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Title: Aspects of Literature

Author: J. Middleton Murry

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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 _Athenaeum_.

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, 'aesthetic' 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 naturae_, 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 aesthetic values. This is the firm ground beneath his feet
when he--too seldom--proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisite
aesthetic 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 aesthetic_. There
is no other power than our aesthetic intuition by which we can imagine or
conceive it; we can express it only in aesthetic 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 aesthetic intuition. Plato's philosophy is aesthetic through and
through, and because it is aesthetic 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 aesthetic. 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic
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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic
intuition at all. At the best he is likely to find that it is mixed and
various; that fragments of aesthetic 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 aesthetic, 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
aesthetic 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 Religieuse 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 Religieuse 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 aeternitatis_. 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 meme de tenter vous convaincre;
    il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicite de
    mon coeur. Consultez le votre 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 etres si singulierement constitues doivent necessairement
    s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. Il est impossible
    qu'avec des ames si differemment modifies ils ne portent pas dans
    l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idees l'empreinte de
    ces modifications. Si cette empreinte echappe a ceux qui n'ont
    aucune notion de cette maniere d'etre, elle ne peut echapper a ceux
    qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectes eux-memes. C'est une
    signe caracteristique auquel les inities se reconnoissent entre eux;
    et ce qui donne un grand prix a 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 sitot qu'il y
    parvient, on ne sauroit s'y meprendre; il est vrai des 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 Encyclopaedists, 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 retablissement des arts et des
sciences a contribue a epurer 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 brigue, et pour un auteur inconnu, me
donna la premiere assurance veritable 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 _Reveries_, 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 _Reverie_
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 retrouve la Loi.
  Il faut ceder enfin! o porte, il faut admettre
  L'hote; coeur fremissant, il faut subir le maitre,
  Quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-meme 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_ anathematise les sciences et les arts, et ne
    voit le salut que dans les academies; le _Discours sur l'Inegalite_
    parait detruire tout autorite, et recommande pourtant "l'obeissance
    scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs": la
    _Nouvelle Heloise_ preche d'abord l'emancipation sentimentale, et
    proclame la suprematie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit a
    exalter la fidelite conjugale, a consolider les grands devoirs
    familiaux et sociaux. Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la meme
    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 tiedes,' 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 Peguy 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 Caesar's shall be rendered unto Caesar.

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 reveille 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 _AEneadum 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 definitions de l'homme la plus mauvaise me parait
    celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable. Je ne me vante pas
    excessivement en me donnant pour doue de plus de raison que la
    plupart de ceux de mes semblables que j'ai vus de pres ou dont j'ai
    connu l'histoire. La raison habite rarement les ames communes, et
    bien plus rarement encore les grands esprits.... J'appelle
    raisonnable celui qui accorde sa raison particuliere avec la raison
    universelle, de maniere a n'etre jamais trop surpris de ce qui
    arrive et a s'y accommoder tant bien que mal; j'appelle raisonnable
    celui qui, observant le desordre de la nature et la folie humaine,
    ne s'obstine point a y voir de l'ordre et de la sagesse; j'appelle
    raisonnable enfin celui qui ne s'efforce pas de l'etre.'

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 Noziere[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 achete qui donne de l'argent?'

    'Je ne devais jamais connaitre le prix de l'argent. Tel j'etais a
    trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapisse de boutons de
    roses, tel je restai jusqu'a la vieillesse, qui m'est legere, comme
    elle l'est a toutes les ames 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 plutot je le connais trop bien.'

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

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 mere, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-etre
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 pensee.
    Maintenant qu'il m'est devenu tout a fait etranger, je puis en sa
    compagnie me distraire de la mienne. Je l'aime, moi qui ne m'aime ni
    ne me hais. Il m'est doux de vivre en pensee les jours qu'il vivait
    et je souffre de respirer l'air du temps ou 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-charmed'; 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-surfed 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-matched 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic, 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic
impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has
been, present to consciousness is _ipso facto_ unified aesthetically. 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 aesthetic unity
by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an
arbitrary (because non-aesthetic) 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
aesthetic 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
    no