UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 
 
 /' 
 
 /-
 
 THE CELTIC TEMPERAMENT
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 
 
 THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS 
 
 New Edition, with 13 Illustrations in 
 Colour by Evelyn Paul 
 
 MODERN MYSTICISM 
 
 PARISIAN PORTRAITS 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF THE UNDERMAN 
 
 LA VIE ET LES HOMMES (in French) 
 
 JOHN LANE, THE BODLKY HEAD, LONDON
 
 THE CELTIC 
 TEMPERAMENT 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 BY FRANCIS GRIERSON 
 
 LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY 
 TORONTO : BELL & COCKBURN MCMXIV
 
 Fifth Edition 
 
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 1^ 13 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 OITTING one evening with the author of 
 -^ KJ Monte Crista, in his study, on the 
 Boulevard Malesherbes, I was for the first 
 time impressed by what might be called 
 the personality of a free and experienced 
 r- mind. 
 
 CD "You are a foreigner," he said, half in- 
 I differently. Then he added with some 
 curiosity in his look : " You are very 
 young " ; and then, as if by a sort of in- 
 tuition : " With your gifts you will find all 
 doors open before you." 
 
 Dumas was now an old man. He had seen 
 
 the world ; but not as I was to see it. He 
 
 \J^ began his career on the incoming tide of 
 
 ^ Romanticism ; I was beginning mine on the 
 
 x^j ^incoming tide of Realism. But not as a 
 
 ^ writer; for I was too young to write about 
 
 5 
 
 c^ V \y 
 
 936
 
 Introduction 
 
 anything, nor did I bother myself about 
 schools and systems. I lived in a world of 
 illusions, impressions, and intuitions. I 
 floated about, in and on these air-bubbles, at 
 a time when von Moltke and Bismarck were 
 concocting schemes for the overthrow of the 
 Empire — the one stroke of destiny which 
 was to usher in the school of Realism, make 
 a pessimist of Renan, the optimist, and put 
 Alexandre Dumas and Auber in their graves. 
 Who could have guessed that with the 
 descent of the Prussian eagles on Sedan, the 
 great romancist would leave that apparte- 
 inent, with its life-sized figures from Faiist 
 painted on the walls, and its artistic associa- 
 tions, to die in the country, almost in distress, 
 far removed from the Empire of poetic 
 adventure? 
 
 From 1830, down to the time I mention, 
 poets like Hugo and Alfred de Musset, 
 novelists like Balzac and Dumas, impression- 
 able natures like Chopin, found an element 
 of romance in which to live and work. They 
 
 6
 
 ■^ Introduction 
 
 had a public. They were liberally supported, 
 not by small groups, but by a nation, and 
 beyond that nation by a whole world of 
 culture. It was not a question of combating 
 and development, but one of working and 
 enjoying. They appeared on the scene, and 
 triumphed from the beginning to the end ; 
 for even Hugo had the way prepared for 
 him by the creative magic of Chateaubriand ; 
 and after Chateaubriand, Chopin was perhaps 
 the only one who brought with him a unique 
 creative force. Yet, strange and original as 
 his personality was, he had a public waiting 
 for him ; he had no conditions to seek out 
 and create. In his time, poetry, art, and 
 emotion were one ; sentiment, spontaneity, 
 and enthusiasm, belonged to the age of 
 romance ; people listened or read from 
 choice, not because of passing fashions and 
 isms. 
 
 When, one year previous to the awakening 
 at Sedan, I sat listening to the author of 
 Monte Crista explaining the spiritual state of 
 
 7
 
 Introduction 
 
 his mind, I little thought that in thirty years 
 I should arrive at something like the same 
 conclusions — but by experiences totally 
 different. I arrived in Paris just as all the 
 romance was fading out of art and literature ; 
 but I was not yet old enough to understand 
 the things that were happening ; so I moved 
 along on the stream of experience under the 
 illusion that society was full of poetry and 
 romance. To me the world was a sort of 
 dream, and through it I walked, a living but 
 sealed book of illusions. My head was full 
 of unwritten Arabian Nights adventure, and 
 in my ignorance I imagined that the world 
 was full of charming and generous people 
 willing to aid art for art's sake, and to further 
 truth for truth's sake. I walked and 
 existed on the dividing line of romance 
 and reality. 
 
 I had, for two or three years before meet- 
 ing Dumas, " gone where I pleased " ; and it 
 was the facile success which I met with, and 
 a half blind, half clairvoyant enthusiasm for 
 
 8
 
 Introduction 
 
 all the romantic mysteries of the world, 
 which gave me courage to face every danger 
 and defy every difficulty. As I sat listening 
 to the wise talk of an old and celebrated 
 man who knew the world, I realised his 
 power and the extent of his fame without 
 ever having read a page of his writings. I 
 had never read a novel. The desire to read 
 books of adventure had never once possessed 
 me. A desire to see the world was born 
 with me ; it was an instinct. The idea of 
 knowing the world from books had never 
 entered my head, and at that time I thought 
 every one felt as I did. Nor did I ever feel 
 that what I was doing was at all uncommon. 
 It seemed quite natural to go about alone in 
 foreign countries, without funds in the bank 
 to draw from, and without rich relatives to 
 help me in time of trouble. To see, to hear, 
 and to know the world for myself, that was 
 the "instinct." 
 
 Fortunately my art did not assume the 
 literary or plastic form, else I should have 
 
 9
 
 Introduction 
 
 given many useless impressions to the world 
 about people, things, and incidents. A first 
 impression is just as likely to be wrong as 
 right, and in the case of youth much more 
 likely to be wrong. I had begun at the very 
 beginning with human nature itself in all its 
 phases, from the simple bourgeois and the 
 superficial boulevardier to the company of 
 writers, musicians, artists, and courtiers. 
 From the first, destiny never once permitted 
 me to halt in the tent of any "set" or 
 " school." Without trying or wishing I found 
 myself tour a tour in the company of artists 
 and artisans, poets and peasants, duchesses 
 of the old Faubourg, and parvenus of the 
 Champs Elysees ; for such experiences are 
 in the order of things when the world 
 regards you as a " prodigy." In that 
 case there is no need to take Goethe's 
 hint to "give yourself out as somebody"; 
 the world takes all that on to its own broad 
 shoulders. 
 
 I had to take my experiences as they 
 
 10
 
 Introduction 
 
 came, according to the day and the hour, 
 for I soon learnt that every forced effort was 
 a failure. I no longer tried to meet any one. 
 So suspicious did I grow with regard to 
 forced meetings, that I often refused to meet 
 people when I had reason to suspect some- 
 thing strained and conventional in the 
 preliminaries. I early learned to wait. And 
 while I went where I pleased, I seldom 
 started on a journey to a strange land without 
 a feeling that the time had come to make the 
 experience. When the impulse seized me to 
 go to Russia I gave way to it, and on my 
 arrival found myself possessed of twenty 
 francs and a feeling of security which 
 bordered on indifference. I had not fore- 
 seen the hardships that awaited me there. 
 Poverty and, indeed, hunger had no terrors 
 for me in the early years. But in spite of 
 my desire to know the world, there were 
 countries I never cared to visit. When I 
 was invited to the Cumberland Palace, in 
 Austria, where were assembled the Courts 
 
 II
 
 Introduction 
 
 of Cumberland, Hanover, and Denmark, I 
 began to realise how little of chance there is 
 in the lives of some people, and how much 
 of Destiny ; and I value the souvenir pre- 
 sented to me on that occasion as symbolising 
 one of the most romantic events in a long 
 chain of romance. 
 
 So, too, I had never much desire to see 
 Germany. To live in a city like Berlin, 
 with its militarism and materialistic science, 
 was not a pleasant notion ; but at last I gave 
 way to a sudden and imperative feeling to 
 know Berlin, where to my surprise, I found 
 a host of sympathetic people, my sojourn 
 being interrupted by an invitation to visit the 
 King and Queen of Saxony at Dresden, in 
 which city I again thought of the prophetic 
 words of the author of Monte Crista. A 
 dream within a dream was what life now 
 seemed. Romantic and extraordinary inci- 
 dents were occurring in such unlooked-for 
 and divers forms that my reason was taxed 
 to account for them. The writers and 
 
 12
 
 Introduction 
 
 artists of the romantic period past and gone 
 attained the poetic mysteries of life by 
 remaining in one place; Balzac, Chopin, 
 Berlioz, and Georges Sand lived compara- 
 tively quiet lives. In an age of rank material- 
 ism I stood practically alone. There were 
 whole weeks and months when a hearing 
 seemed impossible, even in Paris, so dense 
 had the artistic atmosphere become. People 
 seemed intoxicated v^ith the alcoholic fumes 
 of U Assommoir and the impossible scenes 
 of Nana. Zola was the god in literature, 
 Meissonnier the god in art, and music had 
 sounded its last note with the death of 
 Berlioz. Gounod counted for nothing; his 
 Faust was composed during the Empire, 
 and was now an old story. But not only in 
 France, in all the other nations a spirit 
 of cheap and machine-made art prevailed. 
 Paris gave the tone to the whole world. 
 Paul Bourget, Anatole France, Pierre Loti, 
 Stephane Mallarme, Sully Prudhomme, had 
 not yet risen into power. They were on the 
 
 13
 
 Introduction 
 
 way ; but between them and the ante-bellum 
 days a plain of Tophet stretched where a 
 sacrificial altar to La Bhe Humaine was 
 erected by popular clamour. 
 
 Not till 1889 did the reaction against this 
 Bete Humaine literature set in. In that year 
 I published a book in Paris which contained 
 an essay entitled "La Revolte Ide'aliste." I 
 wrote that essay with a cool head, after duly 
 considering all sides of the question, and in 
 a spirit absolutely detached from any clique 
 or school, for I belonged to none. It was 
 that little book which brought me letters 
 from Jules Claretie, Sully Prudhomme, Jules 
 Simon, the Due d'Aumale — to be precise, 
 nine of the leading academicians, besides 
 many signs of appreciation from members of 
 the old aristocracy, such as the Duchesse 
 Isabelle de La Roche-Guyon and the Com- 
 tesse Diane de Beausacq ; from imperialists, 
 the Princesse Mathilda Bonaparte and Prince 
 Roland Bonaparte ; from republicans and 
 young socialists ; from leading writers in Spain, 
 
 14
 
 Introduction 
 
 Italy, and Belgium; and notably from Maurice 
 Maeterlinck. I could scarcely believe my 
 eyes when I saw these tokens of better things 
 for the future of art and literature. It was 
 one of those surprises which come on the 
 wings of romantic mystery. I asked myself 
 how it was that I should be chosen for this 
 work, unknown as I was to all these writers, 
 without any following to support me, with- 
 out so much as a friend on one of the 
 journals to call attention to my book. I had 
 to wait twenty years, every month of which 
 was replete with some form of hard work, 
 rude experience, mingled success and failure, 
 and trials of every description. But, as I 
 said before, I was my own world of romance. 
 I tried to fathom the mystery of my own 
 cycle of experiences, and I could get no 
 answer but this : the things which we think 
 we need are the things which our souls 
 can do without, and the things which we 
 think we can live without are the things 
 which we need the most. What is it that 
 
 15
 
 Introduction 
 
 regulates and evolves all the incidents 
 of life as if they had been planned and 
 fixed from the beginning? I put away 
 the hypothesis of chance when I saw the 
 results of what at first looked like mere 
 coincidence. 
 
 Had I been brought up in Russia, under 
 the influence of Count Tolstoy, I should have 
 become one of his most fanatical followers. 
 Unremitting contact with the great world of 
 action and international custom made it im- 
 possible for me to become the disciple of 
 any master. My personal knowledge of the 
 Russian character helped me to arrive at 
 an estimate which otherwise would have re- 
 quired years of thought. I was twenty years 
 in coming to a conclusion about Wagner's 
 teachings and work. Musicians considered 
 me a good type of the Wagner fanatic at a 
 time when his music was denied both in 
 France and England. But at last I heard 
 Parsifal on his own ground, under his own 
 conditions ; it give me the one experience 
 
 i6
 
 Introduction 
 
 which was lacking to form a definite personal 
 judgment with regard to Wagner's music. 
 My sojourn in Bayreuth did something more. 
 It proved to me how much more potent 
 spontaneous inspiration is than that which is 
 written and printed. Improvisatore as I was, 
 I had personal experiences among German 
 friends and residents in Bayreuth which were 
 worth more to me than all that had happened 
 previously. The true magic is generated at 
 the first contact of inspiration. But this 
 instantaneous impression is only possible 
 in the impromptu arts : oratory and impro- 
 visation. When we hear a great orator speak 
 we receive the psychic power which comes 
 with the first contact of thought ; when we 
 read the printed speech we get the form 
 without the spirit — it has been stripped of 
 the thing which made it vital When a 
 musical inspiration is written, printed, and 
 rehearsed, it can never have the same effect 
 as one that comes to the hearers direct. 
 Even a Bayreuth orchestra has to produce 
 
 B 17
 
 Introduction 
 
 Wagner's inspirations in a sort of phono- 
 graphic way; they are simply repetitions. 
 The psychic wave which produced them has 
 rolled back and receded from our presence 
 for ever, to pass on, perhaps, to some far 
 invisible shore, there to assume another form 
 and a fresh outflowing. 
 
 It was only after my sojourn in Bayreuth 
 that the law of spontaneous contact was made 
 plain to me. The spontaneous phenomena 
 of life are the things which dominate the 
 affairs of heart and intellect. At Bayreuth 
 I put away the doubting, half sceptical, half 
 convinced feeling as to my own gifts, a 
 feeling that had possessed me all through 
 my career up to this time, in spite of repeated 
 successes. I now at last came face to face 
 with the truth : the spirit is more potent than 
 the form, the thing that is first heard more 
 potent than that which is written ; the force 
 that arrives spontaneously dominates and 
 controls all conventional forms of art and 
 thought. The best that is written is still 
 
 i8
 
 Introduction 
 
 only a small part of the inspiration and the 
 man. 
 
 The first serious work I ever read was 
 Comte's PhilosopJiie Positive. In books I 
 sought for thought, not romance; in life I 
 sought experience, and got both romance and 
 experience. The people who lead active lives 
 are never great readers. The real dreamers 
 through life are the bookworms. The world 
 to them is a fairyland, a mystical panorama 
 of illusions. Men of great worldly experi- 
 ence may have illusions, but they are never 
 the illusions of the printed page. The reality 
 is concrete, like the diamond ; out of it 
 flashes the white heat of the actual. Speak- 
 ing for myself, I was always attracted to 
 short essays, to letters, aphorisms, and 
 maxims. We discover the real George Eliot 
 in the aphorisms scattered here and there 
 in Adam Bede, Middlemarck, and Daniel 
 Deronda ; the real spirit of Bourget and 
 Stevenson in their essays ; the real Flaubert 
 and Georges Sand in their letters. In my 
 
 19
 
 Introduction 
 
 opinion it is impossible for an essay to be 
 too short. I have always waited for what I 
 call the concrete mood before attempting to 
 write. A mere impression is not enough. 
 I was powerfully impressed when I first 
 heard Madame Yvette Guilbert, but several 
 years passed before I felt in the proper mood 
 to write the essay entitled " Modern Melan- 
 choly." Competent critics in England and 
 France have assured me that I did not wait 
 in vain ; and the fact that I have succeeded 
 in this and other efforts intended only for a 
 limited public is all the satisfaction I can 
 hope to attain in a world dominated by 
 Cook's tours, experience bought by the mile, 
 romance by the round-trip, and heart-throbs 
 at so much per minute. 
 
 The horror with which some people con- 
 template cheap literature and cheap emotion 
 springs from something deeper than mere 
 distrust and misgiving. It is that all those 
 who have faced the "ordeals" of life, who 
 have resisted the temptation of suicide and 
 
 20
 
 Introduction 
 
 the abyss of insanity, who have been whirled 
 through the maelstrom of modern emotions, 
 and landed on solid ground, bruised but 
 not broken, able to stand erect without 
 splints or props, realise the danger of quick 
 transit and quick learning. How many 
 times have I not been contradicted by the 
 man with a large banking account, who has 
 seen the world through the windows of 
 express trains, from the terraces of palatial 
 hotels, and the point of view of the Chat 
 Noir and the cafe chantant. Rich people 
 labour under the illusion that they can pur- 
 chase knowledge and experience as they 
 purchase coronets and yachts. I have not 
 yet been able to purchase anything of con- 
 sequence with money except material com- 
 forts. Nor have I ever known a millionaire, 
 among the scores I have met, who could 
 add one iota to his store of intellect by 
 purchase. All the practical knowledge of 
 the world I possess came to me gradu- 
 ally through my own personal efforts. Had 
 
 21
 
 Introduction 
 
 I travelled about with my pockets stuffed 
 with bank-notes and letters of introduc- 
 tion I should now be as ignorant of the 
 world as I am of the language of the 
 Mandarins, When I first began to travel 
 necessity compelled me to do without 
 letters of introduction ; later I refused to 
 use them when I possessed them. If 
 forced efforts in art are vain, forced meet- 
 ings are both vain and misleading. For 
 it cannot be denied that if a man of talent 
 presents a letter of introduction to a rich 
 man, the writer or artist will be shown 
 a series of highly-coloured, conventional 
 pictures of the rich man's surroundings, 
 with those of his friends added. The 
 stranger sits down to a conventional din- 
 ner, listens to opinions which are carefully 
 weighed before being uttered, and sees faces 
 only lit by automatic smiles. Such scenes 
 make but a poor and weak imitation of real 
 life. If, on the other hand, a letter of intro- 
 duction is presented to a professional man, 
 
 22
 
 I-,' 
 
 Introduction 
 
 in nine cases out of ten the incident proves 
 but a source of annoyance to the one to whom 
 the letter is addressed, We are tricked by 
 the rich, and repulsed by the busy profes- 
 sional man. 
 
 The world contains, at this hour, thinkers, 
 writers, and artists who can face the hyp- 
 notic regard of the minotaur without winc- 
 ing, and there are still thousands of people 
 who live and move in a world in which 
 the fashions and assumptions of greed 
 and materialism have neither influence nor 
 control. 
 
 Just one year after my meeting with 
 Alexandre Dumas I was at the residence of 
 the late Viscountess Combermere, in Bel- 
 grave Square. It was on a Sunday evening, 
 the 17th of April, 1870. As I sat there I 
 could not help contrasting the company with 
 the people I met at the residence of Dumas. 
 There was still a glamour of art and romance 
 in that company ; in Belgrave Square I found 
 myself among wealthy, titled people, among 
 
 23
 
 Introduction 
 
 whom I could not discern so much as a 
 glimmer of art, poetry, romance, or intuition. 
 London seemed to me a place whence the 
 soul had departed : it was ripe for a reign of 
 literary materialism which was to last for 
 twenty years.i 
 
 Paradoxical as it may appear, it is science 
 that is now the most romantic and mystical 
 thing in this matter-of-fact world. Wireless 
 telegraphy, the transmission of thought, the 
 double consciousness of mind, the dual 
 capacity of the brain, the possibilities of 
 intuitional achievement, have been revealed 
 through the unfolding of scientific law. Out 
 of a crude scepticism a force has developed 
 which has, even now, given a death-blow to 
 
 ^ I dealt with many questions touching that period in a 
 series of discourses delivered in 1880, and published in 
 1882: — "Materialism in Germany"; "The Influence of 
 Modern Literature from a Spiritual Standpoint"; "The 
 Future of China" ; &c. (Sir Robert Hart, twenty years later, 
 gave expression to sentiments in harmony with the leading 
 views contained in the discourse on China.) The dialogue 
 on Macbeth, published in Afodetn Mysticism, was also dic- 
 tated at this time. 
 
 24
 
 Introduction 
 
 the old nightmare of materialism. We know 
 too much now ever to sink back into that 
 slough of despond. We have entered upon 
 a new era, and victories will be gained by 
 all who have eyes to see and ears to hear. 
 
 THE AUTHOR 
 
 25
 
 Contents 
 
 Introduction 
 
 The Celtic Temperament . 
 Style and Personality 
 Hebraic Inspiration . 
 Practical Pessimism , 
 Omar and Immortality 
 Emerson and Unitarianism 
 Theatrical Audiences. 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hall 
 The ABBi Joseph Roux 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 The Conservation of Energy 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 Reflections .... 
 
 5 
 31 
 
 SI 
 61 
 
 79 
 97 
 109 
 117 
 129 
 141 
 163 
 
 183 
 191 
 
 207 
 
 27
 
 IS 
 THE CELTIC TEMPERAMENT
 
 i^' 
 
 THE CELTIC TEMPERAMENT 
 
 NOTHING could be more marked than 
 the progress of philosophic and 
 scientific absolutism which characterised the 
 thought and teachings of the three greatest 
 German thinkers of the past hundred and 
 twenty years, beginning with Goethe and 
 ending with Nietzsche. Goethe, conciliatory 
 and authoritative ; Schopenhauer, contradic- 
 tory and imperative ; Nietzsche, denunciatory 
 and absolute. 
 
 The final effort to reach the pinnacle of 
 absolutism was made in 1876, when Nietzsche 
 erected the last ladder and set out alone to 
 scale the dizzy heights of the imperative and 
 the ultimate. To deny the force exercised 
 by Schopenhauer is not only to deny the in- 
 fluence of Nietzsche, his successor, but to 
 take a wrong view of Goethe, the first and 
 
 31
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 prime mover in the imperative cycle. Just 
 as well might we attempt a denial of the 
 power and influence of Caesar and Bona- 
 parte. But not only in Germany have we 
 an example of the cyclic development 
 of genius — we have just as striking an 
 example in France, beginning with Chateau- 
 briand, born in 1768, only nineteen years 
 later than Goethe. In Germany there was 
 an evolution towards the absolute, with a 
 basic element of science ; in France, Chateau- 
 briand was followed by Ernest Renan, and 
 Renan by Pierre Loti, all semi-mystical 
 Celts; but the progressive development 
 here was towards a sort of resigned and 
 literary pessimism. For Chateaubriand re- 
 entered the Church from motives purely 
 sentimental and psychological, Renan left it 
 from motives of intellectual liberty, while 
 Pierre Loti finds it impossible to make his 
 reason conform to sentiment. 
 
 What a difference there is between the 
 manner of the Teutons and the manner of 
 
 32
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 the Celts! The stentorian tones of the 
 German thinkers are heard everywhere. 
 Dramatic, militant, vehement, they command 
 the world's attention as much as a great 
 flood or a calamitous battle; but with the 
 three French writers the manner of the 
 thought is different. Here there are no 
 trumpet calls, no serious attempts to lead 
 men back into the known, or forward into 
 the untried. They are silent forces. No 
 one disputes about Chateaubriand, and the 
 readers of Pierre Loti admire in silence. 
 Nevertheless, the works of the three French- 
 men have a wide and permeating influence 
 on thousands who take no interest in the 
 three German philosophers. And just here 
 lies the instructive part of the intellectual 
 history of these later times. We are con- 
 fronted with two currents of thought, coming 
 from opposite directions, but merging into 
 one stream, flowing towards the unattained 
 and the nebulous. A kind of vortex is 
 formed in which humanity is being whirled. 
 C 33
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 In it the debris of broken idols float, while 
 above the surface are seen the souvenirs of the 
 sanctuaries of Faith and Hope. 
 
 The three great Germans fought against 
 the pessimistic idea by seeking relief in 
 philosophy, science, and sociology. In 
 France the genius of Chateaubriand found 
 a vent in literature, romance, diplomacy, 
 and travel ; that of Renan in philological and 
 historical research ; that of Loti in romance 
 and literature. Renan was always what 
 Talleyrand said of Charles X., an unfrocked 
 priest. The real Renan is to be found in 
 his Life of Christ, and the real Chateau- 
 briand, not in his Genius of Christianity, but 
 in his Memoires d Outre To^nbe. 
 
 The Genius of Christianity is the pleading 
 of an emotional lawyer before a jury sus- 
 ceptible of emotional influence. It is all 
 rhetoric. But in the Memoires d' Outre Tombe 
 Chateaubriand is at home. Here we see 
 him as he is. The eloquence is natural, 
 the pathos unaffected, the adventure en- 
 
 34
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 thralling, and the style impeccable. Here 
 we have for the first time the Celtic tempera- 
 ment in all its complex charm, mystical 
 depths, and that indefinable something which 
 hovers over and around the real and the 
 commonplace, and which adds an inimitable 
 beauty to the sentiment and passion which 
 so many feel but so few can express by 
 tongue or pen. Perhaps the most striking 
 qualities here are the dramatic power and 
 the marvellous insight into human motives, 
 in contradistinction to the mystical, poetic, 
 and emotional parts of this great work. 
 The beauty and power of a work like this 
 remain as a sealed book to the readers of 
 problem novels and humdrum philosophy. 
 
 There is not in all literature anything 
 more vivid than certain portraits in these 
 memoirs. Carlyle uses the mallet and the 
 axe in hewing Mirabeau out of the revolu- 
 tionary block. In Chateaubriand's hands 
 we see the Mirabeau without the aid of 
 rhetoric : " En sortant de notre diner, on 
 
 35
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 discutait des ennemis de Mirabeau ; je me 
 trouvais a cote de lui et n'avait pas prononc6 
 un mot. II me regarda en face avec ses 
 yeux d'orgueil, de vice, et de genie, et 
 m'appliquant sa main sur I'epaule, il me 
 dit : ' lis ne me pardonneront jamais ma 
 superiorite ! ' Je sens encore I'impression 
 de cette main, comme si Satan m'eut touche 
 de sa griffe de feu." 
 
 Chateaubriand was an artist, in the sense 
 in which Goethe uses the word art. Seeing, 
 hearing, and understanding were one with 
 him. " Discernment," says La Bruyere, 
 "is the rarest thing in the world." It is 
 the rarest thing because it accompanies the 
 highest condition of the critical faculty, and 
 cannot be acquired. It is perhaps the pre- 
 eminent quality of Celtic genius. To dis- 
 tinguish at a glance, and apply the fitting 
 word and phrase, to penetrate beneath the 
 surface to the core of the apparent, to 
 discriminate between gold and gilt, between 
 natural gifts and acquired knowledge, to 
 
 36
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 judge without waiting to ponder over bulky 
 tomes for months or years, until the mind 
 has dissipated the force of the first impression, 
 to go straight, as if by magic, to the inner 
 meaning, and clutch at the very heart of the 
 usurping mediocrity — these things Chateau- 
 briand did, and these things have made him 
 immortal. His Celtic thought was framed 
 in a Latin mould, and while Goethe and 
 Carlyle had to become classics by a gradual 
 ascent of appreciation, the author of Memoires 
 d' Outre Tombe was a classic as soon as the 
 work appeared. What distinguishes this 
 work from all others of the kind is its 
 multiplicity of moods. When people write 
 memoirs, the writing too often partakes of 
 the photograph and the phonograph. The 
 greater part of such work is made up of 
 souvenirs set down in cold blood, with little 
 style and no imagination. To seek for any 
 sign of passion or inspiration would be futile. 
 This is why no lasting human interest attaches 
 to the memoirs of "distinguished " diplomats 
 
 37 
 
 .B36
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 and statesmen in these days. In the Memoires 
 d'Outre Tombe the charm resides in the 
 impression conveyed by its moods; the 
 fascination, in the union of impression and 
 style. The secret of this complexity of 
 moods lies, once more, in the Celtic tempera- 
 ment. No other temperament equals it in 
 dazzling paradox and bewitching anomaly. 
 You think you have at last posed the author 
 for an exact likeness of himself, when click ! 
 before the picture is taken the expression has 
 changed and you have a likeness of a person 
 you scarcely recognise. As well might we 
 try to photograph the other side of the moon 
 as to attempt to analyse and fix a personality 
 like this. The quality of the moodal tempera- 
 ment is the very touchstone of genius. All 
 lovers of Goethe and Beethoven know what 
 moods meant in their lives. And Schopen- 
 hauer says : " That which distinguishes 
 genius, and should be the standard of judging 
 it, is the height to which it is able to soar 
 when it is in the proper mood and finds a 
 
 38
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 fitting occasion." When writers like Georges 
 Sand and Emile Zola spin off a regular 
 number of pages every day we know with 
 certainty to what category such work belongs. 
 Facility is not inspiration, as Joubert says ; 
 nor can merely brilliant and humorous out- 
 bursts produce an impression as vivid and 
 powerful as that produced by the passionate 
 concentration of the intellect and feelings on 
 a single theme on a special occasion. It is 
 not easy to produce excellent work, even 
 when genius is ready and anxious, for the 
 reason that a mood is not to be induced to 
 order. There is nothing so delicate and 
 complex. Its duration is short, like certain 
 flowers that come and go in a day, or 
 others that bloom in the night at long inter- 
 vals. This is why a written speech is never 
 so effective as an impromptu one, if the 
 speaker be of the proper temperament and 
 in the proper mood. Such moments possess 
 immortality. They contain the double spirit 
 of time and eternity. On these occasions 
 
 39
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 the higher forces of nature combine to 
 produce the magic unity of art, beauty, and 
 inspiration. 
 
 The Celtic temperament is as much apart 
 from all others as the temperament of the 
 Latin races is from the Teutonic. The 
 character of the Celt is inscrutable in its 
 complex subtlety, endowed as it is with 
 the faculty of absorbing the quintessential 
 learning of the world without any loss to 
 personality. The moods of this tempera- 
 ment are akin to the changes and fluctua- 
 tions of nature, because so intimately related 
 to the physical elements seen and felt in 
 daily life — the rolling of mists across bleak 
 and barren hills at seasons when the soul is 
 longing for light and sunshine, and when 
 the human instinct rebels against the inevit- 
 able and the incongruous ; the beating ot 
 seas against rock-bound coasts which present 
 an appearance as bleak and unrelenting as 
 the surging waves themselves ; sudden 
 showers on fine summer days, which im- 
 
 40
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 press the mind with the close relationship 
 between physical law and spiritual life, 
 between the joys of living and the burden of 
 thinking, between illusion and reality, and 
 the vast, mysterious realm bounded on one 
 side by the sensuous and the real, while on 
 the other there is no limit to the mystic and 
 the imaginative. 
 
 In literature, the Celtic temperament is 
 characterised by imagination, sentiment, and 
 an indefinable sense of poetic mystery; but 
 the style produced by these qualities is 
 marked by intense personality — a style which, 
 like all passionate and poetic art, is indivi- 
 dual and spontaneous, because melancholy 
 and passion create their own figures and 
 symbols, and refuse to be confined within the 
 limits of imitation. 
 
 It has been the habit of the drawing-room 
 snob to dub with the epithets " fickle " and 
 "insincere" a whole nation noted among 
 experienced and competent minds as one of 
 the most conservative in Europe. The 
 
 41
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 wonderful law of compensation may be seen 
 here, as elsewhere ; and that other force, 
 that endows a people with immortality while 
 starving on a dung-heap, which turns the 
 fumes of wretchedness into halos of light and 
 aureolas of glory ! Fire and famine, injustice 
 and misrepresentation have been the material 
 portion of the Irish Celt. His capital is 
 ruled by Protestants born in Ireland, while 
 Scotland is Protestant governed by Presby- 
 terians. Indeed, the strife going on in 
 Scotland is neither political nor social ; it 
 is, in reality, the struggle of temperament 
 against intellect. The renascence of Scot- 
 tish humour is the bursting of a sentimental 
 bud on the hard tree of metaphysics. The 
 inventors of this pleasant antidote have 
 calmly weighed the doses and calculated the 
 effect. This medicine is not intended to 
 act as most antidotes of the kind: it does not 
 make the patient ill ; it is a cordial remedy. 
 Its action is on the heart. If Calvinism has 
 made the Scotch mind more metaphysical 
 
 42
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 than aesthetical, the symbols of Catholicism 
 have helped to keep the Irish character 
 mystical and poetic. Scottish humour is 
 always accompanied by a smile of sadness, 
 delicate and pathetic, in spite of a rugged 
 demeanour — sunshine on the summit of Ben 
 Nevis in November ! Sentimental and criti- 
 cal, it belongs to the ethical mood. The 
 mind is always a little more positive than the 
 heart, the philosophical spirit a little more 
 pronounced than the sentimental. And Irish 
 humour ! A ray of light in the haunts of the 
 banshee ; a burst of temper in the inverted 
 mood of pity and tenderness. The seeming 
 levity is not a sign of cynical indifference. It 
 is distracted compassion. 
 
 The Celt speaks of Nature with a kind 
 of mystical authority. The Celtic mind, at 
 its best, becomes identified with Nature. It 
 becomes one with the modes, conditions, 
 and symbols of natural things. Other minds 
 cognise the beauties and the forces of Nature, 
 but rarely penetrate to the core of the thing 
 
 43
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 seen ; they depict and appreciate the out- 
 ward appearance of trees, meadows, rivers, 
 and mountains ; the Celt speaks for them, 
 interprets the appearance, turns the material 
 form into a spiritual atmosphere, explains 
 the mystery of shapes and shadows, light 
 and darkness, sensation and sound. To the 
 ordinary mind the four seasons mean nothing 
 more than change in health or variation in the 
 conditions of bodily comfort ; to the Celtic 
 mind every day, every month, every season 
 has its soul as well as its visible atmosphere. 
 
 " Un caractere moral s'attache aux scenes 
 de I'automne," says Chateaubriand; "ces 
 feuilles qui tombent comme nos ans, ces 
 fleurs qui se fanent comme nos heures, ces 
 nuages qui fuient comme nos illusions, cette 
 lumiere qui s'afifaiblit comme notre intelli- 
 gence, ce soleil qui se refroidit comme nos 
 amours, ces fleuves qui se glacent comme 
 notre vie, ont des rapports secrets avec nos 
 destinees." 
 
 The poet-seer does not give us a mere 
 
 44
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 impression, a definition of something felt 
 exclusively by himself, but he interprets 
 the meaning of autumn in language which 
 artists and poets will recognise as one of 
 marvellous simplicity in style and profound 
 penetration in thought. 
 
 To the superficial student Nature is a 
 sealed book. The quasi-poetic mind can 
 never be made to comprehend the relation 
 that exists between Nature and man. "A 
 landscape represents a state of the soul," 
 says Amiel ; but it requires a writer with 
 a soul to say so. Out of twenty persons 
 who may admire a landscape, hardly one 
 has any idea of the psychological relation- 
 ship of colour and form with the mental 
 state of the beholder. In Nature, as in 
 art, people are most attracted by the trivial 
 and the insignificant. Few can feel and 
 appreciate the ensemble of light, colour, 
 shadow, and form manifest in the visible 
 world in any place or season. Goethe's 
 descriptions of Nature pertain to the scien- 
 
 45
 
 f 
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 tific ; Rousseau's to the sentimental. When 
 Versailles was built, trees and shrubs were 
 rounded, squared, trimmed, inverted accord- 
 ing to a regular system. The gardener did 
 his best to hide Nature in the artificial ; 
 and the mock dignity of the Court accorded 
 well with the hideous contortions in the 
 name of art. It was classicism gone mad. 
 It required a whole age of civil and philo- 
 sophical revolution to overthrow this moun- 
 tain of shams. If Rousseau advised a 
 homely appreciation of Nature, Chateau- 
 brand unveiled it, and, for the first time, 
 spoke of it as one acquainted with the 
 mysteries of earth and sky, forest and sea. 
 He speaks of the constellations as only a 
 great poet could speak : " A mesure que 
 sur mon rivage natal la lune descend au 
 bout du ciel, elle accroit son silence qu'elle 
 communique a la mer ; bientot elle tombe 
 a I'horizon, I'intersecte, ne montre plus que 
 la moitie de son front qui s'assoupit, s'incline 
 et disparait dans la molle intumescence des 
 
 46
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 vagues. La lune n'est pas plutot couchee 
 qu'un souffle venant du large, brise I'image 
 des constellations, comme on eteint les 
 flambeaux apres una solennite." 
 
 This is the poetic and mystical impres- 
 sion of this part of Nature ; but the same 
 object inspires Pierre Loti with sentiments 
 which oppress by the force of the inexorable 
 and the scientific : " La-bas, au-dessus des 
 montagnes de I'Est, un large disque rose, 
 d'un rose de sang, commence a surgir, et la 
 lune, montrant sa figure d'eternelle morte, 
 rejette mon esprit dans I'abime des temps, 
 dans I'insondable des origines — et tout ce 
 leurre de foi, qui m'avait un instant berce 
 dans le tranquille cimetiere, s'evanouit 
 devant I'apparition rose. En verite cela 
 opresse, de songer qu'elle y est et qu'elle 
 y sera toujours, inevitable, aux memes heures 
 montrant sa face lepreuse et sans vie, sorte 
 de scorie immonde attachee a nous et dont 
 rien, aux siecles des siecles, ne nous pourra 
 plus debarrasser jamais." 
 
 47
 
 The Celtic Temperament 
 
 Pierre Loti represents the Celtic imagina- 
 tion keenly alive to the mandates and inter- 
 pretations of modern science. In his pages 
 there is as much reality as romance, and 
 a sense of the inevitable is manifest through 
 all his writings. The British Celt is less 
 frankly outspoken. His pantheism abides 
 under the symbols of Catholicism, or it is 
 subdued by the weight of social majorities. 
 Nevertheless, as the immortal author of 
 Memoires d' Outre Tombe says : " Let the 
 young generations await in hope ; there is a 
 long period yet before arriving at the end." 
 
 Nature possesses the secret of turning 
 dreams into realities. Out of the West come 
 the sounds and the symbols of a great re- 
 vival. A knell has been tolled for the old 
 order of apathy and prejudice ; the new dis- 
 pensation will conciliate national animosities, 
 and offer compensation to the genius and 
 the language of an almost forgotten people. 
 
 48
 
 'style and personality 
 
 D
 
 STYLE AND PERSONALITY 
 
 Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer 
 index to character than the face. 
 
 Schopenhauer. 
 
 EFFECTIVE wisdom begins with style. 
 For style is the rhythmic sense applied 
 to literature. With this sense idea and form 
 are engendered in the mind as one. It 
 means harmony of thought and movement. 
 A perfect idea is conceived in the mind as a 
 force which perpetuates itself in other minds 
 by vibratory waves of rhythmic motion. 
 The immortal part of literature resides in 
 this harmony. As a dance without har- 
 monious movement has no charm, so an 
 idea without style has no force. 
 
 Style, in the hands of a practical thinker, 
 may be likened to drill and dash in the army 
 of a great leader. It has a subtle movement 
 
 51
 
 Style and Personality 
 
 and a vigorous spring. There is in such 
 a power an affinity between action and 
 intellect. 
 
 If a true definition of style is impossible, 
 it is on the other hand an easy matter to tell 
 what style is not. There is a kind of writing 
 which hides the natural sentiments, as certain 
 garments hide the natural shape of the body. 
 An unnatural manner of writing and speak- 
 ing leads directly to simulation. No man 
 can imitate another and remain true to 
 himself. The dignity of Milton was innate 
 and unaffected, but in recent times a 
 spurious sedateness has become fashionable ; 
 an assumed tranquillity which is destructive 
 both to power and personality. A studied 
 and calculated reticence is now a recognised 
 synonym of simulation. And there is a 
 tendency to express no emotion frankly, to 
 admit only the half of what one feels, and 
 about a fourth of what one thinks. There 
 are people foolish enough to suppose that 
 prose is, for some unaccountable reason 
 
 52
 
 Style and Personality 
 
 freed from the exigencies and principles 
 that govern the world of poetry, music, and 
 art. Now, the test of a picture is to be found 
 in the quality of the impression it produces 
 on the minds of competent artists, the test of 
 a poem is to be found in the depth of the 
 impression it produces on the minds of the 
 poetic, and so of music, and so of prose. The 
 question resolves itself to this: What im- 
 pression do you carry away with you 
 from a picture-gallery, a concert, a novel, a 
 chapter of history, or a page of criticism? 
 Macaulay, for example, leaves no marked 
 impression, and his readers take nothing 
 with them. No writer lived so long, wrote 
 so much, and said so little. His great essay 
 on Bacon is in reality a bundle of moral 
 platitudes reeled off the rhetorical loom in 
 the orthodox drab of the typical cotton- 
 spinner. The texture is of cotton, and the 
 silk-mercer finds it of no use. A little more 
 and the same could be said of Samuel 
 Johnson. This writer was saved by the 
 
 53
 
 Style and Personality 
 
 social and daily cares which surrounded him. 
 There is a humour which is akin to sorrow. 
 Effective sarcasm is the offspring of bitter 
 experience, and monotony is the mother of 
 mediocrity. 
 
 Evasiveness can possess no style, no matter 
 how many other virtues it may have. When 
 the manner is evasive and the spirit ondoyant, 
 the result is barren. 
 
 It is difficult to fix the starting-point of 
 this decadence in English literature; but, 
 consciously or unconsciously, Thackeray 
 capped the climax of inverted moods. His 
 writings are the history of an inverted tem- 
 perament. His novels are a development of 
 emotional satire. No one was more emo- 
 tional, more nervous. It is evident that 
 Thackeray accomplished the miracle of 
 living in one mood and writing in another. 
 Consider his treatment of Charlotte Bronte 
 on the occasion of that author's memorable 
 visit to the Thackeray home. He slipped 
 out of the house and hurried to the club, 
 
 54
 
 ^ Style and Personality 
 
 leaving his guest unable herself to deal with 
 the exigencies of the occasion. This incident 
 was the result of habitual moodal suppres- 
 sion. It was Thackeray's business to save 
 the evening by some sign of humorous senti- 
 ment, some natural flow of emotional feeling, 
 even to the simulation of feeling. 
 
 When we stop to ponder over these things, 
 the present decadent state of society is not 
 so mysterious and unaccountable as it would 
 appear to many. Thackeray's life was steri- 
 lised by cynicism, and the inversion cut him 
 off before his time. Dickens gave vent to 
 his emotions in many ways, and succeeded 
 in being natural. For this reason the style 
 of Dickens possesses a charm denied to that 
 of Thackeray. 
 
 Even in that day the club was the place of 
 refuge. Instead of conversation at the home 
 dinner-table, or a social evening with a few 
 friends before the homely fireside, the pose, 
 the gossip, and artificial life of the club had 
 become the proper thing. Talk took the 
 
 55
 
 Style and Personality 
 
 place of conversation ; humour and persiflage 
 the place of style. For at the club a writer 
 was supposed to suppress all show of feeling. 
 At this human abattoir an author was, even 
 in Thackeray's day, stripped of his person- 
 ality, and horns and hide disappeared in the 
 democratic crematorium which reduced the 
 habitue to so much dust and ashes. No 
 man can elbow himself into a crowd, and 
 remain there, and be free. With the advent 
 of the modern club serious conversation was 
 no longer possible. Epigram and witty 
 evasion became the correct thing. Im- 
 promptu opinions took the place of calm 
 judgment expressed in the course of an 
 evening's tite-a-tite before a cup of coffee 
 or a bottle of unadulterated port. For 
 in Thackeray's day English drinks were 
 masculine ; they are now feminine. It 
 requires all the wit of some writers to hide 
 the ravages of tannic acid poison ; and 
 to do this a new art had to be invented. 
 The effects of insomnia had to be veiled by 
 
 56
 
 ■> Style and Personality 
 
 simulated repose and bonhomie — a most 
 difficult and thankless accomplishment, for 
 all the other sufferers recognise the trick. 
 Thus, what looks like envy, is in many cases 
 the result of neurasthenia. Writer's cramp 
 is nothing- compared with writer's irritability. 
 Carlyle and Thackeray were perhaps the 
 greatest sufferers and the greatest sinners ; 
 but immunity from the uric acid diathesis is 
 a question of temperament, like everything 
 else. Authors who suffer from "nerves," 
 and who subsist on nerve-racking ailments 
 are to be pitied. Style, therefore, to be 
 fostered and maintained, means living as 
 near as possible to the central source of 
 naturalness and simplicity. Hurried talk, 
 choppy conversation, puerile gossip, fashion- 
 able dinners, afternoon teas, and receptions, 
 are inimical to a man's personality, the 
 harmony of his thought, and his natural 
 manner of writing. Gossips enter into the 
 lives of serious writers like the Bedouin 
 robbers on the path of a well-stocked 
 
 57
 
 Style and Personality 
 
 caravan. The drones of the working world 
 rob the thinkers whenever an occasion offers. 
 Indeed, much of what passes for comfort and 
 progress, for sociability and good-humour, 
 are devices of the incompetent to lure the 
 unsuspecting and independent mind to a 
 levelling ground of mediocrity. Amongst 
 literary people twenty persons constitute a 
 crowd, and thirty a mob. Is it any wonder 
 that the Hardys and the Merediths, the 
 Ruskins and the Stevensons get away as far 
 as they conveniently can from the mad 
 carnival of dyspeptic riot and absurd blend- 
 ing of teas and temperaments which London 
 now supplies ? Personality and style are an 
 inheritance and a possession, and should not 
 be bartered for a mess of pottage, nor be 
 discussed across the boards of Mammon's 
 banquets, between the latest musical comedy 
 and the last melodrama at Drury Lane. 
 
 58
 
 HEBRAIC INSPIRATION
 
 HEBRAIC INSPIRATION 
 
 SOME words have souls, some have spirit, 
 and some have only form. The Hebrew 
 prophets possessed the soul of language ; in 
 modern poetry we have more of the spirit 
 and the form. What renders the inspiration 
 of Isaiah so potent is the mystical meaning 
 attached to the Hebrew vocabulary. This 
 lansfuacfe was and still is a medium for the 
 invocation of the untold and inscrutable 
 forces of Time and Eternity. 
 
 In the mystical languages, such as Hebrew 
 and Arabic, there is a close affinity between 
 the prophetic utterance and the mode of 
 ancient music. Words and music contained 
 something magical. The prophets seemed 
 to possess the soul of music as well as the 
 soul of words. "The Spirit of God will 
 come upon me when the musician plays," 
 
 6i
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 cried Elisha.^ The spirit of Time seems 
 identified with recent modes of speaking and 
 writing. There is something transitory in 
 the moods evoked by rhyme. For rhyme 
 shimmers on the surface of language like 
 sunlight on the surface of shallow streams ; 
 it conducts the mind as in a circle ; its 
 sphere is a world of harmonic delights. 
 Rhyme is to the minds what sentimentality 
 is to art. The Hebrew prophets immor- 
 talised sentiment by a process the secret of 
 which came into the world with the race 
 and the language. The art they displayed 
 was one of unconscious form ; it arrived in 
 the consciousness as a part of the unity of 
 a spiritualised harmony. When we read 
 Isaiah we are influenced by the potential 
 elements of loftiness, and we become part 
 of the sublime and the eternal. The pro- 
 phets and seers not only possessed the 
 faculty of discernment, but they were re- 
 ceptive as well ; for it is not enough to see ; 
 
 ^ 2 Kings iii. 15. 
 62
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 one must both see and possess to be able 
 to explain and pour out. Receptivity is 
 even rarer than discernment ; for the state 
 of receptivity cannot be attained without a 
 union and acquiescence of all the loftier 
 forces of will and reason. When religion 
 became intellectual it lost its qualities of 
 adhesion and unity. Spirit and form forbade 
 the transmission of spiritual force by trans- 
 cendental intuition. Western art, like 
 Western religion, has defeated the aims and 
 gone beyond the first principles of art. 
 Artifice has taken the place of simplicity, 
 and pedantry the place of naivete ; and the 
 scourge of the modern academy has made 
 naturalness and inspiration all but impos- 
 sible. 
 
 When we read a chapter in Isaiah, or Job, 
 or Solomon, and then turn to the utterances 
 of our greatest preachers, the truth becomes 
 apparent that we have lost the gift, if we 
 ever possessed it, of attaining the supreme 
 through the simple. Superfluous rhetoric, 
 
 63
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 sentences devoid of soul, and words devoid 
 of passion, vain attempts to attain the 
 sublime through tortuous paths of weary- 
 phraseology, these things we find, with 
 frequent displays of learning, without real 
 feeling. 
 
 Since Burke, we have no orator who has 
 been able to fuse discernment and sublimity. 
 For when we are sublime we cease to be 
 clairvoyant, and when we see clearly we 
 become didactic. No man can create his 
 language; he has to choose it. In the 
 English language style is the rarest of all 
 things, because to write and speak in this 
 tongue, even with moderate decorum, requires 
 as much care as it does to cross a muddy 
 road without soiling one's boots. The 
 language is a mixture of vulgarity and 
 sublimity, the Anglo-Saxon predominating, 
 the Latin cropping up here and there to 
 give dignity and architectural proportion. 
 So that we must do with our pens what 
 we do in the streets — pick our way with ex- 
 
 64
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 ceeding caution. Isaiah did not create the 
 Hebrew which he used. He found it when 
 he came into the world. It was there as a 
 mould for his inspirations and his wisdom. 
 Similarly, Mohammed found the Arabic 
 ready to hand, and when he opens the 
 Koran with the dulcet strains : El hamdu 
 lilla hee rabee il Allah mina, we are as much 
 thrilled with the verbal magic as we are 
 with the divine strains of the great move- 
 ment in Beethoven's symphony in C minor. 
 Modern speech has become vivid and pene- 
 trating ; it is rarely vivifying and exalting. 
 Hebrew is the principal tongue in the 
 hierarchy of languages, the mother of pro- 
 found and exalted emotions, the most 
 primitive and authoritative medium for the 
 expression of transcendent praise and in- 
 effable sorrows. By it, imagination soars 
 through the ages, and we alight on the 
 summits of Israel overlooking the sacred 
 precincts where Elisha prophesied while 
 the minstrel played and where the Ark of 
 E 65
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 the Covenant was carried to Jerusalem by 
 the hosts of David. There are words 
 which hold the mind to earthly things, to 
 the temporal, the ephemeral ; others, which 
 deal with fixed periods ; and lastly, the 
 ones which set the soul free, give it wings, 
 sight, and volition. These last are the 
 words which contain a magical combination 
 of sense and sound, as when the Mussul- 
 man cries : La ilia ella Allah, Mochamed 
 rossoul Allah ! Here thought and language 
 become vital, and the meaning penetrates 
 like a musical phrase to the very marrow 
 of consciousness. 
 
 Everything superfluous in language is 
 either impertinent or puerile. A mixture of 
 the metaphysical and the aesthetic is fatal 
 to any precept of established wisdom. 
 With a multiplicity of gods, the Greeks 
 were confounded by a multiplicity of schools. 
 No one could tell what new system would 
 spring forth on the morrow. With every 
 god came a new temple and a strange 
 
 66
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 teaching. Disciples contradicted their mas- 
 ters in almost everything. The truth is, the 
 wisdom of the Greek teachers was not con- 
 centrated ; they were simple and direct only 
 in the drama, and even here the effort and 
 the inspiration tended towards the scrutiny 
 of the unknowable. The tragedians ex- 
 hausted themselves on the unattainable. 
 The Greek mind seemed always a little 
 above the level of human needs and oppor- 
 tunity. In the search for the beautiful and 
 the sublime they forgot the world and the 
 people in it. And this is why the Greeks 
 had no Bible of their own, no book of 
 Psalms, no prophets or seers. The grandeur 
 of Israel is that the prophets and the singers 
 all spoke with one voice. There are no dis- 
 cords, discussions, contradictions, or schisms. 
 From the time that Moses descended from 
 Sinai with the ten commandments, to the 
 last recorded prophecy, there is but one 
 spirit, one impulsion, one source and aim 
 animating the whole. It requires no stretch 
 
 ^7
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 of the imagination to think of Moses as 
 being the author of Solomon's Proverbs. It 
 is impossible to controvert the laws of the 
 first, or dispute the precepts of the second. 
 And equally so, the character and tone of 
 the seers agree, from the greatest to the 
 smallest. The transition from this unity to 
 the vanity of Greek metaphysics is both dis- 
 appointing and disconcerting. Among the 
 Greeks we find a free play of fancy in every 
 sphere of thought, without the essential 
 stamina of wordly wisdom and religious 
 aspiration. Every man had his own little 
 world of imagination and theory, and the 
 result was philosophical and religious dis- 
 integration. The philosophical disputes 
 which arose in the time of Plato and Aris- 
 totle increased in intensity until the end of 
 the Roman Empire. With the Renaissance 
 came a revival of scholastic disputation 
 which has continued ever since. 
 
 Three things characterise philosophy, as 
 we know it — abstraction, inversion, and con- 
 
 68
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 tradiction. The main object of a system is 
 to destroy the foundations of the preceding 
 system. There is not so much inharmony 
 among Christian sects as there is among the 
 diverse schools of philosophy. If all the 
 philosophical works since Solomon's time 
 were bound in one volume, the proper title 
 of the book would be : " The History of 
 Intellectual Folly." We are told that philo- 
 sophical disputation is good for the mind. 
 But we know for a certainty that the dis- 
 ciples of Plato never change, just as we 
 know that argument has never changed a 
 disciple of Aristotle. If inharmony is good 
 for the intellect, just as much so would be 
 the presence in the house of a drunken man 
 or a brawling woman. Stubbornness is the 
 mother of disputation. Thinkers who love 
 the subtle, the vague, and the polemical, 
 are superfluous in the economy of our social 
 universe, because they wander from the 
 centre of the knowable, pass out of the 
 orbital sphere, and enter the region of the 
 
 69
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 nebulous. Removed from the centre, in- 
 tellect becomes eccentric, folly whirls in 
 centrifugal disorder, and is finally swallowed 
 up in regions beyond the Central-Sun of 
 knowledge. Vanity and vexation of spirit 
 are the end of philosophical discussion, as 
 they are of personal ambition, riches, and 
 individual strife. 
 
 In the writings of the Hebrews humanity 
 is divided into two sections — the good and 
 the wicked, the wise and the foolish. And 
 the maxims are concrete. Let any intelli- 
 gent man read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, 
 and he will have to conclude that there 
 is nothing new under the sun save a few 
 mechanical inventions which have added 
 nothing to the essential wisdom of the 
 human mind. For what was true of old 
 is true now, and the fatal blunder lies 
 in concluding that our mechanical inven- 
 tions bring us more happiness and better 
 inspirations. The Jews on the one hand, and 
 the Celts on the other, are awakening to a 
 
 70
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 fresh appreciation of the realities of Hfe. But 
 the Israelite never lost the sense of unity 
 embodied in the sacred writings of his an- 
 cestors. Here and nowhere else, lies the 
 explanation of the cohesive power of the 
 modern followers of the Prophets ; for in 
 spite of the decadence of Jewry, from 
 covetousness. there exists a vital spark of 
 the old inspirations which has helped to 
 enlighten and illuminate the remnants of 
 Israel everywhere. The covetousness of 
 the Jew is no new thing; the Old Testa- 
 ment is full of lamentations and warnings 
 concerning this vice. While Israel endured 
 as a nation there were but two social 
 elements — the wise and those who followed 
 them, and the fools, with their followers. 
 When men like David and Solomon ruled 
 and taught all was well ; when the super- 
 stitious and the ignorant were in power all 
 went wrong. How does it come about that 
 the teachings of such men are venerated 
 wherever people have any judgment left, 
 
 71
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 in every denomination throughout the world 
 where the Bible is read ? There is but one 
 answer — because of the enduring harmony 
 and fitness of the things uttered. 
 
 The fool, with his empty words, his 
 ephemeral enthusiasms, and volatile anger, 
 the rush after signs and wonders by the 
 half-cultured, the hair-splitting disputations 
 of the self-sufficient, the vanity of false 
 systems and false gods, absurd hopes and 
 ridiculous ambitions — there is not a person 
 or a thing, an ambition or a passion, that 
 is not depicted here by a lightning-phrase, 
 as if shot from the quiver of infallible 
 wisdom. Nowhere else is there so much 
 comfort in so small a space. The maxims 
 uttered are living, applicable precepts for 
 believers and sceptics alike ; for the thing 
 that happened yesterday is the same that 
 happens to-day, and the thing which will 
 happen to-morrow will be like that of to- 
 day ; time and eternity are one ; nothing 
 shall change from the beginning to the 
 
 72
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 ending of the world. There is a temporal 
 wisdom and a wisdom of infallibility. Open 
 the book of Proverbs, and you will meet 
 the infallible on every page : subtle world- 
 knowledge, clairvoyant penetration, a seeing 
 through appearances, an unravelling of petty 
 passions and cunning avidity, a searching 
 out of the false, and a ruling for the simple 
 and the true ; — all the knowledge of the 
 Greeks and the Romans seems but an at- 
 tenuated imitation of the simplicity and 
 sublimity of Israel. Those who think the 
 human heart has changed can do no better 
 than read certain portions of the Old Testa- 
 ment. All through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, 
 David, and Solomon, the things described 
 and the laws laid down might have been 
 rendered by a seer or a philosopher of 
 yesterday, so modern is the applicability of 
 the visions, the examples, and the maxims. 
 This is one reason why the Bible is the 
 most popular book extant. It is both a 
 surprise and a comfort to know that Jeru- 
 
 73
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 salem, the sacred City, was no better or 
 worse than the great capitals of the world 
 to-day. Jewish prophets and historians tell 
 us all that is worth knowing about Jerusa- 
 lem ; and we have it all with us to-day — the 
 same money-lenders, the same oppressors of 
 the poor, the same " folding of the hands 
 to sleep," the same hypocrites, the same 
 mischief-makers, the same drunkards, and 
 the same gossips who poison the air of 
 peaceful homes and spread mischief from 
 neighbour to neighbour. 
 
 It is difficult to say what one admires 
 most in the wise sayings of the Hebrews. 
 We lean, now to the beauty of the symbols 
 and the arrangement of words, now to the 
 knowledge of the human heart, the precision, 
 the simplicity, the scientific certainty of the 
 thought. The pestle and the mortar are 
 both concrete ; and between them illusion 
 is precipitated from reality. Isaiah and 
 Solomon strip the human frame of illusions 
 as a gust strips a tree of its rotten fruit. 
 
 74
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 ''■ Between the wisdom of Proverbs and the 
 inexorable scrutiny of Ecclesiastes there is 
 nothing left. Beside the residue of Solo- 
 mon's smelting-pot, Attic understanding 
 seems like dross, and Buddhism like smoke 
 and vapour. All other literature goes above, 
 around, or beneath the actual, dallies with 
 theories, soars on chimerical wings, or enters 
 dreamland by the portal of vain desires and 
 vanished hopes. We hear the beating of 
 the wings of the world against the gates 
 of Destiny; but the Preacher of Jerusalem 
 makes straight for the things that are. One 
 by one he divests himself of the garments of 
 illusion. In his wisdom and folly he be- 
 comes the prototype of the human race. 
 His words are a paradox of terror and 
 consolation. 
 
 There is this to be said about Truth : 
 different peoples arrive at it by different 
 methods. Job, Isaiah, Solomon, were not 
 long in finding the shortest road to the 
 meaning of life. The wisest Jew lived five 
 
 75
 
 Hebraic Inspiration 
 
 hundred years before the wisest Greek, and 
 about six hundred years after Moses. That 
 all this wisdom was attained at that epoch 
 of the world's history may well fill the 
 modern mind with perpetual wonder. 
 
 At the end of it all, work and right 
 living are the only means of obtaining 
 peace and contentment. And this, at last, 
 after three thousand years, is what is left us. 
 
 76
 
 PRACTICAL PESSIMISM
 
 PRACTICAL PESSIMISM 
 
 JUST as Herbert Spencer did his work 
 during the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century, so Schopenhauer accomplished his 
 during the first half. With a patience and 
 assurance which borders on the superhuman 
 these two thinkers waited and worked, 
 unmindful of worldly distinctions and 
 meaningless titles. But here the resem- 
 blance ends. For to speak of the great 
 German at all means a direct and trenchant 
 descent into the very heart of the things 
 that are. He compels us to put aside mere 
 sentiment and belief, and come at once to 
 the reality. Herbert Spencer's position was 
 that of a great thinker who hoped for a 
 better world. He was an evolutionist who 
 believed that through the slow process of 
 evolutionary law society will some day arrive 
 
 79
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 at a plane of co-operative harmony. And he 
 was right, from his point of view. Notwith- 
 standing this, the Spencerian philosophy is 
 pessimism with an optimistic veil. Like 
 hundreds of other thinkers, illusion compels 
 him to hope, and his hope takes the form of 
 evolution. But, while it is a fact that the 
 world is being developed under evolutionary 
 law, there is not the shadow of evidence 
 that individual man will ever be much better 
 than he is. History and experience tell us 
 that there never will be individual perfection ; 
 but illusion — which is a natural but necessary 
 element — impels us towards this perfection. 
 There are paradoxes that are divine. As 
 far as we can now see, evolution means that 
 species of change which brings with it new 
 illusions — the actor with many masks, the 
 conjurer with many devices, the three sirens 
 with modern melodies : science, hope, and 
 harmony. 
 
 It is idle to deny that in the writings of 
 the greatest thinkers the most striking lesson 
 
 80
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 to' be gained is that of the continuity of the 
 pessimistic instinct; but every age has its 
 particular mode of expressing human tribu- 
 lation, folly, and illusion. In everything 
 development mounts upwards by regular 
 stages, the last expression in the ladder of 
 progress being the most favourable, but 
 never final. For we shall not reach finality 
 till the last flicker of hope goes out on the 
 shores of Silence and Eternity. Hebrew 
 pessimism was sentimental and religious, and 
 weeping is mentioned frequently all through 
 the Old Testament The pessimism of 
 Greece was philosophical and poetic. The 
 Greeks began to look at Destiny with a sort 
 of mystical science. The pagan Romans 
 became stoical, and never wept ; but the 
 Christians of decadent Rome became ecsta- 
 tic and mystical, and a suppressed joy 
 tempered a form of pessimism destined to 
 become general throughout half the world. 
 The pessimism of our day has neither tears 
 nor moments of mystical joy. It is scientific 
 F 8i
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 and aesthetic, and the consolation, if any, 
 lies in resignation. 
 
 The pessimists of the present age are 
 of two kinds : those who feel keenly, but 
 are incapable of deep thought, and those 
 who cannot help meditating, analysing, and 
 classifying. In the domain of literature, 
 writers of nervous energy, whose feelings are 
 poignantly alive to the facts and the force of 
 physical law, but who lack the faculty of 
 insight, pass, by universal agreement, into the 
 second rank. A kind of clairvoyance is a 
 characteristic of the greatest. And so, of the 
 many prophets and seers mentioned in the 
 Old Testament, there were but four really 
 great, two of them supreme. They were all 
 pessimists. The Babylonian captivity and 
 the terrible destruction of Jerusalem were 
 predicted by Jeremiah, who lamented the 
 most because he could see the farthest. We 
 owe to Isaiah that book in which sorrow 
 and indignation unite in forming the highest 
 kind of literary style, and an immortality 
 
 82
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 that will extend to the limits of recorded 
 history. 
 
 It was a sense of mystery and mourning 
 which gave immortality to the work of the 
 tragic cycle begun by yEschylus and ended 
 by Euripides — who was another seer. A 
 sense of the nothingness of life gave beauty 
 and sublimity to the letters of Seneca and 
 the meditations of Marcus Aurelius; it was 
 the Cross, the symbol of earthly suffering, 
 which inspired the early Christians and 
 made them willing martyrs. The great 
 men of antiquity indulged in no persiflage. 
 In Goethe's principal work it is Mephis- 
 topheles who laughs. The rest suffer. In- 
 souciant pleasures and cynical wit are among 
 the signs which precede the downfall of long- 
 established systems and matured nations ; 
 and hot-headed pleasure and pessimistic 
 prophecy are the two poles that meet like 
 an electric current in the body politic just 
 before disaster. Of the two currents that 
 flow from the battery of life, pessimism 
 
 83
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 is positive, pleasure negative. While Vol- 
 taire and Rousseau saw the end of old 
 systems in France, the people sought dis- 
 traction in frivolous pleasures and puerile 
 pursuits; and the Roman stoics were pre- 
 paring for the worst while the populace in- 
 dulged in bloody scenes in the Imperial Arena. 
 Optimism, indeed, never produced a 
 prophet. Because of all earthly things op- 
 timism is the most undiscerning. Optimists 
 imagine themselves secure. This is why 
 the action of optimism never extends be- 
 yond a certain limit, the line of which 
 becomes visibly marked just before the 
 realisation of desire. Optimism teaches 
 that the human family will be more con- 
 tented to-morrow. Just as well might we 
 expect the British climate to change for 
 the better as to expect human existence to 
 become more contented. For when we put 
 man above the actual and the scientific we 
 contradict the very figures of chemistry, 
 biology, and mathematics. 
 
 84
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 Previous to Schopenhauer the realm of 
 Philosophy was a land of dreams and 
 speculation to all but a few who preferred 
 to walk as much as possible on the solid 
 earth. The greater body of philosophers 
 were men who sat quietly at home philoso- 
 phising on things they had never seen, 
 emotions they had never felt, and miseries 
 they had never endured. Men like Hegel, 
 Fichte, and Schelling were incompetent as 
 much from lack of experience as from lack 
 of clear vision ; and until Goethe united 
 poetic feeling with science and experience, 
 science and common sense were the two 
 things most alien to modern thought. For 
 Bacon did not go deeply into anything be- 
 yond appearance and effect. He put into 
 words what every educated mind could 
 instantly grasp. His was the worldly wis- 
 dom of the ages moulded in a form at once 
 acceptable and satisfying ; but it was not 
 new. This is why Bacon was recognised 
 from the very first as an intellectual power, 
 
 85
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 Had he revealed new truths he would have 
 had a long battle with ignorance and error. 
 Schopenhauer's point of view was made 
 possible by the scientific attitude of Spin- 
 oza and the contemporaneous example of 
 Goethe. Schopenhauer rent the veil of 
 illusion, brought philosophy down from the 
 clouds, made guess-work ridiculous, and 
 speculation absurd. Philosophy, in his day, 
 was like a menagerie of beasts and birds, 
 both vicious and harmless, among which it 
 was scarcely possible to move without in- 
 convenience or danger; but he entered 
 this menagerie, and for thirty years defied 
 its occupants to do their worst. They re- 
 mained silent; for they had no answer. 
 They were uncertain and negative, and dared 
 not face the inexorable. For the so-called 
 thinkers of his day were themselves wavering 
 between doubt and belief 
 
 There are, indeed, but two ways of treat- 
 ing the world — by the imperative or by the 
 conciliatory. The first is absolute, the 
 
 86
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 second vacillating. Bonaparte and Bis- 
 marck were absolutists, in their own way, 
 and so were all the greatest thinkers down 
 to the present. Calvin and Luther in re- 
 ligion, Spinoza and Schopenhauer in philo- 
 sophy — these names are typical manifesta- 
 tions of the personal and the absolute. Com- 
 petent thinkers have always treated social 
 fashion and worldly favour as if such things 
 did not exist. Bacon looked down at the 
 world from a height, Pascal never gave it 
 a thought, Goethe made fun of it, Scho- 
 penhauer dissected it without the aid of 
 anaesthetics, Frederick Nietzsche without 
 pity. As for the conciliatory manner, there 
 are millionaires who live in constant fear 
 lest the world will think them as rich as 
 they are, statesmen who never pass a law 
 without offering a humble excuse, bishops 
 who would rule by persuasion, philosophers 
 who equivocate while they profess to teach. 
 But the egoism which is reprehensible in 
 the diplomat and the millionaire is essential 
 
 87
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 to all thinkers with a new law evoked from 
 personal knowledge. A writer who is ab- 
 solute in his own sphere of experience and 
 intuition will no more think of tempering 
 his speech with smiles, or his writings with 
 suave apology, than a general would think 
 of asking a traitor's pardon before having 
 him executed. 
 
 If in Goethe we find for the first time a 
 union of science and poetic sentiment, in 
 Schopenhauer we have for the first time a 
 scientific mind showing the futility of pass- 
 ing illusions and philosophical superstitions. 
 Goethe still gives us some of the glamour 
 of the sentimental and the metaphysical. In 
 Schopenhauer we have all this, but in a 
 suppressed form. He feels the power of old 
 errors, but he knows the difference between 
 appearance and reality, between atavic senti- 
 ment and physical law. 
 
 When Schopenhauer began to travel he 
 came face to face with the actual. Every- 
 where he was impressed with the same thing 
 
 88
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 r— the vanity of illusions. But while some 
 thinkers gain this experience slowly, others 
 pass into it suddenly. Solomon declared 
 that everything was vanity when he had 
 attained all the wisdom, riches, honour, and 
 pleasure that life could bestow. The process 
 was gradual. After the French defeat at 
 Sedan, Ernest Renan put away optimism 
 like a worn and useless garment. The 
 dreamer awoke with the blow. Such are the 
 moments when the leaden fact strikes like a 
 plummet that touches the bottom of experi- 
 ence ; the contact comes with a dull thud, 
 and vanity itself disappears in the depths of 
 consciousness. 
 
 Potent as intuition is in the world of 
 philosophy and art, experience acts with just 
 as much power at certain epochs and seasons 
 in the development of human life. Of all 
 the sensations which dispel illusion, none is 
 more sudden and arresting than that which 
 comes with the bestowal of a symbol of 
 worldly power. A man never feels himself 
 
 89
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 so little, so helpless, as when he receives a 
 so-called honour at the hands of any man or 
 body of men. If great wealth makes a man 
 actually feel the limits of his power, the 
 bestowal of a title makes him suddenly feel 
 his weakness. Only then does he realise his 
 inability to go further. He is in the position 
 of a bird with clipped wings. He can soar 
 no more, he has completed his circle; he sits 
 down and ponders over the folly of ambition 
 and the futility of all worldly schemes. 
 Every writer who becomes a member of an 
 academy, or of the titled aristocracy, makes 
 a public confession of weakness. When 
 Tennyson received a barony he became a 
 negative pessimist. For the first time life 
 appeared little. For the first time he stood 
 in the presence of the actual. The office of 
 poet laureate was already a device to reduce 
 the poetic afflatus to a condition of national 
 mediocrity, but the poet could still know 
 some moments of personal freedom and the 
 illusions of a far-off something, a vague hope, 
 
 90
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 a mysterious destiny, a desire above and 
 beyond the vain pomp of frivolous and 
 childish minds. But with the rank of noble- 
 man expectation was at an end. The curtain 
 came down on the shifting scenes in the 
 panorama of progress, the arena of action 
 was darkened, and the light had gone from 
 illusion. 
 
 Solomon was the first poet-pessimist of 
 real power, originality, and distinction. As 
 the tribulations of the Hebrew race had no 
 end, and as trouble followed the Jews every- 
 where, they became more and more instinc- 
 tively pessimistic. Spinoza brought Judaic 
 pessimism down to the threshold of modern 
 science. The fact needs emphasis : the 
 Jews, owing to an innate principle of applied 
 pessimism, have triumphed always and every- 
 where, and in the face of universal and 
 concentrated enmity. The Jews have had a 
 portion in every modern kingdom ; and the 
 ancient prophecy has been fulfilled. Indeed, 
 their part has been the best part. They alone 
 
 91
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 have accepted the world as it is ; for Greek 
 thought was metaphysical and speculative ; 
 Roman authority meant futurition. While 
 other peoples speculate about the rrkodes and 
 conditions of a future life, the Jewish mind 
 concerns itself with the needs of the day, 
 the comforts of the moment, the exact thing 
 to be done, the conservation of energy by 
 patience and methodical perseverance. The 
 Jewish mind is concrete. It is never 
 weakened by outward influences which do 
 not actually concern it. The Jew has shown 
 Christians the futility of the sentimental, 
 and philosophers the absurdity of the specu- 
 lative. Forced to execute an appalling 
 circuit in the race after Mammon, his arrival 
 at last coincides with destiny and confirms 
 disaster. 
 
 The Buddhist has his moments of ecstasy, 
 the Mohammedan his moods, the Christian 
 his enthusiasm, but the Jew is inflexible. 
 He is the adamant upon which the pillars 
 of our commercial world are fixed, the sole 
 
 92
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 .y entity which neither recedes nor shrinks. 
 He brings others to his adamantine base, 
 and makes them sit or stand, at last, like 
 Patience on a monument smiling at Grief. 
 
 Such is the force of the pessimistic instinct 
 when applied to the practical affairs of the 
 world. Men are made potent and persever- 
 ing from fear of the future, and never from 
 an absolute confidence in it. 
 
 Pessimism is engendered by the instability 
 of things physical and moral, by long years 
 of poverty, by philosophical and political 
 disillusionment. Previous to 1789 it was 
 the misery of the people united with the 
 scepticism of the thinkers — that is to say, a 
 double cause, material and spiritual — which 
 created a pessimistic element in France. 
 After 1793 it was continual wars, then again 
 revolutions, right up to the catastrophe of 
 Sedan. In Germany the people suffered the 
 invasions of Bonaparte, several revolutions, 
 then, in our day, a whole series of wars ; 
 but during this time the English marched 
 
 93
 
 Practical Pessimism 
 
 their soldiers off to India, to the antipodes, 
 to continental Europe, everywhere out of 
 England, sniffing at the good things, harvest- 
 ing the wheat of foreign fields, bringing home 
 fruits cultivated by others who had not the 
 time to gather them, mixing in everything, 
 marching at the head of native troops in 
 foreign countries, playing with fire but never 
 burning their fingers, riding the seas, like the 
 Flying Dutchman, yet always finding a good 
 port at the decisive movement. 
 
 In our day, an optimist may be likened to 
 a man who resides in a fool's paradise from 
 which there is no means of exit ; a pessimist, 
 one who prepares for the exigencies of the 
 future by every means devisable by the 
 ingenuity of human imagination. 
 
 94
 
 OMAR AND IMMORTALITY
 
 iS' 
 
 OMAR AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 NEVER in the history of recorded con- 
 sciousness has the effect of Death 
 appeared to the minds of thinking people with 
 so much force as at present. The Christian 
 professes to regard death without fear, the 
 Spiritist professes to regard it without con- 
 cern, while the philosopher affects to regard 
 it with stoical indifference. All join in the 
 single desire to clothe it with a mask of 
 illusion — poetic, religious, artistic, or philo- 
 sophical ; but little by little the different forms 
 of illusion have been gradually vanishing, 
 much as tinsel wears off and drops from the 
 borders of a worn garment. The grinding- j 
 stone of sciejTce has sharpened doubt and put \ 
 a keen edge on that pessimism which was for- 
 merly the biblical embodiment of future hope, 
 but is now a general and permanent condition 
 G 97
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 of the educated mind. The subdued and 
 disciph'ned horror of the world's mental con- 
 dition to-day is not considered proper for 
 conversation ; for motives of shame or fear, 
 or both, men try to hide the hideous truth. 
 But music and poetry deal with the secret 
 and sacred feelings of the heart in their own 
 magic way — they speak of the inadmissible 
 in a conciliating manner, of the indefinable 
 in a tone of satisfying wonder and mystery, 
 and of the inevitable in a tone of consolation 
 and sympathy. Once in a long while a poet 
 arises who treats of the inadmissible and the 
 inevitable. Once in an age a singer arises 
 with a voice attuned to the sorrows and the 
 burdens of those who work in patience and 
 wait in doubt; delicately, softly, as a butter- 
 fly alighting on a flower, he expresses the 
 feelings and sensations of the modern dis- 
 illusioned mind. 
 
 Death was not feared until a belief in 
 eternal punishment became general. With 
 the introduction of Christianity tears of 
 
 98
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 compassion for the departed were mingled 
 4 with a sentiment of doubt in the present 
 and dread of the future. The whole Chris- 
 tian world was moved and affected by the 
 sentimental; but Fear, like a phantom, 
 walked before Pity, and the two were never 
 separated until Montaigne appeared with his 
 paradox of sentimental belief and agnostic 
 uncertainty. Fear and Sentiment were now 
 to be found less and less in each other's 
 company; it was the dawn of modern 
 philosophy : but the light of positive science 
 was not yet visible. That rose over the 
 horizon with Darwin, and Christendom was 
 stunned with the searchlight of fact. The 
 blow broke the back of fear. The feelings 
 of society changed, and the fear of death 
 gave place to sentimental pessimism. The 
 mind was now left to ponder over the dry 
 facts of science, but the heart was bleeding. 
 Reason accepted the judgment, but senti- 
 ment revolted, and the mind clutched in 
 despair at every straw floating by on the 
 
 99
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 stream of destiny. Society laid hold of 
 everything the eye could see and the hands 
 touch — Spiritism and Buddhism were de- 
 vised, like rafts from the debris of a floating 
 wreck. Faith had disappeared, and doubt 
 and despair were causing a sort of spiritual 
 delirium ; but science, inexorable, cold as 
 the waters of a tidal wave, once more swept 
 the ocean of belief. Mere sentimental con- 
 viction vanished in the universal upheaval. 
 What place had the human heart in this old 
 world of vanished dreams, in this new world 
 of scientific fact ? Where was sentiment to 
 lodge ? On what rock were pity and yearn- 
 ing to take refuge? Renunciation was no 
 longer found desirable in a world where the 
 real and the practical were daily concomitants 
 of work and warfare. Renunciation is for 
 the vanquished, for men who have ceased to 
 work, who have no desire to live. A new 
 condition of life was created, a condition of 
 conflicting thought and emotion ; but where 
 was the cultured mind to look for support ? 
 
 lOO
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 Browning is too vague and lofty, Whitman 
 too jubilant and expectant, Tennyson too 
 exclusive and credulous. The modern 
 thinker demanded the poetry of sentiment 
 and common sense, fact and feeling. 
 Whitman would have filled the gap but for 
 his extreme optimism, while Tennyson shut 
 out the world by refusing to live with it. 
 While one was looking too far into the future, 
 another was polishing his lines to fit the 
 courtly needs of the hour, while a third 
 revelled in a sphere of philosophical conceits, 
 from which people might evolve any belief 
 or system most convenient. Something was 
 demanded which should go beyond mere 
 power, eloquence, and poetic suggestion. 
 There is an optimism which soars above 
 human necessity and which leaves the heart 
 untouched. Serious readers were waiting | 
 for the sound of an instrument that should 
 express the simplest emotions and the most 
 poignant sentiments in a key attuned to the 
 needs of the age. That instrument was ' 
 
 lOI
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 Omar, and the key was Resignation. Sub- 
 mission to the inevitable, with the heart 
 conscious of its sentimental atavism, and the 
 affections more than ever alive to the mean- 
 ings and menaces of modern science — this 
 is Resignation as we know it to-day. For 
 instead of the world being in the " narthex of 
 penitence," as Amiel says, it is in the narthex 
 of sentimental submission. But in attaining 
 this state poetic support was necessary. 
 Sentiment and sensibility could not sustain 
 the shock without the aid of a sympathiser 
 who, by a process of poetic intuition, knew 
 the secrets of Nature as well as human 
 nature. When rhyme and polished verse 
 became fashionable it was at the cost of 
 simplicity and sincerity. Poetic emotion 
 was weakened by having to pass through an 
 artificial mould with which sentiment and 
 feeling have in reality nothing to do. No 
 orator could influence a crowd of people 
 by speaking in rhyme. With Shakespeare, 
 Milton, and Shelley rhythm was born with 
 
 1 02
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 the idea ; impressions, sentiments, emotions 
 were conceived and embodied in the " rhyth- 
 mic sense." With a few exceptions, since 
 Shelly poetic inspiration has been weakened 
 by a search for rhyme, an idea more in- 
 genious and subtle than spontaneous and 
 unaffected. Poetry was getting farther and 
 farther away from the actual needs of mind 
 and heart ; for rhyme, in the hands of 
 Tennyson, was pathetic and meUifluous ; in 
 the hands of Swinburne it meant passion 
 and vehemence. The first pacified, but did 
 not convince ; the second stimulated, but 
 did not console. Because spiritual impres- 
 sions, Hke poetic inspirations, may be con- 
 ceived with art but never with artifice. The 
 more refined our methods became the more 
 did poetry partake of the superficial in senti- 
 ment and the artificial in art. Omar arrived, 
 and with him a return of the genetical 
 manner. The Persian tent-maker brought 
 us a statement of fact, in a form un- 
 trammelled by fashionable conventions, free 
 
 103
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 from artifice or affectation, wherein is nothing 
 morbid or morose. His moods are exigent 
 and artless, for necessity causes the mind 
 to forget skill. Simplicity makes art a part 
 of Nature ; sympathy makes it consoling ; 
 worldly knowledge makes it permanent. 
 Omar has neither conceits nor illusions. 
 Yet he has sighs for the sorrows of the 
 world and the inevitable destiny of the 
 human "kind. He had seen what was to be. 
 He had the clairvoyance of those who live 
 with Nature, and, by an unscrutable, mystical 
 law, he wrote for an epoch when science 
 was at last to coalesce with the pantheistic 
 idea of the Greeks. If one more example 
 were needed of the scientific faculty of the 
 poetic temperament we have it here. Modern 
 as Shakespeare seems in his allusions to death 
 and the hereafter, Omar appeals still more 
 intimately to the peculiar necessities of the 
 hour. He alludes to death in the dulcet 
 voice of poetic suggestion. Poe, in The 
 Conquering Worm, and some other pages, 
 
 104
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 speaks of the fate of mankind with merciless 
 ; realism, but the Persian poet is always gentle 
 as well as strong, while in his meekness there 
 is nothing humiliating. A philosophical and 
 poetic resignation, which is never marred by 
 an affectation of mental suffering, is his chief 
 characteristic. He lifts the veil of illusion, 
 he lays bare the futility of man's conceits, 
 the vanity of sentimental ideals, the absurdity 
 of earthly, ambitions, the littleness of man's 
 life, the nothingness of everything sentient. 
 In his time he announced, not the effort of 
 modern science, but its effect. This precon- 
 ception of Destiny did not originate with a 
 metaphysical Greek, nor a learned Italian, 
 but a humble Persian, ignorant of academical 
 systems and schools of philosophical culture. 
 Philosophy with Francis Bacon has not ac- 
 complished so much, nor has science with 
 Goethe, nor pessimism with Schopenhauer, 
 nor the latest sociology with Nietzsche. 
 
 Omar gives us the thought and the feeling 
 without the consciousness of artistic effort* 
 
 105
 
 Omar and Immortality 
 
 and he prepares the educated mind for the 
 scientific ordeal by a soothing process ; he 
 prepares the lethal chamber by ethers of 
 perfume and nepenthe. We sail with him 
 along the borders of a Styx where the poppy 
 and the pomegranate grow together in a 
 country dotted with the laurel and the 
 cypress, symbols of glory and of grief The 
 great prophets were characterised by indigna- 
 tion and melancholy ; Omar is characterised 
 by pity and resignation. In the sanctuary of 
 the world's heart there is an altar where the 
 flame of pity shimmers eternally ; a lamp is 
 held before the feet of the multitudes that 
 pass from the shore of Time into the Ever- 
 lasting. 
 
 1 06
 
 EMERSON AND UNITARIANISM
 
 EMERSON AND UNITARIANISM 
 
 UNITARIANISM has in its composition 
 some of the elements of Episcopah'an- 
 ism with much of New England Puritanism, 
 It would be impossible to name another 
 system of religion with so much intellect and 
 so little heart. The difference between the 
 virtues of Unitarianism and the vitality of 
 Catholicism is the difference between intellect 
 and ardour. The generosity which springs 
 from the intellect is always more or less 
 conventional. Acts are weighed, deeds are 
 balanced, one against the other, emotions 
 are held in check, something formal is placed 
 against the out-pourings of the affections. 
 There is nothing that so belittles a thinker 
 as to say : " He is all intellect." A man who 
 is all intellect must in the nature of things 
 take a wrong view of life. New England 
 
 109
 
 Emerson and Unitarianism 
 
 poets and thinkers have all received rude 
 knocks from the stumbling-block of intel- 
 lectuality. There was developed in them — 
 partly from climatic conditions, partly from 
 hereditary influence — much nerve and bone, 
 but little blood. James Russell Lowell and 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most robust 
 and genial; but in spite of their unconven- 
 tional sayings they were still in the trammels 
 of conventional thought. Unitarianism has 
 had considerable local influence, but it can 
 never become a widely active force. The 
 vital necessity everywhere lies in the heart 
 and not in the head. The phenomenal 
 success of General Booth's army proves once 
 more how superior living forces are to the 
 conventions of the intellect. For the leading 
 trait of the Salvation Army is the social 
 trait, from which spring all those natural and 
 needful impulses : comradeship, love, friend- 
 ship, and the like. 
 
 Unitarianism is sophisticated Puritanism. 
 The Puritans lived above the body, the 
 
 no
 
 Emerson and Unitarianism 
 
 Unitarians live above the heart. Emerson 
 ■* -Showed his limitations not by what he said, 
 but by what he left unsaid. Freethinker as 
 Emerson was, he never succeeded in freeing 
 himself from certain Northern prejudices. 
 The Bostonian intellect came at last to 
 resemble a hot-house where all the fruits 
 and flowers are cultivated save those from 
 the South. As the climate lacks sunshine, 
 the intellect lacks warmth. To appreciate 
 Emerson properly is to define the real 
 spirit of Unitarianism. He requires to be 
 studied and accepted on a plane which is 
 several degrees above the human or uni- 
 versal plane. The explanation of Emerson's 
 optimism lies in his intellectual aloofness, 
 his mental indifference to things beneath 
 the plane on which he lived. The great 
 thinker was not well acquainted with the 
 world and the people in it. He saw people 
 and things as through a telescope, but he 
 never walked in the "valley of the shadow." 
 Real life he did not know, and he was too 
 
 III
 
 Emerson and Unitarianism 
 
 honest to deal with what was foreign to his 
 nature. 
 
 The Sage of Concord was incapable of 
 falling in love as a Goethe or a Schopen- 
 hauer would fall in love. His was the 
 intellectual kind that lies above impulse 
 and passion. For this reason he makes 
 friendship superior to love in his Essays. 
 And he was probably right in so far as 
 friendship gives more unalloyed and pro- 
 longed satisfaction ; but had Emerson been 
 able to write a book like the Sor^rows of 
 Werther, that extra power would have given 
 him that extra touch which was needed to 
 make him the greatest essayist the world has 
 known. His essays are like a plot of ground 
 sown with lilies and other white flowers, but 
 without perfume. A few of Omar's perennial 
 roses, and a little of his wine, would have 
 given colour and fragrance to the garden and 
 some passion to his prose. 
 
 When Carlyle took Emerson through the 
 slums of London to prove that society was 
 
 112
 
 Emerson and Unitarlanism 
 
 rotten to the core, Emerson, by his answer 
 that all these poor people were simply ful- 
 filling their mission in this world, and that 
 everything was going on as it should, proved 
 himself an optimistic dreamer. Carlyle, in 
 spite of his dyspepsia and his chronic melan- 
 choly, was on the positive side, the side of 
 action ; Emerson was on the negative side, 
 the side of theory. Carlyle was moved by a 
 Celtic passion, which was the keynote of his 
 power and his influence. If the Optimists 
 show strength, patience, and an unruffled 
 demeanour, Us grands melancoliques, as 
 Scherer calls them, have force, fervour, and 
 emotional passion to give them universal 
 influence. Carlyle's work stands as a warn- 
 ing and a prophecy. Emerson is a mixture 
 of vague transcendentalism and shrewd 
 common sense. He passes beyond the 
 practical and the peremptory into the region 
 of the super-ethical. While Carlyle speaks to 
 the heart and conscience, Emerson appeals 
 to the mind and the intellect ^ and while 
 H 113
 
 Emerson and Unitarianism 
 
 intellectual power may fascinate, of itself it 
 never satisfies, being a kind of radiance which 
 gives no warmth. Carlyle speaks from the 
 soul, from man to man ; and as the soul is 
 ever a greater magnet than the mind, his 
 power in the world will ever exceed that of 
 Emerson. The Sage of Concord appealed 
 more to a group of minds, limited to certain 
 physical and metaphysical conditions, such 
 as the Unitarian element in American 
 thought. 
 
 114
 
 THEATRICAL AUDIENCES
 
 THEATRICAL AUDIENCES 
 
 NO true lover of theplayhouse ever ignores 
 the size, the quality, and the condition 
 of the audience. To understand the audience 
 you must bear in mind the significance of 
 the season and the function of the day. 
 Indeed, the most interesting thing connected 
 with a theatre is the people who witness the 
 plays ; for a theatre is a veritable battle-field 
 of conflicting emotions, opinions, and senti- 
 ments. The playwright who knows his 
 business attacks the public by the antithesis 
 of tears and laughter; by surprises, feints, 
 and make-believes, by flank movements and 
 witty assaults, by forced situations, as well 
 as by natural ones. On this battle-field tears 
 mean conditional surrender, but in un- 
 restrained laughter the audience surrenders 
 unconditionally. 
 
 117
 
 Theatrical Audiences 
 
 An author concocts a play, and an actor 
 conceives a role. A plan is imagined, de- 
 veloped, and carried out, but the onlookers 
 sit and lay no plans ; they listen and appro- 
 priate. It is their function to sympathise or 
 remain neutral, to receive a shock from the 
 human battery on the stage at a given 
 moment, or to remain passive when the shock 
 is supposed to occur. Everything in a theatre 
 is illusive, except the audience. 
 
 The test of a play, as literature, lies in the 
 reading of it ; the test of an audience lies in 
 its behaviour. The difference between the 
 play and the listeners lies in this : the first is 
 a patchwork of imaginary plot and passion ; 
 the second is composed of a thousand living, 
 personal entities, whose laughter means real 
 fun and whose tears mean real emotion. 
 But the plot — which is the movement — 
 means the tricks and devices of stage-craft ; 
 the plot requires the actor, the soul of the 
 play means study and meditation. When 
 Hamlet declaims the soliloquy he talks pure 
 
 ii8
 
 Theatrical Audiences 
 
 literature and not drama ; but when the actor 
 pours poison into the King's ear he is playing 
 an illusive trick on the people in the stalls. 
 The soliloquy is just as great when read 
 in your own sitting-room. This is why the 
 secret of the play's worth lies in its sugges- 
 tive power. All else is superficial and in- 
 cidental. For the most part audiences 
 behave as if the dramatic tricks were the 
 realities, and the literature of a play its 
 stuffing — as if the nourishment were not 
 in the meat but in the onions and the 
 bread-crumbs. 
 
 Much depends on the size of the audi- 
 torium and the quality of the play, but as 
 a rule the brains of an audience are in the 
 stalls, the stomach in the pit, and the heart 
 in the gallery. The balcony is the most 
 neutral part of the house ; the inexperienced 
 and the respectable provincial sit here by 
 preference. The playhouse is a social 
 crucible where people mingle without being 
 mixed. Smiles and laughter are here the 
 
 119
 
 Theatrical Audiences 
 
 signs and the sounds by which the student 
 of human nature may perceive the social 
 grades that exist between the stalls, the 
 dress-circle, the balcony, and the gallery. 
 Below sit the society sphinxes, who stare at 
 the stage in vapid serenity, but never laugh 
 — it is their province. The laughter upstairs 
 is always somewhat hoarse and horsy. The 
 hilarity is often accompanied by wheezy 
 coughing, aggravated by hysterical contagion 
 and bad air. Mirth amongst the people is 
 torrential. Indeed, a theatre is a cauldron 
 of emotional witch-broth ; the things that 
 are done pertain to magic. The old actors 
 appear youthful, the callous sentimental, 
 the stupid witty, the plain beautiful, and the 
 commonplace romantic. It is the world of 
 illusion, where an art or a scene may reflect 
 a magic ray of reality in a sphere as vast 
 as imagination and as potent as life and love, 
 but to the actors themselves there is no 
 mystery. It is the playgoer who has entered 
 the region of artifice, the realm of light and 
 
 1 20
 
 Theatrical Audiences 
 
 shade, the abode of fancy and fascination, 
 where enigma, mystery, and emotion are one, 
 and where the problems of life revolve 
 in a kaleidoscopic world of romance and 
 realism. A theatre is a hot-bed of paradox. 
 As the theatrical world has its seasons and 
 days, so there are special theatres for special 
 classes. A playhouse is like a human entity ; 
 every theatre has its soul ; each has its own 
 form, colour, and influence. Theatrical 
 superstition springs from an ignorance of the 
 psychological laws which rule here as else- 
 where. It is not then merely in the physical 
 formation of a theatre that the secret lies, 
 but in its personal social attraction. Attrac- 
 tion or repulsion, all depends upon a unity 
 of material and mystical law. The material 
 depends upon the structural form, the mysti- 
 cal on a combination of subtle moods and 
 influences too illusive to be grasped by any 
 save those who feel them without being able 
 to explain them. So subtle are the influences 
 which govern here that certain theatres may 
 
 121
 
 Theatrical Audiences 
 
 be likened to the planets : they have their 
 seasons of ascendency. They rise above the 
 social horizon, increase in brightness, then 
 grow dim, and sink just beneath the realm of 
 royalty and fashion, perhaps to rise again into 
 brilliance and favour after a long period of 
 obscurity. 
 
 There are three kinds of audiences which 
 symbolise contemporary social states and in- 
 fluences. Mr Pinero presents the everyday 
 fact in a polished frame, with a gold leaf of 
 sentiment well laid on in the proper places ; 
 Ibsen gives the realities condensed, he 
 presents them without gilt and without 
 glamour ; Maeterlinck presents a picture 
 with a rugged frame, in which is seen the 
 romance of reality. Mr Pinero's romance 
 is instantly assimilated by the audience ; 
 Ibsen's realities offend the sentimental and 
 the romantic; while Maeterlinck's audience 
 forms two distinct parts — the one senti- 
 mental, the other poetic. It is not difficult 
 to sum up the constitution of a Pinero 
 
 122
 
 Theatrical Audiences 
 
 audience, and an Ibsen house may be judged 
 after a half-hour's scrutiny; but a Maeter- 
 linck audience is never quite what it seems. 
 The listeners form a complex and contra- 
 dictory mass. On these occasions the gallery 
 presents the most interesting study. There 
 are no oranges, apples, and nuts here now, 
 no horsy laughter, no passing of stale beer. 
 The place has been metamorphosed into the 
 precincts of a temple whose god is being wor- 
 shipped in an unknown tongue ; for most of 
 the ladies have the cachet of refinement, but 
 they have left their critical faculties at home. 
 These refined faces, with spectacled eyes, 
 peer at the stage- pictures and are impressed 
 by something they cannot define. They are 
 moved by something they cannot critically 
 explain ; for they are witnessing a play the 
 words of which are like a foreign language. 
 The play has become like a tableau vivant ; 
 they are judging the whole thing in the light 
 of the mis-en-scene, the love scenes, and the 
 gestures. The art and the poetry of the play 
 
 1:^3
 
 Theatrical Audiences 
 
 they have missed. When we get to the 
 stalls the element of paradox is still more 
 marked. The stockbroker is here with his 
 fashionable companion. Every one is here ; 
 there are too many people here. Every 
 critical person is, so to speak, sitting on pins. 
 Every one is thinking of what the others will 
 think. The man who has read the play at 
 home, in peace and silence, feels he has done 
 wrong in coming, and hopes there will be no 
 contre-temps during the performance. He 
 begins to wish himself well out of the house, 
 but the fascination of the human holds him ; 
 for, curious in the human chemistry of 
 theatrical composition, he is here to make 
 comparative notes. He waits, and wonders, 
 and listens. He has a vague feeling of 
 approachingcalamity — some bunglingservant 
 will let the priceless vase fall, and the art, 
 the form, the myrrh, and the mystery will all 
 vanish together. Still, his real business is 
 with the audience, and if the vase should fall 
 his eyes will not be on the stage, but on the 
 
 124
 
 Theatrical Audiences 
 
 audience. For the theatre itself is the touch- 
 stone of contemporary moods and emotions, 
 poetic aspirations, and social ambitions. 
 The leading religious sects, all political 
 parties, meet in the playhouse. A music-hall 
 is a barometer for political storms ; a theatre 
 is a thermometer for social moods. 
 
 125
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE MUSIC-HALL 
 
 fe.
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE MUSIC-HALL 
 
 HOW vast and overpowering is the influ- 
 ence of the modern music-hall ! What 
 a world it represents ! For the variety hall 
 is now the pastime most dear to the hearts 
 of the public. What the Colosseum was to 
 Rome the music-hall is to London, but with- 
 out the rugged and masculine character of 
 the Roman institution. 
 
 Seated in a comfortable Hall, we can well 
 imagine ourselves floating down the stream 
 of life, without oars or rudder, compass or 
 captain, in a sort of Flying Dutchman of 
 destiny which will land us somewhere, some- 
 how, on the golden banks of a world of bliss 
 from whose enchanted shores — like Tenny- 
 son's Lotus Eaters — we shall return no more. 
 Melodious languor symbolises the type. The 
 favourites are the songs that might have been 
 I 129
 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hall 
 
 composed in a drunken dream, to be sung in 
 a maudlin reverie — music expressing the lan- 
 guid lilt of the latter-day disposition, by turns 
 supine and cynical, sentimental and obtuse. 
 Swayed to and fro by variety and sensation, 
 the music-hall audience lolls in nonchalant 
 security, heedless of the duties and the calls 
 of the morrow ; for the Hall is the paradise 
 of the absent-minded. To a student of 
 human nature everything here is curious, 
 instructive, fateful. Infinitely so is the 
 paradox of seeming refinement and callous 
 vulgarity. Amazing is the fusion of the 
 cynical with the sentimental. The close ob- 
 server soon discovers that there is something 
 else to be heard here besides old-fashioned 
 humour and innocent sentiment. Sharp as 
 a serpent's tooth is the sarcasm, corroding as 
 the contents of a vial of vitriol is the satire 
 which follows the singing of " The Lost 
 Chord," or " Queen of the Earth." A popu- 
 lar comedian appears and carries the people 
 along in the groove of his trenchant sallies; 
 
 130
 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hall 
 
 and with a kind of democratic symbolism he 
 -evolves from a tired and half-blase people 
 a spirit of reckless and rollicking diablerie 
 which astonishes foreigners who are just 
 being initiated in this kind of amusement. 
 The actor is typifying an able-bodied and 
 willing pauper, and the audience instantly 
 appreciate the mordant wit of the words, the 
 inimitable expression, and the attitude. 
 
 The music-hall as it exists to-day, is the 
 natural pendant of the race-course. It is the 
 synthesis of the customs, habits, and thought 
 of an age of sentiment without sense, amuse- 
 ment without discrimination. The music- 
 hall is the national lounge for millions of 
 people who are tired of devising means to 
 avoid work. For tired brains require light 
 and attenuated stimulants. A little at a time, 
 and often, with unceasing variety. 
 
 In vain may we search the history of 
 nations for a parallel to the "frenzied 
 frivolity" of the present age. For, what 
 renders the music-hall so potent and popular 
 
 131
 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hail 
 
 is the fact that in it the sensations of the fox 
 and tame-deer hunt, and the blatant emotions 
 of the race-course, are revived under new and 
 ever varying conditions. It is sport set to 
 maudlin music — for there is no denying the 
 glaring fact that the London music-hall, even 
 at its best, is plebeian. It represents the 
 humour and the lolling licence of a sordid 
 democracy fringed about and set off by the 
 fashion and the glamour of the titled and 
 the rich ; and the circumstances of society 
 leaders appearing on its boards serves but 
 to emphasise the sordidness of its surround- 
 ings. Here the old and dying sensations 
 are revived nightly with all the artifice and 
 electrical "vim" that modern ingenuity can 
 devise. Nothing is forgotten. Even tears 
 have a regular place in each performance ; a 
 short space is set apart for the lachrymal, 
 just as in certain tobacco shops a divan is set 
 apart where the opium-smoker may doze and 
 dream without let or hindrance. The smok- 
 ing of bad tobacco is general, and the 
 
 132
 
 The Spirit of the Muslc-Hall 
 
 drinking of stale beer de rigueiir. Reminis- 
 cences of the old and classical days are 
 evoked now and then, such as scenes from 
 Dickens — ^just enough to permit the sexa- 
 genarian in the stalls to realise how far he 
 has got from real sentiment, and how irre- 
 parably he is glued to the cynical present. 
 
 The penchant for imitation is one of 
 the most marked features of the London 
 music-hall. These imitations are attempts 
 at dramatic and musical art. But the most 
 distinct feature of the English music-hall 
 is the spirit of mockery displayed in the 
 character songs by the leading "artistes." 
 Herein it resembles the Parisian music-hall. 
 But the Halls of Paris are of two distinct 
 kinds : those of Montmartre represent the 
 weirdly decadent ; those of the inner boule- 
 vards, the humorous and the sentimental. 
 A sort of intellectual danse macabre is in- 
 dulged in by the typical wits of Montmartre. 
 Death is mimicked in direful attitudes, and 
 evoked by vertiginous efforts of the imagina- 
 
 133
 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hall 
 
 tion. In Paris the old century and the old 
 era were accompanied to the limbo of dead 
 things by a ronde infernale in which the 
 dominant spirit was pitiless cynicism. The 
 actors here acted their parts with the full 
 consciousness of the meaning of every word 
 and gesture. They knew the import of 
 every phrase, every wink of the eye, every 
 note of the weird accompaniment. The 
 morbid picture was artfully designed and 
 cunningly executed, and the general effect 
 was one that reduced the listeners to a full 
 realisation of the negation of all the systems, 
 schools, and ambitions of the modern world. 
 The cabarets of Montmartre, in the heyday 
 of success, represented the death's head at 
 the last banquet of the nineteenth century. 
 Like a great spot on the sun the cabaret 
 was there to remind France — and the whole 
 world with her — that nothing is perfect yet, 
 and that nations have not learnt to forget the 
 grim realities of existence. 
 
 The spirit that moves the music-hall 
 
 134
 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hall 
 
 actors of London is not one of wilful and 
 cunningly devised cynicism. There is some- 
 thing impromptu about the words and the 
 attitudes of the artistes. At Montmartre 
 it requires artistic perception, penetration, 
 and a cosmopolitan experience to appreciate 
 what one sees and hears. In London the 
 art is popular. It is English as well as 
 cockney. It stands for the whole of Britain ; 
 it is representative of a whole race. The 
 music-hall synchronises the soul of London. 
 In the absence of a national theatre we have 
 this institution which makes Shakespeare an 
 impossibility without a splendid mise-en-scene, 
 and which reduces a play by Mr Pinero to 
 the minimum of success unless it contains at 
 least one scene a la Gay Lord Quex. For, 
 after all is said and done, it is not the beauty 
 of Shakespeare's words nor the wisdom of 
 his aphorisms that attract the people. The 
 masses are enticed by the splendour of the 
 scenes and the costumes. Amusement is 
 sought, and when a young man has been to 
 
 135
 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hail 
 
 a music-hall two or three times during the 
 week, he selects a theatre which he thinks 
 will afford him one evening's diversion. If 
 Julius CcBsar is being played, he will see that 
 once for the sake of the murder scene ; if it 
 be A Midsummer Night's Dream, he will 
 attend once for the sake of the music ; if it 
 is Henry the Eighth, once for the sake of 
 the pageantry ; and so on throughout the 
 Shakespearian repertoire. Strictly speaking, 
 there is no Shakespeare public in London. 
 Neither is there a Pinero public. But there 
 is a Gay Lord Quex public, and there will 
 continue to be until the tower of Westminster 
 falls in a universal pandemonium. 
 
 The music-halls of Paris are not so nation- 
 ally representative as those of London. In 
 Paris the variety halls are frequented by a 
 class of people who live on or near the 
 boulevards — habitues of the cafes and the 
 brasseries, people without fixed homes, 
 without regular occupation. In London 
 all classes frequent the music-hall, which 
 
 136
 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hall 
 
 now constitutes a permanent and national 
 *4node of diversion, as much a part of the 
 lives of the people as attending mass used to 
 be before the Reformation. The music-hall 
 is a law unto itself; it exists by itself and 
 for itself; but it must not be supposed that 
 it has a mission in any sense or degree. The 
 people who flock to it, night after night, are 
 people who are incapable of any serious 
 thought during the day, who have not worked 
 particularly hard, and who wish to be amused 
 in the most neutral manner possible in the 
 evening. For, in spite of appearances, the 
 Hall is neutral — in art, in thought, in senti- 
 ment, in religion, in everything. On occa- 
 sion it appears to possess character ; but 
 this is only when it is seized with the 
 epilepsy of politics. At such times its 
 spasms of patriotic indignation constitute 
 a real danger to the State. Even now a 
 good many thinking people judge the temper 
 of the nation by the temper of the music- 
 hall ; for in this hypnotic atmosphere cool, 
 
 137
 
 The Spirit of the Music-Hall 
 
 clear reasoning is impossible. The typical 
 patrons of the Halls, who hail the name of 
 the Prime Minister one evening, would, on 
 the next, acclaim his rival with equal gusto 
 were his rival to come into power. 
 
 Like the public-house, the music-hall is a 
 huge and ugly growth, beyond the art of the 
 reformer or the wit of the politician. It is 
 the home of the " neutral " of every class 
 and creed, the unconscious enemy of serious 
 art, serious sentiment, and above all, of the 
 serious drama. England will have it as long 
 as she has the public-house; that long and 
 no longer ; but the thought that inspires 
 sadness is the one that, by the time the 
 public-house gives place to something better, 
 London may have sunk to the level of a 
 second-class caravansary for the American 
 tourist, who will see in the helpless inhabit- 
 ants of the metropolis a curious and in- 
 structive remnant of a once noble and 
 mighty people. 
 
 138
 
 THE ABBE JOSEPH ROUX
 
 THE ABBE JOSEPH ROUX 
 
 Full well we feel, full well we know, 
 Great sorrows spring from little deeds. 
 Great happiness from some great woe ; 
 The truth humanity most needs 
 Affliction's fires can best bestow. 
 
 nr^ALENT is the faculty of acquiring 
 ■^ knowledge by the cultivation of cer- 
 tain gifts, such as singing, acting, story-tell- 
 ing, picture-making, and the like, which may 
 be moulded and modelled after almost any 
 fashion — time, patience, imitation, and 
 memory being the principal factors in its 
 development. 
 
 Genius may be roughly classed as of two 
 kinds — that which is subtile and delicate, 
 the inspiration of which is like an electric 
 current that conducts thought to the very 
 core of things, and that which is powerful 
 and methodical, which often mistakes mere 
 facility for inspiration. 
 
 141
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roiix 
 
 Original thought and profound feeh'ng 
 constitute a union of the intellectual and 
 emotional faculties which we may term per- 
 sonality. Without this blending of brain 
 and nerve we have only the imitator, who 
 mistakes the prevailing modes of psycho- 
 logical rhetoric for the highest and the 
 deepest conceptions of united mental and 
 moral attributes. 
 
 Clever repartee, some wordly experience, 
 an apt mode of expression, sympathy, and 
 humour, diluted to cover the susceptibilities 
 of a large portion of humanity who judge 
 the competent by the laws which govern 
 their own limited capacity to know and to 
 feel — these things, with much more of equi- 
 valent import, are what cause the master of 
 mere words to be mistaken for the profound 
 thinker and creative artist. 
 
 From the earliest times down to the 
 present the individual environment has 
 mystified the most experienced psycholo- 
 gists. The highest intelligence is rarely 
 
 142
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 displayed under a garb of physical attrac- 
 Jtjon. Nature spreads before us an illusive 
 show which deceives all who are not close 
 observers of her laws. Compare the shrill 
 cry and brilliant plumage of the parrot and 
 the peacock with the plain colours and 
 pleasant song of the lark and the nightin- 
 gale ; the brightest flowers are commonly 
 the least fragrant, and placid waters have 
 the profoundest depths. These examples 
 might be multiplied without limit, humanity 
 itself presenting the most interesting and 
 instructive. 
 
 The poet is concealed under seeming im- 
 perfections, and is looked upon with mingled 
 feelings of doubt and distrust, and the world 
 stares in silent wonder when Nature's Titan 
 walks forth clothed in the habiliments of 
 his own creations. 
 
 To live a life of self-abnegation and soli- 
 tude, in a sphere of thought and labour far 
 beneath one's real self, and yet remain 
 morally healthy and intellectually vigorous, 
 
 143
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 is an ordeal which only the best intellects 
 can survive. The Abbe Joseph Roux is one 
 of these. This humble parish priest, living 
 a life of isolation, studied first his own 
 heart, the sooner to arrive at a knowledge 
 of that outer world which he had only 
 known in history and fabled romances. 
 
 There is no science, spiritual or material, 
 which can suddenly develop an accomplished 
 and practical thinker. Good taste, noble 
 aims, judgment, patience, and, above all, 
 innate culture are necessary to temper the 
 flow of intuitive thought which might other- 
 wise swamp the intellect in poetic illusions 
 of various kinds. 
 
 In the Abbe Roux's Meditations what 
 strikes the reader most is their universality 
 of idea and application. Dryden's maxim 
 that, " Genius must be born and never can 
 be taught," is quite a propos here, and al- 
 though Joseph Roux received a classical 
 education, it is safe to say that for the most 
 part it served, not to develop, but to restrain 
 
 144
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 the natural progress of his own temperament. 
 sJ^alent, which imitates and adapts from 
 models, must have these examples, but the 
 poet-philosopher, the life-artist, born with 
 understanding to analyse the mysteries of 
 head and heart, who is gifted with that free- 
 dom of soul and speech which characterised 
 the immortals of old, must be untrammelled 
 by the formulas of critics, or fear of con- 
 ventional censors. Nevertheless, the works 
 of the Abbe Roux are sufficiently original, 
 in spite of his rigid school training, to rank 
 him among the great maximists of the 
 world. 
 
 Nothing impresses us more than to read 
 thoughts closely akin to our own secret 
 sentiments expressed by a stranger and a 
 foreigner in a far-off country, who lives and 
 moves in a social and political atmosphere 
 wholly unlike our own. We marvel at the 
 exhibition of a gift that can make the cul- 
 tured of all nations feel that they are reading 
 the sentiments of one of their own kind in 
 K 145
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 spirit and in substance. We feel, when we 
 read the maxims, word-pictures, and intimate 
 thoughts of a writer hke this, that we have 
 known him long and understand him well, 
 that we have suffered his afflictions, drunk 
 from the same cup of bitterness, eaten the 
 same bread of disappointment, lived his 
 seclusion, waited like him in silence, and at 
 last entered with him into fame. 
 
 It was Flaubert who said that, " Every 
 work deserves condemnation in which the 
 author can be divined " ; but, as M. Marieton 
 says, " I prefer to think with M. Paul Bourget, 
 that no poetical work can be necessary to 
 another soul if it has not first been necessary 
 to our own." Nothing is truer than that we 
 seek the acquaintance of an author in his 
 works, in order to discover what manner of 
 man he is, and if we fail to discover some- 
 thing which we can apply directly to our life- 
 experiences, our interest in the author cools 
 and diminishes. As a proof of this, I may 
 say that we all like those authors best whom 
 
 146
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 we most clearly understand, for without this 
 understanding there can be no sympathy, 
 and without sympathy no appreciation. 
 The good that a writer may do us depends 
 on the kind of influence his thoughts and 
 opinions may have on our minds and actions, 
 and no amount of sermonising will move us 
 if our sympathies are not aroused toward the 
 author. And in this regard the thoughts of 
 the Abbe Roux have the most direct bear- 
 ing on the inner lives of thousands who 
 deem themselves intellectually and morally 
 isolated by the force of just such peculiar 
 circumstances and conditions as are de- 
 scribed in these unique volumes. 
 
 Isolated from men of thought and culture, 
 his spirit was almost broken by a rude yoke 
 of psychological restraint. For years he was 
 familiar with solitude and melancholy, those 
 mighty and inexorable elements which make 
 a hot-house of the soul, where flowers and 
 fruits are forced without regard to time or 
 season. Poet, priest, philosopher, some of 
 
 147
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 his pages border on paradox, while others 
 might be misconstrued by the surface reader 
 into negative pessimism. 
 
 We approach great and incomprehensible 
 minds through their foibles and necessities, 
 as we gaze at the sun through a piece of 
 smoked glass without being dazzled; and in 
 these aphorisms we recognise the imprint of 
 that seal, antique and classical, which touches 
 a common cord in the hearts of intimate 
 humanity of whatever creed or opinion. 
 This is the spirit which at last seeks expres- 
 sion in all forms of Nature, without which 
 nothing beautiful can exist — it is autumn 
 in the seasons, it is the minor mode in 
 music, in the mind it is melancholy, in 
 philosophy practical pessimism. In art and 
 literature it gives that indescribable grace 
 of pose and pathos so vividly depicted by 
 the Athenians. It was the unity of poetic 
 melancholy with physical beauty that per- 
 fected and immortalised the Greek concep- 
 tion of art. 
 
 148
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 I cannot make more than a passing 
 Sjibtice here of a peculiar prejudice, not at 
 all at variance with the moral and spiritual 
 standard of Joseph Roux's early theological 
 training and convictions, and although this 
 minor fault does not affect him as a poet, 
 it does to a limited extent taint some of his t- 
 judgments as a philosopher and critic. But 
 then the poet is greater than the philosopher, 
 and it is to the poet that I allude principally 
 in these remarks ; and in spite of this char- 
 acteristic bias, the human heart-throbs of 
 the artist render his thoughts and emotions 
 palpably and permanently intimate to the 
 student of the higher forms of literature. 
 More than this, his opinions are graced by 
 a large-hearted charity which at once intro- 
 duces us to the poet-priest acquainted with 
 the vanities and follies of the world — a man 
 of silence and solitude, too far removed from 
 self-interest to fear public opinion, and too 
 conscientious to favour it. 
 
 "The heart of man is a lyre of seven 
 
 149
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 chords ; six chords for sadness, a single 
 chord for joy which rather vibrates." This 
 is the dominant tone of Joseph Roux's life 
 and writings, but it is only a repetition of 
 what all profound minds have passed 
 through whose thought and example have 
 been effective and durable. It must not be 
 supposed, however, that these two volumes 
 of Meditations are filled with the bitterness 
 of disappointed genius. There are chapters 
 given to joy and fortune, as well as to love, 
 friendship, and friends, each subject being 
 handled with rare deliberation and judgment. 
 With what gentle vigour he says : " The 
 difference between a cultured and an 
 uncultured man is not greater than the 
 difference between a king and a beggar"; 
 as if to remind the reader that his life has 
 been sacrificed on the altar of the peasants 
 among whom he has lived and preached 
 so long, like an intellectual giant among 
 pigmies. With a single stroke he tells 
 what is only to be learned by a combined 
 
 150
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 experience of travel and human nature, and 
 > perhaps this is the only instance where so 
 much actual wisdom has been displayed 
 within limits at once so isolated and con- 
 tracted. 
 
 Victor Hugo might have written the 
 following: "Those who agitate much, and 
 those who reflect much, contract an ex- 
 perience of men and things which makes 
 them understand each other by the least 
 word or sign." There is a deep analytical 
 insight which characterises these aphorisms, 
 unaccountable on any other hypothesis than 
 that of intuition. But there is no such 
 thing as inspiration superior to the creative 
 faculty of the individual ; and it must not 
 be forgotten that Joseph Roux is before 
 everything a man of meditation and thought, 
 whose whole life may be likened to an 
 iEolian harp fixed in the turret of a 
 deserted castle, so finely strung that the 
 faintest breeze awakens a pensive and 
 responsive tone. 
 
 151
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 Nothing renders a man of power so 
 self-conscious as this element of isolation. 
 Solitude and patience are two things that 
 give power and polish to thought Medi- 
 tation is the secret of refined and durable 
 intelligence, without which no prophet ever 
 preached, without which the passions and 
 sentiments of poetry are only a passing 
 impulsion, composed by the dilettante in 
 a day, to be read and assimilated by the 
 novice in an hour. The presence of medi- 
 tation gives grace to solitude and courage 
 to patience ; it acts like an arbiter between 
 the personal power and the reason, which 
 dominate the brain, and the egoistic pleasures, 
 which dominate the heart. Study is agita- 
 tion, movement, like the juice of the grape 
 in fermentation ; but meditation is like the 
 pure wine which sharpens the wit and gives 
 power to the wings of genius. Medita- 
 tion contemplates the past, appropriates the 
 present, and anticipates the future. 
 
 The Abbe Roux encountered a spirit of 
 
 152
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 jealousy and envy even in his obscure 
 '.parish, for he says : " The fate of a man of 
 talent is to be pitied. His mediocre and 
 jealous brethren cry out like the brothers of 
 Joseph : ' How are you to become greater ? 
 Ought we to serve and submit?'" Jealous 
 friends are more to be feared than rivals in 
 love, for in this kind of jealousy one has 
 to deal with a tyranny constantly mani- 
 fested by a number of persons in different 
 places. 
 
 If there is one sign of genius more positive 
 than another it is the absolute conviction of 
 personal originality and power — a conviction 
 which is never weakened by public denial 
 or individual jealousy. It is this element in 
 genius that renders it a perpetual mystery to 
 the multitude. This lonely man was gifted 
 from the first with the " patience of genius " 
 — a phrase often used, but little understood. 
 It is the consciousness of superiority and final 
 triumph, without which the mind would have 
 no incentive to think, the hands no incentive 
 
 153
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 to work, the heart no solace for suffering. 
 This personal acquaintance with one's own 
 inherent worth is one of the most curious 
 as well as instructive features connected with 
 the lives of original thinkers. It lends a 
 strange fascination to the solitude they are 
 compelled to keep, and the communion they 
 constantly maintain with the spontaneous 
 harmonies of Nature is doubly consoling on 
 this account. This reserve force was one of 
 the attributes which caused the ancients to 
 look upon their heroes as divine. 
 
 The Abbe Roux is interested only in 
 reality, which means the ideal, and not in 
 the material, which means disappointment, 
 for he says : " When I return from the 
 country of men, I carry back nothing but 
 illusions and disillusions." To use the 
 words of another French writer, " His spirit 
 is ill, but his heart is sound." These things 
 remind me that there is a close connection 
 between the poet who has learned what 
 illusion means, and the pessimist who has 
 
 154
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 little faith in the progressive goodness ot 
 jhumanity here below. Poet, pagan, pessimist, 
 are three terms which strike the senses with 
 a singular unity of design and metaphor. 
 How difficult it is to separate them ! If 
 we judge poets by the standard which our 
 brilliant maximist sets up, there will not be 
 many left who can clear the barriers of 
 paganism, and when we admit this, there is 
 nothing left but to admit pessimism in some 
 form. It is impossible to deal with poetry 
 in its broadest sense without at least appear- 
 ing to follow the style and thought of panthe- 
 ism, and the more one is given to solitude 
 and meditation the more susceptible does 
 the mind become to its influence. The 
 beautiful sentiment of Schopenhauer that, 
 " Musicians speak the highest wisdom in a 
 language which they do not understand," 
 may be reversed somewhat and applied to 
 the pessimistic poets of France of all degrees 
 of merit and all stages in history. Many of 
 them, in spite of certain theological pre- 
 
 155
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 judices, have spoken and sung in accents far 
 above their evident convictions, while, on 
 the other hand, the thinkers, Hke Joseph 
 Roux, who hold with great tenacity to 
 dogmatic forms, often pass below their own 
 level of spiritual faith and appear what they 
 are not. Like Montaigne he sees, feels, 
 and meditates in one mood, and reasons in 
 another. In reading these powerful pro- 
 ductions it is sometimes necessary to separate 
 the man of feeling from the man of reason. 
 Here and there a line should be drawn be- 
 tween the moralist and the artist, and a 
 distinction made between the poet and the 
 priest. He is not all things to all minds, 
 but he is susceptible to degrees and qualifica- 
 tions of physical moods and mental condi- 
 tions, which are indeed the true birthright 
 of all creative intellects ; and were he not a 
 theologian we might expect him to show a 
 wit as keen as Voltaire, a sarcasm as pene- 
 trating as La Rochefoucauld, and a bitterness 
 as hopeless as Pascal. As it is, he reminds 
 
 156
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 one of all three, although so distinctly 
 ^applicable to the present condition of philo- 
 sophy and society. 
 
 Joseph Roux presents in a striking manner 
 the three virtues which Goethe declared all 
 should possess : Reverence for what is above 
 us, for all that is beneath us, and for all our 
 equals. It is not the individual he attacks, 
 but the system ; not the person, but the 
 practice. He condemns what he believes 
 to be false teaching, not by abusing the 
 writers whose seeming errors he hates, but 
 by a single blow, directed with great critical 
 acumen and rhetorical precision at the 
 most vital and vulnerable part of their 
 works. 
 
 The Abbe Roux's portraits of Limousin 
 peasants are like antithetical bas-reliefs hewn 
 from the native rocks of primitive humanity, 
 whose figures and faces are lit with the pale 
 humour of a sordid necessity, and whose 
 rugged character glimmers with a rude poetry 
 midway between superstition and religion. 
 
 157
 
 \'. 
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 These pages on the peasants of the country 
 parish are unlike anything in modern prose. 
 With what mystery and charm he dashes into 
 the bleak night, depicting at each step the 
 lonely hut of the village sorceress, her looks, 
 her speech, her apparel, who, lamp in hand, 
 goes out into the darkness not so much on 
 a mission of mercy as of magic. With what 
 bewitching touches he carries us over moor 
 and meadow, through field and forest, to the 
 dwelling of the sick child where a room full 
 of soil-tillers are awaiting the effect of the 
 spell which the witch-doctor has just intoned 
 over the cradle. He creates a chromatic 
 meaning in the minds of his readers by these 
 images, brought forth from the depths of 
 ignorance and misery, which make one think 
 of Rembrandt. 
 
 There are intellectual pugilists who, in 
 argument, knock one down more by the force 
 of will than by superior knowledge, but the 
 poet of Limousin is not one of these. The 
 seal of meditation and wisdom is affixed to 
 
 158
 
 The Abbe Joseph Roux 
 
 every expression of his thoughts, and every 
 paragraph bears the stamp of that patience 
 which has been his sustenance, that faith 
 which has been his companion, that inspira- 
 tion which has been his guide. 
 
 159
 
 PORTRAITS AND IMPRESSIONS 
 
 I
 
 iJ. 
 
 PORTRAITS AND IMPRESSIONS 
 
 DAVID HUME, in his essay entitled 
 " A Standard of Taste," says : " Among 
 a thousand different opinions that men may 
 have on the same subject, there is but one 
 just and true, and the only difficulty is to 
 ascertain and fix it." 
 
 I have occasion to ponder over this axiom 
 in a room where I cannot look up from my 
 writing-desk, without fixing my attention on 
 some poet, artist, musician, or philosopher. 
 I find that these portraits not only teach 
 valuable lessons in art and literature, but 
 also give a knowledge of the intimate tastes 
 and inclinations of one's friends which, I 
 believe, nothing else could afford. 
 
 The more I gaze at these portraits and 
 busts, the more interested I become in the 
 talent and the genius they represent. What 
 
 163
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 romance and illusion, stoical patience, virtue 
 and vanity issue from this ensemble. It 
 seems at times, in the glimmering of lamp- 
 light, as if the immortal procession only 
 speaks of mythological fables, too idealistic 
 to be real. The pictures are arranged 
 according to harmony of form, colour, and 
 size, so that tragedians, clergymen, and 
 comedians often fall together — a fortunate 
 circumstance, as it compels me to go beyond 
 the beaten track of individual parallels in 
 comparing human nature; and convention- 
 ality — that bane of art — has been avoided, 
 by which I might have huddled all the 
 musicians into a corner by themselves, or 
 placed the novelists together in a circle, 
 until the very walls would have groaned 
 with all the evil and envious things they 
 ever said of one another. 
 
 The majority of my visitors are attracted 
 by the elegance and simplicity displayed in a 
 portrait of Madame Recamier, while the 
 portrait of Rachel beside it is scarcely noticed. 
 
 164
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 "Grace in women," says Hazlitt, "gains the 
 affections sooner and secures them longer 
 than anything else." But it seems to me that 
 Hazlitt here means mere physical beauty, of 
 the kind which captivates the larger portion 
 of humanity, as I have just mentioned. If 
 this be so he is right, for beauty of this 
 kind is an illusion, which fascinates the 
 ordinary mind longer than anything else; 
 but it will not satisfy thoughtful people. In 
 Rachel this grace is half hidden by an air 
 of repose and severity unintelligible to the 
 casual observer. Adrienne Lecouvreur is 
 typical of emotion, Mademoiselle Mars of 
 enthusiasm, Siddons of dignity, but Rachael 
 is all this and more; and one has only to 
 compare this head with that of Madame 
 Bernhardt to note the difference between 
 the classical and the sensational in dramatic 
 art. Rachel was Grecian, while Madame 
 Bernhardt is Parisian, and in her most 
 characteristic scenes shows a power that 
 combines vehemence with impulsiveness, 
 
 165
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 wherein she gains in objective realism while 
 she loses in subjective harmony. 
 
 When Rachel first appeared romanticism 
 was at its height. It had not yet given 
 place to sensationalism in the drama. The 
 Parisians went to the theatre not only to 
 be amused but to learn. The Theatre 
 Fran^ais was the rendezvous for the 
 bourgeois and the noble, the artist and 
 the poet. Mothers accompanied their 
 daughters to witness the productions of 
 the great French dramatists, not only to 
 receive lessons in deportment and dress, 
 but to receive a moral and intellectual 
 stimulant as well. The House of Moli^re 
 was regarded as a temple of the Muses. 
 The trials and triumphs of mythical heroes 
 were here depicted with historical authority 
 and classical art, and the mind was never 
 distracted from the uniformity of the 
 ensemble by clever stage management and 
 artful monologues intended to rivet the 
 attention on a single actor or actress. In 
 
 i66
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 those days several dramatic stars were 
 jvisible on the stage at once ; and while the 
 genius of Rachel rose above everything else, 
 it did not detract from the merits of the 
 other artists. Her acting lent a brilliancy 
 to their efforts, because she possessed the 
 secret of becoming one with the character 
 she was personating, which, in turn, inspired 
 her comrades with enthusiasm. Madame 
 Bernhardt, on the contrary, aided by Sardou 
 and D'Annunzio, has evolved a new mani- 
 festation of dramatic art whereby the interest 
 in the monologue is maintained by cunning 
 manoeuvres and magnificent mise-en-scene. 
 The moment Rachael spoke she addressed the 
 characters of the play and not the audience. 
 Her facial expression, her movements, her 
 postures, had the impress of one who did 
 not pose before the public but who acted 
 her part wholly absorbed in the personality 
 of the rdle. As Cleopdtre Madame Bernhardt 
 places the actress on exhibition, to the 
 detriment of the highest interests of dramatic 
 
 167
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 unity. Her acting is a brilliant illustration 
 of the spirit of the times and the tendency 
 to become, day by day, more egoistical and 
 less impersonal, more vehement and less sug- 
 gestive, more passionate and less impressive. 
 
 » • • • • 
 
 An air of languour and heaviness is often 
 a paradoxical sign of the highest talent. 
 While the mind is absent in a land of poetic 
 creations the face wears an expression of 
 inanity. The spirit seems, for the moment, 
 to wander in regions where the emotions 
 offer the strongest attraction — it trembles in 
 doubt with Pascal, swoons in pity with 
 Dante, triumphs with the heroes of Shake- 
 speare, while the features remain immovable 
 throughout all. The portrait of Beethoven 
 has the abstraction of one obsessed ; Buffon 
 looks heavy, sleepy ; Pascal fatigued and 
 feeble. These are some of the characteris- 
 tics that distinguish genius from mere wit, 
 talent, and scholarship. On the other hand, 
 wit wears the smile on the lip and the sar- 
 
 i68
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 castic expression of the eye which distin- 
 > guish the typical Rivarol from the typical 
 Pascal. It is this spirit of bonhomie that 
 limits the beaux esprits to local influence and 
 transitory fame. Let their success in the 
 beginning be ever so great, without the 
 charm of imagination, without the flavour of 
 poetry, without a union of reason and senti- 
 ment, their names soon cease to be remem- 
 bered. Out of ten great men and women 
 we find nine wearing an expression of habi- 
 tual reserve, abstraction, and melancholy. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Every age produces men who are in exact 
 harmony with the needs of the hour. Vol- 
 taire, the mephistophelian mind of the 
 eighteenth century, lived and acted in 
 accordance with the laws which govern the 
 raison d'etre of the inscrutable mysteries of 
 human nature. There never was a more 
 perfect type of this kind. With a physiog- 
 nomy that suggests the courage of the eagle 
 and the cunning of the fox, every line of the 
 
 169
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 face may be paralleled with some form of 
 humorous fancy, some phase of polished 
 thought, some personal peculiarity, that 
 makes one think of elements and motives, 
 but not of individuals. His penetrating eye, 
 pragmatic nose, and protruding chin are an 
 index of the intellectual and sarcastic vigour 
 that ruled the foremost nation of his time. 
 Equanimity worthy of a saint added metho- 
 dical harmony to a cynical face and a philo- 
 sophical mind which turned his seeming 
 trivial disposition into the most practical and 
 serious results. His temper was balanced 
 by a mental tranquillity which was seldom 
 jeopardised by fits of passion. Nature had 
 equipped him with the accoutrements of 
 mother-wit and worldly wisdom. This im- 
 pregnable coat of mail was richly garnished 
 with golden fringes of poetic fancy, and the 
 whole, tinged with courtly intrigue, gave zest 
 to his followers while it terrified his oppo- 
 nents. His sarcasm withered without giving 
 time for decay. His pen was mightier than 
 
 170
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 any sword, for it did not make corpses of 
 his enemies, but turned them into yawning 
 mummies whose sole insignia of modern 
 existence lay in the inimitable Voltarian art 
 with which they were embalmed. 
 
 Modern history does not furnish a more 
 remarkable example of literary and political 
 discretion. Never for a moment did he lay 
 himself open to ridicule. He was one of 
 the few satirists whose sorties on the corrupt 
 legions of society left no weak spots in the 
 ramparts of his reason. His business was 
 not with the bullet and the battle-axe, but 
 with the conscience. It is generally a feeble 
 mind, backed by the instincts of the bull- 
 dog, that expresses its predilections in war- 
 like exploits ; and sarcasm has a mission of 
 mercy to perform among a stupid and de- 
 generate people by constraining them to 
 mend their ways and avert the horrors of 
 social anarchy. Thus it was that Goethe 
 ignored the wars of his time, taking no part 
 or interest in them, while the petty kings and 
 
 171
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 politicians censured him for not descending 
 from the throne of genius to dabble in the 
 miserable squabbling of rival factions and 
 personal intrigue. 
 
 Compare the efforts and events in Vol- 
 taire's life with those in the life of Bona- 
 parte ! What a picture of wit and judgment 
 versus power and glory ! Voltaire, starting 
 out amid divers vicissitudes, held his own in 
 spite of social preferment and political plot- 
 ting, gradually mounting the ladder of fame, 
 learning new lessons here, winning new 
 laurels there, until his position in the eyes 
 of the thinking world was impregnable, living 
 so long that he saw his enemies pass away 
 one by one, leaving him sitting upon an 
 intellectual throne — to the last a very king 
 of tact, humour, and vivacity. 
 
 Behold Bonaparte, the political parvenu, 
 rising from obscure regions, a mighty spirit 
 of impulse and ambition, subduing men by 
 sheer will, without the gift of foreseeing and 
 preventing reactions. He possessed ability 
 
 172
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 without discretion, tact without judgment. 
 JL-He moved men by a mental stimulus gene- 
 rated by personal magnetism. But it was 
 not the force caused by the wit and common 
 sense of Voltaire— it was the kind that begets 
 more fear than reverence, and more wonder 
 than applause. 
 
 Many of Bonaparte's victories were fol- 
 lowed by a psychological and material re- 
 action ; but Voltaire was never disturbed by 
 disputes nor frustrated by quarrelling fac- 
 tions. He sat quietly in his chair, using his 
 pen to perform what warriors and statesmen 
 could not bring about by perfidious experi- 
 ments with the patience and the purses of a 
 long-suffering nation. 
 
 • ••••* 
 
 There is a strong resemblance between the 
 portraits of Poe and Paganini. There is a 
 contempt for routine, an intense individuality 
 in these two faces which seems to say, " I 
 am in harmony with my art, at war with the 
 world." 
 
 173
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 Paganini possessed that special faculty of 
 emotional improvisation which fascinates the 
 public. This is what a certain kind of music 
 will do, and it cannot be accomplished by 
 poetry. The performances of the great 
 violinist both surprised and charmed, thus 
 adding two potent factors to the simple one 
 of art Poe appealed to the emotions through 
 the intellect. He demanded the highest 
 culture in his readers, and that element was 
 small in America in his day. 
 
 It is an error to suppose that an appre- 
 ciation of brilliant music is a sign of culture. 
 Sentiment, like emotion, is ever ready to 
 laugh or shed tears over a form of art which 
 may have its origin in passionate impulse and 
 sensuous delights. To be a great poet re- 
 quires much more than imitation, passion, 
 and imagination — it requires a philosophical 
 intuition, a musical art which lies beyond that 
 of mere tonic melody ; and it is this which 
 makes a writer like Poe an enigma to his 
 contemporaries. 
 
 174
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 There is something about brilh'ant music 
 ►wjtiich acts on the senses like the fragrance 
 of flowers and the eclat of colours ; ninety 
 intelligent men out of a hundred know its 
 value and meaning ; but with the highest 
 poetry a correct judgment is much more diffi- 
 cult and rare. The brilliant musician need 
 not use reason. Paganini's art was like 
 that of the orator — it contained an element 
 of emotional hysteria that turned sentiment 
 into tears. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Chopin was the poet, and Liszt the mecha- 
 nician among the pianists. The famous 
 Hungarian was the master of technical diffi- 
 culties, Chopin of inspiration. Unceasing 
 labour developed Liszt's talent ; the other 
 was born with a gift at once poetic and 
 artistic. 
 
 Liszt — a polished barbarian — was not 
 poetic, but furious, like the typical American 
 Indian, whom he resembled. The familiar 
 portrait of Liszt, with a large mouth, com- 
 
 175
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 pressed lips, and long, thick hair, would pass 
 anywhere for that of a Sioux chief if two 
 feathers were simply stuck in his hair and 
 a striped blanket thrown over his shoulders. 
 Not only is the face that of an Indian, but it 
 has that impress of pride, of independence, 
 and of obstinacy which belongs to the 
 character of a chief 
 
 Liszt was a musician who managed to lead 
 without being able to create, and we have 
 here a striking example of the power that 
 attracts the crowd as compared with the 
 influence of real art. What is most astonish- 
 ing is the solid patronage that such artists 
 receive from the hands of apparently intelli- 
 gent persons in centres of art like Paris, 
 Vienna, London, and Rome. Could any- 
 thing be more fatiguing than an over-con- 
 scious musician ? Think of listening to a 
 singer or a pianist who says to himself, " I 
 am unique ! " Of all the artists, a musician 
 should have the least affectation. Not only 
 was Chopin free from this weakness, but his 
 
 176
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 music was like the man — it was full of the 
 ;subtle charm of imaginative colour, poetic 
 grace, and intuitive spontaneity. 
 
 Liszt, by his eccentricity, his aplomb, his 
 advertising proclivities, kept his name before 
 the public long after the musician himself had 
 passed beyond the region of physical and 
 mental exertion ; and during the time that 
 he was becoming rich and famous by these 
 contortions in the name of art, Berlioz was 
 starving in Paris, while Wagner was reduced 
 to the necessity of writing dance music for 
 beer-halls. 
 
 Liszt's technique was perfect, and he some- 
 times played with great feeling, but he was 
 almost devoid of taste. His music had the 
 characteristics of Hungarian sentiment — it 
 was noisy, jerky, rhapsodical. He never 
 arranged an opera or an air for the piano 
 which he did not disarrange in the trans- 
 position. He was a Peter the Great among 
 pianists, a pigmy among composers. 
 
 Chopin was a musical mystic acquainted 
 M 177
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 with the science of emotional and mystical 
 harmony — the kind of harmony that makes 
 poets dream and philosophers think. He 
 had as rivals the handsome Kalkbrenner, 
 Henri Herz, the popular finger-gymnast, and 
 the young giant, Liszt, even then skilled in 
 the art of attracting le gros public by clever 
 puffs and eccentric demeanour. Chopin knew 
 that these gymnasts of the keyboard were 
 born to cater to the public, and he left them 
 to their fate, while he retired to a select circle 
 of his own, where art and inspiration were culti- 
 vated and cherished for their own qualities. 
 
 Liszt, whose artistic tours through Ger- 
 many resembled more the advance of some 
 mighty potentate than the progress of a 
 simple pianist, became accustomed to see 
 the inhabitants of certain towns quit work 
 and take a holiday on his arrival, and he 
 lived long enough to find himself neglected 
 in Germany and forgotten in France. He 
 had pampered the public with technicalities 
 instead of art, audacity in place of inspiration, 
 
 178
 
 Portraits and Impressions 
 
 power in lieu of genius. Just in propor- 
 tion as Liszt's fame was decreasing, that 
 of Chopin was increasing, until, at present, 
 his temperament and his work form the 
 most remarkable and the most abiding 
 chapter in the history of composers for 
 the piano. Chopin stands alone as poet- 
 pianist, a projector of tone-visions — the only 
 one who played better in the dark than in 
 the light, the only one who failed as a public 
 performer, because the public could not 
 appreciate the delicacy and mystical dis- 
 tinction of his inspirations, the only one 
 who understood the subtle laws of impro- 
 visation, who, by sheer force of originality, 
 musical instinct, and poetic spontaneity, un- 
 consciously called together in one compact 
 coterie all that was best in the artistic and 
 intellectual Paris of his day. The sentiment 
 inspired by his improvisations was one of 
 sincere hero-worship — a sentiment as foreign 
 to fads and fashions as it was spontaneous 
 and irrepressible. 
 
 179
 
 THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY 
 
 I
 
 THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY 
 
 THE secret of equanimity lies in the 
 conservation of energy. Vain exertion 
 and excitement weaken the body and mind, 
 and a man can neither be sound physically 
 nor mentally as long as he permits himself 
 to be moved by the conflicting moods and 
 emotions of the hour. Every troubled 
 thought, every angry word, every excited 
 gesture, is a weight in the balance which 
 prevents the equipoise of intellect and reduces 
 stamina. 
 
 It requires as much energy to hate with 
 vigour as it does to love with passion, and 
 more astuteness to continue in the narrow 
 and neutral path that lies between exaspera- 
 tion and infatuation than is commonly mani- 
 fest in the ruling of a State. Anger which is 
 impotent enfeebles the will and diminishes 
 
 183
 
 The Conservation of Energy- 
 vital force ; so that no wise man will harbour 
 it except at the moments when destiny puts 
 into his hands the means at once for the 
 execution of justice and judgment. 
 
 Passion, hate, envy, and ambition are 
 four things which invalidate energy. Pas- 
 sion limits the will to certain boundaries, 
 hate binds the will in a vicious circle, envy 
 nullifies and saps the secret sources of in- 
 spiration, while ambition is restless, sus- 
 picious, and apprehensive. Of all these 
 things envy is the most pernicious, for, as a 
 wise king has said : " A sound heart is the 
 life of the flesh : but envy the rottenness of 
 the bones." 
 
 There are men of profound learning and 
 deep insight who seem to possess every 
 quality but one, and that one the most 
 necessary to equanimity — the secret of avoid- 
 ing that which irritates and provokes. Of 
 the few excellent things which may be ac- 
 quired by will and practice this is the most 
 desirable. It is a sign of weakness in men 
 
 184
 
 The Conservation of Energy 
 
 of intelligence to be moved and influenced 
 S_by inimical criticism. Those who are sensi- 
 tive to mockery and misrepresentation should 
 avoid reading unfriendly criticism, while the 
 insensitive should put even this small effort 
 to better use. The conservation of energy 
 consists principally in knowing how to range 
 and regulate the little things of life. The 
 big things soon cure or kill themselves. 
 More strength of mind and body is wasted 
 in the daily repetitions of the avoidable than 
 in any other thing. Thinkers and artists 
 make little progress while they are hampered 
 by conflicting counsel and the acrimonious 
 sentiments of rival schools and factions. One 
 must live far above these things, or avoid 
 them by circumambiency. To be swayed 
 by them means servile imitation or decad- 
 ence. To live above the elements of dis- 
 sension and opposition means a spirit of 
 independence which is almost indifference 
 — a state which borders on a cynical dis- 
 regard of the feelings of the majority in 
 
 i8s
 
 The Conservation of Energy 
 
 every rank and calling. To live just beyond 
 the reach of discord means a subtle manage- 
 ment of daily affairs, a penetration that 
 almost attains to clairvoyance. It means 
 knowing the knowable, avoiding the avoid- 
 able, living in the world, but not of it. A 
 man who wishes to conserve his energy 
 should promenade around the arena of strife 
 and passion, but never descend into it. As 
 a hermit in his cave hears the howling of the 
 storm, the rushing of swollen streams, and 
 the crashing of giant pines, a wise man ought 
 both to see and hear the rush of rivalry and 
 the roar and movement of envy without being 
 moved by the flux or reflux of change. 
 
 There is a double meaning attached to the 
 conservation of energy : the greatest forces 
 are the silent ones. The original intellects 
 are those that achieve the most without being 
 obstreperous. Force is a sort of energy 
 which is often not even seen or heard. 
 Power is attended with clamour and visible 
 movement. For this reason it is always 
 
 1 86
 
 The Conservation of Energy- 
 popular. The world is impressed by what 
 j_: it sees, and people mistake violent gesture 
 for sincere acting. There is no known 
 human power that can extinguish a page of 
 recorded truth. 
 
 In the effort to attain equanimity the sen- 
 sitive find pity the most serious stumbling- 
 block. A man who has not learned to 
 pity himself by abstaining from the useless 
 pitying of others will find his days full of 
 misery. In all great cities the daily sights 
 and sounds of the street make perpetual de- 
 mands on the sense of pity. The feeling of 
 commiseration in the minds of the sensitive 
 comes at last to be a source of greater pain 
 than cold and hunger are to the people who 
 often appear more wretched than they really 
 are. For much of the visible misery is more 
 apparent than real. People who are not 
 ashamed of drinking to excess, or of begging 
 in the streets, cannot discern the demoralis- 
 ing effects of penury and hunger. To con- 
 serve our energies, then, requires something 
 
 187
 
 The Conservation of Energy 
 
 more than a mere effort of the will ; it means 
 the framing of a set of rules, to be followed 
 in the street and in the drawing-room, in the 
 study and the counting-house — rules never 
 to be forgotten in the hurry and excitement 
 of business or pleasure. 
 
 In the modern intellectual world Goethe 
 presents the most striking example of the 
 successful storing and maintenance of energy. 
 In the midst of war he managed to forget 
 it, and continue his literary work. George 
 Eliot was a wise woman, as well as a great 
 writer. She never read the opinion of 
 unfriendly critics. Brain-workers owe it to 
 themselves, first of all, to avoid undue irri- 
 tation ; they owe it to their friends to avoid 
 everything that detracts from equanimity ; 
 and, lastly, they owe it to unknown readers 
 everywhere to avoid undignified discussion 
 and unseemly denials and contradictions. 
 The secret of the conservation of energy lies 
 within the grasp of each individual man. 
 
 i88
 
 THE PSYCHIC ACTION OF GENIUS
 
 THE PSYCHIC ACTION OF GENIUS 
 
 MEN of genius are the symbols and the 
 finger-posts which Nature sets up 
 here and there as indications of the mathema- 
 tical and psychic progression of the visible 
 and invisible world in which we live. The 
 human brain is the most powerful embodiment 
 of electro-magnetic energy of which we have 
 any knowledge. This is why thinkers often 
 receive simultaneous impressions regarding 
 things of universal importance. The brain 
 of one thinker acts as an invisible conductor 
 to another ; the interchange of psychic force 
 is produced without conscious effort. Nature 
 has placed her psychic batteries all over the 
 world, in the exact positions required ; the 
 invisible conductors are at work everywhere ; 
 the magnetic currents meet and mingle or 
 cross and recross, according to affinity or 
 
 191
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 repulsion. When the brain of genius becomes 
 highly charged with electric energy, con- 
 sciousness becomes illuminated. In such 
 moments it arrives at the truth as by a flash, 
 and we call it intuition ; but illumination is 
 the proper word. Consciousness is lit much 
 as darkness is lit by a flash of lightning. At 
 such times the intellect becomes clairvoyant. 
 In science it discovers, in poetry it an- 
 nounces a rhythmic truth, in wordly affairs 
 it attains the prophetic. Considered in its 
 relation to material things it is mechanical. 
 The brain acts with the precision of a well- 
 regulated instrument ; and the difference 
 between the brain of talent and the brain of 
 genius is the difference between an ordinary 
 watch and a chronometer. 
 
 The personal quality of genius is anything 
 but mechanical ; it has a dual quality : in the 
 world of invisible forces it is mechanical, in 
 the social world it has a personality distinct 
 and apart from all others. But the mechani- 
 cal action of one harmonious brain in com- 
 
 192
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 munication with another must not be con- 
 ^-'founded with the abnormal and eccentric 
 manifestations of hypnotic subjects. In the 
 illuminating process of the brain, in its 
 highest development, there is no guessing or 
 groping after truth. Genius is a mathematical 
 and psychic progression. 
 
 Nature builds by degrees ; the intellect is 
 developed in exact harmony with the physi- 
 cal law, and the one cannot exist without 
 the other. The reason why there is so much 
 blundering in diplomacy and statecraft is 
 that the poorly developed brains are oftener 
 than not placed in control of matters which 
 only genius could hope to elucidate. But 
 the greatest thinkers never concern them- 
 selves with local conditions and interests. 
 There is a sort of unconscious freemasonry 
 among the most gifted minds. The fraternal 
 spirit is not confined to any school or nation 
 —it is universal, for genius and provincialism 
 are inimical. In time the provincial spirit 
 is pushed aside by the inexorable forces of 
 N 193
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 world-development. In the highest regions 
 of science, as in the highest regions of 
 literature, no thought is given to what the 
 world thinks or does. Newton and Darwin 
 were not concerned about local prejudices 
 when they were discovering some of the 
 long-hidden secrets of Nature. In all mani- 
 festations of genius, whether taken singly or 
 in groups, there is something apart from the 
 crowd and the public. A king is not con- 
 strained to keep within the limits of a titled 
 circle in his intercourse with society, for he 
 may have commoners as intimate friends ; 
 but men of genius are constrained by a 
 rigid law of nature to have as friends only 
 those who possess an intellectual affinity 
 for the work of genius. Frederick the 
 Great, who had the wit and imagination 
 of a thinker, took delight in the society of 
 Voltaire, who possessed more wit than the 
 king. 
 
 In the laws which govern intellectual force 
 there is something magical. In the electric 
 
 194
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 currents that flow from one brain to another 
 *■— there is a force that sets at naught all other 
 forces, overruling and dominating the seem- 
 ing puissance of the physical. Invisible 
 force is infinitely more potent than anything 
 apparent and tangible. Perhaps if the secret 
 forces of Nature could be divined, they would 
 appal some minds who think that all un- 
 pleasant truth can be buried out of sight by 
 cleverly planned codes and subtle devices. 
 For the mystery is this : sign-posts which 
 mark the latest development of human in- 
 telligence are invisible to the world at large, 
 just as the farthest stars are invisible to 
 people without telescopes. A Kepler is e7i 
 rapport with his subject. He deals with the 
 science of astronomy in a way the tyro can- 
 not understand ; his calculations are accurate 
 and his reasoning just. When he announces 
 a new discovery competent astronomers know 
 the meaning of his symbols and his figures. 
 His discovery stands for a fixed fact ; but it 
 remains a mystery to other minds who are 
 
 195
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 incapable of any deep, discriminating effort 
 of reason and imagination. 
 
 What occurs in the astronomical world 
 occurs in the world of philosophy and litera- 
 ture. The brains endowed with psychic 
 energy and imagination are attracted and 
 held by unwritten laws far more binding than 
 those recorded in any book. Nature rises 
 above systems and written codes ; but the 
 law of intellect now is what it was for 
 Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This law is 
 acting in London and Paris as it acted in 
 Athens and Rome. One hour's conversation 
 with Socrates did as much for Athenian 
 superstition as Samson's foxes did for the 
 corn-fields of the Philistines. But whereas 
 Samson's fox passed through the land like a 
 fiery, flying serpent, and was a visible pheno- 
 menon, the influence of Socrates was a 
 manifestation of hidden, intangible force, un- 
 conquerable and indestructible. No one 
 could solve the Socratic mystery. We can- 
 not explain the force of an electric battery 
 
 196
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 by handling it, neither could the rulers of 
 S^-Athens nullify the influence of Socrates by 
 suppressing the man. When Walter Savage 
 Landor said : " Give me ten competent minds 
 as readers," he knew that the dynamic forces 
 of his intellect would harmonise with the 
 latent or active forces of ten competent minds 
 unknown to him, and so act and react on 
 others. He knew that the psychic waves 
 evolved in his brain would flow on through 
 others, fulfilling the intended mission of in- 
 exorable and immutable law. A man whose 
 brain is a storehouse of electric force may 
 sit quietly in an obscure corner of the world 
 and launch his psycho-electric currents of 
 thought in a thousand directions by what De 
 Quincey terms a drop of ink on the point of 
 a pen. He needs no wires, no intricate 
 machinery, no light or dark room for the 
 taking and developing of his mental pictures. 
 The machinery is invisible, intangible. It 
 was set up and regulated at the beginning of 
 things, and the mystery of its creation has 
 
 197
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 remained an inscrutable secret. We may 
 reason away everything else in the world ; 
 we may explain and analyse all other pheno- 
 mena by study, research, and worldly know- 
 ledge — the mystery of spiritual force is one 
 with the eternal mystery of the unknowable. 
 This force never conforms to inferior con- 
 ditions. It moves and acts in its own sphere; 
 and the minds which desire any knowledge 
 of it must be willing to mount towards it. 
 To obtain any benefit from an electric battery 
 one must come in contact with the two poles 
 of the battery ; and it is only a wise use of 
 such an instrument which gives us any bene- 
 fit. The moment we begin to tinker with 
 it the electric current ceases and we defeat 
 our purpose. 
 
 A new cycle begins with every new genius. 
 Plato followed Socrates, and Aristotle fol- 
 lowed Plato. Of these three cycles the last 
 assumed a scientific form. Nature never 
 moves by fits and starts. Aristotle was not 
 possible before Plato, nor Plato before 
 
 198
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 Socrates. Out of the intuitive and the 
 i_. speculative, scientific knowledge is evolved 
 and made known ; for thought must precede 
 action. Ideas rule the world, says Plato ; 
 but an idea without action is a barren thing. 
 And so nature has ordained that ideas 
 engender action. Out of the psychic world 
 of Socrates and Plato issued Aristotle ; out 
 of the pen of Voltaire came the sword of 
 Bonaparte. Perhaps of all the puerile efforts 
 made by impotent man, the effort of criticis- 
 ing and explaining away the doings of this or 
 that man of genius is the most foolish. The 
 moment we begin to look into history, and 
 put one name against another, that moment 
 our efforts at moralising and sermonising 
 appear vain and altogether void of reason. 
 We may discover where a cycle began and 
 where it ended, but that is all. We see 
 Voltaire, Rousseau, and Bonaparte ; we see 
 the local revolution of 1789, and then the 
 universal upheaval of Napoleon. We recog- 
 nise ideas first, then words, then deeds ; 
 
 199
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 but when we begin to criticise Bonaparte we 
 become mere children unless we consider 
 the forces that produced Bonaparte. We are 
 compelled to go back and face Voltaire and 
 all the encyclopedists who worked to bring 
 about the Revolution. When we have done 
 this we realise the futility of explaining away 
 the deeds of Napoleon. If we have any 
 conception of mathematical unity, of the 
 cyclic action of human thought, we give up 
 the game of psychological guess-work and 
 accept the inexorable decrees of the hidden 
 and unwritten laws of psycho-cyclic develop- 
 ment. To explain away genius is to explain 
 the unknowable. In other words, to do so 
 implies the getting rid of scientific law and 
 putting in its place sentiment, theory, and 
 guess-work. And since every man has his 
 own opinion, one would be just as proper as 
 another. 
 
 In every country the action of genius is 
 visible in cyclic waves. In Germany we see 
 Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and 
 
 200
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 Nietszche. There is here no sign of chance 
 work. The cyclic development is as marked 
 as that of the Socratic cycle in Greece, or 
 that of the Voltarian cycle in France; for 
 there can be no psychical action without ideas. 
 This is why Nature, for example, did not 
 constitute Macaulay as a psychic centre. 
 When, half a century ago, Macaulay said 
 that there was not a writer living who would 
 be read in fifty years, he spoke as a blind 
 man in a blind world. His brain was not of 
 the generating order; he possessed material 
 power without the psychic energy. 
 
 Nature often ordains her cycles by threes : 
 Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in philosophy ; 
 ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in the 
 drama ; Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner in 
 music ; but it is impossible to fix a limit 
 to the duration of the cyclic action since 
 it is impossible to tell where or how the 
 first manifestation occurred. Such reasoning 
 would not only take us to the dawn of 
 history, but far into the aeons of geological 
 
 201
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 formations, through the fauna and fossils of 
 mammal and moUusk, to the first visible sign 
 of corporeal life in the Olenellus zone, and 
 out of that into the jelly masses without 
 motion, into the aeriform bodies, until, once 
 more, we face the starry heavens of astro- 
 nomical science and the inexorability of 
 the psychic principle manifest in cyclic 
 and mathematical evolution. Kant was 
 filled with awe when he looked at the stars 
 and thought of the moral law; but the 
 moral law is the psychical principle in cyclic 
 progression. The ideas which impress us 
 most at this epoch are very different from 
 those which animated our ancestors. There 
 is but one force and one meaning ; but 
 force is of untold variability. The things 
 we see through the telescope harmonise in 
 motion with the things visible on our own 
 planet. All the worlds differ in character, 
 but they are governed by the law which 
 governs all things here. Astronomy is the 
 science of psycho-physical motion. The 
 
 202
 
 The Psychic Action of Genius 
 
 fixed stars, planets, comets, and nebulous 
 , formations have their counterparts in our 
 little world. For human beings differ as 
 the heavenly bodies differ; and, like the 
 suns and planets, human beings may be 
 divided into two classes — the luminous 
 and the non-luminous. Groups of men 
 are attracted and held by central minds ; 
 they revolve with mathematical precision, 
 as the moon round the earth, and both 
 round the sun. For the notion that we 
 are free agents cannot be considered as 
 scientifically demonstrable. The illusions 
 of sight and sense cause us to think 
 ourselves free ; for without these illusions 
 conscious existence would become unbear- 
 able. Without the light and heat of the 
 Sun there would be no life on our planet ; 
 without the illuminating minds of genius 
 there would be no light in the world of the 
 intellect. The social world has its psychical 
 suns, its spiritual planets, its satellites in 
 every sphere of human activity and human 
 
 203
 
 The Psycliic Action of Genius 
 
 intercourse ; but genius, which is the suprem- 
 est personal force in the world of thought, 
 is a central sun of itself, at the back of which 
 the essence of the unknowable rules and acts 
 in mysterious, inscrutable, and eternal law. 
 
 204
 
 REFLECTIONS
 
 REFLECTIONS 
 
 MAN is composed of matter, spirit, and 
 soul. The body is served by the 
 spirit, and, when we speak, the spirit shows 
 itself as its servant and its slave. The spirit 
 puts into words all that is corporal — hasty 
 opinions and worldly judgments. The soul 
 speaks only by silent expression. Words 
 are always more or less dangerous, consider- 
 ing their connection with the spirit and the 
 body. Spoken sentiments are seldom just 
 what the soul would say. The more one 
 gesticulates, explains, expostulates, the 
 more the soul retires and hides itself In 
 a conversation we do not see the real 
 man, but his double, which represents him 
 more in masquerade than in truth, for in a 
 conversation there are too many smiles, 
 too much affability, flattery, bad humour, 
 
 207
 
 Reflections 
 
 or vehemence. To judge a face from the 
 grimaces of a conversation is to deceive 
 one's self as to the true nature of the man. 
 The spirit and soul are two ; how, then, can 
 we understand by his language alone the 
 man who thinks and feels profoundly ? The 
 body, with its vanities and its passions, is 
 continually in evidence — impossible to hide 
 it or deny it. And the body has so many 
 needs, while the soul has so few ; and the 
 double is always there, ever ready to 
 mystify, to disconcert, to distract, that the 
 world may not divine the mysteries of the 
 soul. 
 
 A person seated alone somewhere, medi- 
 tating, carries in his face a psychic expres- 
 sion. This expression is the man himself. 
 The moment another person comes upon 
 the scene the expression changes and the 
 double appears. The soul retires, and the 
 spirit, restless, loquacious, and vain, holds 
 its court, evoking the artifice of words, the 
 egoistic subterfuges of the day, of circum- 
 
 208
 
 Reflections 
 
 stances, of exterior existence. Likewise, 
 jjg/hen one has received a disagreeable im- 
 pression from a wise and good man, it is the 
 double that one has seen and heard, not the 
 man himself. From this source spring half 
 the contradictions, the apparent paradoxes, 
 and the personal misunderstandings of life. 
 
 Innumerable false conceptions arise from 
 the fact that we ignore the part played by 
 the double. The soul is the quintessential 
 character of the man, but the double is 
 volatile and delusive, therefore we are con- 
 tinually deceived by appearances. The soul 
 never asserts nor manifests itself; it is 
 neither vague nor vehement ; it never gropes 
 about, but encounters and takes possession, 
 acting through intuition and attraction, and 
 not through will and artifice. 
 
 Most of the puerile systems in the world 
 arise from the fact that the manifestations of 
 the double have been taken for those of the 
 soul. Systems, generally, have proved vain 
 and futile since they are commonly derived 
 O 209
 
 Reflections 
 
 from the sentiments and sensations engen- 
 dered by the double. Each soul is personal 
 in itself, stands alone, invincible. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 All is mystery. Whatever we do we can- 
 not escape that fact. This is the funda- 
 mental law which causes the illusion of 
 progress and a constant desire to acquire 
 more knowledge, to seek the unseen, the 
 unheard, the unknown. Mystery engenders 
 illusion — the most wonderful and subtle of 
 all the primordial elements. Everything 
 revolves or reposes on illusion ; it is the 
 action exercised on the mind by some person 
 or some thing, and we are always under its 
 influence, whether it be good or bad or in- 
 different. 
 
 Indefinable though they be, illusions are, 
 nevertheless, realities. The secret and mys- 
 terious relations of things, psychological and 
 magnetic influences, are, in truth, solidly 
 based on facts, and are of the greatest pro- 
 fundity. But this seems never to have 
 
 2IO
 
 Reflections 
 
 occupied, the attention of philosophers. 
 ♦ "^Phey know nothing of it, though they live 
 in this element, though they daily feel the 
 effects of its influences, and from time to 
 time are even exalted by its ecstatic mani- 
 festations. Take, for example, the illusion 
 of colour, of light, of shade. In itself it is 
 of little import — an effect produced on the 
 mind ; this effect is illusion, in the general 
 sense of the word ; we see the effects, or 
 we feel them, in the same way as we feel 
 pleasure or aversion in listening to certain 
 music. 
 
 Love, as a passion, also depends on this 
 psychological influence. It is an all-powerful 
 element, and, while only an illusion, it is one 
 of the great mysteries, never quite explain- 
 able, for in its essence it is both mystical and 
 absolute. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 In great events, like love and war, sur- 
 prises are fatal. An army that sleeps, and 
 is surprised by the enemy, is lost ; but in 
 
 211
 
 Reflections 
 
 love there are a hundred-fold more oppor- 
 tunities for the unexpected to play a fatal 
 part. The unexpected is the enemy that 
 lies in wait for those who are susceptible to 
 the tender passion, and that in a thousand 
 forms and aspects night and day. 
 
 It is in the first place through the sight 
 that surprise acts most fatally on the imagi- 
 nation. The eyes are struck with a new 
 face, then the heart is attained by an un- 
 looked-for manifestation of sympathy, then 
 one's egotism is captured by a sudden and 
 subtle flattery, uniting itself to all the other 
 elements of psychological love to cajole, 
 fascinate, and reduce the victim to a state 
 of abject submission ; after which one lives 
 in a world of illusions, where appearance 
 is everything, where reason is hypnotised 
 by the imagination, and, in fact, no longer 
 exists, where sentiment dominates will, 
 leaving the body like a ship without a 
 rudder. 
 
 It is especially in places that are lighted 
 
 212
 
 Reflections 
 
 by shaded lamps — where illusion floats 
 ^-between the pink light and the suggestive 
 shadows — that love triumphs through sur- 
 prise. There are other dangerous places, 
 but this one is where the victim is entrapped 
 with the greatest facility. This is the home 
 of the psychological spider that lies in wait 
 for the unsuspecting fly which is naive enough 
 to enter. 
 
 The vanity engendered by wealth produces 
 illusions even greater than those produced 
 by love. It is possible for a woman without 
 beauty or extraordinary qualities of mind and 
 heart to believe that she possesses the power 
 to charm, and, in fact, often does charm ; 
 but the influence that she attributes to her 
 wealth renders her susceptible to emotions 
 and follies that love would never produce. 
 
 • « • • • • 
 
 When Bonaparte gave away kingdoms to 
 the first-comer a fatal step was taken towards 
 a development of materialism in its worst 
 form. Selfish ambitions, morbid greed, love 
 
 213
 
 Reflections 
 
 of display, took possession of a class of 
 newly created nobles, who, in their intense 
 egoism, held back or smothered the higher 
 instincts of the more cultured and intelligent 
 classes. The example set by Bonaparte had 
 its effect, and a scramble for social position 
 began which was felt everywhere in France, 
 even among the most exclusive and inde- 
 pendent aristocrats. It was found that the 
 new nobles were mere sticks, without so 
 much as the common sense displayed by 
 shopkeepers and wine-dealers ; but they 
 lived in splendour, they possessed millions, 
 they could buy and they could sell, so riches 
 came to be regarded as the one thing 
 needful. The evil spread to Germany ; it 
 entered Russia, and gave us nihilism ; it 
 passed into England and gave us commercial 
 know-nothingism. 
 
 The ever-recurring political revolution has 
 its immediate effect on every phase of philo- 
 sophy, art, and literature. While it sets 
 aside the old and effete, it destroys the 
 
 214
 
 Reflections 
 
 ideals of young aspirants ; while it exiles 
 ^he tyrant, the poet and the thinker may 
 starve. The periodical revolution never 
 gets rid of the social and moral incubus of 
 knaves and imbeciles. 
 
 Perhaps there is no class so hopelessly 
 decadent as the typical wealthy parvenu. 
 Religion is kept up as a form of respecta- 
 bility, insignificant sums are given here and 
 there, not for conscience' sake, but as peace 
 offerings thrown to the public, much as a 
 fleeing Russian would throw a pig from his 
 sleigh to a pack of hungry wolves. 
 
 The purse-proud parvenu, whose wealth 
 is synonymous with ignorance, vainly seeks 
 distinction through ostentatious deeds of 
 indiscriminate charity ; and blind vulgarity 
 will not let him see that money lavished on 
 undeserving persons and questionable things 
 serves only to attract fresh attention to the 
 mental sterility of the giver, while the 
 recipients, in most cases better judges of 
 
 215
 
 Reflections 
 
 human nature than the donor, mingle 
 compliments full of irony with feelings of 
 contemptuous gratitude. 
 
 Riclies united to egoism create in the 
 minds of the delicate a feeling of repug- 
 nance which touches on fear ; one flies 
 from the egoists who pride themselves on 
 their fortune as from the tyrants who seek 
 not only the rights but the life of others. 
 
 Nothing revives our waning illusions like 
 the promise of a life which flatters our 
 weaknesses. 
 
 There are persons who choose their re- 
 ligion as they choose their garments : that 
 one is preferred which flatters their vanity 
 most. A belief in reincarnation is at once 
 the most easy and the most flattering. 
 
 • ••••« 
 
 The difference between the modern 
 agnostic and the modern spiritist is that 
 
 316
 
 Reflections 
 
 the first is waiting to see and learn, the 
 •"'second waiting to see and feel. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 The more one ignores the laws that 
 govern interior and spiritual life, the more 
 one is crushed by the power and the 
 number of fatidical influences. 
 
 • ••«•• 
 
 As long as the world lasts, physical and 
 mental antipathies will prove a question 
 of social and intellectual discord. That 
 inscrutable power which we call magnetism 
 will always play the principal role in the 
 affairs of man. We are attracted or repelled 
 by certain persons, often without knowing 
 why, and the most secret, the most simple 
 laws of nature surpass in justice and com- 
 prehension the best laws made by society. 
 An attraction of the heart and the intellect 
 makes us forget physical deformity, ugli- 
 ness, and the discrepancies of age, but a 
 mere corporal attachment can never atone 
 for the lack of intellectual affinity The 
 
 217
 
 Reflections 
 
 raison d'etre of the different schools in art, 
 philosophy, and literature is founded on 
 the natural laws of attraction and repulsion. 
 The world would be insupportable were 
 each person left to think and act alone. 
 
 Sentiments and opinions are the only 
 things which a man can rightly claim as his 
 own, because these belong to his tempera- 
 ment. An idea, if it possesses a vital germ 
 of truth, may be conceived spontaneously 
 by a thousand minds at the same time, thus 
 rendering what we call an original idea, in 
 the imagination of any one mind, a thing 
 beyond the possibility of proof. A real 
 idea lies within the domain of the mathe- 
 matical, and is, therefore, an eternal fixture 
 in the essence of things. We come upon 
 ideas in two ways — by experiment and by 
 intuition. 
 
 • • • • . 
 
 Man is a "religious animal," say the 
 philosophers. Here the word "animal" 
 
 218
 
 Reflections 
 
 suggests ironical humour. Essay to explain 
 •"'something metaphysical, and you at once 
 discover that it is not to be explained. 
 
 • • • • • • 
 
 In these pragmatic times there is a per- 
 sonal duality about the man of talent which 
 renders his life a source of much mystifica- 
 tion and futile criticism. In our intercourse 
 with him we are at first interested, than 
 mystified, then disappointed. In his work 
 he is poetic and philosophical ; in his 
 manners usually commonplace. The de- 
 scent from the ideal to the real shocks our 
 ideas of the fitness of things, and we at last 
 come to believe that the man of talent, in 
 our day, is as sordid as he is entertaining. 
 
 However, when we go to the depths of this 
 intellectual enigma we find that the fault 
 rests not with the man but with the age. 
 Modern society compels the serious writer 
 to live and work in two conflicting elements, 
 wholly at variance with the idea of unity. 
 To-day, in his study, our author is charming ; 
 
 219
 
 Reflections 
 
 to-morrow he disenchants us in the street. 
 The material and the mediocre everywhere 
 conflict with the spiritual and the artistic. 
 At one moment he is responsive, sym- 
 pathetic, enthusiastic ; at another, non- 
 chalant, unsympathetic, blase. In our senti- 
 ments of admiration there is little place left 
 for that reasonable judgment which ought 
 to tell us that he is — like all other human 
 beings — a victim of conditions and circum- 
 stances, a creature of habit, conforming to 
 certain natural laws and transitory fashions 
 which exist in the present state of society, 
 and which rule us all with an iron hand. 
 We must not blame him if he does not 
 always and everywhere harmonise with our 
 ideas of what he should be, but we must 
 remember that " the world is a lie," that a 
 decadent society has no place in its morbid 
 economy for thinkers and philosophers, and 
 that, moreover, this is an age of buying and 
 selling, of gossip and curiosity, which ofifers a 
 poor entertainment to the man of thought and 
 
 220
 
 Reflections 
 
 feeling, who is forced to live a dual life in order 
 to be at once a minister to men's ideal wants 
 and a participant in theirworldly commodities. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 Poetry is the flower of passion, music is 
 the perfume ; and poets and musicians are 
 more intimately connected than the painter 
 is to either. Music and poetry are two 
 things that fall to the level of mediocrity if 
 they do not awaken a sentiment of the 
 Infinite. Shelley reminds me of Wagner, 
 not only by his lyrical perfection, but also 
 by his banality the moment he ceases to be 
 inspired. Shelley, like Wagner, often falls 
 into the most insipid mediocrity. Although 
 the most uneven of all the English poets, he 
 is the most original and the most fascinating. 
 No one else has succeeded in combining 
 the mystical idea and the lyrical form with 
 such unity and harmony. Shelley soars to the 
 empyrean ; he ascends to a region where senti- 
 ment, emotion, thought, and form are one. 
 
 Certain poems of Keats owe their perfec- 
 
 221
 
 Reflections 
 
 tion to a union of art, sentiment, and beauty, 
 while in Shelley there is an indefinable 
 quality which renders one heedless of the 
 aesthetic element; the artist is no longer 
 considered, but the soul, the intangible 
 element of things, and, in consequence, the 
 reality. It is no longer a question of artistic 
 work, but of a mystical revelation of the 
 Infinite, which one would have thought 
 inexpressible, even in poetry. 
 
 • • • • ■ • 
 
 Poetry is passion illuminated by imagina- 
 tion and regulated by art. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 Poetry affects the heart and the mind ; 
 music affects the heart and the nerves. The 
 former has more hold on man, and its raison 
 (Vitre rests on a more solid foundation. 
 
 ■ ••••* 
 
 Music awakens in us a sentiment of the 
 Infinite ; but mingled with this sentiment 
 is an ineffable sadness, for music is still 
 another mode of the illusory. The soul, 
 
 222
 
 Reflections 
 
 first awakened, then rendered clairvoyant by 
 harmonic rhythm, recognises during a few 
 *-thoments the unutterable imponderability of 
 the things that are. While rejoicing, it con- 
 fesses its powerlessness. This explains the 
 short duration of impressions produced by 
 music, which are, however, for the moment 
 more penetrating than those produced by 
 poetry. 
 
 • • ■ • • • 
 
 Carried to its utmost limits, music pro- 
 duces one of two impressions — resignation, 
 which calms (Beethoven), or dramatic action, 
 which excites (Wagner). 
 
 Music is a metaphysical illusion, whose 
 secrets are often felt but never uttered. 
 • ••... 
 
 The greatest poets have been those who 
 studied least, but who possessed a certain 
 faculty of divining the mysterious. Appli- 
 cation, which fortifies the intellect, kills 
 imagination, for in rendering the mind 
 
 223
 
 Reflections 
 
 positive it clips the wings of fantasy. 
 Hence, the more a poet studies his style 
 the more he limits his creative power. 
 
 Imagination is the moonlight of the soul, 
 where reason wanders unbridled 'twixt illusion 
 and reality. 
 
 • • • • • ff 
 
 Of all tasks, that of imitating the style of 
 another is the most difficult, the most futile, 
 and the most ungrateful. For " the style is 
 the man," and he who imitates attempts a 
 kind of dedoublement of the soul that is like 
 a defiance to Nature. Those whom we call 
 "masters," are so from the fact that they 
 have remained themselves in spite of all 
 temptation to swerve from the path which 
 Nature intended them to follow. 
 
 Style is a siren who charms more by her 
 melody than by her words. The writers 
 who charm us most do not resemble the 
 diamond whose value lies in mere bulk 
 but the one whose facets reflect the clear- 
 
 224
 
 Reflections 
 
 est light. It is the difference between pre- 
 ponderation and quality. Such writers are 
 'almost always found where the critical 
 explorer least expects them. They are 
 analogous to those rare denizens of the 
 deep that live in the silence and the shadow 
 of profound waters, eluding the most patient 
 and adroit fishermen, only mounting to the 
 surface at certain hours of the day, certain 
 seasons of the year, certain periods of a 
 mystic cycle. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 Writers like Poe and De Quincey unite 
 the critical with the poetic faculty, so that 
 they are critics of their own work as well 
 as of that of others, while in Goethe and 
 Carlyle we see writers who often think the 
 least when they do the most. When thinkers 
 and artists attain a certain degree of know- 
 ledge, every attempt to mount higher leads 
 them towards that desert of the mind called 
 intellectual perfection. Without restraint, 
 an element is reached where the soul is 
 P 225
 
 Reflections 
 
 consumed by perpetual thirst, and where 
 illusions assume the form of the mirage. 
 
 The modern statue says : " Behold, here I 
 am ! " Heroism is represented by bombast, 
 beauty by pose, contemplation by grimace. 
 
 The Greek statute is unconscious — alone 
 perfect and comprehensible, as well from 
 its form as from its repose. Here is no 
 school ; it is a truth which charms by a 
 divine expression of the Beautiful, at once 
 harmonious and universal. It is Nature 
 chiselled by the artist, without affectation 
 and without arriere-pensee. Every sculptor 
 who leaves this Greek simplicity becomes 
 affected, weak, and false. 
 
 Raphael : a subject, a study ; Angelo : a 
 problem, a philosophy ; the first, the ideal 
 artist; the second, the ideal artist-poet. 
 Raphael : simple, expressive, and beautiful ; 
 Angelo : passionate, powerful, and universal. 
 It is the difference between the highest art 
 
 226
 
 Reflections 
 
 and the highest genius. The one is a school, 
 the other a university. 
 
 The difference between the galleries of 
 Munich and Dresden is as marked as that 
 between Rubens and Raphael. The artistic 
 tone of the gallery of Dresden is given by 
 the incomparable Sistina Madonna, which 
 dominates the ensemble like some mystic 
 spirit, presiding and governing with an inborn 
 distinction, delicate, penetrating, absorbing. 
 Of all the art galleries this one is the most 
 equal in composition, the most harmonious 
 in colour. One is struck by the quality of 
 the pictures. Distinction and sincerity are 
 manifest in all the rooms; one walks in an 
 element of inspiration. Here it is the artist 
 who presides ; at Munich it is the painter. 
 The gallery of Dresden is for the poet, the 
 artist, the connoisseur ; that of Munich is 
 for the public. 
 
 There exist as many false gods in art 
 as existed in past ages in religion. Italy 
 
 227
 
 Reflections 
 
 possesses the greatest number of these false 
 gods, and it is the English and the Germans 
 who have contributed most to the conserva- 
 tion and propagation of their cult. 
 
 There are many things which a young man 
 can do better than a middle-aged or elderly 
 man. In every kind of art which requires a 
 free play of imagination, passion, and enthu- 
 siasm, the young man will be found more at 
 home than the mind of maturer years. But 
 the critical faculties come into play just at 
 the period when enthusiasm and illusion 
 begin to wane. The critical faculties may 
 be so developed at the age of thirty that 
 sentiment and passion cannot hinder correct 
 judgment, but such instances are extremely 
 rare. Indeed, they only exist where there is 
 some marked manifestation of philosophical 
 and artistic insight akin to intuition. 
 
 Men are judged more by the quality than 
 by the quantity of their thoughts and acts ; 
 
 228
 
 Reflections 
 
 and this rule applies with as much force to 
 -the deeds of statesmen and conquerors as it 
 does to the productions of the thinker and 
 the artist. Look where we may we find that 
 when quality is distilled from quantity there 
 remains a surprising amount of superfluous 
 work, vain attempts at additional glory, false 
 calculations of permanent worth, and foolish 
 demands for the applause of posterity. We 
 say a man has lived too long when he has 
 done too much. Success in the sphere of 
 intellectuality is analogous to success in 
 commerce — first results create an ambitious 
 appetite for another fruitful effort. The 
 successful writer, whose first impressions 
 have come unsought, after causing flattering 
 comment from the public, is soon enveloped 
 in the meshes of imaginary conditions which 
 only exist in the individual. It is a phase 
 of intellectual reaction which we can under- 
 stand but cannot easily explain. 
 
 • • • • • • 
 
 The moment we cross another's threshold 
 
 229 
 
 ^
 
 Reflections 
 
 we leave our personality at the door, like the 
 Mussulman who takes off his sandals before 
 entering the mosque. For every man is a 
 god in his own house, and on entering the 
 house of a stranger we put ourselves under 
 the domination of another god. Friend or 
 enemy, we render him homage as long as we 
 remain. This is why we say : " You did me 
 the honour of paying me a visit " ; for the 
 most stupid feel that no honour could equal 
 the loss of one's personality, even for an 
 hour. If you doubt the truth of this, call 
 on your acquaintances a day or two after 
 having received them as guests, and you will 
 be surprised at the confident and authorita- 
 tive air of these same people who, the other 
 day, at your house, showed you so much 
 deference. You feel that, whether you like 
 it or not, you, in your turn, have left your 
 aplomb at the door, and that this time it is 
 for you to bend before a host with an eye 
 full of confidence, of easy mien, and free 
 from all constraint. 
 
 230
 
 Reflections 
 
 The greatest proof of our admiration is to 
 pass voluntarily some time under the domi- 
 nation of another, particularly if that person 
 be gifted. In this case the word "master" 
 takes a double sense — master in the intel- 
 lectual world, and our master as long as we 
 are in his house. 
 
 231
 
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