much the intrinsic value ofthe gift as the kindly thought which prompted the giver. Mr Shanks'sspeciality is beauty. He also is an amateur of nature. He bids us: 'Hearthe loud night-jar spin his pleasant note. ' Of course, Mr Shanks cannothave heard a real night-jar. His description is proof of that. Butagain, it was a kindly thought. Mr Freeman is, like Mr Squire, a moreinteresting case, deserving detailed analysis. For the moment we canonly recommend a comparison of his first and second poems in this bookwith 'Sabrina Fair' and 'Love in a Valley' respectively. 

It is only when we are confronted with the strange blend of technicalskill and an emotional void that we begin to hunt for reminiscences. Reminiscences are no danger to the real poet. He is the splendidborrower who lends a new significance to that which he takes. Heincorporates his borrowing in the new thing which he creates; it has itsbeing there and there alone. One can see the process in the one finepoem in _Wheels_, Mr Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting':--

 'It seemed that out of the battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which Titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall. With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. "Strange, friend, " I said, "Here is no cause to mourn. " "None, " said the other, "save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also. . . "'

The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest inthese two books, both in intention and achievement. Yet no one canmistake its source. It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Inductionto 'Hyperion. ' The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of thedying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats. 

 'None can usurp this height, return'd that shade, But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest. '

That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen's 'StrangeMeeting. ' It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in itstechnique there is the hand of the master to be. Those monosyllabicassonances are the discovery of genius. We are persuaded that this poemby a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death inhis heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotionalsignificance of the war that has yet been achieved by English poetry. Byincluding it in his book, the editor of _Wheels_ has done a greatservice to English letters. 

Extravagant words, it may be thought. We appeal to the documents. Read_Georgian Poetry_ and read 'Strange Meeting. ' Compare Wilfred Owen'spoem with the very finest things in the Georgian book--Mr Davies's'Lovely Dames, ' or Mr de la Mare's 'The Tryst, ' or 'Fare Well, ' or thetwenty opening lines of Mr Abercrombie's disappointing poem. You willnot find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but youwill find in 'Strange Meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to thatwhich has been most profound in the experience of a generation. Youwill, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing ofwhich makes the confusion of a book like _Georgian Poetry_ possible, restored to you. You will remember three forgotten things--that poetryis rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, andthat its significance finally depends upon the quality andcomprehensiveness of the emotion. You will recognise that the tricks ofthe trade have never been and never will be discovered by which abilitycan conjure emptiness into meaning. 

It seems hardly worth while to return to _Wheels_. Once the argument hasbeen pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting, ' the rest of thecontents of the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry wewill characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as falsesophistication. There are the same contemporary reminiscences. CompareMr Osbert Sitwell's _English Gothic_ with Mr T. S. Eliot's _Sweeney_; andyou will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal withthe emotions of a complex one. The spectacle is almost as amusing asthat of the similar process in the Georgian book. Nevertheless, ingeneral, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merelyirritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positivelynoxious. Miss Edith Sitwell's deliberate painted toys are a great dealbetter than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones. In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a perplexed emotion manages to make itsway through a chaotic technique. She represents the solid impulse whichlies behind the opposition in general. This impulse she describes, though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these notuninteresting verses:--

 'But since we are mere children of this age, And must in curious ways discover salvation I will not quit my muddled generation, But ever plead for Beauty in this rage. 

 'Although I know that Nature's bounty yields Unto simplicity a beautiful content, Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent Will I give back my body to the fields. '

There is the opposition. Against the righteous man, the _mauvaissujet_. We sympathise with the _mauvais sujet_. If he is persistent andlaborious enough, he may achieve poetry. But he must travel alone. Inorder to be loyal to your age you must make up your mind what your ageis. To be muddled yourself is not loyalty, but treachery, even to amuddled generation. 

[DECEMBER, 1919. 

_The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield_

Mr Masefiled is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end, which is the glorification of England in narrative verse. _Reynard theFox_ marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal. He has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so subdued thatthey no longer sensibly impede the movement of his verse, a point atwhich we may begin to speak (though not too loud) of mastery. We feelthat he now approaches what he desires to do with some certainty ofdoing it, so that we in our turn can approach some other questions withsome hope of answering them. 

The questions are various; but they radiate from and enter again intothe old question whether what he is doing, and beginning to do well, isworth while doing, or rather whether it will have been worth while doingfifty years hence. For we have no doubt at all in our mind that, incomparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as _Reynardthe Fox_ is valuable. We may use the old rough distinction and ask firstwhether _Reynard the Fox_ is durable in virtue of its substance, andsecond, whether it is durable in virtue of its form. 

The glorification of England! There are some who would give their soulsto be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by Shakespeare, byMilton, by Wordsworth, and by Hardy. For an Englishman there is noricher inspiration, no finer theme; to have one's speech and thoughtsaturated by the fragrance of this lovely and pleasant land was oncethe birthright of English poets and novelists. But something has creptbetween us and it, dividing. Instead of an instinctive love, there is aconscious desire of England; instead of slow saturation, a desperateplunge into its mystery. The fragrance does not come at its own sweetwill; we clutch at it. It does not enfold and pervade our most arduousspeculations; no involuntary sweetness comes flooding in upon ourconfrontation of human destinies. Hardy is the last of that great line. If we long for sweetness--as we do long for it, and with how poignant apain!--we must seek it out, like men who rush dusty and irritable fromthe babble and fever of the town. The rhythm of the earth never entersinto their gait; they are like spies among the birds and flowers, likecollectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. The Georgianssnatch at nature; they are never part of it. And there is some elementof this desperation in Mr Masefield. We feel in him an anxiety to loadevery rift with ore of this particular kind, a deliberate intention toemphasise that which is most English in the English country-side. 

How shall we say it? It is not that he makes a parade of arcaneknowledge. The word 'parade' does injustice to his indubitableintegrity. But we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical, and at times archaic phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himselfthat he is saturated in essential Englishness, and we incline to thinkthat even his choice of an actual subject was less inevitable thanself-imposed. He would isolate the quality he would capture, have itmore wholly within his grasp; yet, in some subtle way, it finallyeludes him. The intention is in excess, and in the manner of itsexecution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess also. Themusic of English place-names, for instance is too insistent; no one intowhom they had entered with the English air itself would use them with somanifest an admiration. 

Perhaps a comparison may bring definition nearer. The first part of MrMasefield's poem, which describes the meet and the assembled persons oneby one, recalls, not merely by the general cast of the subject, but bymany actual turns of phrase, Chaucer's _Prologue_. Mr Masefield's parsonhas more than one point of resemblance to Chaucer's Monk:--

 'An out-ryder, that loved venerye; A manly man to ben an abbot able. . . . '

But it would take too long to quote both pictures. We may choose for ourjuxtaposition the Prioress and one of Mr Masefield's young ladies:--

 'Behind them rode her daughter Belle, A strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face Was sweet with thought and proud with race, And bright with joy at riding there. She was as good as blowing air, But shy and difficult to know. The kittens in the barley-mow, The setter's toothless puppies sprawling, The blackbird in the apple calling, All knew her spirit more than we. So delicate these maidens be In loving lovely helpless things. '

And here is the Prioress:--

 'But for to speken of hir conscience, She was so charitable and so pitous, She wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde. Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed With rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread, But sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded Or if men smote it with a yerde smerte: And all was conscience and tendere herte. ' Ful semely hir wympel pynched was; His nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas; Hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red, But sikerly she hadde a fair forhed. '

There is in the Chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidencethat the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside whichMr Masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost _malsain_. Howfar outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the applecalling, ' and how tainted by the desperate _bergerie_ of the Georgianera!

It is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set Mr Masefield'sprologue beside Chaucer's. But not only is it a tribute to Mr Masefieldthat he brought us to reading Chaucer over again, but the comparison isat bottom just. Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; hehas none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music thatbelong to one: but he has perdurable qualities. He is at home with hisspeech and at home with his world; by his side Mr Masefield seemsnervous and uncertain about both. He belongs, in fact, to a race (or ageneration) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloadingevery rift with ore. The question is whether such a man can hope toexpress the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side. 

Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimateimpulse is a _nostalgie de la boue_ that betrays itself in line afterline, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust thatany associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield, in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien tohim, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (andrightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be thereotherwise. For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself. Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:--

 'His pleasure lay in hounds and horses; He loved the Seven Springs water-courses, Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass, Where scent would hang like breath on glass). He loved the English country-side; The wine-leaved bramble in the ride, The lichen on the apple-trees, The poultry ranging on the lees, The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover, His wife's green grave at Mitcheldover, Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw. Under his hide his heart was raw With joy and pity of these things. . . '

That 'raw heart' marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia. Apart fromthe fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to thefirst whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it wouldbe a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come to thequestion of Mr Masefield's style in general. 

As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepteddistinction between substance and form, we have for a long while alreadybeen discussing Mr Masefield's style under a specific aspect. But theparticular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield'sgeneral condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not findit in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himselfof the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the veryvitals of his artistic effort. He is seeking always to be that which heis not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knowshe can never wholly possess. 

 'From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops, All wet red clay, where a horse's foot Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root. The fox raced on, on the headlands firm, Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm; The rooks rose raving to curse him raw, He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw. Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled, With a bay horse near and a white horse leading, And a man saying "Zook, " and the red earth bleeding. '

The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. It comes, we believe, from a consciousness of anæmia, a frenetic reaction towards what used, some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts. '

And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of oursympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness andright-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure forthis 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every countryhouse), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time. Itscolour is hectic; its tempo feverish. He has sought the healing virtuewhere he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whosemagic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whosestrong rhythm is in Hardy. But the virtue eludes all consciousinquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there ispeace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would havedone better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel, but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can masterit, in his consciousness? We will not presume to answer, mindful that MrMasefield may not recognise himself in our mirror, but we will contentourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of the almostheroic effort that has gone to its composition _Reynard the Fox_ lacksall the qualities essential to durability. 

[JANUARY, 1920. 

_The Lost Legions_

One day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by thebreath which moves the Spirits of Pity in Mr Hardy's _Dynasts_. It willbe a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of thegeneration that perished in the war. It will be a work of genius, forthe essence that must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief, almost beyond imagination. We know of its existence by signs hardly morematerial than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet allbut inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead. The autobiographer-novelists have been legion, yet we turn from them allwith a slow shake of the head. 'No, it was not that. Had we lost onlythat we could have forgotten. It was not that. '

No, it was the spirit that troubled, as in dream, the waters of thepool, some influence which trembled between silence and a sound, aprecarious confidence, an unavowed quest, a wisdom that came not ofyears or experience, a dissatisfaction, a doubt, a devotion, somestrange presentiment, it may have been, of the bitter years in store, inmemory an ineffable, irrevocable beauty, a visible seal on the foreheadof a generation. 

 'When the lamp is shattered. The light in the dust lies dead-- When the cloud is scattered The rainbow's glory is shed. When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not. . . '

Yet out of a thousand fragments this memory must be created anew in aform that will outlast the years, for it was precious. It was somethingthat would vindicate an epoch against the sickening adulation of thehero-makers and against the charge of spiritual sterility; a light inwhose gleam the bewildering non-achievements of the present age, the artwhich seems not even to desire to be art, the faith which seems not todesire to be faith, have substance and meaning. It was shot through andthrough by an impulse of paradox, an unconscious straining after theimpossible, gathered into two or three tremulous years which passed tooswiftly to achieve their own expression. Now, what remains of youth iscynical, is successful, publicly exploits itself. It was not cynicalthen. 

Elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lastedlong enough to receive a name. There was Unanimism. The name isremembered; perhaps the books are read. But it will not be found in thebooks. They are childish, just as the English novels which endeavouredto portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited. Behindall the conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay afundamental candour of which only a flickering gleam can now berecaptured. It glints on a page of M. Romains's _Europe_; the memory ofit haunts Wilfred Owen's poems; it touches Keeling's letters; it hoversover these letters of Charles Sorley. [14] From a hundred strangelurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers andwithdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for ifit wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever. 

 [Footnote 14: _The Letters of Charles Sorley_. (Cambridge University Press. )]

Charles Sorley was the youngest fringe of the strange unity thatincluded him and men by ten years his senior. He had not, as they had, plunged with fantastic hopes and unspoken fears into the world. He hadnot learned the slogans of the day. But, seeing that the slogans wereonly a disguise for the undefined desires which inspired them he lostlittle and gained much thereby. The years at Oxford in which he wouldhave taken a temporary sameness, a sameness in the long run protectiveand strengthening, were spared him. In his letters we have himunspoiled, as the sentimentalists would say--not yet with thedistraction of protective colouring. 

One who knew him better than the mere reader of his letters can pretendto know him declares that, in spite of his poems, which are among themost remarkable of those of the boy-poets killed in the war, Sorleywould not have been a man of letters. The evidence of the lettersthemselves is heavy against the view; they insist upon being regarded asthe letters of a potential writer. But a passionate interest inliterature is not the inevitable prelude to a life as a writer, andalthough it is impossible to consider any thread in Sorley's letters asof importance comparable to that which joins the enthronement anddethronement of his literary idols, we shall regard it as the record ofa movement of soul which might as easily find expression (as didKeeling's) in other than literary activities. It takes more thanliterary men to make a generation, after all. 

And Sorley was typical above all in this, that, passionate andpenetrating as was his devotion to literature, he never looked upon itas a thing existing in and for itself. It was, to him and his kind, thesatisfaction of an impulse other and more complex than the æsthetic. Artwas a means and not an end to him, and it is perhaps the apprehension ofthis that has led one who endeavoured in vain to reconcile Sorley toPater into rash prognostication. Sorley would never have been an artistin Pater's way; he belonged to his own generation, to which _l'art pourl'art_ had ceased to have meaning. There had come a pause, a throbbingsilence, from which art might have emerged, may even now after theappointed time arise, with strange validities undreamed of or forgotten. Let us not prophesy; let us be content with the recognition thatSorley's generation was too keenly, perhaps too disastrously aware ofdestinies, of

 'the beating of the wings of Love Shut out from his creation, '

to seek the comfort of the ivory tower. 

Sorley first appears before us radiant with the white-heat of aschoolboy enthusiasm for Masefield. Masefield is--how we remember thefeeling!--the poet who has lived; his naked reality tears through 'thelace of putrid sentimentalism (educing the effeminate in man) whichrotters like Tennyson and Swinburne have taught his (the superficialman's) soul to love. ' It tears through more than Tennyson and Swinburne. The greatest go down before him. 

 'So you see what I think of John Masefield. When I say that he has the rapidity, simplicity, nobility of Homer, with the power of drawing character, the dramatic truth to life of Shakespeare, along with a moral and emotional strength and elevation which is all his own, and therefore I am prepared to put him above the level of these two great men--I do not expect you to agree with me. '--(From a paper read at Marlborough, November, 1912. )

That was Sorley at seventeen, and that, it seems to us, is the qualityof enthusiasm which should be felt by a boy of seventeen if he is tomake his mark. It is infinitely more important to have felt that flamingenthusiasm for an idol who will be cast down than to have felt what weought to feel for Shakespeare and Homer. The gates of heaven are openedby strange keys, but they must be our own. 

Within six months Masefield had gone the way of all flesh. In a paper on_The Shropshire Lad_ (May, 1913), curious both for critical subtlety andthe faint taste of disillusion, Sorley was saying: 'His (Masefield's)return (to the earth) was purely emotional, and probably lessinteresting than the purely intellectual return of Meredith. ' At thebeginning of 1914, having gained a Scholarship at University College, Oxford, he went to Germany. Just before going he wrote:--

 'I am just discovering Thomas Hardy. There are two methods of discovery. One is when Columbus discovers America. The other is when some one begins to read a famous author who has already run into seventy editions, and refuses to speak about anything else, and considers every one else who reads the author's works his own special converts. Mine is the second method. I am more or less Hardy-drunk. '

The humorous exactness and detachment of the description are remarkable, and we feel that there was more than the supersession of a small by agreat idol in this second phase. By April he is at Jena, 'only 15 milesfrom Goethe's grave, whose inhabitant has taken the place of ThomasHardy (successor to Masefield) as my favourite prophet. '

 'I hope (if nothing else) before I leave Germany to get a thorough hang of _Faust_. . . . The worst of a piece like _Faust_ is that it completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself. There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it. '

He had a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. Helumped together 'nasty old Lyttons, Carlyles, and Dickenses. ' And theintoxication itself was swift and fleeting. There was something wrongwith Goethe by July; it is his 'entirely intellectual' life. 

 'If Goethe really died saying "more light, " it was very silly of him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth. '

And he writes home for Richard Jefferies, the man of his own county--forthrough Marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the WiltshireDowns. 

 'In the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities--Masefield, Hardy, Goethe--I always fall back on Richard Jefferies wandering about in the background. I have at least the tie of locality with him. '

A day or two after we incidentally discover that Meredith is up (thoughnot on Olympus) from a denunciation of Browning on the queer non- (orsuper-) æsthetic grounds of which we have spoken:--

 'There is much in B. I like. But my feeling towards him has (ever since I read his life) been that of his to the "Lost Leader. " I cannot understand him consenting to live a purely literary life in Italy, or (worse still) consenting to be lionised by fashionable London society. And then I always feel that if less people read Browning, more would read Meredith (his poetry, I mean. )'

Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He hadloved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free fromillusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are madeof. The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote whiletraining at Shorncliffe:--

 'For the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope Germany will win. It would do the world good, and show that real faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just, " but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard defeat. "'. . . 

 'England--I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy, that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling "imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to generation. . . . And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany (who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "Huns, " because they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making experiments in morality. Not that I approve of the experiment in this particular case. Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth. "For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. " But all these convictions are useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them. What a worm one is under the cart-wheels--big, clumsy, careless, lumbering cart-wheels--of public opinion. I might have been giving my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity: instead, I am giving my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most enterprising nation in the world. '

The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is morewisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaderswritten throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said;he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought incomplete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), tosuffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the lastalways the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken. 

His intellectual evolution went on to the end. No wonder that he foundRupert Brooke's sonnets overpraised:--

 'He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice. . . . It was not that "they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude. '

Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is thiscriticism of Brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity onewho has given up the search. 'There is no such thing as a just war, 'writes this boy. 'What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan. ' Fromthis position Sorley never flinched. Never for a moment was he renegadeto his generation by taking 'the sentimental attitude. ' Neither had hein him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect. 

Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We donot receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of thoselost legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it tothe end. In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems. After rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circumstance"' as bad poetry, and passing an incisive criticism on 'Men who March away, ' hecontinues:--

 'I cannot help thinking that Hardy is the greatest artist of the English character since Shakespeare; and much of _The Dynasts_ (except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare. But I value his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into the comprehensiveness of his novels and _The Dynasts_) as truly, and with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in his novels. His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare's or Shelley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but I like them and they stick. '

A little later, having finished _The Egoist_, --

 'I see now that Meredith belongs to that class of novelists with whom I do not usually get on so well (_e. G. _ Dickens), who create and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters with amusement, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as with Hardy's people, into whom the author does not inject his own exaggerated characteristics. '

The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died. What would henot have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone standsequal? But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strangecompany, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in hisheart, for other reasons than that the love of the Wessex hills hadcrept into his blood. He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in thehead by a sniper as he led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench nearHulluch. 

[JANUARY, 1920. 

_The Cry in the Wilderness_

We have in Mr Irving Babbitt's _Rousseau and Romanticism_ to deal with aclosely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind. We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which theauthor has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly thatthe preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatevermay be our final attitude towards the author's conclusions, we cannotbut regard _Rousseau and Romanticism_ as masterly. Its style is, weadmit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought whichanimates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declarethat it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared forclarity and depth of thought with Mr Santayana's _Three PhilosophicalPoets_. 

By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall moreeasily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt'sachievement. We think that it would be easy to show that in the lastgeneration--we will go no further back for the moment, though ourauthor's arraignment reaches at least a century earlier--criticism hasimperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may callappreciation. The emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of theindividual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern 'critic' hasbeen to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the lastresort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminatedin the artistic creation of the author examined. And there moderncriticism has stopped. There has been no indication that it was aware ofthe necessity of going further. Many influences went to shape thegeneral conviction that mere presentation was the final function ofcriticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of ascientific terminology. The word 'objectivity' had a great vogue; it wasfelt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the criticwas faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard, irreduciblefacts, and his function was, like the scientist's, that of recordingthem as compendiously as possible and without prejudice. The unconsciousprogramme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. All facts may be ofequal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literarycritic. He chose those which interested him most for the exercise of histalent for demonstration. But that choice was, as a general rule, theonly specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it wasusually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a'scientific' importance. Reasoned judgments of value were rigorouslyeschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is attimes vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is betterthan another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist'sintention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of hisappreciation. Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at whichall works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. Whatevery artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. Asbetween things unique there is no possibility of subordination orcomparison. 

That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism, although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that theimpulse towards the penetration of an artist's consciousness is initself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism, provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final criticaljudgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea. Such adiagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an oldergeneration than that to which it is applied. But they should not rejoiceprematurely. We require of them an answer to the question whether theywere really in better case--whether they were not the fathers whose sinsare visited upon the children. Professor Babbitt, at least, has no doubtof their responsibility. From his angle of approach we might rake theirranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: When you invoked thesanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When youriddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forgetthat religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historicalfacts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name oftruth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether thosecreations of men's minds were _capax imperii_ in man's universe? Whatright had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is strongerfor his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that sametruth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit tobear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why didyou, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in themost romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively thegreatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for onemoment pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clotheyour statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and theworld to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon whoguarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Whydid you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man'sresponsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because youclothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you hadnot the time (or was it the courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce usbecause our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?

But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals withmorals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection isconceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vitalcentre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilisminevitably involves an æsthetic nihilism, which can be obscured onlytemporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself asupreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is anadequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there isno doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two. The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the lastresort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than moralityaffords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literatureshould be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous libertyprevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics ofthe society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing adeeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far ashe is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was anage in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum thanthis. Its philosophy has played it false. It has passed from thenebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one wouldhave thought that to a generation with even a vague memory ofAristotle's _Poetics_, the mere title, _The Philosophy of History_ wouldhave been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and ofinstinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man _is_ a beast'; from theother, 'Trust your instincts. ' The sole manifest employment of reason isto overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with theimagination, the vital principle of control. 

Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to oursenses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certainthat in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of aremedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome theworld. It is the confusion between existence and value. That strangemalady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progresswas supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, andwhich so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in aliterature of objective realism. One of the most admired ofcontemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of amackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, ofalmost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with suchreminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filledher decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writerswho abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side whenthey refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an oldergeneration. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logicaloutcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealouslycherished? They may not like the bastard progeny of the variousmistresses they adored--of a Science which they enthroned above insteadof subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which theso-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humanedevotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism whichappears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absoluteindolence--but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it. Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the æsthetic andmoral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt's indictmentof themselves and decide whether they have no sin:--

 '"If I am to judge by myself, " said an eighteenth-century Frenchman, "man is a stupid animal. " Man is not only a stupid animal, in spite of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that Buddha, with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. In spite of the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance. An energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. Just this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the ages--the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for one another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a world which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse in some respects than that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success that has been obtained in 'perfecting the mystery of murder. ' Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up the beast in man. Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the leadership of the Occident is no longer here. The leaders have succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way, for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the facts. But the veto power is itself a fact--the weightiest with which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation. '

We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of thisindictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not theuniverse in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller andlarger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, largerin spiritual possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of scienceseriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is aninvitation to disaster. Humanism must reassert itself, for even we cansee that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets. The reassertion ofhumanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life andconduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individualto this ideal. There must now be a period of critical and humanisticpositivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say frankly that it isnot to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. We regardthem as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, Itis among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our newtraditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are morekeenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they aretrembling. 

[FEBRUARY, 1920. 

_Poetry and Criticism_

Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in wayspeculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browningwas a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparentlymore fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in acurious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelledby a sense that, although we have been living at a time ofextraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has comeout of it. Having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetryis an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our mindsfor some fuller justification of the poetic activity. A presentimentthat our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortablewith it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standardshould be once more created and applied. 

What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, aworld of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, aglimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom? All these things--alldifferent, yet not all contradictory--have been required of poetry. Whatshall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and asvague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demandedof any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must beadequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but aculmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more completeuniversality. 

Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demandthese things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is alyrical age. ' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply thatpoetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has alwaysbeen, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of allexperience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though therehave been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberatelymade the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searchingexperience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced greatlyrical poetry. Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidentalachievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have alwaysbeen those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vesselof the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable. 

Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, andnot merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to thecondition of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_ or Milton's_Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely thecolloquial prose of Tchehov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good a claim to becalled poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ as _TheRing and the Book_, _The Possessed_ as _Phèdre_? Where are we to call ahalt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art mergeinto one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are indanger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening uponwhat will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference. The difference we seek must be substantial and essential. 

The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt's _New Study of EnglishPoetry_ is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage, sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highestspiritual activity of man. It has seldom been our good fortune to read abook of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only calla purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim issingle, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on amatter of infinite moment. Perhaps better, because subtler, books ofliterary criticism have appeared in England during the last tenyears--if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more trulytolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product ofa soul in which no lie remains. Whether it is that Sir Henry has likePlato's Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know, but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus'speaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods andleft the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate. 

Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newboltshould declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong tothe same kind. It is important not because there is anything very novelin the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportunebecause at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vitalelement that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. Thegeneral mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; itloves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the factthat the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes arelegion. An age of fiddlesticks! Whatever the present age is--and it isan age of many interesting characteristics--it is not an age of poetry. It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead offive hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all theimpresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. The differentiaof verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, orliterature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. Where youhave the evidence of that act, the sovereign æsthetic process, there youhave poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet orboth together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by whichthose various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does notsuffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to becontent with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from eachsingle act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is thecomfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is notsufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's _Arabia_ or MrDavies's _Lovely Dames_ or Miss Katherine Mansfield's _Prelude_ or MrEliot's _Portrait of a Lady_, in each of which the vital act ofintuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish ahierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more trulycomprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must beprepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of itskind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has beencreated, but to relate the kind to the finest kind. 

That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and onewhich is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type ofcriticism which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation andappreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitivecomprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. Wherethere are real poets--and only a bigot will deny that there are realpoets among us now: we have just named four--there will always be truecriticism of poetic method, though it may seldom find utterance in theprinted word. But criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, noperspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing underthe aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily most often does, assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life ofman; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the standardsthat are implicit in such an assumption. That is the function ofphilosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined withcriticism of method--and there is no reason why they should not coexistin a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenthcentury, Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind--so much the better;but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate needat this moment. 

A good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets wepossess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of thekind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't. ' But topoint out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself mustinevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or ifa non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is notto urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert theirwork. Who but a fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or MissMansfield to give us a novel? But he might be a wise man who called uponMr Eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; andwithout a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who shouldsummon the popular imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot tobegin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desiredto comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands ofunprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have sofar given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipidimitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in theattempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus. There is somethingheroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an altitude. 

Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is acontinual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberatelyin every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown onto the horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplinessensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; thecounterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct ofone's own or the nation's affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is heldup to ridicule. Opportunism in politics has its complement inopportunism in poetry. Mr Lloyd George's moods are reflected in Mr----'s. And, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of awhole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poeticintensity by the physical intensity with which they look at anydisagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. Perhaps theywill find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities ofliterature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfactionthey will have. They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from theacid of philosophical criticism. If a reaction to life has in itself theseeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. If ayoung poet's nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant ofanything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of beingrefined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of theappropriate mechanism or myth. But to register the mere facts ofconsciousness, undigested by the being, without assessment orreinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry, no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets. 

We do not wish to suggest that Sir Henry Newbolt would regard thislengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction. He, we think, is agood deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate towork out the consequences of the principles which he enunciates andapply them vigorously to the present time. But as a vindication of thesupreme place of poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus tocritical thought and a guide to exquisite appreciation of which hisessay on Chaucer is an honourable example--_A New Study of EnglishPoetry_ deserves all the praise that lies in our power to give. 

[MARCH, 1920. 

_Coleridge's Criticism_

It is probably true that _Biographia Literaria_ is the best book ofcriticism in the English language; nevertheless, it is rash to assumethat it is a book of criticism of the highest excellence, even when ithas passed through the salutary process of drastic editing, such as thatto which, in the present case, [15] the competent hands of Mr GeorgeSampson have submitted it. Its garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage, the marks which even the finest portions show of submersion in the tepidtranscendentalism that wrought such havoc upon Coleridge's mind--theseare its familiar disfigurements. They are not easily removed; for theyenter fairly deeply even in the texture of those portions of the book inwhich Coleridge devotes himself, as severely as he can, to the properbusiness of literary criticism. 

 [Footnote 15: _Coleridge: Biographia Literaria_, Chapters I. -IV. , XIV. -XXII. --_Wordsworth: Prefaces and Essays on Poetry_, 1800-1815. Edited by George Sampson, with an Introductory Essay by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. (Cambridge University Press. )]

It may be that the prolixity with which he discusses and refutes thepoetical principles expounded by Wordsworth in the preface of _LyricalBallads_ was due to the tenderness of his consideration for Wordsworth'sfeelings, an influence to which Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch directs ourattention in his introduction. That is honourable to Coleridge as a man;but it cannot exculpate him as a critic. For the points he had to makefor and against Wordsworth were few and simple. First, he had to showthat the theory of a poetic diction drawn exclusively from the languageof 'real life' was based upon an equivocation, and therefore wasuseless. This Coleridge had to show to clear himself of the commoncondemnation in which he had been involved, as one wrongly assumed toendorse Wordsworth's theory. He had an equally important point to makefor Wordsworth. He wished to prove to him that the finest part of hispoetic achievement was based upon a complete neglect of this theory, andthat the weakest portions of his work were those in which he mostclosely followed it. In this demonstration he was moved by the desire toset his friend on the road that would lead to the most triumphantexercise of his own powers. 

There is no doubt that Coleridge made both his points; but he made them, in particular the former, at exceeding length, and at the cost of a gooddeal of internal contradiction. He sets out, in the former case, tomaintain that the language of poetry is essentially different from thelanguage of prose. This he professes to deduce from a number ofprinciples. His axiom--and it is possibly a sound one--is that metreoriginated in a spontaneous effort of the mind to hold in check theworkings of emotion. From this, he argues, it follows that to justifythe existence of metre, the language of a poem must show evidence ofemotion, by being different from the language of prose. Further, hesays, metre in itself stimulates the emotions, and for this condition ofemotional excitement 'correspondent food' must be provided. Thirdly, theemotion of poetical composition itself demands this same 'correspondentfood. ' The final argument, if we omit one drawn from an obscure theoryof imitation very characteristic of Coleridge, is the incontrovertibleappeal to the authority of the poets. 

Unfortunately, the elaborate exposition of the first three arguments isnot only unnecessary but confusing, for Coleridge goes on todistinguish, interestingly enough, between a language proper to poetry, a language proper to prose, and a neutral language which may be usedindifferently in prose and poetry, and later still he quotes a beautifulpassage from Chaucer's _Troilus and Cressida_ as an example of thisneutral language, forgetting that, if his principles are correct, Chaucer was guilty of a sin against art in writing _Troilus andCressida_ in metre. The truth, of course, is that the paraphernalia ofprinciples goes by the board. In order to refute the Wordsworthiantheory of a language of real life supremely fitted for poetry you haveonly to point to the great poets, and to judge the fitness of thelanguage of poetry you can only examine the particular poem. Wordsworthwas wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but Coleridge wasequally wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre_necessitated_ a language essentially different from that of prose. 

So it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literarycriticism of the _Biographia_ takes us nowhere in particular. Thevaluable part is contained in his critical appreciation of Wordsworth'spoetry and that amazing chapter--a little forlorn, as most ofColeridge's fine chapters are--on 'the specific symptoms of poetic powerelucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_. In these few pages Coleridge is at the summit of his powers as a critic. So long as his attention could be fixed on a particular object, so longas he was engaged in deducing his general principles immediately fromparticular instances of the highest kind of poetic excellence, he was acritic indeed. Every one of the four points characteristic of earlypoetic genius which he formulates deserves to be called back to the mindagain and again:--

 'The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. . . . 

 'A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetical power. . . . 

 'Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterise the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit. . . . 

 'The last character . . . Which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former--yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree . . . Is _depth_ and _energy_ of _thought_. No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. '

In the context the most striking peculiarity of this enunciation of thedistinguishing marks of poetic power, apart from the conviction which itbrings, is that they are not in the least concerned with the actuallanguage of poetry. The whole subject of poetic diction is dropped whenColeridge's critical, as opposed to his logical, faculty is at work;and, although this Chapter XV is followed by many pages devoted to theanalysis and refutation of the Wordsworthian theory and to theestablishment of those principles of poetic diction to which we havereferred, when Coleridge comes once more to engage his pure criticalfaculty, in the appreciation of Wordsworth's actual poetry in ChapterXXII, we again find him ignoring his own principles precisely on thoseoccasions when we might have thought them applicable. 

Coleridge enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, hesays, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke hisprinciples: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that stylewhich I should place in the second division of language, dividing itinto the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry;_second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutralor common to both. ' But in the very first instance which Coleridgegives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair, and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. Hegives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind HighlandBoy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting, had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt ofprobabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):--

 'And one, the rarest, was a shell Which he, poor child, had studied well: The Shell of a green Turtle, thin And hollow;--you might sit therein, It was so wide, and deep. 

 'Our Highland Boy oft visited The house which held this prize; and led By choice or chance, did thither come One day, when no one was at home, And found the door unbarred. '

The discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, itdoes not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworthhas used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focusof apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on thedetail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key ofthe poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, however, indubitable:--

 'Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest. And though little troubled with sloth, Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth To be such a traveller as I. Happy, happy liver! _With a soul as strong as a mountain River Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver_, Joy and jollity be with us both, Hearing thee or else some other As merry as a Brother I on the earth will go plodding on, By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done. '

The two lines in italics are discordant. But again it is no question oflanguage in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of awhole already debilitated by metrical insecurity. 

Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a _matter-of-factness_in certain poems. ' Once more there is no question of language. Coleridgetakes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth'sobsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essentialcatholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested inlaboriously exact description both of places and persons. The poetsterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for noreason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediateobject a moral end instead of the giving of æsthetic pleasure. Hisprophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probablethat they should be of this condition--it is on the contrary highlyimprobable--but because we are thus to be taught a salutary morallesson. The question of language in itself, if it enters at all here, enters only as the indifferent means by which a non-poetic end issought. The accidentality lies not in the words, but in the poet'sintention. 

Coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for thedramatic form, ' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought, 'may be passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case theycould only be the cause of a jejuneness of language. The fifth, moreinteresting, is the appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for thesubject . . . An approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast. 'Coleridge brings forward as his first instance of this four lines whichhave taken a deep hold on the affections of later generations:--

 'They flash upon the inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude! And then my heart with pleasure fills And dances with the daffodils. '

Coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet afterthe first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept thatverdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as adescription of physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting tonote that the objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner whichconfirms Coleridge's criticism. The 'inward eye' is almost universallyremembered apart from its context, and interpreted as a description ofthe purely spiritual process to which alone, in Coleridge's opinion, itwas truly apt. 

The enumeration of Wordsworth's excellences which follows is masterly;and the exhilaration with which one rises through the crescendo to thefamous: 'Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of_Imagination_ in the highest and strictest sense of the word . . . ' isitself a pleasure to be derived only from the gift of criticism of thehighest and strictest kind. 

The object of this examination has been to show, not that the_Biographia Literaria_ is undeserving of the high praise which has beenbestowed upon it, but that the praise has been to some extentundiscriminating. It has now become almost a tradition to hold up to ouradmiration Coleridge's chapter on poetic diction, and Sir ArthurQuiller-Couch, in a preface that is as unconventional in manner as it isstimulating in most of its substance, maintains the tradition. As amatter of fact, what Coleridge has to say on poetic diction is prolixand perilously near commonplace. Instead of making to Wordsworth thewholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest kind employs alanguage that by no perversion can be called essentially the same as thelanguage of prose, he allows himself to be led by his German metaphysicinto considering poetry as a _Ding an sich_ and deducing therefrom theproposition that poetry _must_ employ a language different from that ofprose. That proposition is false, as Coleridge himself quite adequatelyshows from his remarks upon what he called the 'neutral' language ofChaucer and Herbert. But instead of following up the clue and beginningto inquire whether or not narrative poetry by nature demands a languageapproximating to that of prose, and whether Wordsworth, in so far as heaimed at being a narrative poet, was not working on a correct butexaggerated principle, he leaves the bald contradiction and swerves offto the analysis of the defects and excellences of Wordsworth's actualachievement. Precisely because we consider it of the greatest importancethat the best of Coleridge's criticism should be studied and studiedagain, we think it unfortunate that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch shouldrecommend the apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart. He will be condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubiouslogic and a false conclusion. What is worth while learning fromColeridge is something different; it is not his behaviour with 'aprinciple, ' but his conduct when confronted with poetry in the concrete, his magisterial ordonnance (to use his own word) and explication of hisown æsthetic intuitions, and his manner of employing in this, theessential task of poetic criticism, the results of his own deep study ofall the great poetry that he knew. 

[APRIL, 1920. 

_Shakespeare Criticism_

It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of thegreat modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover. One derives fromthe exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism whichcannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had hismerits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail tohave, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, toadmire the amazing erudition of Steevens. One sees the phases of thecurious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning ofthe nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal man of genius couldbreathe. For a dizzy moment every line that he wrote bore the authenticimpress of the divine. _Efflavit deus_. In a century, from being largelybeneath criticism Shakespeare had passed to a condition where he wasalmost completely beyond it. 

_King John_ affords an amusing instance of this reverential attitude. The play, as is generally known, was based upon a slightly earlier andutterly un-Shakespearean production entitled _The Troublesome Raigne ofKing John_. The only character Shakespeare added to those he found readyto his hand was that of James Gurney, who enters with Lady Falconbridgeafter the scene between the Bastard and his brother, says four words, and departs for ever. 

 '_Bast_. --James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?

 _Gur_. --Good leave, good Philip. 

 _Bast_. --Philip! Sparrow! James. '

It is obvious that Shakespeare's sole motive in introducing Gurney is toprovide an occasion for the Bastard's characteristic, though not to amodern mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that Philip was atthe time a common name for a sparrow. The Bastard, just dubbed SirRichard Plantagenet by the King, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at hisformer name, Philip, to which he had just shown such breezyindifference. The jest could not have been made to Lady Falconbridgewithout a direct insult to her, which would have been alien to thenatural, blunt, and easygoing fondness of the relation which Shakespeareestablishes between the Bastard and his mother. So Gurney is quitecasually brought in to receive it. But this is not enough for theShakespeare-drunken Coleridge. 

 'For an instance of Shakespeare's power _in minimis_, I generally quote James Gurney's character in _King John_. How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!'

Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge's titleas a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. He is thegreatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence isdisplayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play. In Act III, scene ii. , Warburton's emendation of 'airy' to 'fiery' hadin Coleridge's day been received into the text of the Bastard's lines:--

 'Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot; Some airy devil hovers in the sky. '

On which Coleridge writes:--

 'I prefer the old text: the word 'devil' implies 'fiery. ' You need only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil, ' to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's alteration. '

The test is absolutely convincing--a poet's criticism of poetry. Butthat Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influenceof his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion thatis forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volumeof the modern _Variorum_. There has been much editing, much comment, butsingularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of breadto an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently fromniggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressingexercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is atypical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks uponthe play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, _King John_ is anintellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustratethe idea of treachery. ' We remember that Mr Masefield has much betterthan this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten uponthis sentence because it is set before us in the _Variorum_, and becauseit too 'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessionsillustrates his idea of criticism. ' Genetically, it is a continuation ofthe shoddy element in Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism, a continualbias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take theorigin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of thefeeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object)after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softerpart of Coleridge's brain. 

_King John_ is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerousinfluence, has persuaded himself it is. It is simply the effort of ayoung man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. Theeffort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only agood one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising. The miracle isthat anything should have been made of _The Troublesome Raigne_ at all. The _Variorum_ extracts show that, of the many commentators who studiedthe old play with Shakespeare's version, only Swinburne saw, or had thecourage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. To have madeShakespeare's Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have createdthe scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of thatdecrepit skeleton--that is the work of a commanding poetical genius onthe threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, nodoubt, but doubly worthy of close examination. 

But 'ideas of treachery'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we beenbeguiled by Coleridge's laudanum trances? A limbo--of this we areconfident--where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life, and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. Wemust save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping oureye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good)play. Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where theinfluence and ravages of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, butmerely a Shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic geniuswhich can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist everyattempt at invasion by the 'idea'-bacillus. 

In considering a Shakespeare play the word 'idea' had best be kept outof the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it mightbe intelligibly used. You might call the dramatic skeleton Shakespeare'sidea of the play. It is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in thework of poetic creation--the necessary means by which a poet canconveniently explicate and express his manifold æsthetic intuitions. This dramatic skeleton is governed by laws of its own, which were firstand most brilliantly formulated by Aristotle in terms that, inessentials, hold good for all time. You may investigate this skeleton, seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by which it is differentiatedfrom all other skeletons; you may say, for instance, that _Othello_ is atragedy of jealousy, or _Hamlet_ of the inhibition of self-consciousness. But if your 'idea' is to have any substance it must be moulded veryclosely upon the particular object with which you are dealing; and inthe end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individualcharacters. 

On the other hand, the word 'idea' might be intelligibly used ofShakespeare's whole attitude to the material of his contemplation, thecentre of comprehension from which he worked, the aspect under which heviewed the universe of his interest. There is no reason to rest contentwith Coleridge's application of the epithet 'myriad-minded, ' which is, at the best, an evasion of a vital question. The problem is to seeShakespeare's mind _sub specie unitatis_. It can be done; there neverhas been and never will be a human mind which can resist such an inquiryif it is pursued with sufficient perseverance and understanding. Whatchiefly stands in the way is that tradition of Shakespeariolatry whichColeridge so powerfully inaugurated, not least by the epithet'myriad-minded. '

But of 'ideas' in any other senses than these--and in neither of thesecases is 'idea' the best word for the object of search--let us beware aswe would of the plague, in criticism of Shakespeare or any other greatpoet. Poets do not have 'ideas'; they have perceptions. They do not havean 'idea'; they have comprehension. Their creation is æsthetic, and theworking of their mind proceeds from the realisation of one æstheticperception to that of another, more comprehensive if they are to begreat poets having within them the principle of poetic growth. There isundoubtedly an organic process in the evolution of a great poet, whichyou may, for convenience of expression, call logical; but the moment youforget that the use of the word 'logic, ' in this context, ismetaphorical, you are in peril. You can follow out this 'logicalprocess' in a poet only by a kindred creative process of æstheticperception passing into æsthetic comprehension. The hunt for 'ideas'will only make that process impossible; it prevents the object from evermaking its own impression upon the mind. It has to speak with thelanguage of logic, whereas its use and function in the world is to speakwith a language not of logic, but of a process of mind which is at leastas sovereign in its own right as the discursive reason. 

Let us away then with 'logic' and away with 'ideas' from the art ofliterary criticism; but not, in a foolish and impercipient reaction, torevive the impressionistic criticism which has sapped the English brainfor a generation past. The art of criticism is rigorous; impressions aremerely its raw material; the life-blood of its activity is in theprocess of ordonnance of æsthetic impressions. 

It is time, however, to return for a moment to Shakespeare, and toobserve in one crucial instance the effect of the quest for logic in asingle line. In the fine scene where John hints to Hubert at Arthur'smurder, he speaks these lines (in the First Folio text):--

 'I had a thing to say, but let it goe: The Sunne is in the heauen, and the proud day, Attended with the pleasure of the world, Is all too wanton, and too full of gawdes To giue me audience: If the midnight bell Did with his yron tongue, and brazen mouth Sound on into the drowzie race of night, If this same were a Churchyard where we stand, And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs: . . . Then, in despight of brooded watchfull day, I would into thy bosome poure my thoughts. . . . '

If one had to choose the finest line in this passage, the choice wouldfall upon

 'Sound on into the drowsy race of night. '

Yet you will have to look hard for it in the modern editions ofShakespeare. At the best you will find it with the mark of corruption:--

 +'Sound on into the drowsy race of night ('Globe');

and you run quite a risk of finding

 'Sound one into the drowsy race of night' ('Oxford'). 

There are six pages of close-printed comment upon the line in the_Variorum_. The only reason, we can see, why it should be the mostcommented line in _King John_ is that it is one of the most beautiful. No one could stand it. Of all the commentators, only one, Miss Porter, whom we name _honoris causa_, stands by the line with any conviction ofits beauty. Every other person either alters it or regrets his inabilityto alter it. 

'How can a bell sound on into a race?' pipe the little editors. What is'the race of night?' What _can_ it mean? How _could_ a race be drowsy?What an _awful_ contradiction in terms! And so while you and I, and allthe other ordinary lovers of Shakespeare are peacefully sleeping in ourbeds, they come along with their little chisels, and chop out thehorribly illogical word and pop in a horribly logical one, and we(unless we can afford the _Variorum_, which we can't) know nothingwhatever about it. We have no redress. If we get out of our beds andcreep upon them while they are asleep--they never are--and take out ourlittle chisels and chop off their horribly stupid little heads, we shallbe put in prison and Mr Justice Darling will make a horribly stupidlittle joke about us. There is only one thing to do. We must make up ourminds that we have to combine in our single person the scholar and theamateur; we cannot trust these gentlemen. 

And, indeed, they have been up to their little games elsewhere in _KingJohn_. They do not like the reply of the citizens of Angiers to thesummons of the rival kings:--

 'A greater powre than We denies all this, And till it be undoubted, we do locke Our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates; Kings of our feare, untill our feares resolu'd Be by some certaine king, purg'd and depos'd. '

Admirable sense, excellent poetry. But no! We must not have it. Insteadwe are given 'King'd of our fears' ('Globe') or 'Kings of ourselves'('Oxford'). Bad sense, bad poetry. 

They do not like Pandulph's speech to France:--

 'France, thou maist hold a serpent by the tongue, A cased lion by the mortall paw, A fasting tiger safer by the tooth Than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold. '

'Cased, ' caged, is too much for them. We must have 'chafed, ' in spite of

 'If thou would'st not entomb thyself alive And case thy reputation in thy tent. '

Again, the Folio text of the meeting between the Bastard and Hubert inAct V. , when Hubert fails to recognise the Bastard's voice, runs thus:--

 'Unkinde remembrance: thou and endles night, Have done me shame: Brave Soldier, pardon me That any accent breaking from thy tongue Should scape the true acquaintaince of mine eare. '

This time 'endless' is not poetical enough for the editors. Theobald'semendation 'eyeless' is received into the text. One has only to read thebrief scene through to realise that Hubert is wearied and obsessed bythe night that will never end. He is overwrought by his knowledge of

 'news fitting to the night, Black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible, '

and by his long wandering in search of the Bastard:--

 'Why, here I walk in the black brow of night To find you out. '

Yet the dramatically perfect 'endless' has had to make way for thedramatically stupid 'eyeless. ' Is it surprising that we do not trustthese gentlemen?

[APRIL, 1920