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Title: Aspects of Literature

Author: John Middleton Murry

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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPECTS OF
LITERATURE ***

ASPECTS OF

LITERATURE

J. MIDDLETON MURRY

NEW YORK: ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXX

Copyright, 1920

Printed in Great Britain

TO BRUCE RICHMOND TO WHOSE GENEROUS
ENCOURAGEMENT I OWE SO MUCH

Preface

Two of these essays, 'The Function of Criticism' and 'The Religion of
Rousseau,' were contributed to the Times Literary Supplement; that on
'The Poetry of Edward Thomas' in the Nation; all the rest save one
have appeared in the Athenæum.

The essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, with two
exceptions. The second part of the essay on Tchehov has been placed with
the first for convenience, although in order of thought it should follow the
essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness.' More important, I have placed 'The
Function of Criticism' first although it was written last, because it treats of
the broad problem of literary criticism, suggests a standard of values
implicit elsewhere in the book, and thus to some degree affords an
introduction to the remaining essays.

But the degree is not great, as the critical reader will quickly discover for
himself. I ask him not to indulge the temptation of convicting me out of my
own mouth. I am aware that my practice is often inconsistent with my
professions; and I ask the reader to remember that the professions were
made after the practice and to a considerable extent as the result of it. The
practice came first, and if I could reasonably expect so much of the reader I
would ask him to read 'The Function of Criticism' once more when he has
reached the end of the book.

I make no apology for not having rewritten the essays. As a critic I enjoy
nothing more than to trace the development of a writer's attitude through its
various phases; I could do no less than afford my readers the opportunity of
a similar enjoyment in my own case. They may be assured that none of the
essays have suffered any substantial alteration, even where, for instance in
the case of the incidental and (I am now persuaded) quite inadequate
estimate of Chaucer in 'The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield,' my view has since
completely changed. Here and there I have recast expressions which,
though not sufficiently conveying my meaning, had been passed in the haste
of journalistic production. But I have nowhere tried to adjust earlier to later
points of view. I am aware that these points of view are often difficult to
reconcile; that, for instance, 'æsthetic' in the essay on Tchehov has a much
narrower meaning than it bears in 'The Function of Criticism'; that the essay
on 'The Religion of Rousseau' is criticism of a kind which I deprecate as
insufficient in the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness,' because it lacks that
reference to life as a whole which I have come to regard as essential to
criticism; and that in this latter essay I use the word 'moral' (for instance in
the phrase 'The values of literature are in the last resort moral') in a sense
which is never exactly defined. The key to most of these discrepancies will,
I hope, be found in the introductory essay on 'The Function of Criticism.'

May, 1920.

Contents

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 1

THE RELIGION OF ROUSSEAU 15

THE POETRY OF EDWARD THOMAS 29

MR YEATS'S SWAN SONG 39

THE WISDOM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 46

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 52

THE PROBLEM OF KEATS 62

THOUGHTS ON TCHEHOV 76

AMERICAN POETRY 91

RONSARD 99

SAMUEL BUTLER 107

THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY 121

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ENGLISH POETRY 139

THE NOSTALGIA OF MR MASEFIELD 150

THE LOST LEGIONS 157

THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS 167

POETRY AND CRITICISM 176

COLERIDGE'S CRITICISM 184

SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM 194

The Function of Criticism

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

This sense of incalculability, which has been aroused by the prodigious
literary efflorescence of late years, reacts upon its cause; and the reaction
tends by many different paths to express itself finally in the ventilation of
problems that hinge about criticism. There is a general feeling that the
growth of the young plant has been too luxuriant; a desire to have it
vigorously pruned by a capable gardener, in order that its strength may be
gathered together to produce a more perfect fruit. There is also a sense that
if the lusus naturæ, the writer of genius, were to appear, there ought to be a
person or an organisation capable of recognising him, however unexpected
his scent or the shape of his leaves. Both these tasks fall upon criticism. The
younger generation looks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a
gardener whom it can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that
there is none.

There is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we have
learned to respect. There are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but no critics,
says another disrespectful young man. Oh, for some more Scotch

Reviewers to settle the hash of our English bards, sighs a third. And the
London Mercury, after whetting our appetite by announcing that it proposed
to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, still leaves us a little in
the dark as to what these standards are. Mr T.S. Eliot deals more kindly, if
more frigidly, with us in the Monthly Chapbook. There are, he says, three
kinds of criticism—the historical, the philosophic, and the purely literary.

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

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

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

We have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism of literature is a
kind apart. The historical critic approaches literature as the manifestation of
an evolutionary process in which all the phases are of equal value.
Essentially, he has no concern with the greater or less literary excellence of
the objects whose history he traces—their existence is alone sufficient for
him; a bad book is as important as a good one, and much more important
than a good one if it exercised, as bad books have a way of doing, a real

influence on the course of literature. In practice, it is true, the historical
critic generally fails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity. He either
begins by making judgments of value for himself, or accepts those
judgments which have been endorsed by tradition. He fastens upon a
number of outstanding figures and more or less deliberately represents the
process as from culmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitrary
foreshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phases which
he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of the group
of writers which it includes. The individuality, the quintessence, of a writer
lies completely outside his view.

We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in theory,
and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the author of a
chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we isolate the
philosophic critic in the same way? And what exactly is a philosophic
critic? Is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in which art and literature
have their places, a critic who therefore approaches literature with a definite
conception of it as one among many parallel manifestations of the human
spirit, and with a system of values derived from his metaphysical scheme?
Hegel and Croce are philosophical critics in this sense, and Aristotle is not,
as far as we can judge from the Poetics, wherein he considers the literary
work of Greece as an isolated phenomenon, and examines it in and for
itself. But for the moment, and with the uneasy sense that we have not
thoroughly laid the ghost of philosophic criticism, we will assume that we
have isolated him, and pass to the consideration of the pure literary critic, if
indeed we can find him.

What does he do? How shall we recognise him? Mr Eliot puts before us
Coleridge and Aristotle and Dryden as literary critics par excellence
arranged in an ascending scale of purity. The concatenation is curious, for
these were men possessed of very different interests and faculties of mind;

and it would occur to few to place Dryden, as a critic, at their head. The
living centre of Aristotle's criticism is a conception of art as a means to a
good life. As an activity, poetry 'is more philosophic than history,' a nearer
approach to the universal truth in appearances; and as a more active
influence, drama refines our spiritual being by a purgation of pity and terror.
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the very pith and
marrow of Aristotle's literary criticism is a system of moral values derived
from his contemplation of life. It was necessary that this relation should
exist, because for Aristotle literature was, essentially, an imitation of life
though we must remember to understand imitation according to our final
sense of the theme which is the golden, persistent thread throughout the
Poetics. The imitation of life in literature was for Aristotle, the creative
revelation of the ideal actively at work in human life. The tragic hero failed
because his composition was less than ideal; but he could only be a tragic
hero if the ideal was implicit in him and he visibly approximated to it. It is
this constant reference to the ideal which makes of 'imitation' a truly
creative principle and the one which, properly understood, is the most
permanently valid and pregnant of all; it is also one which has been
constantly misunderstood. Its importance is, nevertheless, so central that
adequate recognition of it might conceivably be taken as the distinguishing
mark of all fruitful criticism.

To his sympathetic understanding of this principle Coleridge owed a
great debt. It is true that his efforts to refine upon it were not only
unsuccessful, but a trifle ludicrous; his effort to graft the vague
transcendentalism of Germany on to the rigour and clarity of Aristotle was,
from the outset, unfortunately conceived. But the root of the matter was
there, and in Coleridge's fertile mind the Aristotelian theory of imitation
flowered into a magnificent conception of the validity and process of the
poetic imagination. And partly because the foundation was truly
Aristotelian, partly because Coleridge had known what it was to be a great

poet, the reference to life pervades the whole of what is permanently
valuable in Coleridge's criticism. In him, too, there is a strict and mutually
fertilising relation between the moral and the æsthetic values. This is the
firm ground beneath his feet when he—too seldom—proceeds to the free
exercise of his exquisite æsthetic discrimination.

In Dryden, however, there was no such organic interpenetration. Dryden,
too, had a fine sensibility, though less exquisite, by far, than that of
Coleridge; but his theoretical system was not merely alien to him—it was in
itself false and mistaken. Corruptio optimi pessima. He took over from
France the sterilised and lifeless Aristotelianism which has been the plague
of criticism for centuries; he used it no worse than his French exemplars,
but he used it very little better than they. It was in his hands, as in theirs, a
dead mechanical framework of rules about the unities. Dryden, we can see
in his critical writing, was constantly chafed by it. He behaves like a fine
horse with a bearing rein: he is continually tossing his head after a minute
or two of 'good manners and action,' and saying, 'Shakespeare was the best
of them, anyhow'; 'Chaucer beats Ovid to a standstill.' It is a gesture with
which all decent people sympathise and when it is made in language so
supple as Dryden's prose it has a lasting charm. Dryden's heart was in the
right place, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him
a critic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company of Aristotle
and Coleridge.

Our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous. We have
seen that there is a sense in which Dryden is a purer literary critic than
either Coleridge or Aristotle; but we have also seen that it is precisely by
reason of the 'pureness' in him that he is to be relegated into a rank inferior
to theirs. It looks as though we might have to pronounce that the true
literary critic is the philosophic critic. Yet the pronouncement must not be
prematurely made; for there is a real and vital difference between those for

whom we have accepted the designation of philosophic critics, Hegel or
Croce, and Aristotle or Coleridge. Yet three of these (and it might be wise to
include Coleridge as a fourth) were professional philosophers. It is
evidently not the philosophy as such that makes the difference.

The difference depends, we believe, upon the nature of the philosophy.
The secret lies in Aristotle. The true literary critic must have a humanistic
philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, subject to an intimate, organic
governance, by an ideal of the good life. He is not the mere investigator of
facts; existence is never for him synonymous with value, and it is of the
utmost importance that he should never be deluded into believing that it is.
He will not accept from Hegel the thesis that all the events of human
history, all man's spiritual activities, are equally authentic manifestations of
Spirit; he will not even recognise the existence of Spirit. He may accept
from Croce the thesis that art is the expression of intuitions, but he will not
be extravagantly grateful, because his duty as a critic is to distinguish
between intuitions and to decide that one is more significant than another. A
philosophy of art that lends him no aid in this and affords no indication why
the expression of one intuition should be preferred to the expression of
another is of little value to him. He will incline to say that Hegel and Croce
are the scientists of art rather than its philosophers.

Here, then, is the opposition: between the philosophy that borrows its
values from science and the philosophy which shares its values with art. We
may put it with more cogency and truth: the opposition lies between a
philosophy without values and a philosophy based upon them. For values
are human, anthropocentric. Shut them out once and you shut them out for
ever. You do not get them back, as some believe, by declaring that such and
such a thing is true. Nothing is precious because it is true save to a mind
which has, consciously or unconsciously, decided that it is good to know
the truth. And the making of that single decision is a most momentous

judgment of value. If the scientist appeals to it, as indeed he invariably
does, he too is at bottom, though he may deny it, a humanist. He would do
better to confess it, and to confess that he too is in search of the good life.
Then he might become aware that to search for the good life is in fact
impossible, unless he has an ideal of it before his mind's eye.

An ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and the
organic force of a true ideal, must inevitably be æsthetic. There is no other
power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or conceive it;
we can express it only in æsthetic terms. We say, for instance, the good life
is that in which man has achieved a harmony of the diverse elements in his
soul. For the good life, we know instinctively, is one of our human
absolutes. It is not good with reference to any end outside itself. A man does
not live the good life because he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen
because he lives the good life. And here we touch the secret of the most
magnificently human of all books that has ever been written—Plato's
Republic. In the Republic the good life and the life of the good citizen are
identified; but the citizenship is not of an earthly but of an ideal city, whose
proportions, like the duties of its citizens, are determined by the æsthetic
intuition. Plato's philosophy is æsthetic through and through, and because it
is æsthetic it is the most human, the most permanently pregnant of all
philosophies. Much labour has been spent on the examination of the
identity which Plato established between the good and the beautiful. It is
labour lost, for that identity is axiomatic, absolute, irreducible. The Greeks
knew by instinct that it is so, and in their common speech the word for a
gentleman was the kalos kagathos, the beautiful-good.

This is why we have to go back to the Greeks for the principles of art and
criticism, and why only those critics who have returned to bathe themselves
in the life-giving source have made enduring contributions to criticism.
They alone are—let us not say philosophic critics but—critics indeed. Their

approach to life and their approach to art are the same; to them, and to them
alone, life and art are one. The interpenetration is complete; the standards
by which life and art are judged the same. If we may use a metaphor, in the
Greek view art is the consciousness of life. Poetry is more philosophic and
more highly serious than history, just as the mind of a man is more
significant than his outward gestures. To make those gestures significant the
art of the actor must be called into play. So to make the outward event of
history significant the poet's art is needed. Therefore a criticism which is
based on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place of
sovereignty in its scheme of values. That Plato himself did not do this was
due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of 'imitation' in
which art consists; but only the superficial readers of Plato—and a good
many readers deserve no better name—will conclude from the fact that he
rejected art that his attitude was not fundamentally æsthetic. Not only is the
Republic itself one of the greatest 'imitations,' one of the most subtle and
profound works of art ever created, but it would also be true to say that
Plato cleared the way for a true conception of art. In reality he rejected not
art, but false art; and it only remained for Aristotle to discern the nature of
the relation between artistic 'imitation' and the ideal for the Platonic system
to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and an everlasting
foundation for art and the criticism of art.

Art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life. As the ideal is
active and organic so must art itself be. The ideal is never achieved,
therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense of the
word. More than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can man appreciate
or imagine the ideal at all. To discern it is essentially the work of divination
or intuition. The artist divines the end at which human life is aiming; he
makes men who are his characters completely expressive of themselves,
which no actual man ever has been. If he works on a smaller canvas he aims
to make himself completely expressive of himself. That, also, is the aim of

the greater artist who expresses himself through the medium of a world of
characters of his own creation. He needs that machinery, if a coarse and
non-organic metaphor may be tolerated, for the explication of his own
intuitions of the ideal, which are so various that the attempt to express them
through the persona of himself would inevitably end in confusion. That is
why the great poetic genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest
lyrics are as often as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.

Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in the
world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to the absolute
ideal. In subordinating its particular intuitions to the absolute ideal art is,
therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign autonomy. True criticism is
itself an organic part of the whole activity of art; it is the exercise of
sovereignty by art upon itself, and not the imposition of an alien. To use our
previous metaphor, as art is the consciousness of life, criticism is the
consciousness of art. The essential activity of true criticism is the
harmonious control of art by art. This is at the root of a confusion in the
thought of Mr. Eliot, who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of
art, pronounces that the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle
the anomalous Aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that 'he wrote
well about everything,' and has, moreover, to elevate Dryden to a purple
which he is quite unfitted to wear. No, what distinguishes the true critic of
poetry is a truly æsthetic philosophy. In the present state of society it is
extremely probable that only the poet or the artist will possess this, for art
and poetry were never more profoundly divorced from the ordinary life of
society than they are at the present day. But the poet who would be a critic
has to make his æsthetic philosophy conscious to himself; to him as a poet
it may be unconscious. This necessary change from unconsciousness to
consciousness is by no means easy, and we should do well to insist upon its
difficulty, for quite as much nonsense is talked about poetry by poets and by
artists about art as by the profane about either. Moreover, it is important to

remember that in proportion as society approaches the ideal—there is no
continual progress towards the ideal; at present society is as far removed
from it as it has ever been—the chance of the philosopher, of the scientist
even, becoming a true critic of art grows greater. When the æsthetic basis of
all humane activity is familiarly recognised, the values of the philosopher,
the scientist, and the artist become consciously the same, and therefore
interchangeable.

Still, the ideal society is sufficiently remote for us to disregard it, and we
shall say that the principle of art for art's sake contains an element of truth
when it is opposed to those who would inflict upon art the values of
science, of metaphysics, or of a morality of mere convention. We shall also
say that the principle of art for art's sake needs to be understood and
interpreted very differently. Its implications are tremendous. Art is
autonomous, and to be pursued for its own sake, precisely because it
comprehends the whole of human life; because it has reference to a more
perfectly human morality than other activity of man; because, in so far as it
is truly art, it is indicative of a more comprehensive and unchallengeable
harmony in the spirit of man. It does not demand impossibilities, that man
should be at one with the universe or in tune with the infinite; but it does
envisage the highest of all attainable ideals, that man should be at one with
himself, obedient to his own most musical law.

Thus art reveals to us the principle of its own governance. The function
of criticism is to apply it. Obviously it can be applied only by him who has
achieved, if not the actual æsthetic ideal in life, at least a vision and a sense
of it. He alone will know that the principle he has to elucidate and apply is
living, organic. It is indeed the very principle of artistic creation itself.
Therefore he will approach what claims to be a work of art first as a thing in
itself, and seek with it the most intimate and immediate contact in order that
he may decide whether it too is organic and living. He will be untiring in his

effort to refine his power of discrimination by the frequentation of the finest
work of the past, so that he may be sure of himself when he decides, as he
must, whether the object before him is the expression of an æsthetic
intuition at all. At the best he is likely to find that it is mixed and various;
that fragments of æsthetic vision jostle with unsubordinated intellectual
judgments.

But, in regarding the work of art as a thing in itself, he will never forget
the hierarchy of comprehension, that the active ideal of art is indeed to see
life steadily and see it whole, and that only he has a claim to the title of a
great artist whose work manifests an incessant growth from a merely
personal immediacy to a coherent and all-comprehending attitude to life.
The great artist's work is in all its parts a revelation of the ideal as a
principle of activity in human life. As the apprehension of the ideal is more
or less perfect, the artist's comprehension will be greater or less. The critic
has not merely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and
Shakespeare, between Dante and Milton, between Cezanne and
Michelangelo, Beethoven and Mozart. If the foundations of his criticism are
truly æsthetic, he is compelled to believe and to show that among would-be
artists some are true artists and some are not, and that among true artists
some are greater than others. That what has generally passed under the
name of æsthetic criticism assumes as an axiom that every true work of art
is unique and incomparable is merely the paradox which betrays the
unworthiness of such criticism to bear the name it has arrogated to itself.
The function of true criticism is to establish a definite hierarchy among the
great artists of the past, as well as to test the production of the present; by
the combination of these activities it asserts the organic unity of all art. It
cannot honestly be said that our present criticism is adequate to either task.

[APRIL, 1920.

The Religion of Rousseau

These are times when men have need of the great solitaries; for each man
now in his moment is a prey to the conviction that the world and his deepest
aspirations are incommensurable. He is shaken by a presentiment that the
lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human minds put out in a
conflict for something which never can be won in the clash of material
arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as a child pitifully
wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoes the strange word
'Peace.' Therefore he too wanders pitifully like that child, seeking peace,
and men are become the symbols of mankind. The tragic paradox of human
life which slumbers in the soul in years of peace is awakened again. When
we would be solitary and cannot, we are made sensible of the depth and
validity of the impulse which moved the solitaries of the past.

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

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

From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. His method would
speak against it. Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of
the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate to the
life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made. He had no
historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no real history
can be written. Chronology was meaningless to him because he could
recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. With him ends were
beginnings. In the third Dialogue he tell us—and it is nothing less than the
sober truth told by a man who knew himself well—that his works must be
read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who would understand
him. Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than is imagined by those
who take the parable called the Contrat Social for a solemn treatise of
political philosophy, to give the lie to history. In himself he pitted the
eternal against the temporal and grew younger with years. He might be
known as the man of the second childhood par excellence. To the eye of
history the effort of his soul was an effort backwards, because the vision of
history is focused only for a perspective of progress. On his after-dinner
journey to Diderot at Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of
intuition, that that progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets
he had lived so long was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld the soul
of man sub specie æternitatis. In his vision history and institutions
dissolved away. His second childhood had begun.

On such a man the historical method can have no grip. There is, as the
French say, no engrenage. It points to a certain lack of the subtler kind of
understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly, perhaps, to an
unessential interest, which has of late years been imported into French
criticism from Germany. The Sorbonne has not, we know, gone unscathed

by the disease of documentation for documentation's sake. M. Masson's
three volumes leave us with the sense that their author had learnt a method
and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of the momentous question whether
Jean-Jacques was a person to whom it might be applied with a prospect of
discovery. No one who read Rousseau with a mind free of ulterior motives
could have any doubt on the matter. Jean-Jacques is categorical on the
point. The Savoyard Vicar was speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when
he began his profession of faith with the words:—

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

To the extent, therefore, that M. Masson did not respond to this appeal
and filled his volumes with information concerning the books Jean-Jacques
might have read and a hundred other interesting but only partly relevant
things, he did the citizen of Geneva a wrong. The ulterior motive is there,
and the faint taste of a thesis in the most modern manner. But the method is
saved by the perception which, though it sometimes lacks the perfect
keenness of complete understanding, is exquisite enough to suggest the
answer to the questions it does not satisfy. Though the environment is lavish
the man is not lost.

It is but common piety to seek to understand Jean-Jacques in the way in
which he pleaded so hard to be understood. Yet it is now over forty years
since a voice of authority told England how it was to regard him. Lord
Morley was magisterial and severe, and England obeyed. One feels almost
that Jean-Jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive. He
would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was 'a rag of
metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism,' and he would have

whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his Dialogues
described as the outpourings of a man with persecution mania, he might
have rebelled and muttered silently an Eppur si muove. We see now that it
was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, and that precisely those
Dialogues which the then Mr Morley so powerfully dismissed contain his
plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction. To his contention that he wrote his
books to ease his own soul it might be replied that their publication was a
social act which had vast social consequences. But Jean-Jacques might well
retort that the fact that his contemporaries and the generation which
followed read and judged him in the letter and not in the spirit is no reason
why we, at nearly two centuries remove, should do the same.

A great man may justly claim our deference, if Jean-Jacques asks that his
last work shall be read first we are bound, even if we consider it only a
quixotic humour, to indulge it. But to those who read the neglected
Dialogues it will appear a humour no longer. Here is a man who at the end
of his days is filled to overflowing with bitterness at the thought that he has
been misread and misunderstood. He says to himself: Either he is at bottom
of the same nature as other men or he is different. If he is of the same
nature, then there must be a malignant plot at work. He has revealed his
heart with labour and good faith; not to hear him his fellow-men must have
stopped their ears. If he is of another kind than his fellows, then—but he
cannot bear the thought. Indeed it is a thought that no man can bear. They
are blind because they will not see. He has not asked them to believe that
what he says is true; he asks only that they shall believe that he is sincere,
sincere in what he says, sincere, above all, when he implores that they
should listen to the undertone. He has been 'the painter of nature and the
historian of the human heart.'

His critics might have paused to consider why Jean-Jacques, certainly not
niggard of self-praise in the Dialogues, should have claimed no more for

himself than this. He might have claimed, with what in their eyes at least
must be good right, to have been pre-eminent in his century as a political
philosopher, a novelist, and a theorist of education. Yet to himself he is no
more than 'the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart.' Those
who would make him more make him less, because they make him other
than he declares himself to be. His whole life has been an attempt to be
himself and nothing else besides; and all his works have been nothing more
and nothing less than his attempt to make his own nature plain to men. Now
at the end of his life he has to swallow the bitterness of failure. He has been
acclaimed the genius of his age; kings have delighted to honour him, but
they have honoured another man. They have not known the true Jean-
Jacques. They have taken his parables for literal truth, and he knows why.

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

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

Three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his 'religious
formation' as three volumes. At Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens, as a
boy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul. In Paris, amid the
intellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the Encyclopædists, the memory
of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience. His boyish
unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticism of the
great pioneers of enlightenment and progress. Yet when all had been
destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied. Underneath his
passionate admiration for Diderot smouldered a spark of resentment that he
was not understood. They had torn down the fabric of expression into which
he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty as a boy; sometimes
with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart he surveyed the ruins. But
the certainty that he had once been certain, the memory and the desire of the
past peace—this they could not destroy. They could hardly even weaken
this element within him, for they did not know that it existed, they were
unable to conceive that it could exist. Jean-Jacques himself could give them
no clue to its existence; he had no words, and he was still under the spell of
the intellectual dogma of his age that words must express definite things. In
common with his age he had lost the secret of the infinite persuasion of
poetry. So the consciousness that he was different from those who
surrounded him, and from those he admired as his masters, took hold of
him. He was afraid of his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first
knowledge of their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths.
The pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is
apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' In the note
which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses to this
ideal. If only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable without and
within, he might be delivered from that disquieting sense of tongue-tied
queerness in a normal world.

If he cheated himself at all, the deception was brief. The poignant
memory of Les Charmettes whispered to him that there was a state of grace
in which the hard things were made clear. But he had not yet the courage of
his destiny. His consciousness of his separation from his fellows had still to
harden into a consciousness of superiority before that courage would come.
On the road to Vincennes on an October evening in 1749—M. Masson has
fixed the date for us—he read in a news-sheet the question of the Dijon
Academy: 'Si le rétablissement des arts et des sciences a contribué à épurer
les moeurs?' The scales dropped from his eyes and the weight was removed
from his tongue. There is no mystery about this 'revelation.' For the first
time the question had been put in terms which struck him squarely in the
heart. Jean-Jacques made his reply with the stammering honesty of a man of
genius wandering in age of talent.

The First Discourse seems to many rhetorical and extravagant. In after
days it appeared so to Rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for it than
that he had tried to tell the truth. Before he learned that he had won the
Dijon prize and that his work had taken Paris by storm, he was surely a prey
to terrors lest his Vincennes vision of the non-existence of progress should
have been mere madness. The success reassured him. 'Cette faveur du
public, nullement brigué, et pour un auteur inconnu, me donna la première
assurance véritable de mon talent.' He was, in fact, not 'queer,' but right; and
he had seemed to be queer precisely because he was right. Now he had the
courage. 'Je suis grossier,' he wrote in the preface to Narcisse, 'maussade,
impoli par principes; je me fous de tous vous autres gens de cour; je suis un
barbare.' There is a touch of exaggeration and bravado in it all. He was still
something of the child hallooing in the dark to give himself heart. He
clutched hold of material symbols of the freedom he had won, round wig,
black stockings, and a living gained by copying music at so much a line.
But he did not break with his friends; the 'bear' suffered himself to be made
a lion. He had still a foot in either camp, for though he had the conviction

that he was right, he was still fumbling for his words. The memoirs of
Madame d'Epinay tell us how in 1754, at dinner at Mlle Quinault's,
impotent to reply to the polite atheistical persiflage of the company, he
broke out: 'Et moi, messieurs, je crois en Dieu. Je sors si vous dites un mot
de plus.' That was not what he meant; neither was the First Discourse what
he meant. He had still to find his language, and to find his language he had
to find his peace. He was like a twig whirled about in an eddy of a stream.
Suddenly the stream bore him to Geneva, where he returned to the church
which he had left at Confignon. That, too, was not what he meant. When he
returned from Geneva, Madame d'Epinay had built him the Ermitage.

In the Rêveries, which are mellow with the golden calm of his discovered
peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he had set at forty
years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitage to inquire into the
configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for all his opinions and his
principles. In the exquisite third Rêverie two phrases occur continually. His
purpose was 'to find firm ground'—'prendre une assiette,'—and his means to
this discovery was 'spiritual honesty'—'bonne foi.' Rousseau's deep concern
was to elucidate the anatomy of his own soul, but, since he was sincere, he
regarded it as a type of the soul of man. Looking into himself, he saw that,
in spite of all his follies, his weaknesses, his faintings by the way, his
blasphemies against the spirit, he was good. Therefore he declared: Man is
born good. Looking into himself he saw that he was free to work out his
own salvation, and to find that solid foundation of peace which he so
fervently desired. Therefore he declared: Man is born free. To the whisper
of les Charmettes that there was a condition of grace had been added the
sterner voice of remorse for his abandoned children, telling him that he had
fallen from his high estate.

'J'ai fui en vain; partout j'ai retrouvé la Loi.
Il faut céder enfin! ô porte, il faut admettre

L'hôte; coeur frémissant, il faut subir le maître,
Quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-même que moi.'

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

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

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

To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary; to
the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only a man
stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured by the

passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in his similitude
to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tièdes,' he wrote to Madame Latour in
1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est pas digne de moi.'
There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more plainly still in the
Dialogues. He, too, was persecuted for righteousness' sake, because he, too,
proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven was within men.

And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and
the peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preserving
conclusions—this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to
record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the market-place.
The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man so that he
writes believing that all men will understand. He wakes in the morning and
he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he does not doubt, but
of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. They will read in the letter
what was written in the spirit; their eyes will see the words, but their ears
will be stopped to the music. The mystique as Péguy would have said, will
be degraded into politique. To guard himself against this unhallowed
destiny, at the last Rousseau turns with decision and in the language of his
day rewrites the hard saying, that the things which are Cæsar's shall be
rendered unto Cæsar.

In the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which have been
discovered in Rousseau's work fade away. That famous confusion
concerning 'the natural man,' whom he presents to us now as a historic fact,
now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques, but in the
minds of his critics. The Contrat Social is a parable of the soul of man, like
the Republic of Plato. The truth of the human soul is its implicit perfection;
to that reality material history is irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul
is eternal. And as for the nature of this truth, 'it is true so soon as it is felt.'
When the Savoyard Vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism of

religious dogma, turned to the Gospel story with the immortal 'Ce n'est pas
ainsi qu'on invente,' he was only anticipating what Jean-Jacques was to say
of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his work which could
not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of its source. We may call
Jean-Jacques religious because we have no other word; but the word would
be more truly applied to the reverence felt towards such a man than to his
own emotion. He was driven to speak of God by the habit of his childhood
and the deficiency of a language shaped by the intellect and not by the soul.
But his deity was one whom neither the Catholic nor the Reformed Church
could accept, for He was truly a God who does not dwell in temples made
with hands. The respect he owed to God, said the Vicar, was such that he
could affirm nothing of Him. And, again, still more profoundly, he said, 'He
is to our souls what our soul is to our body.' That is the mystical utterance of
a man who was no mystic, but of one who found his full communion in the
beatific dolce far niente of the Lake of Bienne. Jean-Jacques was set apart
from his generation, because, like Malvolio, he thought highly of the soul
and in nowise approved the conclusions of his fellows; and he was fortunate
to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call his madness (which was
indeed only his flaming and uncomprehending indignation at the
persecution inevitably meted out by those who have only a half truth to one
who has the whole), because he enjoyed the certainty that his high
appraisement of the soul was justified.

[MARCH, 1918.

The Poetry of Edward Thomas

We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the
ruins with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which

disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of Edward Thomas.[2]
They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a palimpsest over which
in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more resonant, yet less enduring,
words were inscribed; or they will be like a phial discovered in the ashes of
what was once a mighty city. There will be the triumphal arch standing
proudly; the very tombs of the dead will seem to share its monumental
magnificence. Yet we will turn from them all, from the victory and sorrow
alike, to this faintly gleaming bubble of glass that will hold captive the
phantasm of a fragrance of the soul. By it some dumb and doubtful
knowledge will be evoked to tremble on the edge of our minds. We shall
reach back, under its spell, beyond the larger impulses of a resolution and a
resignation which will have become a part of history, to something less
solid and more permanent over which they passed and which they could not
disturb.

[Footnote 2: Last Poems. By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount.)]

Our consciousness will have its record. The tradition of England in battle
has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will be compassed about by a
crowd of witnesses. But it might so nearly have been in vain that we should
seek an echo of that which smiled at the conclusions of our consciousness.
The subtler faiths might so easily have fled through our harsh fingers. When
the sound of the bugles died, having crowned reveillé with the equal
challenge of the last post, how easily we might have been persuaded that
there was a silence, if there had not been one whose voice rose only so little
above that of the winds and trees and the life of undertone we share with
them as to make us first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the
incessant pulses of which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal
vague happinesses and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the
sound of speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself
crumbles into dust—this very texture of the life of the soul might have been

a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding had
not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it appears, to
the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more gorgeous woof.

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

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

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

'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember.
No garden appears, no path, no child beside,

Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.'

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

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

Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with the
truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far than the
melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of man's being
which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay. Whence we all
come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home indeed. But
necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. That which we must
obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude ourselves into the
expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more than we dare believe
that the love which moves the sun and the other stars has in it any charity.

We may be, we are, the children of the universe; but we have 'neither father
nor mother nor any playmate.'

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

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

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

Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his
destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of
necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men may
know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the
magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known
truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the truth
stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universe grows

vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little lamp, sees
himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark forest, and
finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all. Yet if he would be a
poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he must at each step in the
downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise what is and celebrate it
as what must be. Thus he regains, by another path, the supremacy which he
has forsaken.

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

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

But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the
more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he
discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy in
the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious of
perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which only the
farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking mind. In a sense
he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes in the more familiar
language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and irrecoverable.

'The simple lack
Of her is more to me
Than other's presence,

Whether life splendid be
Or utter black.

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

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

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

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

There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who
have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant not-
being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the
movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it was that
the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of
becoming haunted and held him most.

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

To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive
to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that was not
instantly engulfed—

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

Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have
felt as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with
none of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped
at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated every
spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old when the
gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A New House.'

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

But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in the
enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul

itself. The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book is
that entitled 'The Other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal, shows that
Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create the myth
which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the unknown of his
emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of this instrument, he
might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other' tells of his pursuit of
himself, and how he overtook his soul.

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

No; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest is
read with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one who had
many (and among them the chief) of the qualities of a great poet. Edward
Thomas was like a musician who noted down themes that summon up
forgotten expectations. Whether the genius to work them out to the limits of
their scope and implication was in him we do not know. The life of
literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunity he would
eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. But, if his
compositions do not, his themes will never fail—of so much we are sure—
to awaken unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds.

[JANUARY 1919.

Mr Yeats's Swan Song

In the preface to The Wild Swans at Coole,[3] Mr W.B. Yeats speaks of
'the phantasmagoria through which alone I can express my convictions
about the world.' The challenge could hardly be more direct. At the
threshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which gives
us the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enter in.
There are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verses written in
the seeming-strong vernacular of literary Dublin, as it were a hospitable
bench placed outside the door. They are indeed inside the house, but by
accident or for temporary shelter. They do not, as the phrase goes, belong to
the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions of the common reality,
whether found in the sensible world or the emotion of the mind. They are,
from Mr Yeats's angle of vision (as indeed from our own), essentially vers
d'occasion.

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

The poet's high and passionate argument must be sought elsewhere, and
precisely in his expression of his convictions about the world. And here, on
the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall find
phantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwise
conveyed, at least by Mr Yeats. To this, in itself, we make no demur. The
poet, if he is a true poet, is driven to approach the highest reality he can
apprehend. He cannot transcribe it simply because he does not possess the
necessary apparatus of knowledge, and because if he did possess it his
passion would flag. It is not often that Spinoza can disengage himself to
write as he does at the beginning of the third book of the Ethics, nor could
Lucretius often kindle so great a fire in his soul as that which made his
material incandescent in Æneadum genetrix. Therefore the poet turns to
myth as a foundation upon which he can explicate his imagination. He may

take his myth from legend or familiar history, or he may create one for
himself anew, but the function it fulfils is always the same. It supplies the
elements with which he can build the structure of his parable, upon which
he can make it elaborate enough to convey the multitudinous reactions of
his soul to the world.

But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The
structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility. The child
knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will rise when
he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience….' And, even when
the poet turns from legend and history to create his own myth, he must
make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be condemned to the
sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic shapes of his own
imagination need, even for their own perfect embodiment, the discipline of
the common perception. The phantoms of the individual brain, left to their
own waywardness, lose all solidity and become like primary forms of life,
instead of the penultimate forms they should be. For the poet himself must
move securely among his visions; they must be not less certain and
steadfast than men are. To anchor them he needs intelligible myth. Nothing
less than a supremely great genius can save him if he ventures into the vast
without a landmark visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a
supremely great genius and was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his
passion gave stability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes
because they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite
work there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we
recognise the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria
of the dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet.
Like Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and
would not let him go.

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

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

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

'I am worn out with dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;
And all day long I look
Upon this lady's beauty
As though I had found in book

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

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

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

It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We do
not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in
and for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose
creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands
upon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching his

vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverishment, as of all else
that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware.

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

Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its bitterness is
a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world of imagination.
Mr Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to contemplate it was
sufficient. Had he been a great poet he would have made it his own, by
forcing it into the fetters of speech. By re-creating it, he would have made it
permanent; he would have built landmarks to guide him always back to
where the effort of his last discovery had ended. But now there remains
nothing but a handful of the symbols with which he was content:—

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

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

Whether Mr Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for
the product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we prefer to believe)
he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and failed, we

cannot certainly say. Of this, however, we are certain, that somehow,
somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He has the apparatus
of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forced to fall back upon
the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him. That it is an insufficient
reserve let this passage show:—

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

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

[APRIL, 1919.

The Wisdom of Anatole France

How few are the wise writers who remain to us? They are so few that it
seems, at moments, that wisdom, like justice of old, is withdrawing from
the world, and that when their fullness of years is accomplished, as, alas! it
soon must be, the wise men who will leave us will have been the last of
their kind. It is true that something akin to wisdom, or rather a quality

whose outward resemblance to wisdom can deceive all but the elect, will
emerge from the ruins of war; but true wisdom is not created out of the
catastrophic shock of disillusionment. An unexpected disaster is always
held to be in some sort undeserved. Yet the impulse to rail at destiny, be it
never so human, is not wise. Wisdom is not bitter; at worst it is bitter-sweet,
and bitter-sweet is the most subtle and lingering savour of all.

Let us not say in our haste, that without wisdom we are lost. Wisdom is,
after all, but one attitude to life among many. It happens to be the one which
will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for all ill-usage. But hard
wear is not the only purpose which an attitude may serve. We may demand
of an attitude that it should enable us to exact the utmost from ourselves. To
refuse to accommodate oneself to the angularities of life or to make
provision beforehand for its catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a
divine folly. It is, at all events, a folly to which poets incline. But poets are
not wise; indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the
best, be but dimly imagined. Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largest
inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an
aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of no
account. To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to have
acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with an imagined power
against whose manifestations, in those moments when no ecstasy remains,
one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublime self-deception, a heroic attempt
to project the soul on to the side of destiny, and to believe ourselves the
masters of those very powers which have overwhelmed us.

Whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do not
know. We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. It is too
conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. Some may seek that
ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others, who do
not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may try to

shake the dust of life from off their feet. Neither will be wise. But precisely
because they are not wise, they will seek the company of wise men. Their
own attitude will not wear. The ecstasy will fail, the will to renunciation
falter; the gray reality which permits no one to escape it altogether will
filter like a mist into the vision and the cell. Then they will turn to the wise
men. They will find comfort in the smile to which they could not frame
their own lips, and discover in it more sympathy than they could hope for.

Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be
Anatole France. His company is constant; his attitude durable. There is no
undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and
haunting beauty to Tchehov. He has never suffered himself to be so
involved in life as to be maimed by it. But the price he has paid for his
safety has been a renunciation of experience. Only by being involved in
life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that
bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. Not that Anatole
France made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would of
his own will turn aside. It was instinct which guided him into a sequestered
path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate exaltation and
catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel. Therefore he has
seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but never face to face. Their
runnings, their stumblings and their gesticulations are a tumultuous portion
of the landscape rather than symbols of an intimate and personal possibility.
They lend a baroque enchantment to the scene.

So it is that in all the characters of Anatole France's work which are not
closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of the
marionette. They are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack a
certain logic, but it is not the logic of personality. They are embodied
comments upon life, but they do not live. And there is for Anatole France,
while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, no reason why

they should live. For living, in the accepted sense, is an activity impossible
without indulging many illusions; and fervently to sympathise with
characters engaged in the activity demands that their author should
participate in the illusions. He, too, must be surprised at the disaster which
he himself has proved inevitable. It is not enough that he should pity them;
he must share in their effort, and be discomfited at their discomfiture.

Such exercises of the soul are impossible to a real acquiescence, which
cannot even permit itself the inspiration of the final illusion that the wreck
of human hopes, being ordained, is beautiful. The man who acquiesces is
condemned to stand apart and contemplate a puppet-show with which he
can never really sympathise.

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

The chasm between living and being wise (which is to be raisonnable) is
manifest. The condition of living is to be perpetually surprised, incessantly
indignant or exultant, at what happens. To bridge the chasm there is for the
wise man only one way. He must cast back in his memory to the time when
he, too, was surprised and indignant. No man is, after all, born wise, though

he may be born with an instinct for wisdom. Thus Anatole France touches
us most nearly when he describes his childhood. The innocent, wayward,
positive, romantic little Pierre Nozière[4] is a human being to a degree to
which no other figures in the master's comedy of unreason are. And it is
evident that Anatole France himself finds him by far the most attractive of
them all. He can almost persuade himself, at moments, that he still is the
child he was, as in the exquisite story of how, when he had been to a truly
royal chocolate shop, he attempted to reproduce its splendours in play. At
one point his invention and his memory failed him, and he turned to his
mother to ask: 'Est-ce celui qui vend ou celui qui achète qui donne de
l'argent?'

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

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

To know a thing too well is by worlds removed from not to know it at all,
and Anatole France does not elsewhere similarly attempt to indulge the
illusion of unbroken innocence. He who refused to put a mark of
interrogation after 'What is God,' in defiance of his mother, because he
knew, now has to restrain himself from putting one after everything he
writes or thinks. 'Ma pauvre mère, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-être que
maintenant j'en mets trop.' Yes, Anatole France is wise, and far removed
from childish follies. And, perhaps, it is precisely because of his wisdom
that he can so exactly discern the enchantment of his childhood. So few

men grow up. The majority remain hobbledehoys throughout life; all the
disabilities and none of the unique capacities of childhood remain. There
are a few who, in spite of all experience, retain both; they are the poets and
the grands esprits. There are fewer still who learn utterly to renounce
childish things; and they are the wise men.

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

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

[APRIL, 1919.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Modern poetry, like the modern consciousness of which it is the epitome,
seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. It is hardly
conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself by
insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. The value of
impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives and
renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of the
mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be epic. Roughly

speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few conspicuous
exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet may assume a
hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a hundred influences,
or he may work a single sham personality threadbare or render piecemeal
an undigested influence. What he may not do, or do only at the risk of being
unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call, for the lack of a better word,
the logical progression of an oeuvre. One has no sense of the rhythm of an
achievement. There is an output of scraps, which are scraps, not because
they are small, but because one scrap stands in no organic relation to
another in the poet's work. Instead of lending each other strength, they
betray each other's weakness.

Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not
peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. If it were, we might be
accused of mere querulousness. The rhythm of personality is hard, indeed,
to achieve. The simple mind and the single outlook are now too rare to be
considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering a mind to a
comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy one. The
desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were probably never so
intimately associated as they are now; and it is a little preposterous to ask a
moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see life steadily and see it whole.
We happen to have been born into an age without perspective; hence our
idolatry for the one living poet and prose writer who has it and comes, or
appears to come, from another age. But another rhythm is possible. No
doubt it would be mistaken to consider this rhythm as in fact wholly
divorced from the rhythm of personality; it probably demands at least a
minimum of personal coherence in its possessor. For critical purposes,
however, they are distinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of
technical progression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate
artistic intention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. When
Verlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose,' we know where we are.

And we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse to be
predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring to take
a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple,

And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry,

And azuring-over graybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes,
And magic cuckoo-call
Caps, clears, and clinches all….'

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

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

Here, then, in so many words, is Hopkins's 'avant toute chose' at a higher
level of elaboration. 'Inscape' is still, in spite of the apparent differentiation,
musical; but a quality of formalism seems to have entered with the specific
designation. With formalism comes rigidity; and in this case the rigidity is
bound to overwhelm the sense. For the relative constant in the composition
of poetry is the law of language which admits only a certain amount of
adaptation. Musical design must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be
aware that even in speaking of musical design he is indulging a metaphor.
Hopkins admitted this, if we may judge by his practice, only towards the
end of his life. There is no escape by sound from the meaning of the
posthumous sonnets, though we may hesitate to pronounce whether this
directness was due to a modification of his poetical principles or to the

urgency of the content of the sonnets, which, concerned with a matter of life
and death, would permit no obscuring of their sense for musical reasons.

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

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

Between the 'May Magnificat' and these sonnets is the bulk of Hopkins's
poetical work and his peculiar achievement. Perhaps it could be regarded as
a phase in his evolution towards the 'more balanced and Miltonic style'
which he hoped for, and of which the posthumous sonnets are precursors;
but the attempt to see him from this angle would be perverse. Hopkins was
not the man to feel, save on exceptional occasions, that urgency of content
of which we have spoken. The communication of thought was seldom the
dominant impulse of his creative moment, and it is curious how simple his
thought often proves to be when the obscurity of his language has been
penetrated. Musical elaboration is the chief characteristic of his work, and
for this reason what seem to be the strangest of his experiments are his most
essential achievement So, for instance, 'The Golden Echo':—

'Spare!
There is one, yes, I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of sun,

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

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

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

And the more wonderful opening of 'Windhover' likewise sinks, far less
disastrously, but still perceptibly:—

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

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

There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of
the poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. The
obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear; and
they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who push on
to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether the failure of
his whole achievement was due to the starvation of experience which his
vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice in his poetical
endeavour. For ourselves we believe that the former was the true cause. His
'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritual vacuum, met with no
salutary resistance to modify, inform, and strengthen it. Hopkins told the
truth of himself—the reason why he must remain a poets' poet:—

I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,

My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss
Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.'

[JUNE, 1919.

The Problem of Keats

It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney
Colvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first, because it is
a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all evidence of a general
curiosity concerning a poet so great and so greatly to be loved must be
counted for righteousness. The impassioned and intimate sympathy which is
felt—as we may at least conclude—by a portion of the present generation
for Keats is a motion of the consciousness which stands in a right and
natural order. Keats is with us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity
in Sir Sidney Colvin's mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom
to expect in an older generation, that he should have had more than a
sidelong vision of at least one aspect of the community between his poet-
hero and a younger race which has had the destiny to produce far more
heroes than poets. Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope
to appreciate Keats, Sir Sidney writes:—

'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But
of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his
indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own
time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,
—that the saving of the world from the grip of one great
overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of
ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical.

To that which lies behind and above politics and history to the
general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race, he was, as
we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and acutely
sensitive.'

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

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

It is rather by this than by Sir Sidney's particular contributions to our
knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. This assured, we accept his
patient exposition of the theme of 'Endymion' with a friendly interest that
would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim upon us; and in this
spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute investigation of the
pictorial and plastic material of Keats's imagination. Under auspices less
benign we might have found the former mistaken and the latter irrelevant;
but it so happens that when Sir Sidney shows us over the garden every
goose is a swan. Like travellers who at the end of a long day's journey

among an inhospitable peasantry are, against their expectation received in a
kindly farm, and find themselves talking glibly to their host of matters
which are unimportant and unknown to them—the price of land, and the
points of a pedigree bull—so we follow with an intense and intelligent
absorption a subtle argument in 'Endymion' in which at no moment we
really believe. On the contrary, we are convinced (when we are free from
our author's friendly spell) that Keats wrote 'Endymion' at all adventure.
The words of the cancelled preface: 'Before I began I had no inward feel of
being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain,' were,
we are sure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of his
lack of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapable of
or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'—he had an understanding more
robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon experience, than
any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth not excepted—but at that
phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned with understanding.
'Endymion' is not a record or sublimation of experience; it is itself an
experience. It was the liberation of a verbal inhibition, and the magic word
of freedom was Beauty. The story of Endymion was to Keats a road to the
unknown, in her course along which his imagination might 'paw up against
the sky.'

A refusal to admit that Keats built 'Endymion' upon any structure of
argument, however obscure—even Sir Sidney would acknowledge that the
argument he discovers is very obscure—is so far from being a derogation
from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a full appreciation of
his idiosyncrasy. It is customary to regard the Odes as the pinnacle of his
achievement and to trace a poetical progression to that point and a
subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of this decline in the revised
Induction to 'Hyperion.' As far as an absolute poetical perfection is
concerned there can be no serious objection to the view. But the case of
Keats is eminently one to be considered in itself as well as objectively.

There is no danger that Keats's poetry will not be appreciated; the danger is
that Keats may not be understood. And precisely this moment is opportune
for understanding him. As Mr T.S. Eliot has lately pointed out, the
development of English poetry since the early nineteenth century was
largely based on the achievement of two poets of genius, Keats and Shelley,
who never reached maturity. They were made gods; and rightly, had not
poets themselves bowed down to them. That was ridiculous; there is
something even pitiful in the spectacle of Rossetti and Morris finding the
culmination of poetry, the one in 'The Eve of St Agnes,' the other in 'La
Belle Dame sans Merci.' And this undiscriminating submission of a century
to the influence of hypostatised phases in the development of a poet of
sanity and genius is perhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious,
and for the most part far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at
work in modern poetry.

A sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, that what
has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundred years is
only a cul de sac. Somewhere there has been a substitution. In the resulting
chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, and the critically minded
have the grim amusement of watching verse-writers gain eminence by
imitating Coventry Patmore! The bolder spirits declare that there never was
such a thing as a tradition, that it is no use learning, because there is nothing
to learn. But they are a little nervous for all their boldness, and they prefer
to hunt in packs, of which the only condition of membership is that no one
should ask what it is.

At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less importance to
understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. The culmination of the
achievement of the Keats to be understood is not the Odes, perfect as they
are, nor the tales—a heresy even for objective criticism—nor 'Hyperion';
but precisely that revised Induction to 'Hyperion' which on the other

argument is held to indicate how the poet's powers had been ravaged by
disease and the pangs of unsatisfied love. On the technical side alone the
Induction is of extraordinary interest. Keats's natural and proper revulsion
from the Miltonic style, the deliberate art of which he had handled like an
almost master, is evident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge
that the virus is in his blood. The creative effort of the Induction was
infinitely greater than is immediately apparent. Keats is engaged in a war on
two fronts: he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and struggling also
to deal with an unfamiliar content. The whole direction of his poetic
purpose had shifted since he wrote 'Hyperion.' 'Hyperion,' though far finer
as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same as
'Endymion'; it was an exercise in a manner. Keats desired to prove to
himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that he
was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur. It was, most strictly,
necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. He had drunk, as deeply as
any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he needed to know that he had
assimilated what he had drunk, that he could employ a conscious art as
naturally as the most deliberate artist of the past, and, most of all, that he
would begin, when he did begin, at the point where his forerunners left off,
and not at a point behind them. These necessities were not present in this
form to Keats's mind when he began 'Hyperion'; most probably he began
merely with the idea of holding his own with Milton, and with a delight in
an apt and congenial theme. Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate
plans, which indeed are incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions
were taken not by the intellect, but by the being.

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

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

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

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

More definite still is the letter of November 17, 1819, to his friend and
publisher, John Taylor:—

'I have come to a determination not to publish anything I have
now ready written; but for all that to publish a poem before long and
that I hope to make a fine one. As the marvellous is the most
enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have
been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let
her manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all.
Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men
and Women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little
dramatic skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a
Drama, would, I think, be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the
colouring of St Agnes Eve throughout a poem in which Character
and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three

such poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the
next six years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum.
I mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays—
my greatest ambition—when I do feel ambitious….'

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

The evidence that Keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which it
could be satisfied by the poems of the 1820 volume is overwhelming. His
letters to George of April, 1819, show that he was naturally evolving
towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than
could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration and
emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had
invaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to the new
poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find the method.
The letters we have quoted to show his reaction from the Miltonic influence
display the more narrowly 'artistic' aspect of the same evolution. A
technique more responsive to the felt reality of experience must be found
—'English ought to be kept up'—the apparatus of Romantic story must be
abandoned—'Wonders are no wonders to me'—yet the Romantic colour
must be kept to restore to a realistic psychology the vividness and richly
various quality that are too often lost by analysis We do not believe that we
have in any respect forced the interpretation of the letters; the terminology
of that age needs to be translated to be understood 'Men and Women …
Characters and Sentiments' are called, for better or worse, 'psychology'

nowadays. And our translation has this merit, that some of our ultra-
moderns will listen to the word 'psychology,' where they would be bat-blind
to 'Characters' and stone-deaf to 'Sentiments.'

Modern poetry is still faced with the same problem; but very few of its
adepts have reached so far as to be able to formulate it even with the
precision of Keats's scattered allusions. Keats himself was struck down at
the moment when he was striving (against disease and against a devouring,
hopeless love-passion) to face it squarely. The revised Induction reveals
him in the effort to shape the traditional (and perhaps still necessary)
apparatus of myth to an instrument of his attitude. The meaning of the
Induction is not difficult to discover; but current criticism has the habit of
regarding it dubiously. Therefore we may be forgiven for attempting, with
the brevity imposed upon us, to make its elements clear. The first eighteen
lines, which Sir Sidney Colvin on objective grounds regrets are, we think,
vital.

'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage, too,
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at heaven; pity these have not
Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The shadows of melodious utterance,
But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
For poesy alone can tell her dreams,—
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable chain
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
'Thou art no poet—mays't not tell thy dreams'?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions and would speak, if he had loved,

And been well-nurtured in his mother-tongue.
Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.'

We may admit that the form of these lines is unfortunate; but we cannot
wish them away. They bear most closely upon the innermost argument of
the poem as Keats endeavoured to reshape it. All men, says Keats, have
their visions of reality; but the poet alone can express his, and the poet
himself may at the last prove to have been a fanatic, one who has imagined
'a paradise for a sect' instead of a heaven for all humanity.

This discovery marks the point of crisis in Keats's development. He is no
longer content to be the singer; his poetry must be adequate to all
experience. No wonder then that the whole of the new Induction centres
about this thought. He describes his effort to fight against an invading death
and to reach the altar in the mighty dream palace. As his foot touches the
altar-step life returns, and the prophetic voice of the veiled goddess reveals
to him that he has been saved by his power 'to die and live again before Thy
fated hour.'

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

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

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

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

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

It is a higher thing to mitigate the pain of the world than to brood upon
the problem of it. And not only the lover of mankind, but man the animal is
pre-eminent above the poet-dreamer. His joy is joy; his pain, pain. 'Only the
dreamer venoms all his days.' Yet the poet has his reward; it is given to him
to partake of the vision of the veiled Goddess—memory, Moneta,
Mnemosyne, the spirit of the eternal reality made visible.

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

This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It
stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded as
obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered spirit of
reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In her, joy and pain, life
and death compassion and indifference, vision and blindness are one; she is
the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea if you will, not hypostatised but
immanent. Before this reality the poet is impotent as his fellows; he is
above them by his knowledge of it, but below them by the weakness which
that knowledge brings. He, too, is the prey of contraries, the mirror of his
deity, struck to the heart of his victory, enduring the intolerable pain of
triumph.

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

We fear that Sir Sidney Colvin will not agree with our view. The angles
of observation are different. The angle at which we have placed ourselves is
not wholly advantageous—from it Sir Sidney's book could not have been
written—but it has this advantage, that from it we can read his book with a
heightened interest. As we look out from it, some things are increased and
some diminished with the change of perspective; and among those which
are increased is our gratitude to Sir Sidney. In the clear mirror of his
sympathy and sanity nothing is obscured. We are shown the Keats who
wrote the perfect poems that will last with the English language, and in the
few places where Sir Sidney falls short of the spirit of complete acceptance,

we discern behind the words of rebuke and regret only the idealisation of a
love which we are proud to share.

[JULY, 1919.

Thoughts on Tchehov

We do not know if the stories collected in this volume[7] stand together
in the Russian edition of Tchehov's works, or if the selection is due to Mrs
Constance Garnett. It is also possible that the juxtaposition is fortuitous. But
the stories are united by a similarity of material. Whereas in the former
volumes of this admirable series Tchehov is shown as preoccupied chiefly
with the life of the intelligentsia, here he finds his subjects in priests and
peasants, or (in the story Uprooted) in the half-educated.

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

Such a distinction is, indeed, irrelevant. As Tchehov presents them to our
minds, the life of the country and the life of the town produce the same final
impression, arouse in us an awareness of an identical quality; and thus, the
distinction, by its very irrelevance, points us the more quickly to what is
essential in Tchehov. It is that his attitude, to which he persuades us, is
complete, not partial. His comprehension radiates from a steady centre, and
is not capriciously kindled by a thousand accidental contacts. In other
words, Tchehov is not what he is so often assumed to be, an impressionist.
Consciously or unconsciously he had taken the step—the veritable salto
mortale—by which the great literary artist moves out of the ranks of the
minor writers. He had slowly shifted his angle of vision until he could

discern a unity in multiplicity. Unity of this rare kind cannot be imposed as,
for instance, Zola attempted to impose it. It is an emanation from life which
can be distinguished only by the most sensitive contemplation.

The problem is to define this unity in the case of each great writer in
whom it appears. To apprehend it is not so difficult. The mere sense of unity
is so singular and compelling that it leaves room for few hesitations. The
majority of writers, however excellent in their peculiar virtues, are not
concerned with it: at one moment they represent, at another they may
philosophise, but the two activities have no organic connection, and their
work, if it displays any evolution at all, displays it only in the minor
accidents of the craft, such as style in the narrower and technical sense, or
the obvious economy of construction. There is no danger of mistaking these
for great writers. Nor, in the more peculiar case of writers who attempt to
impose the illusion of unity, is the danger serious. The apparatus is always
visible; they cannot afford to do without the paraphernalia of argument
which supplies the place of what is lacking in their presentation. The
obvious instance of this legerdemain is Zola; a less obvious, and therefore
more interesting example is Balzac.

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

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

I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestation
of l'art pour l'art, because in any commonly accepted sense of that phrase,
he is not. Still, he might be considered as an exemplification of what the
phrase might be made to mean. But instead of being diverted into a barren
dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring into prominence an
aspect of Tchehov which has an immediate interest—his modernity. Again,
the word is awkward. It suggests that he is fashionable, or up to date.
Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases in advance of all that is habitually
described as modern in the art of literature. The artistic problem which he
faced and solved is one that is, at most, partially present to the
consciousness of the modern writer—to reconcile the greatest possible
diversity of content with the greatest possible unity of æsthetic impression.
Diversity of content we are beginning to find in profusion—Miss May
Sinclair's latest experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a

writer with a settled manner and a fixed reputation—but how rarely do we
see even a glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified æsthetic
impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has been,
present to consciousness is ipso facto unified æsthetically. The result of
such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of language and
artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical method.

The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving æsthetic unity
by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an
arbitrary (because non-æsthetic) argument. This argument was let down like
a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a unified
crystalline structure congregated about it. Of all great artists of the past
Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this method. How much
deliberate artistic purpose there was in his employment of songs and
madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally different from that made
by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big for a parenthesis. But he, too,
is at bottom a classic artist. The modern problem—it has not yet been
sufficiently solved for us to speak of a modern method—arises from a sense
that the classical method produces over-simplification. It does not permit of
a sufficient sense of multiplicity. One can think of a dozen semi-treatments
of the problem from Balzac to Dostoevsky, but they were all on the old
lines. They might be called Shakespearean modifications of the classical
method.

Tchehov, we believe, attempted a treatment radically new. To make use
again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different string
to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. In a sense he began
at the other end. He had decided on the quality of æsthetic impression he
wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision, but by one which followed
naturally from the contemplative unity of life which he had achieved. The
essential quality he discerned and desired to represent was his argument, his

string. Everything that heightened and completed this quality accumulated
about it, quite independently of whether it would have been repelled by the
old criterion of plot and argument. There is a magnificent example of his
method in the longest story in this volume, 'The Steppe.' The quality is
dominant throughout, and by some strange compulsion it makes
heterogeneous things one; it is reinforced by the incident. Tiny events—the
peasant who eats minnows alive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who
burned his six thousand roubles—take on a character of portent, except that
the word is too harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is
a sense of incalculability that haunts us. The emphases have all been
slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. It is not while we
are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much significance could
attach to a little boy's questions in a remote village shop:—

'"How much are these cakes?'

'"Two for a farthing.'

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

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

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

'"Like that?' he asked.

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

'"Two for three farthings…."'

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

[AUGUST, 1919.

*****

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

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

vanities will be in the far background, in the shade….'—(January,
1900.)

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

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

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

That was written in 1892. When we remember all the strange literary
effort gathered round about that year in the West—Symbolism, the Yellow
Book, Art for Art's sake—and the limbo into which it has been thrust by
now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own despite, a leader,
Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was plunging with
enthusiasm into one cul de sac after another, incapable of diagnosing its
own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West, had achieved a clear
vision and a sense of perspective.

To-day we begin to feel how intimately Tchehov belongs to us; to-
morrow we may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. A genius
will always be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned with
the genius of Tchehov we must accept the inevitable. We must analyse and
seek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that since
Tchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, a
vast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable.
Writers who would be modern and ignore Tchehov's achievement are,
however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists,
merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of a profession
like any other; for Tchehov is a standard by which modern literary effort
must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry who is not sufficiently
single-minded to apply the standard to himself is of no particular account.

Though Tchehov's genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves a
much exacter study than it has yet received. The publication of this volume
of his letters[8] hardly affords the occasion for that; but it does afford an

opportunity for the examination of some of the chief constituents of his
perfect art. These touch us nearly because—we insist again—the supreme
interest of Tchehov is that he is the only great modern artist in prose. He
belongs, as we have said, to us. If he is great, then he is great not least in
virtue of qualities which we may aspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an
ideal to which we can refer ourselves, He had been saturated in all the
disillusions which we regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which
is distinctive of the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is
reflected in him—and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. He did
not rub his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess
beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for
universal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a
millennium which he alone had the ability to control. He was and wanted to
be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his, we feel
gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was a hero—more
than that, the hero of our time.

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

It is significant that, in reading Tchehov's letters, we do not consider him
under the aspect of an artist. We are inevitably fascinated by his character as
a man, one who, by efforts which we have most frequently to divine for
ourselves from his reticences, worked on the infinitely complex material of
the modern mind and soul, and made it in himself a definite, positive, and
most lovable thing. He did not throw in his hand in face of his manifold
bewilderments; he did not fly for refuge to institutions in which he did not
believe; he risked everything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in
revolution and saying so. In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace
in his letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great
exemplar, by us. He refused to march under any political banner—a thing,

let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his country; he
submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political indifference; yet he
spent more of his life and energy in doing active good to his neighbour than
all the high-souled professors of liberalism and social reform. He undertook
an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin in 1890 to investigate the
condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 he spent the best part of a year as a
doctor devising preventive measures against the cholera in the country
district where he lived, and, although he had no time for the writing on
which his living depended, he refused the government pay in order to
preserve his own independence of action; in another year he was the leading
spirit in organising practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-
Novgorod. From his childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole
support of his family. Measured by the standards of Christian morality,
Tchehov was wholly a saint. His self-devotion was boundless.

Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when
he wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent.' Tchehov was indifferent; but his
indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies will show, was
of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, an axiomatic basis of his own
self-discipline. Since life is what it is and men are what they are, he seems
to have argued, everything depends upon the individual. The stars are
hostile, but love is kind, and love is within the compass of any man if he
will work to attain it. In one of his earliest letters he defines true culture for
the benefit of his brother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he
said, respect human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and
cats only; they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts;
they are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves
to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent
they respect it; they develop the æsthetic feeling in themselves … they seek
as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct. The letter from
which these chief points are taken is tremulous with sympathy and wit.

Tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote it. He concludes with the words:
'What is needed is constant work day and night, constant reading, study,
will. Every hour is precious for it.'

In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man. He set
himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. The indifference
upon which Tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moral
indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the fact
that life itself is indifferent. To that he held fast to the end. But the
conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no particular
difference what any one did, but that the attitude and character of the
individual were all-important. There was, indeed, no panacea, political or
religious, for the ills of humanity; but there could be a mitigation in men's
souls. But the new asceticism must not be negative. It must not cast away
the goods of civilisation because civilisation is largely a sham.

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

Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarily
endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service to
his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned with pluses
alone.' Since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly precious. Only they
must be amenities without humbug.

'Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois
houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the
younger generation…. That is why I have no preference either for
gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the
younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a

superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health,
intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom
—freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make take.
This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.'

What 'the most absolute freedom' meant to Tchehov his whole life is
witness. It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is, achieved at
the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and self-refinement. In one letter
he says he is going to write a story about the son of a serf—Tchehov was
the son of a serf—who 'squeezed the slave out of himself.' Whether the
story was ever written we do not know, but the process is one to which
Tchehov applied himself all his life long. He waged a war of extermination
against the lie in the soul in himself, and by necessary implication in others
also.

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

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

alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up
solidarity.'

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

[MARCH, 1920.

American Poetry

We are not yet immune from the weakness of looking into the back pages
to see what the other men have said; and on this occasion we received a
salutary shock from the critic of the Detroit News, who informs us that Mr
Aiken, 'despite the fact that he is one of the youngest and the newest,
having made his debut less than four years ago, … demonstrates … that he
is eminently capable of taking a solo part with Edgar Lee Masters, Amy
Lowell, James Oppenheim, Vachel Lindsay, and Edwin Arlington
Robinson.' The shock is two-fold. In a single sentence we are in danger of
being convicted of ignorance, and, where we can claim a little knowledge,
we plead guilty; we know nothing of either Mr Oppenheim or Mr Robinson.
This very ignorance makes us cautious where we have a little knowledge
We know something of Mr Lindsay, something of Mr Masters, and a good
deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiar figure in our anthologies
of revolt; and we cannot understand on what principle they are assembled

together. Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded, a negligible poet, with a
tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which she teases out into stupid
'originalities.' Of the other two gentlemen we have seen nothing which
convinces us that they are poets, but also nothing which convinces us that
they may not be.

Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them.
All three have in common what we may call creative energy. They are all
facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all obvious
what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that whatever it is
it cannot be said in the old ways. Not one of them produces the certainty
that this conviction is really justified or that he has tested it; not one has
written lines which have the doom 'thus and not otherwise' engraved upon
their substance; not one has proved that he is capable of addressing himself
to the central problem of poetry, no matter what technique be employed—
how to achieve a concentrated unity of æsthetic impression. They are all
diffuse; they seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon
reality at once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final
issue; they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod—and they are all
interesting.

They are extremely interesting. For one thing, they have all achieved
what is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success.
Very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened Mr Lindsay's 'Congo'
or Mr Masters's 'Spoon River Anthology' or Mr Aiken's 'Jig of Forslin'
without being impelled to read on to the end. That does not very often
happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetry save in the case
of the thronging admirers of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and their similars.
There is, however, another case more exactly in point, namely, that of Mr
Kipling. With Mr Kipling our three American poets have much in common,
though the community must not be unduly pressed. Their most obvious

similarity is the prominence into which they throw the novel interest in their
verse. They are, or at moments they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories.
We will not dogmatise and say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to
insist that to tell a story in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task. It
would indeed be doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell
very different stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotional
subtleties which Mr Aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable of
being exactly expressed in prose.

Since Mr Aiken is the corpus vile before us we will henceforward
confine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his very
sufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worth attention in
modern American poetry. Proceeding then, we find another point of contact
between him and Mr Kipling, more important perhaps than the former, and
certainly more dangerous. Both find it apparently impossible to stem the
uprush of rhetoric. Perhaps they do not try to; but we will be charitable—
after all, there is enough good in either of them to justify charity—and
assume that the willingness of the spirit gives way to the weakness of the
flesh. Of course we all know about Mr Kipling's rhetoric; it is a kind of
emanation of the spatial immensities with which he deals—Empires, the
Seven Seas, from Dublin to Diarbekir. Mr Aiken has taken quite another
province for his own; he is an introspective psychologist. But like Mr
Kipling he prefers big business. His inward eye roves over immensities at
least as vast as Mr Kipling's outward. In 'The Charnel Rose and Other
Poems' this appetite for the illimitable inane of introspection seems to have
gained upon him. There is much writing of this kind:—

'Dusk, withdrawing to a single lamplight
At the end of an infinite street—
He saw his ghost walk down that street for ever,
And heard the eternal rhythm of his feet.

And if he should reach at last that final gutter,
To-day, or to-morrow,
Or, maybe, after the death of himself and time;
And stand at the ultimate curbstone by the stars,
Above dead matches, and smears of paper, and slime;
Would the secret of his desire
Blossom out of the dark with a burst of fire?
Or would he hear the eternal arc-lamps sputter,
Only that; and see old shadows crawl;
And find the stars were street lamps after all?

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

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

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

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

Perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar things
mean, exactly, anything? Mr Aiken warns us that his intention has been to
use the idea—'the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal to

another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some new and
subtler fiction'—'as a theme upon which one might wilfully build a kind of
absolute music.' But having given us so much instruction, he should have
given more; he should have told us in what province of music he has been
working. Are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or for a musical
elaboration of an intellectual theme? We infer, partly from the assurance
that 'the analogy to a musical symphony is close,' more from the absence of
verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaboration of a theme. In that case
the fact that we have a more definite grasp of the theme in the programme-
introduction than anywhere in the poem itself points to failure. In the poem
'stars rush up and whirl and set,' 'skeletons whizz before and whistle
behind,' 'sands bubble and roses shoot soft fire,' and we wonder what all the
commotion is about. When there is a lull in the pandemonium we have a
glimpse, not of eternity, but precisely of 1890:—

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

We are far from saying that Mr Aiken's poetry is merely a chemical
compound of the 'nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but we do
think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into those
elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency in the
poem called 'The Charnel Rose.' 'Senlin' resists disruption longer. But the
same elements are there. They are better but not sufficiently fused. The
rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in rhetoric. We have the sense that
Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to his own idea, and that he tried to drown
the voice of his own doubt by a violent clashing of the cymbals where a
quiet recitative was what the theme demanded and his art could not ensure.

'Death himself in the rain … death himself …
Death in the savage sunlight … skeletal death …

I hear the clack of his feet,
Clearly on stones, softly in dust,
Speeding among the trees with whistling breath,
Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves …
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!…'

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

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

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

In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.
We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the
whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more irrevocably
itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses at the swiftly passing
premonition of a frisson hitherto unknown to us in poetry, and as we
recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he has to travel along the

road of art, and the great labour that he must perform before he becomes
something more than a brilliant feuilletonist in verse. It is hardly for us to
prophesy whether he will devote the labour. His fluency tells us of his
energy, but tells us nothing of its quality. We can only express our hope that
he will, and our conviction that if he were to do so his great pains, and our
lesser ones would be well requited.

[SEPTEMBER, 1919.

Ronsard

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

Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an
amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him more
closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. There is something
churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard against the engaging
graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving like the hero of a Gissing
novel; but the choice is not large. One must regard Ronsard either as a

charming country gentleman, or as a great historical figure in the
development of French poetry, or as a poet; and the third aspect has a
chance of being the most important.

Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. There is nothing
mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible thread of
development in either. They are equable, constant imperturbable, like the
bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of a safe batsman. The
accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment. The nerves, instead of
being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are steady to a degree that
can produce an exasperation in a less well-appointed spectator. He will
never let himself down, or give himself away, one feels, until the admiration
of an apparent sure restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing
to restrain. All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface
of it.

Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for
Ronsard a game. There was plenty of game in it; l'art de bien pétrarquiser
was all he claimed for himself. But the game would have wearied any one
who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied and expressed by
it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire of him, the
fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by some of the
mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No one reading
Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hard to find in the
whole of M. van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'Les Amours'[9] a single
piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto. When you are tired, it is
because you have had enough of that particular kind of man and mind; you
know him too well, and can reckon too closely the chances of a shock of
surprise.

[Footnote 9: Les Amours. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte établi par
Ad. van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Crès.)]

With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard is
generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal tenuity
of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly capable of further
analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is
perpetually in love with making; he disports himself with a childlike
enthusiasm in his art. There are moments when he seems hardly to have
passed beyond the stage of naive wonder that words exist and are
manipulable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtless allied
to the first; it is a naïveté of a particular kind, which differs from the
profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by the fact that it is
employed deliberately. Conscious simplicity is art, and if it is successful art
of no mean order, Ronsard's method of admitting us, as it were, to his
conversation with himself is definitely his own. His interruptions of a verse
with 'Hà' or 'Hé'; his 'Mon Dieu, que j'aime!' or 'Hé, que ne suis-je puce?'
(the difference between Ronsard's flea and Donne's would be worth
examination) have in them an element of irresistible bonhomie. We feel that
he is making us his confidant. He does not have to tear agonies out of
himself, so that what he confides has no chance of making explicit any
secrets of our own. There is nothing dangerous about him; we know that he
is as safe as we are. We are in conversation, not communion. But how
effective and engaging it is!

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

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

or the still more casual

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

Of this device of style our own Elizabethans were to make more
profitable use than Ronsard. At their best they packed an intensity of
dramatic significance into conversational language, of which Ronsard had
no inkling; and even a strict contemporary of his, like Wyatt, could touch
cords more intimate by the same means. But, on the other hand, Ronsard
never fails of his own effect, which is not to convince us emotionally, but to
compel us to listen. His unexpected address to himself or to us is a new
ornament for us to admire, not a new method for him to express a new
thing; and the suggestion of new rhythms that might thus be attained is
never fully worked out.

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

The ampleness of that reverberance is almost isolated.

Ronsard's resources are indeed few. But he needed few. His simple mind
was at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasant
impression of one to whom commonplaces are real. He felt them all over
again. One imagines him reading the classics—the Iliad in three days, or his
beloved companion 'sous le bois amoureux,' Tibullus—with an unfailing
delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted on to unripe
youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus. One might almost say that he saw
his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it not that he faced them
with some directness as physical beings, and that the artificiality implied in
the criticism is incongruous with the honesty of such a natural man. But
apart from a few particulars that would find a place in a census paper one
would be hard put to it to distinguish Cassandre from Hélène. What

charming things Ronsard has to say of either might be said of any charming
woman—'le mignard embonpoint de ce sein,'—

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

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

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

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

But we need, in fact, seek no reason other than the circumscription of
Ronsard's poetical gifts. They reduce to only two—the gift of convinced
commonplace, and the gift of simple melody. His commonplace is genuine
commonplace, quite distinct from the tense and pregnant condensation of a
lifetime of impassioned experience in Dante or Shakespeare; things that
would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinner conversation,
the sentiments that such a rare and amiable person would underscore in his

Horace. (From a not unimportant angle Ronsard is a minor Horace.) These
things are the warp of his poetry; they range from the familiar 'Le temps
s'en va' to the masterly straightforwardness of

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

His melody, likewise, is genuine melody; it is irrepressible. It led him to
belie his own professed seriousness. He could not stop his sonnets from
rippling even when he pretended to passionate argument. Life came easily
to him; he was never weary of it, at the most he acknowledged that he was
'saoûl de la vie.' It is not surprising, therefore, that his remonstrances as the
tortured lover have a trick of opening to a delightful tune:—

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

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

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

But to compare Ronsard's sonnet with 'Follow your saint' is to see how
infinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music was the Elizabethan than the
great French lyrist of the Renaissance. From first to last Ronsard was an
amateur.

[SEPTEMBER, 1919.

Samuel Butler

The appearance of a new impression of The Way of all Flesh[10] in Mr
Fifield's edition of Samuel Butler's works gives us an occasion to consider
more calmly the merits and the failings of that entertaining story. Like all
unique works of authors who stand, even to the most obvious apprehension,
aside from the general path, it has been overwhelmed with superlatives. The
case is familiar enough and the explanation is simple and brutal. It is hardly
worth while to give it. The truth is that although there is no inherent reason
why the isolated novel of an author who devotes himself to other forms
should not be 'one of the great novels of the world,' the probabilities tell
heavily against it. On the other hand, an isolated novel makes a good stick
to beat the age. It is fairly certain to have something sufficiently unique
about it to be useful for the purpose. Even its blemishes have a knack of
being sui generis. To elevate it is, therefore, bound to imply the diminution
of its contemporaries.

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

Yet, apart from the general argument, there are particular reasons why the
praise of The Way of all Flesh should be circumspect. Samuel Butler knew
extraordinarily well what he was about. His novel was written intermittently
between 1872 and 1884 when he abandoned it. In the twenty remaining
years of his life he did nothing to it, and we have Mr Streatfeild's word for it
that 'he professed himself dissatisfied with it as a whole, and always
intended to rewrite, or at any rate, to revise it.' We could have deduced as
much from his refusal to publish the book. The certainty of commercial
failure never deterred Butler from publication; he was in the happy situation
of being able to publish at his own expense a book of whose merit he was
himself satisfied. His only reason for abandoning The Way of all Flesh was
his own dissatisfaction with it. His instruction that it should be published in
its present form after his death proves nothing against his own estimate.

Butler knew, at least as well as we, that the good things in his book were
legion. He did not wish the world or his own reputation to lose the benefit
of them.

But there are differences between a novel which contains innumerable
good things and a great novel. The most important is that a great novel does
not contain innumerable good things. You may not pick out the plums,
because the pudding falls to pieces if you do. In The Way of all Flesh,
however, a compère is always present whose business it is to say good
things. His perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because the asides are
piquant and, in their way, to the point. Butler's mind, being a good mind,
had a predilection for the object, and his detestation of the rotunder
platitudes of a Greek chorus, if nothing else, had taught him that a corner-
man should have something to say on the subject in hand. His arguments
are designed to assist his narrative; moreover, they are sympathetic to the
modern mind. An enlightened hedonism is about all that is left to us, and
Butler's hatred of humbug is, though a little more placid, like our own. We
share his ethical likes and dislikes. As an audience we are ready to laugh at
his asides, and, on the first night at least, to laugh at them even when they
interrupt the play.

But our liking for the theses cannot alter the fact that The Way of all
Flesh is a roman à thèses. Not that there is anything wrong with the roman
à thèses, if the theses emerge from the narrative without its having to be
obviously doctored. Nor does it matter very much that a compère should be
present all the while, provided that he does not take upon himself to replace
the demonstration the narrative must afford, by arguments outside it. But
what happens in The Way of all Flesh? We may leave aside the minor thesis
of heredity, for it emerges, gently enough, from the story; besides, we are
not quite sure what it is. We have no doubt, on the other hand, about the
major thesis; it is blazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious

quotation from St Paul to the Romans. 'We know that all things work
together for good to them that love God.' The necessary gloss on this text is
given in Chapter LXVIII, where Ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:—

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

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

With this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'All experience
does a gentleman good.' It is the kind of thing we should like very much to
believe; as an article of faith it was held with passion and vehemence by
Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word 'gentleman' was for him
very different from the connotation it had for Butler. (Butler's gentleman, it

should be said in passing, was very much the ideal of a period, and not at all
quod semper, quod ubique; a very Victorian anti-Victorianism.) Dostoevsky
worked his thesis out with a ruthless devotion to realistic probability. He
emptied the cornucopia of misery upon his heroes and drove them to
suicide one after another; and then had the audacity to challenge the world
to say that they were not better, more human, and more lovable for the
disaster in which they were inevitably overwhelmed. And, though it is hard
to say 'Yes' to his challenge, it is harder still to say 'No.'

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

After all, as far as the positive side of The Way of all Flesh' is concerned,
Butler's eggs are all in one basket. If the adult Ernest does not materialise,
the book hangs in empty air. Whatever it may be instead it is not a great
novel, nor even a good one. So much established, we may begin to collect
the good things. Christina is the best of them. She is, by any standard, a
remarkable creation. Butler was 'all round' Christina. Both by analysis and
synthesis she is wholly his. He can produce her in either way. She lives as
flesh and blood and has not a little of our affection; she is also constructed

by definition, 'If it were not too awful a thing to say of anybody, she meant
well'—the whole phrase gives exactly Christina's stature. Alethea Pontifex
is really a bluff; but the bluff succeeds, largely because, having experience
of Christina, we dare not call it. Mrs Jupp is triumphantly complete; there
are even moments when she seems as great as Mrs Quickly. The novels that
contain three such women (or two if we reckon the uncertain Alethea, who
is really only a vehicle for Butler's very best sayings, as cancelled by the
non-existent Ellen) can be counted, we suppose, on our ten fingers.

Of the men, Theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word).
But we know little of what went on inside him. We can fill out Christina
with her inimitable day-dreams; Theobald remains something of a skeleton,
whereas we have no difficulty at all with Dr Skinner, of Roughborough. We
have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling the shelves with volumes
of Skinner, and we know how it was done. When he reappears we assume
the continuity of his existence without demur. The glimpse of George
Pontifex is also satisfying; after the christening party we know him for a
solid reality. Pryer was half-created when his name was chosen. Butler did
the rest in a single paragraph which contains a perfect delineation of 'the
Oxford manner' twenty years before it had become a disease known to
ordinary diagnosis. The curious may find this towards the beginning of
Chapter LI. But Ernest, upon whom so much depends, is a phantom—a
dream-child waiting the incarnation which Butler refused him for twenty
years. Was it laziness, was it a felt incapacity? We do not know; but in the
case of a novelist it is our duty to believe the worst. The particularity of our
attitude to Butler appears in the fact that we are disappointed, not with him,
but with Ernest. We are even angry with that young man. If it had not been
for him, we believe, The Way of all Flesh might have appeared in 1882; it
might have short-circuited Robert Elsmere.

[JUNE, 1919.

*****

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

The essential quality of great artists is incommensurable with biography;
they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasion of the event.
All that piety can do for them is beside the mark. Their wilful spirit is fled
before the last stone of the mausoleum can be got in place, and as it flies it
jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and his libation is spilt idly upon the
ground. Although it would be too much and too ungrateful to say that the
monumental piety of Mr Festing Jones has been similarly turned to derision
—after all, Butler was not a great man—we feel that something analogous
has happened. This laborious building is a great deal too large for him to
dwell in. He had made himself a cosy habitation in the Note-Books, with the
fire in the right place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of
criticism. In a two-volume memoir[11] he shivers perceptibly, and at
moments he looks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic.

[Footnote 11: Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon' (1835-1902): a
Memoir. By Henry Festing Jones. 2 vols. (Macmillan.)]

And if it be said that a biography should make no difference to our
estimate of the man who lives and has his being in his published works, we
reply that it shifts the emphasis. An amusingly wrong-headed book about
Homer is a peccadillo; ten years of life lavished upon it is something a good

deal more serious. And even The Way of all Flesh, which as an
experimental novel is a very considerable achievement, becomes something
different when we have to regard it as a laborious and infinitely careful
record of experienced fact. Further still, even the edge of the perfected
inconsequence of certain of the 'Notes' is somewhat dulled when we see the
trick of it being exercised. The origin of the amusing remark on Blake, who
'was no good because he learnt Italian at over 60 in order to read Dante, and
we know Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil
was no good because Tennyson ran him—well, Tennyson goes without
saying,' is to be found in 'No, I don't like Lamb. You see, Canon Ainger
writes about him, and Canon Ainger goes to tea with my aunts.' Repeated, it
becomes merely a clever way of being stupid, as we should be if we were
tempted to say we couldn't bear Handel, because Butler was mad on him,
and Butler was no good because he was run by Mr Jones, and, well, Mr
Jones goes without saying.

Nevertheless, though Butler lives with much discomfort and some danger
in Mr Jones's tabernacle, he does continue to live. What his head loses by
the inquisition of a biography his heart gains, though we wonder whether
Butler himself would have smiled upon the exchange. Butler loses almost
the last vestige of a title to be considered a creative artist when the
incredible fact is revealed that the letters of Theobald and Christina in The
Way of all Flesh are merely reproduced from those which his father and
mother sent him. Nor was Butler, even as a copyist, always adequate to his
originals. The brilliantly witty letters of Miss Savage, by which the first
volume is made precious, seem to us to indicate a real woman upon whom
something more substantial might have been modelled than the delightful
but evanescent picture of Alethea Pontifex. Here, at least, is a picture of
Miss Savage and Butler together which, to our sense, gives some common
element in both which escaped the expression of the author of The Way of
all Flesh:—

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

Again, we feel that the unsubstantial Towneley of the novel should have
been more like flesh and blood when we learn that he too was drawn from
the life, and from a life which was intimately connected with Butler's. Here,
most evidently, the heart gains what the head loses, for the story of Butler's
long-suffering generosity to Charles Paine Pauli is almost beyond belief and
comprehension. Butler had met Pauli, who was two years his junior, in New
Zealand, and had conceived a passionate admiration for him. Learning that
he desired to read for the bar, Butler, who had made an unexpected success
of his sheep-farming, offered to lend him £100 to get to England and £200 a
year until he was called. Very shortly after they both arrived in England,
Pauli separated from Butler, refusing even to let him know his address, and
thenceforward paid him one brief visit every day. He continued, however, to
draw his allowance regularly until his death all through the period when,
owing to the failure of Butler's investments, £200 seems to have been a
good deal more than one-half Butler's income. At Pauli's death in 1897
Butler discovered what he must surely at moments have suspected, that
Pauli had been making between £500 and £800 at the bar, and had left about

£9000—not to Butler. Butler wrote an account of the affair after Pauli's
death which is strangely self-revealing:—

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

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

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

In love such as this there is a feminine tenderness and devotion which
positively illuminates what otherwise appears to be a streak of perversity in
Butler; and the illumination becomes still more certain when we read
Butler's letters to the young Swiss, Hans Faesch, to whom Out into the
Night was written. Faesch had departed for Singapore.

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

The love is almost pathetically lavish. Letters like these reveal to us a
man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier and
defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was rentrée, probably as a
consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication helps us to
understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which he behaved to
Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured weapon. The most
threatening danger for such a man is to take the professions of the world at
their face value; he can inoculate himself only by irony. The more extreme
his case, the more devouring the hunger to love and be loved, the more
extreme the irony, and in Butler it reached the absolute maximum, which is

to interpret the professions of the world as their exact opposite. As a
reviewer of the Note-Books in The Athenæum recently said, Butler's method
was to stand propositions on their heads. He universalised his method; he
applied it not merely to scientific propositions of fact, but, even more
ruthlessly, to the converse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast
majority who meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal
minority who were sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland
cases escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to
regard all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like and
admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and wrong-
headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle the
curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnett of the
British Museum are of uncommon interest. They afford a strange example
of mutual mystification.

Thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does not greatly
matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as with the whole)
but of thought, was closed to him. Most of the poetry, the music, and the art
of the world was humbug to him, and it was only by insisting that Homer
and Shakespeare were exactly like himself that he managed to except them
from his natural aversion. So, in the last resort, he humbugged himself quite
as vehemently as he imagined the majority of men were engaged in
humbugging him. If his standard of truth was higher than that of the many,
it was lower than that of the few. There is a kingdom where the crass
division into sheep and goats is merely clumsy and inopportune. In the slow
meanderings of this Memoir we too often catch a glimpse of Butler
measuring giants with the impertinent foot-rule of his common sense. One
does not like him the less for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting
jokes with which it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation.
Persistently there emerges from the record the impression of something
childish, whether in petulance or gaminerie, a crudeness as well as a

shrewdness of judgment and ideal. Where Butler thought himself complete,
he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he was
complete. To himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of Pauli; to us
he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of Miss Savage.

[OCTOBER, 1919.

The Poetry of Mr Hardy

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

We are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those of
the contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressed
primarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man's chief work must
necessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some such
supposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visible
reluctance to allow Mr Hardy's poetry a clean impact upon the critical
consciousness. It is true that we have ranged against us critics of distinction,
such as Mr Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr Robert Lynd, and that it may
savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could have been
unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressed themselves to
Mr Hardy's poetry. Nevertheless, we find some significance in the fact that
both these critics are of such an age that when they came to years of
discretion the Wessex Novels were in existence as a corpus. There, before
their eyes, was a monument of literary work having a unity unlike that of

any contemporary author. The poems became public only after they had laid
the foundations of their judgment. For them Mr Hardy's work was done.
Whatever he might subsequently produce was an interesting, but to their
criticism an otiose appendix to his prose achievement.

It happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspective
may be different. By the accident of years it would appear to him that Mr
Hardy's poetry was no less a corpus than his prose. They would be extended
equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embark upon
voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and he might find,
in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that the poetry would yield
up to him a quality of perfume not less essential than any that he could
extract from the prose.

This is, as we see it, the case with ourselves. We discover all that our
elders discover in Mr Hardy's novels; we see more than they in his poetry.
To our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is not lifted into
significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels. They also are
complete in themselves. We recognise the relation between the
achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind; but they
are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. The one is only
approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline, therefore, to
attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us the most
important sentence in Who's Who?—namely, that in which Mr Hardy
confesses that in 1868 he was compelled—that is his own word—to give up
writing poetry for prose.

For Mr Hardy's poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. In the
volume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with the
exception of 'The Dynasts,'[12] are pieces bearing the date 1866 which
display an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of the essential

content of great poetry. Nor are such pieces exceptional. Granted that Mr
Hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry, still there are a dozen
poems of 1866-7 which belong either entirely or in part to the category of
major poetry. Take, for instance, 'Neutral Tones':—

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 12: Collected. Poems of Thomas Hardy. Vol. I.
(Macmillan.)]

That was written in 1867. The date of Desperate Remedies, Mr Hardy's
first novel, was 1871. Desperate Remedies may have been written some
years before. It makes no difference to the astonishing contrast between the
immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. It is surely

impossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that Mr Hardy's
poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curious simulacrum of
his prose.

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

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

or this from another sonnet of the same year:—

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

Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the impress
of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curious and impressive
in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringing some physical
compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to say something that
he does not want to say. Of course, it is merely a curious tweak of the
fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as the following an insistent
vision of two youths of an age the one masterful, the other indulgent, and
carrying out his companion's firm suggestion:—

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

But, fancies aside, the effect of these early poems is twofold. Their
attitude is definite:—

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

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

The early years were followed by the long period of the novels, in which,
we are prepared to admit, poetry was actually if not in intention incidental.
It is the grim truth that poetry cannot be written in between times; and,
though we have hardly any dates on which to rely, we are willing to believe
that few of Mr Hardy's characteristic poems were written between the
appearance of Desperate Remedies and his farewell to the activity of novel-
writing with The Well-Beloved (1897). But the few dates which we have tell
us that 'Thoughts of Phena,' the beautiful poem beginning:—

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

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

Whether the development of Mr Hardy's poetry was concealed or visible
during the period of the novels, development there was into a maturity so
overwhelming that by its touchstone the poetical work of his famous
contemporaries appears singularly jejune and false. But, though by the
accident of social conditions—for that Mr Hardy waited till 1898 to publish

his first volume of poems is more a social than an artistic fact—it is
impossible to follow out the phases of his poetical progress in the detail we
would desire, it is impossible not to recognise that the mature poet, Mr
Hardy, is of the same poetical substance as the young poet of the 'sixties.
The attitude is unchanged; the modifications of the theme of 'crass casualty'
leave its central asseveration unchanged. There are restatements,
enlargements of perspective, a slow and forceful expansion of the personal
into the universal, but the truth once recognised is never suffered for a
moment to be hidden or mollified. Only a superficial logic would point, for
instance, to his

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

as a denial of 'casualty.' To envisage an accepted truth from a new angle,
to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope of finding some aspect
which might accord with a large and general view is the inevitable
movement of any mind that is alive and not dead. To say that Mr Hardy has
finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it is true. The harmony of
the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher or the philosopher. Neither
would grant, neither would understand the profound acquiescence that lies
behind 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to the Grecian Urn.' Such acquiescence has no
moral quality, as morality is even now understood, nor any logical
compulsion. It does not stifle anger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling
face upon unsmiling things; it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile
heroics. It accepts the things that are as the necessary basis of artistic
creation. This unity which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet
to deny experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which
is not denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy's mature poetry. It
gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is called the
impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense of background, a

conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the culmination of an
experience, and that the experience of which it is the culmination is far
larger and more profound than the one which it seems to record.

At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy to
all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or dismay.
Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famous lines: 'There
is some corner of a foreign field …' and Mr Hardy's 'Drummer Hodge':—

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

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

'Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
For the stars close their shutters and the
Dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours

The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.'

[NOVEMBER, 1919.

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

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

Therefore we turn—some by instinct and some by deliberate choice—to
the greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these. What
they have, he has, and has in their degree—a plenary vision of life. He is
the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in, modulates
and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual poems of which
they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment of a whole—not a
detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity which implies, calls

for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and completely comprehensive
whole His reaction to an episode has behind and within it a reaction to the
universe. An overwhelming endorsement descends upon his words: he
traces them as with a pencil, and straightway they are graven in stone.

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

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

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

To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?'

On such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visible
endorsement of the universe. The hopes not of a lover but of humanity are
crushed beneath its rhythm. The ruthlessness of the event is intensified in
the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad of destiny, and a
moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain of intense
attention it seems to have been written by the destiny it records.

What is the secret of poetic power like this? We do not look for it in
technique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. But the technique
of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind that we know as we
read that it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. For a moment it
startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words is reverberant
with accumulated purpose. They are pitiless as the poem; the sign of an
ultimate obedience is upon them. Whence came the power that compelled
it? Can the source be defined or indicated? We believe it can be indicated,
though not defined. We can show where to look for the mystery, that in
spite of our regard remains a mystery still. We are persuaded that almost on
the instant that it was felt the original emotion of the poem was endorsed
Perhaps it came to the poet as the pain of a particular and personal
experience; but in a little or a long while—creative time is not measured by
days or years—it became, for him, a part of the texture of the general life. It
became a manifestation of life, almost, nay wholly, in the sacramental
sense, a veritable epiphany. The manifold and inexhaustible quality of life
was focused into a single revelation. A critic's words do not lend themselves
to the necessary precision. We should need to write with exactly the same
power as Mr Hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour stroked its sum,' to make
our meaning likewise inevitable. The word 'revelation' is fertile in false
suggestion; the creative act of power which we seek to elucidate is an act of

plenary apprehension, by which one manifestation, one form of life, one
experience is seen in its rigorous relation to all other and to all possible
manifestations, forms, and experiences. It is, we believe, the act which Mr
Hardy himself has tried to formulate in the phrase which is the title of one
of his books of poems—Moments of Vision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Superstition and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert
the order of the creative process. The poet's act of apprehension is wholly
different from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension the chance-shaped
crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. The concentration of life's
vicissitude upon that white-clothed form was first recognised by a
sovereign act of æsthetic understanding or intuition; the seeming crucifix
supplied a scaffolding for its expression; it afforded a clue to the method of
transposition into words which might convey the truth thus apprehended; it
suggested an equivalence. The distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but
we believe that it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to an
understanding of Mr Hardy's poetry in particular. Indeed, in it must be
sought the meaning of another of his titles, 'Satires of Circumstance,' where

the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, but a symbol
necessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality in life more
largely and variously apprehended by the poet. At the risk of appearing
fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate our meaning. The
poetic process is, we believe, twofold. The one part, the discovery of the
symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what we may call poetic
method. It is concerned with the transposition and communication of
emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for to poetic method the
emotional material is, strictly, indifferent. The other part is an esthetic
apprehension of significance, the recognition of the all in the one. This is a
specifically poetic act, or rather the supreme poetic act. Yet it may be absent
from poetry. For there is no necessary connection between poetic
apprehension and poetic method. Poetic method frequently exists without
poetic apprehension; and there is no reason to suppose that the reverse is
not also true, for the recognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the
peculiar privilege of great poets. We have here, at least a principle of
division between major and minor poetry.

Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and ask
what it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act of
apprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality of the one.
We believe that the answer is simple. The great poet knows what he is
looking for. Once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely, being
compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describe what is
being done in the kingdom of art. The poet, we say, knows the quality for
which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a condition than a possession
of soul. It is a state of responsiveness rather than a knowledge of that to
which he will respond. But it is knowledge inasmuch as the choice of that to
which he will respond is determined by the condition of his soul. On the
purity of that condition depends his greatness as a poet, and that purity in its
turn depends upon his denying no element of his profound experience. If he

denies or forgets, the synthesis—again the word is a metaphor—which must
establish itself within him is fragmentary and false. The new event can
wake but partial echoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received
into, nor can it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable
from limbo into forgetfulness.

Mr Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate
purity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the world's slow stain has not
touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general conspiracy to
forget in which not only those who are professional optimists take a part.
Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence and strangeness of their
own:—

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

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

It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardy should
have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of love poems
that are unique for power and passion in even the English language. This
late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; it has sprung straight
from the main stem of Mr Hardy's poetic growth. Into 'Veteris Vestigia
Flammas' is distilled the quintessence of the power that created the Wessex

Novels and 'The Dynasts'; all that Mr Hardy has to tell us of life, the whole
of the truth that he has apprehended, is in these poems, and no poet since
poetry began has apprehended or told us more. Sunt lacrimæ rerum.

[NOVEMBER, 1919.

*****

POSTSCRIPT

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

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

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

Present Condition of English Poetry

Shall we, or shall we not, be serious? To be serious nowadays is to be ill-
mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter? We have our
opinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in the Georgian
book, a little in Wheels.[13] We know that there is much bad poetry in the
Georgian book, and less in Wheels. We know that there is one poem in
Wheels beside the intense and sombre imagination of which even the good
poetry of the Georgian book pales for a moment. We think we know more
than this. What does it matter? Pick out the good things, and let the rest go.

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

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

And yet, somehow, this question of modern English poetry has become
important for us, as important as the war, important in the same way as the
war. We can even analogise. Georgian Poetry is like the Coalition
Government; Wheels is like the Radical opposition. Out of the one there
issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous redolence
of union sacrée; out of the other, some acidulation of perversity. In the
coalition poets we find the larger number of good men, and the larger
number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find no bad ones with the
coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition goodness, but in a single
case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent, passionate honesty that is the
mark of the martyr of art or life.

On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both
sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost wholly
corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we find intensely

disagreeable. In the coalition we find it noxious, in the opposition no worse
than irritating. No doubt this is because we recognise a tendency to take the
coalition seriously, while the opposition is held to be ridiculous. But both
the coalition and the opposition—we use both terms in their corporate sense
—are unmistakably the product of the present age. In that sense they are
truly representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair
sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we live;
they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete confusion of
æsthetic values that prevails to-day.

The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. Of the
nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we
except absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, and
Mr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, Mr
Abercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the rest
there are varying degrees of saturation. This false simplicity can be quite
subtle. It is compounded of worship of trees and birds and contemporary
poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over at times with a quite
perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other times with what looks to be
technical skill, but generally proves to be a fairly clumsy reminiscence of
somebody else's technical skill. The negative qualities of this simplesse are,
however, the most obvious; the poems imbued with it are devoid of any
emotional significance whatever. If they have an idea it leaves you with the
queer feeling that it is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn
smooth by the rippling of innumerable minds. Then, spread in a luminous
haze over these compounded elements, is a fundamental right-mindedness;
you feel, somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are
very good. There is nothing disturbing about them; ils peuvent être mis dans
toutes les mains; they are kind, generous, even noble. They sympathise with
animate and inanimate nature. They have shining foreheads with big bumps
of benevolence, like Flora Casby's father, and one inclines to believe that

their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear, if only because
their vision is blurred. They are fond of lists of names which never suggest
things; they are sparing of similes. If they use them they are careful to see
they are not too definite, for a definite simile makes havoc of their
constructions, by applying to them a certain test of reality.

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

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

We are not surprised to learn further that

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

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

Then there is Mr Drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man for
moonlit apples—'moon-washed apples of wonder'—and the righteous man's
sense of robust rhythm in this chorus from 'Lincoln':—

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

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

Mr Squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make an
excellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity. He would
repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in the same way as,
we suppose, he deceives himself. His poem 'Rivers' seems to us a very
curious example of the faux bon. Not only is the idea derivative, but the
rhythmical treatment also. Here is Mr de la Mare:—

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

And here is a verse from Mr Squire:—

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

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

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

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

and a lover of dogs.

Mr Shanks, Mr W.J. Turner, and Mr Freeman belong to the same order.
They have considerable technical accomplishment of the straightforward
kind—and no emotional content. One can find examples of the disastrous
simile in them all. They are all in their degree pseudo-naïves. Mr Turner
wonders in this way:—

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

Of course Mr Turner does not really wonder; those four lines are proof
positive of that. But what matters is not so much the intrinsic value of the
gift as the kindly thought which prompted the giver. Mr Shanks's speciality
is beauty. He also is an amateur of nature. He bids us: 'Hear the loud night-
jar spin his pleasant note.' Of course, Mr Shanks cannot have heard a real
night-jar. His description is proof of that. But again, it was a kindly thought.
Mr Freeman is, like Mr Squire, a more interesting case, deserving detailed
analysis. For the moment we can only recommend a comparison of his first
and second poems in this book with 'Sabrina Fair' and 'Love in a Valley'
respectively.

It is only when we are confronted with the strange blend of technical skill
and an emotional void that we begin to hunt for reminiscences.
Reminiscences are no danger to the real poet. He is the splendid borrower
who lends a new significance to that which he takes. He incorporates his
borrowing in the new thing which he creates; it has its being there and there
alone. One can see the process in the one fine poem in Wheels, Mr Wilfred
Owen's 'Strange Meeting':—

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

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

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

That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen's 'Strange
Meeting.' It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its
technique there is the hand of the master to be. Those monosyllabic
assonances are the discovery of genius. We are persuaded that this poem by
a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in his heart, is
the most magnificent expression of the emotional significance of the war
that has yet been achieved by English poetry. By including it in his book,
the editor of Wheels has done a great service to English letters.

Extravagant words, it may be thought. We appeal to the documents. Read
Georgian Poetry and read 'Strange Meeting.' Compare Wilfred Owen's
poem with the very finest things in the Georgian book—Mr Davies's
'Lovely Dames,' or Mr de la Mare's 'The Tryst,' or 'Fare Well,' or the twenty
opening lines of Mr Abercrombie's disappointing poem. You will not find
those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you will find in
'Strange Meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that which has
been most profound in the experience of a generation. You will, finally,
have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of which makes the
confusion of a book like Georgian Poetry possible, restored to you. You
will remember three forgotten things—that poetry is rooted in emotion, and
that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and that its significance finally
depends upon the quality and comprehensiveness of the emotion. You will
recognise that the tricks of the trade have never been and never will be
discovered by which ability can conjure emptiness into meaning.

It seems hardly worth while to return to Wheels. Once the argument has
been pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting,' the rest of the contents of

the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry we will
characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false sophistication.
There are the same contemporary reminiscences. Compare Mr Osbert
Sitwell's English Gothic with Mr T.S. Eliot's Sweeney; and you will detect a
simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with the emotions of a
complex one. The spectacle is almost as amusing as that of the similar
process in the Georgian book. Nevertheless, in general, the affected
sophistication here is, as we have said, merely irritating; while the affected
simplicity of the coalition is positively noxious. Miss Edith Sitwell's
deliberate painted toys are a great deal better than painted canvas trees and
fields, masquerading as real ones. In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a
perplexed emotion manages to make its way through a chaotic technique.
She represents the solid impulse which lies behind the opposition in
general. This impulse she describes, though she is very, very far from
making poetry of it, in these not uninteresting verses:—

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

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

There is the opposition. Against the righteous man, the mauvais sujet. We
sympathise with the mauvais sujet. If he is persistent and laborious enough,
he may achieve poetry. But he must travel alone. In order to be loyal to your
age you must make up your mind what your age is. To be muddled yourself
is not loyalty, but treachery, even to a muddled generation.

[DECEMBER, 1919.

The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield

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

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

The glorification of England! There are some who would give their souls
to be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by Shakespeare, by
Milton, by Wordsworth, and by Hardy. For an Englishman there is no richer
inspiration, no finer theme; to have one's speech and thought saturated by
the fragrance of this lovely and pleasant land was once the birthright of
English poets and novelists. But something has crept between us and it,

dividing. Instead of an instinctive love, there is a conscious desire of
England; instead of slow saturation, a desperate plunge into its mystery. The
fragrance does not come at its own sweet will; we clutch at it. It does not
enfold and pervade our most arduous speculations; no involuntary
sweetness comes flooding in upon our confrontation of human destinies.
Hardy is the last of that great line. If we long for sweetness—as we do long
for it, and with how poignant a pain!—we must seek it out, like men who
rush dusty and irritable from the babble and fever of the town. The rhythm
of the earth never enters into their gait; they are like spies among the birds
and flowers, like collectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. The
Georgians snatch at nature; they are never part of it. And there is some
element of this desperation in Mr Masefield. We feel in him an anxiety to
load every rift with ore of this particular kind, a deliberate intention to
emphasise that which is most English in the English country-side.

How shall we say it? It is not that he makes a parade of arcane
knowledge. The word 'parade' does injustice to his indubitable integrity. But
we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical, and at times archaic
phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himself that he is saturated in
essential Englishness, and we incline to think that even his choice of an
actual subject was less inevitable than self-imposed. He would isolate the
quality he would capture, have it more wholly within his grasp; yet, in some
subtle way, it finally eludes him. The intention is in excess, and in the
manner of its execution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess
also. The music of English place-names, for instance is too insistent; no one
into whom they had entered with the English air itself would use them with
so manifest an admiration.

Perhaps a comparison may bring definition nearer. The first part of Mr
Masefield's poem, which describes the meet and the assembled persons one
by one, recalls, not merely by the general cast of the subject, but by many

actual turns of phrase, Chaucer's Prologue. Mr Masefield's parson has more
than one point of resemblance to Chaucer's Monk:—

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

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

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

And here is the Prioress:—

'But for to speken of hir conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous,
She wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous
Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed
With rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread,
But sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded
Or if men smote it with a yerde smerte:

And all was conscience and tendere herte.'
Ful semely hir wympel pynched was;
His nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red,
But sikerly she hadde a fair forhed.'

There is in the Chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidence
that the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside which Mr
Masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost malsain. How far
outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the apple calling,' and
how tainted by the desperate bergerie of the Georgian era!

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

Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate
impulse is a nostalgie de la boue that betrays itself in line after line, a
nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that any associations
will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield, in his fervour to
grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to him, seems almost to
shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and rightly cannot) persuade
himself that the scent of the mud will be there otherwise. For the same

reason he must make his heroes like himself. Here, for example, is the first
whip, Tom Dansey:—

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

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

As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted
distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already
been discussing Mr Masefield's style under a specific aspect. But the
particular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield's
general condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not find it in
his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself of the worst
of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very vitals of his artistic

effort. He is seeking always to be that which he is not, to lash himself into
the illusion of a certainty which he knows he can never wholly possess.

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

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

And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our
sympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness and right-
thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for this 'epic of
fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country house), is as deeply
debilitated by reaction as any of our time. Its colour is hectic; its tempo
feverish. He has sought the healing virtue where he believed it undefiled, in
that miraculous English country whose magic (as Mr Masefield so well
knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose strong rhythm is in Hardy. But the
virtue eludes all conscious inquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees
riot where there is peace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr
Masefield would have done better not to delude himself into an

identification he cannot feel, but rather to face his own disquiet where alone
the artist can master it, in his consciousness? We will not presume to
answer, mindful that Mr Masefield may not recognise himself in our mirror,
but we will content ourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of
the almost heroic effort that has gone to its composition Reynard the Fox
lacks all the qualities essential to durability.

[JANUARY, 1920.

The Lost Legions

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

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

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

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

Elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lasted
long enough to receive a name. There was Unanimism. The name is
remembered; perhaps the books are read. But it will not be found in the
books. They are childish, just as the English novels which endeavoured to
portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited. Behind all the
conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay a fundamental
candour of which only a flickering gleam can now be recaptured. It glints
on a page of M. Romains's Europe; the memory of it haunts Wilfred Owen's
poems; it touches Keeling's letters; it hovers over these letters of Charles
Sorley.[14] From a hundred strange lurking-places it must be gathered by
pious and sensitive fingers and withdrawn from under the very edge of the

scythe-blade of time, for if it wander longer without a habitation it will be
lost for ever.

[Footnote 14: The Letters of Charles Sorley. (Cambridge University
Press.)]

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

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

And Sorley was typical above all in this, that, passionate and penetrating
as was his devotion to literature, he never looked upon it as a thing existing
in and for itself. It was, to him and his kind, the satisfaction of an impulse

other and more complex than the æsthetic. Art was a means and not an end
to him, and it is perhaps the apprehension of this that has led one who
endeavoured in vain to reconcile Sorley to Pater into rash prognostication.
Sorley would never have been an artist in Pater's way; he belonged to his
own generation, to which l'art pour l'art had ceased to have meaning. There
had come a pause, a throbbing silence, from which art might have emerged,
may even now after the appointed time arise, with strange validities
undreamed of or forgotten. Let us not prophesy; let us be content with the
recognition that Sorley's generation was too keenly, perhaps too
disastrously aware of destinies, of

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

to seek the comfort of the ivory tower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I hope (if nothing else) before I leave Germany to get a thorough
hang of Faust…. The worst of a piece like Faust is that it
completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself.

There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not
somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it.'

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

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

And he writes home for Richard Jefferies, the man of his own county—
for through Marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the
Wiltshire Downs.

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

A day or two after we incidentally discover that Meredith is up (though
not on Olympus) from a denunciation of Browning on the queer non- (or
super-) æsthetic grounds of which we have spoken:—

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

Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He had
loved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from
illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are made of.
The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while training
at Shorncliffe:—

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

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

The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more
wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders written
throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said; he was
fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in complete and
utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to suffer the
cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of 1917. There
is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last always the crystal
clarity of the vision of the unbroken.

His intellectual evolution went on to the end. No wonder that he found
Rupert Brooke's sonnets overpraised:—

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

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

Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We do
not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those lost
legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it to the end. In
November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems. After

rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circumstance"' as bad poetry, and passing an
incisive criticism on 'Men who March away,' he continues:—

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

A little later, having finished The Egoist,—

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

The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died. What would
he not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone stands
equal? But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange
company, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in his heart,
for other reasons than that the love of the Wessex hills had crept into his
blood. He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in the head by a sniper as he
led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench near Hulluch.

[JANUARY, 1920.

The Cry in the Wilderness

We have in Mr Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism to deal with a
closely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind.
We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the
author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that
the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever
may be our final attitude towards the author's conclusions, we cannot but
regard Rousseau and Romanticism as masterly. Its style is, we admit, at
times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which animates it is
of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare that it is the only
book of modern criticism which can be compared for clarity and depth of
thought with Mr Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets.

By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more
easily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt's
achievement. We think that it would be easy to show that in the last
generation—we will go no further back for the moment, though our author's
arraignment reaches at least a century earlier—criticism has imperceptibly
given way to a different activity which we may call appreciation. The
emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the individual, and the
unconscious or avowed aim of the modern 'critic' has been to persuade us to
understand, to sympathise with and in the last resort to enter into the whole
psychological process which culminated in the artistic creation of the author
examined. And there modern criticism has stopped. There has been no
indication that it was aware of the necessity of going further. Many
influences went to shape the general conviction that mere presentation was
the final function of criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious
contagion of a scientific terminology. The word 'objectivity' had a great
vogue; it was felt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the

critic was faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard, irreducible
facts, and his function was, like the scientist's, that of recording them as
compendiously as possible and without prejudice. The unconscious
programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. All facts may be of equal
interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary critic. He chose those
which interested him most for the exercise of his talent for demonstration.
But that choice was, as a general rule, the only specifically critical act
which he performed, and, since it was usually unmotived, it was difficult to
attach even to that more than a 'scientific' importance. Reasoned judgments
of value were rigorously eschewed, and even though we may presume that
the modern critic is at times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one
work of art is better than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of
the artist's intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language
of his appreciation. Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which
all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. What every
artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. As between things
unique there is no possibility of subordination or comparison.

That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism,
although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the
impulse towards the penetration of an artist's consciousness is in itself
salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism, provided that it is
definitely subordinated to the final critical judgment, before which
uniqueness is an impossible plea. Such a diagnosis will no doubt be
welcomed by those who belong to an older generation than that to which it
is applied. But they should not rejoice prematurely. We require of them an
answer to the question whether they were really in better case—whether
they were not the fathers whose sins are visited upon the children. Professor
Babbitt, at least, has no doubt of their responsibility. From his angle of
approach we might rake their ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as
these: When you invoked the sanction of criticism were you more than

merely destructive? When you riddled religion with your scientific
objections, did you not forget that religion is something more, far more than
a nexus of historical facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned
everything in the name of truth and science, why did you not dream of
asking whether those creations of men's minds were capax imperii in man's
universe? What right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is
stronger for his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that
same truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit
to bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why
did you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the most
romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the greatest
good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one moment
pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe your
statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the world to
the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who guarded the cave
of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why did you not see
that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's responsibility for
himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you clothed yourselves in the
shreds of a moral respectability which you had not the time (or was it the
courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce us because our teeth are set on edge
by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?

But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with morals,
and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is conceivable is
precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital centre of our ethics is
also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism inevitably involves an
æsthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only temporarily by an insistence
upon technical perfection as in itself a supreme good. Neither the art of
religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the possibilities
and purpose of art, but there is no doubt that the religion of art is by far the
more vacuous of the two. The values of literature, the standards by which it

must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged,
are in the last resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than
morality affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so.
Literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous
liberty prevails—where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of
the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a deeper
insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as he is man
and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was an age in which
art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than this. Its philosophy
has played it false. It has passed from the nebulous Hegelian adulation of
the accomplished fact (though one would have thought that to a generation
with even a vague memory of Aristotle's Poetics, the mere title, The
Philosophy of History would have been an evident danger signal) to an
adulation of science and of instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man is a
beast'; from the other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment
of reason is to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the
imagination, the vital principle of control.

Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our senses,
which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain that in Aristotle
the present generation would find the beginnings of a remedy for that fatal
confusion of categories which has overcome the world. It is the confusion
between existence and value. That strange malady of the mind by which in
the nineteenth century material progress was supposed to create, ipso facto,
a concomitant moral progress, and which so plunged the world into
catastrophe, has its counterpart in a literature of objective realism. One of
the most admired of contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's
memory of a mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water;
another, of almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with
such reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she
filled her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers

who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when they
refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older generation.
What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical outcome of an
anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously cherished? They
may not like the bastard progeny of the various mistresses they adored—of
a Science which they enthroned above instead of subordinating to
humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the so-called
Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane devotion of
which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which appears in
retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute indolence—but they
certainly have forfeited the right to censure it. Let those who are so eager to
cast the first stone at the æsthetic and moral anarchy of the present day
consider Professor Babbitt's indictment of themselves and decide whether
they have no sin:—

'"If I am to judge by myself," said an eighteenth-century
Frenchman, "man is a stupid animal." Man is not only a stupid
animal, in spite of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here
at the source of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that
Buddha, with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. In
spite of the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material
success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this
effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance. An
energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the failure
to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. Just this
combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the ages—
the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been witnessed
than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a vast
machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for one
another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a world
which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in spite of all

the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be caught once more
in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution of civilisation with
which we are threatened is likely to be worse in some respects than
that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success that has been
obtained in 'perfecting the mystery of murder.' Various traditional
agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up the beast in man.
Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the leadership of the
Occident is no longer here. The leaders have succumbed in greater
or less degree to naturalism, and so have been tampering with the
moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks no obstacle to his
lust for domination has been tampering with this law goes without
saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood and
profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been
tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way, for the very
reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with the moral law, or,
what amounts to the same thing, this overriding of the veto power in
man, has been largely a result, though not a necessary result, of the
rupture with the traditional forms of wisdom. The Baconian
naturalist repudiated the past because he wished to be more positive
and critical, to plant himself on the facts. But the veto power is itself
a fact—the weightiest with which man has to reckon. The
Rousseauistic naturalist threw off traditional control because he
wished to be more imaginative. Yet without the veto power
imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both Baconian and Rousseauist
were very impatient of any outer authority that seemed to stand
between them and their own perceptions. Yet the veto power is
nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but is
very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be proved wrong
without going beyond their own principles, and their wrongness is
of a kind to wreck civilisation.'

We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this
indictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the universe
in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller and larger than
the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger in spiritual
possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of science seriously to
influence, much less control, our human values, is an invitation to disaster.
Humanism must reassert itself, for even we can see that Shakespeares are
better than Hamlets. The reassertion of humanism involves the re-creation
of a practical ideal of human life and conduct, and a strict subordination of
the impulses of the individual to this ideal. There must now be a period of
critical and humanistic positivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say
frankly that it is not to our elders that we think of applying for its
rudiments. We regard them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest
than ourselves, It is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully
for our new traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are
more keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are
trembling.

[FEBRUARY, 1920.

Poetry and Criticism

Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways
peculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning
was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently
more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in a
curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled by
a sense that, although we have been living at a time of extraordinarily
prolific poetic production, not very much good has come out of it. Having

thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry is an end in itself will
suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds for some fuller justification
of the poetic activity. A presentiment that our poetic values are chaotic is
widespread; we are uncomfortable with it, and there is, we believe, a
genuine desire that a standard should be once more created and applied.

What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a
world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a glimpse
through magic casements, profound wisdom? All these things—all
different, yet not all contradictory—have been required of poetry. What
shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as vague
as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded of any
spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be adequate to
all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a culmination of life;
it must be working steadily towards a more complete universality.

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

Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and
not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the condition
of poetry, such as Plato's Republic or Milton's Areopagitica, but the prose of
the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchehov's Cherry
Orchard has as good a claim to be called poetry as The Essay on Man, Tess
of the D'Urbervilles as The Ring and the Book, The Possessed as Phèdre?
Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of
literary art merge into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we
are in danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening
upon what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference.
The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.

The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt's New Study of English
Poetry is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage,
sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highest spiritual
activity of man. It has seldom been our good fortune to read a book of
criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call a purity
of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim is single, to set before
us the results of his own sincere thinking on a matter of infinite moment.
Perhaps better, because subtler, books of literary criticism have appeared in
England during the last ten years—if so, we have not read them; but there
has been none more truly tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more
certainly the product of a soul in which no lie remains. Whether it is that Sir
Henry has like Plato's Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not
know, but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus's
peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods and
left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate.

Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newbolt
should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to the
same kind. It is important not because there is anything very novel in the

contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune because at the
present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital element that is
common both to creative poetry and creative prose. The general mind loves
confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it loves to be able to
conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact that the books of words
cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are legion. An age of fiddlesticks!
Whatever the present age is—and it is an age of many interesting
characteristics—it is not an age of poetry. It would indeed have a better
chance of being one if fifty instead of five hundred books of verse were
produced every month; and if all the impresarios were shouting that it was
an age of prose. The differentia of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is
essential in poetry, or literature if you will, is an act of intuitive
comprehension. Where you have the evidence of that act, the sovereign
æsthetic process, there you have poetry. What remains for you, whether you
are a critic or a poet or both together, is to settle for yourself a system of
values by which those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be
judged. It does not suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the
present day, to be content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you
derive from each single act of comprehension made vocal. That
contentment is the comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It
is not sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's Arabia or Mr
Davies's Lovely Dames or Miss Katherine Mansfield's Prelude or Mr Eliot's
Portrait of a Lady, in each of which the vital act of intuitive comprehension
is made manifest. One must establish a hierarchy, and decide which act of
comprehension is the more truly comprehensive, which poem has the
completer universality. One must be prepared not only to relate each poetic
expression to the finest of its kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if
a new kind has been created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.

That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one which
is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type of criticism

which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation and appreciation of the
means by which the poet communicates his intuitive comprehension to an
audience, is in a less perilous condition. Where there are real poets—and
only a bigot will deny that there are real poets among us now: we have just
named four—there will always be true criticism of poetic method, though it
may seldom find utterance in the printed word. But criticism of poetic
method has, by hypothesis, no perspective and no horizons; it is concerned
with a unique thing under the aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily
most often does, assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual
life of man; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the
standards that are implicit in such an assumption. That is the function of
philosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined with
criticism of method—and there is no reason why they should not coexist in
a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenth century,
Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind—so much the better; but it is
philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need at this moment.

A good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets we
possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the kind
we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to point
out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must inevitably
languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if a non-poetic
age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not to urge the real
masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their work. Who but a
fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or Miss Mansfield to give us
a novel? But he might be a wise man who called upon Mr Eliot to set
himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and without a doubt he would
deserve well of the commonwealth who should summon the popular
imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot to begin by trying to
express something that they did comprehend or desired to comprehend,
even though it should take them into thousands of unprintable pages. It is

infinitely preferable that those who have so far given evidence of nothing
better than a fatal fluency in insipid imitation of true lyric poets should fall
down a precipice in the attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus.
There is something heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an
altitude.

Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a
continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately in
every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on to the
horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplines sensational
experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the counterpart of this
power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of one's own or the nation's
affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held up to ridicule. Opportunism in
politics has its complement in opportunism in poetry. Mr Lloyd George's
moods are reflected in Mr ——'s. And, beneath these heights, we have the
queer spectacle of a whole race of very young poets who somehow expect
to attain poetic intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at
any disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. Perhaps they
will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of
literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction they
will have. They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the acid of
philosophical criticism. If a reaction to life has in itself the seeds of an
intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. If a young poet's nausea at
the sight of a toothbrush is significant of anything at all except bad
upbringing, then it is capable of being refined into a vision of life and of
being expressed by means of the appropriate mechanism or myth. But to
register the mere facts of consciousness, undigested by the being, without
assessment or reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has
with poetry, no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets.

We do not wish to suggest that Sir Henry Newbolt would regard this
lengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction. He, we think, is a good
deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate to work out
the consequences of the principles which he enunciates and apply them
vigorously to the present time. But as a vindication of the supreme place of
poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus to critical thought and a guide
to exquisite appreciation of which his essay on Chaucer is an honourable
example—A New Study of English Poetry deserves all the praise that lies in
our power to give.

[MARCH, 1920.

Coleridge's Criticism

It is probably true that Biographia Literaria is the best book of criticism
in the English language; nevertheless, it is rash to assume that it is a book of
criticism of the highest excellence, even when it has passed through the
salutary process of drastic editing, such as that to which, in the present case,
[15] the competent hands of Mr George Sampson have submitted it. Its
garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage, the marks which even the finest
portions show of submersion in the tepid transcendentalism that wrought
such havoc upon Coleridge's mind—these are its familiar disfigurements.
They are not easily removed; for they enter fairly deeply even in the texture
of those portions of the book in which Coleridge devotes himself, as
severely as he can, to the proper business of literary criticism.

[Footnote 15: Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters I.-IV.,
XIV.-XXII.—Wordsworth: Prefaces and Essays on Poetry, 1800-1815.

Edited by George Sampson, with an Introductory Essay by Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch. (Cambridge University Press.)]

It may be that the prolixity with which he discusses and refutes the
poetical principles expounded by Wordsworth in the preface of Lyrical
Ballads was due to the tenderness of his consideration for Wordsworth's
feelings, an influence to which Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch directs our
attention in his introduction. That is honourable to Coleridge as a man; but
it cannot exculpate him as a critic. For the points he had to make for and
against Wordsworth were few and simple. First, he had to show that the
theory of a poetic diction drawn exclusively from the language of 'real life'
was based upon an equivocation, and therefore was useless. This Coleridge
had to show to clear himself of the common condemnation in which he had
been involved, as one wrongly assumed to endorse Wordsworth's theory. He
had an equally important point to make for Wordsworth. He wished to
prove to him that the finest part of his poetic achievement was based upon a
complete neglect of this theory, and that the weakest portions of his work
were those in which he most closely followed it. In this demonstration he
was moved by the desire to set his friend on the road that would lead to the
most triumphant exercise of his own powers.

There is no doubt that Coleridge made both his points; but he made them,
in particular the former, at exceeding length, and at the cost of a good deal
of internal contradiction. He sets out, in the former case, to maintain that
the language of poetry is essentially different from the language of prose.
This he professes to deduce from a number of principles. His axiom—and it
is possibly a sound one—is that metre originated in a spontaneous effort of
the mind to hold in check the workings of emotion. From this, he argues, it
follows that to justify the existence of metre, the language of a poem must
show evidence of emotion, by being different from the language of prose.
Further, he says, metre in itself stimulates the emotions, and for this

condition of emotional excitement 'correspondent food' must be provided.
Thirdly, the emotion of poetical composition itself demands this same
'correspondent food.' The final argument, if we omit one drawn from an
obscure theory of imitation very characteristic of Coleridge, is the
incontrovertible appeal to the authority of the poets.

Unfortunately, the elaborate exposition of the first three arguments is not
only unnecessary but confusing, for Coleridge goes on to distinguish,
interestingly enough, between a language proper to poetry, a language
proper to prose, and a neutral language which may be used indifferently in
prose and poetry, and later still he quotes a beautiful passage from
Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida as an example of this neutral language,
forgetting that, if his principles are correct, Chaucer was guilty of a sin
against art in writing Troilus and Cressida in metre. The truth, of course, is
that the paraphernalia of principles goes by the board. In order to refute the
Wordsworthian theory of a language of real life supremely fitted for poetry
you have only to point to the great poets, and to judge the fitness of the
language of poetry you can only examine the particular poem. Wordsworth
was wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but Coleridge was equally
wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre necessitated a language
essentially different from that of prose.

So it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literary criticism of
the Biographia takes us nowhere in particular. The valuable part is
contained in his critical appreciation of Wordsworth's poetry and that
amazing chapter—a little forlorn, as most of Coleridge's fine chapters are—
on 'the specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis
of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. In these few pages Coleridge is at the
summit of his powers as a critic. So long as his attention could be fixed on a
particular object, so long as he was engaged in deducing his general
principles immediately from particular instances of the highest kind of

poetic excellence, he was a critic indeed. Every one of the four points
characteristic of early poetic genius which he formulates deserves to be
called back to the mind again and again:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a matter-of-factness in
certain poems.' Once more there is no question of language. Coleridge takes

the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth's obsession
with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential catholicity of poetry;
and this accidentality is manifested in laboriously exact description both of
places and persons. The poet sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the
first case, for no reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his
immediate object a moral end instead of the giving of æsthetic pleasure. His
prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable
that they should be of this condition—it is on the contrary highly
improbable—but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral lesson.
The question of language in itself, if it enters at all here, enters only as the
indifferent means by which a non-poetic end is sought. The accidentality
lies not in the words, but in the poet's intention.

Coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for the
dramatic form,' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought,' may be
passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case they could only
be the cause of a jejuneness of language. The fifth, more interesting, is the
appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for the subject … an
approximation to what might be called mental bombast.' Coleridge brings
forward as his first instance of this four lines which have taken a deep hold
on the affections of later generations:—

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

Coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet after
the first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that verdict
altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a description of
physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting to note that the

objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner which confirms
Coleridge's criticism. The 'inward eye' is almost universally remembered
apart from its context, and interpreted as a description of the purely spiritual
process to which alone, in Coleridge's opinion, it was truly apt.

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

The object of this examination has been to show, not that the Biographia
Literaria is undeserving of the high praise which has been bestowed upon
it, but that the praise has been to some extent undiscriminating. It has now
become almost a tradition to hold up to our admiration Coleridge's chapter
on poetic diction, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in a preface that is as
unconventional in manner as it is stimulating in most of its substance,
maintains the tradition. As a matter of fact, what Coleridge has to say on
poetic diction is prolix and perilously near commonplace. Instead of making
to Wordsworth the wholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest
kind employs a language that by no perversion can be called essentially the
same as the language of prose, he allows himself to be led by his German
metaphysic into considering poetry as a Ding an sich and deducing
therefrom the proposition that poetry must employ a language different
from that of prose. That proposition is false, as Coleridge himself quite
adequately shows from his remarks upon what he called the 'neutral'
language of Chaucer and Herbert. But instead of following up the clue and
beginning to inquire whether or not narrative poetry by nature demands a
language approximating to that of prose, and whether Wordsworth, in so far
as he aimed at being a narrative poet, was not working on a correct but

exaggerated principle, he leaves the bald contradiction and swerves off to
the analysis of the defects and excellences of Wordsworth's actual
achievement. Precisely because we consider it of the greatest importance
that the best of Coleridge's criticism should be studied and studied again,
we think it unfortunate that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should recommend the
apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart. He will be
condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubious logic and a false
conclusion. What is worth while learning from Coleridge is something
different; it is not his behaviour with 'a principle,' but his conduct when
confronted with poetry in the concrete, his magisterial ordonnance (to use
his own word) and explication of his own æsthetic intuitions, and his
manner of employing in this, the essential task of poetic criticism, the
results of his own deep study of all the great poetry that he knew.

[APRIL, 1920.

Shakespeare Criticism

It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the
great modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover. One derives from
the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which cannot
be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his merits as
an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to have, to appreciate
the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to admire the amazing erudition
of Steevens. One sees the phases of the curious process by which
Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a
sphere wherein no mortal man of genius could breathe. For a dizzy moment
every line that he wrote bore the authentic impress of the divine. Efflavit

deus. In a century, from being largely beneath criticism Shakespeare had
passed to a condition where he was almost completely beyond it.

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

'Bast.—James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?

Gur.—Good leave, good Philip.

Bast.—Philip! Sparrow! James.'

It is obvious that Shakespeare's sole motive in introducing Gurney is to
provide an occasion for the Bastard's characteristic, though not to a modern
mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that Philip was at the time a
common name for a sparrow. The Bastard, just dubbed Sir Richard
Plantagenet by the King, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at his former
name, Philip, to which he had just shown such breezy indifference. The jest
could not have been made to Lady Falconbridge without a direct insult to
her, which would have been alien to the natural, blunt, and easygoing
fondness of the relation which Shakespeare establishes between the Bastard
and his mother. So Gurney is quite casually brought in to receive it. But this
is not enough for the Shakespeare-drunken Coleridge.

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

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

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

On which Coleridge writes:—

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

The test is absolutely convincing—a poet's criticism of poetry. But that
Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence of his
idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that is forced
upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume of the
modern Variorum. There has been much editing, much comment, but
singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an
intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from niggling
and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human
ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the
opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon the play: 'Like the best
Shakespearean tragedies, King John is an intellectual form in which a
number of people with obsessions illustrate the idea of treachery.' We
remember that Mr Masefield has much better than this to say of
Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon this sentence because it is
set before us in the Variorum, and because it too 'is an intellectual form in
which a literary man with obsessions illustrates his idea of criticism.'

Genetically, it is a continuation of the shoddy element in Coleridge's
Shakespeare criticism, a continual bias towards transcendental
interpretation of the obvious. To take the origin a phase further back, it is
the portentous offspring of the feeble constituent of German philosophy (a
refusal to see the object) after it had been submitted to an idle process of
ferment in the softer part of Coleridge's brain.

King John is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerous
influence, has persuaded himself it is. It is simply the effort of a young man
of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. The effort was, on the
whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a good one, instead of a
very good one, is not surprising. The miracle is that anything should have
been made of The Troublesome Raigne at all. The Variorum extracts show
that, of the many commentators who studied the old play with
Shakespeare's version, only Swinburne saw, or had the courage to say, how
utterly null the old play really is. To have made Shakespeare's Falconbridge
out of the old lay figure, to have created the scenes between Hubert and
John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that decrepit skeleton—that is the work
of a commanding poetical genius on the threshold of full mastery of its
powers, worthy of all wonder, no doubt, but doubly worthy of close
examination.

But 'ideas of treachery'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been
beguiled by Coleridge's laudanum trances? A limbo—of this we are
confident—where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life, and
where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We must
save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our eye upon
the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good) play. Not an Ibsen,
a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the influence and ravages
of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, but merely a Shakespeare play, one

of those works of true poetic genius which can only be produced by a mind
strong enough to resist every attempt at invasion by the 'idea'-bacillus.

In considering a Shakespeare play the word 'idea' had best be kept out of
the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it might be
intelligibly used. You might call the dramatic skeleton Shakespeare's idea of
the play. It is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in the work of poetic
creation—the necessary means by which a poet can conveniently explicate
and express his manifold æsthetic intuitions. This dramatic skeleton is
governed by laws of its own, which were first and most brilliantly
formulated by Aristotle in terms that, in essentials, hold good for all time.
You may investigate this skeleton, seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by
which it is differentiated from all other skeletons; you may say, for instance,
that Othello is a tragedy of jealousy, or Hamlet of the inhibition of self-
consciousness. But if your 'idea' is to have any substance it must be
moulded very closely upon the particular object with which you are dealing;
and in the end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individual
characters.

On the other hand, the word 'idea' might be intelligibly used of
Shakespeare's whole attitude to the material of his contemplation, the centre
of comprehension from which he worked, the aspect under which he
viewed the universe of his interest. There is no reason to rest content with
Coleridge's application of the epithet 'myriad-minded,' which is, at the best,
an evasion of a vital question. The problem is to see Shakespeare's mind
sub specie unitatis. It can be done; there never has been and never will be a
human mind which can resist such an inquiry if it is pursued with sufficient
perseverance and understanding. What chiefly stands in the way is that
tradition of Shakespeariolatry which Coleridge so powerfully inaugurated,
not least by the epithet 'myriad-minded.'

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

Let us away then with 'logic' and away with 'ideas' from the art of literary
criticism; but not, in a foolish and impercipient reaction, to revive the
impressionistic criticism which has sapped the English brain for a
generation past. The art of criticism is rigorous; impressions are merely its
raw material; the life-blood of its activity is in the process of ordonnance of
æsthetic impressions.

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

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

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

'Sound on into the drowsy race of night.'

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

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

and you run quite a risk of finding

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

There are six pages of close-printed comment upon the line in the
Variorum. The only reason, we can see, why it should be the most
commented line in King John is that it is one of the most beautiful. No one
could stand it. Of all the commentators, only one, Miss Porter, whom we
name honoris causa, stands by the line with any conviction of its beauty.
Every other person either alters it or regrets his inability to alter it.

'How can a bell sound on into a race?' pipe the little editors. What is 'the
race of night?' What can it mean? How could a race be drowsy? What an
awful contradiction in terms! And so while you and I, and all the other
ordinary lovers of Shakespeare are peacefully sleeping in our beds, they
come along with their little chisels, and chop out the horribly illogical word
and pop in a horribly logical one, and we (unless we can afford the
Variorum, which we can't) know nothing whatever about it. We have no
redress. If we get out of our beds and creep upon them while they are asleep
—they never are—and take out our little chisels and chop off their horribly
stupid little heads, we shall be put in prison and Mr Justice Darling will
make a horribly stupid little joke about us. There is only one thing to do. We
must make up our minds that we have to combine in our single person the
scholar and the amateur; we cannot trust these gentlemen.

And, indeed, they have been up to their little games elsewhere in King
John. They do not like the reply of the citizens of Angiers to the summons
of the rival kings:—

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

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

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

'France, thou maist hold a serpent by the tongue,
A cased lion by the mortall paw,

A fasting tiger safer by the tooth
Than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[APRIL, 1920

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