Readers and Writers (1917-1921)

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Title: Readers and Writers (1917-1921)
Author: Orage, Alfred Richard
Language: English
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READERS & WRITERS

Readers and Writers
(1917-1921)

By
R. H. C. (A. R. Orage)

[Illustration]

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1

_First published in 1922_

_All rights reserved_

Preface

Under the title of “Readers and Writers” and over the initials “R. H.
C.” I contributed to the _New Age_, during a period of seven or eight
years, a weekly literary causerie of which the present volume, covering
the years 1917-1921, is a partial reprint. My original design was to
treat literary events from week to week with the continuity, consistency
and policy ordinarily applied to comments on current political events;
that is to say, with equal seriousness and from a similarly more or less
fixed point of view as regards both means and end. This design involved
of necessity a freedom of expression rather out of fashion, though it was
the convention of the greatest period of English literature, namely, the
Eighteenth Century; and its pursuit in consequence brought the comments
into somewhat lively disrepute. That, however, proved not to be the
greatest difficulty. Indeed, within the last few years an almost general
demand for more serious, more outspoken and even more “savage” criticism
has been heard, and is perhaps on the way to being satisfied, though
literary susceptibilities are still far from being as well-mannered as
political susceptibilities. The greatest difficulty is encountered in the
fact that literary events, unlike political events, occur with little
apparent order, and are subject to no easily discoverable or demonstrable
direction. In a single week every literary form and tendency may find
itself illustrated, with the consequence that any attempt to set the
week’s doings in a relation of significant development is bound to fall
under the suspicion of impressionism or arbitrariness. I have no other
defence against these charges than Plato’s appeal to good judges, of whom
the best because the last is Time. Time will pronounce as only those
living critics can whose present judgments are an anticipation of Time’s.
Time will show what has been right and what wrong. Already, moreover, a
certain amount of winnowing and sifting has taken place. Some literary
values of this moment are not what they were yesterday or the day before.
A few are greater; many of them are less. My most confident prediction,
however, remains to be confirmed: it is that the perfect English style is
still to be written. That it may be in our own time is both the goal and
the guiding-star of all literary criticism that is not idle chatter.

A. R. ORAGE.

_The New Age_, 38 CURSITOR STREET, E.C. 4.

_December 1921._

Contents

PAGE

PREFACE 5

FONTENELLE 15

BIOGRAPHY 16

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS 17

CRITICS BEWARE 20

HENRY JAMES 22

TURGENEV 27

PLOTINUS 29

THE NEW EUROPE 31

THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM 32

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY 34

WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN? 36

IS NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY? 37

NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS 38

THE END OF FICTION 41

THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE 42

THE FATE OF SCULPTURE 45

THE TOO CLEVER 46

HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS 49

MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS IN PUBLIC 52

MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST 57

MR. EZRA POUND ON RELIGION 60

MR. POUND, CARICATURIST 62

THE ADMIRABLE VICTORIANS 63

FRENCH CLARTÉ 65

WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE? 66

NATURE IN MIND 68

MR. CLIVE BELL’S POT 70

THE CRITICISM OF POETS 73

“JOHN EGLINTON” 74

IRISH HUMOUR 75

THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND 76

MR. STANDISH O’GRADY 79

MR. STANDISH O’GRADY, ENCHANTER 80

LES SENTIMENTS DE JULIEN BENDA 81

CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 82

NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 88

S.S.S. 90

STERNE CRITICISM 92

STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE 94

ENGLISH STYLE 95

LITERARY CULS-DE-SAC 98

THE DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE 98

LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 103

RIGHT CRITICISM 109

MAN’S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH 111

BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS 115

“Æ’S” “CANDLE OF VISION” 117

HOW TO READ 134

THE OLD COUNTRY 135

LOOKING FOR THE DAWN 136

FIELDING FOR AMERICA 139

POOR AUTHORS! 140

ON GUARD 143

THE COMING RENAISSANCE 145

LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER 147

“SHAKESPEARE” SIMPLIFIED 151

THE “LONDON MERCURY” AND ENGLISH 152

MR. G. K. CHESTERTON ON ROME AND GERMANY 155

THE ORIGINS OF MARX 161

MARX AS POLITICIAN 163

JOHN MITCHEL AS THE SAME 166

NORSE IN ENGLISH 167

THE COMEDY OF IT 168

THE EPIC SERBS 171

ERNEST DOWSON 173

A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION 175

THE NEWEST TESTAMENT 178

NOTHING FOREIGN 182

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 184

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE MYSTERIES 185

GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 188

A CAMBRIDGE “COCOON” 190

AN OXFORD MISCELLANY 195

THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE 196

THE “DIAL” OF AMERICA 199

AMERICA REGRESSING 206

THE BEST IS YET TO BE 209

INDEX 215

Readers and Writers

FONTENELLE.—There is a reason that Fontenelle has never before been
translated into English. It is not that Mr. Ezra Pound, who has now
translated a dozen of Fontenelle’s dialogues, was the first to think of
it. Many readers of the original have tried their hand at the translation
only to discover that somehow or other Fontenelle would not “go” in
English as he goes in French. The reason is not very far to seek.
Fontenelle wrote a French peculiarly French, a good but an untranslatable
French. He must, therefore, be left and read in the original if he is to
be appreciated at his intrinsic value. Mr. Pound has made a rash attempt
at the impossible in these dialogues, and he has achieved the unreadable
through no further fault of his own. The result was foregone. The
dialogues themselves in their English form are a little more dull than
are the _Conversations_ of Landor, which is to say that they are very
dull indeed. Nothing at the first glance could be more attractive than
dialogues between the great dead of the world. To every tyro the notion
comes inevitably sooner or later, as if it were the idea for which the
world were waiting. Nevertheless, on attempting it, the task is found to
be beyond most human powers. Nobody has yet written a masterpiece in it.
Fontenelle was not in any case the man to succeed in it from an English
point of view. We English take the great dead seriously. We expect them
to converse paradisaically in paradise, and to be as much above their own
living level as their living level was above that of ordinary men. Here,
however, is a pretty task for a writer of dead dialogues, for he has not
only to imitate the style, but to glorify both the matter and style of
the greatest men of past ages. No wonder that he fails; no wonder that in
the vast majority of cases he produces much the same impression of his
heroes as is produced of them at spiritualistic séances. The attempt,
however, will always continue to be made. It is a literary cactus-form
that blooms every fifty years or so. As I calculate its periodicity, some
one should shortly be producing a new series.

BIOGRAPHY.—Very few biographers have been anywhere near the level of
mind of their subjects, and fewer still have been able to describe even
what they have understood. The character of a great man is so complex
that a genius for grasping essentials must be assumed in his perfect
biographer: at the same time, it is so tedious in the analysis that the
narrative must be condensed to represent it. Between the subtlety to
be described, and the simplicity with which it must be described, the
character of a man is likely to fall in his portrait into the distortion
of over-elaboration or into the sketch. Though difficult, however, the
art has been frequently shown to be not impossible. We could not ask for
a better portrait of Johnson than Boswell’s. Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_
is as good as we desire it to be. Plato’s _Socrates_ is truer than life;
and there are others. On the whole, the modern gossiping method is not
likely to become popular in a cultured country.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS.—From his little brush with the
Press, Dr. Lyttelton has come off badly. It was not because his case
was bad, but because he had not the moral courage to stick to his
guns. His case was that Parliament had practically ceased to be the
leader of the nation, and that its place had been taken by the Press.
Unfortunately, however, the Press had come to depend for its living upon
sensationalism, with the consequence that its tendency was to prefer
fiction to fact. A perfectly good case, I say, who know more of Fleet
Street than Dr. Lyttelton will ever know. Every word of the indictment is
well within the truth. But when challenged by the Press to substantiate
his charges, Dr. Lyttelton, instead of inviting the world simply to
_look_ at the Press and to contrast its reports with facts, proceeded to
exculpate the editors and to put the whole blame on the public. It is
the public, he said, that is responsible, and there is no use in rating
the editors, who merely supplied what the public wanted. But so long as
public men adopt this cowardly attitude nothing can possibly be done,
for the “public,” like a corporation, has neither a body to be kicked
nor a soul to be damned. Relatively to the proprietors and editors of
the Press the public consists of irresponsible individuals, who merely
choose from among what is laid before them. They are mostly as innocent
as children who deal at a tuck-shop, and, perchance, buy sweets and cakes
that are bad for them as readily as things that are good for them. The
responsible parties are the proprietors and editors, and, above them, the
law. It is not an offence to buy articles at a shop that are illegally
displayed for sale. The public supposition is that if they are on sale
they can be bought. And, in fact, the Public Prosecutor, unlike Dr.
Lyttelton, does not proceed against the purchasers of illegal articles,
he proceeds against the vendors. In the case of our newspaper proprietors
and editors the conditions of shop-keeping are parallel; they expose
professed news and views for sale, with an implied guarantee that their
goods are both good and fit for human consumption. The public cannot be
expected to know which is which, or what is what, any more in the case of
news and views than in the case of tea and potatoes. Rather less indeed,
since the ill-effects of false news and unsound views are, as a rule, too
long delayed and too subtle to be attributed to their proper causes. But
the Press proprietors and editors know very well. They know whether the
news they expose is true, or the views they vend are sound. They know
also that in a large degree they are neither the one nor the other. Yet
they continue to sell them, and even to expect public honours for their
fraudulent dealings. The excuses made for them are such as could be made
for any other fraudulent industry; that it pays, that the public swallows
it, that honesty would not pay, that the public does not want truth
and sincerity, that the public must learn to discriminate for itself.
Reduced to a simple statement, all these mean, in effect, that the Press
is prepared to trade on the ignorance and folly of the public. So long
as editors and proprietors are allowed to sail off from responsibility
under the plea that they are only satisfying a public demand, so long
will it be possible for purveyors of other forms of indecent literature
and vendors of other articles of public ill-fare to complain that they
are unfairly treated. There is likely to be always a demand for fiction
against fact, the plausible lie against the honest truth, the doctored
news against the plain statement, and the pleasing superficial against
the strenuous profound. A change of taste in these respects could only
be brought about by a determined effort in education extending over a
generation and applied not only to schools, but to the Press, the pulpit,
and to book-publishing. But because the preference now exists, and is a
profitable taste to pander to, it is not right to acquit the Press that
thrives on it.

CRITICS BEWARE.—Mr. Crees, the author of a new study of George Meredith,
has first pointed out one of the dangers in writing about Meredith
and then fallen into it. Everybody knows what it is; it is writing in
epigram, or, as Mr. Crees calls it, “miscarrying with abortive epigram.”
That phrase alone should have warned Mr. Crees how near he was to
ignoring his own counsel; but apparently he saw only the idea and not
the fact, for a passage soon occurs in which he illustrates the danger
perfectly. He is writing of the difficulty encountered by a certain kind
of intellectual—Meredith, for example—in winning any public recognition;
and this is the way he miscarries on:

The idol of the future is the Aunt Sally of the present. The
pioneer of intellect ploughs a lonely furrow. He is assailed by
invective, beset by contumely, the butt of ridicule, the Saint
Sebastian of the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism.
He is depressed by disregard, chilled by the icy waters of
contempt, haunted by the dread of beggary, the recompense of
strictness of conviction.... And when detraction recites its
palinode, his sole compensation is to reply (from the Elysian
fields), “I told you so.”

There are many untruths contained in this passage, some flattering and
others not, to the “intellectual,” and they are properly expressed—if
untruths ever can be—in the style. The style is one in which the truth
cannot be told; and it perfectly illustrates the axiom that critical
writing cannot be too simple and unaffected. It is a common practice
for a critic to approximate his style to the style of his subject; for
example, to write about poetry poetically, about a “grand impassioned
writer” in a grand and impassioned manner. By so doing it is supposed
that a critic shows his sympathy and his understanding of his subject.
But the method is wrong. Criticism is not a fine art. The conversational
tone is its proper medium, and it should be an absolute rule never to
write in criticism what cannot be imagined as being easily said.

HENRY JAMES.—The “Henry James Number” of the _Little Review_ is devoted
to essays by various hands upon the works and characteristics of the late
novelist. The most interesting essay in the volume is one by Miss Ethel
Coburn Mayne reporting the first appearance and subsequent development
of Henry James as witnessed by the writers for the famous _Yellow Book_,
of whom Miss Mayne was not the least characteristic. What a comedy of
misunderstanding it all was, and how Henry James must have smiled about
it! At the outset the _Yellow Book_ writers had the distinct impression
that Henry James was one of themselves; and they looked forward to
exploiting the new worlds which he brought into their ken. But later on,
to their disappointment, he fell away, receded from their visibility,
and became, as Miss Mayne puts it, concerned less with the “world” than
with the “drawing-room.” The fault, however, was not with James, nor was
the change in him. The _Yellow Book_ too readily assumed that because
James wrote in it, he was willing to be identified with the tendency
of the school; and they thought him lacking in loyalty when afterwards
it appeared that he was powerfully hostile. But how could they have
deceived themselves into supposing that a progress towards the ghostly
could always keep step with a progress towards the fleshly? The two were
worlds apart, and if for a single moment they coincided in an issue or
two of the _Yellow Book_, their subsequent divergence was only made the
more obvious. I, even I, who was still young when the _Yellow Book_ began
to appear, could have told its editors that Henry James was not long
for their world. Between the method employed in, say, the _Death of the
Lion_ and the method of Henry Harland, Max Beerbohm, Miss Mayne herself,
and, subsequently, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, there was, and could be, only
an accidental and momentary sympathy. James was in love with the next
world, or the next state of consciousness; he was always exploring the
borderland between the conscious and the super-conscious. The _Yellow
Book_ writers were positively reactionary to him, for their borderland
was not between men and angels, but between men and beasts. James’s
“contemptuous” word for Mr. D. H. Lawrence—which Miss Mayne still groans
to think of—was the most natural and inevitable under the circumstances.
It might have been foreseen from the moment Henry James put his pen
into the _Yellow Book_. If there are any critics left who imagine that
the _Yellow Book_ was anything but a literary _cul de sac_, I commend to
them this present essay by Miss Mayne. Under the disguise of criticism of
Henry James, it is a confession.

* * * * *

Henry James’s _Middle Years_ is a fragment of the autobiography begun
some years before the author’s death. We are told that this fragment
was “dictated” by Henry James and that it was never revised by himself,
both of which facts explain a little of the peculiarity of his style.
If the style of the earlier books was mazy, the style of _Middle Years_
is mazier. If the earlier style consisted of impressions impassionately
conveyed, the present is more elusive still. Henry James was always
difficult to pin down; in _Middle Years_ his fluttering among words
never rests a sentence. Nobody, I am convinced, who is not either a
genuine devotee of Henry James or one of the paper-audience his friends
cultivated for him, will succeed in reading through this work. An
infinitely leisurely mind or an infinite interest in just Henry James’s
way of looking at things is necessary to the endurance of it. But given
one of these, and in particular the latter, and the reading of _Middle
Years_ becomes an exhilarating exercise in sensing ghosts.

Yes, that is the phrase to describe what Henry James was always after.
He was always after sensing ghosts. His habitat has been said to be the
inter-space between the real and the ideal; but it can be more accurately
defined as the inter-space between the dead and the living. You see his
vision—almost his clairvoyance—actively engaged in this recovery of his
experiences years before as a young man in London. See how he revelled
in them, rolling them off his tongue in long circling phrases. Is it not
obvious that he is most at home in recollection, in the world of memory,
in the inter-world, once more, of the dead and the living? Observe,
too, how only a little more exaggeratedly anfractuous and swirling
his style becomes—but not, in any real sense, different—under the
influence of memory, than when professing to be describing the present.
It is plain that memory differs for him from present vision only in
being a little more vivid, a little more real. In order to see a thing
clearly, he had, in fact, to make a memory of it, and the present tense
of memory is impression. What I am trying to say is that Henry James
mentalised phenomenon; hence that he saw most clearly in the world of
memory where this process had been performed for him by time; and that
he saw less clearly in our actual world because the phenomena herein
resisted immediate mentalisation. The difference for him was between
the pre-digested and the to-be-digested; the former being the persons
and events of memory, and the latter being the events and persons of his
current experience.

Henry James will find himself very much at home with the discarnate minds
who, it is presumed, are now his companions. Incarnation, embodiment, was
for him a screen to be looked through, got over somehow, divined into,
penetrated. He regarded it as a sort of magic curtain which concealed at
the same time that under careful observation it revealed by its shadows
and movements the mind behind it. And I fancy I see him sitting before
the actual sensible world of things and persons with infinite patience
watching for a significant gesture or a revealing shadow. And such
motions and shadows he recorded as impressions which became the stuff of
his analysis and synthesis of the souls that originated them. But if that
was his attitude towards the material world—and it is further proved by
his occasional excursions into the completely ghostly—may we not safely
conclude that in the world he now inhabits his sense of impressions is
more at home still. For there, as I take it, the curtain is drawn, and
minds and souls are by one degree the more exposed to direct vision. With
his marvellous insight into the actual, what would Henry James not make
of the mental and psychic when these are no longer concealed by the
material? On the whole, nobody is likely to be happier “dead” than Henry
James.

TURGENEV.—Both in Mr. Conrad’s Introduction and Mr. Edward Garnett’s
critical study of Turgenev I observe the attitude of defence. They are
defending rather than praising Turgenev. But Turgenev has been so long
the victim of polemics that it is about time some judge summed up the
contentions and delivered judgment. Neither Mr. Conrad nor Mr. Garnett,
however, is qualified for this task by either temper or the power of
judgment itself. Mr. Conrad is a great writer, but he is not a great
critic, and as for Mr. Garnett, he is not even a great writer; and the
temper of both is shown in their common tendency to abuse not only
the plaintiff’s attorney but the jury as well. But there is no use in
abusing the jury—in other words, the reading public of the world—even if
some gain may be got by polemics with this or that critic. I am content
to hear Mr. Maurice Baring and M. Haumont told that they are merely
echoes of Russian partisanship and incapable of feeling the fine shades
of “truth” in Turgenev; for both these writers are quite capable of
hitting back. But when Mr. Conrad satirically remarks that Turgenev had
qualities enough to ruin the prospects of any writer, and Mr. Garnett
echoes _him_ to the effect that Turgenev owes his “unpopularity” to “an
exquisite feeling for balance” which nowadays is “less and less prized
by modern opinion,” I feel that the defence of Turgenev is exceeding
the limits of discretion. For it is not by any means the case that the
“unpopularity” of Turgenev is confined to the mob that has no feeling for
balance or is jealous of his possession of too many qualities. Critics
as good as Mr. Garnett and with no Russian political prejudices against
Turgenev can come to the same conclusion as the innumerable anonymous
gentlemen of the jury, to wit, that Turgenev was a great artist on a
small scale whose faults were large. That is certainly my own case. While
I agree (or affirm, for I am quite willing to take the initiative), that
Turgenev’s art is more exquisite, more humane, more European than that
of any other Russian writer, I must also maintain that in timidity of
thought, in sentimentality, in occasional pettiness of mind, he is no
more of a great writer than, let us say, Mr. Hall Caine. To compare the
whole of him with the whole of Dostoievski is to realise in an instant
the difference between a writer great in parts and a writer great even
in his faults. Turgenev at his best is a European, I would rather say a
Parisianised Russian; but Dostoievski, while wholly Russian, belongs to
the world. An almost exact parallel is afforded by the case of Ibsen and
Björnson, about whose respective values Norway used to dispute as now
Mr. Garnett would have us dispute concerning the respective values of
Dostoievski and Turgenev. The world has settled the first in favour of
Ibsen—with Norway dissenting; the world will similarly settle the latter
in favour of Dostoievski, with Mr. Garnett dissenting.

PLOTINUS.—Plotinus, of whom Coleridge said that “no writer more wants,
better deserves, or is less likely to obtain a new and more correct
translation,” has lately been translated into excellent English by Mr.
Stephen Mackenna (_not_ the author of _Sonia_, by the way). For all
Coleridge’s demand and Mr. Mackenna’s supply, however, Plotinus is not
likely to be read as much as he deserves. Abstract thought, or thinking
in ideas without images, is a painful pleasure, comparable to exercises
designed and actually effective to physical health. There is no doubt
whatever that mental power is increased by abstract thought. Abstract
thinking is almost a recipe for the development of talent. But it is
so distasteful to mental inertia and habit that even people who have
experienced its immense profit are disinclined to persist in it. It was
by reason of his persistence in an exercise peculiarly irksome to the
Western mind that Plotinus approached the East more nearly in subtlety
and purity of thought than all but a few Western thinkers before or after
him. In reading him it is hard to say that one is not reading a clarified
Shankara or a Vyasa of the Bhishma treatises of the _Mahabharata_. East
and West met in his mind.

Plotinus’s aim, like that of all thinkers in the degree of their
conception, is, in Coleridge’s words, “the perfect spiritualisation of
all the laws of Nature into laws of intuition and intellect.” It is the
subsumption of phenomena in terms of personality, the reduction of Nature
to the mind of man. Conversely it will be seen that the process may be
said to personalise Nature; in other words, to assume the presence in
natural phenomena of a kind of personal intelligence. If this be animism,
I decline to be shocked by it on that account; for in that event the
highest philosophy and one of the lowest forms of religion coincide,
and there is no more to be said of it. The danger of this reasoning
from mind to Nature and from Nature to mind is anthropomorphism. We
tend to make Nature in our own image, or, conversely, _à la_ Nietzsche,
to make ourselves after the image of Nature. But the greater the truth
the greater is the peril of it; and thinkers must be on their guard to
avoid the dangers, while nevertheless continuing the method. Plotinus
certainly succeeded in avoiding the anthropomorphic no less than the
crudely animistic dangers of his methods; but at the cost of remaining
unintelligible to the majority of readers.

THE NEW EUROPE.—It should be possible before long to begin to discern
some of the outlines of the new continent that will arise from the flood
of the present war. That it will be a new continent is certain, and that
it will contain as essential features some of the aspects of the Slav
soul is probable. For what has been spiritually most apparent during the
war has been the struggle of the Slav soul to find expression in the
Western medium. Russia, we may say, has sought to Europeanise herself;
or, rather, Russia has sought to impress upon Europe Russian ideas;
with this further resemblance in her fate to the fate of the pioneers
of every great new spiritual impulse, that she has been crucified in
her mission. The crucifixion of Slavdom, however, is the sign in which
Russian ideals—or, let us say Slav ideals—will in the end conquer. They
will not submerge our Western ideas; the new continent will be the
old continent over again; but they will profoundly modify our former
configurations, and compel us to draw our cultural maps afresh. In what
respect, it may be asked, will our conceptions be radically changed? The
reply is to be found confusedly in the events of the Russian Revolution;
in the substitution of the pan-human for the national ideal, and in the
attempt, this time to be made with all the strength at the disposal of
intelligence, to create a single world-culture—a universal Church of men
of good-sense and good-will. This appears to me to be the distinguishing
feature of the new continent about to be formed; and we shall owe it to
the Slavs.

THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM.—The anti-Puritanism of the professed
anti-Puritans is very little, if any, better than the Puritanism they
oppose. The two parties divide the honours of our dislike fairly evenly
between them. Puritanism is a fanatical devotion to a single aspect of
virtue—namely, to morality. It assumes that Life is moral and nothing
else; that Power, Wisdom, Truth, Beauty, and Love are all of no account
in comparison with Goodness; and doing so it offends our judgment of the
nature of Virtue, which is that Virtue is wholeness or a balance of all
the aspects of God. Anti-Puritanism, on the other hand, denies all the
affirmations of Puritanism, but without affirming anything on its own
account. It denies that Life is exclusively moral, but it does not affirm
that Life is anything else; it destroys the false absolute of Puritanism,
but it is silent to the extent of tacitly denying that there is any
absolute whatsoever. This being the case, our choice between Puritanism
and anti-Puritanism is between a false absolute and no absolute, between
a one-sided truth and no truth at all. We are bound to be half-hearted
upon either side, since the thing itself is only half a thing.

I am not likely to revise my opinions about virtue from the school of
Marx and his disciple Kautsky. Marx was another flamen, a priest, that is
to say, of one aspect only of reality—in this case the economic. That the
moral cant of a particular age tends to represent the economic interest
of the dominant class, is, of course, a truism; but there is a world of
difference between moral cant and morality—and the latter is as uniform
throughout all history as the former is variable. Moreover, it is not by
any means always the case that the interests of the dominant class of
capitalism are identical with Puritanism. The interests of capitalism
to-day are decidedly with anti-Puritanism, in so far as the effects of
anti-Puritanism are to break up family life, to restrict births and to
cultivate eugenics. What could suit capitalism better than to atomise
the last surviving natural grouping of individuals and to breed for the
servile State? The anti-Puritan propagandas of Malthusianism and eugenics
are not carried on, either, by Marxians, but by the wealthy classes.
Because he is a shopkeeper, the Anglo-Saxon is to-day an anti-Puritan in
these matters.

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.—The difficulty of popular philosophical discussion
is not insuperable. It is all a matter of style. Mr. Bertrand Russell,
for example, manages by means of an excellent style to make philosophy
as easy to understand and as entrancing to follow as certain writers
have made the equally difficult subject of economics. It is, in fact,
the business of professional thinkers to popularise their subject and to
procure for their Muse as many devotees as possible. In the case of Mr.
Bertrand Russell, his admirable style has been put into the service of
the most abominable philosophy ever formulated. He is an accidentalist
of the most thorough-going kind who denies that life has any meaning or
purpose. Life appeared, he says, by chance, and will disappear, probably
for good, with the cooling of the sun; and he sings like a doomed
cricket on a dissolving iceberg. But it is all the more strange in my
judgment that a man who thinks thus can write as Mr. Russell writes.
There is a contradiction somewhere between the simple richness of his
style and the Spartan poverty of his ideas. He thinks glacially, but his
style is warm. I suspect that if he were psycho-analysed Mr. Bertrand
Russell would turn out to be a walking contradiction. In a word, I don’t
believe he believes a word he says! That tone, that style, them there
gestures—they betray the stage-player of the spirit.

A philosophy written in a popular style is not, of course, the same thing
as a popular philosophy. “From a popular philosophy and a philosophical
populace, good sense deliver us,” said Coleridge, meaning to say that
a philosophy whose substance and not whose expression only has been
adapted to the populace is in all probability false and is certainly
superficial. For in his _Lay Sermons_, published a hundred years ago,
Coleridge supplemented the foregoing remark by deploring the “long and
ominous eclipse of philosophy, the usurpation of that venerable name
by physical and psychological empiricism, and the non-existence of a
learned and philosophical _public_.” Between a philosophic public and
a philosophic populace there is the same distinction as between the
“public” that reads, let us say, Sedlák, and the “populace” that reads,
let us say, Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells is a popular philosopher; but
that is manifestly not the same thing as a writer who is trying to make
philosophy popular.

WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN?—In the _International Journal of Ethics_, Mr.
Herbert Stewart makes a chivalrous attempt to deliver Carlyle from
the charge recently brought home to him of having been a Prussian.
Militarist Prussianism, he says, rests upon a postulate which would have
filled Carlyle with horror, the postulate, namely, that an autocracy
must be organised for war. I am not satisfied, however, that Carlyle
would have been filled with anything but admiration. It is true that he
did not adopt the Prussian error of identifying Might with Right. “Is
Arithmetic,” he asked, “a thing more fixed by the Eternal than the laws
of justice are?” Could Justice or Right, therefore, be allowed to vary
with the amount of Might at its disposal—a deduction inevitable from
the Prussian hypothesis? On the other hand, Carlyle cannot be said to
have been equally free from the more subtle error of Prussianism, the
assumption that Might can be accumulated only by Right means. Might, he
said in effect, being an attribute of God, can be obtained by man only as
a result of some virtue. Hence its possession presumes the possession
of a proportionate virtue, and a man of Might is to that extent a man
of Right also. This subtlety led Carlyle into some strange company for
the moral fanatic he was. It led him to glorify Frederick the Great and
to condone Frederick’s crime against Silesia. It led him to despise
France and to defend West Indian slavery. Mr. Stewart must make his
choice between Carlyle as a confused ethical philosopher and Carlyle as a
Prussian. If he was not the latter, he was the former.

IS NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY?—Nietzsche, we are told, is being read as never
before in Germany. It is certain that Nietzsche was taken, if taken
at all, in the wrong sense in Germany before the war. The Germans did
with him precisely what the mob everywhere does with the satirist; they
swallowed his praise and ignored his warnings. He is still, however, more
of a danger than a saviour to post-war Germany, if only for the reason
that his vocabulary is for the most part militarist. Culture is usually
presented by Nietzsche in the terms of combat, and the still small voice
of perfection is only heard in the silences of his martial sentences. Now
that Germany has begun to re-read Nietzsche, will it read him any more
intelligently than before? Is not a critique of Nietzsche a necessary
condition of safely reading him—in Germany? There are, undoubtedly,
authors who are most dangerous to the nation in which they appear.
Rousseau was particularly dangerous to France. Whitman is inimical to
American culture. Dr. Johnson has been a blight upon English thought. And
Nietzsche, it may well be, is only a blessing outside of Germany. Art and
thought, it is commonly said, are beyond nationality and beyond race; and
from this it follows that it is only a happy accident when a great writer
or thinker is peculiarly suited to the nation in which he happens to be
born. He is addressed to the world—why should his message be specially
adapted to the language and people of his parentage? A nation runs risks
in accenting as its own the doctrines of the great men who chance to
appear among it. Equally, a nation runs the risk of missing its real
chosen unless it examines all the great men of the world. Chauvinism,
either by choice or by exclusion, is always dangerous. We must take the
good where we find it.

NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS.—The English mind is easily “put off” a subject,
and particularly easily off a subject as uncongenial as Nietzsche; and
it has been known to remain in this state for a century or more. Several
of our own greatest thinkers and writers have had to wait a long period
for their readers, and by the time that the English mind has recovered
itself, they are often quite dead. It is likely to be the same with
Nietzsche. Having the plausible excuse for being “off” Nietzsche which
the war provided, the English intellectual classes—note that I do not
say the intellectual English classes, for there are none—will continue
to neglect Nietzsche until he has been superseded, as I believe he will
be before very long. Psycho-analysis has taken a good deal of Nietzsche
in its stride, and it is quite possible that the re-reading of Indian
philosophy in the light of psycho-analysis will gather most of the
remainder.

Nevertheless, the remaining fragments will be worth preserving, since
indubitably they will be the fragments of a giant of thought. As
Heraclitus is represented by a small collection of aphorisms, each so
concentrated that one would serve for an ordinary man’s equipment for
intellectual life, the Nietzsche of the future may be contained in a
very small volume, chiefly of aphorisms. He aimed, he said, at saying in
a sentence what other writers say in a book, and he characteristically
added that he aimed at saying in a sentence what other writers did _not_
say in a book. And he very often succeeded. These successes are his real
contribution to his own immortality, and they will, I think, ensure it. I
should advise Dr. Oscar Levy to prepare such a volume without delay. It
may be the case that Nietzsche will be read in his entirety again, though
I doubt it; but, in any event, such a volume as I have in mind would
serve either to reintroduce him or handsomely to bury the mortal part of
him.

I cannot, however, really believe that Nietzsche is about to be read,
as never before, in Germany. Dr. Levy has assured us, on the report of
a Berlin bookseller, that this was indicated in the sales of Nietzsche
in Germany; but the wish was father to the deduction from the very
small fact. Nietzsche was, before anything else, a great culture-hero;
as a critic of art he has been surpassed by no man. But is there any
appeal in culture to a Germany situated as Germany is to-day? I am here
only a literary _causeur_. With the dinosaurs and other monsters of
international politics I cannot be supposed to be on familiar terms. My
opinion, nevertheless, based upon my own material, is that Germany is
most unlikely to resume the pursuit of culture where she interrupted it
after 1870, or, indeed, to pursue culture at all. And the reason for
my opinion is that Russia is too close at hand, too accessible, and,
above all, too tempting to German cupidity. Think what the proximity to
Germany—to a Germany headed off from the Western world—of a commercially
succulent country like Russia really means. Germans are human, even if
they are not sub-human, and the temptation of an El Dorado at their doors
will prove to be more seductive than the cry from the muezzin to come
to culture, come to culture. Nietzsche on the one side calling them to
spiritual conquests will be met by the big bagmen calling them, on the
other side, to commercial conquests. Who can doubt which appeal will be
the stronger? Germany refused to attend to Nietzsche after 1870, when he
spoke to them as one alive; they are less likely to listen to a voice
from the dead after 1918. On second thoughts, I should advise Dr. Oscar
Levy to publish his volume in Germany first. For there he would show by
one satiric touch that no country needed it so much.

THE END OF FICTION.—Fiction nowadays, we are told, is not what it used
to be. We are told that it is the modern university. It is certainly a
very obliging medium. But on this very account it is as delusive as it is
obliging. It receives impressions easily, readily adapts itself to every
kind of material, and assumes at the word of command any and every mood.
But precisely because it does these things, the effects it produces are
transient. Lightly come, lightly go; and if, as has been said, fiction
is the modern reader’s university, it is a school in which he learns
everything and forgets everything. Modern as I am, and hopeful as I am
of modernity, I cannot think that the predominance of fiction, even of
such fiction as is written to-day, is a good sign; and when we see that
it leads nowhere, that the people who read much of it never read anything
else, and that it is an intellectual _cul-de-sac_, our alarm at the
phenomenon is the greater. What kind of minds do we expect to develop on
a diet of forty parts fiction to two of all other forms of literature?
Assuming the free libraries to be the continuation schools of the public,
what is their value if the only lessons taken in them are the lessons of
fiction? I will not dwell on the obvious discouragement the figures are
to every serious _writer_, for the effect on the readers must be worse.

THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE.—The suppression of the display of feeling, or,
better, the control of the display of feeling, is the first condition
of thought, and only those who have aimed at writing with studied
simplicity, studied lucidity, and studied detachment realise the amount
of feeling that has to be trained to run quietly in harness. The modern
failure (as compared with the success of the Greeks) to recognise
feeling as an essential element of lucidity and the rest of the virtues
of literary form is due to an excess of fiction. Just because fiction
expresses everything it really impresses nothing. Its feeling evaporates
as fast as it exudes. The sensation, nevertheless, is pleasant, for the
reader appears to be witnessing genuine feeling genuinely expressing
itself; and he fails to remember that what is true of a person is likely
to be true of a book, that the more apparent, obvious, and demonstrated
the feelings, the more superficial, unreal, and transient they probably
are. As a matter of cold-blooded fact, it has been clearly shown during
the course of the war that precisely our most “passionate” novelists have
been our least patriotic citizens. I name no names, since they are known
to everybody.

Culture I define as being, amongst other things, a capacity for subtle
discrimination of words and ideas. Epictetus made the discrimination of
words the foundation of moral training, and it is true enough that every
stage of moral progress is indicated by the degree of our perception
of the meaning of words. Tell me what words have a particular interest
for you, and I will tell you what class of the world-school you are in.
Tell me what certain words mean for you and I will tell you what you
mean for the world of thought. One of the most subtle words, and one of
the key-words of culture, is simplicity. Can you discriminate between
natural simplicity and studied simplicity, between Nature and Art? In
appearance they are indistinguishable, but in reality, they are æons
apart; and whoever has learned to distinguish between them is entitled to
regard himself as on the way to culture. Originality is another key-word,
and its subtlety may be suggested by a paradox which was a commonplace
among the Greeks; namely, that the most original minds strive to conceal
their originality, and that the master-minds succeed. Contrast this
counsel of perfect originality with the counsels given in our own day,
in which the aim of originality is directed to appearing original—you
will be brought, thereby, face to face with still another key-idea of
Culture, the relation of Appearance to Reality. All these exercises in
culture are elementary, however, in comparison with the master-problem of
“disinterestedness.” No word in the English language is more difficult to
define or better worth attempting to define. Somewhere or other in its
capacious folds it contains all the ideas of ethics, and even, I should
say, of religion. The _Bhagavad Gita_ (to name only one classic) can be
summed up in the word. Duty is only a pale equivalent of it. I venture
to say that whoever has understood the meaning of “disinterestedness” is
not far off understanding the goal of human culture.

THE FATE OF SCULPTURE.—The art-critic of _The Times_ having remarked that
“the public hardly looks at the sculpture in the Academy, or outside it,”
Mr. John Tweed, an eminent sculptor himself, has now uttered a public
lamentation in agreement with him. Sculpture to-day, he says, is an art
without an audience; and he quotes a Belgian artist who told him what
heroes our contemporary sculptors in this country must be to continue
their work in the face of a unanimous neglect. It is not certain,
however, that the sculptors of to-day do not thoroughly well deserve the
fate to which they now find themselves condemned. In the economy of the
arts, or, if this phrase be preferred, in the strategy of æsthetics,
nothing is more necessary from time to time in each of the arts than an
iconoclast—by which I indicate not a destroyer simply, but a creator of
new forms. Such a pioneer is of necessity a little rude to his immediate
predecessors and to such of his contemporaries as are sheep. But in
the end, nevertheless, if they will only accept and recognise him, he
will revive their art for them. But in the case of sculpture the two
such iconoclasts as have recently appeared—Mr. Epstein and the late
Gaudier-Brzeska—were instantly set upon, not by the public, but by their
contemporaries, and walled within a neglect far more complete than the
neglect sculpture in general has received. Just when it appeared that
they might be about to reawaken public interest in carven forms, the rest
of the sculptors hurried to silence them, with the consequence that at
this moment there is literally nobody engaged in sculpture in whom the
intelligent public takes the smallest interest. As sculptors have treated
sculpture, so the public now treats sculptors. It is a pretty piece of
karma.

THE TOO CLEVER.—Neglect means nothing very much; success is a matter
of time for everything that is really classic. On the other hand,
deliberately to incur neglect by writing for the few involves the further
risk of more and more deserving it. Whoever makes a boast of writing
for a coterie sooner or later finds himself writing for a coterie of a
coterie, and at last for himself alone. It cannot be otherwise. As the
progress of the classic is from the one to the many, the progress of
the romantic is from the many to the one; and the more sincerely the
latter is a romantic, the sooner he arrives at his journey’s end. The
involution of aim thus brought about is obvious already in the succession
of works of the chief writers of the _Little Review_. They grow cleverer
and cleverer, and, at the same time, more and more unintelligible. I am
staggered by the cleverness of such a writer as Mr. Wyndham Lewis, and a
little more so at the cleverness of Mr. James Joyce. But in the case of
both of them I find myself growing more and more mystified, bewildered,
and repelled. Is it, I ask, that they do not write for readers like me?
Then their circle must be contracting, for I am one of many who used to
read them with pleasure. And who are they gaining while losing us? Are
their new readers more intensive if fewer, and better worth while for
their quality than we were for our numbers? But I decline to allow the
favourable answers. The fact is that the writers of the _Little Review_
are getting too clever even for coterie, and will soon be read only by
each other, or themselves.

A characteristic example is to be found in the opening chapter of Mr.
James Joyce’s new novel, _Ulysses_. This is how it begins:—

Stately, plump Buck Milligan came from the stairway, bearing
a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently
behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and
intoned....

Now it is clear that such a passage has not been written without a
great deal of thought, and if thought were art, it might be called an
artistic passage. But thought is not only not art, but the aim of art
is to conceal thought. In its perfection art is indistinguishable from
nature. The conspicuous thoughtfulness of the passage I have quoted is,
therefore, an objection to it; and the more so since it provokes an
inspection it is unable to sustain. Challenged to “think” about what the
writer is saying, the reader at once discovers that the passage will not
bear thinking about. He asks, for instance, _whence_ Buck Milligan came
from the staircase; _how_ he managed to balance a crossed mirror and
razor on a bowl’s edge—and, particularly, while bearing them aloft; and
what mild air it was that sustained the tails of a man’s dressing-gown.
To these questions deliberately provoked by the ostentatious care of
the writer there is either no answer or none forthcoming without more
thought than the detail is worth. The passage, in short, suffers from
being aimed at a diminishing coterie; and it succeeds in satisfying, I
imagine, only the writer of it who is alone in all its secrets. Mr. James
Joyce had once the makings of a great writer—not a popular writer, but
a classic writer. To become what he was he needed to be opened out, to
be simplified, to conceal his cleverness, to write more and more for the
world. But first in the _Egoist_ and now in the _Little Review_ he has
been directed to cultivate his faults, his limitations, his swaddling
clothes of genius, with the result that he is in imminent danger of
brilliant provincialism.

HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS.—Mr. Ezra Pound’s _Homage to Propertius_ has drawn
an American Professor of Latin into the pages of the American magazine
_Poetry_. Professor Hales is indignant at the attempt of Mr. Pound to
make Propertius intelligible as well as merely accessible to the modern
English reader, and in the name of Scholarship, he begs Mr. Pound
to “lay aside the mask of erudition” and to confess himself nothing
better than a poet. With some of Professor Hales’s literal criticisms
it is impossible not to agree. Speaking in the name of the schools, he
is frequently correct. But in the name of the humanities of life, of
art, of literature, what in the world does it matter that Mr. Pound
has spelled Punic with a capital when he meant a small letter, or that
he has forgotten the existence of the Marcian aqueduct? Mr. Pound did
not set out with the intention of making a literal translation of
Propertius. He set out with the intention of creating in English verse a
verse reincarnation, as it were, of Propertius, a “homage” to Propertius
that should take the form of rendering him a contemporary of our own.
And, secondly, all criticism based on the text of Propertius is invalid
unless it is accompanied by a perception of the psychological quality
of Propertius as he lived. But Professor Hales, it is clear, has no
sense for this higher kind of criticism, for he complains that there
is “no hint” in Propertius’s text of “certain decadent meanings” which
Mr. Pound attributes to him. Is there not, indeed? Accepting decadence
in its modern American meaning, Propertius can only be said to be full
of it. No literary critic, accustomed to reading through and between
an author’s lines, whether they be Latin, Greek, or English, can doubt
the evidence of his trained senses that the mind behind the text of
Propertius was a mind which the Latin Professor of the Chicago University
would call decadent, if only it expressed itself in English. The facts
that Propertius was a poet contemporary with Ovid, that he wrote of the
life of the luxurious Roman Empire, as one who habitually lived it,
that he wrote of love and of his own adventures, are quite sufficient
to prove that he was a child of his age; and if his age was, as it
undoubtedly was, decadent, in a professorial sense, Propertius, we may
be sure, shared its decadence. I am not saying, it will be observed,
nor, I think, would Mr. Pound say, that to have shared in decadence and
to be sympathetic to it are the same thing as to be decadent in oneself.
What, in fact, distinguishes Propertius is his æsthetic reaction against
decadence, against the very decadence in which he had been brought up,
and with which he had sympathised. But this is not to admit that “no hint
of certain decadent meanings” is to be found in him. On the contrary, he
could not very well have become the æsthetic reaction against decadence
without importing into his verse more than a hint of certain decadent
meanings. In effect, Propertius is the compendium of the Roman Empire at
its turning point in the best minds. Long before history with its slow
sequence of events proved to the gross senses of mankind that Empire was
a moral and æsthetic blunder, Propertius discovered the fact for himself
and recorded his judgment in the æsthetic form of his exquisite verse.
But he must have passed through decadence in order to have arrived at
his final judgment; and, indeed, as I have said, his verse bears witness
of it. Professor Hales has been misled by Propertius’s reflections, by
his habit of sublimating his experiences, by his criticism of decadence.
But that reflection was only an accompaniment, or, rather, sequel of
Propertius’s mode of life; it did not, any more than such reflection does
to-day, make impossible or even improbable a mode of life in violent
contrast with the reflection made upon it.

MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS IN PUBLIC.—Mr. Ezra Pound has for some
months been the “foreign” or exile editor of the _Little Review_; and
I gather from the nature of the contributions that he has practically
commandeered most of the space. A series of letters and some stories
by Mr. Wyndham Lewis; letters, stories and verse, by Mr. Pound; ditto,
ditto, ditto, by other—shall I say London?—writers—are evidence that
Mr. Pound’s office is no sinecure. He delivers the goods. The aim of
the _Little Review_, as defined without the least attempt at camouflage
by the editress (that is to say, the real American director of the
venture), is to publish articles, stories, verses, and drawings of pure
art—whatever that may be. It is not demanded of them that they shall be
true—or false; that they shall have a meaning—single or double; that
they shall be concerned with life—or fancy. Nothing, in fact, is asked
of them but that they shall be art, just art. Less explicitly, but to
the same effect, both Mr. Pound and Mr. Wyndham Lewis subscribe to the
same formula. They, too, are after art, nothing but art. But in other
respects they define themselves more clearly. From Mr. Wyndham Lewis,
for instance, I gather that the aim of the _Little Review_ artists is
to differentiate themselves from the mob. Art would seem to consist,
indeed, in this differentiation or self-separation. Whatever puts a gulf
between yourself and the herd, and thus “distinguishes” you, is and
must be art, because of this very effect. And Mr. Pound carries on the
doctrine a stage by insisting that the only thing that matters about the
mob is to deliver individuals from it. Art, in short, is the discovery,
maintenance, and culture of individuals.

We have all heard of this doctrine; and there is no doubt that it is
very seductive. But to whom? It has been remarked before that the appeal
of Nietzsche has often been to the last persons in the world you would
have thought capable of responding to him; or, let us say, to the last
persons that ought to respond to him—weak-willed, moral imbeciles, with
not enough intelligence to be even efficient slaves. These, as Nietzsche
discovered, were only too often the sort of person that was attracted
by his muscular doctrine of the Will to Power. It is the case likewise
with the doctrine of individuality. Among its disciples there are, of
course, the few who understand it; but the majority of them are precisely
the persons who prove by their devotion their personal need of it.
Individuality is for these as much a cult as health is a cult among the
sick; and it is to be observed that they also have to take a good deal of
care of themselves. They must never associate with the mob, they must be
careful what they eat in the way of æsthetics; they must pick and choose
among people, places and things with all the delicacy of an eggshell
among potsherds. Above all, they must keep their art pure. Neither Mr.
Wyndham Lewis nor Mr. Ezra Pound belongs to this class of æsthetic
valetudinarians. Both are robust persons with excellent digestions, and
with a great deal of substantial common sense. Nevertheless, both of
them, to my mind, pose as invalids, and simulate all the whimperings and
fastidiousness of the _malades imaginaires_. Read Mr. Lewis’s letters,
for example, in the issues of the _Little Review_ here under notice.
The writer is obviously a very clever man, with a good experience and
judgment of life, and possessed of a powerful style. But he has chosen to
exhibit himself as a clever gymnast of words, with innumerable finnicking
fancies against this or that lest he should be confused with the “mob.”
And Mr. Pound is in much the same state. What is the need of it in their
case, I ask? Unlike most of the other writers, neither Mr. Lewis nor Mr.
Pound has any need to “cultivate” an individuality, or to surround it
with walls and moats of poses. Neither has any need whatever to appear
clever in order to be clever. On the contrary, both of them have need to
do exactly the reverse—namely, to cut their too exuberant individuality
down to the quick, and to reveal their cleverness by concealing it.
Simplicity, as Oscar Wilde said—he, of course, only said it, he never
really thought it—is the last refuge of complexity. And I put it to
Mr. Lewis and Mr. Pound that with just a little more individuality,
and with just a little more cleverness, their ambition will be to be
indistinguishable from the mob, either by their individuality or their
cleverness. They will not succeed in it. Individuality and cleverness,
like murder, will out. The aim, however, of the wise possessor of either,
is to conceal it in subtler and subtler forms of common sense and
simplicity.

Among the clever poses of this type of “stage player of the spirit,” as
Nietzsche called them, is the pose of the _enfant terrible_. They are
mightily concerned to shock the bourgeoisie, and are never so happy as
when they have said something naughty, and actually got it into print.
Now it is, of course, very stupid for the bourgeoisie to be shocked.
The bourgeoisie would be wiser to yawn. But it argues a similar kind
of stupidity—anti-stupidity—to wish to shock them. But we do not wish
to shock them, they say! We are indifferent to the existence of the
bourgeoisie! Our aim is simply to write freely as artists, and to be at
liberty to publish our work for such as can understand it. Publishing,
however, is a public act; and I agree with the bourgeoisie that the art
of an intimate circle or group is not of necessity a public art. Between
private and public morality, personal and public policy, individual
and communal art, there is all the difference of two differing scales
of value. Queen Victoria did not wish to be addressed by Mr. Gladstone
as if she were a public meeting. A public meeting does not like to be
addressed as if it were a party of personal friends. The introduction of
personal considerations into public policy is felt to be an intrusion;
and to treat your friends as if you were legislating on their behalf is
an impertinence. From all this it follows that to thrust all private art
into the public eye is to mix the two worlds. Only that part of private
art that is in good public taste ought to be exhibited in public; the
rest is for private, personal, individual consumption, and ought to be
left unpublished, or circulated only privately. Let the artist write
what pleases him; let him circulate it among his friends; the only
criterion here is personal taste. But immediately he proposes to publish
his work, he should ask himself, the question: Is this in good public
taste?

MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST.—Under the title of _Ezra Pound: His Metric
and Poetry_, a whole book—really, however, only an essay—has been devoted
to the work of this literary enigma. For this honour, if honour it be,
Mr. Pound is indebted more to what he has preached than to what he has
practised; for on his actual achievement, considerable though it is, not
even in America could anybody have been found to write a book. Mr. Pound
will not deny that he is an American in this respect, if in none other,
that he always likes to hitch his wagon to a star. He has always a ton of
precept for a pound of example. And in America, more than in any other
country save, perhaps, Germany, it appears to be required of a man that
there shall be “significant” intention, aim, theory—anything you like
expressive of direction—in everything he does. There does not appear to
me to be anything _very_ original in the creation of poetic images, or
even in the employment of irregular metric; neither of them can be said
to constitute a new departure in poetic technique. Yet Mr. Pound has
elevated each of them to be the star of a cult, with the consequence that
we now have professed “schools” of poetry, calling themselves Imagist or
Verslibrist. These are examples of what I mean in saying that Mr. Pound
loves to hitch his wagon to a star.

It must be admitted that this habit of Mr. Pound has its good as well
as its somewhat absurd side; there is only a step from the ridiculous
to the sublime. It must also be affirmed, however it may reflect upon
our English critics, that it is precisely the good side of Mr. Pound’s
technique which they usually condemn. For the good side consists of
this, that all the poets who can claim to belong to the school of
Mr. Pound must display in addition to the above-mentioned defects,
the certain and positive merits of study of their art and deliberate
craftsmanship. No poet dare claim to be a pupil of Mr. Pound who cannot
prove that he has been to school to poetry, and submitted himself to a
craft-apprenticeship; and no poet will long command Mr. Pound’s approval
who is not always learning and experimenting. Now this, which I call
the good side of Mr. Pound’s doctrine, is disliked in England, where
it has for years been the habit of critics to pretend that poetry grows
on bushes or in parsley-beds. That poetry should be the practice of “a
learned, self-conscious craft,” to be carried on by a “guild of adepts,”
appears to Mr. Archer, for example, to be a heresy of the first order.
How much of the best poetry, he exclaims, has been written with “little
technical study behind it”; and how little necessary, therefore, any
previous learning is. To the dogs with Mr. Pound’s doctrine! Let the
motto over the gates of the Temple of Poetry be: “No previous experience
required.” It will be seen, of course, how the confusion in Mr. Archer’s
mind has arisen. Because it is a fact that the “best” poetry looks
effortless, he has fallen into the spectator’s error of concluding that
it is effortless. And because, again, a considerable part of the work of
the “learned, self-conscious craftsmen” is pedantic and artificial, he
has been confirmed in his error. The truth of the matter, however, is
with Mr. Pound. Dangerous as it may be to require that a poet shall be
learned in his profession, it is much more dangerous to deprecate his
learning. By a happy fluke, it may be, a perfect poem may occasionally be
written “without previous study”; from too much previous study there may
also occasionally result only verse smelling of the lamp; but in the long
run, and for the cultivation of poetry as an art, there is no doubt that
the most fruitful way is the way of the craftsman and the adept.

MR. EZRA POUND ON RELIGION.—Mr. Pound has been called over the coals for
his impolite dismissal of Mr. G. K. Chesterton as a danger to English
literature. But, good gracious, Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s reputation is
not so frail that it cannot take care of itself against a spirited
idiosyncrasy. Mr. Pound has expressed his honest opinion; but what
is discussion for but to elicit honest opinions, and then to extract
the truth from them? There is undoubtedly a fragment of truth in Mr.
Pound’s view of Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s influence, and it is this: that
Mr. Chesterton is a most dangerous man to imitate. His imitators become
apes. But that is not to say that Mr. Chesterton is not himself a great
writer. Shakespeare is likewise a dangerous man to imitate; and we should
only be repeating good criticism if we affirmed that the influence of
Shakespeare upon English style has been on the whole bad. But this is
not to detract from the greatness of Shakespeare. Every writer of a
unique style is liable to ruin his imitators; and, from this point of
view, the wise thing to be done is to classify good writers as writers
to be imitated and writers never to be imitated. Among the former are
the writers whom personally I prefer; for I love best the men of the
eighteenth century, who aimed at writing as nearly as possible like the
world, and through whom the common genius of the English language spoke.
But there is pleasure and profit also in the highly individualised styles
of the latter sort of writers, beginning, let us say, with _Euphues_, and
represented to-day by Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Mr. Pound may have no fancy
for the unique and personally conducted style of Mr. Chesterton, but it
is a matter entirely of taste and not of judgment. Should he announce
that he cannot tolerate Swift or Burke or Sterne, writers of pure
English, then, indeed, I should join in deploring his judgment. As it is,
I listen to his remarks on Mr. Chesterton as I should hear his opinions
of crab-soup.

Coming to his views upon religion and upon Christianity, I find myself
not so much hostile to Mr. Pound as bewildered by him; and yet not
bewildered to the degree of much curiosity. Certain critical views of
religion are stimulating. Nietzsche’s, for example, or Huxley’s, or W.
K. Clifford’s, or even Frazer’s. You feel they come from minds serious
enough to take religion seriously, and that they are expressive rather
of impatience with the superficiality of current religion than of
hostility to religion itself. Nietzsche and the rest, in fact, were not
critical of religion and of Christianity because they were themselves
indifferent to religion, but because they were too intensely concerned
with the religious problem to accept the popular solutions. Mr. Pound,
on the other hand, does not appear to me to be a serious thinker on the
subject. He dismisses the current popular solutions not only as if they
were, as they mostly are, superficial and absurd, but as if the problems
of conscience, the soul, sin, and of salvation, to which these solutions
are trial replies, were non-existent or trivial. It is his indifference
to the reality of the problems, and not his criticism of the popular
solutions, that keeps my mind at a distance from Mr. Pound’s when he is
writing on religion. He does not so much as even irritate me, he simply
leaves me as indifferent to his opinions as he is himself.

MR. POUND, CARICATURIST.—Mr. Ezra Pound comes in for it again—as he
always does. His idiosyncrasies are the enemies of his personality, and
they will always, unless he can amend them, militate against both his
work and his success. Mr. Pound appears to love to give his readers the
impression that he is no end of a fire-eater, and that he is a charlatan
of the first-water, setting up to lecture better men on the virtues he
himself has never cultivated. It is an absolutely incorrect picture,
an exceedingly bad self-portrait, a malicious caricature of himself. A
psycho-analyst would attribute it all to “compensation,” to an attempt on
the part of Mr. Pound to disguise his qualities as defects. In brief, Mr.
Pound has not the courage of his virtues. “No one,” says Mr. Hartley in
the _Little Review_, “admires Ezra Pound more than I do ... but it is his
celestial sneer I admire.” A sneer, celestial or mundane, is, however,
the last gesture of which Mr. Pound is capable. If anything, he is too
benignant, too enthusiastic, too anxious to find excuse for admiration.

THE ADMIRABLE VICTORIANS.—I am prepared to apologise if I have ever used
“Victorian” in a derogatory sense. But I know I have not. I have too
deep a respect for the Victorian character ever to make light of it, and
especially for my own generation, that can afford to laugh at so little.
Mr. Strachey’s “brilliant” essays, therefore, leave me laughing at him
rather than with him. One is impelled to take him personally, and to turn
the tables upon Mr. Strachey with the _argumentum ad hominem_. How do you
compare with the people you write about? For it is the peculiarity of
the Victorians—our grandfathers and great-grandfathers—that whatever we
may feel about them in our current opinions, someone has only to sneer
at them to provoke us to their defence; and what better defence can they
ask than to be compared, man for man, with their critics? As a set-off
to the “brilliant” essays of Mr. Strachey—how easy it is to be brilliant
nowadays! I have recently read, on the loan of his great-grandson, the
privately printed personal memoir of Wm. Mattingly Soundy, who died in
1862, at the full age of 96. For 24 years he was a member of his local
Congregational church, and for 46 years he was deacon. During nearly the
whole of that time he never missed a meeting, Sunday or week-day, and
was never known to be late, though he lived two miles from the church.
It is the round of a machine, you may say, and there is no wonder that
the age was mechanical. But I think of the passionate mainspring that
kept a “machine” going for so long without a psychological breakdown.
What an intensity it must have had! What a character! If to love it is
impossible, it is impossible not to admire it; and since we truly live
by admiration, hope and love, it is something for the Victorians that
they can still fill us with admiration. My own generation (now past as a
force) has provided the soul of the world with nothing so fine.

FRENCH CLARTÉ.—M. Vannier’s _La Clarté Française_ does not throw much
light upon the mysteries of French lucidity. He accepts as self-evident
Rivarol’s axiom that “what is not clear is not French”—surely worthy to
be the national device of France; and he analyses with admirable humour
a considerable number of examples of “clarté,” and the want of it. But
the mystery of lucidity remains a mystery still. Flaubert’s practice of
reading his compositions aloud puts us on the most promising scent, for
it is certain that the French “clarté” is eminently readable aloud and in
company. A great deal of our own literature is meant for the eye and not
for the ear, for the study and not for the salon, with the consequence
that at its best it is the grand style simple, but at its worst shocking.
Written for the ear, and meant to be read in company, French literature
is never grand, but neither is it ever silly. Its range is society, while
ours is solitude.

WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE?—There is nothing particularly “masterly” from
the modern English point of view in Hobbes’s translation of Pericles’s
_Funeral Oration_. His period of English prose appears to have been
ill-adapted for the translation of the Greek idiom of the time of
Pericles. To the usual cautions against translations in general, we ought
to add the caution against translations made in dissimilar epochs. It is
not at any time in the history of a language that a translation from a
foreign language can safely be undertaken. In all probability, indeed,
the proper period for translation is no longer in point of time than the
period within which the original itself was written. If the Periclean
Age lasted, let us say, fifty years, it is within a period in English
history of the same length that an adequate translation can be made.
Once let that period go by, and a perfect translation will be for ever
impossible. And equally the result will be a failure, if the translation
is attempted before its time has come. I do not think that the Hobbesian
period of English was in key with the period of Periclean Greek; nor,
again, do I think that our period for perfect translation has yet come.
A “masterpiece” of translation of Pericles’s _Oration_ is still, in my
opinion, to be done. But I am confident that we are approaching the
proper period, and in proof of this I would remark on the superiority of
Jowett’s translation over that of Hobbes. Jowett, as a writer of original
English, nobody, I think, would compare with Hobbes of Malmesbury. Hobbes
was a great pioneer, a creator of language; Jowett was only a good
writer. Nevertheless, the idiom in which Jowett wrote, was more nearly
perfect (that is, fully developed) English than the idiom in which Hobbes
wrote. And since, in point of development, the correspondence between
Periclean Greek and Jowett’s English is closer than the correspondence
between Periclean Greek and Hobbes’s English, Jowett’s translation is
nearer the original than Hobbes’s.

It would be a pleasant exercise in style to criticise Jowett’s
translation, and a still more profitable exercise to amend it. To a mere
student of comparative values in Periclean Greek and idiomatic English,
some of the errors in Jowett’s translation are obvious. Such a student
needs not to refer with the scholar’s precision to the original Greek
to be able, with the approval of all men of taste, to pronounce that
such and such a phrase or word is most certainly not what may be called
Periclean _English_. It stands to the totality of reason that it is not
so. We may be certain, for instance, that Pericles, were he delivering
his _Oration_ in English, with all the taste and training he possessed
as a Greek of his age, would never have employed such phrases as these:
“commended the law-giver,” “a worthy thing,” “burial to the dead,”
“reputation ... imperilled on ... the eloquence,” “who knows the facts,”
“suspect exaggeration.” Pericles, we cannot but suppose both from the man
and his age, spoke with studied simplicity, that is to say, with perfect
naturalness. The words and phrases he used were in all probability the
most ordinary to the ear of the Athenian, and well within the limits of
serious conversation. But such phrases as I have mentioned are not of
the same English character; they are written, not spoken phrases, and
approximate more to a leading commemorative article in _The Times_ than
to a speech we should all regard as excellent. It would be interesting to
have Lord Rosebery’s version of Pericles’ speech, or even Mr. Asquith’s.
Both, it is probable, would be nearer the original than Jowett’s, though
still some distance off perfection. In another fifty years perfection
will be reached.

NATURE IN MIND.—The _Quest_ contains an article by Mr. G. R. S. Mead, in
which he suggests—and, perhaps, rather more than suggests—an affinity, if
not an identity, between the “laws” of nature and the “laws” of mind.
Ever since I read the following sentence in Coleridge’s _Biographia
Literaria_: “The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist
in the perfect spiritualisation of all the laws of nature into laws of
intuition and intellect,” it has been at the back of my mind as an aim
to keep before philosophy. Whether or not there is a drummer in every
age with whom the active thinkers keep in step, even without being aware
of the fact, I can only say that more and more evidence of this tendency
of thought is coming to light. Boutroux’s _Contingency of the Laws of
Nature_ may be said to have most explicitly attempted the sublimation—or,
dare we say, the humanisation?—of the natural laws; but Boutroux is
only one of many philosophers working in the same direction. Other
areas of study than that of “pure” philosophy seem to have yielded, or
to be yielding, the same result. Mr. Mead quotes, for instance, some
recent studies of Animism to show that Animism, which, together with
Anthropomorphism, we used to dismiss as merely a primitive mode of
thought, may, after all, prove to contain a truth, the truth, namely,
that Nature _is_ living and intelligent, and, on that account, not so
far from human nature as we had come to imagine. “The more we penetrate
Matter,” says Mr. Mead, “the more akin to Mind we find it to be.” The
world is a creation of mind; and the more either of the world or of mind
we understand the more we understand of both. It is a thrilling idea,
the conception of the world of nature as being the externalisation of an
intelligence akin to our own. At the same time, it is, like all thrilling
ideas, associated with considerable danger. The “superstitions” connected
with it are perhaps best left under the shadow that has been cast upon
them.

MR. CLIVE BELL’S POT.—Mr. Clive Bell cannot escape the charge of literary
insolence by giving to his collection of essays the deprecatory name
of _Pot Boilers_. That the articles he has reprinted were designed to
boil Mr. Clive Bell’s pot, and did, in fact, keep it simmering, may be
true enough; for the _Athenæum_, in which most of them appeared, was an
eclectic journal with a surprising taste for the bad as well as for the
good. Mr. Clive Bell’s modesty, however, is titular only, for not merely
has he republished these ashes of his yesterday’s fire, but he imagines
them to be still ablaze. “It charms me,” he says, “to notice as I read
these essays, with what care and conscience they are done.... I seem
consistently to have cared much for four things—Art, Truth, Liberty, and
Peace.” These are things which a more modest man would have left his
biographer and eulogist to say of him; and even then not even friendship
would have made them true. To Art and Truth, there are, of course, a good
many references in Mr. Clive Bell’s essays, but the mere mention of these
names ought not to be regarded as an evidence of care for the things
themselves. Cannot the names of Art and Truth be also taken in vain? In
the two concluding essays of the book are to be found most clearly Mr.
Clive Bell’s conception of Art. It is indistinguishable from what may be
called the Bohemian conception. Art is not moral, art is not useful, art
is not a relative fact; it is an absolute to which all these other things
are relative. The artist, again, is not a “practical” person, and it is
no use expecting of him an interest in the non-artistic affairs of the
world. The war, for instance? It is only a means to art, and what should
be said of artists who abandon the end to occupy themselves with the
means?

But this Bohemian and superior attitude is consistent apparently with
some very mundane bitterness. Mr. Clive Bell does not appreciate the
war, which appears to have put him considerably out, in spite of his
Kensington Olympianism. He is shocked at hearing that “this is no time
for art.” But, on the other hand, he does not appear to be able to escape
from the war. The penultimate essay is about _Art and the War_, and the
first essay is a palinode for the state of affairs to which the war
put an end. According to Mr. Clive Bell, the world before the war was
in a most promising condition of renaissance—of æsthetic renaissance.
“Our governing classes,” he says, “were drifting out of barbarism....
‘Society’ was becoming open-minded, tired of being merely decent, and was
beginning to prefer the ‘clever’ to the ‘good.’” But with the war all
this was interrupted—probably never to be resumed; for what is the use
of attempting to establish an æsthetic culture upon the state of poverty
which will certainly ensue after the war? Poverty and art, he as nearly
as possible says, are incompatible; it is only by means of wealth, wealth
in superabundance, that art is possible. And since war is destructive of
wealth, “war has ruined our little patch of civility” without bringing
us anything in exchange for it. The Bohemian view of art is own brother
to the Sardanapalian view of culture in general; it presupposes great
wealth, while denying that art is a luxury. Art is not a luxury or an
elegant amenity added to life, says Mr. Clive Bell. At the same time, it
is only when Society is wealthy that art can flourish. The contradiction
is obvious, and it pervades Mr. Clive Bell’s work. It is not worth
dwelling on a moment.

THE CRITICISM OF POETS.—Professor Rudmose-Brown, the author of _French
Literary Studies_, is under the fatal illusion that it is necessary (or,
at any rate, proper), to write about poetry poetically; and his comments
are too often in this style: “The illimitable night of his obscurity
is strewn with innumerable stars.” But it is a style which is not only
repellent in itself, but doubly repellent from its association with
an exposition of poetry. Dr. Johnson has written about poetry in the
proper style. He was respectful in the very distance his prose kept from
poetic imagery. Cold and detached he may have seemed to be, but all good
criticism, comment, and even appreciation labour of necessity under this
charge. What would be said of a judge who demonstrated the emotions of
the persons before him; or, equally, of a judge who did not feel them?
To be a critic or judge of poetry, or of any art, requires, in the first
instance, an intense sympathetic power; but, in the second instance, a
powerful self-restraint in expression, manifested in poetical criticism,
I should say, by a prose style free from the smallest suggestion of
poetry.

“JOHN EGLINTON.”—Mr. “John Eglinton” has been called “the Irish Emerson”;
but the description of the “Irish Thoreau” would fit him much better.
He is transcendental, like Emerson, but after a different, and a
less high-falutin’ manner—the manner of transcendental common sense.
On the other hand, he shares with Thoreau the quality of passionate
independence, and what may be called adventurous solitude. “John
Eglinton” names his essays _Anglo-Irish_, and they answer even more
accurately to the description than the compound implies; for they are
essays upon the hyphen that joins them. Exactly as Thoreau was most
completely at home in no other man’s land between the world and the wood,
“John Eglinton” is at his easiest somewhere between England and Ireland.
He is not Irish, nor is he English. He is not Anglo-Irish either; but,
once more, the hyphen between them. It is this sense of difference from
both elements that makes of “John Eglinton” at once so attractive, so
significant, and so illuminating a writer and thinker. Being between
two worlds, and with a foot in each, he understands each world in a
double sense, from within and from without. To each in turn he can be
both interpreter and critic; and in these delightful essays he is to be
found alternately defending and attacking each of the national elements
between which his perch is placed. “Candid friend” would, perhaps, be
a fair description of his attitude towards both nations, if the phrase
were not associated with the disagreeable. But since “John Eglinton” is
anything but acid in his comments, and writes of both nations in a spirit
of mingled admiration and judgment, I can think of nothing better at
the moment than my image of the hyphen. He is alone between two worlds,
friendly but critical equally of both.

IRISH HUMOUR.—Mr. Stephen Gwynn’s _Irish Books and Irish People_ contains
an essay on “Irish Humour.” Mr. Gwynn is severe but just. He refers to
the “damning effects” of the “easy fluency of wit” and the “careless
spontaneity of laughter” which characterise Irish humour. It would be
terrible, however, to have to admit that these divine qualities are
“defects” in the accepted sense of qualities _manqués_; and the “defect”
arises, I think, not from the presence of these qualities in the Irish
genius, but from the absence of the counterbalancing qualities of
weight, high seriousness, and good judgment. It would almost seem that
the “elder gods” departed from Ireland centuries ago, leaving in sole
possession the “younger gods” of irresponsible and incontinent laughter.
As Mr. Gwynn says, “Irish humour makes you laugh”; it always takes one
by surprise. But the laughter has no echoes in the deeper levels of
consciousness; it rings true but shallow. Dogmatism on racial psychology
is dangerous, and I have no wish to exacerbate feelings already too
sore; but, as a literary critic, I venture my judgment that the Irish
genius, as manifested in literature during the last century, is wanting
in the solidity that comes only from hard work. Every Irishman, speaking
roughly, is a born genius; but few Irishmen complete their birth by
“making” themselves. Wit comes to them too easily to be anything but a
tempting line of least resistance.

THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND.—While exceedingly painstaking, thorough,
and well-documented, Mr. Boyd’s essay on _The Contemporary Drama of
Ireland_ cannot be said to add much value to the value of a record.
Unlike his recent volume of _Appreciations and Depreciations_, his
present work carefully, and I should almost say, timidly, avoids coming
to any large and personal conclusions, save in the case, perhaps, of the
plays of Mr. St. John Ervine. The reason for this diffidence I take
to be rather an apprehension of what he might discover were his real
conclusions than any inability to arrive at them; for I cannot think that
upon any other ground so usually decisive a mind would have been content
to leave his readers in the dark. But what then is it that Mr. Boyd may
conceivably have feared to discover? It is obvious enough, I think, to an
outsider—to one, I mean, who does not belong to the coterie that calls
itself the Irish literary movement; it is that the contemporary drama of
Ireland is the history of a rapid decline.

Mr. Boyd is, of course, honest with his facts, and the material is thus
before us for a judgment. He does not conceal from us, for instance,
the illuminating circumstances that the Irish dramatic movement
actually began under the impulse of the Continental movement, and that
its earliest authors were desirous, not so much of creating an Irish
drama, as of creating a drama for Ireland. Mr. Edward Martyn, who was
undoubtedly the chief pioneer, was himself a follower of Ibsen and
aimed at writing and producing what may be called Ibsen plays. But this
praiseworthy attempt to reintroduce the world into Ireland was defeated
by the apparently incorrigible tendency of the native Irish mind to
reduce the world to the size of Dublin. In rather less than two years,
during which time some six or seven plays were produced, the Irish
Literary Theatre, founded by Martyn and Yeats, came to an end, to have
its place taken almost immediately by the Irish _National_ Theatre,
which was formed about the group of Irish players calling themselves
the Irish National Drama Society. But what has been the consequence of
this contraction of aim and of interest? That plays of some value as
folk-drama have resulted from it nobody would deny; but equally nobody
would maintain that the world has been enriched by it in its dramatic
literature. Ireland, in other words, has accepted a gift from the world
without returning it; her literary coterie has taken the inspiration of
the Continent and converted it to a purely nationalist use.

Even against this there would be nothing to be said if it succeeded; but
fortunately for the world-principle it can be shown that such a procedure
ends in sterility. As the reader turns over the pages of Mr. Boyd’s
faithful record of the course of the drama in Ireland, he cannot but
be aware of a gradual obscuration. One by one the lamps lit by Martyn,
Moore, and others, which illuminate the earlier pages, go out, leaving
the reader in the later pages groping his way through petty controversies
acid with personality, and through an interminable undergrowth of sickly
and stunted productions about which even Mr. Boyd grows impatient. The
vision splendid with which the record begins dies down to a twilight, to
a darkness, and finally to black night. The world has once more been shut
out.

MR. STANDISH O’GRADY.—Mr. Standish O’Grady’s _The Flight of the Eagle_
is not a romance in the ordinary sense; it is not an invented story,
but an actual historical episode treated romantically. The period is
Elizabethan, and the story turns mainly on the careers of Sir William
Parrett, an English “Lord-Lieutenant” of Ireland, who appears to
have suffered the usual fate of a popular English Governor, and Red
Hugh O’Donnell or Hue Roe of Tir-Connall, which is now Donegal. If
acquaintance with Irish history is ever to be made by English readers,
the means must be romances of this kind. History proper is, as a rule,
carefully ignored by the average reader, who must therefore have facts,
if he is ever to have them, presented in the form of a story. It is
only by this means, and thanks to Scott in the first instance, that the
history of Scotland has penetrated in any degree beyond the border.
Only by this means, again, have various countries and nations been
brought home to the intellectually idle English reader by writers like
Kipling. Both as a story-writer and as the first and greatest of the
Irish historians of Ireland, Mr. Standish O’Grady is qualified to do for
Ireland what Scott after his own fashion has done for Scotland, namely,
bring his country into the historic consciousness of the world.

MR. STANDISH O’GRADY, ENCHANTER.—_The Selected Essays and Passages from
Standish O’Grady_ is a priceless anthology of this neglected author. Very
few people in England realise that Mr. Standish O’Grady is more than
any other Irishman the rediscoverer of ancient and, in consequence, the
creator of modern Ireland. His very first work on the _Heroic Period_
of Irish history appeared in 1878; it was published at his own expense,
and had a small and a slow sale; but to-day it is the inspiration of the
Celtic revival. “Legends,” says Mr. O’Grady, “are the kind of history
which a nation desires to possess.” For the same reason, legends are the
kind of history which a nation tends to produce. I am not certain that it
would not have been well to leave the legends of ancient Ireland in their
dust and oblivion. They go back to remote periods in time, and seem, even
then, to echo still earlier ages. It is possible, for instance, that
Ireland was a nation over four thousand years ago. Some contend that a
Buddhist civilisation preceded the Christian. Characteristically, it has
been thought that Ireland supported Carthage against Rome. But what is
the present value of these revivals of infantile memories? They cannot be
realised to-day, and to dwell upon them is to run the risk of a psychic
regression from waking to dreaming. “Enchantment,” Mr. O’Grady tells
us, “is a fact in nature.” So potent a charm as himself has created may
have been responsible—who dare say?—for the recall to present-day Irish
consciousness of early historic experience that were best forgotten. Is
it not a fact that the mood of Ireland to-day is between the legendary
and the dreaming? Is not the “ideal” Irishman to-day Cuculain of Dundalk
talking and acting in his sleep? It is a question for psycho-analysis.

LES SENTIMENTS DE JULIEN BENDA.—I thought for some time of translating
_Les Sentiments de Critias_, recently published in Paris by M. Julien
Benda. The style is excellent, and M. Benda has the gifts of epigram and
irony; but, upon second thoughts, the inappositeness of such a style to
the situation in which we find ourselves forbade me. As M. Benda himself
says, “there is no elegance about the war.” And success in writing about
it elegantly must needs, therefore, be a literary failure. Critias’s
“sentiments,” moreover, appear, when compared with the real sentiments
evoked by the contemplation of the war, a little literary. He is like
a sadder and a wiser Mr. Bernard Shaw flickering epigrammatically over
the carnage. Impeccable as his opinions usually are, they are expressed
too lightly to be impressive, and too carefully to be regarded as wholly
natural. And that M. Benda can do no other is evident in his _Open Letter
to M. Romain Rolland_, whom he considers a prig. If he had been capable
of impassioned rhetoric it is in this address that he would have shown
his skill, for the subject is to his liking, and the material for an
indictment is ample. But the most striking sentence he achieves is that
“We asked for judgment and you gave us a sermon.” It is pretty, but it is
“art.”

CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER.—Matthew Arnold used to say that to get
his feet wet spoiled his style for days. But there is a far worse enemy
of style than natural damp; it is too much newspaper-reading. Too much
newspaper not only spoils one’s style, it takes off the edge of one’s
taste, so that I know not what grindstones are necessary to put it on
again. Indulgent readers, I have been compelled for some weeks to read
too much newspaper, with the consequence that at the end of my task I was
not only certain that my little of style was gone, but I was indifferent
in my taste. The explanation of the _reductio ad absurdum_ to which an
overdose of newspaper leads is to be found, I think, in the uniformity,
mass and collectivity of newspaper literature. The writing that fills
the Press is neither individual nor does it aim at individuality. If a
citizen’s meeting, a jury, or the House of Commons were to perform the
feat of making its voice heard, the style of their oracles would be
perfect newspaper. But literature, I need not say, is not made after this
fashion; nor is it inspired by such performances. Literature, like all
art, is above everything, individual expression. _Gardez-vous!_ I do not
mean that literature is a personal expression of the personal opinion of
the writer. On the contrary, it is the rôle of newspaper to give common
expression to personal opinions, but it is the function of literature
to give personal expression to common opinions. And since it is only
personal expression that provokes and inspires personal expression,
from newspapers one can derive no stimulus to literature, but only the
opposite, a disrelish and a distaste.

How to recover one’s health after newspaper poisoning is a problem.
To plunge back forthwith into books was for me an impossibility. It
was necessary to begin again from the very beginning and gradually to
accustom myself to the taste for literature again. Re-arranging my
books, and throwing away the certainly-done with was, I found, as useful
a preliminary tonic as any other I could devise. In particular there
is a satisfaction in throwing out books which makes this medicine as
pleasant as it is tonic. It visibly reduces the amount left to be read;
there is then not so much on one’s plate that the appetite revolts at
the prospect. And who can throw away a book without glancing into it to
make sure that it will never again be wanted? Picking and tasting in this
indeliberate way, the invalid appetite is half coaxed to sit up and take
proper nourishment. This destruction and reconstruction I certainly found
recovering, and I can, therefore, commend them to be included in the
pharmacopæias.

Another nourishing exercise when you are in this state is the overhauling
of your accumulations of memoranda, cuttings and note-books. I have
sat for hours during the last few days, like a beaver unbuilding its
dam, turning out with a view to destroying their contents, drawer after
drawer and shelf upon shelf. It is fatal to set about the operation with
any tenderness. Your aim must be to destroy everything which does not
command you to spare it. The tragic recklessness of the procedure is the
virtue of the medicine. As a matter of fact there is little or nothing
now left in my drawers for future use. Nearly all my paper-boats have
been burned, including some three-decked galleons which were originally
designed to bring me fame. No matter; the Rubicon is crossed, and to be
on the other side of newspaper with no more than a thin portfolio of
notes is to have escaped cheaply.

For the humour of it, however, I will record a careful exception.
It appears, after all, that I was not so mad as I seemed. Perchance
newspaper, being only a feigned literature, induces only a feigned
madness. Be it as it may. I find that my current note-book, though
as handy and tempting to be destroyed as any other, was nevertheless
destroyed only after the cream of it had been whipped into the permanent
book which I have kept through many rages for a good many years. The
extracts are here before me as I write in convalescence. It is amusing to
me to observe, moreover, that their cream is not very rich. Much better
has gone into the bonfire. Why, then, did I save these and sacrifice
those? Look at a few of them. “Nobody’s anything always”—is there aught
irrecoverable in that to have compelled me to spare it? “Lots of window,
but no warehouse”—a remark, I fancy, intended to hit somebody or other
very hard indeed—but _does_ it? Is any of the present company fitted
with a cap? “The judgment of the world is good, but few can put it into
words.” That is a premonitory symptom, you will observe, of a remark made
a few lines above to the effect that literature is a personal expression
of a common opinion or judgment. I have plainly remembered it. _Apropos_
of the _New Age_, I must have told somebody, and stolen home to write it
down, that its career is that of a rocking-horse, all ups and downs but
never any getting forward. It is too true to be wholly amusing; let me
horse-laugh at it and pass it on. “A simple style is like sleep, it will
not come by effort.” Not altogether true, but true enough. The rest are
not much worse or better, and the puzzle is to explain why those should
be taken and these left.

Again _apropos_, may a physician who has healed himself offer this piece
of advice? Read your own note-books often. I have known some people who
have a library of note-books worth a dukedom, who never once looked into
them after having filled them. That is collecting mania pure and simple.
From another offensive angle what a confession of inferior taste is
made in preferring the note-books of others to one’s own. A little more
self-respect in this matter is clearly necessary if your conversation
is to be personal at all; for in all probability the references and
quotations you make _without_ the authority of your own collection are
hackneyed. They are the reach-me-downs of every encyclopædia. Is this the
reason that the vast majority of current quotations are as worn as they
are; that a constant reader, forewarned of the subject about to be dealt
with, is usually forearmed against the tags he will find employed in
it? In any case, the advice I have just given is the corrective of this
depressing phenomenon of modern writing. You have only to trade in your
own note-books to be, and to give the air of being, truly original.

Browsing is a rather more advanced regimen for convalescence than the
re-arrangement of books. The latter can be performed without the smallest
taste for reading. It is a matter of sizing them up, and any bookseller’s
apprentice can do it. But browsing means dipping into the contents here
and there; it is both a symptom of returning health and a means to it. In
the last few days I must have nibbled in a hundred different pastures,
chiefly, I think, in the pastures of books about books. De Quincey,
Matthew Arnold, Bagehot, Macaulay, Johnson, etc.—what meadows, what
lush grass, what feed! After all, one begins to say, literature cannot
be unsatisfying that fed such bulls and that so plumped their minds.
It cannot be only a variety of newspaper. Thus a new link with health
is established, and one becomes able to take one’s books again. Here I
should end, but that a last observation in the form of a question occurs
to me. Is not or can not a taste for literature be acquired by the same
means by which it can be re-acquired? Are not the child and the invalid
similar? In that case the foregoing directions may be not altogether
useless.

NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.—In observation of Nature English literature
excels all others. But that is by no means to say that every English
writer upon Nature is good. The astonishing thing is that contemporary
with such masters of both Nature-observation and literary expression
as—to name but two—Mr. W. H. Hudson and Mr. Warde Fowler (and half a
dozen others could be named in the same street) there should still be so
many writers insensible enough to perfection to write about Nature when
they have little to say and few gifts of expression. You would think that
having seen the sun they would not light a candle, or that if they did,
nobody would look at it. But the truth is that not only are many candles
lit, but they are all much admired—much more, indeed, than the suns
themselves. There may be a good reason for it, namely, that the reading
public is so much in love with Nature-writing that the best is not good
enough for us. Or, again, everybody living in the country and having a
pen at all, wishes to write his own Nature-observations as everybody
wishes to write his own love-lyrics, regardless of the fact that the best
love-lyrics have already been written. It may be so; but the admission
appears to me to be over-generous.

Mr. Percy W. D. Izzard has published in book form his “Year of Country
Days” under the general title of _Homeland_. The series has appeared
in the _Daily Mail_, where it appears to have given pleasure to a
considerable number of readers. I do not doubt the fact. Even the
least suggestion of Nature would be a relief in the stuffy and bawling
atmosphere of the _Daily Mail_. But in the form of a book, in which three
hundred and sixty-five of them appear, they are almost intolerable. Their
value lay in their contrast to the surrounding columns of the journal in
which they were published. Take away that background and let them stand
by themselves, and they are seen to be what they are—pale, anæmic, and
not very knowledgeable commonplace observations. Nothing really exciting
appears to have happened in the country under Mr. Izzard’s observation.
When reading Jefferies or Hudson or Ward Fowler or Selous, you are made
to feel, in a simple walk along a hedgerow, that something dramatic is
afoot. Discovery is in the air. But Mr. Izzard is never fortunate, and
all he has to record are the commonplaces of the country-side, which I
could as easily reconstruct from a calendar as gather from his text. “The
silver clouds are heaped together in billowy masses that sail with deeps
of Italian blue between.” How pretty! But the delight is wanting.

S.S.S.—The Simplified Spelling Society has broken loose from obscurity
again in the issue of a new pamphlet, called _Breaking the Spell; an
Appeal to Common Sense_. A preface contributed by Dr. Macan rehearses all
the old “reasons” for simplifying our spelling with as little attention
as ever to the real reasons against it. “Spelling,” we are told, “should
be the simplest of all arts.” It is so in Spanish, in Italian, in Welsh,
and in Dutch, and it was so in Greek and Latin. Why not, therefore, in
English? The reasoning, however, is ridiculous, for it assumes that it
was by some deliberate and self-conscious design that these languages
came to be spelled phonetically, and hence that we have only to follow
them faithfully (and the advice of the S.S.S.) in order to place our
language in a similar state. Language, however, is not a product
of logic and science, but of art and taste. It is determined not by
reason alone, but by the totality of our judgment, in which many other
factors than reason are included. To ask us to “reform” our spelling in
order to make it “reasonable” is to ask us to forgo the satisfaction
of every intellectual taste save that of logic; a procedure that would
not only “reform” our spelling, but all literature into the bargain. It
is pretended that the adoption of simplified spelling would have, at
worst, only a passing effect upon the well-being of literature. If, for
example, all the English classics were re-spelled in conformity with
phonetic rules, and their use made general, very soon, we are told, we
should forget their original idiosyncrasies, and love them in their new
spelling as much as ever. But people who argue in this way must have been
blinded in their taste in their pursuit of rationalistic uniformity.
Literature employs words not for their rational meaning alone, not even
for their sound alone, but for their combined qualities of meaning,
sound, _sight_, association, history, and a score of other attributes. By
reducing words to a rational rule of phonetic spelling, more than half
of these qualities would be entirely, or almost entirely, eliminated. A
re-spelled Shakespeare, for instance, if it should ever take the place of
the present edition, would be a new Shakespeare—a Shakespeare translated
from the coloured language in which he thought and wrote into a language
of logical symbols. An exact analogy—as far as any analogy can be
exact—for the proposal of the S.S.S. would be to propose to abolish the
use of colour in pictorial art, and to produce everything in black and
white. The colour-blind would, no doubt, be satisfied in the one case,
and, in the other, the word-blind would be equally pleased. Fortunately,
both proposals have the same chance of success.

STERNE CRITICISM.—Everybody knows that Sterne’s _Sentimental Journey_
broke off suddenly in the second book at the crisis of a Shandian
incident. What everybody does not know—I confess I only learnt it myself
a few days ago—is that Sterne’s Editor “Eugenius” not only concluded
the incident, but carried on the journey to the extent of another two
books. He did this, he informs us, from notes and materials left or
communicated to him by Sterne himself, and he is so frank as to say
that he has striven to complete the work in the style and manner of his
late friend. Having a particular admiration for the style of Sterne,
which, to my mind, is the easiest ever achieved in English, I have now
a double resentment against the presumptuous Eugenius. In the first
place, I question the man’s veracity almost as much as the veracity of
Sterne himself is to be questioned in the matter of Sterne’s intention
of completing his journey. The _Journey_ was a _tour de force_; it was
the result, as it were, of a challenge. Sterne had made a bet that he
would maintain the reader’s interest in a series of the most trivial
incidents by his mere manner of writing about them. That he had any
other intention than that of showing his power I do not for a moment
believe; least of all the suggestion that he had a plan of writing
in his mind which required the book to be finished in four sections,
four and just four. Eugenius’s excuses that he had often discussed the
completion of the _Journey_ with Sterne, and had heard from him the
“facts, events, and observations,” intended to be introduced into the
unwritten book, are thus a mere literary device for getting his own work
tied to Sterne’s kite. Even if Sterne gave him authority for it, I should
refuse to believe it, since Sterne may easily have been badgered into
consenting; and, in any case, is not necessarily to be believed upon a
matter of fact. One’s resentment is embittered by the manner in which
Eugenius makes the continuation. It is notorious that Sterne never made
a statement that could definitely incriminate himself. It was his whole
art to leave everything to his readers’ imagination, and to put upon
them the odium of the obvious interpretation. An admission on his part
would have been fatal not only to himself, but to the style and intention
of his work, which may be described as skating upon thin ice. Eugenius,
however, in spite of all the intimacy which he says subsisted between
himself and Mr. Sterne, was so far from having appreciated the elementary
quality of the _Journey_ that in completing the very incident on which
Book Two breaks off, he falls into the blunder of committing Sterne to a
“criminal” confession. I need not say what the confession is; it is the
obvious deduction to be drawn from the description provided by Sterne
himself. And it is precisely on this account that I am certain Sterne
would never have made it.

STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE.—One of my correspondents must have been reading
Sterne at the same time that I was being annoyed by Eugenius, for he has
written to remind me of Sterne’s opinion of Love as it is understood in
France. “The French,” wrote Sterne, “have certainly got the credit of
understanding more of Love, and making it better than any other nation
upon earth; but for my own part I think them arrant bunglers, and in
truth, the worst set of marksmen that ever tried Cupid’s patience.”
My correspondent recalls the fact from the dark backward and abysm of
time that, in a discussion of Stendhal, I expressed the same opinion;
and he has, no doubt, supplied the parallel in order to gratify me.
Gratifying it is, in one sense, to find oneself confirmed in a somewhat
novel opinion—which, moreover, was thought to be original as well—by an
observer of the penetration of Sterne. But it is less gratifying when one
reflects that Sterne was the last person in the world to have the right
to talk about Love at all. What should a genuine as well as a professed
sentimentalist have to say of Love more than that in its practice the
French were not sentimental enough for him? But it is not the defect of
sentimentality that stamps Love as understood in France with the mark of
inferiority, but the presence of too much egoism—a fault Sterne would
never have observed.

ENGLISH STYLE.—The same correspondent copies out for me Quincey’s “fine
analysis of Swift’s style,” as follows:—

The main qualification for such a style was plain good sense,
natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly
practice in the putting together of sentences so as to avoid
mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all, the
advantage of a _subject_ such in its nature as instinctively
to reject ornament lest it should draw attention from itself.
Such subjects are common; but grand impassioned subjects
insist upon a different treatment; and there it is that the
true difficulties of style commence, and there it is that your
worshipful Master Jonathan would have broken down irrecoverably.

This “fine analysis” of Swift’s style does not appear to me to be
anything more than a powerful attack delivered by an apostle of the
opposing school. Swift and de Quincey are obviously poles apart in the
direction of their style, and I have no doubt that I could find in Swift
as severe an analysis of de Quincey as my correspondent has found in
de Quincey of Swift. At bottom the controversy carries us back to the
very foundations of European culture. On the whole, Swift followed the
Greek tradition—exemplified by Demosthenes—while de Quincey followed the
Latin—exemplified by Cicero. There can be no doubt of the school to which
Swift belonged; his _Drapier’s Letters_, for instance, were confessedly
modelled on Demosthenes. Likewise there can be no doubt of the school
which de Quincey attended; he learned his style of Cicero. The question,
however, is one of taste, by no means a matter of _non est disputandum_.
Which of the two schools of style is capable of the highest absolute
development; and, above all, which is the most suited to the English
language? My mind is fully made up; I am for the Greek and Demosthenes
against the Latin and Cicero. I am for Swift against de Quincey; for the
simple against the ornate.

De Quincey appears to me to fall into an almost vulgar error in
assuming that the style of plain good sense cultivated by Swift is fit
only for commonplace subjects, and that “grand impassioned subjects”
demand an ornate style. The style of Demosthenes was obviously quite as
well fitted to the high subjects of his Discourse on the Crown as to
the details for the fitting out of an expedition against Philip. The
_Apology_ of Plato is in much the same style, and not even de Quincey
would say that the subject was not anything but commonplace. With the
majority of English critics, I have a horror of fine writing, and
especially about fine things. The proper rule is, in fact, the very
reverse of that laid down by de Quincey; it is on no account to write
upon “grand impassioned subjects” in a grand impassioned style. After
all, as the Greeks understood, there are an infinite number of degrees
of simplicity, ranging from the simple colloquial to the simple grand.
The ornate Latin style, with its degrees of ornateness, is, on the other
hand, a bastard style. The conclusion seems to be this: that the simple
style is capable of anything, even of dealing with “grand impassioned
subjects”; whereas the ornate style is only barely tolerable in the most
exceptional circumstances. I would sooner trust Swift than de Quincey not
to embarrass a reader on a difficult occasion, as, for the same reason, I
prefer Shakespeare the Greek to Ben Jonson the Latinist.

LITERARY CULS-DE-SAC.—A cul-de-sac occurs in literary history when a
direction is taken away from the main highway of the national language
and literature; when the stream it represents is not part of the main
stream of the traditional language, but a backwater or a side stream.
There have been dozens of such private streams in the course of our
literary history, and I am not denying for an instant that their final
contribution to the main stream has been considerable.

THE DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE.—Pure intelligence I should define as
displaying itself in disinterested interest in things; in things, that
is to say, of no _personal_ advantage, but only of general, public, or
universal importance. Interest (to turn the cat in the pan) is the
growing end of the mind, and its direction and strength are marked by
a motiveless curiosity to know; it reveals itself, while it is still
active, as a love of knowledge for its own sake. Later on it often
appears that this motiveless love had a motive; in other words, the
knowledge acquired under its impulse is discovered in the end to “come
in handy,” and to have been of use. But the process of acquiring this
knowledge is for the most part, indeliberate, unaware of any other aim
than that of the satisfaction of curiosity; utility is remote from its
mind. This is what I have called disinterested interest, and it is this
free intelligence of which it appears to me that there is a diminishing
amount in our day. Were it not the case, the fortunes of the really
free Press would be much brighter than they are. An organ of free
opinion would not need to discover a utilitarian attraction for its free
opinions, but would be able to command a sale on its own merits. Such,
indeed, is the case in several European countries, notably in France,
Italy, and Germany. I am told that it is the case also in Bohemia (in
which country there is not only no illiterate, but no un-read adult) and
in the provinces of Yugo Slavia. In these countries a journal of opinions
can live without providing its readers with any commercial or specialist
bribe in the way of exclusive utilitarian information; it can live, that
is to say, by the sale of its free intelligence. Happy countries—in one
sense of the word; happy if also tragical; for their existence is not
always, at any rate, a paradise for the rich, a hell for the poor, and a
purgatory for the able!

To what is due this decline amongst us of free intelligence? There
are several explanations possible, though none is wholly satisfying.
It can be attributed to the industrialisation of our own country,
a metamorphosis of occupation which has been longer in being in
England than anywhere else. The economic balance between primary and
secondary production has been for a longer period lost in this country
than elsewhere, with the consequence that we have been the first to
exhibit the effects of over-industrialisation in the loss of the free
intelligence associated with primary production. The other nations may
be expected to follow suit as the same metamorphosis overtakes them.
Another explanation is the reaction against the intellectualism of the
nineteenth century. It is a familiar topic, but it is obvious that if
faith in the ultimate _use_ of intelligence is lost, men become cynical
in regard to the passion itself. Let us suppose that every love affair
always and invariably ended in disappointment or disaster. Let us suppose
that it became the accepted belief that such would always be the case.
Would it not soon become fashionable to nip the first stirrings of love
in the bud, and to salt its path whenever its shoots began to appear?
The nineteenth century reached its climax in a vast disappointment with
science, with the intellect, with intellectualism. The fifth act of
the thrilling drama inaugurated after the French Revolution closed in
utter weariness and ennui. It was no wonder that the twentieth century
opened in a return to impulse and in a corresponding reaction from
intellectuality. That the reaction has gone too far is the very disease
we are now trying to diagnose; for only an excessive reaction towards
impulse and away from thought can account for the poverty of free
intelligence. Sooner or later, the pendulum must be set free again, if
not in this country, then in America, or in some of the countries whose
rebirth we are now witnessing. It cannot be the will of God that free
intelligence should be extinguished from the planet; the world, somehow
or other, must be made safe for intelligence as well as for democracy.

My last guess at the origin of the phenomenon is the decline of the
religious spirit. Religion, I conceive, is the study and practice of
perfection, and it is summed up in the text: “Be ye perfect, even as your
Father in Heaven is perfect.” This impossible and infinite aim includes,
as a matter of course, the employment and development of intelligence as
one of the most powerful aids to perfection. Fools, the Indian Scriptures
inform us, can enter heaven, but only wise men know how to stay there.
And if the perfection we seek is to be lasting and incorruptible, it is
certain that an infinite amount of intelligence will be necessary to its
accomplishment. The loss of the belief in the perfectibility of the human
spirit, in the religious duty of perfection, might easily account for the
diminution of our regard for one of the chief instruments of perfection,
namely, intelligence. Why should we strive to set the crooked straight,
since it is not only impossible, but is no duty of ours? And why labour
with the instrumental means when the end is of no value? None of these
explanations, however, really satisfies me.

The free Press is more severely criticised by its readers than the “kept”
Press by its clientèle. The reason is, no doubt, that in comparison
with the “kept” Press it protests its freedom and sets itself up on a
pedestal. Every “excuse” is consequently denied to it, and the smallest
complaint is enlarged to a grievance. The “kept” Press may be caught
in flagrant self-contradiction, in lies, in chicanery of all kinds, in
every form of intellectual and other dishonesty—it continues to be read
and “followed” as if the oracle were infallible. No newspaper in this
country has ever died of exposure; many live by being found out. The free
Press, on the other hand, has often for its readers not only the most
exigent of critics, but the most contradictory. They are not only hard to
please (which is a merit), but their reasons for being pleased, or the
reverse, are bewilderingly various. And, moreover, when they are pleased
they are usually silent, and when they are displeased they cease to buy
the journal.

LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA.—Horace Walpole used to say that the
Americans were the only people by whom he would wish to be admired. Let
me put the compliment a little differently and say that the Americans
are the people among all others whom we would most wish to admire most.
Having done so much to command our admiration already, we are not only
willing, we are desirous and anxious, that they should leave no amendable
fault unamended in themselves. Our command to them is that they should
become perfect.

This must be my excuse for joining in the discussion concerning the law
of literary copyright in America, and the effect it has on the literary
relations of this country and America. I must agree with Mr. Pound that
the literary relations of our two countries are bad, and that much of
this estrangement, if not all of it, is due to remediable causes lying
at present on the American book of statutes. The actual facts of the
situation are simple. The copyright laws of America, unlike those of
any other civilised country, with the exception of ex-Tsarist Russia,
require as a condition of extending the protection of its copyright
to any work of foreign publication, that the latter shall be set up,
printed, and published in America within a period of thirty to sixty
days after its publication in the country of its origin. Failing such
practically simultaneous publication in America, not only is an American
publisher thereafter entitled to proceed immediately to publish the work
in question without the permission of the author, but the author and
his national publisher are not entitled to demand any royalties or fees
on the sale of the same. In other words, as far as the original author
and publisher are concerned, they are non-existent in America unless
they have made arrangements for the publication of their work in America
within one, or, at most, two months of its original publication in their
own country.

Not to exaggerate in describing such a procedure it can be exactly
characterised by no other phrase than looting under the form of law.
Every author and publisher in this country knows how difficult it is to
arrange for the simultaneous publication of works at home and in America.
The time-conditions of publication are seldom the same in both countries.
A book that is timely in this country may not be simultaneously timely in
America, and it would be very odd if it always were.

Again, a couple of months is a small period of time in which to arrange
to have an English work dispatched, accepted, set up, printed, and
published in America. Commercial difficulties of all kinds arise in
the course of the transaction, and every delay brings the day of the
accursed shears of the American Copyright Act nearer. Is an English
publisher to bargain with the advantage of time always on the side of
America, with the certain knowledge that, unless he comes to terms at
once, he will lose everything both for himself and his author? But either
that or indefinitely delaying publication in _this_ country is his only
possible course. The American Copyright Law is thus seen to be a modern
example of Morton’s fork. By requiring that the foreign author shall
publish his work in America within one or two months of its publication
at home, the law compels him to make a choice (in the majority of cases)
between forfeiting his copyright in America, and delaying, at his own
cost, the publication of his book in his own country. Upon either prong
he is impaled. If he elects for American publication he must forgo the
chance of the immediate market at home, and if he elects for immediate
publication at home he must forgo the protection of American copyright.

Such an ingenious device for Dick-Turpining European authors cannot have
been invented and enforced without some presumed moral justification.
America cannot be conceived as a willing party to the legislation of
literary piracy, and it was and is, no doubt, under some cover of
justification that the law was enacted and now runs. The defence for it,
I should suppose, is the presumed necessity for protecting the industry
of book-making in America on behalf of American authors, printers, and
publishers alike. Its defence, in short, is the same defence that is
set up for protection in commercial matters in this country, namely,
the desirability of excluding foreign competition, and of encouraging
home-industry. Against this defence, however, there is a great deal to
be said that ought to weigh with the American people, and that ought
to weigh in their calculations as well as in their taste and sense of
right. For, as to the latter, I take it that no American would undertake
to defend his Copyright Law on the principles either of good taste
or common justice. It cannot be in conformity with good taste for the
literary artists of America to procure protection for themselves by
penalising their European confrères, and it cannot be justice to rob
a European author of his copyrights, or to compel him to delay his
publication in Europe. These admissions I take for granted, and the only
defence left is the calculation that such a Copyright Act is good for the
American book-making interests.

If books were like other commodities, their sale, like the sale of other
commodities, would fall under the economic law of diminishing returns.
Thereunder, as their supply increased, the demand for books would tend
to decrease, as is the case with cotton, say, or wooden spoons. And upon
such an assumption there might be some reason for prohibiting the free
importation of printed books, since the imported articles would compete
in the home market for a relatively inelastic demand. But books, it is
obvious, are not a commodity in this sense of the word. They do not
_satisfy_ demand, but _stimulate_ it, and their sale, therefore, does not
fall under the economic law of diminishing returns, but under the very
contrary, that of increasing returns. Books, there is no doubt of it,
are the cause of books. New books do not take the place of old books;
nor do books really compete, as a general rule, with each other. On the
contrary, the more books there are, the more are demanded and the more
are produced. The free importation of books is not a means of contracting
the home-production of books; it is the very opposite, the most effective
means of stimulating home-production to its highest possible degree. If
I were an American author, resident in America, and concerned for the
prosperity of the American book-making profession, craft, and industry, I
should not be in the least disposed to thank the American Copyright Law
for the protection it professes to give me. The appetite for books, upon
which appetite I and my craft live, grows, I should say, by what it feeds
on. Addressing the Copyright Act as it now exists, I should say to it:
“In discouraging the free importation of foreign books, and in alienating
the good-will of foreign authors and publishers, you are robbing foreign
authors (that is true), but, much worse, you are depriving my public
of the stimulus necessary to its demand for my books. Since we authors
in America have a vital interest in increasing literary demand, and
the more books the more demand is created, our real protection lies in
freely importing books, and not in placing any impediment in their way.
Intending to help us, you—the Copyright Law—are really our enemy.” I
cannot see what reply the Copyright Law could make to this attack upon it
by its protégés, and I believe, moreover, that if they were to make it,
the Law would soon be amended.

RIGHT CRITICISM.—To abandon the aim of “finality” of judgment is to
let in the jungle into the cultivated world of art; it is to invite
Tom, Dick, and Harry to offer their opinions as of equal value with the
opinions of the cultivated. It is no escape from this conclusion to
inquire into the “mentality” of the critic and to attach importance to
his judgment as his mentality is or is not interesting. In appraising a
judgment I am not concerned with the mentality, interesting or otherwise,
of the judge who delivers it. My concern is not with him, but with
the work before us; nor is the remark to be made upon his verdict the
personal comment, “How interesting!” but the critical comment, “How
true!” or “How false!” Personal preferences turn the attention in the
nature of the case from the object criticised to the critic himself. The
method substitutes for the criticism of art the criticism of psychology.
In a word, it is not art criticism at all.

It may be said that if we dismiss personal preference as a criterion of
art judgment, there is either nothing left or only some “scientific”
standard which has no relevance to æsthetics. It is the common plea
of the idiosyncrats that, inconclusive as their opinions must be, and
anything but universally valid, no other method within the world of art
is possible. I dissent. A “final” judgment is as possible of a work of
art as of any other manifestation of the spirit of man; there is nothing
in the nature of things to prevent men arriving at a universally valid
(that is, universally accepted) judgment of a book, a picture, a sonata,
a statue or a building, any more than there is to prevent a legal judge
from arriving at a right judgment concerning any other human act; and,
what is more, such judgments of art are not only made daily, but in the
end they actually prevail and constitute in their totality the tradition
of art. The test is not scientific, but as little is it merely personal.
Its essential character is simply that it is right; right however arrived
at, and right whoever arrives at it. That the judge in question may or
may not have “studied” the history of the art-work he is judging is a
matter of indifference. Neither his learning nor his natural ignorance is
of any importance. That he is or is not notoriously this, that, or the
other, is likewise no concern. All that matters is that his judgment,
when delivered, should be “right.” But who is to settle this, it may be
asked? Who is to confirm a right judgment or to dispute a wrong one?
The answer is contained in the true interpretation of the misunderstood
saying, _De gustibus non est disputandum_. The proof of right taste
is that there is no real dispute about its judgment; its finality is
evidenced by the cessation of debate. The truth may be simply stated; a
judge—that is to say, a true judge—is he with whom everybody is compelled
to agree, not because he says it, but because it is so.

MAN’S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH.—What the circulation of the _Quest_ is
I have no idea, but it should be ten times greater. Is there, however,
a sufficiently large class of cultured persons in England—in the
Empire—in the world? Assuming that the spread of culture can be reckoned
numerically as well as qualitatively, can we pride ourselves on the
extension of culture while the number of free intelligences is relatively
decreasing? But how does one know that this class is really on the
decrease? Only by the same means that we judge the number of the curious
lepidoptera in any area—by holding a light up in the dark and counting
the hosts attracted by it. In the case of the _Quest_ there is no doubt
whatever that a light is being held up in our darkness. Its articles are
upon the most exalted topics; they are, for the most part, luminously
written, and their purity of motive may be taken for granted. The _Quest_
is the literary Platonic Academy of our day. Yet it is seldom spoken of
in literary circles. We “good” are very apathetic, and it is lucky for
the devil that his disciples are unlike us in this respect. They see to
it that everything evil shall flourish like the bay-tree, while we allow
the bays of the intelligent to fade into the sere.

Mr. Mead contributes an article on a topic which has not yet been
exhausted, “Man’s Survival of Bodily Death.” Mr. Randall is not the
first to deny “immortality” while affirming an absolute morality, nor
even the first to attempt to explain religion without recourse to a
dogma of survival. The Sadducees did it before him; and the Confucians
managed somehow or other to combine ancestor-worship with a lively denial
of their continued existence. There is, moreover, an ethical value in
the denial which almost makes the denial of survival an act of moral
heroism. For if a man can pursue the highest moral aims without the
smallest hope of personal reward hereafter, and, still less, here, his
disinterestedness is obvious; he pursues virtue as the pupil is enjoined
in the _Bhagavad Gita_ to act, namely, without hope or fear of fruit.
I am not of the heroic breed myself, and, in any case, the problem is
one of fact as well as of moral discipline. It may be heroic to put the
telescope of truth to a deliberately blinded eye, but unless you suspect
yourself of being unable to master the fact, I see no indispensable
virtue in its wilful denial. At all risks to my morality I should prefer
to keep my weather-eye open for such evidences of survival as may loom up
behind the fog.

Premising that “no high religion can exist which is not based on faith
in survival,” Mr. Mead proceeds to examine the two forms of inquiry
which conceivably promise conclusions: the comparative study of the
mystic philosophers and their recorded religious experiences in all
ages, and the more material examination of the spiritualistic phenomena
of modern psychical research. For himself, Mr. Mead has chosen the
former method, and I am interested to observe his testimony, in a
rare personal statement, to the satisfaction, more or less, that is
possible from following this road. At the same time, though without any
experience in the second method, Mr. Mead is explicitly of the opinion
that it is one that should be employed by science with increasing
earnestness. The difficulties are tremendous, and as subtle as they
are considerable. Before survival can be scientifically demonstrated,
a host of working hypotheses must be invented and discredited, and
the utmost veracity will be necessary in the students. With such facts
before us as telepathy, dissociated personality, subconscious complexes,
autosuggestion and suggestion, the phenomena that superficially point to
survival may plainly be nothing of the kind. Survival, in short, must be
expected to be about the last rather than the first psychic fact to be
scientifically established. The student must, therefore, be exigent as
well as hopeful.

There is a third method from which we may hope to hear one day something
to our advantage—assuming that the certain knowledge of survival would be
to mankind’s advantage—the method of psycho-analysis. If psycho-analysis
of the first degree can make us acquainted with the subconscious, why
should not a psycho-analysis of the second degree make us acquainted
with the super-conscious; and as the language of the subconscious may
be sleeping dreams, the language of the super-conscious may be waking
visions. To return to Mr. Mead’s article, an interesting account is
contained in it of a recent census taken in America by Professor Leuba of
the creeds of more or less eminent men. The returns for the article of
faith in survival and immortality are curious, not to say surprising. Of
the eminent physicists canvassed, 40 per cent. confessed their belief in
man’s survival of bodily death. Thereafter the percentage falls through
the stages of historians 35 per cent., and sociologists 27 per cent., to
psychologists with the degraded percentage of 9. It is a strange reversal
of the procession that might have been anticipated, and it expresses,
perhaps, the condition of real culture in America. For that the
physicists should be the most hopeful class of scientists in America, and
the psychologists the most hopeless is an indication that the best brains
in America are still engaged in physical problems. The poor psychologists
are scarcely even hopeful of discovering anything.

BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS.—“Unbounded” admiration is precisely what I
cannot feel for Aubrey Beardsley’s work, even “within its own sphere.”
I ought to say, perhaps, “because of its sphere.” Pure æsthetic is a
matter for contemplation only, and we should be prepared upon occasion
to suspend every other kind of judgment. Or, would it not be true to
say that the purely æsthetic does itself suspend in the beholder every
other form of judgment or reaction—such as the moral, the intellectual,
and the practical? A great tragedy, for instance, is a kind of focus
of the whole nature of man; every faculty is engaged in it, and all
are lifted up and transfigured into the pure æsthetic of contemplation.
But one is not aware, in that case, of moral or other reservations;
one has not to apologise for the experience by pretending that the
“essentially repulsive and diabolic decadence” contained in the tragedy
is merely an expression of the age. Beardsley is only “something of a
genius” precisely because he failed to transfigure the moral and other
reactions of the spectator of his work. He did not occupy the _whole_
of one’s mind. All the while that one’s æsthetic sense was being led
captive by his art, several other of one’s senses were in rebellion.
His command (his genius, in short) was not “absolute,” but only a quite
limited monarchy. This is not to deny that he was an artist; it is to
deny only that he was one of the greatest of artists. Other artists owe
him a greater debt than the world at large. He was a great art-master,
but not a master of art. The doctrine of Mr. Arthur Symons is dangerous.
Juggling with the terms good and evil is always dangerous, since in a
prestidigital exhibition of them, one can so easily be made to look like
the other. _Demon est Deus inversus._ The paradoxical truth about the
matter, however, is that evil is good only so long as it is regarded as
evil. The moment it is thought of as good it is nothing but evil. Mr.
Arthur Symons has confused in his mind the problem of good and evil with
the quite alien problem of quantity of energy.

“Æ’S” “CANDLE OF VISION.”—“Æ’s” _Candle of Vision_ is not a book for
everybody, yet I wish that everybody might read it. Rarely and more
rarely does any artist or poet interest himself in the processes of his
mental and spiritual life, with the consequence, so often deplored by Mr.
Penty, that books on æsthetics, philosophy, and, above all, psychology,
are left to be written by men who have no immediate experience of what
they are writing of. “Æ’s” narrative, and criticism of his personal
experiences may be said to take the form of intimate confessions made
_pour encourager les autres_. For, happily for us, he is an artist who is
also a philosopher, a visionary who is also an “intellectual”; and, being
interested in both phases of his personality, he has had the impulse and
the courage to express both. What the ordinary mind—the mind corrupted
by false education—would say to “Æ’s” affirmations concerning his
psychological experiences, it would not be difficult to forecast. What
is not invention, it would be said, is moonshine, and what is neither is
a pose to be explained on some alienist hypothesis. Only readers who
can recall some experiences similar to those described by “Æ” will find
themselves able to accept the work for what it is—a statement of uncommon
fact; and only those who have developed their intuition to some degree
will be able to appreciate the spirit of truth in which the _Candle of
Vision_ is written. A review of such work is not to be undertaken by me,
but I have made a few notes on some passages.

* * * * *

Page 2. “_I could not so desire what was not my own, and what is our own
we cannot lose.... Desire is hidden identity._” This is a characteristic
doctrine of mysticism, and recurs invariably in all the confessions.
Such unanimity is an evidence of the truth of the doctrine, since it is
scarcely to be supposed that the mystics borrow from one another. But the
doctrine, nevertheless, is difficult for the mere mind to accept, for it
involves the belief that nothing happens to us that is not ourselves.
Character in that event is destiny—to quote a variant of “Æ’s” sentence;
and our lives are thus merely the dramatisation of our given psychology.
Without presuming to question the doctrine, I feel a reserve concerning
its absoluteness. Fate appears to me to be above destiny in the same
sense that the old lady conceived that there was One above that would
see that Providence did not go too far. To the extent that character
is destiny or, as “Æ” says, desire is hidden identity, a correct
psychological forecast would be at the same time a correct temporal
forecast. And while this may be true, in the abstract and under, so to
say, ideal conditions, I cannot yet agree that everything that happens to
the individual is within his character. The unforeseeable, the margin of
what we call Chance, allows for events that belong to Fate rather than to
Destiny.

* * * * *

Page 3. “Æ” says he “_was not conscious in boyhood (up to the age of
sixteen or seventeen) of any heaven lying about me._” “Childhood,” he
thinks, is no nearer the “eternally young” than age may be. Certainly
it appears to be so in the case of “Æ” himself, for the intimations of
immortality which Wordsworth (and the world in general) attributed to
children were only begun to be experienced by “Æ” after his sixteenth
or seventeenth year. From that time onwards, as this book testifies,
he has been growing younger in precisely those characteristics. There
is a good deal to be thought, if not said, on this subject. Children
are, I conceive, rather symbols of youth than youth itself; they are
unconsciously young. Age, on the other hand, has the power of converting
the symbol into the reality, and of being young and knowing it.
Unless ye become, _not_ little children, but _as_ little children,
ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven. At the same time it
is comparatively rare for the ordinary child, that “Æ” says he was,
to develop childlikeness in later life. Usually a return occurs to a
state unconsciously experienced in early youth. But there appear to be
strata of characteristics in every mind, and life is their successive
revelation. Without knowing anything of the facts, I surmise that “Æ’s”
heredity was mixed, and that the first layer or stratum to appear was
that of some possibly Lowland Scot ancestry. When that was worked
through, by the age of sixteen, another layer came to the surface,
whereupon “Æ” entered on another phase of “desire.”

* * * * *

Page 7. “_We may have a personal wisdom, but spiritual wisdom is not to
speak of as ours._” This illustrates another characteristic of the mystic
that while his experiences are personal, the wisdom revealed in them is
always attributed to “Him that taught me”—in other words, to something
not ourselves. An egoist mysticism is a contradiction in terms. Not only
no man is entitled to claim originality for a spiritual truth, but no
man can. The truth is no longer true when it has a name to it. “Truth
bears no man’s name” is an axiom of mysticism. The reason, I presume, is
that the very condition of the appreciation of a spiritual truth is the
absence of the sense of egoism. Such truths are simply not revealed to
the egoistic consciousness, and therefore cannot appear as the product of
human wisdom. Their character is that of a revelation from without rather
than that of a discovery from within, and the report of the matter is
thus objective rather than subjective.

* * * * *

Page 16. “_I could prophesy from the uprising of new moods in myself that
without search I should soon meet people of a certain character, and so
I met them.... I accepted what befell with resignation.... What we are
alone has power.... No destiny other than we make for ourselves._” I
have already expressed my doubts whether this is the whole truth. It is,
of course, the familiar doctrine of Karma; but I do not think it can be
interpreted quite literally. There is what is called the Love of God, as
well as the Justice of God, and I would venture to add, with Blake, the
Wrath of God. Judgment is something more than simple justice; it implies
the consent of the whole of the judging nature, and not of its sense
of justice only. Love enters into it, and so, perhaps, do many other
qualities not usually attributed to the Supreme Judge. In interpreting
such doctrines we must allow for the personal equation even of the
highest personality we can conceive.

* * * * *

Page 19. “_None needs special gifts of genius._” “Æ’s” _Candle of Vision_
is confessedly propagandist. It aims deliberately at encouraging age
to discover eternal youth, and to lay hold of everlasting life. It is
to this end that “Æ” describes his own experiences, and offers to his
readers the means of their verification. He is quite explicit that no
“special gifts” or “genius” are necessary. “This do and ye shall find
even as I have found.” The special gift of genius does not, I agree, lie
in the nature of fact of the experience (though here, again, favour seems
sometimes to be shown), but it does, I think, lie in the bent towards
the effort involved. Anybody, it is true, may by the appropriate means
experience the same results, but not everybody has the “desire” to employ
them. Desire, moreover, is susceptible of many degrees of strength.
Like other psychological characteristics, it appears to peel off like
the skins of Peer Gynt’s onion. What is it that I really desire? Ask
me to-day, and I shall answer one thing. Ask me next year, and it may
be another. Years hence it may have changed again. But desire, in the
mystical sense, is the desire that is left when all the transient wishes
or fancies have either vanished or been satisfied. Only such a desire
leads the student to make the effort required by “Æ,” and the possession
of such a desire is something like a “special gift” or “genius.”

* * * * *

Page 20. “_Our religions make promises to be fulfilled beyond the grave,
because they have no knowledge now to be put to the test.... Mistrust
the religion that does not cry out: ‘Test me that we can become as
gods.’_” This is an excellent observation, and accounts, to my mind, for
all the so-called scepticism of modern times. It is usual to attribute
to our predecessors, the most remote as well as the more recent, a
quality of “faith” superior to our own. They are said to have been more
religious than we are. I do not believe it; or, rather, I believe that
they were religious because they had very good reason to be; in other
words, they were not only told the mysteries, but they were shown them.
Either they or their priests had the “open vision.” Is it conceivable
that the primitive peoples had the confidence-trick played on them?
Or, again, is it the fact that credulity is less to-day than before?
I feel sure that if our ancestors were brought to belief, it was by
means which would equally carry conviction to the present generation.
To repeat myself: They believed because they were shown. “Æ” suggests
that the after-life promises of modern religion are a substitute for
or an invasion of present demonstration. Religions, that is to say,
concentrate upon the invisible because their power over the visible is
gone. It is not the fact, however, that the earlier religions ignored the
after-death adventures of the soul; they were quite as much concerned
with the life beyond the grave as our own religions. What they did, and
what our religions fail to do, was to give present guarantees for their
future promises. Their priests could procure belief in the after-life on
the strength of their demonstrated power over this life. It is probable,
indeed, that many of the elect experienced “death” before it occurred
physically. The Egyptian mysteries were a kind of experimental death.

Page 21. Here and on the neighbouring pages “Æ” expounds his method of
meditation—the means by which any “ordinary” person may acquire spiritual
experience. “Æ’s” method follows the familiar line of the mystic schools,
namely, unwavering concentration on some mental object. “Five minutes of
this effort,” “Æ” says, “will at first leave us trembling as at the end
of a laborious day.” I can testify that this is no exaggeration, for,
like “Æ,” I have practised meditation after the methods prescribed.
It is no easy job, and after months of regular practice I was still an
amateur at the simplest exercises. There is no doubt, however, about the
benefit of it. Much is learned in meditation that cannot be realised by
any other mental exercise. The _mind_ becomes a real organ, as distinct
from the personality as a physical limb. And gradually one learns to
acquire sufficient control over it, if not to use it like a master, at
any rate, to realise that it _can_ be so used. I have not the smallest
doubt that one day men will be able to “use” their minds, and thus to
cease to be “used” by them; for it is obvious that at present we are
victims rather than masters of our mind. Meditation, as a means of
mind-control, is the appointed method, and “Æ’s” personal experience
should encourage his readers to take up the discipline.

* * * * *

Page 41. In regard to “visions,” they are usually dismissed by the
commonalty as products of imagination, “as if,” says “Æ,” “imagination
were as easily explained as a problem in Euclid.” This habit of referring
one mystery to another, as if this latter were no mystery, is very
common; and it arises, no doubt, from intellectual apathy. We cannot be
bothered to reduce mysteries to knowledge, and, moreover, the realisation
that literally everything is a mystery, that we simply live in mystery,
is a little disconcerting. Hence our preference for assuming some
things, at any rate, to be below the need of explanation. Imagination,
however, provides us with no escape from the mysteries of vision, any
more than matter provides us with an escape from the problems of spirit.
“Æ” raises some difficult, and, probably, insoluble problems concerning
imagination itself. _What_ is it in us that imagines? _How_ does it cast
thoughts into form? Even allowing (which we cannot) that imagination is
only “the re-fashioning of memory,” what re-fashions and transforms out
of their original resemblance the memories of things seen? “Æ” has had
many visions, some of which, no doubt, he could trace to recollected
impressions; but, leaving aside once more the difficulty involved in this
reconstruction, what of the visions that had, or appeared to have, no
earthly progenitors? “Æ’s” conclusion appears to be indisputable, that
“we swim in an æther of deity”—for “in Him we live and move and have our
being.”

Passim. Is it possible that telepathy occurs between people having the
same mental “wavelength”? Coincidences (another Mesopotamian word, by the
way) are too frequent to be accountable on any other supposition than
that of an established communication. Like many another, I could give
some remarkable instances of telepathy, but they would be tedious to
relate. Mental training, however, is certainly a means to this end; for
in proportion as the mind is brought under control, its susceptibility
to thoughts from outside palpably increases. The experience of the Old
Testament prophet who knew the plans of the enemy before they were
uttered is not unique, even in these days. It will be far less uncommon
in the days to come.

* * * * *

Page 54. “_Is there a centre within us through which all the threads of
the universe are drawn?_” An ingenious image for a recurrent doctrine
of mysticism, the doctrine, namely, that everything is everywhere. One
of the earliest discoveries made in meditation is the magnitude of the
infinitesimal. The tiniest point of space appears to have room enough
for a world of images; and the mediæval discussion concerning the number
of angels that could dance on the point of a needle was by no means
ridiculous. If I am not mistaken, “Æ’s” problem is identical with it.

* * * * *

Page 89. The Architecture of Dreams. In this chapter “Æ” sets himself to
casting some doubts (shall we say?) on the sufficiency of the Freudian
theory of dreams. Dreams, according to Freud, are the dramatisation of
suppressed desires; but what, asks “Æ,” is the means by which desires,
suppressed or otherwise, dramatise themselves? “A mood or desire may
_attract_ its affinities”; in other words, there may be a congruity
between the desire and the dream which serves the Freudian purpose
of interpretation; but desire can hardly be said “to _create_ what
it attracts.” Between anger, for instance, and a definite vision of
conflict, such as the dream may represent, there is a gulf which the
theory of Freud does not enable us to cross. What, in fact, _are_ dreams?
_Who_ or _what_ carries out the dramatisation? Assuming, with Freud,
that their impulse is a desire, what power shapes this desire into the
dream-cartoon? “Æ” throws no light on the mystery, but, at any rate, he
does not dismiss it as no mystery at all. Its philosophical discussion is
to be found in the Indian philosophy known as the Sankhya.

* * * * *

Page 89. “_The process must be conscious on some plane_”—the
dramatisation, that is to say, must be the conscious work of some
intelligent agent or quality. I am a little doubtful of this, for
reasons to be discovered in the Sankhya philosophy just referred to. Is
the pattern taken by sand on a shaken plate a “conscious” design? Are
frost-flowers the work of intelligence? Forms, according to the Sankhya,
are the reflection in matter (Prakriti) of the activities of the spirit
(Purusha); they are consciousness visible. But it would not follow that
they are themselves conscious or that their creation is a “conscious”
process.

* * * * *

Page 90. “Have imaginations body?” In other words, are the figures seen
in dream and vision three-dimensional? “Æ” describes several incidents
within his experience that certainly seem to suggest an objective reality
in dream-figures, and the occasional projection of dream-figures into
phantasms is a further evidence of it. But, once again, I would refer
“Æ” to the Sankhya aphorisms, and to Kapila’s commentary on them. The
question is really of the general order of the relation of form to
thought.

* * * * *

Page 114. Here, and in the succeeding essay, “Æ” develops his intuitional
thesis that sound and thought have definite affinities. For every
thought there is a sound, and every sound is at the same time a thought.
The idea is, of course, familiar, and, like many more in the _Candle
of Vision_, is found recurring like a decimal throughout mystical and
occult literature in all ages. The most ancient occult literature—dispute
whether that of India or Egypt—is most precise on the subject, the
general proposition being therein reduced to a series of equivalents in
which form, sound, colour, thought, emotion, and number, all seem to
be interchangeable. Each of these, in fact, is said to be a language—a
complete language; and to the initiate it is a matter of indifference
whether the text before him is “written” in form, in colour, in number,
or sound. Unfortunately, neither “Æ” nor anybody within our knowledge,
is able to procure even the skeleton key to the mystery. The records
are so perversely confused that I cannot believe that their authors
were not deliberately playing a game with us. It would be rather like
the old initiates to “dis” their type before leaving it to be examined
by the barbarian invaders; and certainly nobody of ordinary faculty
can begin to make head or tail of the “correspondences” recorded in
the Indian scriptures. It is the same, strangely enough, with Plato,
whose _Cratylus_ deals with the relation of verbal language to mental
conception. A master of simple exposition, he becomes in the _Cratylus_,
whether from design or feebleness of understanding, as cryptic as the
Indians themselves. I have read the _Cratylus_ all ways, with no better
result than to feel that I have wasted my time. “Æ” has approached the
problem, however, experimentally, with the aid of his intuition. If, he
said to himself, there is really a definite correspondence between sound
and idea, meditation on one or the other should be able to discover it.
In other words, he has attempted to re-discover the lost language, and
to find for himself the key whose fragments bestrew the ancient occult
works. This again, however, is no novelty, but another of the recurrent
ideas of mystics and would-be occultists. All of them have tried it,
but, unfortunately, most of them come to different conclusions. “Æ’s”
guesses must, therefore, be taken as guesses only, to be compared with
the guesses of other students.

* * * * *

Page 132. One of the features of the _Candle of Vision_ is the occasional
ray cast by “Æ” upon the obscure texts of the Bible. The Bible, of
course, is for the most part unmistakably “occult”; and not only its
stories are myths (“which things are an allegory”), but many of its texts
are echoes of a gnosis infinitely older than the Christian era. Greece,
it has now been established, was an infant when Egypt was old; and Egypt,
in its turn, was an infant when some civilisation anterior to it was in
its dotage. The Bible is a kind of ark, in which were stored (without
much order, I imagine) some of the traditions of the world that was
about to be submerged. They can be brought to life again, however, and
here and there, in the course of the _Candle of Vision_, “Æ” undoubtedly
rejuvenates a Biblical text, and restores to it its ancient meaning.
“He made every flower before it was in the field, and every herb before
it grew.” This points, says “Æ,” to the probability that the Garden of
Eden was the “Garden of the Divine Mind,” in which flowers and herbs and
all the rest of creation lived before they were made—visible! Such a
conception is very illuminating. Moreover, it brings the story of Genesis
into line with the genesis stories of both ancient India and the most
recent psychology. For modern psycho-analysis, in the researches of Jung
in particular, is undoubtedly trembling on the brink of the discovery
of the divine mind which precedes visible creation. The process is
indissolubly linked up with the psychology of imagination, phantasm, and
vision.

* * * * *

Page 137. On Power. “_If we have not power we are nothing, and must
remain outcasts of Heaven._” In this chapter “Æ” shakes the fringes of
the most dangerous subject in the world, that of the acquisition of
“spiritual” power. I put the word under suspicion, because while in the
comparative sense spiritual, the powers here spoken of may be anything
but beneficent. The instructions to be found in, let us say, Patanjali,
are full of warnings against the acquisition of occult powers before
the character of the student is “purified.” We are a long way, of
course, from the plane of conventional goodness in the use of this word
purity. The conventionally good may have all the characteristics of
the black magician (so-called) when he finds himself in the possession
of power. Purity, in the sense implied, connotes non-attachment, and
non-attachment, again, implies the non-existence of any personal
desire—even for the good. Nietzsche died before he began to understand
himself. His pre-occupation with the problem of power was undoubtedly
an occult exercise; and his discovery that spiritual power needs to be
exercised “beyond good and evil,” was a hint of the progress he had made.
Unfortunately for Nietzsche, his _Beyond Good and Evil_ was still not
clear of the element of egotism; he carried into the occult world the
attachment and the desire that emphatically belong to the world of both
Good and Evil. In short, he attempted to take Heaven by egoistic storm,
and his defeat was a foregone conclusion and a familiar tragedy in occult
history. “Æ,” like his authorities, is full of warning against the quest
of power. At the same time, like them, he realises that without power the
student can do nothing. Here is the paradox, the mightiest in psychology,
that the weakest is the strongest and the strongest the weakest. I
commend this chapter to Nietzscheans in particular. They have most to
learn from it.

* * * * *

Page 153 et seq. “Æ” makes an attempt to systematise “Celtic cosmogony.”
It appears to me to be altogether premature, and of as little value
as the “interpretation” of Blake’s cosmogony, which Messrs. Yeats and
Ellis formerly attempted. Celtic cosmogony, as found in Irish legend and
tradition, may be a cosmogony, and perhaps one of the oldest in the world
(for Ireland is always with us!). But the fragmentary character of the
records, the absence of any living tradition in them, coupled with the
difficulty of re-interpretation in rational terms, make even “Æ’s” effort
a little laborious. There is little illumination in the _Candle_ when it
becomes an Irish bog-light.

HOW TO READ.—The greatest books are only to be grasped by the total
understanding which is called intuition. As an aid to the realisation
of the truth, we may fall back upon the final proofs of idiom and
experience. Idiom is the fruit of wisdom on the tree of language; and
experience is both the end and the beginning of idiom. What more familiar
idiom is there than that which expresses the idea and the experience of
reading a book “between the lines”; reading, in fact, what is not there
in the perception of our merely logical understanding? And what, again,
is more familiar than the experience of “having been done good” by
reading a great, particularly a great mystical or poetical work, like the
Bible or Milton; still more, by reading such works as the _Mahabharata_?
Idiom and experience do not deceive us. The “subconscious” of every great
book is vastly greater than its conscious element, as the “subconscious”
of each of us is many times richer in content than our conscious minds.
Reading between the lines, resulting often and usually in a sense of
illuminated bewilderment difficult to put into words, is in reality
intuitional reading; the subconscious in the reader is put into relation
with the subconscious of the writer. Deep communicates with deep. No
“interpretation” of an allegorical kind need result from it. We may be
unable at once to put into words any of the ideas we have gathered.
Patience! The truths thus grasped will find their way to the conscious
mind, and one day, perhaps, to our lips.

THE OLD COUNTRY.—A country may grow aged in mind long before it is really
old in history, and it may be the case with England that long before
she is old in history her mind is becoming aged. The peculiarity of the
aged mind is not that it cannot think, but that it cannot think new
thoughts. All its energy runs in grooves, and there is none to spare
for the cutting of a new road into new ideas. There is little and less
“free mind” in England. Like the commons and the commonwealth, all the
mind-energy has been appropriated by one interest or another, with the
consequence that every fresh idea is compelled either to starve at home
or to emigrate abroad. America, as an intellectually youthful nation
(may it never grow aged!) reaps the advantage of the decline of its aged
parent. Ideas that cannot pick up a living in this country, owing to
the appropriations of energy already made, may emigrate to America and
flourish there.

LOOKING FOR THE DAWN.—The Spring issue of _Art and Letters_ has been
long enough out to have had its run for its money. Consequently I am
free to say that it is not only not so good as the first issue, but
that the descent has been steep as well as rapid. This decline from
the almost sublime to the more than ridiculous was inevitable from
the peculiar characteristics of our immediately contemporary epoch;
for it is the sober truth that our contemporary world does not supply
youthful stuff enough to make more than a single issue of a literary
magazine of high pretension. I have looked about me with the eye of an
eagle and the appetite of a raven to discover youthful talent possibly
budding into genius. A few sprigs and sprays have fallen within my
vision, and I have counted myself recompensed for hours and years of
trouble. But at this present moment such apparitions and premonitions
of the future are fewer than ever I have known them to be. Whether it
is that more than individual—_collective_ talent—has fallen in the war;
whether the increasing pre-occupation of men’s minds with economics
has proportionately impoverished the will to literature of our young
men; or whether a critical taste is losing generosity, the number of
fresh talents just being committed to us appears utterly unequal to the
unequalled opportunity for employing them. There never was a time when
it was easier for a young writer to find publication in one form or
another. The number of new magazines projected and issued recently has
been legion. I have examined most of them; for it is my hobby to collect
the earliest specimens, and it is my unpleasant opinion that most of them
would be better for never having been born.

They manage, or, at any rate, they are beginning to manage these things
better in America. That America is the country of the future is open
to less doubt as a prophecy when the critic has made acquaintance with
the new and renewed magazines now appearing in that country. A tone
of provinciality still dominates a considerable part of the American
literary Press, but it is obvious that tremendous efforts are being made
to recover or, let us say, to discover centrality. American literary
editors are more and more aiming to interest the world of readers rather
than a mere province of them. I need scarcely say that the world of
readers is not the same thing as a world of readers. A world of readers
connotes large numbers, consisting chiefly of readers in search of
amusement; but the world of readers consists of the few in every country
who really read for their living, or rather, for their lives. To appeal
to the latter class is to be “of the centre,” for the centre of every
movement of life is not only the most vital, it is the smallest element,
of the whole. The most recent American literary journals appear to me
to be endeavouring to become organs for this class of reader. It is not
indicated more plainly in the fact that they are enlisting European
writers than in the fact that their American contributors are writing to
be read in Europe as well as in America. America has begun to discover
Europe. America is on the way to absorb Europe. In the course of a
few generations, if the present American magazines may be taken as
indicating direction, European writers will be as intelligible in America
as in Europe; and, perhaps, more so.

FIELDING FOR AMERICA.—It is very doubtful whether anybody reads Fielding
nowadays. Nevertheless, like all the eighteenth century writers, he is
more than worth all the time we waste on certain contemporaries. There
is nothing of the “damned literary” about Fielding; but also there is
nothing of what usually goes with the absence of letters, sentimentality.
Fielding’s letters, one feels, were absorbed into his blood; they did not
remain like crumbs on the lips after a barbarian repast. Fielding could
carry his letters as his contemporaries boasted they could carry their
port—without showing it. And it was no less the case that he carried his
feelings with the same well-bred ease, without displaying them, and,
even more, without permitting them to rule his intelligence. Richardson
seems born to have provoked Fielding to write. He incarnated everything
that Fielding thought worth a negative. But for Richardson, Fielding
would possibly have never found his true _métier_; Richardson was his
twin opposite. Fielding, however, must always pay the penalty of being
a reactionary, of requiring a stimulant; he is no creator, for the stuff
of creation was not native to him. He is an amusing _causeur_ with his
eye always upon Richardson; a man of the world telling a story _à la_
Richardson, but with the explanations common to the class of English
gentlemen. He is put among the English _Men of Letters_ in the series
edited by Lord Morley, and now he is receiving attention in America.
America needs Fielding; for what is America in danger of becoming but
a kind of Richardson continent? Our eighteenth century writers are a
school to which American literature must go as a means of escape from
the Roundhead tradition which otherwise America will scarcely succeed in
overpassing. I cannot conceive, however, that _Tom Jones_ will be popular
in America yet awhile. He has more resistance to encounter there than in
any other civilised nation. But until _Tom Jones_ can be read in America
without a blush, American literature will remain several centuries behind
English and European literature.

POOR AUTHORS!—Is it a fact that the dearness of literature alone or
mainly restricts its sale? Is it certain that either cheap publication
or (what amounts to the same thing) a generous diffusion of money among
the masses would ensure the success of, let us say, good first novels—in
the present state of public taste? We have had some experience both of
cheapness and of the diffusion of money. Publication was cheap enough
before the war in all conscience. New novels could be brought out for
a shilling. Was it the common experience that the best of them proved
a commercial success? The best of them were nine times out of ten a
commercial failure. And in respect of the diffusion of money, what has
been our experience of the direction in which the diffused money has been
spent? Have the masses accumulated libraries? Have they patronised the
arts? Have they encouraged literature with discriminating taste? Have
they sought out and bought the young authors, the promising writers, the
writers of to-morrow? We know they have done nothing of the kind. The
diffused money has fallen, for the most part, into two sets of hands, the
hands of the ignorant profiteers and the hands of the ignorant masses.
And both classes have neglected literature in favour of sports and furs,
display and amusement. It is idle to pretend that things are other than
they are. We need not necessarily be discouraged by the fact, but it is
necessary to recognise the facts. And the facts in the present case
are that the people who have the money (much or little) do not care a
shilling for literature and accept no responsibility for its existence.
Their _excuse_ for the moment is that literature is too dear; but it
would be all the same if it were cheap. I have never observed that rich
or poor have complained that their sports and amusements are too dear.
Nobody appeals to cinema-proprietors or yachting entrepreneurs to pity
their clients and ruin themselves commercially. When the public wants
literature as much as it wants to be entertained, there will be no need
for anybody’s charity.

In the meanwhile, what is the young writer to do? In particular, the
young novelist? He appears to be about to be among the most miserable of
mankind. To be published and to be a commercial failure is bad enough in
a country like our own, where a _succès d’estime_ is almost a certificate
for pity. But not to be published at all is infinitely worse. Instead
of appealing to commercial publishers, however, is it not possible to
appeal to the Guild of Authors, to the fraternity whose function and
responsibility are the creation and encouragement of literature? Who
should be patrons of literature if not men of letters themselves? And
whose duty should it be, if not that of novelists as a guild, to secure
the succession and to provide for the future princes? If publishers are
willing to assume the burdens of literature—always heavy in proportion
to the ignorance of the public—let them by all means. So much the more
honour to them. But the proper shoulders for the burden, in the absence
of an enlightened public, are the shoulders of the Guild of Letters,
the shoulders, in particular, of the _successful_ men. There is no lack
of money among them. I should roughly calculate that the income of our
successful novelists is more than equal to that of all our publishers
put together. Why should they not subsidise literature? Why, out of
their abundance, should they not set aside a portion for their literary
posterity?

ON GUARD.—As one of the thirty thousand who take in and occasionally read
_The Times Literary Supplement_, I may draw attention to the danger to
truth its composite character is always creating. Being familiar with the
back-ways of publishing I am not taken in, of course, by the uniform use
of the editorial “we” in a journal like _The Times Literary Supplement_.
“We” represents a score of different people, all or most of whom are
as much at intellectual sixes and sevens as any other score; and the
editor-in-chief, whoever he may be, is just as powerless as a sovereign
is over its twenty shillings. That being granted, the situation is still
a little strange from the fact that certain sentiments are allowed
to appear in the _Literary Supplement_ which, to say the least, are
incongruous with _The Times_ and all _The Times_ stands for. Here, for
instance, are three quotations from recent issues: “Whether you beat your
neighbour by militarism or buy him by industrialism—the effect is the
same.” “That most false and nauseating of legends—‘the happy warrior.’”
“The organisation of trade is of secondary moment: what is of the first
moment is the organisation of a humane enjoyment of its benefits.” These
sentiments are true, and they are sufficiently strikingly put. But in
_The Times Literary Supplement_ they are not only incongruous, but they
are in a very subtle sense actually lies, and the more dangerous lies
from their identity with the truth. It is one of the paradoxes of truth
that a statement is only true when it is in truthful company. As the
corruption of the best is the worst, so evil communications corrupt good
statements, and a truth in bad company is the worst of lies. It is a
mystery not easily to be understood, but the intuition may, perhaps, make
something of it. Is it not the fact that the occurrence of statements
like those just quoted in _The Times Literary Supplement_ causes a
feeling of nausea? On examining the cause it will be found to lie in the
unconscious realisation that such statements are there made for no good
purpose, but are only decoy ducks for the better snaring of our suffrages
for the real policy of _The Times_ itself.

THE COMING RENAISSANCE.—The prognostication of the approach of a new
Renaissance has quite naturally been received with incredulity. Is it not
the fact that civilisation is in a thoroughly morbid condition bordering
on hysteria, and was ever the outlook for culture darker than it is at
this moment? I have just been discussing the subject with a friend who
laid this evidence before me with a touch of reproach: how _could_ I, in
the face of such a circle of gloom, pretend that we were even possibly
(which is all I affirm) on the eve of a new Renaissance? My explanation
of this part of the story is, however, quite simple. The war has
precipitated a development in external events _faster_ than the average
mind has been able to adapt itself to them, with the consequence that the
average mind has had to take refuge in hysteria. For the greater part of
hysteria is due to nothing more than an inadequacy of the mind to a given
situation; and when the situation as given to-day is a situation that
should and would, but for the war, have arisen only, let us say, twenty
years hence, there is no wonder that in the mass of the slowly developing
minds of our people an inadequacy to the occasion should be experienced
or that the result should appear as hysteria. On the other hand, hysteria
is not a stable condition of the mind; it is a transition to a more
complete adaptation to reality, or, in the alternative, to complete
disintegration. But what is to be expected from the present situation?
Not, surely, disintegration in the general sense, though it may take
place in individual cases, but a forward movement in the direction of
adaptation. This forward movement is the Renaissance, and it is thus from
the very circumstances of gloom and hysteria that we may draw the hope
that a fresh advance of the human spirit is about to be made.

It is significant that concurrently with such a social diagnosis as
anyone may make, special observers, with or without a bee in their
bonnet, are arriving at the same conclusion. There are very confident
guesses now being disseminated by the various religious and mystic
schools concerning what, in their vocabulary, they call the Second
Advent—which, however, may well be the seven hundredth or the seven
thousandth for all we know. Attach no importance, if you like, to the
phenomena in question, but the fact of the coincidence of forecast is
somewhat impressive; for while it is absurd to believe the “Second
Adventists” of all denominations when they stand alone in their
prognostications, their testimony is not negligible when it is supported
by what amounts to science. And the fact is that to-day science, no less
than mysticism, is apprehensive of a New Coming of some kind or other.
What the nature of that New Coming is likely to be, and when or how it
will manifest itself, are matters beyond direct knowledge, but the ear of
science, no less than the ear of mysticism, is a little thrilled with the
spirit of expectation.

LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER.—Leonardo da Vinci’s name has been
frequently mentioned among the intelligent during the last few years, and
it cannot be without a meaning. It may be said that his reappearance as a
subject for discussion is due to a fortuitous concurrence of publishers.
But accidents of this kind are like miracles: they do not happen; and
I, for one, am inclined to suspect the “collective unconscious” of a
design in thrusting forward at this moment the name and personality of
the great Renaissance humanist. What can we guess the design to be? What
is the interpretation of this prominent figure in our current collective
dreams? The symbols appearing in dreams are the expressive language of
the unconscious mind, and the appearance of the symbol of da Vinci is
or may be an indication that the “unconscious” is “dreaming” of a new
Renaissance. And since the dreams of the unconscious to-day are or may be
the acts of the conscious to-morrow, the prevalent interest in Leonardo
is a further possible piece of evidence that we are or may be on the eve
of a recurrence of the Italian Renaissance.

Leonardo as an artist interests us less than Leonardo as a person. That
is not to say that Leonardo was not a great artist, for, of course, he
was one of the greatest. But it is to say that the promise of which
he was an incarnation was even greater than the fulfilment which he
achieved. There is a glorious sentence in one of the Upanishads which is
attributed to the Creator on the morrow of His completion of the creation
of the whole manifested universe. “Having pervaded all this,” he says,
“I remain.” Not even the creation of the world had exhausted His powers
or even so much as diminished His self-existence. When that greatest of
works of art had been accomplished, He, the Creator, “remained.” Leonardo
was, if I may use the expression, a chip of the original block in this
respect. His works, humanly speaking, were wonderful; they were both
multitudinous and various. Nevertheless, after the last of them had been
performed, Leonardo remained as a great “promise,” still unfulfilled.
That is the character of the Renaissance type, as it is also the
character of a Renaissance period; its promise remains over even after
great accomplishment. The Renaissance man is greater than his work; he
pervades his work, but he is not submerged in it.

I should be trespassing on the domain of the psycho-analysts if I were
to attempt to indicate the _means_ by which a collective hysteria
may be resolved into an integration. Taking the Italian Renaissance,
however, as a sort of working model, and Leonardo da Vinci as its typical
figure, it would appear that the method of resolution is all-round
expression—expression in as many forms and fields as the creative powers
direct. Leonardo was not only an artist, he was a sculptor, a poet, an
epigrammatist, an engineer, a statesman, a soldier, a musician, and I
do not know what else besides. He indulged his creative or expressive
impulses in every direction his “fancy” indicated. Truly enough he was
not equally successful in an objective or critical sense in all these
fields; but quite as certainly he owed his surpassing excellence in
one or two of them to the fact that he tried them all. The anti- or
non-Renaissance type of mind would doubtless conclude that if Leonardo,
let us say, had been content to be only a painter, or only a sculptor,
he would have succeeded even more perfectly in that single mode of
expression into which _ex hypothesi_ he might have poured the energy
otherwise squandered in various subordinate channels. But concentrations
of energy of this kind are not always successful; the energies, in fact,
are not always convertible; and the attempt to concentrate may thus have
the effect, not only of failing of its direct object, but of engaging one
part of the total energy in suppressing another. At any rate, the working
hypothesis (and it did work) of the Renaissance type is that a natural
multiplicity of modes of expression is better than an unnatural or forced
concentration. The latter, if successful, may possibly lead to something
wonderful; but if unsuccessful, it ends in hysteria, in unresolved
conflicts. The former, on the other hand, while it may lead to no great
excellence in any direction (though equally it may be the condition of
excellence) is, at any rate, a resolution of the internal conflict. We
shall be well advised to deny ourselves nothing in the region of æsthetic
creation. Let us “dabble” to our hearts’ content in every art-form to
which our “fancy” invites us. The results in a critical sense may be
unimportant; “art happens,” as Whistler used to say, and it “happens,”
it may be added, in the course of play. The play is the thing, and I
have little doubt that the approaching Renaissance will be heralded by a
revival of dilettantism in all the arts.

“SHAKESPEARE” SIMPLIFIED.—English literary criticism lies under the
disgrace of accepting Shakespeare, the tenth-rate player, as Shakespeare
the divine author, and so long as a mistake of this magnitude is
admitted into the canon, nobody of any perception can treat the canon
with respect. My theory of authorship is simple, rational, and within
the support of common experience. All it requires is that we should
assume that Shakespeare the theatre-manager had on his literary staff or
within call a wonderful dramatic genius whose name we do not yet know;
that this genius was as modest as he was wonderful, and as adaptable
as he was original; and that, of the plays passed to him for licking
into shape (plays drawn from Shakespeare the actor-manager’s store),
some he scarcely touched, others he changed only here and there, while
a few, the few that appealed to his “fancy,” he completely transformed
and re-created in his own likeness. There is nothing incredible,
nothing even requiring much subtlety to accept, in this hypothesis. The
Elizabethan age was a strange age. It had very little of the passion
for self-advertisement that distinguishes our own. It contained many
anonymous geniuses of whom the obscure translators of the Bible were
only one handful. The author of the plays may well have been one of the
number—a quiet, modest, retiring sort of man, thankful to be able to
find congenial work in reshaping plays to his own liking. That, at any
rate, is my surmise, and so far from thinking the theory unimportant, I
believe it throws a beam of light on the psychology of genius during the
Elizabethan age.

THE “LONDON MERCURY” AND ENGLISH.—It goes without saying that the _London
Mercury_ had what is called a “good Press.” Without imputing it to Mr.
Squire for unrighteousness, it is a fact that Mr. Squire has a “good
Press” for whatever he chooses to do. He appears to have been born with a
silver pen in his mouth, and for quite a number of years now it has been
impossible to take up a literary journal without finding praise of Mr.
Squire in it. As a poet Mr. Squire deserves _nearly_ all that is said of
him; not for the mass of his work, but for an occasional poem of almost
supreme excellence. As a literary _causeur_, of whom _The Times_ said in
compliment that “he never makes you think,” he has the first and great
qualification of readableness. Finally, as a parodist he is without a
superior in contemporary literature. But when one has said this, one
has said all; for Mr. Squire is not a great or even a sound critic, he
is not an impressive writer, and he is not a distinguished or original
thinker. Time and Mr. Squire may prove my judgment wrong, but I do not
think, either, that he will make a great or an inspiring editor. Great
editorship is a form of creation, and the great editor is measured by
the number and quality of the writers he brings to birth—or to ripeness.
We shall see in course of time whether Mr. Squire is a creator in this
sense. So far, he has not even a dark horse in his stable.

Among the objects set out to be accomplished by the _London Mercury_ is
the advancement of English style. It is a worthy and even a momentous
object, but the _London Mercury_ is not the first modern journal to
venture upon this quest. After all, I, in my way, during the last seven
years or so, have made occasional references to current English style,
and my comments cannot be said to be distinguished by any particular
tenderness to bad English, by whomsoever it has been written. It amused
me, therefore, to read sundry and divers exhortations to Mr. Squire
to be severe, and, if need be, “savage” in criticism, and especially
when I observed that some of the names appended to the advice were of
writers who have anything but appreciated the severity, let alone the
“savagery,” of reviews addressed to themselves. Let it pass. The thing
in question is English style, and nobody can be too enthusiastic in its
maintenance and improvement. The peril of English style, I take it, lies
in its very virtue, that of directness, and its fighting edges are to
be found where the colloquial and the vernacular (or, let us say, the
idiomatic) meet and mix. The English vernacular is the most powerful
and simple language that was ever written, but the danger always lies
in wait for it of slipping into the English colloquial, which, by the
same token, is one of the worst of languages. The difference between
them is precisely the difference between Ariel and Caliban; and I am
not sure that “Shakespeare” had not this, among other things, in mind
when he dreamed his myth. Caliban is a direct enough creature to be
English, and there are writers who imagine his style to be the mirror of
perfection. But Ariel is no less direct; he is only Caliban transformed
and purified and become a thing of light. There is, of course, no
rule for distinguishing between them; between the permissible and the
forbidden use of the colloquial; for it is obvious that the vernacular
is finally derived from the colloquial. The decision rests with taste,
which alone can decide what of the colloquial shall be allowed to enter
into the vernacular. In general, I should say, the criterion is grace;
the hardest, the rarest, but the most exquisite of all the qualities of
style. I hope one day to see English written in the vernacular, with
all its strength and directness, but with grace added unto it. Newman,
perhaps, was furthest of all writers on the way to it. But Newman did
not always charm. Now I have written the word, I would substitute charm
for grace, and say that the perfect English style, which nobody has yet
written, will charm by its power.

MR. G. K. CHESTERTON ON ROME AND GERMANY.—Hovelaque’s _Les Causes
profondes de la Guerre_ is either the original or a plagiarism of Mr.
G. K. Chesterton’s theory that the war was only an episode in the
eternal “revolt” of “Germany” against “Rome.” I put these words into
quarantine to signify that they are to be handled with care; for it is
not only Germany or Rome that is in question, but the psychological
characteristics and the relation between them which they embody. Thus
raised to psychological dimensions, Germany and Rome become principles,
types of mentality: in radical opposition. Germany is of one camp,
Rome is of the other, and given the fact of their inherent antagonism,
war between them is endless. Mr. Mann, a German writer, has carried
the subject further; he has entered into particulars. In the following
pairs of qualities, tabulated by Mr. Mann, the first of each is to be
attributed to “Germany” and the other to “Rome.” Heroic, rational;
people, masses; personality, individuality; culture, civilisation;
spiritual life, social life; aristocracy, democracy; romance, classicism;
nationalism, internationalism. I do not know how Mr. Chesterton will fare
among these pairs of opposites, for it appears to me that his preferences
are to be found at least as often among the “German” group as among the
“Roman” group. There, however, they are, as drawn up by a supporter of
his general theory, and we must leave him to make the best of them.

There is another pair which Mr. Mann has not mentioned, though it has
been brought close home to many of us. The German “Persius” has confessed
that “the lie has always been one of Germany’s chief weapons, both by
land and sea.” The lie, however, is not the “Roman” way; the “Roman” way
is silence, and anybody engaged in the dissemination of ideas knows which
of the two forms of opposition is the more difficult to meet. After all,
the liar takes risks; moreover, he does the idea he opposes the honour of
noticing it if only to lie about it. But silence risks nothing; it kills
without leaving a trace.

Leaving the subject where, for the moment, it is, we can inquire whether
the suggested antagonism is not altogether false. _Is_ Rome so eternal
as all that, or Germany either? We have been familiarised with a view
that represents the map of Europe as a map primarily of mind; but I can
discover in such a map no confirmation of the statement that it is Rome
and Germany that are in permanent conflict. On the contrary, what we call
“formal mind”—in other words, the rationalistic consciousness—appears to
me to distinguish “Rome” quite as much as “Germany.” It may be true that
on the whole the “Roman” qualities are better integrated and that the
“Roman” type is more completely a “man of the world.” But, in comparison
with a type of the universal man, the man of the whole world, I doubt
whether it can be said that the “Roman” is much more inclusive than the
German. Both exclude a good deal, and thus the opposition between them is
not of principle, but of accident, the accident being that the anthology
of qualities which we call “Rome” differs from the anthology called
German. It would follow from this that so far from being in necessarily
eternal conflict “Rome” and “Germany” are susceptible of a synthesis
in which the qualities of each will complement the qualities of the
other. “Germany,” in other words, needs to Romanise, while “Rome” needs
to “Germanise.” Their approach to each other would mark the end of the
conflict.

In so far as it is true that “Germany” represents the “elemental
instincts” always in revolt against “Rome,” “the representative of the
supremacy of reason” (Hovelaque), there are grounds for believing that
a psychological _rapprochement_ is necessary to the psychic health no
less than to the peace of Europe. Long before the war we heard, even
in this country, criticism of the right of reason to supremacy; and,
strangely enough, it was from the “Roman” Mr. Chesterton that the
criticism came most powerfully. “Germany,” in that case, may certainly
be said to have taken the lead in the active revolt against Rome; but
it was, we must observe, against a Rome already weakened from within
by the dissatisfaction with Romanism of many of the leading “Romans.”
The fact is that the “supremacy of reason,” for which “Rome” stands,
is always in danger, like every other supremacy, of degenerating into
a dictatorship; and the dictatorship which reason was establishing
before the war involved precisely the suppression of the “elemental
instincts” attributed to Germany. The so-called encirclement of Germany
was, in fact, and in psychological terms, the rational encirclement
of instinct; and I must again observe that it was not in geographical
Germany alone that the encirclement was felt to be oppressive, but in
every “Germany within us,” in so far as each of us contained “elemental
instincts” of any kind. The meaning of what I am saying is that the
elemental instincts, call them German, or anything you please, cannot
be permanently tyrannised over by “reason”; nor should they be. Nor
is it necessary that reason should attempt such a dictatorship. Its
rule should be that of a constitutional monarch under the direction of
representatives, not of itself, but of the elemental instincts. The
practical conclusion to be drawn is that the “eternal antagonism” of
“Rome” and “Germany” is not a necessary fact in psychology. It becomes a
fact only when “Rome” aims at a dictatorship of reason to the inevitable
isolation and suppression of “Germany.” Reason must learn how to
cultivate its instincts.

I do not imagine that Mr. Chesterton identifies “Rome” with the Holy See,
though others, no doubt, do. It is interesting, however, to remark that
before the war, and for a considerable period during the war, the policy
of the Holy See was directed to the support of Germany. I have often
wondered how a Catholic like M. Hovelaque accommodates his thesis with
that fact. If the war, as he says, was only an episode in the secular
conflict of Germany with Rome (meaning the Roman Church as the spiritual
successor of the Roman Empire), how came it that before and during the
war the directors of the Roman Church were pro-German? Something must
surely be wrong here; for either the Roman Church did not take that
view of Germany which M. Hovelaque has defined, or, as seems to me more
probable, the Holy See had another end in view than victory over Germany,
namely, alliance with a prospectively victorious Germany! With this key,
I think, the mystery is unlocked for the ordinary man, however much it
continues sealed to the faithful. As _The Times Literary Supplement_
said: “Modernists understand no better than Newman the springs of Roman
ecclesiastical policy, which is never fanatical or idealistic, but
always based on cool political calculation.” And, undoubtedly, the “cool
political calculation” of the Holy See, both before and during the first
years of the war, was that Germany would win. If this was not the case,
how are we to explain the sudden change over of policy when it began
to appear that Germany, after all, was not to be the victor? That at
a certain stage in the war such a change took place is well known to
everybody, and it was openly admitted in the Catholic _Dublin Review_.
“The pendulum of Catholicism,” said the _Dublin Review_, “has swung away
from Germany ... with Austria and Spain ... and with the English-speaking
peoples and their Latin Allies the Catholic order in the era of the
future.” The “eternal conflict” theory must go by the board after this,
for it obviously fails to fit the facts.

THE ORIGINS OF MARX.—It is to be hoped that the reputation of Marx will
not long survive the war unimpaired. I can scarcely think that the German
Socialists will be so proud of their Marxism in the future as they have
been in the past, since it will have clearly betrayed them into one of
the most shameful moral surrenders in all history. It is dangerous for
a man’s writings to be regarded as the “Bible” even of Socialists; and
when, in addition, the Marxian Bible, unlike the other, aims at and,
in a sense, achieves, logical consistency, the peril of it is greater
upon minds lacking the inestimable virtue of common sense. Marx was not
himself a slave of his own inspiration; he was anything but a Marxian
in the sense in which his followers are Marxian. He had, indeed, a very
sharp word for certain of the disciples whose breed, unfortunately, has
not been extinguished by it. “Amateur anarchists,” he called them, who
“make up by rabid declarations and bloodthirsty rampings for the utter
insignificance of their political existence.” Groups of his disciples,
answering perfectly to this description, are to be found to-day in
English as well as in other Labour circles. In between their rampings
they reveal their political insignificance by inquiring of each other
such elementary facts about literature and history as schoolboys should
be ashamed to have forgotten. And the surprising thing is that even these
open confessions induce no reaction upon their conviction that they
understand Marx.

It is a common supposition among Marx’s followers that not only has he
left nothing to be said on the subject of economics, but that nothing was
said before him. One German Socialist, at any rate, has rid himself of
this notion, for Dr. Menger has remarked that “Marx was completely under
the influence of the earlier English Socialists, and more particularly
of William Thompson.” In a valuable essay upon Marx, by Professor Alfred
Rahilly, the facts are let out. Marx, it appears, came across Thompson’s
work on _The Distribution of Wealth_ (1824) in the British Museum, and
read it with great profit. From Thompson he took practically all his
chief doctrines, with the exception of his peculiar interpretation
of history in terms of economics. The theory of Value as measured by
labour-power, the distinction between capital and capitalism, the law
of decreasing utility, and, above all, the very phrase as well as the
very idea of Surplus Value—all of these “Marxian” doctrines Marx found
in Thompson. I am not arguing that Marx was the less for having been
indebted to his English predecessors. He would, indeed, in my opinion,
have been a greater man if he had borrowed more of Thompson, for
Thompson possessed the common sense to realise that it was possible that
the concentration of capital might take place simultaneously, with a
diffusion of ownership—an idea which would have spared Marx the ignominy
of many of his most fanatical disciples. What, on the other hand, was
great in Marx, was his capacity for large generalisations, and his
industry in establishing them. In this respect he belonged to the great
Victorians, and, as such, he deserves more credit than his present-day
followers will permit him to receive.

MARX AS POLITICIAN.—The centenary celebrations of Marx ought not to
conclude without a tribute to his astonishing political insight.
Philosophically Marx was confused; as an economist he has suffered from
his disciples; but as a political critic he has seldom been surpassed.
Particular attention may be drawn to his analysis of the circumstances
of Bismarck’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and to his forecast of
the consequences. Though writing in London, and without our historic
knowledge of the Ems telegram, or our present knowledge of the world-war,
Marx might have written his manifesto to-day; but, in that case, I doubt
whether he would be published in Germany, or read with much attention by
Marx’s followers in this country. It is a strange reflection, indeed,
upon the fate of the works of Marx that it is precisely the most clear
and prophetic part of them which his professed followers neglect. For his
dubious forecasts and his riddling analyses they have a reverence that
transcends bibliolatry; but, concerning his most absolute and explicit
political policies—not a word!

The war of 1870, as we all know, was for Germany a declared war of
defence, exactly like the present war. Germany is always defending
herself at the world’s expense. No sooner, however, had the ostensible
motive of defence been satisfied by Sedan, than the real objects of
German militarism began to be revealed. Unhindered by the earlier
protestations of the Emperor William that Germany was at war only
with Napoleon and not with France, the militarists inspired the German
liberal bourgeoisie to press for annexations in the name of race and
security. They dared to pretend, said Marx, that the people of the
two provinces were burning to be annexed to Germany, and they adopted
without reflection the excuse of the military party that a rectification
of the Imperial frontiers was a strategic necessity. Thus, concluded
Marx, they insisted upon sowing in the terms of peace the seeds of new
wars—the phrase is Marx’s own. And what wars, too! Marx was not blind
to their probable character. History, he said, would not measure the
German offence by the number of miles of territory annexed, but by
the significance of the fact of annexation. This significance was no
less than a declaration of “a policy of conquest,” from which might be
anticipated in logical order a German racial war against “the Slav and
Latin races combined.” The war of 1870, having thus ended, would, he
said, be the precursor of a series of international wars, in the course
of which it was probable that the working-classes everywhere would
succumb to the forces of militarism and capitalism. What comment has the
_Call_ or any of our contemporary Marxian pacifists to make upon this?
It is not right that they should ignore it, more especially when it is
recalled that Marx paid a tribute to the English working-classes of his
day, who “protested with all their might against the dismemberment of
France.”

JOHN MITCHEL AS THE SAME.—Marx, however, was not the only observer of
the events of 1870 to be moved to prophecy by them. As a matter of fact,
everything has been foreseen. John Mitchel, the Irish Nationalist, whose
name is invoked by Sinn Feiners to-day, was in Paris before the 1870 war,
and wrote of the events of the war in the _Irish Citizen_ and elsewhere
during its progress. He, too, had no illusions concerning the nature of
Prussian militarism, and though his sympathies were mainly with France,
he had a word of warning for England. “Prussia,” he said, “cannot be
England’s friend. Prussia has her own aspirations and ambitions; one of
these is to be a great maritime power, or rather _the_ great maritime
Power of Europe; and nothing in the future can be more sure than that
Prussia, if successful in this struggle with France, will take Belgium,
and threaten from Antwerp the mouth of the Thames.” Things have not
worked out exactly as Mitchel prophesied, but they have worked out
nearly enough to justify his political clairvoyance. Like Marx, he was
not deceived by the events before him, and both saw in them the shadows
of the events which have now befallen us. I remark with irony that just
as the self-styled followers of the economist Marx ignore the political
judgments of their master, the professed inheritors of the Nationalist
opinions of Mitchel ignore his international opinions. It is in this
way that the garments of the great are divided, and the seamless coat
shredded to make partisan ribbons.

NORSE IN ENGLISH.—Professor C. H. Herford makes a meritorious attempt
to recall attention to the influence and value of the Norse Myths
upon English Poetry. William Morris was most powerfully and directly
influenced by the Sagas, and of Morris Professor Herford says that
“no other English poet has felt so keenly the power of Norse myth;
none has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its
earth-shaking humour, and its heights of tragic passion and pathos, to
a place in our memories, and a home in our hearts.” It will not do,
however, for (let me whisper it) who reads Morris’s poetry to-day? Has
he a home in our hearts? Are his Norse enthusiasms really anything to
us? I am not defending our generation for neglecting Morris, or for
being indifferent to the Norse theogony, of which he was a prophet. Our
age is one of prose, and the passion of prose is justice—reasonable and
regulated justice. Terrible beauty, earth-shaking humour, tragic passion,
and so on—the stuff of epic poetry—are relegated nowadays to the police
court. Moreover, the Norse mythology is not only “pagan” in the sense of
being non-Christian, it is pagan in the sense of being sub- as much as
pre-Christian, differing in this respect from the Indian mythology of the
_Mahabharata_, or the Egyptian mythology of the _Book of the Dead_. We
can never return to it without committing an act of regression, since it
is a paganism of a world inferior rather than superior to the “Christian”
world. At the same time, since we must carry all our sheaves with us in
order to enjoy the complete harvest of the human soul, it is necessary
not to drop from consciousness the heroic past, albeit a past to which we
may not return. Let it be enshrined and enjoyed in poetry and music now
that it is no longer possible in life.

THE COMEDY OF IT.—Comedy still remains a secret hid from the English
mind, and not all the efforts of Mr. John Francis Hope to bring it into
popularity will succeed where the prior efforts of Meredith have failed.
The reason, as Mr. Hope has often explained it, even more clearly than
Meredith, is not only that the spirit of Comedy demands “a society of
cultivated men and women, wherein ideas are current and perceptions
quick”—a condition certainly not now existing—but the absence of three
qualities, each of which, unfortunately, blooms luxuriantly among
us—“sentimentalism, puritanism, and bacchanalianism.” Comedy, the play
of the mind about real ideas, is quite incompatible with any one of
these three vices. If you sentimentalise, play is over, and equally it
is over if you are shocked, or if you carry the _suggested_ humour of
the situation too far. But one of these things the ordinary English man
or woman is almost bound to do; and thus it comes about that “play,” the
sparkle of common sense, is so rare among us.

Meredith certainly worked very hard to instil Comedy into the English
mind. His essay is a classic, and our only classic on the subject. And
he may be said to have written the whole of his novels in order to
illustrate his idea. Meredith’s novels are much more than a mirror held
up in Nature; they are a model held up to human nature; and, from this
point of view, they are only an appendix to the _Essay on Comedy_. The
serious way in which Meredith’s novels are read, however, is an evidence
of his failure, and it would be interesting to hear his secret comment
on the critics who acclaim him as the grand portrait-painter of women.
Did Meredith even set himself to draw a woman? Was his art not rather to
“draw out” a woman from the imperfect society his times provided him?
Were not his “portraits,” in fact, constructive criticisms of the women
he knew? I put these opinions into interrogation out of mere courtesy,
for there is really no doubt whatever about them. Meredith drew women
still to be, as he hoped they would become.

“To love comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women
well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope
for good.” That is an almost complete summary of the conditions of the
comic spirit; but there must be added the “sense of society,” the social
sense, which is quite as important. This also introduces a considerable
difficulty for us, since if “our English school had not clearly imagined
society” in 1877, when Meredith wrote, it is less than ever probable
to-day. In 1877, such people of intelligence as were living in England
were still more or less homogeneous in their general views about life.
They were not eighteenth century—the century of our highest English
social culture; but they were not yet what we have subsequently become,
discrete and warring atoms of intellectuality. It was possible when
Meredith was alive for a group of people to meet, and to create something
remotely resembling a salon. The hope of realising a “salon spirit” was
not entirely dead. To-day nothing is more improbable than even an attempt
to restore a salon. Not only would nobody undertake to do it, but to
nobody would it occur that its restoration is highly desirable. But the
salon is, as it were, the foyer of the theatre of Comedy, as the theatre
of Comedy is itself the foyer of the Civilised Life of Brilliant Common
Sense; and if we cannot re-create a salon it is perfectly certain that
the greater mysteries are beyond us. We may continue, however, to “hope
for good,” since that also is an essential of Comedy.

THE EPIC SERBS.—_Kossovo: the Heroic Songs of the Serbs_, translated by
Miss Helen Rootham, has now been published for some months. If there is
any “epic sense” alive in this country, it must surely be gratified by
the appearance of these Serbian ballads, which are much more truly epic
fragments than ballads as we understand the term. In the ballad proper
the prevailing note is tragedy—sometimes individual, sometimes family,
sometimes clan; but in the Serbian, as in the Homeric, the tragedy
expressed in the popular poetry is more spacious even than the nation;
the nation becomes the race, and the race symbolises a psychological
power, which may very well be called a god—a suffering god. Grimm said of
these ballads that there had been “nothing since Homer to compare with
them; they were the best of all times and nations.” Goethe compared them
to the _Song of Songs_. Certainly there is something Homeric in them; and
since they are sung to-day, they can be regarded as unique. Long dwelling
on them, with a view to discovering their innermost secret, convinces
me, however, that they differ from the Homeric mood in their comparative
hopelessness. Mr. Baring says in his Introduction that these Serbian
ballad-writers “saw the world with the eyes of a child and the heart
of a man.” “Child” is a word of multiple _entente_; and the difference
between the Homeric and the Serbian “childhood” is that the latter
appears doubtful whether it can grow up. Homer, we know, occasionally
let fall a sad regret that his splendid heroes should still be children;
and in the plays of Æschylus the high philosophical meditations of Homer
are considerably elaborated. But in these Serbian ballads there does not
appear to me any sign of the _mind_ of a man, however much of the heart
there may be. No Serbian Plato will ever find in them such a text as
the Greek Plato found in Homer. It is not to be wondered at. Serbia has
always been on the frontier of European civilisation, and perpetually in
the trenches. Since 1389 Serbia has been in unbroken but unsubmissive
captivity, and her deliverance from alien bondage is only an event
of yesterday. But if the elements of the future are contained in the
quintessence of these ballads, there is no sight of a new Athens in them.

ERNEST DOWSON.—Mr. Arthur Symons’s Introduction to the reprinted _Poems
and Prose_ of the late Ernest Dowson has all the characteristics of the
age to which both he and Dowson belonged. It is delicately appreciative,
and not lacking in good judgment. Mr. Symons says, for instance, that
Dowson was small enough to be overwhelmed by experiences that would
have been nourishing food to a great man. But the style and manner of
passing judgment almost completely contradict the matter of the judgment
itself, and leave us in doubt whether Mr. Symons is not judging against
his judgment. Literary criticism does not need to be literature; least
of all does it need to be belles-lettres. Yet Mr. Arthur Symons and his
whole school seem to aim at precisely this effect, that of writing in the
same style as the work criticised. Thus we find him saying of Dowson:
“all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which had
so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius”—words
and phrases which might have been written by Dowson himself. They are
apologiastic of the person when what we ask of criticism is judgment of
the quality of the style, and in the unfortunate identification of genius
with disaster and suicide they are almost an incentive to the little
artists to trade on their neuroses. I do not know whether Mr. Symons knew
Dowson personally; it is of no importance; but his bedside manner with
ailing geniuses would have been anything but tonic.

It is symptomatic of Dowson’s state of mind, though Mr. Symons misses
the subtlety of it, that he was always repeating Poe’s line: “the viol,
the violet, and the vine.” A special affection for labials and liquids
is conclusive evidence of minority, not to say infantilism; and stylists
with any ambition to excel, and to develop both themselves and their
style, will be wise to watch their “v’s” and “m’s” and “l’s,” in fact,
their labials and liquids generally. Dowson wallowed in liquids and
labials to the end of his short life; his vocabulary never grew up, and
I have no doubt that, had he been asked to quote his own best lines, he
would have pointed, not to the notorious “Cynara,” which is sufficiently
pretty-pretty, but to these lines, in which he came as near to Poe as
originality permits:—

Violets and leaves of vine
For Love that lives a day.

“One is essentially of the autumn,” he wrote of himself. But that is not
true, for Dowson was not ripe, but (I say it of course with respect)
rotten. He remained in the cradle sucking sensations long after he should
have been out in the world creating sensations. Life never got beyond his
lips.

A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION.—The writers of the _Venture_, a literary
magazine published from Bristol, and written chiefly by members of the
Postal Service, are sincere in that they are manifestly striving to
acquire a good English style; and they are modest in that they do not
pretend to have attained to it. Even better, and unlike so many current
“stylists,” they do not say that the unreachable grapes are sour,
while those only which they can pluck are the perfect fruit; in other
words, they do not try to pass off their defects as new beauties of
style. Their models are good, and their exercises are promising. The
introductory note contains, however, a little cant, rather out of key
with the prevailing mood of the journal. It demands “stalwart criticism,”
not for itself only, but for literature in general. The _London Mercury_
appeared before the world in the same austere attitude, calling in
prophetic tones for sterner criticism, more outspoken criticism,
criticism that should both say and mean something, criticism, in short,
of the kind which has for years ensured the ostracism of precisely that
kind of critic. It is the easiest thing in the world to demand such
criticism, and very popular on one condition—that it be never actually
provided. For the fact is that the criticism in question is really
killing; and how many of those who ask for stern criticism would welcome
their own extinction?

Special attention is directed to the longish poem by Mr. Francis Andrews.
It is entitled “Mother,” and the opening stanza is as follows:—

You can see from the gate which once enclosed my world
The tinted woods o’ the hill and the white road wending,
And among the nearer boughs whereon my stars were hung
The blown and shifting wraith of the blue smoke curled.

Let us stop at that and collect our impressions. It is a very dangerous
subject that Mr. Andrews has chosen. The temptation to indulge in
“sob-stuff” in reflecting on “Mother,” is well-nigh irresistible, since
the sentiment goes back to the childhood not only of the individual, but
of the race, and probably earlier. It is almost inextricably mingled with
the tears of things. But tears are not a proper accompaniment of poetry
or of beauty. The mission of Art is to dry all tears, and the utmost
severity and serenity are needed in dealing with a profoundly emotional
subject exactly to keep the tears from welling into it. That Mr. Andrews
has not succeeded is evident from the opening stanza which I have just
quoted. It is almost drenched with sentiment. Listen to the rhythm
which is nearly a lullaby in reverie, and let us ask ourselves whether
it is not calculated, quite apart from the words, to throw the reader
backwards into his mother’s arms. “Which once enclosed my world,” “and
the white road wending,” “whereon my stars were hung,” “the blown and
shifting wraith of blue smoke curled”—these are sentimental rhythms, and
their inevitable effect is to induce a reverie of the past rather than a
meditation or contemplation of the future. The mood is backward-looking,
and not forward-looking, an indulgence and not an effort of spirit. It
is quite in accordance with the diagnosis that a concluding stanza of
the poem should repeat the opening stanza, since there is no release
in a mood of this kind. In great reveries it will be observed that
the movement is forward and upwards. The action starts from a profound
sentiment, but it works its way upward to a triumphant assertion of
spiritual realisation. Look, for instance, at _Lycidas_ or _Adonais_,
both sentimental in origin, but both exalted in conclusion. There the
song springs from a dewy bed, drenched with tears, but it mounts and
mounts until it ends in the sky. Mr. Andrews keeps well to the ground,
and, as I have said, his concluding stanza is only a slight variation
of the prelude. The influence of Kipling is to be discerned at work,
especially Kipling’s “Envoi,” beginning, “There’s a whisper down the
field.” Kipling is another of the writers whose sentiment is still tied
to his mother’s apron-strings; and his “Envoi” and “Mother o’ Mine” are
almost as poisonous to poetry as Meredith’s “Love in the Valley.” We need
not be averse to sentiment as such, but the most careful discrimination
between the nest and the sky is essential to an æsthetic use of it. Let
us start in sentiment, by all means, but let us rise from it as quickly
as possible.

THE NEWEST TESTAMENT.—Various attempts have been made from time to time
to “render” the New Testament into colloquial English in order to bring
it “up-to-date.” None of these, we may congratulate ourselves, has so far
been more than a nine days’ sensation, and even less than that length
of life is destined for the latest attempt, _Sayings and Stories_, a
translation into “colloquial English” of the Sermon on the Mount and
some Parables. The Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis
at Mansfield College gives us his assurance that however “startlingly
unlike the familiar versions” these translations by Mr. Hoare may be,
they are nevertheless “actual translations and not mere paraphrases,”
and he commends the “style” to the “candid judgment of the reader.” The
prose sections, in particular, he says, are “curiously reminiscent”
of the “homely speech in which the sayings of Jesus Christ have been
preserved.” It may be so, but then, again, it may not; since, after all,
it is not a question of reproducing in colloquial English the colloquial
Greek of the original, but a question rather of reproducing in English
the meaning of the Gospel writers; and this may very well require, not
colloquial English, but the English vernacular in its highest degree
of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not sufficiently acquainted
with the popular Greek in which much of the New Testament was written
to pass a candid judgment on its quality as a Greek style, but if the
aim of the original writers was the grand style simple—as it must have
been—whether they achieved it or not, it is indubitably achieved in the
English of the authorised translation. Assuming the original, in fact,
to be “faithfully” represented in the colloquial English of Mr. Hoare,
I unhesitatingly say that the English of the authorised translation is
nearer the spirit of the original than the present translation, and, in
that sense, more fully faithful to the intentions of the original authors.

It would be tedious to cite more than one example, and I will take it in
the very first sentence of Mr. Hoare’s translation. “What joy,” he says,
“for those with the poor man’s feelings! Heaven’s Empire is for them,”
the authorised translation of which is too familiar to need quotation. I
do not see what is gained, setting aside the cost, by the substitution of
the exclamatory “What joy ...” for the ecstatic affirmation, “Blessed are
the poor.” Why again, “the poor man,” and, after that, the “poor man’s
feelings”? Why also “Heaven’s Empire” instead of “the Kingdom of Heaven”;
and why “is for them” instead of “theirs is”? The gain, even literally,
is imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning has been sacrificed.
“Blessed” is an incomparably more spiritual word than “joy”—in English,
at any rate, whatever their respective originals may indicate; and there
is a plane of difference between an incontinent ejaculation such as “What
joy,” which resembles “What fun,” and has in view rather a prospect
than a fact—and the serene and confident utterance of an assured truth.
Further, and again without regard to the literal original, “a poor man’s
feelings” must be miles away, from the intention of the original authors,
since it definitely conveys to us associations derived from social
surroundings, social reform, and what not. Was _this_ the intention of
the Sermon on the Mount, the very location of which symbolised a state
of mind above that of the dwellers in the plain of common life? Was it a
socialist or communist discourse? If not, the “poor man’s feelings,” in
our English colloquial sense, is utterly out of place, and the original
must have meant something symbolically different. The substitution,
again, of “Heaven’s Empire” for the “Kingdom of Heaven” may be, as
Professor Dodd assures us, a more correct literal translation of the
original phrase; but only a literary barbarian can contemplate it without
grieving over the lost worlds of meaning. What is the prospect of an
“Empire,” even Heaven’s Empire, to us to-day? As certainly as the phrase
“Kingdom of Heaven” has come to mean, in English, a state of beatitude,
the reversion to an “Empire” marks the decline of that state to one of
outward pomp and circumstance. The spiritual meaning which must have
characterised the intention of the Sermon on the Mount is completely
sacrificed in the substitution of Empire for Kingdom. The volume is
published by the “Congregational Union of England and Wales,” and it
serves to indicate the depths to which Nonconformist taste can sink. We
only need now this “colloquial English” version in the “nu speling” to
touch bottom.

NOTHING FOREIGN.—It is better for a nation to “import” art than to go
without it altogether; and it is the _duty_ of its critics to stimulate
home-production by importing as many as possible of the best foreign
models. That home-production may fail to find itself encouraged to the
point of creation is perfectly possible; inspiration may continue to be
wanting; but of the two states of no home-production and no imports and
no home-production and imports, the latter is to be preferred.

“Foreign” is a word that should be employed with increasing
discrimination, and, most of all, by English writers. There is an English
genius the perfect flower of which we have still to see; for perfect
English has never yet been written. But nothing foreign ought to be
alien to a race as universal in character and mentality as the English;
and in the end, the perfection of the English genius is only possible in
a spiritual synthesis of all the cultures of the world. Two tendencies
equal and opposite are at work in this direction, and have always been
in English history. On the one side, we find an ever-present tendency
towards cosmopolitanism, an excess of which would certainly result in
the complete loss of essential national characteristics. On the other
side, and usually balancing the first, we find an ever-present tendency
towards insularity and æsthetic chauvinism, the excess of which would
undoubtedly result in a caricature of the English genius—the development
of idiosyncrasies in place of style. Somewhere between these two
tendencies the critic of English art must fix his seat, in order that his
judgment may determine, as far as possible, the perfect resultant of the
blend of opposites. It is a matter, too, of time as well as of forms of
culture. Not only are not all times alike, but there is a time for import
and a time for export and a time for “protection”; but, equally, there is
room for discrimination in the kind of art that may wisely be imported or
exported. In general, we should import only what we need and export only
what other nations need, and thus, in the old mediæval sense, traffic
in treasure. Thus guarded, nothing but good can come of the greatest
possible international commerce of the arts.

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS.—Psycho-analysis is not the last word in psychological
method; and a great deal more of experiment is needed. Freud’s theory of
dreams, for instance, is excellent pioneer work in a field hitherto left
more or less uncultivated, but it is very far from being exhaustively
explanatory of the facts. Suppose it were possible to _control_ dreams—in
other words, to dream of what you will—would not the theory of Freud that
dreams are subconscious wish-fulfilments stand in need of amendment? But
to control dreams is not an utter impossibility. Sufficient experimental
work has been done in this direction to prove that the gate of dreams is
open to the intelligent will. And there is warrant for the attempt in a
good deal of mystical literature. I was reading only recently the poems
of Vaughan the Silurist, and what should I come across but the following
passage:

Being laid and dress’d for sleep, close not thy eyes
Up with the curtains; give thy soul the wing
In some good thoughts; so when the day shall rise
And thou unrak’st thy fire, those sparks will bring
New flames; besides, where these lodge, vain heats mourn
And die; that bush where God is shall not burn.

Vaughan’s lines are not great poetry, but they contain a useful
psychological hint.

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE MYSTERIES.—It would be unwise to make a dogma
of any of the present conclusions of psycho-analysis. As a means of
examining the contents of the subconscious, psycho-analysis is an
instrument of the highest value, but in the interpretation of what it
finds there, and in the conclusions it draws as to their origin—how the
apple got into the dumpling, in fact—psycho-analysis requires to be
checked by all the knowledge we have at our command. Mr. Mead has raised
the question of origins, but it is just as easy to raise the question of
interpretation. I am not satisfied that the interpretation placed by Jung
on myths is any more than correct as far as it goes, and I am disposed to
think that it does not go far enough. His reduction, for example, of a
whole group of myths to the “incest” motive, appears to me, even in the
light of his definition of incest as the “backward urge into childhood,”
to give us only a partial truth, an aspect of truth. For there is a
sense in which an “urge into childhood” is not backward but forward,
not a regression into an old, but a progression into a new childhood.
“Unless ye become as little children, ye can in no wise enter the Kingdom
of Heaven.” “Incest” is a strictly improper term to apply to such a
transformation; the new birth might suit the case better. Mr. Mead takes
the same view. The interpretations of psycho-analysis carry us back, he
suggests, to the lesser mysteries; but they need to be “elevated” in the
Thomist sense in order to carry us back to the greater. So long as it
confines itself to the “body” psycho-analysis must plainly be confined
to the lesser mysteries, for the lesser mysteries are all concerned with
generation. The greater mysteries are concerned with regeneration, and,
hence, with the “soul”; and even if we assume the “soul” to require a
body, we are outside the region of ordinary generation if that body is
not the physical body. The psycho-analytic interpretation suffers from
this confinement of its text to the physical body, since “the genuine
myth has first and foremost to do with the life of the soul.”

Another caution to remember is that reality cannot be grasped with one
faculty or with several; it requires them all. Only the whole can grasp
the whole. For this reason it is impossible to “think” reality; for
though the object of thought may be reality, all reality is not to
be thought. Similarly, it is impossible to “feel” or to “will” or to
“sense” reality completely. Each of these modes of experiencing reality
reports us only a mode of reality, and not the whole of it. Before we
can say certainly that a thing is true—before, that is, we can affirm a
reality—it must not only think true, but feel true, sense true, and do
true. The pragmatic criterion that reports a thing to be true because it
works may be contradicted by the intellectual criterion that reports a
thing to be true because it “thinks” true; and when these both agree in
their report, their common conclusion may fail to be confirmed by the
criterion of feeling that reports a thing to be true when it “feels”
true. It is from an appreciation of the many-sided nature of truth, and,
consequently, from an appreciation of the many faculties required to
grasp it, that the value set by the world on common sense is derived. For
common sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in its outcome
it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense
when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion, and the senses; when,
in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality. Otherwise a
statement may be logical, it may be pleasing, it may be practical, it may
be obvious; but only when it is all is it really common sense.

But can we, with only our present faculties, however developed and
harmonised, ever arrive at reality? It may be that in the natural order
of things, humanity implies by definition a certain state of ignorance,
and that this state is only to be transcended by the overpassing of the
“human” condition. Psycho-analysis is still only at the beginning of its
discoveries, but on the very threshold we are met by the problem of the
nascent or germinal faculties of the mind. Are there in the subconscious,
“yearning to mix themselves with life,” faculties for which “humanity”
has not yet developed end-organs? If this be so, as our fathers have told
us, the next step in evolution is to develop them.

GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS.—I am doubtful whether we have sufficiently
developed the ideas of psycho-analysis to make a fruitful parallel
possible between them and the ideas contained in Patanjali.
Psycho-analysis, as the name indicates, is more concerned with analysis
than with synthesis, and “Yoga,” whose dominant idea is re-union or
synthesis, appears to be rather a complement than an analogue of
psycho-analysis in the broad sense. Take, for example, the idea of Yoga
as a means to the re-union of the individual with the world-soul: “Thou
art That; Thou shalt become That.” According to Jung, this attempt at
re-union may be nothing more than a megalomaniac regressive introversion,
representing on a grand scale a return to the mother and infantilism.
Since it is separation from the mother (actual and metaphorical), that,
in Jung’s view, creates the basis of consciousness, any attempt to become
re-united with the “mother” is an act of regression. It is obvious from
this dissonance of doctrine that Yoga and psycho-analysis have not as yet
discovered any profound common ground; in fact, in some respects they
appear to be opposed.

I count myself among the increasing number of enthusiastic students of
psycho-analysis. It is the hopeful science of the dawning era. No new era
appears to me to be possible without it, and such a work as Dr. Ernest
Jones’s _Psycho-Analysis_ is one of the books most worth buying at the
present time. But it is elsewhere that I find the best justification
for my enthusiasm, in these words from an old Hermetic text: “The
beginning of perfection is gnosis of man; but gnosis of God is perfected
perfection.” Psycho-analysis thus appears to be the beginning of the
gnosis of man, and, in this sense, the beginning of perfection. But
it is only the beginning. Mere morality, however psychological, is no
substitute for religion; and the most profoundly and sincerely moral of
men—Ibsen, for example—end in a state of despair unless at the point at
which their morality gives out, religion of some kind comes to their aid.
Psycho-analysis, I think it will be found, is doomed, while it remains
analysis, to end in the same state of despair. It will teach us all
there is to be known about the nature of man; but the gnosis of man is
not satisfying. For it is only thereafter and when man is transcended as
an object of gnosis that perfected perfection is possible. I would not,
however, hasten by a single impatient step this second and completing
phase of the process of our learning. The gnosis of man is necessary to
the gnosis of God, and God can well look after Himself and bide our time.
Furthermore, a premature attempt to know God before we are initiated into
the mysteries of the gnosis of man must be heavily paid for. Religion
without humanity is more dangerous than humanity without religion. Let us
then settle down with concentrated attention to the problem before us,
the material and method of which are to be found in psycho-analysis. We
shall be able to afford to whistle when we are through that wood.

A CAMBRIDGE “COCOON.”—The new Cambridge magazine, _The Cocoon_, cannot
be regarded as superfluous, the editors suggest, since its point of
view is unique. It is not written by “theological” minds that “estimate
affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs,” but by
minds that hold that things “are capable of more than one truthful
interpretation.” The second of these contentions is true enough, but,
unfortunately, the new interpretations of _The Cocoon_, however truthful,
are trivial. Age, we are told, sees the Moon as just a “heavenly body”;
whereas the youth who spin _The Cocoon_ see the Moon as “a wonderful
cheese” or a prehistoric coin. Age, again, looks at the Great Pyramid
and interprets it as a pyramidal structure; but our spinning youth
interpret it as a “colossal and awe-inspiring cube,” with emphasis on
the awe. The difference between the interpretations is, to my mind,
all in favour of age. It may be true that the Moon is translatable in
terms of cheese, and the Great Pyramid may really be a cube, but the
interpretations are without interest or value. If _The Cocoon_ had said
that the Moon might conceivably be the Devil, or the Great Pyramids the
psychic meeting-place of the Rosicrucians, the new “interpretation”
might have had some interest. As it is, we are back in the nursery,
and not by any means in the nursery of the race. The earlier editorial
affirmation is not even sense, but a contradiction of sense. “To estimate
affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs,” is not
theological only, it is only means of estimating at all. Things _are_
so and so, and the unchangeability of dogma and fixity of belief are
determined, or should be, by the corresponding unchangeability and
fixity of things as they are. When we find that the nature of things
changes arbitrarily from day to day, we may consider the advisability
of changing our belief that it is fixed as rapidly as nature itself is
transformed. Otherwise, if anything we say is to be “true,” it must be
because there is a fixed and unchangeable nature to which our dogmas and
beliefs refer. The alternative is not youth and imagination and “other
truthful interpretations of things,” it is nursery chatter about cheese
and pyramidal cubes.

Pass the articles on Balzac and D’Annunzio, both of which might have
been written by Old Age or even by Middle Age, and let us see how
the state of mind calling itself Youth deals with history. Remember
that Cambridge, where the Cocoons come from, regards itself as “the
nursery of the nation”; and then listen to Mr. L. J. Cheney, no doubt
one of our future representatives on the World-League, preparing his
programme. “It is stupid,” he says, “to write history or to study
history, on the assumption that we Western Europeans are the salt of
the earth.” And Mr. H. Y. Oulsham, on the same subject, remarks that
“we must keep the sociological aim of history in sight”; ... “the
be-all and end-all of history is sociology.” No wonder the _Manchester
Guardian_—the guardian, that is to say, of Manchester—found _The
Cocoon_ so promising, for the opinions expressed by Mr. Cheney and Mr.
Oulsham are embryos of _Manchester Guardian_ “leaders,” they are _so_
cosmopolitan and _so_ humanitarian. Apart, however, from their extreme
Age, bordering on decrepitude, I find in them not even an unimportant
“truthful interpretation.” It is not true that sociology is the be-all
and end-all of history as it ought to be written; and to deny, in the
name of history, that Western Europe _is_ the salt of the earth (however
it may have lost its savour) is just to deny and repudiate European
world-responsibility. Things, again, _are_ so and so, and not otherwise,
let Youth interpret them as it will. Europe _is_ the responsible mind of
the world, and the be-all and end-all of history is the fulfilment of a
world-purpose whose objective is more than merely human sociology. If the
“nursery of the nation” has a different interpretation, the nursery of
the nation is wrong.

_The Cocoon_ is under the impression that there is something valuable
in Youth in years; that Youth in years is the only kind of Youth; that
Youth in years is Youth indeed. Our first birth, however, is only a sleep
and a forgetting, and real Youth comes only after the second-birth.
The once-born are creatures of pure circumstance, owing their youth
to the accident of time alone; but the twice-born are self-creations
defying time; they never grow old, though they are always growing up.
_The Cocoon_ fairly describes Youth as “a condition of energy and
receptiveness”; but is Youth in years necessarily of that kind? As for
receptiveness, we have already seen that the “historians” of the “nursery
of the nation” either hark back or hark forward to ideas long since dead.
And as for “energy,” barring its animal manifestation in sport, the
highest culture demands the highest concentration of energy, and where
shall we find it but in the twice-born? Whoever can make a turn upon
himself and his habits of thought is young, whatever his years. On the
other hand, whoever cannot be “bothered” to think afresh, but contents
himself with what he used to think is old and lacking in energy, whatever
his years or his blues.

It is the fate of the once-born to become pessimistic as they grow
old, as it is privilege of the twice-born to increase in hope as they
wax in youth. One of our Cocoonists, therefore, must be prematurely
old in the former sense, since he lifts up his lamentation that “the
beauty of English prose is already mainly a thing of the past.” It is
not a sentiment for “the nursery of the nation,” and it is altogether
untrue. Beautiful English prose has certainly been written, but the best
is yet to be. Beautiful qualities of English prose we have certainly
had revealed to us in abundance, and some of our greatest writers have
succeeded in making an anthology in their style of two or three or
even four of them; but an English prose with all its known qualities
harmonised and synthesised in a single style is a thing of the future
and not of the past. There are qualities in English still unrevealed. A
great deal of “energy,” however, will be necessary to such a synthesis.
Its creator must be not only twice-born, but, as the _Mahabharata_
says of Indian sages, “blazing with spiritual energy,” for the fire of
imagination to fuse all the qualities of English prose into a style is
too intense for ordinary mortals.

AN OXFORD MISCELLANY.—_A Queen’s College Miscellany_ is filially
dedicated to Walter Pater and Ernest Dowson, both of whom, it seems, were
Queen’s men in their day. Still another association with these writers
is sought in the comparison of the college coterie from which each arose
with the group responsible for the present miscellany. Something of the
nature of a cult is indicated; and I take it that the various items of
the miscellany are “corporate” as well as individual. The foreword says
as much. In a vocabulary that seems most ominous for literature, we are
referred to a “literary team” whose “output” is here presented, and to
an attempt to “prove that team-work is possible in prose and poetry.”
And the miscellany is the first “harvest” of “the refined product.” My
opinion of “team-work” is certainly that it is possible both in prose and
poetry. No individual has ever by himself written either great prose or
great poetry, and the greatest literary works of the world, not excepting
Shakespeare, are of anonymous—that is to say, of collective—authorship.
The elevation of the group-consciousness, however, is everything, and I
need not remark that a group whose highest aim is to emulate Pater and
Dowson, and whose considered “foreword” contains such terminological
ineptitudes as “team-work,” “output,” and the “harvest” of a “refined
product,” is not yet upon a very high plane of discourse.

THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE.—A correspondent has made the admirable
suggestion that a new _Don Quixote_ be written to slay the dragon of
Capitalism with the pen of satire. The suggestion is unconditionally
free; no acknowledgment of its source need be made; but anybody is
at liberty to begin on the work at once. Some excellent arguments are
adduced why the work should be undertaken. Capitalism has long troubled
the land, and its evils are generally admitted. Reason has failed to
make any impression on the beast, and sentiment appears almost to be
its favourite food. Satire, therefore, is plainly indicated as the
appropriate weapon, and at its crack, my correspondent suggests, the
beast would dissolve into nothing amidst universal laughter. What more
need be said but “Cervantes, forward!”?

Unfortunately my correspondent proceeds to weaken his appeal by affirming
that Cervantes himself had Capitalism in his mind when writing certain
chapters of the First Book of _Don Quixote_. In Chaps. 44 and 45 it
appears to me, he says, that Don Quixote’s identity as a capitalist is
undoubted. Sancho Panza’s identity with the mass of labour is equally
undoubted; and the middle classes are represented by a number of ladies
and gentlemen, a canon, a judge, and a doctor. These chapters standing
by themselves would be a good allegorical explanation of the present
financial position. But why of the “present” position, if satire is
capable of dissolving Capitalism in laughter? Without questioning the
allegorical character of the chapters referred to, which may, for all
I dare say, be a perfect anticipation of the economics of Douglas—it
is not encouraging to our present-day Cervantes to be told that their
proposed method has already been tried by a master only to leave the
dragon of Capitalism still to be tickled to death. Now one comes to think
of it, not even Chivalry, an even more undoubted object than Capitalism
of Cervantes’s satire, really died of the shock, for the very good
reason that it was dead before Cervantes rained his laughter upon it.
Even Cervantes’s satire killed nothing, and the task to be undertaken
for my correspondent is therefore greater than Cervantes’. In the spirit
of Squeers, I can only suggest that he who spells window, w-i-n-d-e-r,
should clean it. My correspondent, forward!

The power of satire is usually much exaggerated; as a matter of fact, it
is one of the least effective of psychological weapons. Almost anything
can turn its edge. Juvenal is not reported to have done much more than
incur the dislike of his contemporaries; and Swift, the most serious
satirist since Juvenal, never effected anything by satire alone. His two
most immediately effective pamphlets, the _Drapier’s Letters_, and the
_Conduct of the Allies_, contained passages of satire, irony, and every
other sort of appeal, but neither of them can be called satirical as a
whole. Satire, like wit, is effective in small doses given at opportune
moments; but, as in the case of wit, sustained satire defeats its own
object. It owes what power it wields to the contrast in which it stands
to the prevailing mood of the work in which it appears: its unexpected
appearance therein. Surprise is the condition of its doing any work at
all. Surely if this were not the case the satirical journals of, let
us say, Germany or France, would have dissolved in laughter the vices
aimed at long before now. But satire is expected of them, is discounted
in advance, and positively adds to the attractiveness of the objects
satirised. I will not go so far as to say that Cervantes recalled
dead Chivalry to life by satirising it, though the crop of romances
that followed _Don Quixote_ in England may almost be said to justify
the charge; but it can safely be said that a satire directed against
Capitalism would lengthen rather than contract the life of the dragon, by
adding amusement to its claims to exist.

THE “DIAL” OF AMERICA.—The American _Dial_ is perhaps the most fully
realised of all the promising literary magazines now current in the
world. It is in all probability considerably in advance of the American
reading public for whom it is intended, but it is all the better on
that account. Culture is always called upon to sacrifice popularity,
and, usually, even its existence, in the interests of civilisation;
for civilisation is the child of culture, and has in general as little
consideration for culture as a human child for its own education. The
custodians of culture (or the disinterested pursuit of human perfection)
are the adults of the race of which civilisation is the children’s
school: and, fortunately or unfortunately, in these democratic days,
their function is largely under the control of their pupils. Gone are
the times when a Brahmanic caste can lay down and enforce a curriculum
of education for its civilisation. Modern civilisations believe
themselves to be, and possibly are, “old enough” to exercise their
right of selecting their teachers. It cannot be said, as yet, that
they exercise their choice with remarkable discretion, but the process
of popular self-education, if slow, may at any rate be expected to be
sure. In any event there is no use in kicking against the stars. If the
forces of culture are to rule modern civilisations, they must do so
constitutionally. The days of the dictatorship of the intelligentzia are
past.

There are two kinds of judgment which it is essential for civilisation
to acquire: judgment of men and judgment of things. Things are of
primary importance, but so also are persons. One is not before or
after the other. For instance, culture itself is a “thing” in the
philosophic sense; it is a reality in the world of ideas; but of quite
equal importance in our mixed world of ideas and individuals, are the
actual persons and personalities claiming to embody and direct culture.
Hence the transcendent importance of criticism next to creation in
both spheres: criticism of personalities and criticism of “works.” The
mistaking of a little man for a great man, or the reverse, may easily
mean the delay of the work of culture for whole generations. And,
equally, the confusion of the objects of culture with the objects of
civilisation may spell the ruin of a nation. Few critics realise the
magnitude and responsibility of their function, or the degree to which
personal disinterestedness is indispensable to its fulfilment. Holding
the office of inspectors of the munitions of culture, they are often
guilty of “passing” contraband upon the public, and, still more often,
of failing to ensure delivery of Culture’s most effective weapons. More
seriousness is needed, very much more, in matters of criticism. We must
be capable of killing if we are to be capable of giving life.

The _Dial_ is particularly to be praised for its courageous criticism
of great dead Americans. America, like Europe, suffers from necrophily,
a kind of worship of the dead. Indeed, as a good Injun was synonymous
with a dead Injun, a great American writer is usually a dead American
writer. All his faults die with him, and only his myth remains, with the
result that people who would not have acknowledged the existence of, let
us say, Whitman living, will not acknowledge a fault in Whitman dead.
For a nation thus under a critical statute of Mortmain, the utterance of
what seems like blasphemy is a necessary part of their education. They
must know that the dead great, by very virtue of their greatness and the
survival of their works, are still alive and active, and that the same
kind of criticism must be kept playing on them as upon the living forces.
The _Dial_ reviewers show no disposition to shirk this unpleasing duty.
One by one, as the occasion suggests, the dead great are given the honour
of living criticism, and treated as the immortal present which they are.
Since their spirits go marching on, criticism must go marching along with
them.

One of the recently so honoured dead in the pages of the _Dial_ has been
Whitman; and in an essay on _Whitman’s Love Affairs_ Mr. Emery Holloway
throws a fresh light on an old but still obscure subject. His “love
affairs” were obviously more matter for criticism in Whitman than in
some other writers, since Whitman was pre-eminently an autobiographical
writer who sang himself. What, then, does Mr. Holloway find? A little
surprisingly—at least to readers who have not already divined Whitman’s
secret—that Whitman “suffered” from love, and struggled against it
rather as a raw tyro than as the “master of himself” of his poetic
fiction. In some private diaries of Whitman, quoted by Mr. Holloway,
we are presented with the spectacle of Whitman grappling with his own
soul after the manner of saints mortifying the flesh, or, as I would
suggest, after the distinctively modern fashion. Instinct was at war
with reason, even in Whitman, and, in the end, as usually occurs with
modern men, it was reason that won. Mr. Holloway divides Whitman’s works
between two periods: the first, in which he sang “untrammelled natural
impulses”; and a second, in which he was concerned about democracy and
the immortality of the soul; in short, with reason. And between these two
periods, or worlds of discourse, Mr. Holloway tells us, was a purgatory,
in which Whitman’s soul was tried as by fire. The diaries already
mentioned contain some of the records of Whitman’s conflict with himself.
Here, for example, is an entry bearing all the marks of a painful
resolution. “I must,” he says, “pursue her no more” ... and resolve “to
give up absolutely and for good, from this present hour, the feverish,
fluctuating, useless, undignified pursuit of 164 ... avoid seeing her
or any meeting whatever from this hour forth, for life.” The reader is
to be pitied who does not understand, however dimly, what Whitman must
have gone through in imagination and reality to confide to the author
of _Leaves of Grass_ such a shocking confession. He emerged from the
experience with that past behind him, but still, I think, unresolved. For
it was not his to reconcile instinct with reason in an epigenesis; he
passed from one phase to the next without carrying his sheaves with him.
From being within sight of real greatness, he declined to the stature of
a great American.

Following its faithful treatment of the Whitman myth, the _Dial_ examines
the case of Mark Twain. It is undoubtedly a pathological case, and not
only Mark Twain but America was the victim in it. A nation suffers the
fate of its great men; as is their odyssey so is the odyssey of the
nation to which they belong. Does a great man in any nation become
corrupt; does he succumb to falsehood and to the morality of the herd?
Even so his nation is on the downward path. On the other hand, does he
maintain his integrity, even though his life should pay for it? There
is a sign that his nation also will battle through. From this point of
view, Mark Twain presents the spectacle both of a tragedy and a portent.
Nobody can read his works without realising the essential truthfulness of
the man, his marvellous capacity for intellectual honesty, his unerring
perception of the norm of things. Mark Twain, permitted and encouraged
to pass free judgment upon American and human life, might have been one
of the cultural forces of the new world; he was one of God’s best gifts
to America. We know, however, what America did for Mark Twain; it slowly
but surely emasculated him in the supposed interests of the female (not
the feminine) in the American soul. Under the influence of his wife who,
as he said, not only “edited everything I wrote, but edited me,” under
the similar influence of all that was bourgeois in America—Mark Twain
consented to “make fun” of everything he held dear. Talents and powers
which it is spiritual death to trade, Mark Twain prostituted for the
amusement of a people whose deepest need was high seriousness. As Mr.
Lovett says, Mark Twain “flattered a country without art, letters, beauty
or standards to laugh at these things.” The judgment is severe, but it is
just; and Mark Twain, I believe, would be the first to acquiesce in it.

That he preserved, in the back of his mind, his spiritual vision and
knowledge, there can be no doubt. He sinned not only against the light,
but in the light. One or two revealing phrases in his works have escaped
the censorship of the female American he married. “In our country,” he
said, “we have three unspeakably precious things: freedom of thought,
freedom of speech, and the prudence never to practise either.” It must
be admitted that this is a “snag” in the smooth current of a work of
amusement; it betokened the existence of depths and danger. But it is
nothing to the remarks let off in conversation on the rare occasions when
the censor was absent. “I’ve a good mind,” he once said to a friend, “to
blow the gaff on the whole damned human race.” It is tragedy, indeed,
that he never did. We have the gaff blown on us all too seldom, and
usually by men whose idiosyncrasies and abnormalities allow us to ignore
them. Mark Twain was such a normal man that his blowing of the gaff could
not possibly have been attributed to a neurotic complex derived from
infantile suppression: it would have been the judgment of man upon Man.
His failure to bestow this inestimable gift upon America and the world we
owe to America, and if, as I have said, a nation suffers the fate of its
great men, we may be sure that America will pay for it.

AMERICA REGRESSING.—Just when we in Europe were beginning to envy America
her promise, contrasting it with the winter of our own discontent, “the
authorities” (as one might say the furies, the parcæ or the weird
sisters) have descended upon our unfortunate but deserving friend,
the _Little Review_, and suspended its mail service on account of its
publication of a chapter of Mr. James Joyce’s new novel, _Ulysses_. That
such an absurd act of puritanic spleen should be possible after and
before years of world-war is evidence that spiritual meanness is hard to
transcend; and it confirms the justice or, at least, the apprehension
expressed in Mr. Ezra Pound’s _bon mot_ that the U.S.A. should be renamed
the Y.M.C.A. Not only is the _Little Review_ perfectly harmless; would to
heaven, indeed, that it were, or could be otherwise, for never can any
good be done by something incapable of doing harm; but the _Ulysses_ of
Mr. James Joyce is one of the most interesting symptoms in the present
literary world, and its publication is very nearly a public obligation.
Such sincerity, such energy, such fearlessness as Mr. Joyce’s are rare
in any epoch, and most of all in our own, and on that very account they
demand to be given at least the freedom of the Press. What the giant
America can fear from Mr. Joyce or from his publication in the _Little
Review_ passes understanding. Abounding in every variety of crime
and stupidity as America is, even if _Ulysses_ were a literary crime
committed in a journal of the largest circulation, one more or less could
not make much difference to America. But _Ulysses_ is no crime; but a
noble experiment; and its suppression will sadden the virtuous at the
same time that it gratifies the base. America, we my be sure, is not
going to “get culture” by stamping upon every germ of new life. America’s
present degree of cultural toleration may ensure a herb-garden, but not a
flower will grow upon the soil of Comstock.

Among the scores of interesting experiments in composition and style
exhibited in _Ulysses_, not the least novel is Mr. Joyce’s attempt to
develop a theory of harmonics in language. By compounding nouns with
adjectives and adjectives with adverbs, Mr. Joyce tries to convey to
the reader a complex of qualities or ideas simultaneously instead of
successively. “Eglintoneyes looked up skybrightly.” In such a sentence
agglutination has been carried beyond the ordinary level of particles
into the plane of words, and the effect is to present a multitude of
images as if they were one. Thus “a new and complex knowledge of self”
finds its “appropriate medium of expression in terms of art.” I am not
so sure that Mr. Joyce has not carried the experiment too far, but this,
again, is a virtue rather than a defect in a pioneer. Moreover, the world
needs a few studio-magazines like the _Little Review_, and a few studio
writers like Mr. James Joyce. What does it matter if, in his enthusiasm,
Mr. Joyce travels beyond the limits of good taste, beyond, that is, the
already cultivated, if only a single new literary convention is thereby
brought into common use?

THE BEST IS YET TO BE.—“One dreams of a prose,” says _The Times Literary
Supplement_, “that has never yet been written in English, though the
language is made for it and there are minds not incapable of it, a prose
dealing with the greatest things quietly and justly as men deal with
them in their secret meditations ... the English Plato is still to be.”
Alas, however, that _The Times_ should be just a little misled, for the
“quiet” of meditation is not the real genius of the English language,
and the emphasis in the phrase, “English Plato,” should be on the word
English. Greek Plato translated into English would not give us what we
are seeking. What we need is Plato’s mind. It is characteristic, however,
this demand for quiet, or, rather, quietism, in _The Times Literary
Supplement_, since, on the whole, the _Supplement_ is about the deadest
mouse in the world of journalism. Above all, it is suggested, writers
must keep their voices low, speak in whispers, even, perhaps, a little
under their breath as if in meditation, in case—well, in case of what? Is
there not a _hush_ in the _Literary Supplement_ which is not the hush of
reverence for literature, but of fear and prudence?

Our writer observes very acutely that prose is usually thought greatest
when it is nearest poetry, and he properly dissents from this common
opinion. Prose, we should say, can only be great as it differs from
poetry, and the greatest prose is furthest away from poetry. And the
difference, we are told, is the difference between love and justice.
The cardinal virtue of poetry, he says, is love, while the cardinal
virtue of prose is justice. May we not rather say that the difference
is one of plane of consciousness, prose being at the highest level of
the rational mind, and poetry at the highest level of the spiritual
mind? Yes, but then, in all probability, _The Times_ would regard us as
fanciful, for note, anything _exact_ about spiritual things is likely
to be dismissed by the _Literary Supplement_ as fanciful and dangerous.
Again, “prose is the achievement of civilisation”; in other words,
it is the norm of social life. True, but let me add that it is the
register of Culture, marking the degree to which Culture has affected
its surrounding civilisation. Prose without poetry is impossible, and
the greatest prose presupposes the culture of the greatest poetry, for
the “justice” of prose is only the “love” of poetry _with seeing eyes_.
Finally, we must agree with our essayist when he quotes with approval
the excellent observation of Mr. Sturge Moore that “simplicity _may_ be a
form of decadence.” Simplicity is a sign of decadence when it sacrifices
profundity of thought to simplicity of expression—as in the classical
case of Voltaire, who positively dared not think deeply lest he should
be unable to write clearly, clarity of expression being more to him (and
often to the French genius generally) than depth of thought. And writers
like Mr. Clutton Brock are just as certainly symptoms of the decadence of
simplicity in our own time and place. On the other hand, I still dream
of a profound simplicity, the style of which is transparent over depths;
and in this, if no English writer has ever been a master, Lao Tse is
the world’s model, at least in fragments. We must learn to distinguish
between a puerile and a virile simplicity, between innocence and virtue;
and perhaps the first exercise in such judgment should be to put the
_Literary Supplement_ in its proper place.

This brings us back to quietism and the question whether the perfect
English prose would deal with the highest things in the spirit of
man’s secret meditations. I do more than doubt it. Secret meditation
is incommunicably secret; it is thought without words, and disposed to
poetry rather than prose. I suspect our writer really means rumination,
in which case, however, he is no better off. For the genius of the
language does not run easily in reverie, it is a language that loves
action and life. It has few cloistered virtues, and to employ it for
cloistered thought would be to use only one or two of its many stops,
and those not the most characteristic. Lastly, I cannot but think that
the choice of “quietism” as the aim of perfect English prose is a sign
of decadence, for it indicates the will to retire into oneself, and to
cease to “act” by means of words. The scene it calls up is familiar and
bourgeois: a small circle of “cultured” men week-ending in a luxurious
country house and confessing “intimately” their literary weaknesses.
It is the prevalent atmosphere of the _Literary Supplement_ and the
_Spectator_. It is essential that there be “equality” between them, that
none should presume to wish to inspire another to any “new way of life,”
that action, in short, should be excluded. Once granted these conditions
of sterility, and the perfect prose, we are told, would emerge.

The rest of us, however, have a very different conception of the perfect
English prose. The perfect English prose will be anything but a sedative
after a full meal of action. It will be not only action itself, but the
cause of action, and its deliberate aim will be to intensify and refine
action and to raise action to the level of a fine art. Anything less
than a real effect upon real people in a real world is beneath the
dignity even of common prose. The very “leaders” in the penny journals
aim at leaving a mark upon events. Is the perfect prose to be without
hope of posterity? On second thoughts, I shall withdraw Plato from the
position of model in which I put him. Plato, it is evident, is likely
to be abused; without intending it, his mood, translated into English,
appears to be compatible only with luxurious ease; he is read by modern
Epicureans. And I shall put in Plato’s place Demosthenes, the model
of Swift, the greatest English writer the world has yet seen. Yes,
Demosthenes let it be, since Plato is being used for balsam. We seek an
English Demosthenes.

Index

_Adonais_, 178

“Æ,” 117-34

Andrews, Francis, 176

_Anglo-Irish Essays_ (John Eglinton), 74

_Apology, The_ (Plato), 97

_Appreciations and Depreciations_ (Boyd), 76

Archer, William, 59

Arnold, Matthew, 82

_Art and Letters_, 136

Asquith, H. H., 68

_Athenæum, The_, 70

Baring, Maurice, 27

Beardsley, Aubrey, 115

Beerbohm, Max, 23

Bell, Clive, 72

Benda, Julien, 81

_Beyond Good and Evil_ (Nietzsche), 133

_Bhagavad Gita, The_, 44, 112

_Biographia Literaria_ (Coleridge), 69

Björnson, B., 29

Blake, William, 134

Boutroux, Emile, 69

Boyd, E. A., 76

_Breaking the Spell_ (Macan), 90

Brock, A. Clutton, 211

Caine, Hall, 28

_Call, The_, 165

_Candle of Vision, The_ (“Æ”), 117

Carlyle, Thomas, 36

_Causes profondes de la Guerre, Les_ (Hovelaque), 155

Cervantes, 197

Cheney, L. J., 192

Chesterton, G. K., 60, 155

Cicero, 96

_Clarté Française, La_ (Vannier), 65

_Cocoon, The_, 191

Coleridge, S. T., 29, 35, 69

Conrad, Joseph, 27

_Contemporary Drama of Ireland_ (Boyd), 76

_Contingency of the Laws of Nature, The_ (Boutroux), 69

_Cratylus, The_ (Plato), 130

Crees, G., 20

_Daily Mail, The_, 89

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 96

De Quincey, 95

_Dial, The_, 199

_Distribution of Wealth, The_ (Thompson), 162

Dodd, Professor, 181

_Don Quixote_ (Cervantes), 196

Dostoievski, F., 28

Douglas, C. H., 198

Dowson, Ernest, 173, 195

_Drapier’s Letters, The_ (Swift), 96, 198

_Dublin Review, The_, 161

“Eglinton, John,” 74

_Egyptian Book of the Dead_, 168

Ellis, Henry, 134

Epstein, Jacob, 46

Ervine, St. John, 76

_Essay on Comedy, An_ (Meredith), 168

_Euphues_, 61

Fielding, Henry, 139

Flaubert, G., 65

_Flight of the Eagle, The_ (Standish O’Grady), 79

Fontenelle, 15

Fowler, Warde, 88

_French Literary Studies_ (Rudmose-Brown), 73

Freud, Professor, 127

_Funeral Oration, The_ (Pericles), 66

Garnett, Edward, 27

Gaudier-Brzeska, 46

Gwynn, Stephen, 75

Hales, Professor, 49

Harland, Henry, 23

Haumont, M., 27

Heraclitus, 39

Herford, Professor C. H., 167

Hoare, —., 179

Hobbes of Malmesbury, 67

Holloway, Emery, 202

_Homage to Propertius_ (Pound), 49

_Homeland_ (Izzard), 89

Hope, John Francis, 168

Hovelaque, M., 155

Hudson, W. H., 88

Ibsen, Henrik, 29

_International Journal of Ethics, The_, 36

_Irish Books and Irish People_ (Gwynn), 75

_Irish Citizen, The_, 166

Izzard, P. W. D., 89

James, Henry, 22-7

Jones, Dr. Ernest, 189

Jonson, Ben, 98

Jowett, B., 67

Joyce, James, 47, 207

Jung, Professor, 185, 189

Juvenal, 198

Kautsky, K., 33

Kipling, Rudyard, 178

_Kossovo: Heroic Songs of the Serbs_ (Rootham), 171

Landor, W. S., 15

Lawrence, D. H., 23

_Lay Sermons_ (Coleridge), 35

_Leaves of Grass_ (Whitman), 204

Leuba, Professor, 114

Levy, Dr. Oscar, 40

Lewis, Wyndham, 47, 52

_Little Review, The_, 22, 47, 52, 63, 207

_Lockhart’s Life of Scott_, 16

_London Mercury, The_, 152, 176

Lovett, R. A., 205

_Lycidas_, 178

Lyttelton, Dr., 17

Macan, Dr., 90

Mackenna, Stephen, 29

_Mahabharata, The_, 30, 135, 168, 195

_Manchester Guardian, The_, 193

Mann, Henry, 156

Martyn, Edward, 77

Marx, Karl, 33, 161-7

Mayne, Ethel Coburn, 22

Mead, G. R. S., 68, 112, 185

Menger, Dr., 162

Meredith, George, 20, 168, 178

_Middle Years, The_ (Henry James), 24

Mitchel, John, 166

Moore, T. Sturge, 211

Morris, William, 167

_New Age, The_, 86

Newman, Henry, 155

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 37-41, 53, 55, 133

O’Grady, Standish, 79-81

Oulsham, H. Y., 192

Patanjali, 132, 188

Pater, Walter, 195

Pericles, 66

Plato, 130, 209

Plotinus, 29

_Poems and Prose_ (Dowson), 173

_Pot-boilers_ (Clive Bell), 70

Pound, Ezra, 15, 49, 52-63, 104, 207

_Pound, Ezra: His Metric and Poetry_, 57

Propertius, 49

_Psycho-Analysis_ (Dr. Ernest Jones), 189

_Queen’s College Miscellany, A_, 195

_Quest, The_, 68, 111

Rahilly, Professor A., 162

Randall, A. E., 112

Richardson, Samuel, 139

Rootham, Helen, 171

Rosebery, Lord, 68

Rousseau, J. J., 38

Rudmose-Brown, Professor, 73

Russell, Bertrand, 34

_Sayings and Stories_ (Hoare), 179

Sedlák, Francis, 35

_Selected Essays and Passages_ (Standish O’Grady), 80

_Sentiments de Critias, Les_ (Benda), 81

_Sentimental Journey, A_ (Sterne), 92

Shakespeare, 60, 91, 151, 154

Shankara, 30

Shaw, G. Bernard, 82

_Song of Songs_, 172

Soundy, W. Mattingly, 64

_Spectator, The_, 211

Squire, J. C., 152

Stendhal, 95

Sterne, Laurence, 92

Stewart, Herbert, 36

Strachey, Lytton, 63

Swift, Benjamin, 95, 198

Symons, Arthur, 115, 173

Thompson, William, 162

Thoreau, H. D., 74

_Times, The_, 45, 145, 153

_Times Literary Supplement, The_, 143, 160, 209

_Tom Jones_ (Fielding), 140

Turgenev, 27

Twain, Mark, 204

Tweed, John, 45

_Ulysses_ (Joyce), 47, 207

Vannier, M., 65

Vaughan, Henry, 184

_Venture, The_, 175

Voltaire, 211

Vyasa, 30

Walpole, Horace, 103

Wells, H. G., 36

Whitman, Walt, 38, 202

_Whitman’s Love Affairs_ (Holloway), 202

Wilde, Oscar, 55

Wordsworth, William, 119

Yeats, W. B., 134

_Yellow Book, The_, 23

_Printed in Great Britain by_
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON

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