2032873
 
 READERS 
 
 AND 
 WRITERS
 
 SOME RECENT 
 BORZOI BOOKS 
 
 THE OPINIONS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 
 Paul Gsell 
 
 MAX BEERBOHM IN PERSPECTIVE 
 Bohun Lynch 
 
 THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA 
 George Jean Nathan 
 
 PASTICHE AND PREJUDICE 
 A. B. Walkley 
 
 THE NO-PLAYS OF JAPAN 
 Arthur Waley 
 
 READERS AND WRITERS 
 A. R. Orage 
 
 ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 Robert Graves 
 
 AFOOT IN ENGLAND 
 W. H. Hudson 
 
 FRIDAY NIGHTS 
 
 Edward Garnett
 
 Readers and Writers 
 
 (1917-1921) 
 by A. R. Orage 
 
 New York Alfred A Knopf Mcmxxii
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, ITXC. 
 
 Published, May. 19St 
 
 Set up and printed 6j the Vail-Ballou Co., Bingtiamton, N. Y. 
 Paper furnished bv W. F. h'.therlnnlon A Co., tft<o I'orl:. ff Y. 
 Bound 5 the H. Wolff Estate, New York, A'. Y. 
 
 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 Stack 
 
 PN 
 511 
 
 Preface 
 
 UNDER the title of "Readers and Writers" and over 
 the initials "R. H. C." the "C" occasionally becom- 
 ing "Congreve" for other purposes I contributed to 
 the New Age, during a period of seven or eight years, 
 a weekly literary causerie of which the present vol- 
 ume, covering the years 1918-1921, is a partial re- 
 print. My original design was to treat literary events 
 from week to week with the continuity, consistency 
 and policy ordinarily applied to comments on current 
 political events; that is to say, with equal seriousness 
 and from a similarly more or less fixed point of view 
 as regards both means and end. This design in- 
 volved of necessity a freedom of expression distinctly 
 out of fashion, though it was the convention of the 
 greatest period of English literature, namely, the 
 Eighteenth Century; and its pursuits in consequence 
 brought the comments themselves and the journal in 
 which they appeared into somewhat lively disrepute. 
 That, however, proved not to be the greatest diffi- 
 culty. Indeed, within the last few years an almost 
 general demand for more serious, more outspoken and 
 even more "savage" criticism has been heard, and is 
 perhaps on the way to being satisfied, though literary 
 susceptibilities are still far from being as well-man- 
 nered as political susceptibilities. The greatest diffi-
 
 Preface 
 
 culty is encountered in the fact that literary events, 
 unlike political events, occur with little apparent 
 order, and are subject to no easily discoverable or 
 demonstrable direction. In a single week every liter- 
 ary form and tendency may find itself illustrated, with 
 the consequence that any attempt to set the week's 
 doings in a relation of significant development is 
 bound to fall under the suspicion of impressionism or 
 arbitrariness. I have no other defence against these 
 charges than Plato's appeal to good judges, of whom 
 the best because the last is Time. Time, if ever it 
 should condescend to re-consider the judgments con- 
 tained herein, will pronounce upon them as only those 
 living critics can whose present judgments are an 
 anticipation of Time's. Time will show what has been 
 right and what wrong. Already, moreover, a certain 
 amount of winnowing and sifting has taken place. 
 Some literary values of this moment are not what 
 they were yesterday or the day before. A few are 
 greater; many of them are less. And I think I can 
 afford to look on most of the changes with equanimity. 
 My most confident prediction, however, remains to 
 be confirmed: it is that the perfect English style is still 
 to be written. That it may be in our own time is 
 both the goal and the guiding-star of all literary 
 criticism that is not idle chatter. 
 
 A. R. ORAGE. 
 
 The New Age, 
 
 38 CURSITOR STREET, E. C. 4. 
 December 1921.
 
 Contents 
 
 Preface, I 
 
 Fontenelle, 3 
 
 Biography, 4 
 
 The Responsibility of the Press, 5 
 
 Critics Beware, 7 
 
 Henry James, 9 
 
 Turgenev, 13 
 
 Plotinus, 15 
 
 The New Europe, 17 
 
 The Fashion of Anti-Puritanism, 18 
 
 Popular Philosophy, 20 
 
 Was Carlyle Prussian? 21 
 
 Is Nietzsche for Germany? 23 
 
 Nietzsche in Fragments, 24 
 
 The End of Fiction, 26 
 
 The Criteria of Culture, 27 
 
 The Fate of Sculpture, 30 
 
 The Too Clever, 31
 
 Contents 
 
 Homage to Propertius, 33 
 
 Mr. Pound and Mr. Wyndham Lewis 
 in Public, 36 
 
 Mr. Ezra Pound as Metricist, 40 
 
 Mr. Ezra Pound on Religion, 43 
 
 Mr. Pound, Caricaturist, 45 
 
 The Admirable Victorians, 46 
 
 French Clarte, 47 
 
 When Shall We Translate? 48 
 
 Nature in Mind, 50 
 
 Mr. Clive Bell's Pot, 52 
 
 The Criticism of Poets, 54 
 
 " John Eglinton," 55 
 
 Irish Humour, 56 
 
 The Literary Drama of Ireland, 57 
 
 Mr. Standish O'Grady, 59 
 
 Mr. Standish O'Grady, Enchanter, 60 
 
 Les Sentiments de Julien Benda, 62 
 
 Convalescence after Newspaper, 63 
 
 Nature in English Literature, 67 
 
 S.S.S., 69 
 
 Sterne Criticism, 71
 
 Contents 
 
 Sterne on Love in France, 73 
 
 English Style, 74 
 
 Literary Culs-de-sac, 76 
 
 The Decline of Free Intelligence, 77 
 
 Literary Copyright in America, 81 
 
 Right Criticism, 86 
 
 Man's Survival of Bodily Death, 88 
 
 Beardsley and Arthur Symons, 91 
 
 "^E's" "Candle of Vision," 93 
 
 How to Read, 107 
 
 The Old Country, 109 
 
 Looking for the Dawn, 109 
 
 Fielding for America, 112 
 
 Poor Authors! 113 
 
 On Guard, 115 
 
 The Coming Renaissance, 117 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci as Pioneer, 119 
 
 " Shakespeare " Simplified, 122 
 
 The " London Mercury " and English, 123 
 
 Mr. G. K. Chesterton on Rome and Ger- 
 many, 126 
 
 The Origins of Marx, 131
 
 Contents 
 
 Marx as Politician, 133 
 
 John Mitchel as the Same, 135 
 
 Norse in English, 136 
 
 The Comedy of It, 138 
 
 The Epic Serbs, 140 
 
 Ernest Dowson, 142 
 
 A Sentimental Excursion, 144 
 
 The Newest Testament, 147 
 
 Nothing Foreign, 150 
 
 Psycho-Analysis, 151 
 
 Psycho-Analysis and the Mysteries, 152 
 
 Gently with Psycho-Analysis, 155 
 
 A Cambridge " Cocoon," 157 
 
 An Oxford Miscellany, 162 
 
 The Impotence of Satire, 163 
 
 The " Dial " of America, 165 
 
 America Regressing, 171 
 
 The Best is Yet to Be, 174 
 
 INDEX, 179
 
 READERS 
 
 AND 
 WRITERS
 
 Fontenelle 
 
 There is a reason that Fontenelle has never before 
 been translated into English. It is not that Mr. Ezra 
 Pound, who has now translated a dozen of Fontenelle's 
 dialogues, was the first to think of it. Many readers 
 of the original have tried their hand at the translation 
 only to discover that somehow or other Fontenelle 
 would not "go" in English as he goes in French. The 
 reason is not very far to seek. Fontenelle wrote a 
 French peculiarly French, a good but an untranslat- 
 able French. He must, therefore, be left and read 
 in the original if he is to be appreciated at his intrinsic 
 value. Mr. Pound has made a rash attempt at the im- 
 possible in these dialogues, and he has achieved the 
 unreadable through no further fault of his own. The 
 result was foregone. The dialogues themselves in 
 their English form are a little more dull than are the 
 Conversations of Landor, which is to say that they are 
 very dull indeed. Nothing at the first glance could be 
 more attractive than dialogues between the great dead 
 of the world. To every tyro the notion comes inevita- 
 bly sooner or later, as if it were the idea for which 
 the world were waiting. Nevertheless, on attempting 
 it, the task is found to be beyond most human powers. 
 Nobody has yet written a masterpiece in it. Fonte- 
 nelle was not in any case the man to succeed in it from 
 an English point of view. We English take the great 
 
 3
 
 4 Readers and Writers 
 
 dead seriously. We expect them to converse paradi- 
 saically in paradise, and to be as much above their own 
 living level as their living level was above that of or- 
 dinary men. Here, however, is a pretty task for a 
 writer of dead dialogues, for he has not only to imitate 
 the style, but to glorify both the matter and style of 
 the greatest men of past ages. No wonder that he 
 fails; no wonder that in the vast majority of cases he 
 produces much the same impression of his heroes as is 
 produced of them at spiritualistic seances. The at- 
 tempt, however, will always continue to be made. It 
 is a literary cactus-form that blooms every fifty years 
 or so. As I calculate its periodicity, some one should 
 shortly be producing a new series. 
 
 *** 
 
 Biography 
 
 Very few biographers have been anywhere near the 
 level of mind of their subjects, and fewer still have 
 been able to describe even what they have understood. 
 The character of a great man is so complex that a 
 genius for grasping essentials must be assumed in his 
 perfect biographer : at the same time, it is so tedious in 
 the analysis that the narrative must be condensed to 
 represent it. Between the subtlety to be described, and 
 the simplicity with which it must be described, the char- 
 acter of a man is likely to fall in his portrait into the 
 distortion of over-elaboration or into the sketch. 
 Though difficult, however, the art has been frequently
 
 Responsibility of the Press 5 
 
 shown to be not impossible. We could not ask for a 
 better portrait of Johnson than Boswell's. Lockhart's 
 Life of Scott is as good as we desire it to be. Plato's 
 Socrates is truer than life; and there are others. On 
 the whole, the modern gossiping method is not likely 
 to become popular in a cultured country. 
 
 * * 
 
 The Responsibility of the Press 
 
 From his little brush with the Press, Dr. Lyttelton 
 has come off badly. It was not because his case was 
 bad, but because he had not the moral courage to stick 
 to his guns. His case was that Parliament had practi- 
 cally ceased to be the leader of the nation, and that its 
 place had been taken by the Press. Unfortunately, 
 however, the Press had come to depend for its living 
 upon sensationalism, with the consequence that its ten- 
 dency was to prefer fiction to fact. A perfectly good 
 case, I say, who know more of Fleet Street than Dr. 
 Lyttelton will ever know. Every word of the indict- 
 ment is well within the truth. But when challenged 
 by the Press to substantiate his charges, Dr. Lyttelton, 
 instead of inviting the world simply to look at the Press 
 and to contrast its reports with facts, proceeded to ex- 
 culpate the editors and to put the whole blame on the 
 public. It is the public, he said, that is responsible, 
 and there is no use in rating the editors, who merely 
 supplied what the public wanted. But so long as pub- 
 lic men adopt this cowardly attitude nothing can possi-
 
 6 Readers and Writers 
 
 bly be done, for the "public," like a corporation, has 
 neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned. 
 Relatively to the proprietors and editors of the Press 
 the public consists of irresponsible individuals, who 
 merely choose from among what is laid before them. 
 They are mostly as innocent as children who deal at a 
 tuck-shop, and, perchance, buy sweets and cakes that 
 are bad for them as readily as things that are good for 
 them. The responsible parties are the proprietors 
 and editors, and, above them, the law. It is not an 
 offence to buy articles at a shop that are illegally dis- 
 played for sale. The public supposition is that if they 
 are on sale they can be bought. And, in fact, the 
 Public Prosecutor, unlike Dr. Lyttelton, does not pro- 
 ceed against the purchasers of illegal articles, he 
 proceeds against the vendors. In the case of our news- 
 paper proprietors and editors the conditions of shop- 
 keeping are parallel; they expose professed news and 
 views for sale, with an implied guarantee that their 
 goods are both good and fit for human consumption. 
 The public cannot be expected to know which is which, 
 or what is what, any more in the case of news and 
 views than in the case of tea and potatoes. Rather less 
 indeed, since the ill-effects of false news and unsound 
 views are, as a rule, too long delayed and too subtle to 
 be attributed to their proper causes. But the Press 
 proprietors and editors know very well. They know 
 whether the news they expose is true, or the views they 
 vend are sound. They know also that in a large de- 
 gree they are neither the one nor the other. Yet they 
 continue to sell them, and even to expect public honours
 
 Critics Beware 7 
 
 for their fraudulent dealings. The excuses made for 
 them are such as could be made for any other fraudu- 
 lent industry; that it pays, that the public swallows it, 
 that honesty would not pay, that the public does not 
 want truth and sincerity, that the public must learn to 
 discriminate for itself. Reduced to a simple state- 
 ment, all these mean, in effect, that the Press is pre- 
 pared to trade on the ignorance and folly of the public. 
 So long as editors and proprietors are allowed to sail 
 off from responsibility under the plea that they are only 
 satisfying a public demand, so long will it be possible 
 for purveyors of other forms of indecent literature 
 and vendors of other articles of public ill-fare to com- 
 plain that they are unfairly treated. There is likely 
 to be always a demand for fiction against fact, the 
 plausible lie against the honest truth, the doctored news 
 against the plain statement, and the pleasing, superficial 
 against the strenuous profound. A change of taste in 
 these respects could only be brought about by a deter- 
 mined effort in education extending over a generation 
 and applied not only to schools, but to the Press, the 
 pulpit, and to book-publishing. But because the pref- 
 erence now exists, and is a profitable taste to pander 
 to, it is not right to acquit the Press that thrives on it. 
 
 * * 
 
 Critics Beware 
 
 Mr. Crees, the author of a new study of George 
 Meredith,- has first pointed out one of the dangers in
 
 8 Readers and Writers 
 
 writing about Meredith and then fallen into it. Every- 
 body knows what it is; it is writing in epigram, or, as 
 Mr. Crees calls it, "miscarrying with abortive epi- 
 gram." That phrase alone should have warned Mr. 
 Crees how near he was to ignoring his own counsel; 
 but apparently he saw only the idea and not the fact, 
 for a passage soon occurs in which he illustrates the 
 danger perfectly. He is writing of the difficulty en- 
 countered by a certain kind of intellectual Meredith, 
 for example in winning any public recognition; and 
 this is the way he miscarries on: 
 
 The idol of the future is the Aunt Sally of the present. The 
 pioneer of intellect ploughs a lonely furrow. He is assailed by 
 invective, beset by contumely, the butt of ridicule, the Saint 
 Sebastian of the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. He 
 is depressed by disregard, chilled by the icy waters of contempt, 
 haunted by the dread of beggary, the recompense of strictness 
 of conviction. . . . And when detraction recites its palinode, 
 his sole compensation is to reply (from the Elysian fields), "I 
 told you so." 
 
 There are many untruths contained in this passage, 
 some flattering and others not, to the "intellectual," 
 and they are properly expressed if untruths ever can 
 be in the style. The style is one in which the truth 
 cannot be told; and it perfectly illustrates the axiom 
 that critical writing cannot be too simple and unaf- 
 fected. It is a common practice for a critic to approxi- 
 mate his style to the style of his subject; for example, 
 to write about poetry poetically, about a "grand im- 
 passioned writer" in a grand and impassioned manner.
 
 Henry James 9 
 
 By so doing it is supposed that a critic shows his 
 sympathy and his understanding of his subject. But 
 the method is wrong. Criticism is not a fine art. The 
 conversational tone is its proper medium, and it should 
 be an absolute rule never to write in criticism what 
 cannot be imagined as being easily said. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 Henry James 
 
 The "Henry James Number" of the Little Review 
 is devoted to essays by various hands upon the works 
 and characteristics of the late novelist. The most in- 
 teresting essay in the volume is one by Miss Ethel 
 Coburn Mayne reporting the first appearance and sub- 
 sequent development of Henry James as witnessed by 
 the writers for the famous Yellow Book, of whom Miss 
 Mayne was not the least characteristic. What a 
 comedy of misunderstanding it all was, and how Henry 
 James must have smiled about it! At the outset the 
 Yellow Book writers had the distinct impression that 
 Henry James was one of themselves ; and they looked 
 forward to exploiting the new worlds which he brought 
 into their ken. But later on, to their disappointment, 
 he fell away, receded from their visibility, and became, 
 as Miss Mayne puts it, concerned less with the "world" 
 than with the "drawing-room." The fault, however, 
 was not with James, nor was the change in him. The 
 Yellow Book too readily assumed that because James 
 wrote in it, he was willing to be identified with the
 
 10 Readers and Writers 
 
 tendency of the school; and they thought him lacking 
 in loyalty when afterwards it appeared that he was 
 powerfully hostile. But how could they have deceived 
 themselves into supposing that a progress towards the 
 ghostly could always keep step with a progress towards 
 the fleshly? The two were worlds apart, and if for 
 a single moment they coincided in an issue or two of 
 the Yellow Book, their subsequent divergence was only 
 made the more obvious. I, even I, who was still 
 young when the Yellow Book began to appear, could 
 have told its editors that Henry James was not long 
 for their world. Between the method employed in, 
 say, the Death of the Lion and the method of Henry 
 Harland, Max Beerbohm, Miss Mayne herself, and, 
 subsequently, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, there was, and 
 could be, only an accidental and momentary sympathy. 
 James was in love with the next world, or the next 
 state of consciousness; he was always exploring the 
 borderland between the conscious and the super-con- 
 scious. The Yellow Book writers were positively 
 reactionary to him, for their borderland was not 
 between men and angels, but between men and beasts. 
 James's "contemptuous" word for Mr. D. H. Law- 
 rence which Miss Mayne still groans to think of 
 was the most natural and inevitable under the circum- 
 stances. It might have been foreseen from the 
 moment Henry James put his pen into the Yellow Book. 
 If there are any critics left who imagine that the 
 Yellow Book was anything but a literary ad de sac, I 
 commend to them this present essay by Miss Mayne.
 
 Henry James II 
 
 Under the disguise of criticism of Henry James, it is 
 a confession. 
 
 Henry James's Middle Years is a fragment of the 
 autobiography begun some years before the author's 
 death. We are told that this fragment was "dictated" 
 by Henry James and that it was never revised by 
 himself, both of which facts explain a little of the 
 peculiarity of his style. If the style of the earlier 
 books was mazy, the style of Middle Years is mazier. 
 If the earlier style consisted of impressions impassion- 
 ately conveyed, the present is more elusive still. 
 Henry James was always difficult to pin down; in Mid- 
 dle Years his fluttering among words never rests a 
 sentence. Nobody, I am convinced, who is not either 
 a genuine devotee of Henry James or one of the paper- 
 audience his friends cultivated for him, will succeed in 
 reading through this work. An infinitely leisurely mind 
 or an infinite interest in just Henry James's way of 
 looking at things is necessary to the endurance of it. 
 But given one of these, and in particular the latter, 
 and the reading of Middle Years becomes an exhilarat- 
 ing exercise in sensing ghosts. 
 
 Yes, that is the phrase to describe what Henry 
 James was always after. He was always after sensing 
 ghosts. His habitat has been said to be the inter-space 
 between the real and the ideal; but it can be more 
 accurately defined as the inter-space between the dead 
 and the living. You see his vision almost his clair- 
 voyance actively engaged in this recovery of his
 
 12 Readers and Writers 
 
 experiences years before as a young man in London. 
 See how he revelled in them, rolling them off his 
 tongue in long circling phrases. Is it not obvious that 
 he is most at home in recollection, in the world of 
 memory, in the inter-world, once more, of the dead 
 and the living? Observe, too, how only a little more 
 exaggeratedly anfractuous and swirling his style be- 
 comes but not, in any real sense, different under the 
 influence of memory, than when professing to be de- 
 scribing the present. It is plain that memory differs 
 for him from present vision only in being a little more 
 vivid, a little more real. In order to see a thing 
 clearly, he had, in fact, to make a memory of it, and 
 the present tense of memory is impression. What I 
 am trying to say is that Henry James mentalized phe- 
 nomenon; hence that he saw most clearly in the world 
 of memory where this process had been performed for 
 him by time ; and that he saw less clearly in our actual 
 world because the phenomena herein resisted immedi- 
 ate mentalization. The difference for him was 
 between the pre-digested and the to-be-digested; the 
 former being the persons and events of memory, and 
 the latter being the events and persons of his current 
 experience. 
 
 Henry James will find himself very much at home 
 with the discarnate minds who, it is presumed, are now 
 his companions. Incarnation, embodiment, was for 
 him a screen to be looked through, got over somehow, 
 divined into, penetrated. He regarded it as a sort of 
 magic curtain which concealed at the same time that 
 under careful observation it revealed by its shadows
 
 Turgenev 13 
 
 and movements the mind behind it. And I fancy I 
 see him sitting before the actual sensible world of 
 things and persons with infinite patience watching for 
 a significant gesture or a revealing shadow. And such 
 motions and shadows he recorded as impressions which 
 became the stuff of his analysis and synthesis of the 
 souls that originated them. But if that was his atti- 
 tude towards the material world and it is further 
 proved by his occasional excursions into the completely 
 ghostly may we not safely conclude that in the world 
 he now inhabits his sense of impressions is more at 
 home still. For there, as I take it, the curtain is 
 drawn, and minds and souls are by one degree the more 
 exposed to direct vision. With his marvelous insight 
 into the actual, what would Henry James not make of 
 the mental and psychic when these are no longer con- 
 cealed by the material? On the whole, nobody is 
 likely to be happier "dead" than Henry James. 
 
 *** 
 
 Turgenev 
 
 Both in Mr. Conrad's Introduction and Mr. Edward 
 Garnett's critical study of Turgenev I observe the atti- 
 tude of defence. They are defending rather than prais- 
 ing Turgenev. But Turgenev has been so long the vic- 
 tim of polemics that it is about time some judge summed 
 up the contentions and delivered judgment. Neither 
 Mr. Conrad nor Mr. Garnett, however, is qualified for 
 this task by either temper or the power of judgment
 
 14 Readers and Writers 
 
 itself. Mr. Conrad is a great writer, but he is not 
 a great critic, and as for Mr. Garnett, he is not even 
 a great writer; and the temper of both is shown in 
 their common tendency to abuse not only the plaintiff's 
 attorney but the jury as well. But there is no use in 
 abusing the jury in other words, the reading public of 
 the world even if some gain may be got by polemics 
 with this or that critic. I am content to hear Mr. 
 Maurice Baring and M. Haumont told that they 
 are merely echoes of Russian partisanship and in- 
 capable of feeling the fine shades of "truth" in 
 Turgenev; for both these writers are quite capable 
 of hitting back. But when Mr. Conrad satirically 
 remarks that Turgenev had qualities enough to ruin 
 the prospects of any writer, and Mr. Garnett echoes 
 him to the effect that Turgenev owes his "unpopular- 
 ity" to "an exquisite feeling for balance" which nowa- 
 days is "less and less prized by modern opinion," I 
 feel that the defence of Turgenev is exceeding the 
 limits of discretion. For it is not by any means the 
 case that the "unpopularity" of Turgenev is confined to 
 the mob that has no feeling for balance or is jealous 
 of his possession of too many qualities. Critics as 
 good as Mr. Garnett and with no Russian political 
 prejudices against Turgenev can come to the same con- 
 clusion as the innumerable anonymous gentlemen of 
 the jury, to wit, that Turgenev was a great artist on 
 a small scale whose faults were large. That is cer- 
 tainly my own case. While I agree (or affirm, for I 
 am quite willing to take the initiative) , that Turgenev's 
 art is more exquisite, more humane, more European
 
 Plotinus 15 
 
 than that of any other Russian writer, I must also 
 maintain that in timidity of thought, in sentimentality, 
 in occasional pettiness of mind, he is no more of a 
 great writer than, let us say, Mr. Hall Caine. To 
 compare the whole of him with the whole of Dos- 
 toievski is to realize in an instant the difference between 
 a writer great in parts and a writer great even in 
 his faults. Turgenev at his best is a European, I 
 would rather say a Parisianized Russian; but Dos- 
 toievski, while wholly Russian, belongs to the world. 
 An almost exact parallel is afforded by the case of 
 Ibsen and Bjornson, about whose respective values 
 Norway used to dispute as now Mr. Garnett would 
 have us dispute concerning the respective values of 
 Dostoievski and Turgenev. The world has settled 
 
 ith Norway dissenting; 
 the latter in favour of 
 dissenting. 
 
 e said that "no writer 
 is less likely to obtain 
 ation," has lately been 
 by Mr. Stephen Mack- 
 by the way) . For all 
 lackenna's supply, how- 
 be read as much as he 
 thinking in ideas with-
 
 16 Readers and Writers 
 
 out images, is a painful pleasure, comparable to exer- 
 cises designed and actually effective to physical health. 
 There is no doubt whatever that mental power is in- 
 creased by abstract thought. Abstract thinking is al- 
 most a recipe for the development of talent. But 
 it is so distasteful to mental inertia and habit that 
 even people who have experienced its immense profit 
 are disinclined to persist in it. It was by reason of 
 his persistence in an exercise peculiarly irksome to 
 the Western mind that Plotinus approached the East 
 more nearly in subtlety and purity of thought than all 
 but a few Western thinkers before or after him. In 
 reading him it is hard to say that one is not reading 
 a clarified Shankara or a Vyasa of the Bhishma trea- 
 tises of the Mahabbarata. East and West met in his 
 mind. 
 
 Plotinus's aim, like that of all thinkers in the degree 
 of their conception, is, in Coleridge's words, "the per- 
 fect spiritualization of all the laws of Nature into laws 
 of intuition and intellect. It is the subsumption of 
 phenomena in terms of personality, the reduction of 
 Nature to the mind of man. Conversely it will be 
 seen that the process may be said to personalize 
 Nature; in other words, to assume the presence in 
 natural phenomena of a kind of personal intelligence. 
 If this be animism, I decline to be shocked by it on 
 that account; for in that event the highest philosophy 
 and one of the lowest forms of religion coincide, and 
 there is no more to be said of it. The danger of this 
 reasoning from mind to Nature and from Nature to 
 mind is anthropomorphism. We tend to make Nature
 
 The New Europe 17 
 
 in our own image, or, conversely, a la Nietzsche, to 
 make ourselves after the image of Nature. But the 
 greater the truth the greater is the peril of it; and 
 thinkers must be on their guard to avoid the dangers, 
 while nevertheless continuing the method. Plotinus 
 certainly succeeded in avoiding the anthropomorphic 
 no less than the crudely animistic dangers of his 
 methods; but at the cost of remaining unintelligible 
 to the majority of readers. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 It should be possible before long to begin to discern 
 some of the outlines of the new continent that will 
 arise from the flood of the present war. That it will 
 be a new continent is certain, and that it will contain 
 as essential features some of the aspects of the Slav 
 soul is probable. For what has been spiritually most 
 apparent during the war has been the struggle of the 
 Slav soul to find expression in the Western medium. 
 Russia, we may say, has sought to Europeanize her- 
 self; or, rather, Russia has sought to impress upon 
 Europe Russian ideas; with this further resemblance 
 in her fate to the fate of the pioneers of every great 
 new spiritual impulse, that she has been crucified in 
 her mission. The crucifixion of Slavdom, however, is 
 the sign in which Russian ideals or, let us say Slav 
 ideals will in the end conquer. They will not sub- 
 merge our Western ideals; the new continent will be
 
 1 8 Readers and Writers 
 
 the old continent over again; but they will profoundly 
 modify our former configurations, and compel us to 
 draw our cultural maps afresh. In what respect, it 
 may be asked, will our conceptions be radically 
 changed? The reply is to be found confusedly in the 
 events of the Russian Revolution; in the substitution of 
 the pan-human for the national ideal, and in the at- 
 tempt, this time to be made with all the strength at 
 the disposal of intelligence, to create a single world- 
 culture a universal Church of men of good-sense and 
 good-will. This appears to me to be the distinguish- 
 ing feature of the new continent about to be formed; 
 and we shall owe it to the Slavs. 
 
 * * 
 
 The Fashion of Anti-Puritanism 
 
 The anti-Puritanism of the professed anti-Puritans 
 is very little, if any, better than the Puritanism they 
 oppose. The two parties divide the honours of our 
 dislike fairly evenly between them. Puritanism is a 
 fanatical devotion to a single aspect of virtue namely, 
 to morality. It assumes that Life is moral and noth- 
 ing else; that Power, Wisdom, Truth, Beauty, and 
 Love are all of no account in comparison with Good- 
 ness; and doing so it offends our judgment of the nature 
 of Virtue, which is that Virtue is wholeness or a balance 
 of all the aspects of God. Anti-Puritanism, on the 
 other hand, denies all the affirmations of Puritanism,
 
 The Fashion of Anti-Puritanism 19 
 
 but without affirming anything on its own account. It 
 denies that Life is exclusively moral, but it does not 
 affirm that Life is anything else; it destroys the 
 false absolute of Puritan propagandas of Malthusian- 
 ism and tacitly denying that there is any absolute what- 
 soever. This being the case, our choice between 
 Puritanism and anti-Puritanism is between a false 
 absolute and no absolute, between a one-sided truth 
 and no truth at all. We are bound to be half-hearted 
 upon either side, since the thing itself is only half a 
 thing. 
 
 I am not likely to revise my opinions about virtue 
 from the school of Marx and his disciple Kautsky. 
 Marx was another flamen, a priest, that is to say, of 
 one aspect only of reality in this case the economic. 
 That the moral cant of a particular age tends to repre- 
 sent the economic interest of the dominant class, is, 
 of course, a truism; but there is a world of difference 
 between moral cant and morality and the latter is as 
 uniform throughout the history as the former is vari- 
 able. Moreover, it is not by any means always the 
 case that the interests of the dominant class of capi- 
 talism are identical with Puritanism. The interests 
 of capitalism today are decidedly with anti-Puritanism, 
 in so far as the effects of anti-Puritanism are to break 
 up family life, to restrict births and to cultivate eu- 
 genics. What could suit capitalism better than to 
 atomize the last surviving natural grouping of indi- 
 viduals and to breed for the servile State? The 
 anti-Puritan propagandas of Malthusianism and eu-
 
 2O Readers and Writers 
 
 genics are not carried on, too, by Marxians, but by the 
 wealthy classes. Because he is a shopkeeper, the 
 Anglo-Saxon is today an anti-Puritan in these matters. 
 
 *** 
 
 Popular Philosophy 
 
 The difficulty of popular philosophical discussion is 
 not insuperable. It is all a matter of style. Mr. Ber- 
 trand Russell, for example, manages by means of an 
 excellent style to make philosophy as easy to under- 
 stand and as entrancing to follow as certain writers 
 have made the equally difficult subject of economics. 
 It is, in fact, the business of professional thinkers to 
 popularize their subject and to procure for their Muse 
 as many devotees as possible. In the case of Mr. 
 Bertrand Russell, his admirable style has been put into 
 the service of the most abominable philosophy ever 
 formulated. He is an accidentalist of the most 
 thorough-going kind who denies that life has any 
 meaning or purpose. Life appeared, he says, by 
 chance, and will disappear, probably for good, with the 
 cooling of the sun; and he sings like a doomed cricket 
 on a dissolving iceberg. But it is all the more strange 
 in my judgment that a man who thinks thus can write 
 as Mr. Russell writes. There is a contradiction some- 
 where between the simple richness of his style and the 
 Spartan poverty of his ideas. He thinks glacially, but 
 his style is warm. I suspect that if he were psycho- 
 analysed Mr. Bertrand Russell would turn out to be
 
 Was Carlyle Prussian? 21 
 
 a walking contradiction. In a word, I don't believe 
 he believes a word he says! That tone, that style, 
 them there gestures they betray the stage-player of 
 the spirit. 
 
 A philosophy written in a popular style is not, of 
 course, the same thing as a popular philosophy. 
 "From a popular philosophy and a philosophical pop- 
 ulace, good sense deliver us," said Coleridge, meaning 
 to say that a philosophy whose substance and not whose 
 expression only has been adapted to the populace is in 
 all probability false and is certainly superficial. For 
 in his Lay Sermons, published a hundred years ago, 
 Coleridge supplemented the foregoing remark by de- 
 ploring the "long and ominous eclipse of philosophy, 
 the usurpation of that venerable name by physical and 
 psychological empiricism, and the non-existence of a 
 learned and philosophical public" Between a philo- 
 sophic public and a philosophic populace there is the 
 same distinction as between the "public" that reads, 
 let us say, Sedlak, and the "populace" that reads, let 
 us say, Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells is a popular 
 philosopher; but that is manifestly not the same thing 
 as a writer who is trying to make philosophy popular. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 Was Carlyle Prussian? 
 
 In the International Journal of Ethics, Mr. Herbert 
 Stewart makes a chivalrous attempt to deliver Carlyle 
 from the charge recently brought home to him of hav-
 
 22 Readers and Writers 
 
 ing been a Prussian. Militarist Prussianism, he says, 
 rests upon a postulate which would have filled Carlyle 
 with horror, the postulate, namely, that an autocracy 
 must be organized for war. I am not satisfied, how- 
 ever, that Carlyle would have been filled with any- 
 thing but admiration. It is true that he did not adopt 
 the Prussian error of identifying Might with Right. 
 "Is Arithmetic," he asked, "a thing more fixed by the 
 Eternal than the laws of justice are?" Could Justice 
 or Right, therefore, be allowed to vary with the 
 amount of Might at its disposal a deduction inevit- 
 able from the Prussian hypothesis? On the other 
 hand, Carlyle cannot be said to have been equally free 
 from the more subtle error of Prussianism, the as- 
 sumption that Might can be accumulated only by Right 
 means. Might, he said in effect, being an attribute 
 of God, can be obtained by man only as a result of some 
 virtue. Hence its possession presumes the possession 
 of a proportionate virtue, and a man of Might is to 
 that extent a man of Right also. This subtlety led 
 Carlyle into some strange company for the moral 
 fanatic he was. It led him to glorify Frederick the 
 Great and to condone Frederick's crime against Silesia. 
 It led him to despise France and to defend West In- 
 dian slavery. Mr. Stewart must make his choice 
 between Carlyle as a confused ethical philosopher and 
 Carlyle as a Prussian. If he was not the latter, he was 
 the former. 
 
 * *
 
 Is Nietzsche for Germany? 23 
 Is Nietzsche for Germany? 
 
 Nietzsche we are told, is being read as never before 
 in Germany. It is certain that Nietzsche was taken, 
 if taken at all, in the wrong sense in Germany before 
 the war. The Germans did with him precisely what 
 the mob everywhere does with the satirist; they swal- 
 lowed his praise and ignored his warnings. He is 
 still, however, more of a danger than a saviour to 
 post-war Germany, if only for the reason that his vo- 
 cabulary is for the most part militarist. Culture is 
 usually presented by Nietzsche in the term of combat, 
 and the still small voice of perfection is only heard in 
 the silences of his martial sentences. Now that Ger- 
 many has begun to re-read Nietzsche, will it read him 
 any more intelligently than before? Is not a critique 
 of Nietzsche a necessary condition of safely reading 
 him in Germany? There are, undoubtedly, authors 
 who are most dangerous to the nation in which they 
 appear. Rousseau was particularly dangerous to 
 France. Whitman is inimical to American culture. 
 Dr. Johnson has been a blight upon English thought. 
 And Nietzsche, it may well be, is only a blessing out- 
 side of Germany. Art and thought, it is commonly 
 said, are beyond nationality and beyond race; and from 
 this it follows that it is only a happy accident when 
 a great writer or thinker is peculiarly suited to the 
 nation in which he happens to be born. He is ad- 
 dressed to the world why should his message be 
 specially adapted to the language and people of his
 
 24 Readers and Writers 
 
 parentage? A nation runs risks in accepting as its own 
 the doctrines of the great men who chance to appear 
 among it. Equally, a nation runs the risk of missing 
 its real chosen unless it examines all the great men of 
 the world. Chauvinism, either by choice or by ex- 
 clusion, is always dangerous. We must take the good 
 where we find it. 
 
 * * 
 
 Nietzsche in Fragments 
 
 The English mind is easily "put off" a subject, and 
 particularly easily off a subject as uncongenial as 
 Nietzsche; and it has been known to remain in this 
 state for a century or more. Several of our own 
 greatest thinkers and writers have had to wait a long 
 period for their readers, and by the time that the 
 English mind has recovered itself, they are often quite 
 dead. It is likely to be the same with Nietzsche. 
 Having the plausible excuse for being "off" Nietzsche 
 which the war provided, the English intellectual classes 
 note that I do not say the intellectual English 
 classes, for there are none will continue to neglect 
 Nietzsche until he has been superseded, as I believe he 
 will be before very long. Psycho-analysis has taken 
 a good deal of Nietzsche in its stride, and it is quite 
 possible that the re-reading of Indian philosophy in 
 the light of psycho-analysis will gather most of the 
 remainder. 
 
 Nevertheless, the remaining fragments will be worth 
 preserving, since indubitably they will be the fragments
 
 Nietzsche in Fragments 25 
 
 of a giant of thought. As Heraclitus is represented 
 by a small collection of aphorisms, each so concen- 
 trated that one would serve for an ordinary man's 
 equipment for intellectual life, the Nietzsche of the 
 future may be contained in a very small volume, chiefly 
 of aphorisms. He aimed, he said, at saying in a sen- 
 tence what other writers say in a book, and he charac- 
 teristically added that he aimed at saying in a sentence 
 what other writers did not say in a book. And he very 
 often succeeded. These successes are his real contri- 
 bution to his own immortality, and they will, I think, 
 ensure it. I should advise Dr. Oscar Levy to prepare 
 such a volume without delay. It may be the case that 
 Nietzsche will be read in his entirety again, though I 
 doubt it; but, in any event, such a volume as I have in 
 mind would serve to either reintroduce him or hand- 
 somely to bury the mortal part of him. 
 
 I cannot believe that Nietzsche is about to be read, 
 as never before, in Germany. Dr. Levy has assured 
 us, on the report of a Berlin bookseller, that this was 
 indicated in the sales of Nietzsche in Germany; but 
 the wish was father to the deduction from the very 
 small fact. Nietzsche was, before anything else, a 
 great culture-hero; as a critic of art he has been sur- 
 passed by no man. But is there any appeal in culture 
 to a Germany situated as Germany is today? I am 
 here only a literary causeur. With the dinosaurs and 
 other monsters of international politics I cannot be 
 supposed to be on familiar terms. My opinion, never- 
 theless, based upon my own material, is that Germany
 
 26 Readers and Writers 
 
 is most unlikely to resume the pursuit of culture where 
 she interrupted it after 1870, or, indeed, to pursue 
 culture at all. And the reason for my opinion is that 
 Russia is too close at hand, too accessible, and, above 
 all, too tempting to German cupidity. Think what the 
 proximity to Germany to a Germany headed off from 
 the Western world of a commercially succulent 
 country like Russia really means. Germans are hu- 
 man, even if they are not sub-human, and the tempta- 
 tion of an El Dorado at their doors will prove to be 
 more seductive than the cry from the muezzin to come 
 to culture, come to culture. Nietzsche on the one side 
 calling them to spiritual conquests will be met by the 
 big bagmen calling them, on the other side, to com- 
 mercial conquests. Who can doubt which appeal will 
 be the stronger? Germany refused to attend to 
 Nietzsche after 1870, when he spoke to them as one 
 alive; they are less likely to listen to a voice from the 
 dead after 1918. On second thoughts, I should advise 
 Dr. Oscar Levy to publish his volume in Germany first. 
 For there he would show by one satiric touch that no 
 country needed it so much. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 The End of Fiction 
 
 Fiction nowadays, we are told, is not what it used 
 to be. We are told that it is the modern university. 
 It is certainly a very obliging medium. But on this
 
 The Criteria of Culture 27 
 
 very account it is as delusive as it is obliging. It re- 
 ceives impressions easily, readily adapts itself to every 
 kind of material, and assumes at the word of command 
 any and every mood. But precisely because it does 
 these things, the effects it produces are transient. 
 Lightly come, lightly go; and if, as has been said, fic- 
 tion is the modern reader's university, it is a school in 
 which he learns everything and forgets everything. 
 Modern as I am, and hopeful as I am of modernity, 
 I cannot think that the predominance of fiction, even 
 of such fiction as is written today, is a good sign; and 
 when we see that it leads nowhere, that the people who 
 read much of it never read anything else, and that it 
 is an intellectual cul-de-sac, our alarm at the phenom- 
 enon is the greater. What kind of minds do we ex- 
 pect to develop on a diet of forty parts fiction to two 
 of all other forms of literature? Assuming the free 
 libraries to be the continuation schools of the public, 
 what is their value if the only lessons taken in them 
 are the lessons of fiction? I will not dwell on the 
 obvious discouragement the figures are to every serious 
 writer, for the effect on the readers must be worse. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 The Criteria of Culture 
 
 The suppression of the display of feeling, or, better, 
 the control of the display of feeling, is the first condi- 
 tion of thought, and only those who have aimed at
 
 28 Readers and Writers 
 
 writing with studied simplicity, studied lucidity, and 
 studied detachment realize the amount of feeling that 
 has to be trained to run quietly in harness. The 
 modern failure (as compared with the success of the 
 Greeks) to recognize feeling as an essential element of 
 lucidity and the rest of the virtues of literary form is 
 due to an excess of fiction. Just because fiction ex- 
 presses everything it really impresses nothing. Its 
 feeling evaporates as fast as it exudes. The sensation, 
 nevertheless, is pleasant, for the reader appears to be 
 witnessing genuine feeling genuinely expressing itself; 
 and he fails to remember that what is true of a person 
 is likely to be true of a book, that the more apparent, 
 obvious, and demonstrated the feelings, the more 
 superficial, unreal, and transient they probably are. 
 As a matter of cold-blooded fact, it has been clearly 
 shown during the course of the war that precisely our 
 most "passionate" novelists have been our least 
 patriotic citizens. I name no names, since they are 
 known to everybody. 
 
 Culture I define as being, amongst other things, a 
 capacity for subtle discrimination of words and ideas. 
 Epictetus made the discrimination of words the foun- 
 dation of moral training, and it is true enough that 
 every stage of moral progress is indicated by the de- 
 gree of our perception of the meaning of words. Tell 
 me what words have a particular interest for you, and 
 I will tell you what class of the world-school you are 
 in. Tell me what certain words mean for you and I 
 will tell you what you mean for the world of thought.
 
 The Criteria of Culture 29 
 
 One of the most subtle words, and one of the key- 
 words of culture, is simplicity. Can you discriminate 
 between natural simplicity and studied simplicity, be- 
 tween Nature and Art? In appearance they are 
 indistinguishable, but in reality they are aeons apart; 
 and whoever has learned to distinguish between them 
 is entitled to regard himself as on the way to culture. 
 Originality is another key-word, and its subtlety may 
 be suggested by a paradox which was a common-place 
 among the Greeks; namely, that the most original 
 minds strive to conceal their originality, and that the 
 master-minds succeed. Contrast this counsel of per- 
 fect originality with the counsels given in our own day, 
 in which the aim of originality is directed to appearing 
 original you will be brought, thereby, face to face 
 with still another key-idea of Culture, the relation of 
 Appearance to Reality. All these exercises in culture 
 are elementary, however, in comparison with the mas- 
 ter-problem of disinterestedness. No word in the 
 English language is more difficult to define or better 
 worth attempting to define. Somewhere or other in its 
 capacious folds it contains all the ideas of ethics, and 
 even, I should say, of religion. The Bhagavad Gita 
 (to name only one classic) can be summed up in the 
 word. Duty is only a pale equivalent of it. I venture 
 to say that whoever has understood the meaning of 
 "disinterestedness" is not far off understanding the 
 goal of human culture. 
 
 ***
 
 30 Readers and Writers 
 
 The Fate of Sculpture 
 
 The art-critic of The Times having remarked that 
 "the public hardly looks at the sculpture in the Acad- 
 emy, or outside it," Mr. John Tweed, an eminent 
 sculptor himself, has now uttered a public lamentation 
 in agreement with him. Sculpture today, he says, is 
 an art without an audience; and he quotes a Belgian 
 artist who told him what heroes our contemporary 
 sculptors in this country must be to continue their work 
 in the face of a unanimous neglect. It is not certain, 
 however, that the sculptors of today do not thoroughly 
 well deserve the fate to which they now find them- 
 selves condemned. In the economy of the arts, or, if 
 this phrase be preferred, in the strategy of the aesthet- 
 ics, nothing is more necessary from time to time in 
 each of the arts than an iconoclast by which I indi- 
 cate not a destroyer simply, but a creator of new forms. 
 Such a pioneer is of necessity a little rude to his im- 
 mediate predecessors and to such of his contemporaries 
 as are sheep. But in the end, nevertheless, if they will 
 only accept and recognize him, he will revive their 
 art for them. But in the case of sculpture the two 
 such iconoclasts as have recently appeared Mr. Ep- 
 stein and the late Gaudier-Brzeska were instantly set 
 upon, not by the public, but by their contemporaries, 
 and walled within a neglect far more complete than the 
 neglect sculpture in general has received. Just when 
 it appeared that they might be about to reawaken 
 public interest in carven forms, the rest of the sculp-
 
 The Too Clever 31 
 
 tors hurried to silence them, with the consequence that 
 at this moment there is literally nobody engaged in 
 sculpture in whom the intelligent public takes the 
 smallest interest. As sculptors have treated sculpture, 
 so the public now treats sculptors. It is a pretty 
 piece of karma. 
 
 * * 
 
 The Too Clever 
 
 Neglect means nothing very much; success is a 
 matter of time for everything that is really classic. 
 On the other hand, deliberately to incur neglect by 
 writing for the few involves the further risk of more 
 and more deserving it. Whoever makes a boast of 
 writing for a coterie sooner or later finds himself 
 writing for a coterie of a coterie, and at last for him- 
 self alone. It cannot be otherwise. As the progress 
 of the classic is from the one to the many, the progress 
 of the romantic is from the many to the one; and the 
 more sincerely the latter is a romantic, the sooner he 
 arrives at his journey's end. The involution of aim 
 thus brought about is obvious already in the succession 
 of works of the chief writers of the Little Review. 
 They grow cleverer and cleverer, and, at the same 
 time, more and more unintelligible. I am staggered 
 by the cleverness of such a writer as Mr. Wyndham 
 Lewis, and a little more so at the cleverness of Mr. 
 James Joyce. But in the case of both of them, I find 
 myself growing more and more mystified, bewildered,
 
 32 Readers and Writers 
 
 and repelled. Is it, I ask, that they do not write for 
 readers like me? Then their circle must be contract- 
 ing, for I am one of many who used to read them with 
 pleasure. And who are they gaining while losing us? 
 Are their new readers more intensive if fewer, and 
 better worth while for their quality than we were for 
 our numbers? But I decline to allow the favourable 
 answers. The fact is that the writers of the Little 
 Review are getting too clever even for coterie, and 
 will soon be read only by each other, or themselves. 
 
 A characteristic example is to be found in the open- 
 ing chapter of Mr. James Joyce's new novel, Ulysses. 
 This is how it begins: 
 
 Stately, plump Buck Milligan came from the stairway, bear- 
 ing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. 
 A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind 
 him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and in- 
 toned. . . . 
 
 Now it is clear that such a passage has not been 
 written without a great deal of thought, and if thought 
 were art, it might be called an artistic passage. But 
 thought is not only not art, but the aim of art is to 
 conceal thought. In its perfection art is indistinguish- 
 able from nature. The auspicious thoughtfulness of 
 the passage I have quoted is, therefore, an objection 
 to it; and the more so since it provokes an inspection 
 it is unable to sustain. Challenged to "think" about 
 what the writer is saying, the reader at once discovers 
 that the passage will not bear thinking about. He 
 asks, for instance, whence Buck Milligan came from
 
 Homage to Propertius 33 
 
 the staircase; how he managed to balance a crossed 
 mirror and razor on a bowl's edge and, particularly, 
 while bearing them aloft; and what mild air it was that 
 sustained the tails of a man's dressing-gown. To 
 these questions deliberately provoked by the ostenta- 
 tious care of the writer there is either no answer or 
 none forthcoming without more thought than the de- 
 tail is worth. The passage, in short, suffers from 
 being aimed at a diminishing coterie; and it succeeds 
 in satisfying, I imagine, only the writer of it who is 
 alone in all its secrets. Mr. James Joyce had once 
 the makings of a great writer not a popular writer, 
 but a classic writer. To become what he was he 
 needed to be opened out, to be simplified, to conceal 
 his cleverness, to write more and more for the world. 
 But first in the Egoist and now in the Little Review he 
 has been directed to cultivate his faults, his limitations, 
 his swaddling clothes of genius, with the result that 
 he is in imminent danger of brilliant provincialism. 
 
 * * 
 
 Homage to Propertius 
 
 Mr. Ezra Pound's Homage to Propertius has drawn 
 an American Professor of Latin into the pages of the 
 American magazine Poetry. Professor Hales is in- 
 dignant at the attempt of Mr. Pound to make Pro- 
 pertius intelligible as well as merely accessible to the 
 modern English reader, and in the name of Scholar- 
 ship, he begs Mr. Pound to "lay aside the mask of
 
 34 Readers and Writers 
 
 erudition" and to confess himself nothing better than 
 a poet. With some of Professor Hales's literal criti- 
 cisms it is impossible not to agree. Speaking in the 
 name of the schools, he is frequently correct. But in 
 the name of the humanities of life, of art, of litera- 
 ture, what in the world does it matter that Mr. Pound 
 has spelled Punic with a capital when he meant a small 
 letter, or that he has forgotten the existence of the 
 Marcian aqueduct? Mr. Pound did not set out with 
 the intention of making a literal translation of Pro- 
 pertius. He set out with the intention of creating in 
 English verse a verse reincarnation, as it were, of Pro- 
 pertius, a "homage" to Propertius that should take the 
 form of rendering him a contemporary of our own. 
 And, secondly, all criticism based on the text of Pro- 
 pertius is invalid unless it is accompanied by a percep- 
 tion of the psychological quality of Propertius as he 
 lived. But Professor Hales, it is clear, has no sense 
 for this higher kind of criticism, for he complains that 
 there is "no hint" in Propertius's text of "certain de- 
 cadent meanings" which Mr. Pound attributes to him. 
 Is there not, indeed? Accepting decadence in its 
 modern American meaning, Propertius can only be said 
 to be full of it. No literary critic, accustomed to 
 reading through and between an author's lines, whether 
 they be Latin, Greek, or English, can doubt the evi- 
 dence of his trained senses that the mind behind the 
 text of Propertius was a mind which the Latin Profes- 
 sor of the Chicago University would call decadent, if 
 only it expressed itself in English. The facts that 
 Propertius was a poet contemporary with Ovid, that
 
 Homage to Propertius 35 
 
 he wrote of the life of the luxurious Roman Empire, 
 as one who habitually lived it, that he wrote of love 
 and of his own adventures, are quite sufficient to prove 
 that he was a child of his age; and if his age was, as it 
 undoubtedly was, decadent, in a professorial sense, 
 Propertius, we may be sure, shared its decadence, I 
 am not saying, it will be observed, nor, I think, would 
 Mr. Pound say, that to have shared in decadence and 
 to be sympathetic to it are the same thing as to be de- 
 cadent in oneself. What, in fact, distinguishes Pro- 
 pertius is his aesthetic reaction against decadence, 
 against the very decadence in which he had been 
 brought up, and with which he had sympathized. But 
 this is not to admit that "no hint of certain decadent 
 meanings" is to be found in him. On the contrary, he 
 could not very well have become the aesthetic reaction 
 against decadence without importing into his verse 
 more than a hint of certain decadent meanings. In 
 effect, Propertius is the compendium of the Roman 
 Empire at its turning point in the best minds. Long 
 before history with its slow sequence of events proved 
 to the gross senses of mankind that Empire was a 
 moral and aesthetic blunder, Propertius discovered the 
 fact for himself and recorded his judgment in the 
 aesthetic form of his exquisite verse. But he must have 
 passed through decadence in order to have arrived 
 at his final judgment; and, indeed, as I have said, his 
 verse bears witness of it. Professor Hales has been 
 misled by Propertius's reflections, by his habit of sub- 
 limating his experiences, by nis criticism of decadence. 
 But that reflection was only an accompaniment, or,
 
 36 Readers and Writers 
 
 rather, sequel of Propertius's mode of life; it did not, 
 any more than such reflection does today, make im- 
 possible or even improbable a mode of life in violent 
 contrast with the reflection made upon it. 
 
 * * 
 
 Mr. Pound and Mr. Wyndham Lewis in 
 Public 
 
 Mr. Ezra Pound has for some months been the 
 "foreign" or exile editor of the Little Review, and I 
 gather from the nature of the contributions that he 
 has practically commandeered most of the space. A 
 series of letters and some stories by Mr. Wyndham 
 Lewis; letters, stories and verse, by Mr. Pound; ditto, 
 ditto, ditto, by other shall I say London? writers 
 are evidence that Mr. Pound's office is no sinecure. 
 He delivers the goods. The aim of the Little Review, 
 as defined without the least attempt at camouflage by 
 the editress (that is to say, the real American director 
 of the venture), is to publish articles, stories, verses, 
 and drawings of pure art whatever that may be. It 
 is not demanded of them that they shall be true or 
 false; that they shall have a meaning single or 
 double; that they shall be concerned with life or 
 fancy. Nothing, in fact, is asked of them but that 
 they shall be art, just art. Less explicitly, but to the 
 same effect, both Mr. Pound and Mr. Wyndham Lewis 
 subscribe to the same formula. They, too, are after 
 art, nothing but art. But in other respects they de-
 
 Mr. Pound and Mr. Lewis 37 
 
 fine themselves more clearly. From Mr. Wyndham 
 Lewis, for instance, I gather that the aim of the Little 
 Review artists is to differentiate themselves from the 
 mob. Art would seem to consist, indeed, in this dif- 
 ferentiation or self-separation. Whatever puts a gulf 
 between yourself and the herd, and thus "distin- 
 guishes" you, is and must be art, because of this very 
 effect. And Mr. Pound carries on the doctrine a stage 
 by insisting that the only thing that matters about the 
 mob is to deliver individuals from it. Art, in short, 
 is the discovery, maintenance, and culture of indi- 
 viduals. 
 
 We have all heard of this doctrine ; and there is no 
 doubt that it is very seductive. But to whom? It 
 has been remarked before that the appeal of Nietzsche 
 has often been to the last persons in the world you 
 would have thought capable of responding to him; or, 
 let us say, to the last persons that ought to respond to 
 him weak-willed, moral imbeciles, with not enough 
 intelligence to be even efficient slaves. These, as 
 Nietzsche discovered, were only too often the sort 
 of person that was attracted by his muscular doctrine 
 of the Will to Power. It is the case likewise with the 
 doctrine of individuality. Among its disciples there 
 are, of course, the few who understand it; but the ma- 
 jority of them are precisely the persons who prove 
 by their devotion their personal need of it. Individu- 
 ality is for these as much a cult as health is a cult 
 among the sick; and it is to be observed that they also 
 have to take a good deal of care of themselves. They 
 must never associate with the mob, they must be care-
 
 38 Readers and Writers 
 
 ful what they eat in the way of aesthetics; they must 
 pick and choose among people, places and things with 
 all the delicacy of an egg-shell among potsherds. Above 
 all, they must keep their art pure. Neither Mr. Wynd- 
 ham Lewis nor Mr. Ezra Pound belongs to this class 
 of aesthetic valetudinarians. Both are robust persons 
 with excellent digestions, and with a great deal of sub- 
 stantial common sense. Nevertheless, both of them, 
 to my mind, pose as invalids, and simulate all the 
 whimperings and fastidiousness of the malades imagln- 
 aires. Read Mr. Lewis's letters, for example, in the 
 issues of the Little Review here under notice. The 
 writer is obviously a very clever man, with a good ex- 
 perience and judgment of life, and possessed of a 
 powerful style. But he has chosen to exhibit himself 
 as a clever gymnast of words, with innumerable finnick- 
 ing fancies against this or that lest he should be con- 
 fused with the "mob." And Mr. Pound is in much 
 the same state. What is the need of it in their case, 
 I ask? Unlike most of the other writers, neither Mr. 
 Lewis nor Mr. Pound has any need to "cultivate" an 
 individuality, or to surround it with walls and moats 
 of poses. Neither has any need whatever to appear 
 clever in order to be clever. On the contrary, both 
 of them have need to do exactly the reverse namely, 
 to cut their too exuberant individuality down to the 
 quick, and to reveal their cleverness by concealing it. 
 Simplicity, as Oscar Wilde said he, of course, only 
 said it, he never really thought it is the last refuge 
 of complexity. And I put it to Mr. Lewis and Mr. 
 Pound that with just a little more individuality, and
 
 Mr. Pound and Mr. Lewis 39 
 
 with just a little more cleverness, their ambition will 
 be to be indistinguishable from the mob, either by their 
 individuality or their cleverness. They will not suc- 
 ceed in it. Individuality and cleverness, like murder, 
 will out. The aim, however, of the wise possessor of 
 either, is to conceal it in subtler and subtler forms of 
 common sense and simplicity. 
 
 Among the clever poses of this type of "stage player 
 of the spirit," as Nietzsche called them, is the pose of 
 the enfant terrible. They are mightily concerned to 
 shock the bourgeoisie, and are never so happy as when 
 they have said something naughty, and actually got it 
 into print. Now it is, of course, very stupid for the 
 bourgeoisie to be shocked. The bourgeoisie would be 
 wiser to yawn. But it argues a similar kind of stupid- 
 ity anti-stupidity to wish to shock them. But we 
 do not wish to shock them, they say! We are indif- 
 ferent to the existence of the bourgeoisie ! Our aim 
 is simply to write freely as artists, and to be at liberty 
 to publish our work for such as can understand it. 
 Publishing, however, is a public act; and I agree with 
 the bourgeoisie that the art of an intimate circle or 
 group is not of necessity a public art. Between pri- 
 vate and public morality, personal and public policy, in- 
 dividual and communal art, there is all the difference of 
 two differing scales of value. Queen Victoria did not 
 wish to be addressed by Mr. Gladstone as if she were a 
 public meeting. A public meeting does not like to be 
 addressed as if it were a party of personal friends. 
 The introduction of personal considerations into pub- 
 lic policy is felt to be an intrusion; and to treat your
 
 40 Readers and Writers 
 
 friends as if you were legislating on their behalf is an 
 impertinence. From all this it follows that to thrust 
 all private art into the public eye is to mix the two 
 worlds. Only that part of private art that is in good 
 public taste ought to be exhibited in public; the rest 
 is for private, personal, individual consumption, and 
 ought to be left unpublished, or circulated only pri- 
 vately. Let the artist write what pleases him; let him 
 circulate it among his friends; the only criterion here 
 is personal taste. But immediately he proposes to 
 publish his work, he should ask himself the question: 
 Is this in good public taste? 
 
 * 
 * 
 
 Mr. Ezra Pound as Metricist 
 
 Under the title of Ezra Pound: His Metric and 
 Poetry, a whole book really, however, only an essay 
 has been devoted to the work of this literary enigma. 
 For this honour, if honour it be, Mr. Pound is in- 
 debted more to what he has preached than to what 
 he has practised; for on his actual achievement, con- 
 siderable though it is, not even in America could any- 
 body have been found to write a book. Mr. Pound 
 will not deny that he is an American in this respect, 
 if in none other, that he always likes to hitch his wagon 
 to a star. He has always a ton of precept for a 
 pound of example. And in America, more than in any 
 other country save, perhaps, Germany, it appears to 
 be required of a man that there shall be "significant"
 
 Mr. Ezra Pound as Metricist 41 
 
 intention, aim, theory anything you like expressive 
 of direction in everything he does. There does not 
 appear to me to be anything very original in the crea- 
 tion of poetic images, or even in the employment of 
 irregular metric; neither of them can be said to consti- 
 tute a new departure in poetic technique. Yet Mr. 
 Pound has elevated each of them to be the star of a 
 cult, with the consequence that we now have professed 
 "schools" of poetry, calling themselves Imagist or 
 Verslibrist. These are examples of what I mean in 
 saying that Mr. Pound loves to hitch his wagon to a 
 star. 
 
 It must be admitted that this habit of Mr. Pound 
 has its good as well as its somewhat absurd side; there 
 is only a step from the ridiculous to the sublime. It 
 must also be affirmed, however it may reflect upon our 
 English critics, that it is precisely the good side of 
 Mr. Pound's technique which they usually condemn. 
 For the good side consists of this, that all the poets who 
 can claim to belong to the school of Mr. Pound must 
 display in addition to the above-mentioned defects, the 
 certain and positive merits of study of their art and 
 deliberate craftsmanship. No poet dare claim to be 
 a pupil of Mr. Pound who cannot prove that he has 
 been to school to poetry, and submitted himself to a 
 craft-apprenticeship; and no poet will long command 
 Mr. Pound's approval who is not always learning and 
 experimenting. Now this, which I call the good side 
 of Mr. Pound's doctrine, is disliked in England, where 
 it has for years been the habit of critics to pretend that 
 poetry grows on bushes or in parsley-beds. That
 
 42 Readers and Writers 
 
 poetry should be the practice of "a learned, self-con- 
 scious craft," to be carried on by a "guild of adepts," 
 appears to Mr. Archer, for example, to be a heresy of 
 the first order. How much of the best poetry, he ex- 
 claims, has been written with "little technical study 
 behind it"; and how little necessary, therefore, any 
 previous learning is. To the dogs with Mr. Pound's 
 doctrine ! Let the motto over the gates of the Temple 
 of Poetry be : "No previous experience required." It 
 will be seen, of course, how the confusion of Mr. 
 Archer's mind has arisen. Because it is a fact that 
 the "best" poetry looks effortless, he has fallen into 
 the spectator's error of concluding that it is effortless. 
 And because, again, a considerable part of the work 
 of the "learned, self-conscious craftsmen" is pedantic 
 and artificial, he has been confirmed in his error. The 
 truth of the matter, however, is with Mr. Pound. 
 Dangerous as it may be to require that a poet shall 
 be learned in his profession, it is much more dangerous 
 to deprecate his learning. By a happy fluke, it may 
 be, a perfect poem may occasionally be written "with- 
 out previous study" ; from too much previous study 
 there may also occasionally result only verse smelling 
 of the lamp; but in the long run, and for the cultiva- 
 tion of poetry as an art, there is no doubt that the 
 most fruitful way is the way of the craftsman and the 
 adept. 
 
 * 
 
 * *
 
 Mr. Ezra Pound on Religion 43 
 Mr. Ezra Pound on Religion 
 
 Mr. Pound has been called over the coals for his 
 impolite dismissal of Mr. G. K. Chesterton as a danger 
 to English literature. But, good gracious, Mr. G. K. 
 Chesterton's reputation is not so frail that it cannot 
 take care of itself against a spirited idiosyncrasy. Mr. 
 Pound has expressed his honest opinion; but what is 
 discussion for but to elicit honest opinions, and then 
 to extract the truth from them? There is undoubt- 
 edly a fragment of truth in Mr. Pound's view of Mr. 
 G. K. Chesterton's influence, and it is this: that Mr. 
 Chesterton is a most dangerous man to imitate. His 
 imitators become apes. But that is not to say that 
 Mr. Chesterton is not himself a great writer. Shake- 
 speare is likewise a dangerous man to imitate ; and we 
 should only be repeating good criticism if we affirmed 
 that the influence of Shakespeare upon English style 
 has been on the whole bad. But this is not to detract 
 from the greatness of Shakespeare. Every writer of 
 a unique style is liable to ruin his imitators; and, from 
 this point of view, the wise thing to be done is to 
 classify good writers as writers to be imitated and 
 writers never to be imitated. Among the former are 
 the writers whom personally I prefer; for I love best 
 the men of the eighteenth century, who aimed at writ- 
 ing as nearly as possible like the world, and through 
 whom the common genius of the English language 
 spoke. But there is pleasure and profit also in the 
 highly individualized styles of the latter sort of writers,
 
 44 Readers and Writers 
 
 beginning, let us say, with Euphnes, and represented 
 today by Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Mr. Pound may 
 have no fancy for the unique and personally invented 
 style of Mr. Chesterton, but it is a matter entirely of 
 taste and not of judgment. Should he announce that 
 he cannot tolerate Swift or Burke or Sterne, writers of 
 pure English, then, indeed, I should join in deploring 
 his judgment. As it is, I listen to his remarks on Mr. 
 Chesterton as I should hear his opinions of crab-soup. 
 Coming to his views upon religion and upon Chris- 
 tianity, I find myself not so much hostile to Mr. Pound 
 as bewildered by him; and yet not bewildered to the de- 
 gree of much curiosity. Certain critical views of 
 religion are stimulating. Nietzsche's, for example, 
 or Huxley's, or W. K. Clifford's, or even Frazer's. 
 You feel they come from minds serious enough to take 
 religion seriously, and that they are expressive rather 
 of impatience with the superficiality of current religion 
 than of hostility to religion itself. Nietzsche and the 
 rest, in fact, were not critical of religion and of Chris- 
 tianity, because they were themselves indifferent to 
 religion, but because they were too intensely concerned 
 with the religious problem to accept the popular so- 
 lutions. Mr. Pound, on the other hand, does not 
 appear to me to be a serious thinker on the subject. 
 He dismisses the current popular solutions not only 
 as if they were, as they mostly are, superficial and ab- 
 surd, but as if the problems of conscience, the soul, 
 sin, and of salvation, to which these solutions are trial 
 replies, were non-existent or trivial. It is his indif- 
 ference to the reality of the problems, and not his
 
 Mr. Pound, Caricaturist 45 
 
 criticism of the popular solutions, that keeps my mind 
 at a distance from Mr. Pound's when he is writing on 
 religion. He does not so much as even irritate me, 
 he simply leaves me as indifferent to his opinions as 
 he is himself. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 Mr. Pound, Caricaturist 
 
 Mr. Ezra Pound comes in for it again as he always 
 does. His idiosyncrasies are the enemies of his per- 
 sonality, and they will always, unless he can amend 
 them, militate against both his work and his success. 
 Mr. Pound appears to love to give his readers the im- 
 pression that he is no end of a fire-eater, and that he 
 is a charlatan of the first-water, setting up to lecture 
 better men on the virtues he himself has never culti- 
 vated. It is an absolutely incorrect picture, an ex- 
 ceedingly bad self-portrait, a malicious caricature of 
 himself. A psycho-analyst would attribute it all to 
 "compensation," to an attempt on the part of Mr. 
 Pound to disguise his qualities as defects. In brief, 
 Mr. Pound has not the courage of his virtues. "No 
 one," says Mr. Hartley in the Little Review, "admires 
 Ezra Pound more than I do ... but it is his celestial 
 sneer I admire." A sneer, celestial or mundane, is, 
 however, the last gesture of which Mr. Pound is capa- 
 ble. If. anything, he is too benignant, too enthusias- 
 tic, too anxious to find excuse for admiration. 
 
 * *
 
 46 Readers and Writers 
 
 The Admirable Victorians 
 
 I am prepared to apologize if I have ever used 
 "Victorian" in a derogatory sense. But I know I have 
 not. I have too deep a respect for the Victorian char- 
 acter ever to make light of it, and especially for my 
 own generation, that can afford to laugh at so little. 
 Mr. Strachey's "brilliant" essays, therefore, leave me 
 laughing at him rather than with him. One is com- 
 pelled to take him personally, and to turn the tables 
 upon Mr. Strachey with the argumentum ad hominem. 
 How do you compare with the people you write about? 
 For it is the peculiarity of the Victorians our grand- 
 fathers and great-grandfathers that whatever we 
 may feel about them in our current opinions, some one 
 has only to sneer at them to provoke us to their de- 
 fence; and what better defence can they ask than to 
 be compared, man for man, with their critics? As 
 a set-off to the "brilliant" essays of Mr. Strachey 
 how easy it is to be brilliant nowadays! I have re- 
 cently read, on the loan of his great-grandson, the pri- 
 vately printed personal memoir of Wm. Mattingly 
 Soundy, who died in 1862, at the full age of 96. For 
 24 years he was a member of his local Congregational 
 church, and for 46 years he was deacon. During 
 nearly the whole of that time he never missed a meet- 
 ing, Sunday or week-day, and was never known to be 
 late, though he lived two miles from the church. It 
 is the round of a machine, you may say, and there is no
 
 French Clarte 47 
 
 wonder that the age was mechanical. But I think of 
 the passionate mainspring that kept a "machine" going 
 for so long without a psychological breakdown. What 
 an intensity it must have had! What a character! 
 If to love it is impossible, it is impossible not to ad- 
 mire it; and since we truly live by admiration, hope 
 and love, it is something for the Victorians that they 
 can still fill us with admiration. My own generation 
 (now past as a force) has provided the soul of the 
 world with nothing so fine. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 French Clarte 
 
 M. Vannier's La Clarte Franqaise does not throw 
 much light upon the mysteries of French lucidity. He 
 accepts as self-evident Rivarol's axiom that "what is 
 not clear is not French" surely worthy to be the 
 national device of France; and he analyses with ad- 
 mirable humour a considerable number of examples of 
 "clarte," and the want of it. But the mystery of lucid- 
 ity remains a mystery still. Flaubert's practice of 
 reading his compositions aloud puts us on the most 
 promising scent, for it is certain that the French 
 "clarte" is eminently readable aloud and in company. 
 A great deal of our own literature is meant for the 
 eye and not for the ear, for the study and not for the 
 salon, with the consequence that at its best it is the 
 grand style simple, but at its worst shocking. Written
 
 48 Readers and Writers 
 
 for the ear, and meant to be read in company, French 
 literature is never grand, but neither is it ever silly. 
 Its range is society, while ours is solitude. 
 
 * * 
 
 When Shall We Translate? 
 
 There is nothing particularly "masterly" from the 
 modern English point of view in Hobbes's translation 
 of Pericles's Funeral Oration. His period of English 
 prose appears to have been ill-adapted for the transla- 
 tion of the Greek idiom of the time of Pericles. To 
 the usual cautions against translations in general, we 
 ought to add the caution against translations made in 
 dissimilar epochs. It is not at any time in the history 
 of a language that a translation from a foreign lan- 
 guage can safely be undertaken. In all probability, 
 indeed, the proper period for translation is no longer 
 in point of time, than the period within which the 
 original itself was written. If the Periclean Age 
 lasted, let us say, fifty years, it is within a period in 
 English history of the same length that an adequate 
 translation can be made. Once let that period go by, 
 and a perfect translation will be for ever impossible. 
 And equally the result will be a failure, if the transla- 
 tion is attempted before its time has come. I do not 
 think that the Hobbesian period of English was in 
 key with the period of Periclean Greek; nor, again, do 
 I think that our period for perfect translation has yet 
 come. A "masterpiece" of translation of Pericles's
 
 When Shall We Translate 49 
 
 Oration is still, in my opinion, to be done. But I am 
 confident that we are approaching the proper period, 
 and in proof of this I would remark on the superiority 
 of Jowett's translation over that of Hobbes. Jowett, 
 as a writer of original English, nobody, I think, would 
 compare with Hobbes of Malmesbury. Hobbes was 
 a great pioneer, a creator of language; Jowett was 
 only a good writer. Nevertheless, the idiom in 
 which Jowett wrote, was more nearly perfect (that is, 
 fully developed) English than the idiom in which 
 Hobbes wrote. And since, in point of development, 
 the correspondence between Periclean Greek and 
 Jowett's English, is closer than the correspondence 
 between Periclean Greek and Hobbes's English, 
 Jowett's translation is nearer the original than 
 Hobbes's. 
 
 It would be a pleasant exercise in style to criticize 
 Jowett's translation, and a still more profitable exer- 
 cise to amend it. To a mere student of comparative 
 values in Periclean Greek and idiomatic English, some 
 of the errors in Jowett's translation are obvious. 
 Such a student needs not to refer with the scholar's 
 precision to the original Greek to be able, with the ap- 
 proval of all men of taste, to pronounce that such and 
 such a phrase or word is most certainly not what may 
 be called Periclean English. It stands to the totality 
 of reason that it is not so. We may be certain, for 
 instance, that Pericles, were he delivering his Oration 
 in English, with all the taste and training he possessed 
 as a Greek of his age, would never have employed 
 such phrases as these: "commended the law-giver,"
 
 50 Readers and Writers 
 
 "a worthy thing," "burial to the dead," "reputation 
 . . . imperilled on ... the eloquence," "who knows 
 the facts," "suspect exaggeration." Pericles, we can- 
 not but suppose, both from the man and his age, spoke 
 with studied simplicity, that is to say, with perfect 
 naturalness. The words and phrases he used were in 
 all probability the most ordinary to the ear of the 
 Athenian, and well within the limits of serious conver- 
 sation. But such phrases as I have mentioned are not 
 of the same English character; they are written, not 
 spoken phrases, and approximate more to a leading 
 commemorative article in The Times than to a speech 
 we should all regard as excellent. It would be interest- 
 ing to have Lord Rosebery's version of Pericles' speech, 
 or even Mr. Asquith's. Both, it is probable, would be 
 nearer the original than Jowett's, though still some 
 distance off perfection. In another fifty years per- 
 fection will be reached. 
 
 *** 
 
 Nature in Mind 
 
 The Quest contains an article by Mr. G. R. S. Mead, 
 in which he suggests and, perhaps, rather more than 
 suggests an affinity, if not an identity, between the 
 "laws" of nature and the "laws" of mind. Ever since 
 I read the following sentence in Coleridge's Biographia 
 Liter aria: "The highest perception of natural philos- 
 ophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all 
 the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect,"
 
 Nature in Mind 51 
 
 it has been at the back of my mind as an aim to keep 
 before philosophy. Whether or not there is a drum- 
 mer in every age with whom the active thinkers keep 
 in step, even without being aware of the fact, I can 
 only say that more and more evidence of this tendency 
 of thought is coming to light. Boutroux's Contingency 
 of the Laws of Nature may be said to have most ex- 
 plicitly attempted the sublimation or, dare we say, 
 the humanization? of the natural laws; but Bou- 
 troux is only one of many philosophers working in the 
 same direction. Other areas of study than that of 
 "pure" philosophy, seem to have yielded, or to be 
 yielding, the same result. Mr. Mead quotes, for in- 
 stance, some recent studies of Animism to show that 
 Animism, which, together with Anthropomorphism, we 
 used to dismiss as merely a primitive mode of thought, 
 may, after all, prove to contain a truth, the truth, 
 namely, that Nature is living and intelligent, and, on 
 that account, not so far from human nature as we had 
 come to imagine. "The more we penetrate Matter," 
 says Mr. Mead, "the more akin to Mind we find it to 
 be." The world is a creation of mind; and the more 
 either of the world or of mind we understand the more 
 we understand of both. It is a thrilling idea, the 
 conception of the world of nature as being the exter- 
 nalization of an intelligence akin to our own. At the 
 same time, it is, like all thrilling ideas, associated with 
 considerable danger. The "superstitions" connected 
 with it are perhaps best left under the shadow that 
 has been cast upon them. 
 
 * 
 
 * *
 
 52 Readers and Writers 
 
 Mr. Clive Bell's Pot 
 
 Mr. Clive Bell cannot escape the charge of literary 
 insolence by giving to his collection of essays the dep- 
 recatory name of Pot Boilers. That the articles he 
 has reprinted were designed to boil Mr. Clive Bell's 
 pot, and did, in fact, keep it simmering, may be true 
 enough; for the Athenceum, in which most of them 
 appeared, was an eclectic journal with a surprising 
 taste for the bad as well as for the good. Mr. Clive 
 Bell's modesty, however, is titular only, for not merely 
 has he published these ashes of his yesterday's fire, 
 but he imagines them to be still ablaze. "It charms 
 me," he says, "to notice as I read these essays, with 
 what care and conscience they are done. ... I seem 
 consistently to have cared much for four things Art, 
 Truth, Liberty, and Peace." These are things which 
 a more modest man would have left his biographer 
 and eulogist to say of him; and even then not even 
 friendship would have made them true. To Art and 
 Truth, there are, of course, a good many references 
 in Mr. Clive Bell's essays, but the mere mention of 
 these names ought not to be regarded as an evidence 
 of care for the things themselves. Cannot the names 
 of Art and Truth be also taken in vain? In the two 
 concluding essays of the book are to be found most 
 clearly Mr. Clive Bell's conception of Art. It is in- 
 distinguishable from what may be called the Bohemian 
 conception. Art is not moral, art is not useful, art is 
 not a relative fact; it is an absolute to which all these 
 other things are relative. The artist, again, is not a
 
 Mr. Clive Bell's Pot 53 
 
 "practical" person, and it is no use expecting of him 
 an interest in the non-artistic affairs of the world. The 
 war, for instance? It is only a means to art, and what 
 should be said of artists who abandon the end to oc- 
 cupy themselves with the means? 
 
 But this Bohemian and superior attitude is con- 
 sistent apparently with some very mundane bitterness. 
 Mr. Clive Bell does not appreciate the war, which ap- 
 pears to have put him considerably out, in spite of his 
 Kensington Olympianism. He is shocked at hearing 
 that "this is no time for art." But, on the other hand, 
 he does not appear to be able to escape from the war. 
 The penultimate essay is about Art and the War, and 
 the first essay is a palinode for the state of affairs to 
 which the war put an end. According to Mr. Clive 
 Bell, the world before the war was in a most promis- 
 ing condition of renaissance of aesthetic renaissance. 
 "Our governing classes," he says, "were drifting out 
 of barbarism. . . . 'Society' was becoming open- 
 minded, tired of being merely decent, and was begin- 
 ning to prefer the 'clever' to the 'good.' ' But with 
 the war all this was interrupted probably never to 
 be resumed; for what is the use of attempting to estab- 
 lish an aesthetic culture upon the state of poverty which 
 will certainly ensue after the war? Poverty and art, 
 he as nearly as possible says, are incompatible; it is 
 only by means of wealth, wealth in superabundance, 
 that art is possible. And since war is destructive of 
 wealth, "war has ruined our little patch of civility" 
 without bringing us anything in exchange for it. The 
 Bohemian view of art is own brother to the Sardana-
 
 54 Readers and Writers 
 
 palian view of culture in general; it presupposes great 
 wealth, while denying that art is a luxury. Art is not 
 a luxury or an elegant amenity added to life, says Mr. 
 Clive Bell. At the same time, it is only when Society 
 is wealthy that art can flourish. The contradiction is 
 obvious, and it pervades Mr. Clive Bell's work. It 
 is not worth dwelling on a moment. 
 
 * 
 
 The Criticism of Poets 
 
 Professor Rudmose-Brown, the author of French 
 Literary Studies, is under the fatal illusion that it is 
 necessary (or, at any rate, proper), to write about 
 poetry poetically; and his comments are too often in 
 this style: "The illimitable night of his obscurity is 
 strewn with innumerable stars." But it is a style which 
 is not only repellent in itself, but doubly repellent from 
 its association with an exposition of poetry. Dr. 
 Johnson has written about poetry in the proper style. 
 He was respectful in the very distance his prose kept 
 from poetic imagery. Cold and detached he may 
 have seemed to be, but all good criticism, comment, 
 and even appreciation labour of necessity under this 
 charge. What would be said of a judge who demon- 
 strated the emotions of the persons before him; or, 
 equally, of a judge who did not feel them? To be a 
 critic or judge of poetry, or of any art, requires, in 
 the first instance, an intense sympathetic power; but, 
 in the second instance, a powerful self-restraint in ex-
 
 "John E glint on" 55 
 
 pression, manifested in poetical criticism, I should say, 
 by a prose style free from the smallest suggestion of 
 poetry. 
 
 * * 
 
 "John Eglinton." 
 
 Mr. "John Eglinton" has been called "the Irish 
 Emerson"; but the description of the "Irish Thoreau" 
 would fit him much better. He is transcendental, like 
 Emerson, but after a different, and a less high-falutin' 
 manner the manner of transcendental common sense. 
 On the other hand, he shares with Thoreau the quality 
 of passionate independence, and what may be called 
 adventurous solitude. "John Eglinton" names his es- 
 says Anglo-Irish, and they answer even more accurately 
 to the description than the compound implies; for 
 they are essays upon the hyphen that joins them. Ex- 
 actly as Thoreau was most completely at home in no 
 other man's land between the world and the wood, 
 "John Eglinton" is at his easiest somewhere between 
 England and Ireland. He is not Irish, nor is he 
 English. He is not Anglo-Irish either ; but, once more, 
 the hyphen between them. It is this sense of difference 
 from both elements that makes of "John Eglinton" 
 at once so attractive, so significant, and so illuminating 
 a writer and thinker. Being between two worlds, 
 and with a foot in each, he understands each world 
 in a double sense, from within and from without. To 
 each in turn he can be both interpreter and critic; and
 
 56 Readers and Writers 
 
 in these delightful essays he is to be found alternately 
 defending and attacking each of the national elements 
 between which his perch is placed. "Candid friend" 
 would, perhaps, be a fair description of his attitude 
 towards both nations, if the phrase were not associated 
 with the disagreeable. But since "John Eglinton" is 
 anything but acid in his comments, and writes of both 
 nations in a spirit of mingled admiration and judgment, 
 I can think of nothing better at the moment than my 
 image of the hyphen. He is alone between two 
 worlds, friendly but critical equally of both. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 Irish Humour 
 
 Mr. Stephen Gwynn's Irish Books and Irish People 
 contains an essay on "Irish Humour." Mr. Gwynn 
 is severe but just. He refers to the "damning effects" 
 of the "easy fluency of wit" and the "careless spon- 
 taneity of laughter" which characterize Irish humour. 
 It would be terrible, however, to have to admit that 
 these divine qualities are "defects" in the accepted 
 sense of qualities manques; and the "defect" arises, I 
 think, not from the presence of these qualities in the 
 Irish genius, but from the absence of the counter- 
 balancing qualities of weight, high seriousness, and 
 good judgment. It would almost seem that the "elder 
 gods" departed from Ireland centuries ago, leaving in 
 sole possession the "younger gods" of irresponsible 
 and incontinent laughter. As Mr. Gwynn says, "Irish
 
 The Literary Drama of Ireland 57 
 
 humour makes you laugh"; it always takes one by sur- 
 prise. But the laughter has no echoes in the deeper 
 levels of consciousness ; it rings true but shallow. Dog- 
 matism on racial psychology is dangerous, and I have 
 no wish to exacerbate feelings, already too sore; but, 
 as a literary critic, I venture my judgment that the 
 Irish genius, as manifested in literature during the last 
 century, is wanting in the solidity that comes only from 
 hard work. Every Irishman, speaking roughly, is a 
 born genius; but few Irishmen complete their birth by 
 "making" themselves. Wit comes to them too easily 
 to be anything but a tempting line of least resistance. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 The Literary Drama of Ireland 
 
 While exceedingly painstaking, thorough, and well- 
 documented, Mr. Boyd's essay on The Contemporary 
 Drama of Ireland cannot be said to add much value to 
 the value of a record. Unlike his recent volume of 
 Appreciations and Depreciations, his present work 
 carefully, and I should almost say, timidly, avoids 
 coming to any large and personal conclusions, save in 
 the case, perhaps, of the plays of Mr. St. John Ervine. 
 The reason for this diffidence I take to be rather an 
 apprehension of what he might discover where his real 
 conclusions might prove to be than any inability to 
 arrive at them; for I cannot think that upon any other 
 ground so usually decisive a mind would have been 
 content to leave his readers in the dark. But what
 
 58 Readers and Writers 
 
 then is it that Mr. Boyd may conceivably have feared 
 to discover? It is obvious enough, I think, to an out- 
 sider to one, I mean, who does not belong to the 
 coterie that calls itself the Irish literary movement; 
 it is that the contemporary drama of Ireland is the 
 history of a rapid decline. 
 
 Mr. Boyd is, of course, honest with his facts, and 
 the material is thus before us for a judgment. He 
 does not conceal from us, for instance, the illuminating 
 circumstances that the Irish dramatic movement actu- 
 ally began under the impulse of the Continental move- 
 ment, and that its earliest authors were desirous, not 
 so much of creating an Irish drama, as of creating a 
 drama for Ireland. Mr. Edward Martyn, who was 
 undoubtedly the chief pioneer, was himself a follower 
 of Ibsen and aimed at writing and producing what may 
 be called Ibsen plays. But this praiseworthy attempt 
 to reintroduce the world into Ireland was defeated by 
 the apparently incorrigible tendency of the native Irish 
 mind to reduce the world to the size of Dublin. In 
 rather less than two years, during which time some six 
 or seven plays were produced, the Irish Literary 
 Theatre, founded by Martyn and Yeats, came to an 
 end, to have its place taken almost immediately by the 
 Irish National Theatre, which was formed about the 
 groups of Irish players calling themselves the 
 Irish National Drama Society. But what has been 
 the consequence of this contraction of aim and of 
 interest? That plays of some value as folk-drama 
 have resulted from it nobody would deny; but equally 
 nobody would maintain that the world has been en-
 
 Mr. Standish O'Grady 59 
 
 riched by it in its dramatic literature. Ireland, in 
 other words, has accepted a gift from the world with- 
 out returning it; her literary coterie has taken the in- 
 spiration of the Continent and converted it to a purely 
 nationalist use. 
 
 Even against this there would be nothing to be said 
 if it succeeded; but fortunately for the world-principle 
 it can be shown that such a procedure ends in sterility. 
 As the reader turns over the pages of Mr. Boyd's 
 faithful record of the course of the drama in Ireland, 
 he cannot but be aware of a gradual obscuration. One 
 by one the lamps lit by Martyn, Moore, and others, 
 which illuminate the earlier pages, go out, leaving the 
 reader in the later pages groping his way through 
 petty controversies acid with personality, and through 
 an interminable undergrowth of sickly and stunted 
 productions about which even Mr. Boyd grows impa- 
 tient. The vision splendid with which the record be- 
 gins dies down to a twilight, to a darkness, and finally 
 to black night. The world has once more been shut 
 out. 
 
 * 
 
 Mr. Standish O'Grady 
 
 Mr. Standish O'Grady's The Flight of the Eagle is 
 not a romance in the ordinary sense; it is not an in- 
 vented story, but an actual historical episode treated 
 romantically. The period is Elizabethan, and the 
 story turns mainly on the careers of Sir William
 
 60 Readers and Writers 
 
 Parrett, an English "Lord-Lieutenant" of Ireland, 
 who appears to have suffered the usual fate of a pop- 
 ular English Governor, and Red Hugh O'Donnell or 
 Hue Roe of Tir-Connall, which is now Donegal. If 
 acquaintance with Irish history is ever to be made by 
 English readers, the means must be romances of this 
 kind. History proper is, as a rule, carefully ignored 
 by the average reader, who must therefore have facts, 
 if he is ever to have them, presented in the form of 
 a story. It is only by this means, and thanks to Scott 
 in the first instance, that the history of Scotland has 
 penetrated in any degree beyond the border. Only 
 by this means, again, have various countries and nations 
 been brought home to the intellectually idle English 
 reader by writers like Kipling. Both as a story-writer 
 and as the first and greatest of the Irish historians 
 of Ireland, Mr. Standish O'Grady is qualified to do 
 for Ireland what Scott after his own fashion has done 
 for Scotland, namely, bring his country into the his- 
 toric consciousness of the world. 
 
 * * 
 
 Mr. Standish O'Grady, Enchanter 
 
 The Selected Essays and Passages from Standish 
 O'Grady isi a priceless anthology of this neglected 
 author. Very few people in England realize that Mr. 
 Standish O'Grady is more than any other Irishman 
 the rediscoverer of ancient and, in consequence, the
 
 Mr. Standish O'Grady, Enchanter 61 
 
 creator of modern Ireland. His very first work on 
 the Heroic Period of Irish history appeared in 1878; 
 it was published at his own expense, and had a small 
 and a slow sale; but today it is the inspiration of the 
 Celtic revival. "Legends," says Mr. O'Grady, "are 
 the kind of history which a nation desires to possess.'* 
 For the same reason, legends are the kind of history 
 which a nation tends to produce. I am not certain 
 that it would not have been well to leave the legends 
 of ancient Ireland in their dust and oblivion. They 
 go back to remote periods in time, and seem, even then, 
 to echo still earlier ages. It is possible, for instance, 
 that Ireland was a nation over four thousand years 
 ago. Some contend that a Buddhist civilization pre- 
 ceded the Christian. Characteristically, it has been 
 thought that Ireland supported Carthage against 
 Rome. But what is the present value of these revivals 
 of infantile memories? They cannot be realized to- 
 day, and to dwell upon them is to run the risk of a 
 psychic regression from waking to dreaming. "En- 
 chantment," Mr. O'Grady tells us, "is a fact in nature." 
 So potent a charm as himself has created may have 
 been responsible who dare say? for the recall to 
 present-day Irish consciousness, of early historic ex- 
 perience that were best forgotten. Is it not a fact 
 that the mood of Ireland today is between the legend- 
 ary and the dreaming? Is not the "ideal" Irishman 
 today Cuculain of Dundalk talking and acting in his 
 sleep? It is a question for psycho-analysis. 
 
 * *
 
 62 Readers and Writers 
 
 Les Sentiments de Julien Benda 
 
 I thought for some time of translating Les Senti- 
 ments de Critias, recently published in Paris by M. 
 Julien Benda. The style is excellent, and M. Benda 
 has the gifts of epigram and irony; but, upon second 
 thoughts, the inappositeness of such a style to the situ- 
 ation in which we find ourselves forbade me. As M. 
 Benda himself says, "there is no elegance about the 
 war." And success in writing about it elegantly must 
 needs, therefore, be a literary failure. Critias's "senti- 
 ments" moreover, appear, when compared with the 
 real sentiments evoked by the contemplation of the 
 war, a little literary. He is like a sadder and a wiser 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw flickering epigrammatically over 
 the carnage. Impeccable as his opinions usually are, 
 they are expressed too lightly to be impressive, and 
 too carefully to be regarded as wholly natural. And 
 that M. Benda can do no other is evident in his Open 
 Letter to M. Romain Rolland, whom he considers a 
 prig. If he had been capable of impassioned rhetoric 
 it is in this address that he would have shown his skill, 
 for the subject is to his liking, and the material for 
 an indictment is ample. But the most striking sentence 
 he achieves is that "We asked for judgment and you 
 gave us a sermon." It is pretty, but it is "art." 
 
 * 
 
 * *
 
 Convalescence After Newspaper 63 
 Convalescence After Newspaper 
 
 Matthew Arnold used to say that to get his feet 
 wet spoiled his style for days. But there is a far worse 
 enemy of style than natural damp ; it is too much news- 
 paper-reading. Too much newspaper not only spoils 
 one's style, it takes off the edge of one's taste, so that 
 I know not what grindstones are necessary to put it 
 on again. Indulgent readers, I have been compelled 
 for some weeks to read too much newspaper, with the 
 consequence that at the end of my task I was not only 
 certain that my little of style was gone, but I was in- 
 different in my taste. The explanation of the reductio 
 ad absurdum to which an overdose of newspaper leads 
 is to be found, I think, in the uniformity mass and 
 collectivity of newspaper literature. The writing that 
 fills the Press is neither individual nor does it aim at 
 individuality. If a citizen's meeting, a jury, or the 
 House of Commons were to perform the feat of mak- 
 ing its voice heard, the style of their oracles would be 
 perfect newspaper. But literature, I need not say, is 
 not made after this fashion; nor is it inspired by such 
 performances. Literature, like all art, is above every- 
 thing, individual expression. Gardez-vous! I do not 
 mean that literature is a personal expression of the per- 
 sonal opinion of the writer. On the contrary, it is 
 the role of newspaper to give common expression to 
 personal opinions, but it is the function of literature to 
 give personal expression to common opinions. And 
 since it is only personal expression that provokes and
 
 64 Readers and Writers 
 
 inspires personal expression, from newspapers one can 
 derive no stimulus to literature, but only the opposite, 
 a disrelish and a distaste. 
 
 How to recover one's health after newspaper poi- 
 soning is a problem. To plunge back forthwith into 
 books was for me an impossibility. It was necessary 
 to begin again from the very beginning and gradually 
 to accustom myself to the taste for literature again. 
 Re-arranging my books, and throwing away the cer- 
 tainly-done with was, I found, as useful a preliminary 
 tonic as any other I could devise. In particular there 
 is a satisfaction in throwing out books which makes 
 this medicine as pleasant as it is tonic. It visibly 
 reduces the amount left to be read; there is then not 
 so much on one's plate that the appetite revolts at the 
 prospect. And who can throw away a book without 
 glancing into it to make sure that it will never again 
 be wanted? Picking and tasting in this indeliberate 
 way, the invalid appetite is half coaxed to sit up and 
 take proper nourishment. This destruction and re- 
 construction I certainly found recovering, and I can, 
 therefore, commend them to be included in the phar- 
 macopaeias. 
 
 Another nourishing exercise when you are in this 
 state is the overhauling of your accumulations of 
 memoranda, cuttings and note-books. I have sat for 
 hours during the last few days, like a beaver unbuild- 
 ing its dam, turning out with a view to destroying their 
 contents, drawer after drawer and shelf upon shelf. 
 It is fatal to set about the operation with any tender- 
 ness. Your aim must be to destroy everything which
 
 Convalescence After Newspaper 65 
 
 does not command you to spare it. The tragic reck- 
 lessness of the procedure is the virtue of the medicine. 
 As a matter of fact there is little or nothing now left 
 in my drawers for future use. Nearly all my paper- 
 boats have been burned, including some three-decked 
 galleons which were originally designed to bring me 
 fame. No matter; the Rubicon is crossed, and to be 
 on the other side of newspaper with no more than a 
 thin portfolio of notes is to have escaped cheaply. 
 
 For the humour of it, however, I will record a care- 
 ful exception. It appears, after all, that I was not so 
 mad as I seemed. Perchance newspaper, being only 
 a feigned literature, induces only a feigned madness. 
 Be it as it may. I find that my current note-book, 
 though as handy and tempting to be destroyed as any 
 other, was nevertheless destroyed only after the cream 
 of it had been whipped into the permanent book which 
 I have kept through many rages for a good many years. 
 The extracts are here before me as I write in conva- 
 lescence. It is amusing to me to observe, moreover, 
 that their cream is not very rich. Much better has 
 gone into the bonfire. Why, then, did I save these 
 and sacrifice those? Look at a few of them. "No- 
 body's anything always" is there aught irrecoverable 
 in that to have compelled me to spare it? "Lots of 
 window, but no warehouse" a remark, I fancy, in- 
 tended to hit somebody or other very hard indeed 
 but does it? Is any of the present company fitted 
 with a cap? "The judgment of the world is good, 
 but few can put it into words." That is a premoni- 
 tory symptom, you will observe, of a remark made a
 
 66 Readers and Writers 
 
 few lines above to the effect that literature is a per- 
 sonal expression of a common opinion or judgment. 
 I have plainly remembered it. Apropos of the New 
 Age, I must have told somebody, and stolen home to 
 write it down, that its career is that of a rocking-horse, 
 all ups and downs but never any getting forward. It 
 is too true to be wholly amusing; let me horse-laugh 
 at it and pass it on. "A simple style is like sleep, it 
 will not come by effort." Not altogether true, but true 
 enough. The rest are not much worse or better, and 
 the puzzle is to explain why those should be taken and 
 these left. 
 
 Again apropos, may a physician who has healed him- 
 self offer this piece of advice? Read your own note- 
 books often. I have known some people who have a 
 library of note-books worth a dukedom, who never 
 once looked into them after having filled them. That 
 is collecting mania pure and simple. From another 
 offensive angle what a confession of inferior taste is 
 made in preferring the note-books of others to one's 
 own. A little more self-respect in this matter is clearly 
 necessary if your conversation is to be personal at all; 
 for in all probability the references and quotations you 
 make without the authority of your own collection are 
 hackneyed. They are the reach-me-downs of every 
 encyclopaedia. Is this the reason that the vast ma- 
 jority of current quotations are as worn as they are; 
 that a constant reader, forewarned of the subject about 
 to be dealt with, is usually forearmed against the tags 
 he will find employed in it? In any case, the advice 
 I have just given is the corrective of this depressing
 
 Nature in English Literature 67 
 
 phenomenon of modern writing. You have only to 
 trade in your own note-books to be, and to give the 
 air of being, truly original. 
 
 Browsing is a rather more advanced regimen for 
 convalescence than the re-arrangement of books. The 
 latter can be performed without the smallest taste for 
 reading. It is a matter of sizing them up, and any 
 bookseller's apprentice can do it. But browsing means 
 dipping into the contents here and there; it is both a 
 symptom of returning health and a means to it. In 
 the last few days I must have nibbled in a hundred dif- 
 ferent pastures, chiefly, I think, in the pastures of 
 books about books. De Quincey, Matthew Arnold, 
 Bagehot, Macaulay, Johnson, etc. what meadows, 
 what lush grass, what feed! After all, one begins to 
 say, literature cannot be unsatisfying that fed such bulls 
 and that so plumped their minds. It cannot be only 
 a variety of newspaper. Thus a new link with health 
 is established, and one becomes able to take one's 
 books again. Here I should end, but that a last ob- 
 servation in the form of a question occurs to me. Is 
 not or can not a taste for literature be acquired by the 
 same means by which it can be re-acquired? Are not 
 the child and the invalid similar? In that case the 
 foregoing directions may be not altogether useless. 
 
 * * 
 
 Nature in English Literature 
 
 In observation of Nature, English literature excels 
 all others. But that is by no means to say that every
 
 68 Readers and Writers 
 
 English writer upon Nature is good. The astonishing 
 thing is that contemporary with such masters of both 
 Nature-observation and literary expression as to 
 name but two Mr. W. H. Hudson and Mr. Warde 
 Fowler (and half a dozen others could be named in 
 the same street) there should still be so many writers 
 insensible enough to perfection to write about Nature 
 when they have little to say and few gifts of expression. 
 You would think that having seen the sun they would 
 not light a candle, or that if they did, nobody would 
 look at it. But the truth is that not only are many 
 candles lit, but they are all much admired much 
 more, indeed, than the suns themselves. There may 
 be a good reason for it, namely, that the reading public 
 is so much in love with Nature-writing that the best 
 is not good enough for us. Or, again, everybody 
 living in the country and having a pen at all, wishes to 
 write his own Nature-observations as everybody wishes 
 to write his own love-lyrics, regardless of the fact that 
 the best love-lyrics have already been written. It 
 may be so; but the admission appears to me to be over- 
 generous. 
 
 Mr. Percy W. D. Izzard has published in book 
 form his "Year of Country Days" under the general 
 title of Homeland. The series has appeared in the 
 Dally Mail, where it appears to have given pleasure 
 to a considerable number of readers. I do not doubt 
 the fact. Even the least suggestion of Nature would 
 be a relief in the stuffy and bawling atmosphere of the 
 Daily Mail. But in the form of a book, in which three 
 hundred and sixty-five of them appear, they are almost
 
 S. S. S. 69 
 
 intolerable. Their value lay in their contrast to the 
 surrounding columns of the journal in which they were 
 published. Take away that background and let them 
 stand by themselves, and they are seen to be what they 
 are pale, anaemic, and not very knowledgeable com- 
 monplace observations. Nothing really exciting ap- 
 pears to have happened in the country under Mr. 
 Izzard's observation. When reading Jefferies or Hud- 
 son or Warde Fowler or Selous, you are made to feel, 
 in a simple walk along a hedgerow, that something 
 dramatic is afoot. Discovery is in the air. But Mr. 
 Izzard is never fortunate, and all he has to record are 
 the common places of the country-side, which I could 
 as easily reconstruct from a calendar as gather from 
 his text, "The silver clouds are heaped together in 
 billowy masses that sail with deeps of Italian blue 
 between." How pretty! But the delight is wanting. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 S. S. S. 
 
 The Simplified Spelling Society has broken loose 
 from obscurity again in the issue of a new pamphlet, 
 called Breaking the Spell; an Appeal to Common Sense. 
 A preface contributed by Dr. Macan rehearses all the 
 old "reasons" for simplifying our spelling with as little 
 attention as ever to the real reasons against it. 
 "Spelling," we are told, "should be the simplest of 
 all arts." It is so in Spanish, in Italian, in Welsh, 
 and in Dutch, and it was so in Greek and Latin. Why
 
 yo Readers and Writers 
 
 not, therefore, in English? The reasoning, however, 
 is ridiculous, for it assumes that it was by some delib- 
 erate and self-conscious design that these languages 
 came to be spelled phonetically, and hence, that we 
 have only to follow them faithfully (and the advice 
 of the S. S. S.) in order to place our language in a 
 similar state. Language, however, is not a product 
 of logic and science, but of art and taste. It is de- 
 termined not by reason alone, but by the totality of 
 our judgment, in which many other factors than reason 
 are included. To ask us to "reform" our spelling in 
 order to make it "reasonable" is to ask us to forgo the 
 satisfaction of every intellectual taste, save that of 
 logic; a procedure that would not only "reform" our 
 spelling, but all literature into the bargain. It is pre- 
 tended that the adoption of simplified spelling would 
 have, at worst, only a passing effect upon the well-being 
 of literature. If, for example, all the English classics 
 were re-spelled in conformity with phonetic rules, and 
 their use made general, very soon, we are told, we 
 should forget their original idiosyncrasies, and love 
 them in their new spelling as much as ever. But 
 people who argue in this way must have been blinded 
 in their taste in their pursuit of rationalistic uniformity. 
 Literature employs words not for their rational mean- 
 ing alone, not even for their sound alone, but for their 
 combined qualities of meaning, sound, sight, associa- 
 tion, history, and a score of other attributes. By re- 
 ducing words to a rational rule of phonetic spelling, 
 more than half of these qualities would be entirely, 
 or almost entirely, eliminated. A re-spelled Shake-
 
 Sterne Criticism 71 
 
 speare, for instance, if it should ever take the place 
 of the present edition, would be a new Shakespeare 
 a Shakespeare translated from the coloured language 
 in which he thought and wrote into a language of logi- 
 cal symbols. An exact analogy as far as any anal- 
 ogy can be exact for the proposal of the S. S. S. would 
 be to propose to abolish the use of colour in pictorial 
 art, and to produce everything in black and white. 
 The colour-blind would, no doubt, be satisfied in the 
 one case, and, in the other, the word-blind would be 
 equally pleased. Fortunately, both proposals have the 
 same chance of success. 
 
 Sterne Criticism 
 
 Everybody knows that Sterne's Sentimental Journey 
 broke off suddenly in the second book at the crisis of a 
 Shandian incident. What everybody does not know 
 I confess I only learnt it myself a few days ago is 
 that Sterne's Editor "Eugenius" not only concluded 
 the incident, but carried on the journey to the extent 
 of another two books. He did this, he informs us, 
 from notes and materials left or communicated to him 
 by Sterne himself, and he is so frank as to say that he 
 has striven to complete the work in the style and man- 
 ner of his late friend. Having a particular admira- 
 tion for the style of Sterne, which, to my mind, is the 
 easiest ever achieved in English, I have now a double 
 resentment against the presumptuous Eugenius. In
 
 72 Readers and Writers 
 
 the first place, I question the man's veracity almost 
 as much as the veracity of Sterne himself is to be ques- 
 tioned in the matter of Sterne's intention of completing 
 his journey. The Journey was a tour de force; it was 
 the result as it were, of a challenge. Sterne had made 
 a bet that he would maintain the reader's interest in a 
 series of the most trivial incidents by his mere manner 
 of writing about them. That he had any other inten- 
 tion than that of showing his power I do not for a 
 moment believe; least of all the suggestion that he had 
 a plan of writing in his mind which required the book 
 to be finished in four sections, four and just four. 
 Eugenius's excuses that he had often discussed the com- 
 pletion of the Journey with Sterne, and had heard from 
 him the "facts, events, and observations," intended 
 to be introduced into the unwritten book, are thus a 
 mere literary device for getting his own work tied to 
 Sterne's kite. Even if Sterne gave him authority for 
 it, I should refuse to believe it, since Sterne may easily 
 have been badgered into consenting; and, in any case, 
 is not necessarily to be believed upon a matter of fact. 
 One's resentment is embittered by the manner in which 
 Eugenius makes the continuation. It is notorious that 
 Sterne never made a statement that could definitely 
 incriminate himself. It was his whole art to leave 
 everything to his readers' imagination, and to put upon 
 them the odium of the obvious interpretation. An ad- 
 mission on his part would have been fatal not only to 
 himself, but to the style and intention of his work, 
 which may be described as skating upon thin ice. 
 Eugenius, however, in spite of all the intimacy which he
 
 Sterne on Love in France 73 
 
 says subsisted between himself and Mr. Sterne, was 
 so far from having appreciated the elementary quality 
 of the Journey that in completing the very incident on 
 which Book Two breaks off, he falls into the blunder 
 of committing Sterne to a "criminal" confession. I 
 need not say what the confession is; it is the obvious 
 deduction to be drawn from the description provided 
 by Sterne himself. And it is precisely on this account 
 that I am certain Sterne would never have made it. 
 
 * 
 * 
 
 Sterne on Love in France 
 
 One of my correspondents must have been reading 
 Sterne at the same time that I was being annoyed by 
 Eugenius, for he has written to remind me of Sterne's 
 opinion of Love as it is understood in France. "The 
 French," wrote Sterne, "have certainly got the credit 
 of understanding more of Love, and making it better 
 than any other nation upon the earth; but for my own 
 part I think them arrant bunglers, and in truth, the 
 worst set of marksmen that ever tried Cupid's pa- 
 tience." My correspondent recalls the fact from the 
 dark backward and abysm of time that in a discussion 
 of Stendhal, I expressed the same opinion; and he 
 has, no doubt, supplied the parallel in order to gratify 
 me. Gratifying it is, in one sense, to find oneself con- 
 firmed in a somewhat novel opinion which, moreover, 
 was thought to be original as well by an observer of 
 the penetration of Sterne. But it is less gratifying
 
 74 Readers and Writers 
 
 when one reflects that Sterne was the last person in 
 the world to have the right to talk about Love at all. 
 What should a genuine as well as a professed senti- 
 mentalist have to say of Love more than that in its 
 practice the French were not sentimental enough for 
 him? But it is not the defect of sentimentality that 
 stamps Love as understood in France with the mark 
 of inferiority, but the presence of too much egoism 
 a fault Sterne would never have observed. 
 
 * * 
 
 English Style 
 
 The same correspondent copies out for me Quincey's 
 "fine analysis of Swift's style," as follows: 
 
 The main qualification for such a style was plain good sense, 
 natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice 
 in the putting together of sentences so as to avoid mechanical 
 awkwardness of construction, but above all, the advantage of a 
 subject such in its nature as instinctively to reject ornament 
 lest it should draw attention from itself. Such subjects are 
 common ; but grand impassioned subjects insist upon a different 
 treatment ; and there it is that the true difficulties of style com- 
 mence, and there it is that your worshipful Master Jonathan 
 would have broken down irrecoverably. 
 
 This "fine analysis" of Swift's style does not ap- 
 pear to me to be anything more than a powerful attack 
 delivered by an apostle of the opposing school. Swift 
 and de Quincey are obviously poles apart in the di- 
 rection of their style, and I have no doubt that I could
 
 English Style 75 
 
 find in Swift as severe an analysis of de Quincey as 
 my correspondent has found in de Quincey of Swift. 
 At bottom the controversy carries us back to the very 
 foundations of European culture. On the whole, 
 Swift followed the Greek tradition exemplified by 
 Demosthenes while de Quincey followed the Latin 
 exemplified by Cicero. There can be no doubt of the 
 school to which Swift belonged; his Drapier's Letters, 
 for instance, were confessedly modelled on Demosthe- 
 nes. Likewise there can be no doubt of the school 
 which de Quincey attended; he learned his style of 
 Cicero. The question, however, is one of taste, by no 
 means a matter of non est disputandum. Which of 
 the two schools of style is capable of the highest ab- 
 solute development; and, above all, which is the most 
 suited to the English language? My mind is fully 
 made up ; I am for the Greek and Demosthenes against 
 the Latin and Cicero. I am for Swift against de Quin- 
 cey; for the simple against the ornate. 
 
 De Quincey appears to me to fall into an almost 
 vulgar error in assuming that the style of plain good 
 sense cultivated by Swift is fit only for commonplace 
 subjects, and that "grand impassioned subjects" de- 
 mand an ornate style. The style of Demosthenes was 
 obviously quite as well fitted to the high subjects of 
 his Discourse on the Crown as to the details for the 
 fitting out of an expedition against Philip. The 
 Apology of Plato is in much the same style, and not 
 even de Quincey would say that the subject was not 
 anything but commonplace. With the majority of 
 English critics, I have a horror of fine writing, and
 
 76 Readers and Writers 
 
 especially about fine things. The proper rule is, in 
 fact, the very reverse of that laid down by de Quincey; 
 it is on no account to write upon "grand impassioned 
 subjects" in a grand impassioned style. After all, as 
 the Greeks understood, there are an infinite number 
 of degrees of simplicity, ranging from the simple col- 
 loquial to the simple grand. The ornate Latin style, 
 with its degrees of ornateness, is, on the other hand, 
 a bastard style. The conclusion seems to be this: 
 that the simple style is capable of anything, even of 
 dealing with "grand impassioned subjects"; whereas 
 the ornate style is only barely tolerable in the most 
 exceptional circumstances. I would sooner trust Swift 
 than de Quincey not to embarrass a reader on a diffi- 
 cult occasion, as, for the same reason, I prefer Shake- 
 speare the Greek to Ben Johnson the Latinist. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 Literary Culs-de-sac 
 
 A cul-de-sac occurs in literary history when a di- 
 rection is taken away from the main highway of the 
 national language and literature; when the stream it 
 represents is not part of the main stream of the tra- 
 ditional language, but a back-water or a side stream. 
 There have been dozens of such private streams in the 
 course of our literary history, and I am not denying 
 for an instant that their final contribution to the main 
 stream has been considerable.
 
 The Decline of Free Intelligence 77 
 The Decline of Free Intelligence 
 
 Pure intelligence I should define as displaying itself 
 in disinterested interest in things; in things, that is to 
 say, of no personal advantage, but only of general, 
 public, or universal importance. Interest (to turn the 
 can in the pan) is the growing end of the mind, and 
 its direction and strength are marked by a motiveless 
 curiosity to know; it reveals itself, while it is still active, 
 as a love of knowledge for its own sake. Later on 
 it often appears that this motiveless love had a motive; 
 in other words, the knowledge acquired under its im- 
 pulse is discovered in the end to "come in handy," and 
 to have been of use. But the process of acquiring this 
 knowledge is for the most part, indeliberate, unaware 
 of any other aim than that of the satisfaction of curi- 
 osity; utility is remote from its mind. This is what 
 I have called disinterested interest, and it is this free 
 intelligence of which it appears to me that there is a 
 diminishing amount in our day. Were it not the case, 
 the fortunes of the really free Press would be much 
 brighter than they are. An organ of free opinion 
 would not need to discover a utilitarian attraction for 
 its free opinions, but would be able to command a sale 
 on its own merits. Such, indeed, is the case in several 
 European countries, notably in France, Italy, and Ger- 
 many. I am told that it is the case also in Bohemia 
 (in which country there is not only no illiterate, but 
 no un-read adult) and in the provinces of Yugo Slavia. 
 In these countries, a journal of opinions can live with-
 
 78 Readers and Writers 
 
 out providing its readers with any commercial or 
 specialist bribe in the way of exclusive utilitarian in- 
 formation; it can live, that is to say, by the sale of its 
 free intelligence. Happy countries in one sense of 
 the word; happy if also tragical; for their existence 
 is not always, at any rate, a paradise for the rich, a hell 
 for the poor, and a purgatory for the able ! 
 
 To what is due this decline amongst us of free in- 
 telligence? There are several explanations possible, 
 though none is wholly satisfying. It can be attributed 
 to the industrialization of our own country, a meta- 
 morphosis of occupation which has been longer in be- 
 ing in England than anywhere else. The economic 
 balance between primary and secondary production has 
 been for a longer period lost in this country than else- 
 where, with the consequence that we have been the first 
 to exhibit the effects of over-industrialization in the 
 loss of the free intelligence associated with primary 
 production. The other nations may be expected to fol- 
 low suit as the same metamorphosis overtakes them. 
 Another explanation is the reaction against the intel- 
 lectualism of the nineteenth century. It is a familiar 
 topic, but it is obvious that if faith in the ultimate use 
 of intelligence is lost, men become cynical in regard to 
 the passion itself. Let us suppose that every love af- 
 fair always and invariably ended in disappointment or 
 disaster. Let us suppose that it became the accepted 
 belief that such would always be the case. Would it 
 not soon become fashionable to nip the first stirrings 
 of love in the bud, and to salt its path whenever its 
 shoots began to appear?* The nineteenth century
 
 The Decline of Free Intelligence 79 
 
 reached its climax in a vast disappointment with sci- 
 ence, with the intellect, with intellectualism. The 
 fifth act of the thrilling drama inaugurated after the 
 French Revolution closed in utter weariness and ennui. 
 It was no wonder that the twentieth century opened in 
 a return to impulse and in a corresponding reaction 
 from intellectuality. That the reaction has gone too 
 far is the very disease we are now trying to diagnose; 
 for only an excessive reaction towards impulse and 
 away from thought can account for the poverty of free 
 intelligence. Sooner or later, the pendulum must be 
 set free again, if not in this country, then in America, 
 or in some of the countries whose rebirth we are now 
 witnessing. It cannot be the will of God that free 
 intelligence should be extinguished from the planet; the 
 world, somehow or other, must be made safe for in- 
 telligence as well as for democracy. 
 
 My last guess at the origin of the phenomenon is the 
 decline of the religious spirit. Religion, I conceive, 
 is the study and practice of perfection, and it is summed 
 up in the text: "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in 
 Heaven is perfect." This impossible and infinite aim 
 includes, as a matter of course, the employment and 
 development of intelligence as one of the most power- 
 ful aids to perfection. Fools, the Indian Scriptures 
 inform us, can enter heaven, but only wise men know 
 how to stay there. And if the perfection we seek is 
 to be lasting and incorruptible, it is certain that an in- 
 finite amount of intelligence will be necessary to its 
 accomplishment. The loss of the belief in the per- 
 fectibility of the human spirit, in the religious duty of
 
 8o Readers and Writers 
 
 perfection, might easily account for the diminution of 
 our regard for one of the chief instruments of perfec- 
 tion, namely, intelligence. Why should we strive to set 
 the crooked straight, since it is not only impossible, 
 but is no duty of ours? And why labour with the in- 
 strumental means when the end is of no value? None 
 of these explanations, however, really satisfies me. 
 
 The free Press is more severely criticized by its 
 readers than the "kept" Press by its clientele. The 
 reason is, no doubt, that in comparison with the "kept" 
 Press it protests its freedom and sets itself up on a 
 pedestal. Every "excuse" is consequently denied to 
 it, and the smallest complaint is enlarged to a grievance. 
 The "kept" Press may be caught in flagrant' self-con- 
 tradiction, in lies, in chicanery of all kinds, in every 
 form of intellectual and other dishonesty it continues 
 to be read and "followed" as if the oracle were 
 infallible. No newspaper in this country has ever died 
 of exposure ; many live by being found out. The free 
 Press, on the other hand, has often for its readers not 
 only the most exigent of critics, but the most contradic- 
 tory. They are not only hard to please (which is a 
 merit) , but their reasons for being pleased, or the re- 
 verse, are bewilderingly various. And, moreover, 
 when they are pleased they are usually silent, and 
 when they are displeased they cease to buy the journal. 
 
 * 
 
 * *
 
 Literary Copyright in America 8 1 
 Literary Copyright in America 
 
 Horace Walpole used to say that the Americans 
 were the only people by whom he would wish to be 
 admired. Let me put the compliment a little differ- 
 ently and say that the Americans are the people among 
 all others whom we would most wish to admire most. 
 Having done so much to command our admiration al- 
 ready, we are not only willing, we are desirous and 
 anxious, that they should leave no amendable fault 
 unamended in themselves. Our command to them is 
 that they should become perfect. 
 
 This must be my excuse for joining in the discussion 
 concerning the law of literary copyright in America, 
 and the effect it has on the literary relations of this 
 country and America. I must agree with Mr. Pound 
 that the literary relations of our two countries are bad, 
 and that much of this estrangement, if not all of it, 
 is due to remediable causes lying at present on the 
 American book of statutes. The actual facts of the 
 situation are simple. The copyright laws of America, 
 unlike those of any other civilized country, with the 
 exception of ex-Tsarist Russia, require as a condition 
 of extending the protection of its copyright to any 
 work of foreign publication that the latter shall be set 
 up, printed, and published in America within a period 
 of thirty to sixty days after the publication in the 
 country of its origin. Failing such practically simul- 
 taneous publication in America, not only is an Ameri- 
 can publisher thereafter entitled to proceed immedi-
 
 82 Readers and Writers 
 
 ately to publish the work in question without the 
 permission of the author, but the author and his 
 national publishers are not entitled to demand any 
 royalties or fees on the sale of the same. In other 
 words, as far as the original author and publisher are 
 concerned, they are non-existent in America unless they 
 have made arrangements for the publication of their 
 work in America within one, or, at most, two months 
 of its original publication in their own country. 
 
 Not to exaggerate in describing such a procedure it 
 can be exactly characterized by no other phrase than 
 looting under the form of law. Every author and 
 publisher in this country knows how difficult it is to 
 arrange for the simultaneous publication of works at 
 home and in America. The time-conditions of publi- 
 cation are seldom the same in both countries. A book 
 that is timely in this country may not be simultaneously 
 timely in America, and it would be very odd if it al- 
 ways were. 
 
 Again, a couple of months is a small period of time 
 in which to arrange to have an English work dis- 
 patched, accepted, set up, printed, and published in 
 America. Commercial difficulties of all kinds arise in 
 the course of the transaction, and every delay brings 
 the day of the accursed shears of the American Copy- 
 right Act nearer. Is an English publisher to bargain 
 with the advantage of time always on the side of 
 America, with the certain knowledge that, unless he 
 comes to terms at once, he will lose everything both 
 for himself and his author? But either that or in- 
 definitely delaying publication in this country is his only
 
 Literary Copyright in America 83 
 
 possible course. The American Copyright Law is thus 
 seen to be a modern example of Morton's fork. By 
 requiring that the foreign author shall publish his work 
 in America within one or two months of its publication 
 at home, the law compels him to make a choice (in the 
 majority of cases) between forfeiting his copyright in 
 America, and delaying, at his own cost, the publication 
 of his book in his own country. Upon either prong 
 he is impaled. If he elects for American publication 
 he must forgo the chance of the immediate market at 
 home, and if he elects for immediate publication at 
 home he must forgo the protection of American copy- 
 right. 
 
 Such an ingenious device for Dick-Turpining Euro- 
 pean authors cannot have been invented and enforced 
 without some presumed moral justification. America 
 cannot be conceived as a willing party to the legislation 
 of literary piracy, and it was and is, no doubt, under 
 some cover of justification that the law was enacted 
 and now runs. The defence for it, I should suppose, 
 is the presumed necessity for protecting the industry 
 of book-making in America on behalf of American 
 authors, printers, and publishers alike. Its defence, 
 in short, is the same defence that is set up for protec- 
 tion in commercial matters in this country, namely, the 
 desirability of excluding foreign competition, and of 
 encouraging home industry. Against this defence, how- 
 ever, there is a great deal to be said that ought to weigh 
 with the American people, and that ought to weigh in 
 their calculations as well as in their taste and sense of 
 right. For, as to the latter, I take it that no American
 
 84 Readers and Writers 
 
 would undertake to defend his Copyright Law on the 
 principles either of good taste or common justice. It 
 cannot be in conformity with good taste for the literary 
 artists of America to procure protection for them- 
 selves by penalizing their European confreres, and it 
 cannot be justice to rob a European author of his copy- 
 rights, or to compel him to delay his publication in 
 Europe. These admissions I take for granted, and 
 the only defence left is the calculation that such a Copy- 
 right Act is good for the American book-making 
 interests. 
 
 If books were like other commodities, their sale, 
 like the sale of other commodities, would fall under 
 the economic law of diminishing returns. Thereunder, 
 as their supply increased, the demand for books would 
 tend to decrease, as is the case with cotton, say, or 
 wooden spoons. And upon such an assumption there 
 might be some reason for prohibiting the free importa- 
 tion of printed books, since the imported articles would 
 compete in the home market for a relatively inelastic 
 demand. But books, it is obvious, are not a commodity 
 in this sense of the word. They do not satisfy demand, 
 but stimulate it, and their sale, therefore, does not fall 
 under the economic law of diminishing returns, but 
 under the very contrary, that of increasing returns. 
 Books, there is no doubt of it, are the cause of books. 
 New books do not take the place of old books; nor do 
 books really compete, as a general rule, with each 
 other. On the contrary, the more books there are, the 
 more are demanded and the more are produced. The
 
 Literary Copyright in America 85 
 
 free importation of books is not a means of contracting 
 the home-production of books; it is the very opposite, 
 the most effective means of stimulating home-produc- 
 tion to its highest possible degree. If I were an Ameri- 
 can author, resident in America, and concerned for the 
 prosperity of the American book-making profession, 
 craft, and industry, I should not be in the least disposed 
 to thank the American Copyright Law for the protec- 
 tion it professes to give me. The appetite for books, 
 upon which appetite I and my craft live, grows, I should 
 say, by what it feeds on. Addressing the Copyright Act 
 as it now exists, I should say to it: "In discouraging the 
 free importation of foreign books, and in alienating 
 the goodwill of foreign authors and publishers, you are 
 robbing foreign authors (that is true), but, much 
 worse, you are depriving my public of the stimulus 
 necessary to its demand for my books. Since we 
 authors in America have a vital interest in increasing 
 literary demand, and the more books the more demand 
 is created, our real protection lies in freely importing 
 books, and not in placing any impediment in their way. 
 Intending to help us, you the Copyright Law are 
 really our enemy." I cannot see what reply the Copy- 
 right Law could make to this attack upon it by its pro- 
 teges, and I believe, moreover, that if they were to 
 make it, the Law would soon be amended. 
 
 * 
 * *
 
 86 Readers and Writers 
 
 Right Criticism 
 
 To abandon the aim of "finality" of judgment is 
 to let in the jungle into the cultivated world of art; 
 it is to invite Tom, Dick, and Harry to offer their 
 opinions as of equal value with the opinions of the 
 cultivated. It is no escape from this conclusion to in- 
 quire into the "mentality" of the critic and to attach 
 importance to his judgment, as his mentality is or is 
 not interesting. In appraising a judgment I am not 
 concerned with the mentality, interesting or otherwise, 
 of the judge who delivers it. My concern is not with 
 him, but with the work before us; nor is the remark 
 to be made upon his verdict the personal comment, 
 "How interesting!" but the critical comment, "How 
 true!" or "How false!" Personal preferences turn 
 the attention in the nature of the case from the object 
 criticized to the critic himself. The method substitutes 
 for the crticism of art the criticism of psychology. In 
 a word, it is not art criticism at all. 
 
 It may be said that if we dismiss personal preference 
 as a criticism of art judgment, there is either nothing 
 left or only some "scientific" standard which has no 
 relevance to aesthetics. It is the common plea of the 
 idiosyncrats that, inconclusive as their opinions must 
 be, and anything but universally valid, no other method 
 within the world of art is possible. I dissent. A 
 "final" judgment is as possible of a work of art as of 
 any other manifestation of the spirit of man; there is 
 nothing in the nature of things to prevent men
 
 Right Criticism 87 
 
 arriving at a universally valid (that is, universally ac- 
 cepted) judgment of a book, a picture, a sonata, a 
 statue, or a building any more than there is to prevent 
 a legal judge from arriving at a right judgment con- 
 cerning any other human act; and, what is more, such 
 judgments of art are not only made daily, but in the end 
 they actually prevail and constitute in their totality 
 the tradition of art. The test is not scientific, but 
 as little is it merely personal. Its essential character 
 is simply that it is right; right however arrived at, and 
 right whoever arrives at it. That the judge in ques- 
 tion may or may not have "studied" the history of the 
 art-work he is judging is a matter of indifference. 
 Neither his learning nor his natural ignorance is of any 
 importance. That he is or .is not notoriously this, 
 that, or the other, is likewise no concern. All that 
 matters is that his judgment, when delivered, should 
 be "right." But who is to settle this, it may be asked? 
 Who is to confirm a right judgment or to dispute a 
 wrong one? The answer is contained in the true in- 
 terpretation of the misunderstood, saying, De gustibus 
 non est disputandum. The proof of right taste is that 
 there is no real dispute about its judgment; its finality 
 is evidenced by the cessation of debate. The truth 
 may be simply stated; a judge that is to say, a true 
 judge is he with whom everybody is compelled to 
 agree, not because he says it, but because it is so. 
 
 *
 
 88 Readers and Writers 
 
 Man's Survival of Bodily Death 
 
 What the circulation of the Quest is I have no idea, 
 but it should be ten times greater. Is there, however, 
 a sufficiently large class of cultured persons in Eng- 
 land in the Empire in the world? Assuming that 
 the spread of culture can be reckoned numerically as 
 well as qualitatively, can we pride ourselves on the 
 extension of culture while the number of free intelli- 
 gences is relatively decreasing? But how does one 
 know that this class is really on the decrease? Only 
 by the same means that we judge the number of the 
 curious lepidoptera in any area by holding a light up 
 in the dark and counting the hosts attracted by it. In 
 the case of the Quest there is no doubt whatever that 
 a light is being held up in our darkness. Its articles 
 are upon the most exalted topics; they are, for the most 
 part, luminously written, and their purity of motive 
 may be taken for granted. The Quest is the literary 
 Platonic Academy of our day. Yet it is seldom spoken 
 of in literary circles. We "good" are very apathetic, 
 and it is lucky for the devil that his disciples are un- 
 like us in this respect. They see to it that every- 
 thing evil shall flourish like the bay-tree, while we al- 
 low the bays of the intelligent to fade into the sere. 
 
 Mr. Mead contributed an article on a topic which 
 has not yet been exhausted, "Man's Survival of Bodily 
 Death." Mr. Randall is not the first to deny "immor- 
 tality" while affirming an absolute morality, nor even 
 the first to attempt to explain religion without recourse
 
 Mans Survival of Bodily Death 89 
 
 to a dogma of survival. The Sadducees did it before 
 him; and the Confucians managed somehow or other 
 to combine ancestor-worship with a lively denial of 
 their continued existence. There is, moreover, an 
 ethical value in the denial which almost makes the 
 denial of survival an act of moral heroism. For if a 
 man can pursue the highest moral aims without the 
 smallest hope of personal reward, hereafter, and, still 
 less, here, his disinterestedness is obvious; he pursues 
 virtue as the pupil is enjoined in the Bhagavad Gita to 
 act, namely, without hope or fear of fruit. I am not 
 of the heroic breed myself, and, in any case, the prob- 
 lem is one of fact as well as of moral discipline. It 
 may be heroic to put the telescope of truth to a delib- 
 erately blinded eye, but unless you suspect yourself of 
 being unable to master the fact, I see no indispensable 
 virtue in its wilful denial. At all risks to my morality 
 I should prefer to keep my weather-eye open for such 
 evidences of survival as may loom up behind the fog. 
 
 Premising that "no high religion can exist which is 
 not based on faith in survival," Mr. Mead proceeds to 
 examine the two forms of inquiry which conceivably 
 promise conclusions: the comparative study of the 
 mystic philosophers and their recorded religious ex- 
 periences in all ages, and the more material examination 
 of the spiritualistic phenomena of modern psychical 
 research. For himself, Mr. Mead has chosen the 
 former method, and I am interested to observe his tes- 
 timony, in a rare personal statement, to the satisfaction, 
 more or less, that is possible from following this road. 
 At the same time, though without any experience in
 
 90 Readers and Writers 
 
 the second method, Mr. Mead is explicitly of the 
 opinion that it is one that should be employed by sci- 
 ence with increasing earnestness. The difficulties are 
 tremendous, and as subtle as they are considerable. 
 Before survival can be scientifically demonstrated, a 
 host of working hypotheses must be invented and 
 discredited, and the utmost veracity will be necessary 
 in the students. With such facts before us as telepathy, 
 dissociated personality, subconscious complexes, auto- 
 suggestion and suggestion, the phenomena that super- 
 ficially point to survival may plainly be nothing of the 
 kind. Survival, in short, must be expected to be about 
 the latest rather than the first psychic fact to be scien- 
 tifically established. The student must, therefore, be 
 exigent as well as hopeful. 
 
 There is a third method from which we may hope 
 to hear one day something to our advantage assuming 
 that the certain knowledge of survival would be to 
 mankind's advantage the method of psycho-analysis. 
 If psycho-analysis of the first degree can make us ac- 
 quainted with the subconscious, why should not a psy- 
 cho-analysis of the second degree make us acquainted 
 with the super-conscious; and as the language of the 
 subconscious may be sleeping dreams, the language of 
 the super-conscious may be waking visions. To re- 
 turn to Mr. Mead's article, an interesting account is 
 contained in it of a recent census taken in America by 
 Professor Leuba of the creeds of more or less eminent 
 men. The returns for the article of faith in survival 
 and immortality are curious, not to say surprising. Of 
 the eminent physicists canvassed, 40 per cent, confessed
 
 Beardsley and Arthur Symons 91 
 
 their belief in man's survival of bodily death. There- 
 after the percentage falls through the stages of his- 
 torians 35 per cent., and sociologists 27 per cent., to 
 psychologists with the degraded percentage of 9. It 
 is a strange reversal of the procession that might have 
 been anticipated, and it expresses, perhaps, the condi- 
 tion of real culture in America. For that the physicists 
 should be the most hopeful class of scientists in 
 America, and the psychologists the most hopeless is 
 an indication that the best brains in America are still 
 engaged in physical problems. The poor psycholo- 
 gists are scarcely even hopeful of discovering anything. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 Beardsley and Arthur Symons 
 
 "Unbounded" admiration is precisely what I can- 
 not feel for Aubrey Beardsley's work, even "within 
 its own sphere." I ought to say, perhaps, "because 
 of its sphere." Pure aesthetic is a matter for contem- 
 plation only, and we should be prepared upon occasion 
 to suspend every other kind of judgment. Or, would 
 it not be true to say that the pure aesthetic does itself 
 suspend in the beholder every other form of judgment 
 or reaction such as the moral, the intellectual, and 
 the practical? A great tragedy, for instance, is a 
 kind of focus of the whole nature of man; every fac- 
 ulty is engaged in it, and all are lifted up and trans- 
 figured into the pure aesthetic of contemplation. But 
 one is not aware, in that case, of moral or other reser-
 
 92 Readers and Writers 
 
 vations; one has not to apologize for the experience 
 by pretending that the "essentially repulsive and dia- 
 bolic decadence" contained in the tragedy is merely 
 an expression of the age. Beardsley is only "some- 
 thing of a genius" precisely because he failed to trans- 
 figure the moral and other reactions of the spectator 
 of his work. He did not occupy the whole of one's 
 mind. All the while that one's aesthetic sense was 
 being led captive by his art, several other of one's 
 senses were in rebellion. His command (his genius, 
 in short) was not "absolute," but only a quite limited 
 monarchy. This is not to deny that he was an artist; 
 it is to deny only that he was one of the greatest of 
 artists. Other artists owe him a greater debt than the 
 world at large. He was a great art-master, but not 
 a master of art. The doctrine of Mr. Arthur Symons 
 is dangerous. Juggling with the terms good and evil 
 is always dangerous, since in a prestidigital exhibition 
 of them, one can so easily be made to look like the 
 other. Demon est Deus inversus. The paradoxical 
 truth about the matter, however, is that evil is good 
 only so long as it is regarded as evil. The moment 
 it is thought of as good it is nothing but evil. Mr. 
 Arthur Symons has confused in his mind the problem 
 of good and evil with the quite alien problem of quan- 
 tity of energy. 
 
 * *
 
 "Candle of Fision" 93 
 
 "y's" "Candle of Vision" 
 
 "JE's" Candle of Vision is not a book for everybody, 
 yet I wish that everybody might read it. Rarely and 
 more rarely does any artist or poet interest himself 
 in the processes of his mental and spiritual life, with 
 the consequence, so often deplored by Mr. Penty, that 
 books on aesthetics, philosophy, and, above all, psy- 
 chology, are left to be written by men who have no 
 immediate experiences of what they are writing of. 
 "vE's" narrative and criticism of his personal ex- 
 periences may be said to take the form of intimate 
 confessions made pour encourager les autres. For, 
 happily for us, he is an artist who is also a philosopher, 
 a visionary who is also an "intellectual" ; and, being 
 interested in both phases of his personality, he has had 
 the impulse and the courage to express both. What 
 the ordinary mind the mind corrupted by false edu- 
 cation would say to "JE's" affirmations concerning 
 his psychological experiences, it would not be difficult 
 to forecast. What is not invention, it would be said, 
 is moonshine, and what is neither is a pose to be ex- 
 plained on some alienist hypothesis. Only readers 
 who can recall some experience similar to those de- 
 scribed by "IE" will find themselves able to accept the 
 work for what it is a statement of uncommon fact; 
 and only those who have developed their intuition to 
 some degree will be able to appreciate the spirit of 
 truth in which the Candle of Vision is written. A re- 
 view of such work is not to be undertaken by me, but 
 I have made a few notes on some passages.
 
 94 Readers and Writers 
 
 Page 2. "I could not so desire what was not my 
 own, and what is our own we cannot lose . . . Desire 
 is hidden identity." This is a characteristic doctrine 
 of mysticism, and recurs invariably in all the confes- 
 sions. Such unanimity is an evidence of the truth of 
 the doctrine, since it is scarcely to be supposed that the 
 mystics borrow from one another. But the doctrine, 
 nevertheless, is difficult for the mere mind to accept, 
 for it involves the belief that nothing happens to us 
 that is not ourselves. Character in that event is des- 
 tiny to quote a variant of "^E's" sentence; and our 
 lives are thus merely the dramatization of our given 
 psychology. Without presuming to question the doc- 
 trine, I feel a reserve concerning its absoluteness. Fate 
 appears to me to be above destiny in the same sense 
 that the old lady conceived that there was One above 
 that would see that Providence did not go too far. 
 To the extent that character is destiny or, as "IE" says, 
 desire is hidden identity, a correct psychological fore- 
 cast would be at the same time a correct temporal fore- 
 cast. And while this may be true, in the abstract and 
 under, so to say, ideal conditions, I cannot yet agree 
 that everything that happens to the individual is within 
 his character. The unforeseeable, the margin of what 
 we call Chance, allows for events that belong to Fate 
 rather than to Destiny. 
 
 P a g e 3- "j3i" says he "was not conscious in boy- 
 hood (up to the age of sixteen or seventeen} of any 
 heaven lying about me." "Childhood," he thinks, is 
 no nearer the "eternally young" than age may be.
 
 "Candle of Vision' 95 
 
 Certainly it appears to be so in the case of "IE" him- 
 self, for the intimations of immortality which Words- 
 worth (and the world in general) attributed to children 
 were only begun to be experienced by "^E" after his 
 sixteenth or seventeenth year. From that time on- 
 wards, as this book testifies, he has been growing 
 younger in precisely those characteristics. There is 
 a good deal to be thought, if not said, on this subject. 
 Children are, I conceive, rather symbols of youth than 
 youth itself; they are unconsciously young. Age, on 
 the other hand, has the power of converting the sym- 
 bol into the reality, and of being young and knowing 
 it. Unless ye become, not little children, but as little 
 children, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. At the same time it is comparatively rare 
 for the ordinary child, that "JE" says he was, to de- 
 velop childlikeness in later life. Usually a- return 
 occurs to a state unconsciously experienced in early 
 youth. But there appear to be strata of character- 
 istics in every mind, and life is their successive revela- 
 tion. Without knowing anything of the facts, I 
 surmise that "JE's" heredity was mixed, and that the 
 first layer or stratum to appear was that of some 
 possibly Lowland Scot ancestry. When that was 
 worked through, by the age of sixteen, another layer 
 came to the surface, whereupon "IE" entered on 
 another phase of "desire." 
 
 Page 7. "We may have a personal wisdom, but 
 spiritual wisdom is not to speak of as ours." This 
 illustrates another characteristic of the mystic that
 
 96 Readers and Writers 
 
 while his experiences are personal, the wisdom revealed 
 in them is always attributed to "Him that taught me" 
 in other words, to something not ourselves. An 
 egoist mysticism is a contradiction in terms. Not only 
 no man is entitled to claim originality for a spiritual 
 truth, but no man can. The truth is no longer true 
 when it has a name to it. "Truth bears no man's 
 name" is an axiom of mysticism. The reason, I pre- 
 sume, is that the very condition of the appreciation of 
 a spiritual truth is the absence of the sense of egoism. 
 Such truths are simply not revealed to the egoistic con- 
 sciousness, and therefore cannot appear as the product 
 of human wisdom. Their character is that of a revela- 
 tion from without rather than that of a discovery from 
 within, and the report of the matter is thus objective 
 rather than subjective. 
 
 Page 1 6. "/ could prophesy from the uprising of 
 new moods in myself that without search I should soon 
 meet people of a certain character, and so I met them. 
 . . . 7 accepted what befell with resignation. . . . 
 What we are alone has power. . . . No destiny other 
 than we make for ourselves" I have already ex- 
 pressed my doubts whether this is the whole truth. It 
 is, of course, the familiar doctrine of Karma; but I do 
 not think it can be interpreted quite literally. There 
 is what is called the Love of God, as well as the Justice 
 of God, and I would venture to add, with Blake, the 
 Wrath of God. Judgment is something more than 
 simple justice ; it implies the consent of the whole of the 
 judging nature, and not of its sense of justice only.
 
 "Candle of Vision' 97 
 
 Love enters into it, and so, perhaps, do many other 
 qualities not usually attributed to the Supreme Judge. 
 In interpreting such doctrines we must allow for the 
 personal equation even of the highest personality we 
 can conceive. 
 
 Page 19. "None needs special gifts of genius" 
 "^E's" Candle of Fision is confessedly propagandist. 
 It aims deliberately at encouraging age to discover 
 eternal youth, and to lay hold of everlasting life. It 
 is to this end that "yE" describes his own experiences, 
 and offers to his readers the means of their verification. 
 He is quite explicit that no "special gifts" or "genius" 
 are necessary. "This do and ye shall find even as I 
 have found." The special gift of genius does not, I 
 agree, lie in the nature of fact of the experience 
 (though here, again, favour seems sometimes to be 
 shown) , but it does, I think, lie in the bent towards the 
 effort involved. Anybody, it is true, may by the appro- 
 priate means, experience the same results, but nat every- 
 body has the "desire" to employ them. Desire, 
 moreover, is susceptible of many degrees of strength. 
 Like other psychological characteristics, it appears to 
 peel off like the skins of Peer Gynt's onion. What is it 
 that I really desire? Ask me today, and I shall 
 answer one thing. Ask me next year, and it may be 
 another. Years hence it may have changed again. 
 But desire, in the mystical sense, is the desire that is 
 left when all the transient wishes or fancies have either 
 vanished or been satisfied. Only such a desire leads 
 the student to make the effort required by "IE" and
 
 98 Readers and Writers 
 
 the possession of such a desire is something like a 
 "special gift" or "genius." 
 
 Page 20. "Our religions make promises to be ful- 
 filled beyond the grave, because they have no knowl- 
 edge now to be -put to the test. . . . Mistrust the 
 religion that does not cry out: 'Test me that we can 
 become as gods? ' This is an excellent observation, 
 and accounts, to my mind, for all the so-called scepti- 
 cism of modern times. It is usual to attribute to our 
 predecessors, the most remote as well as the more re- 
 cent, a quality of "faith" superior to our own. They 
 are said to have been more religious than we are. I 
 do not believe it; or, rather, I believe that they were 
 religious because they had very good reason to be ; in 
 other words, they were not only told the mysteries, but 
 they were shown them. Either they or their priests, 
 had the "open vision." Is it conceivable that the 
 primitive peoples had the confidence-trick played on 
 them? Or, again, is it the fact that credulity is less 
 today than before? I feel sure that if our ancestors 
 were brought to belief, it was by means which would 
 equally carry conviction to the present generation. To 
 repeat myself : They believed because they were shown. 
 "^E" suggests that the after-life promises of modern 
 religion are a substitute for an evasion of present 
 demonstration. Religions, that is to say, concentrate 
 upon the invisible because their power over the visible 
 is gone. It is not the fact, however, that the earlier 
 religions ignored the after-death adventures of the 
 soul; they were quite as much concerned with the life
 
 "Candle of Vision' 99 
 
 beyond the grave as our own religions. What they 
 did, and what our religions fail to do, was to give 
 present guarantees for their future promises. Their 
 priests could procure belief in the after-life on the 
 strength of their demonstrated power over this life. 
 It is probable, indeed, that many of the elect ex- 
 perienced "death" before it occurred physically. The 
 Egyptian mysteries were a kind of experimental death. 
 
 Page 21. Here and on the neighbouring pages 
 "JE" expounds his method of meditation the means 
 by which any "ordinary" person may acquire spiritual 
 experience. "^E's" method follows the familiar line 
 of the mystic schools, namely, "unwavering concentra- 
 tion on some mental object." "Five minutes of this 
 effort," "j?i" says, "will at first leave us trembling as 
 at the end of a laborious day." I can testify that this 
 is no exaggeration, for, like "^E," I have practised 
 meditation after the methods prescribed. It is no easy 
 job, and after months of regular practice I was still 
 an amateur at the simplest exercises. There is no 
 doubt, however, about the benefit of it. Much is 
 learned .in meditation that cannot be realized by any 
 other mental exercise. The mind becomes a real or- 
 gan, as distinct from the personality as a physical limb. 
 And gradually one learns to acquire sufficient control 
 over it, if not to use it like a master, at any rate, to 
 realize that it can be so used. I have not the smallest 
 doubt that one day men will be able to "use" their 
 minds, and thus to cease to be "used" by them; for it 
 is obvious that at present we are victims rather than
 
 loo Readers and Writers 
 
 masters of our mind. Meditation, as a means of mind- 
 control, is the appointed method, and "./E's" personal 
 experience should encourage his readers to take up 
 the discipline. 
 
 Page 41. In regard to "visions," they are usually 
 dismissed by the commonalty as products of imagina- 
 tion, "as if," says "M" "imagination were as easily 
 explained as a problem in Euclid." This habit of re- 
 ferring one mystery to another, as if this latter were 
 no mystery, is very common; and it arises, no doubt, 
 from intellectual apathy. We cannot be bothered to 
 reduce mysteries to knowledge, and, moreover, the 
 realization that literally everything is a mystery, that 
 we simply live in mystery, is a little disconcerting. 
 Hence our preference for assuming some things, at any 
 rate, to be below the need of explanation. Imagina- 
 tion, however, provides us with no escape from the 
 mysteries of vision, any more than matter provides us 
 with an escape from the problems of spirit. "yE" 
 raises some difficult, and, probably, insoluble prob- 
 lems concerning imagination itself. What is it in us 
 that imagines? How does it cast thoughts into 
 form? Even allowing (which we cannot) that 
 imagination is only the re-fashioning of memory, what 
 re-fashions and transforms out of their original 
 resemblance the memories of things seen? "^E" has 
 had many visions, some of which, no doubt, he could 
 trace to recollected impressions; but, leaving aside 
 once more the difficulty involved in this reconstruction, 
 what of the visions that had, or appeared to have,
 
 "Candle of Vision' 101 
 
 no earthly progenitors? "^E's" conclusion appears 
 to be indisputable, that "we swim in an sether of 
 deity" for "in Him we live and move and have our 
 being." 
 
 Passim. Is it possible that telepathy occurs be- 
 tween people having the same mental "wave-length"? 
 Coincidences (another Mesopotamian word, by the 
 way) are too frequent to be accountable on any other 
 supposition than that of an established communication. 
 Like many another, I could give some remarkable in- 
 stances of telepathy, but they would be tedious to 
 relate. Mental training, however, is certainly a 
 means to this end; for in proportion as the mind is 
 brought under control, its susceptibility to thoughts 
 from outside palpably increases. The experience of 
 the Old Testament prophet who knew the plans of 
 the enemy before they were uttered, is not unique, 
 even in these days. It will be far less uncommon in 
 the days to come. 
 
 Page 54. "/5 there a centra within us through 
 which all the threads of the universe are drawn?" 
 An ingenious image for a re-current doctrine of mys- 
 ticism, the doctrine, namely, that everything is every- 
 where. One of the earliest discoveries made in med- 
 itation is the magnitude of the infinitesimal. The 
 tiniest point of space appears to have room enough 
 for a world of images; and the mediaeval discussion 
 concerning the number of angels that could dance on 
 the point of a needle was by no means ridiculous. If I 
 am not mistaken, "^E's" problem is identical with it.
 
 IO2 Readers and Writers 
 
 Page 89. The Architecture of Dreams. In this 
 chapter "IE" sets himself to casting some doubts 
 (shall we say?) on the sufficiency of the Freudian 
 theory of dreams. Dreams, according to Freud, are 
 the dramatization of suppressed desires; but what, 
 asks "IE," "is the means by which desires, suppressed 
 or otherwise, dramatize themselves?" "A mood or 
 desire may attract its affinities" ; in other words, there 
 may be a congruity between the desire and the dream 
 which serves the Freudian purpose of interpretation; 
 but desire can hardly be said "to create what it at- 
 tracts." Between anger, for instance, and a definite 
 vision of conflict, such as the dream may represent, 
 there is a gulf which the theory of Freud does not 
 enable us to cross. What, in fact, are dreams? Who 
 or what carries out the dramatization? Assuming, 
 with Freud, that their impulse is a desire, what power 
 shapes this desire into the dream-cartoon? "JE" 
 throws no light on the mystery, but, at any rate, he 
 does not dismiss it as no mystery at all. Its philo- 
 sophical discussion is to be found in the Indian phi- 
 losophy known as the Sankhya. 
 
 Page 89. "The process must be conscious on some 
 plane" the dramatization, that is to say, must be the 
 conscious work of some intelligent agent or quality. 
 I am a little doubtful of this, for reasons to be dis- 
 covered in the Sankhya philosophy just referred to. 
 Is the pattern taken by sand on a shaken plate a 
 "conscious" design? Are frost-flowers the work of 
 intelligence? Forms, according to the Sankhya, are
 
 "Candle of Vision' 103 
 
 the reflection in matter (Prakriti) of the activities of 
 the spirit (Purusha) ; they are consciousness visible. 
 But it would not follow that they are themselves con- 
 scious or that their creation is a "conscious" process. 
 
 Page 90. "Have imaginations body?" In other 
 words, are the figures seen in dream and vision three- 
 dimensional? "IE" describes several incidents within 
 his experience that certainly seem to suggest an ob- 
 jective reality in dream-figures, and the occasional pro- 
 jection of dream-figures into phantasms is a further 
 evidence of it. But, once again, I would refer "IE" 
 to the Sankhya aphorisms, and to Kapila's commen- 
 tary on them. The question is really of the general 
 order of the relation of form to thought. 
 
 Page 114. Here, and in the succeeding essay, 
 "IE" develops his intuitional thesis that sound and 
 thought have definite affinities. For every thought 
 there is a sound, and every sound is at the same time 
 a thought. The idea is, of course, familiar, and, 
 like many more in the Candle of Vision, is found re- 
 curring like a decimal throughout mystical and occult 
 literature in all ages. The most ancient occult litera- 
 ture dispute whether that of India or Egypt is 
 most precise on the subject, the general proposition 
 being therein reduced to a series of equivalents in 
 which form, sound, colour, thought, emotion, and 
 number, all seem to be interchangeable. Each of 
 these, in fact, is said to be a language a complete lan- 
 guage ; and to the initiate it is a matter of indifference
 
 IO4 Readers and Writers 
 
 whether the text before him is "written" in form, in 
 colour, in number, or sound. Unfortunately, neither 
 U ^E" nor anybody within our knowledge, is able to 
 procure even the skeleton key to the mystery. The 
 records are so perversely confused that I cannot be- 
 lieve that their authors were not deliberately playing 
 a game with us. It would be rather like the old initi- 
 ates to "dis" their type before leaving it to be 
 examined by the barbarian invaders; and certainly 
 nobody of ordinary faculty can begin to make head 
 or tail of the "correspondences" recorded in the In- 
 dian scriptures. It is the same, strangely enough, 
 with Plato, whose Cratylus deals with the relation of 
 verbal language to mental conception. A master of 
 simple exposition, he becomes in the Cratylus, whether 
 from design or feebleness of understanding, as cryp- 
 tic as the Indians themselves. I have read the 
 Cratylus all ways, with no better result than to feel 
 that I have wasted my time. "^E" has approached 
 the problem, however, experimentally, with the aid of 
 his intuition. If, he said to himself, there is really 
 a definite correspondence between sound and idea, 
 meditation on one or the other should be able to 
 discover it. In other words, he has attempted to re- 
 discover the lost language, and to find for himself 
 the key whose fragments bestrew the ancient occult 
 works. This again, however, is no novelty, but 
 another of the recurrent ideas of mystics and would- 
 be occultists. All of them have tried it, but, unfor- 
 tunately, most of them come to different conclusions. 
 "^E's" guesses must, therefore, be taken as guesses
 
 "Candle of Vision' 105 
 
 only, to be compared with the guesses with other 
 students. 
 
 Page 132. One of the features of the Candle of 
 Vision is the occasional ray cast by U ^E" upon the 
 obscure texts of the Bible. The Bible, of course, is 
 for the most part unmistakably "occult"; and not only 
 its stories are myths ("which things are an allegory"), 
 but many of its texts are echoes of a gnosis; infinitely 
 older than the Christian era. Greece, it has now been 
 established, was an infant when Egypt was old; and 
 Egypt, in its turn, was an infant when some civiliza- 
 tion anterior to it was in its dotage. The Bible is a 
 kind of urk, in which were stored (without much 
 order, I imagine) some of the traditions of the world 
 that was about to be submerged. They can be 
 brought to life again, however, and here and there, 
 in the course of the Candle of Vision, ".#" undoubt- 
 edly rejuvenates a Biblical text, and restores to it its 
 ancient meaning. "He made every flower before it 
 was in the field, and every herb before it grew." 
 This points, says "j*E," to the probability that the 
 Garden of Eden was the "Garden of the Divine 
 Mind," in which flowers and herbs and all the rest of 
 creation lived before they were made visible ! Such 
 a conception is very illuminating. Moreover, it 
 brings the story of Genesis into line with the genesis 
 stories of both ancient India and the most recent psy- 
 chology. For modern psycho-analysis, in the re- 
 searches of Jung in particular, is undoubtedly trem- 
 bling on the brink of the discovery of the divine mind
 
 106 Readers and Writers 
 
 which precedes visible creation. The process is in- 
 dissolubly linked up with the psychology of imagina- 
 tion, phantasm, and vision. 
 
 Page 137. On Power. "// we have not power we 
 are nothing, and must remain outcasts of Heaven" 
 In this chapter "IE" shakes the fringes of the most 
 dangerous subject in the world, that of the acquisition 
 of "spiritual" power. I put the word under suspicion, 
 because while in the comparative sense spiritual, the 
 powers here spoken of may be anything but beneficent. 
 The instructions to be found in, let us say, Patanjall, 
 are full of warnings against the acquisition of occult 
 powers before the character of the student is "purified." 
 We are a long way, of course, from the plane of con- 
 ventional goodness in the use of this word purity. The 
 conventionally good may have all the characteristics 
 of the black magician (so-called) when he finds him- 
 self in the possession of power. Purity, in the sense 
 implied, connotes non-attachment, and non-attachment, 
 again, implies the non-existence of any personal desire 
 even for the good. Nietzsche died before he be- . 
 gan to understand himself. His pre-occupation with 
 the problem of power was undoubtedly an occult ex- 
 ercise; and his discovery that spiritual power needs to 
 be exercised "beyond good and evil," was a hint of 
 the progress he had made. Unfortunately for 
 Nietzsche, his Beyond Good and Evil was still not 
 clear of the element of egotism; he carried into the 
 occult world the attachment and the desire that em- 
 phatically belong to the world of both Good and Evil.
 
 How to Read 107 
 
 In short, he attempted to take Heaven by egoistic 
 storm, and his defeat was a foregone conclusion and 
 a familiar tragedy in occult history. "^E," like his 
 authorities, is full of warning against the quest of 
 power. At the same time, like them, he realizes that 
 without power the student can do nothing. Here is 
 the paradox, the mightiest in psychology, that the 
 weakest is the strongest and the strongest the weak- 
 est. I commend this chapter to Nietzscheans in par- 
 ticular. They have most to learn from it. 
 
 Page 153 et seq. U ^E" makes an attempt to sys- 
 tematize "Celtic cosmogony." It appears to me to 
 be altogether premature, and of as little value as the 
 "interpretation" of Blake's cosmogony, which Messrs. 
 Yeats and Ellis formerly attempted. Celtic cosmog- 
 ony, as found in Irish legend and tradition, may be 
 a cosmogony, and perhaps one of the oldest in the 
 world (for Ireland is always with us!). But the 
 fragmentary character of the records, the absence of 
 any living tradition in them, coupled with the difficulty 
 of re-interpretation in rational terms, make even "^E's" 
 effort a little laborious. There is little illumination 
 in the Candle when it becomes an Irish boglight. 
 
 * * 
 
 How to Read 
 
 The greatest books are only to be grasped by the 
 total understanding which is called intuition. As an
 
 Io8 Readers and Writers 
 
 aid to the realization of the truth, we may fall back 
 upon the final proofs of idiom and experience. Idiom 
 is the fruit of wisdom on the tree of language; and 
 experience is both the end and the beginning of idiom. 
 What more familiar idiom is there than that which 
 expresses the idea and the experience of reading a 
 book "between the lines"; reading, in fact, what is 
 not there in the perception of our merely logical under- 
 standing? And what, again, is more familiar than 
 the experience of "having been done good" by reading 
 a great, particularly a great mystical or poetical work, 
 like the Bible or Milton; still more, by reading such 
 works as the Mahabharata? Idiom and experience 
 do not deceive us. The "subconscious" of every great 
 book is vas.tly greater than its conscious element, as the 
 "subconscious" of each of us is many times richer in 
 content than our conscious minds. Reading between 
 the lines, resulting often and usually in a sense of 
 illuminated bewilderment, difficult to put into words, 
 is in reality intuitional reading; the subconscious in the 
 reader is put into relation with the subconscious of the 
 writer. Deep communicates with deep. No "inter- 
 pretation" of an allegorical kind need result from it. 
 We may be unable at once to put into words any of 
 the ideas we have gathered. Patience! The truths 
 thus grasped will find their way to the conscious mind, 
 and one day, perhaps, to our lips. 
 
 * 
 * *
 
 Looking for the Dawn 109 
 
 The Old Country 
 
 A country may grow aged in mind long before it is 
 really old in history, and it may be the case with Eng- 
 land that long before she is old in history her mind is 
 becoming aged. The peculiarity of the aged mind is 
 not that it cannot think, but that it cannot think new 
 thoughts. All its energy runs in grooves, and there 
 is none to spare for the cutting of a new road into 
 new ideas. There is little and less "free mind" in 
 England. Like the commons and the common-wealth, 
 all the mind-energy has been appropriated by one in- 
 terest or another, with the consequence that every 
 fresh idea is compelled either to starve at home or 
 to emigrate abroad. America, as an intellectually 
 youthful nation (may it never grow aged!) reaps the 
 advantage of the decline of its aged parent. Ideas 
 that cannot pick up a living in this country, owing to 
 the appropriations of energy already made, may emi- 
 grate to America and flourish there. 
 
 *** 
 
 Looking for the Dawn 
 
 The Spring issue of Art and Letters has been long 
 enough out to have had its run for its money. Con- 
 sequently I am free to say that it is not only not so 
 good as the first issue, but that the descent has been 
 steep as well as rapid. This decline from the almost
 
 no Readers and Writers 
 
 sublime to the more than ridiculous was inevitable 
 from the peculiar characteristics of our immediately 
 contemporary epoch; for it is the sober truth that our 
 contemporary world does not supply youthful stuff 
 enough to make more than a single issue of a literary 
 magazine of high pretension. I have looked about 
 me with the eye of an eagle and the appetite of a 
 raven to discover youthful talent possibly budding into 
 genius. A few sprigs and sprays have fallen within 
 my vision, and I have counted myself recompensed for 
 hours and years of trouble. But at this present mo- 
 ment such apparitions and premonitions of the future 
 are fewer than ever I have known them to be. 
 Whether it is that more than individual collective 
 talent has fallen in the war; whether the increasing 
 pre-occupation of men's minds with economics has 
 proportionately impoverished the will to literature of 
 our young men; or whether a critical taste is losing 
 generosity, the number of fresh talents just being com- 
 mitted to us appears utterly unequal to the unequalled 
 opportunity for employing them. There never was 
 a time when it was easier for a young writer to find 
 publication in one form or another. The number of 
 new magazines projected and issued recently has been 
 legion. I have examined most of them; for it is my 
 hobby to collect the earliest specimens, and it is my 
 unpleasant opinion that most of them would be better 
 for never having been born. 
 
 They manage, or, at any rate, they are beginning 
 to manage these things better in America. That 
 America is the country of the future is open to less
 
 Looking for the Dawn in 
 
 doubt as a prophecy when the critic has made ac- 
 quaintance with the new and renewed magazines now 
 appearing in that country. A tone of provinciality 
 still dominates a considerable part of the American 
 literary Press, but it is obvious that tremendous efforts 
 are being made to recover or, let us say, to discover 
 centrality. American literary editors are more and 
 more aiming to interest the world of readers rather 
 than a mere province of them. I need scarcely say 
 that the world of readers is not the same thing as a 
 world of readers. A world of readers connotes large 
 numbers, consisting chiefly of readers in search of 
 amusement; but the world of readers consists of the 
 few in every country who really read for their living, 
 or rather, for their lives. To appeal to the latter class 
 is to be "of the centre," for the centre of every move- 
 ment of life is not only the most vital, it is the small- 
 est element, of the whole. The most recent American 
 literary journals appear to me to be endeavouring to 
 become organs for this class of reader. It is not in- 
 dicated more plainly in the fact that they are enlisting 
 European writeis than in the fact that their American 
 contributors are writing to be read in Europe as well 
 as in America. America has begun to discover Eu- 
 rope. America is on the way to absorb Europe. In 
 the course of a few generations, if the present Ameri- 
 can magazines may be taken as indicating direction, 
 European writers will be as intelligible in America 
 as in Europe; and, perhaps, more so. 
 
 * 
 * *
 
 112 Readers and Writers 
 
 Fielding for America 
 
 It is very doubtful whether anybody reads Fielding 
 nowadays, nevertheless, like all the eighteenth century 
 writers, he is more than worth all the time we waste 
 on certain contemporaries. There is nothing of the 
 "damned literary" about Fielding; but also there is 
 nothing of what usually goes with the absence of 
 letters, sentimentality. Fielding's letters, one feels, 
 were absorbed into his blood; they did not remain like 
 crumbs on the lips after a barbarian repast. Fielding 
 could carry his letters as his contemporaries boasted 
 they could carry their port without showing it. And 
 it was no less the case that he carried his feelings with 
 the same well-bred ease, without displaying them, 
 and, even more, without permitting them to rule his 
 intelligence. Richardson seems born to have pro- 
 voked Fielding to write. He incarnated everything 
 that Fielding thought worth a negative. But for 
 Richardson, Fielding would possibly have never found 
 his true metier; Richardson was his twin opposite. 
 Fielding, however, must always pay the penalty of 
 being a reactionary, of requiring a stimulant; he is no 
 creator, for the stuff of creation was not native to 
 him. He is an amusing causeur with his eye always 
 upon Richardson; a man of the world telling a story 
 a la Richardson, but with the explanations common to 
 the class of English gentlemen. He is put among 
 the English Men of Letters in the series edited by 
 Lord Morley, and now he is receiving attention in
 
 Poor Authors! 113 
 
 America. America needs Fielding; for what is 
 America in danger of becoming but a kind of Richard- 
 son continent? Our eighteenth century writers are a 
 school to which American literature must go as a 
 means of escape from the Roundhead tradition which 
 otherwise America will scarcely succeed in overpassing. 
 I cannot conceive, however, that Tom Jones will be 
 popular in America yet awhile. He has more resist- 
 ance to encounter there than in any other civilized 
 nation. But until Tom Jones can be read in America 
 without a blush, American literature will remain 
 several centuries behind English and European 
 literature. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 Poor Authors ! 
 
 Is it a fact that the dearness of literature alone or 
 mainly restricts its sale? Is it certain that either 
 cheap publication or (what amounts to the same 
 thing) a generous diffusion of money among the 
 masses would ensure the success of, let us say, good 
 first novels in the present state of public taste ? We 
 have had some experience both of cheapness and of 
 the diffusion of money. Publication was cheap 
 enough before the war in all conscience. New novels 
 could be brought out for a shilling. Was it the com- 
 mon experience that the best of them proved a com- 
 mercial success? The best of them were nine times 
 out of ten a commercial failure. And in respect of
 
 114 Readers and Writers 
 
 the diffusion of money, what has been our experience 
 of the direction in which the diffused money has been 
 spent? Have the masses accumulated libraries? 
 Have they patronized the arts? Have they encour- 
 aged literature with discriminating taste? Have they 
 sought out and bought the young authors, the promis- 
 ing writers, the writers of tomorrow? We know 
 they have done nothing of the kind. The diffused 
 money has fallen, for the most part, into two sets of 
 hands, the hands of the ignorant profiteers and the 
 hands of the ignorant masses. And both classes have 
 neglected literature in favour of sports and furs, dis- 
 play and amusement. It is idle to pretend that things 
 are other than they are. We need not necessarily be 
 discouraged by the fact, but it is necessary to recog- 
 nize the facts. And the facts in the present case are 
 that the people who have the money (much or little) 
 do not care a shilling for literature and accept no 
 responsibility for its existence. Their excuse for the 
 moment is that literature is too dear; but it would be 
 all the same if it were cheap. I have never observed 
 that rich or poor have complained that their sports 
 and amusements are too dear. Nobody appeals to 
 cinema-proprietors or yachting entrepreneurs to pity 
 their clients and ruin themselves commercially. When 
 the public wants literature as much as it wants to be 
 entertained, there will be no need for anybody's 
 charity. 
 
 In the meanwhile, what is the young writer to do? 
 In particular, the young novelist? He appears to be 
 about to be among the most miserable of mankind.
 
 On Guard 115 
 
 To be published and to be a commercial failure is bad 
 enough in a country like our own, where a succes 
 d'estime is almost a certificate for pity. But not to 
 be published at all is infinitely worse. Instead of ap- 
 pealing to commercial publishers, however, is it not 
 possible to appeal to the Guild of Authors, to the fra- 
 ternity whose function and responsibility arc the crea- 
 tion and encouragement of literature? Who should 
 be patrons of literature if not men of letters them- 
 selves? And whose duty should it be, if not that of 
 novelists as a guild, to secure the succession and to 
 provide for the future princes? If publishers are 
 willing to assume the burdens of literature always 
 heavy in proportion to the ignorance of the public- 
 let them by all means. So much the more honour to 
 them. But the proper shoulders for the burden, in 
 the absence of an enlightened public, are the shoulders 
 of the Guild of Letters, the shoulders, in particular, 
 of the successful men. There is no lack of money 
 among them. I should roughly calculate that the in- 
 come of our successful novelists is more than equal 
 to that of all our publishers put together. Why should 
 they not subsidize literature? Why, out of their 
 abundance, should they not set aside a portion for 
 their literary posterity? 
 
 * * 
 
 On Guard 
 
 As one of the thirty thousand who take in and oc- 
 casionally read The Times Literary Supplement, I
 
 Ii6 Readers and Writers 
 
 may draw attention to the danger to truth its com- 
 posite character is always creating. Being familiar 
 with the back-ways of publishing I am not taken in, of 
 course, by the uniform use of the editorial "we" in a 
 journal like The Times Literary Supplement. "We" 
 represents a score of different people, all, or most of 
 whom are as much at intellectual sixes and sevens as 
 any other score; and the editor-in-chief, whoever he 
 may be, is just as powerless as a sovereign is over its 
 twenty shillings. That being granted, the situation 
 is still a little strange from the fact that certain senti- 
 ments are allowed to appear in the Literary Supple- 
 ment which, to say the least, are incongruous with 
 The Times and all The Times stands for. Here, for 
 instance, are three quotations from recent issues: 
 "Whether you beat your neighbour by militarism or 
 buy him by industrialism the effect is the same." 
 "That most fals'e and nauseating of legends 'the 
 happy warrior.' ' "The organization of trade is of 
 secondary moment: what is of the first moment is the 
 organization of a humane enjoyment of its benefits." 
 These sentiments are true, and they are sufficiently 
 strikingly put. But in The Times Literary Supple- 
 ment they are not only incongruous, but they are in a 
 very subtle sense, actually lies, and the more dangerous 
 lies from their identity with the truth. It is one of 
 the paradoxes of truth that a statement is only true 
 when it is in truthful company. As the corruption of 
 the best is the worst, so evil communications corrupt 
 good statements, and a truth in bad company is the 
 worst of lies. It is a mystery not easily to De under-
 
 The Coming Renaissance 117 
 
 stood, but the intuition may, perhaps, make something 
 of it. Is it not the fact that the occurrence of state- 
 ments like those just quoted in The Times Literary 
 Supplement causes a feeling of nausea? On examin- 
 ing the cause it will be found to lie in the unconscious 
 realization that such statements are there made for 
 no good purpose, but are only decoy ducks for the 
 better snaring of our suffrages for the real policy of 
 The Times itself. 
 
 * * 
 
 The Coming Renaissance 
 
 The prognostication of the approach of a new Re- 
 naissance has quite naturally been received with in- 
 credulity. Is it not the fact that civilization is in a 
 thoroughly morbid condition bordering on hysteria, 
 and was ever the outlook for culture darker than it is 
 at this moment? I have just been discussing the sub- 
 ject with a friend who laid this evidence before me 
 with a touch of reproach: how could I, in the face of 
 such a circle of gloom, pretend that we were even 
 possibly (which is all I affirm) on the eve of a new 
 Renaissance? My explanation of this part of the 
 story is, however, quite simple. The war has precipi- 
 tated a development in external events faster than the 
 average mind has been able to adapt itself to them, 
 with the consequence that the average mind has had 
 to take refuge in hysteria. For the greater part of 
 hysteria is due to nothing more than an inadequacy
 
 n8 Readers and Writers 
 
 of the mind to a given situation; and when the situa- 
 tion as given today is a situation that should and 
 would, but for the war, have arisen only, let us say, 
 twenty years hence, there is no wonder that in the mass 
 of the slowly developing minds of our people an in- 
 adequacy to the occasion should be experienced or that 
 the result should appear as hysteria. On the other 
 hand, hysteria is not a stable condition of the mind; 
 it is a transition to a more complete adaptation to 
 reality, or, in the alternative, to complete disintegra- 
 tion. But what is to be expected from the present 
 situation? Not, surely, disintegration in the general 
 sense, though it may take place in individual cases, 
 but a forward movement in the direction of adapta- 
 tion. This forward movement is the Renaissance, 
 and it is thus from the very circumstances of gloom 
 and hysteria that we may draw the hope that a fresh 
 advance of the human spirit is about to be made. 
 
 It is significant that concurrently with such a social 
 diagnosis as any one may make, special observers, with 
 or without a bee in their bonnet, are arriving at the 
 same conclusion. There are very confident guesses 
 now being disseminated by the various religious and 
 mystic schools concerning what, in their vocabulary, 
 they call the Second Advent which, however, may 
 well be the seven hundredth or the seven thousandth 
 for all we know. Attach no importance, if you like, 
 to the phenomena in question, but the fact of the 
 coincidence of forecast is somewhat impressive; for 
 while it is absurd to believe the "Second Adventists" 
 of all denominations when they stand alone in their
 
 Leonardo da Find as Pioneer 119 
 
 prognostications, their testimony is not negligible when 
 it is supported by what amounts to science. And the 
 fact is that today science, no less than mysticism, is 
 apprehensive of a New Coming of some kind or other. 
 What the nature of that New Coming is likely to be, 
 and when or how it will manifest itself, are matters 
 beyond direct knowledge, but the ear of science, no 
 less than the ear of mysticism, is a little thrilled with 
 the spirit of expectation. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci as Pioneer 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci's name has been frequently 
 mentioned among the intelligent during the last few 
 years, and it cannot be without a meaning. It may 
 be said that his reappearance as a subject for discus- 
 sion is due to a fortuitous concurrence of publishers. 
 But accidents of this kind are like miracles: they do 
 not happen; and I, for one, am inclined to suspect the 
 "collective unconscious" of a design in thrusting for- 
 ward at this moment the name and personality of the 
 great Renaissance humanist. What can we guess the 
 design to be? What is the interpretation of this 
 prominent figure in our current collective dreams? 
 The symbols appearing in dreams are the expressive 
 language of the unconscious mind, and the appearance 
 of the symbol of da Vinci is or may be an indication 
 that the "unconscious" is "dreaming" of a new 
 Renaissance. And since the dreams of the uncon-
 
 I2O Readers and Writers 
 
 scious today are or may be the acts of the conscious 
 tomorrow, the prevalent interest in Leonardo is a 
 further possible piece of evidence that we are or may 
 be on the eve of a recurrence of the Italian 
 Renaissance. 
 
 Leonardo as an artist interests us less than 
 Leonardo as a person. That is not to say that 
 Leonardo was not a great artist, for, of course, he was 
 one of the greatest. But it is to say that the promise 
 of which he was an incarnation was even greater than 
 the fulfilment which he achieved. There is a glorious 
 sentence in one of the Upanishads which is attributed 
 to the Creator on the morrow of His completion of 
 the creation of the whole manifested universe. "Hav- 
 ing pervaded all this," he says, "I remain." Not even 
 the creation of the world had exhausted His powers 
 or even so much as diminished His self-existence. 
 When that greatest of works of art had been accom-. 
 plished, He, the Creator, "remained." Leonardo 
 was, if I may use the expression, a chip of the original 
 block in this respect. His works, humanly speaking, 
 were wonderful; they were both multitudinous and 
 various. Nevertheless, after the last of them had 
 been performed, Leonardo remained as a great 
 "promise," still unfulfilled. That is the character of 
 the Renaissance type, as it is also the character of a 
 Renaissance period; its promise remains over even 
 after great accomplishment. The Renaissance man 
 is greater than his work; he pervades his work, but 
 he is not submerged in it. 
 
 I should be trespassing on the domain of the psycho-
 
 Leonardo da Find as Pioneer 121 
 
 analysts if I were to attempt to indicate the means 
 by which a collective hysteria may be resolved into an 
 integration. Taking the Italian Renaissance, how- 
 ever, as a sort of working model, and Leonardo da 
 Vinci as its typical figure, it would appear that the 
 method of resolution is all-round expression ex- 
 pression in as many forms and fields as the creative 
 powers direct. Leonardo was not only an artist, he 
 was a sculptor, a poet, an epigrammatist, an engineer, 
 a statesman, a soldier, a musician, and I do not know 
 what else besides. He indulged his creative or ex- 
 pressive impulses in every direction his "fancy" indi- 
 cated. Truly enough he was not equally successful in 
 an objective or critical sense in all these fields; but, 
 quite as certainly he owed his surpassing excellence in 
 one or two of them to the fact that he tried them all. 
 The anti- or non-Renaissance type of mind would 
 doubtless conclude that if Leonardo, let us say, 
 had been content to be only a painter, or only 
 a sculptor, he would have succeeded even more 
 perfectly in that single mode of expression into which 
 ex hypothesi he might have poured the energy other- 
 wise squandered in various subordinate channels. 
 But concentrations of energy of this kind are not al- 
 ways successful; the energies, in fact, are not always 
 convertible; and the attempt to concentrate may thus 
 have the effect, not only of failing of its direct object, 
 but of engaging one part of the total energy in sup- 
 pressing another. At any rate, the working hypoth- 
 esis (and it did work) of the Renaissance type is that 
 a natural multiplicity of modes of expression is better
 
 122 Readers and Writers 
 
 than an unnatural or forced concentration. The 
 latter, if successful, may possibly lead to something 
 wonderful; but if unsuccessful, it ends in hysteria, in 
 unresolved conflicts. The former, on the other hand, 
 while it may lead to no great excellence in any direction 
 (though equally it may be the condition of excellence) 
 is, at any rate, a resolution of the internal conflict. 
 We shall be well advised to deny ourselves nothing 
 in the region of aesthetic creation. Let us "dabble" 
 to our hearts' content in every art-form to which our 
 "fancy" invites us. The results in a critical sense may 
 be unimportant; "art happens," as Whistler used to 
 say, and it "happens," it may be added, in the course 
 of play. The play is the thing, and I have little doubt 
 that the approaching Renaissance will be heralded by 
 a revival of dilettantism in all the arts. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 ''Shakespeare" Simplified 
 
 English literary criticism lies under the disgrace of 
 accepting Shakespeare, the tenth-rate player, as 
 Shakespeare the divine author, and so long as a 
 mistake of this magnitude is admitted into the canon, 
 nobody of any conception can treat the canon with 
 respect. My theory of authorship is simple, rational, 
 and within the support of common experience. All 
 it requires is that we should assume that Shakespeare 
 the theatre-manager had on his literary staff or within 
 call a wonderful dramatic genius whose name we do
 
 "London Mercury" and English 123 
 
 not yet know; that this genius was as modest as he 
 was wonderful, and as adaptable as he was original; 
 and that, of the plays passed to him for licking into 
 shape (plays drawn from Shakespea.re, the actor- 
 manager's store), some he scarcely touched, others he 
 changed only here and there, while a few, the few that 
 appealed to his "fancy," he completely transformed 
 and re-created in his own likeness. There is nothing 
 incredible, nothing even requiring much subtlety to 
 accept, in this hypothesis. The Elizabethan age was 
 a strange age. It had very little of the passion for 
 self-advertisement that distinguishes our own. It con- 
 tained many anonymous geniuses of whom the obscure 
 translators of the Bible were only one handful. The 
 author of the plays may well have been one of the 
 number a quiet, modest, retiring sort of man, thank- 
 ful to be able to find congenial work in re-shaping plays 
 to his own liking. That, at any rate, is my surmise, 
 and so far from thinking the theory unimportant, I 
 believe it throws a beam of light on the psychology 
 of genius during the Elizabethan age. 
 
 * * 
 
 The "London Mercury" and English 
 
 It goes without saying that the London Mercury 
 had what is called a "good Press." Without imput- 
 ing it to Mr. Squire for unrighteousness, it is a fact 
 that Mr. Squire has a "good Press" for whatever he 
 chooses to do. He appears to have been born with a
 
 124 Readers and Writers 
 
 silver pen in his mouth, and for quite a number of 
 years now it has been impossible to take a literary 
 journal without finding praise of Mr. Squire in it. As 
 a poet Mr. Squire deserves nearly all that is said of 
 him; not for the mass of his work, but for an occa- 
 sional poem of almost supreme excellence. As a 
 literary causeur, of whom The Times said in compli- 
 ment that "he never makes you think," he has the first 
 and great qualification of readableness. Finally, as 
 a parodist he is without a superior in contemporary 
 literature. But when one has said this, one has said 
 all; for Mr. Squire is not a great or even a sound critic, 
 he is not an impressive writer, and he is not a dis- 
 tinguished or original thinker. Time and Mr. Squire 
 may prove my judgment wrong, but I do not think, 
 either, that he will make a great or inspiring editor. 
 Great editorship is a form of creation, and the great 
 editor is measured by the number and quality of the 
 writers he brings to birth or to ripeness. We see in 
 course of time whether Mr. Squire is a creator in this 
 sense. So far, he has not even a dark horse in his 
 stable. 
 
 Among the objects set out to be accomplished by the 
 London Mercury is the advancement of English style. 
 It is a worthy and even a momentous object, but the 
 London Mercury is not the first modern journal to set 
 out upon this quest. After all, I, in my way, during 
 the last seven years or so, have made occasional 
 references to current English style, and my comments 
 cannot be said to be distinguishd by any particular 
 tenderness to bad English, by whomsoever lit has been
 
 "London Mercury' and English 125 
 
 written. It amused me, therefore, to read sundry and 
 divers exhortations to Mr. Squire to be severe, and, 
 if need be, "savage" in criticism, and especially when 
 I observed that some of the names appended to the 
 advice were of writers who have anything but appre- 
 ciated the severity, let alone the "savagery," of re- 
 views addressed to themselves. Let it pass. The 
 thing in question is English style, and nobody can be 
 too enthusiastic in its maintenance and improvement. 
 The peril of English style, I take it, lies in its very 
 virtue, that of directness, and its fighting edges are to 
 be found where the colloquial and the vernacular 
 (or, let us say, the idiomatic) meet and mix. The 
 English vernacular is the most powerful and simple 
 language that was ever written, but the danger always 
 lies in wait for it of slipping into the English col- 
 loquial, which, by the same token, is one of the worst 
 of languages. The difference between them is pre- 
 cisely the difference between Ariel and Caliban; and 
 I am not sure that "Shakespeare" had not this, among 
 other things, in mind when he dreamed his myth. 
 Caliban is a direct enough creature to be English, 
 and there are writers who imagine his style to be the 
 mirror of perfection. But Ariel is no less direct; 
 he is only Caliban transformed and purified and be- 
 come a thing of light. There is, of course, no rule 
 for distinguishing between them; between the per- 
 missible and the forbidden use of the colloquial; for 
 it is obvious that the vernacular is finally derived from 
 the colloquial. The decision rests with taste, which 
 alone can decide what of the colloquial shall be al-
 
 126 Readers and Writers 
 
 lowed to enter into the vernacular. In general, I 
 should say, the criterion is grace; the hardest, the 
 rarest, but the most exquisite of all the qualities of 
 style. I hope one day to see English written in the 
 vernacular, with all its strength and directness, but 
 with grace added to it. Newman, perhaps, was 
 furthest of all writers on the way to it. But New- 
 man did not always charm. Now I have written the 
 word, I would substitute charm for grace, and say that 
 the perfect English style, which nobody has yet writ- 
 ten, will charm by its power. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 Mr. G. K. Chesterton on Rome and Ger- 
 many 
 
 Hovelaque's Les Causes profondes de la Guerre is 
 either the original or a plagiarism of Mr. G. K. Ches- 
 terton's theory that the war was only an episode in 
 the eternal "revolt" of "Germany" against "Rome." 
 I put these words into quarantine to signify that they 
 are to be handled with care; for it is not only Germany 
 or Rome that is in question, but the psychological char- 
 acteristics and the relation between them which they 
 embody. Thus raised to psychological dimensions, 
 Germany and Rome become principles, types of men- 
 tality: in radical opposition. Germany is of one 
 camp, Rome is of the other, and given the fact of their 
 inherent antagonism, war between them is endless. 
 Mr. Mann, a German writer, has carried the subject
 
 Mr. G. K. Chesterton 127 
 
 further; he has entered into particulars. In the fol- 
 lowing pairs of qualities, tabulated by Mr. Mann, the 
 first of each is to be attributed to "Germany" and the 
 other to "Rome." Heroic, rational; people, masses; 
 personality, individuality; culture, civilization; spirit- 
 ual life, social life; aristocracy, democracy; romance, 
 classicism; nationalism, internationalism. I do not 
 know how Mr. Chesterton will fare among these pairs 
 of opposites, for it appears to me that his preferences 
 are to be found at least as often among the "German" 
 group as among the "Roman" group. There, how- 
 ever, they are, as drawn up by a supporter of his 
 general theory, and we must leave him to make the 
 best of them. 
 
 There is another pair which Mr. Mann has not 
 mentioned, though it has been brought close home to 
 many of us. The German "Persius" has confessed 
 that "the lie has always been one of Germany's chief 
 weapons, both by land and sea." The lie, however, 
 is not the "Roman" way; the "Roman" way is silence, 
 and anybody engaged in the dissemination of ideas 
 knows which of the two forms of opposition is the 
 more difficult to meet. After all, the liar takes risks; 
 moreover, he does the idea he opposes the honour of 
 noticing it if only to lie about it. But silence risks 
 nothing; it kills without leaving a trace. 
 
 Leaving the subject where, for the moment, it Is, 
 we can inquire whether the suggested antagonism is 
 not altogether false. Is Rome so eternal as all that, 
 or Germany either? We have been familiarized 
 with a view that represents the map of Europe as a
 
 128 Readers and Writers 
 
 map primarily of mind; but I can discover in such a 
 map no confirmation of the statement that it is Rome 
 and Germany that are in permanent conflict. On the 
 contrary, what we call "formal mind" in other 
 words, the rationalistic consciousness appears to me 
 to distinguish "Rome" quite as much as "Germany." 
 It may be true that on the whole, the "Roman" qual- 
 ities are better integrated and that the "Roman" type 
 is more completely a "man of the world." But, in 
 comparison with a type of the universal man, the man 
 of the whole world, I doubt whether it can be said 
 that the "Roman" is much more inclusive than the 
 German. Both exclude a good deal, and thus the op- 
 position between them is not of principle, but of ac- 
 cident, the accident being that the anthology of 
 qualities which we call "Rome" differs from the 
 anthology called German. It would follow from this 
 that so far from being in necessarily eternal conflict 
 "Rome" and "Germany" are susceptible of a synthe- 
 sis in which the qualities of each will complement the 
 qualities of the other. "Germany," in other words, 
 needs to Romanize, while "Rome" needs to Ger- 
 manize. Their approach to each other would mark 
 the end of the conflict. 
 
 In so far as it is true that "Germany" represents 
 the "elemental instincts" always in revolt against 
 "Rome," "the representative of the supremacy of 
 reason" (Hovelaque), there are grounds for believing 
 that a psychological rapprochement is neccessary to 
 the psychic health no less than to the peace of Europe. 
 Long before the war we heard, even in this country,
 
 Mr. G. K. Chesterton 129 
 
 criticism of the right of reason to supremacy; and, 
 strangely enough, it was from the "Roman" Mr. Ches- 
 terton that the criticism came most powerfully. "Ger- 
 many," in that case, may certainly be said to have 
 taken the lead in the active revolt against Rome; but 
 it was, we must observe, against a Rome already 
 weakened from within by the dissatisfaction with 
 Romanism of many of the leading "Romans." The 
 fact is that the "supremacy of reason," for which 
 "Rome" stands, is always in danger, like every other 
 supremacy, of degenerating into a dictatorship; and 
 the dictatorship which reason was establishing before 
 the war involved precisely the suppression of the "ele- 
 mental instincts" attributed to Germany. The so- 
 called encirclement of Germany was, in fact, and in 
 psychological terms, the rational encirclement of in- 
 stinct; and I must again observe that it was not in geo- 
 graphical Germany alone that the encirclement was 
 felt to be oppressive, but in every "Germany within 
 us," in so far as each of us contained "elemental in- 
 stincts" of any kind. The meaning of what I am 
 saying is that the elemental instincts, call them Ger- 
 man, or anything you please, cannot be permanently 
 tyrannized over by "reason"; nor should they be. 
 Nor is it necessary that reason should attempt such a 
 dictatorship. Its rule should be that of a constitu- 
 tional monarch under the direction of representatives, 
 not of itself, but of the elemental instincts. The prac- 
 tical conclusion to be drawn is that the "eternal an- 
 tagonism" of "Rome" and "Germany" is not a 
 necessary fact in psychology. It becomes a fact only
 
 130 Readers and Writers 
 
 when "Rome" aims at a dictatorship of reason to the 
 inevitable isolation and suppression of "Germany." 
 Reason must learn how to cultivate its instincts. 
 
 I do not imagine that Mr. Chesterton identifies 
 "Rome" with the Holy See, though others, no doubt, 
 do. It is interesting, however, to remark that before 
 the war, and for a considerable period during the war, 
 the policy of the Holy See was directed to the support 
 of Germany. I have often wondered how a Catholic 
 like M. Hovelaque accommodates his thesis with that 
 fact. If the war, as he says, was only an episode in 
 the secular conflict of Germany with Rome (meaning 
 the Roman Church as the spiritual successor of the 
 Roman Empire), how came it that before and during 
 the war the directors of the Roman Church were pro- 
 German? Something must surely be wrong here; for 
 either the Roman Church did not take that view of 
 Germany which M. Hovelaque has defined, or, as 
 seems to me more probable, the Holy See had another 
 end in view than victory over Germany, namely, alli- 
 ance with a prospectively victorious Germany ! With 
 this key, I think, the mystery is unlocked for the or- 
 dinary man, however much it continues sealed to the 
 faithful. As The Times Literary Supplement said: 
 "Modernists understand no better than Newman the 
 springs of Roman ecclesiastical policy, which is never 
 fanatical or idealistic, but always based on cool politi- 
 cal calculation." And, undoubtedly, the "cool political 
 calculation" of the Holy See, both before and during 
 the first years of the war, was that Germany would win. 
 If this was not the case, how are we to explain the
 
 The Origins of Marx 131 
 
 sudden change over of policy when it began to appear 
 that Germany, after all, was not to be the victor? 
 That at a certain stage in the war such a change took 
 place is well known to everybody, and it was openly 
 admitted in the Catholic Dublin Review. "The 
 pendulum of Catholicism," said the Dublin Review, 
 "has swung away from Germany ... with Austria 
 and Spain . . . and with the English-speaking peoples 
 and their Latin Allies the Catholic order in the era of 
 the future." The "eternal conflict" theory must go 
 by the board after this, for it obviously fails to fit the 
 facts. 
 
 * * 
 
 The Origins of Marx 
 
 It is to be hoped that the reputation of Marx will 
 not long survive the war unimpaired. I can scarcely 
 think that the German Socialists will be so proud of 
 their Marxism in the future as they have been in the 
 past, since it will have clearly betrayed them into one of 
 the most shameful moral surrenders in all history. It is 
 dangerous for a man's writings to be regarded as the 
 "Bible" even of Socialists; and when, in addition, the 
 Marxian Bible, unlike the other, aims at and, in a 
 sense, achieves logical consistency, the peril of it is 
 greater upon minds lacking the inestimable virtue of 
 common sense. Marx was not himself a slave of his 
 own inspiration; he was anything but a Marxian in 
 the sense in which his followers are Marxian. He
 
 132 Readers and Writers 
 
 had, indeed, a very sharp word for certain of the dis- 
 ciples whose breed, unfortunately, has not been ex- 
 tinguished by it. "Amateur anarchists," he called 
 them, who "make up by rapid declarations and blood- 
 thirsty rampings for the utter insignificance of their 
 political existence." Groups of his disciples, answer- 
 ing perfectly to this description, are to be found today 
 in English as well as in other Labour circles. In be- 
 tween their rampings they reveal their political in- 
 significance by inquiring of each other such elementary 
 facts about literature and history as schoolboys should 
 be ashamed to have forgotten. And the surprising 
 thing is that even these open confessions induce no re- 
 action upon their conviction that they understand 
 Marx. 
 
 It is a common supposition among Marx's followers 
 that not only has he left nothing to be said on the 
 subject of economics, but that nothing was said before 
 him. One German Socialist, at any rate, has rid him- 
 self of this notion, for Dr. Menger has remarked that 
 "'Marx was completely under the influence of the 
 earlier English Socialists, and more particularly of 
 William Thompson." In a valuable essay upon Marx, 
 by Professor Alfred Rahilly, the facts are let out. 
 Marx, it appears, came across Thompson's work on 
 The Distribution of Wealth (1824) in the British 
 Museum, and read it with great profit. From 
 Thompson he took practically all his chief doctrines, 
 with the exception of his peculiar interpretation of 
 history in terms of economics. The theory of Value 
 as measured by labour-power, the distinction between
 
 Marx as Politician 133 
 
 capital and capitalism, the law of decreasing utility, 
 and, above all, the very phrase as well as the very idea 
 of Surplus Value all of these "Marxian" doctrines 
 Marx found in Thompson. I am not arguing that 
 Marx was the less for having been indebted to his 
 English predecessors. He would, indeed, in my opin- 
 ion, have been a greater man if he had borrowed more 
 of Thompson, for Thompson possessed the common 
 sense to realize that it was possible that the concentra- 
 tion of capital might take place simultaneously with a 
 diffusion of ownership an idea which would have 
 spared Marx the ignominy of many of his most fanati- 
 cal disciples. What, on the other hand, was great in 
 Marx, was his capacity for large generalizations, and 
 his industry in establishing them. In this respect he 
 belonged to the great Victorians, and, as such, he de- 
 serves more credit than his present-day followers will 
 permit him to receive. 
 
 * * 
 
 Marx as Politician 
 
 The centenary celebrations of Marx ought not to 
 conclude without a tribute to his astonishing political 
 insight. Philosophically Marx was confused; as an 
 economist he has suffered from his disciples; but as a 
 political critic he has seldom been surpassed. Particu- 
 lar attention may be drawn to his analysis of the cir- 
 cumstances of Bismarck's annexation of Alsace-Lor- 
 raine, and to his forecast of the consequences. Though
 
 134 Readers and Writers 
 
 writing in London, and without our historic knowledge 
 of the Ems telegram, or our present knowledge of the 
 world-war, Marx might have written his manifesto 
 today; but, in that case, I doubt whether he would be 
 published in Germany, or read with much attention by 
 Marx's followers in this country. It is a strange re- 
 flection, indeed, upon the fate of the works of Marx 
 that it is precisely the most clear and prophetic part 
 of them which his professed followers neglect. For 
 his dubious forecasts and his riddling analyses they 
 have a reverence that transcends bibliolatry; but, con- 
 cerning his most absolute and explicit political policies 
 not a word ! 
 
 The war of 1870, as we all know, was for Germany 
 a declared war of defence, exactly like the present war. 
 Germany is always defending herself at the world's 
 expense. No sooner, however, had the ostensible 
 motive of defence been satisfied by Sedan, than the 
 real objects of German militarism began to be re- 
 vealed. Unhindered by the earlier protestations of 
 the Emperor William that Germany was at war only 
 with Napoleon, and not with France, the militarists 
 inspired the German liberal bourgeoisie to press for 
 annexations in the name of race and security. They 
 dared to pretend, said Marx, that the people of the 
 two provinces were burning to be annexed to Ger- 
 many, and they adopted without reflection the excuse 
 of the military party that a rectification of the Im- 
 perial frontiers was a strategic necessity. Thus, con- 
 cluded Marx, they insisted upon sowing in the terms 
 of peace the seeds of new wars the phrase is Marx's
 
 John Mite he I as the Same 135 
 
 own. And what wars, too! Marx was not blind to 
 their probable character. History, he said, would 
 not measure the German offence by the number of 
 miles of territory annexed, but by the significance of 
 the fact of annexation. This significance was no less 
 than a declaration of "a policy of conquest," from 
 which might be anticipated in logical order a German 
 racial war against "the Slav and Latin races com- 
 bined." The war of 1870, having thus ended, would, 
 he said, be the precursor of a series of international 
 wars, in the course of which it was probable that the 
 working-classes everywhere would succumb to the 
 forces of militarism and Capitalism. What com- 
 ment has the Call or any of our contemporary 
 Marxian pacifists to make upon this? It is not right 
 that they should ignore it, more especially when it is 
 recalled that Marx paid a tribute to the English work- 
 ing-classes of his day, who "protested with all their 
 might against the dismemberment of France." 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 John Mitchel as the Same 
 
 Marx, however, was not the only observer of the 
 events of 1870 to be moved to prophecy by them. 
 As a matter of fact, everything has been foreseen. 
 John Mitchel, the Irish Nationalist, whose name is 
 invoked by Sinn Feiners today, was in Paris before 
 the 1870 war, and wrote of the events of the war in 
 the Irish Citizen and elsewhere during its progress.
 
 136 Readers and Writers 
 
 He, too, had no illusions concerning the nature of 
 Prussian militarism, and though his sympathies were 
 mainly with France, he had a word of warning for 
 England. "Prussia," he said, "cannot be England's 
 friend. Prussia has her own aspirations and am- 
 bitions; one of these is to be a great maritime power, 
 or rather the great maritime Power of Europe; and 
 nothing in the future can be more sure than that 
 Prussia, if successful in this struggle with France, will 
 take Belgium, and threaten from Antwerp the mouth 
 of the Thames." Things have not worked out ex- 
 actly as Mitchel prophesied, but they have worked 
 out nearly enough to justify his political clairvoyance. 
 Like Marx, he was not deceived by the events before 
 him, but both saw in them the shadows of the events 
 which have now befallen us. I remark with irony 
 that just as the self-styled followers of the economist 
 Marx ignore the political judgments of their master, 
 the professed inheritors of the Nationalist opinions 
 of Mitchel ignore his international opinions. It is in 
 this way that the garments of the great are divided, 
 and the seamless coat shredded to make partisan 
 ribbons. 
 
 * * 
 
 Norse in English 
 
 Professor C. H. Herford makes a meritorious at- 
 tempt to recall attention to the influence and value of
 
 Norse in English 137 
 
 the Norse Myths upon English Poetry. William 
 Morris was most powerfully and directly influenced 
 by the Sagas, and of Morris Professor Herford says 
 that "no other English poet has felt so keenly the 
 power of Norse myth; none has done so much to- 
 restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its earth-shak- 
 ing humour, and its heights of tragic passion and 
 pathos, to a place in our memories, and a home in our 
 hearts." It will not do, however, for (let me whis- 
 per it) who reads Morris's poetry today? Has he 
 a home in our hearts? Are his Norse enthusiasms 
 really anything to us? I am not defending our gen- 
 eration for neglecting Morris, or for being indifferent 
 to the Norse theogony, of which he was a prophet. 
 Our age is one of prose, and the passion of prose is 
 justice reasonable and regulated justice. Terrible 
 beauty, earth-shaking humour, tragic passion, and so 
 on the stuft of epic poetry are relegated nowadays 
 to the police court. Moreover, the Norse mythology 
 is not only "pagan" in the sense of being non-Christian, 
 it is pagan in the sense of being sub- as much as pre- 
 Christian, differing in this respect from the Indian 
 mythology of the Mahabharata, or the Egyptian my- 
 thology of the Book of the Dead. We can never re- 
 turn to it without committing an act of regression, 
 since it is a paganism of a world inferior rather than 
 superior to the "Christian" world. At the same time, 
 since we must carry all our sheaves with us, in order 
 to enjoy the complete harvest of the human soul, it is 
 necessary not to drop from consciousness the heroic
 
 138 Readers and Writers 
 
 past, albeit a past to which we may not return. Let 
 it be enshrined and enjoyed in poetry and music now 
 that it is no longer possible in life. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 The Comedy of It 
 
 Comedy still remains a secret hid from the English 
 mind, and not all the efforts of Mr. John Francis Hope 
 to bring it into popularity will succeed where the prior 
 efforts of Meredith have failed. The reason, as Mr. 
 Hope has often explained it, even more clearly than 
 Meredith, is not only that the spirit of Comedy de- 
 mands "a society of cultivated men and women, 
 wherein ideas are current and perceptions quick" a 
 condition certainly not now existing but the absence 
 of three qualities, each of which, unfortunately, 
 blooms luxuriantly among us "sentimentalism, puri- 
 tanism, and bacchanalianism." Comedy, the play of 
 the mind about real ideas, is quite incompatible with 
 any one of these three vices. If you sentimentalize, 
 play is over, and equally it is over if you are shocked, 
 or if you carry the suggested humour of the situation 
 too far. But one of these things the ordinary Eng- 
 lishman or woman is almost bound to do; and thus it 
 comes about that "play," the sparkle of common sense, 
 is so rare among us. 
 
 Meredith certainly worked very hard to instil 
 Comedy into the English mind. His essay is a classic, 
 and our only classic on the subject. And he may be
 
 The Comedy of It 139 
 
 said to have written the whole of his novels in order 
 to illustrate his idea. Meredith's novels are much 
 more than a mirror held up in Nature; they are a 
 model help to human nature; and, from this point of 
 view, they 1 are only an appendix to the Essay on 
 Comedy. The serious way in which Meredith's novels 
 are read, however, is an evidence of his failure, and 
 it would be interesting to hear his secret comment on 
 the critics who acclaim him as the grand portrait- 
 painter of women. Did Meredith even set himself 
 to draw a woman? Was his art not rather to "draw 
 out" a woman from the imperfect society his times 
 provided him? Were not his "portraits," in fact, 
 constructive criticisms of the women he knew? I put 
 these opinions into interrogation out of mere courtesy, 
 for there is really no doubt whatever about them. 
 Meredith drew women still to be, as he hoped they 
 would become. 
 
 "To love comedy you must know the real world, 
 and know men and women well enough not to expect 
 too much of them, though you may still hope for 
 good." That is an almost complete summary of the 
 conditions of the comic spirit; but there must be added 
 the "sense of society," the social sense, which is quite 
 as important. This also introduces a considerable 
 difficulty for us, since if "our English school had not 
 clearly imagined society" in 1877, when Meredith 
 wrote, it is less than ever probable today. In 1877, 
 such people of intelligence as were living in England, 
 were still more or less homogeneous in their general 
 views about life. They were not eighteenth century
 
 140 Readers and Writers 
 
 the century of our highest English social culture; 
 but they were not yet what we have subsequently be- 
 come, discreet and warring atoms of intellectuality. 
 It was possible when Meredith was alive for a group 
 of people to meet, and to create something resembling 
 a salon. The hope of realizing a "salon spirit" was 
 not entirely dead. Today nothing is more improbable 
 than even an attempt to restore a salon. Not only 
 would nobody undertake to do it, but to nobody would 
 it occur that its restoration is highly desirable. But 
 the salon is, as it were, the foyer of the theatre of 
 Comedy, as the theatre of Comedy is itself the foyer 
 of the Civilized Life of Brilliant Common Sense; and 
 if we cannot re-create a salon it is perfectly certain 
 that the greater mysteries are beyond us. We may 
 continue, however, to "hope for good," since that also 
 is an essential of Comedy. 
 
 * 
 
 The Epic Serbs 
 
 Kossovo: the Heroic Songs of the Serbs, trans- 
 lated by Miss Helen Rootham, has now been published 
 for some months. If there is any "epic sense" alive 
 in this country, it must surely be gratified by the ap- 
 pearance of these Serbian ballads, which are much 
 more truly epic fragments than ballads as we under- 
 stand the term. In the ballad proper the prevailing 
 note is tragedy sometimes individual, sometimes 
 family, sometimes clan; but in the Serbian, as in the
 
 The Epic Serbs 141 
 
 Homeric, the tragedy expressed in the popular poetry 
 is more spacious even than the nation; the nation be- 
 comes the race, and the race symbolizes a psycholog- 
 ical power, which may very well be called a god a 
 suffering god. Grimm said of these ballads that there 
 had been "nothing since Homer to compare with them; 
 they were the best of all times and nations." Goethe 
 compared them to the Song of Songs. Certainly 
 there is something Homeric in them; and since they 
 are sung today, they can be regarded as unique. 
 Long dwelling on them, with a view to discovering 
 their innermost secret, convinces me, however, that 
 they differ from the Homeric mood in their compara- 
 tive hopelessness. Mr. Baring says in his Introduc- 
 tion that these Serbian ballad-writers "saw the world 
 with the eyes of a child and the heart of a man." 
 "Child" is a word of multiple entente; and the differ- 
 ence between the Homeric and the Serbian "child- 
 hood" is that the latter appears doubtful whether it 
 can grow up. Homer, we know, occasionally let fall 
 a sad regret that his splendid heroes should still be 
 children; and in the plays of ^Eschylus the high philo- 
 sophical meditations of Homer are considerably 
 elaborated. But in these Serbian ballads there does 
 not appear to me any sign of the mind of a man, how- 
 ever much of the heart there may be. No Serbian 
 Plato will ever find in them such a text as the Greek 
 Plato found in Homer. It is to be wondered at. 
 Serbia has always been on the frontier of European 
 civilization, and perpetually in the trenches. Since 
 1389 Serbia has been in unbroken but unsubmissive
 
 142 Readers and Writers 
 
 captivity, and her deliverance from alien bondage is 
 only an event of yesterday. But if the elements of 
 the future are contained in the quintessence of these 
 ballads, there is no sight of a new Athens in them. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 Ernest Dowson 
 
 Mr. Arthur Symons's Introduction to the reprinted 
 Poems and Prose of the late Ernest Dowson, has all 
 the characteristics of the age to which both he and 
 Dowson belongs. It is delicately appreciative, and 
 not lacking in good judgment. Mr. Symons says, for 
 instance, that Dowson was small enough to be over- 
 whelmed by experiences that would have been nour- 
 ishing food to a great man. But the style and 
 manner of passing judgment almost completely con- 
 tradict the matter of the judgment itself, and leave 
 us in doubt whether Mr. Symons is not judging against 
 his judgment. Literary criticism does not need to be 
 literature; least of all does it need to be belles-lettres. 
 Yet Mr. Arthur Symons and his whole school seem 
 to aim at precisely this effect, that of writing in the 
 same style as the work criticized. Thus we find him 
 saying of Dowson: "all the fever and turmoil and the 
 unattained dreams of a life which had so much of 
 the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius" 
 words and phrases which might have been written by 
 Dowson himself. They are apologiastic of the per-
 
 Ernest Dowson 143 
 
 son when what we ask of criticism is judgment of the 
 quality of the style, and in the unfortunate identifi- 
 cation of genius with disaster and suicide they are 
 almost an incentive to the little artists to trade on 
 their neuroses. I do not know whether Mr. Symons 
 knew Dowson personally; it is of no importance; but 
 his bedside manner with ailing geniuses would have 
 been anything but tonic. 
 
 It is symptomatic of Dowson's state of mind, 
 though Mr. Symons misses the subtlety of it, that he 
 was always repeating Poe's line : "the viol, the violet, 
 and the vine." A special affection for labials and 
 liquids is conclusive evidence of minority, not to say 
 infantilism; and stylists with any ambition to excel, 
 and to develop both themselves and their style, will 
 be wise to watch their "v's" and "m's" and "1's," in 
 fact, their labials and liquids generally. Dowson 
 wallowed in liquids and labials to the end of his short 
 life; his vocabulary never grew up, and I have no 
 doubt that, had he been asked to quote his own best 
 lines, he would have pointed, not to the notorious 
 "Cynara," which is sufficiently pretty-pretty, but to 
 these lines, in which he came as near to Poe as origi- 
 nality permits: 
 
 Violets and leaves of vine 
 For Love that lives a day. 
 
 "One is essentially of the autumn," he wrote of him- 
 self. But that is not true, for Dowson was not ripe, 
 but (I say it of course with respect) rotten. He re-
 
 144 Readers and Writers 
 
 mained in the cradle sucking sensations long after he 
 should have been out in the world creating sensations. 
 Life never got beyond his lips. 
 
 * * 
 
 A Sentimental Excursion 
 
 The writers of the Venture, a literary magazine 
 published from Bristol, and written chiefly by members 
 of the Postal Service, are sincere in that they are 
 manifestly striving to acquire a good English style; 
 and they are modest in that they do not pretend to 
 have attained to it. Even better, and unlike so many 
 current "stylists," they do not say that the unreachable 
 grapes are sour, while those only which they can 
 pluck are the perfect fruit; in other words, they do 
 not try to pass off their defects as new beauties of 
 style. Their models are good, and their exercises 
 are promising. The introductory note contains, 
 however, a little cant, rather out of key with the pre- 
 vailing mood of the journal. It demands "stalwart 
 criticism," not for itself only, but for literature in 
 general. The London Mercury appeared before the 
 world in the same austere attitude, calling in pro- 
 phetic tones for sterner criticism, more out-spoken 
 criticism, criticism that should both say and mean 
 something, criticism, in short, of the kind which has 
 for years ensured the ostracism of precisely that kind 
 of critic. It is the easiest thing in the world to de- 
 mand such criticism, and very popular on one condition
 
 A Sentimental Excursion 145 
 
 that it be never actually provided. For the fact 
 is that the criticism in question is really killing; and 
 how many of those who ask for stern criticism would 
 welcome their own extinction? 
 
 Special attention is directed to the longish poem 
 by Mr. Francis Andrews. It is entitled "Mother," 
 and the opening stanza is as follows: 
 
 You can see from the gate which once enclosed my world 
 The tinted woods o' the hill and the white road wending, 
 And among the nearer boughs wherein my stars were hung 
 The blown and shifting wraith of the blue smoke curled. 
 
 Let us stop at that and collect our impressions. It 
 is a very dangerous subject that Mr. Andrews has 
 chosen. The temptation to indulge in "sob-stuff" in 
 reflecting on "Mother," is well-nigh irresistible, since 
 the sentiment goes back to the childhood not only of 
 the individual, but of the race, and probably earlier. 
 It is almost inextricably mingled with the tears of 
 things. But tears are not a proper accompaniment 
 of poetry or of beauty. The mission of Art is to dry all 
 tears, and the utmost severity and serenity are needed 
 in dealing with a profoundly emotional subject exactly 
 to keep the tears from welling into it. That Mr. 
 Andrews has not succeeded is evident from the opening 
 stanza which I have just quoted. It is almost 
 drenched with sentiment. Listen to the rhythm 
 which is nearly a lullably in reverie, and let us ask 
 ourselves whether it is, not calculated, quite apart 
 from the words, to throw the reader backwards into 
 his mother's arms. "Which once enclosed my
 
 146 Readers and Writers 
 
 world," "and the white road wending," "whereon 
 my stars were hung," "the blown and shifting wraith 
 of blue smoke curled" these are sentimental rhythms, 
 and their inevitable effect is to induce a reverie of 
 the past rather than a meditation or contemplation 
 of the future. The mood is backward-looking, and 
 not forward-looking, an indulgence and not an effort 
 of spirit. It is quite in accordance with the diagnosis 
 that a concluding stanza of the poem should repeat 
 the opening stanza, since there is no release in a mood 
 of this kind. In great reveries it will be observed 
 that the movement is forward and upward. The 
 action starts from a profound sentiment, but it works 
 its way upward to a triumphant assertion of spiritual 
 realization. Look, for instance, at Lycldas or 
 Adonals, both sentimental in origin, but both exalted 
 in conclusion. There the song springs from a dewy 
 bed, drenched with tears, but it mounts and mounts 
 until it ends in the sky. Mr. Andrews keeps well to 
 the ground, and, as I have said, his concluding stanza 
 is only a slight variation of the prelude. The in- 
 fluence of Kipling is to be discerned at work, 
 especially Kipling's "Envoi," beginning, "There's a 
 whisper down the field." Kipling is another of the 
 writer's whose sentiment is still tied to his mother's 
 apron-strings; and his "Envoi" and "Mother o' Mine" 
 are almost as poisonous to poetry as Meredith's "Love 
 in the Valley." We need not be averse to sentiment 
 as such, but the most careful discrimination between 
 the nest and the sky is essential to an aesthetic use
 
 The Newest Testament 147 
 
 of it. Let us start in sentiment, by all means, but 
 let us rise from it as quickly as possible. 
 
 *** 
 
 The Newest Testament 
 
 Various attempts have been made from time to time 
 to "render" the New Testament into colloquial 
 English in order to bring it "up-to-date." None of 
 these, we may congratulate ourselves, has so far been 
 more than a nine days' sensation, and even less than 
 that length of life is destined for the latest attempt, 
 Sayings and Stories, a translation into "colloquial 
 English" of the Sermon on the Mount and some 
 Parables. The Yates Professor of New Testament 
 Greek and Exegesis at Mansfield College gives us 
 his assurance that however "startlingly unlike the 
 familiar versions" these translations by Mr. Hoare 
 may be, they are nevertheless "actual translations and 
 not mere paraphrases," and he commends the "style" 
 to the "candid judgment of the reader." The prose 
 sections, in particular, he says, are "curiously reminis- 
 cent" of the "homely speech in which the sayings of 
 Jesus Christ have been preserved." It may be so, 
 but then, again, it may not; since, after all, it is not 
 a question of reproducing in colloquial English the 
 colloquial Greek of the original, but a question rather 
 of reproducing in English the meaning of the Gospel 
 writers; and this may very well require, not colloquial 
 English, but the English vernacular in its highest de-
 
 148 Readers and Writers 
 
 gree of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not 
 sufficiently acquainted with the popular Greek in which 
 much of the New Testament was written to pass a 
 candid judgment on its quality as a Greek style, but 
 if the aim of the original writers was the grand style 
 simple as it must have been whether they achieved 
 it or not, it is indubitably achieved in the English of 
 the authorized translation. Assuming the original, 
 in fact, to be "faithfully" represented in the colloquial 
 English of Mr. Hoare, I unhesitatingly say that the 
 English of the authorized translation is nearer the 
 spirit of the original than the present translation, 
 and, in that sense, more fully faithful to the intentions 
 of the original authors. 
 
 It would be tedious to cite more than one example, 
 and I will take it in the very first sentence of Mr. 
 Hoare's translation. "What joy," he says, "for 
 those with the poor man's feelings ! Heaven's Em- 
 pire is for them," the authorized translation of which 
 is too familiar to need quotation. I do not see what 
 is gained, setting aside the cost by the substitution of 
 the exclamatory "What joy . . ." for the ecstatic 
 affirmation, "Blessed are the poor." Why again, 
 "the poor man," and, after that, the "poor man's 
 feelings"? Why also "Heaven's Empire" instead of 
 "the Kingdom of Heaven"; and why "is for them" 
 instead of "theirs is"? The gain, even literally, is 
 imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning has 
 been sacrificed. "Blessed" is an incomparably more 
 spiritual word than "joy" in English, at any rate, 
 whatever their respective originals may indicate; and
 
 The Newest Testament 149 
 
 there is a plane of difference between an incontinent 
 ejaculation such as "What joy," which resembles 
 "What fun," and has in view rather a prospect than 
 a fact and the serene and confident utterance of an 
 assured truth. Further, and again without regard to 
 the literal original, "a poor man's feelings" must be 
 miles away from the intention of the original authors, 
 since it definitely conveys to us associations derived 
 from social surroundings, social reform, and what not. 
 Was this the intention of the Sermon on the Mount, 
 the very location of which symbolized a state of mind 
 above that of the dwellers in the plain of common life? 
 Was it a socialist or communist discourse? If not, 
 the "poor man's feelings," in our English colloquial 
 sense, is utterly out of place, and the original must 
 have meant something symbolically different. The 
 substitution, again, of "Heaven's Empire" for the 
 "Kingdom of Heaven" may be, as Professor Dodd 
 assures us, a mere correct literal translation of the 
 original phrase; but only a literary barbarian can 
 contemplate it without grieving over the lost worlds 
 of meaning. What is the prospect of an "Empire," 
 even Heaven's Empire, to us today? As certainly 
 as the phrase "Kingdom of Heaven" has come to 
 mean, in English, a state of beatitude, the reversion 
 to an "Empire" marks the decline of that state to 
 one of outward pomp and circumstance. The spir- 
 itual meaning which must have characterized the 
 intention of the Sermon on the Mount is completely 
 sacrificed in the substitution of Empire for Kingdom. 
 The volume is published by the "Congregational
 
 150 Readers and Writers 
 
 Union of England and Wales," and it serves to in- 
 dicate the depths to which Nonconformist taste can 
 sink. We only need now this "colloquial English" 
 version in the u nu speling" to touch bottom. 
 
 * * 
 
 Nothing Foreign 
 
 It is better for a nation to "import" art than to go 
 without it altogether; and that it is the duty of its 
 critics to stimulate home-production by importing as 
 many as possible of the best foreign models. .That 
 home-production may fail to find itself encouraged to 
 the point of creation is perfectly possible; inspiration 
 may continue to be wanting; but of the two states of 
 no home-production and no imports and no home- 
 production and imports, the latter is to be preferred. 
 
 "Foreign" is a word that should be employed with 
 increasing discrimination, and, most of all, by English 
 writers. There is an English genius the perfect 
 flower of which we have still to see; for perfect 
 English has never yet been written. But nothing 
 foreign ought to be alien to a race as universal in 
 character and mentality as the English; and in the end, 
 the perfection of the English genius is only possible 
 in a spiritual synthesis of all the cultures of the world. 
 Two tendencies equal and opposite are at work in this 
 direction, and have always been in English history. 
 On the one side, we find an ever-present tendency 
 towards cosmopolitanism, an excess of which would
 
 Psycho-analysis 151 
 
 certainly result in the complete loss of essential 
 national characteristics. On the other side, and 
 usually balancing the first, we find an ever-present 
 tendency towards insularity and aesthetic chauvinism, 
 the excess of which would undoubtedly result in a 
 caricature of the English genius the development of 
 idiosyncrasies in place of style. Somewhere between 
 these two tendencies the critic of English art must fix 
 his seat, in order that his judgment may determine, as 
 far as possible, the perfect resultant of the blend of 
 opposites. It is a matter, too, of time as well as of 
 forms of culture. Not only are not all times alike, 
 but there is a time for import and a time for export 
 and a time for "protection"; but, equally, there is 
 room for discrimination in the kind of art that may 
 wisely be imported or exported. In general, we 
 should import only what we need and export only 
 what other nations need, and thus, in the old mediaeval 
 sense, traffic in treasure. Thus guarded, nothing but 
 good can come of the greatest possible international 
 commerce of the arts. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 Psycho- Analysis 
 
 Psycho-analysis is not the last word in psychological 
 method; and a great deal more of experiment is 
 needed. Freud's theory of dreams, for instance, is 
 excellent pioneer work in a field hitherto left more 
 or less uncultivated, but it is very far from being ex-
 
 152 Readers and Writers 
 
 haustively explanatory of the facts. Suppose it were 
 possible to control dreams in other words, to dream 
 of what you will would not the theory of Freud 
 that dreams are subconscious wish-fulfilments stand 
 in need of amendment? But to control dreams is 
 not an utter impossibility. Sufficient experimental 
 work has been done in this direction to prove that the 
 gate of dreams is open to the intelligent will. And 
 there is warrant for the attempt in a good deal of 
 mystical literature. I was reading only recently the 
 poems of Vaughan the Silurist, and what should I 
 come across but the following passage : 
 
 Being laid and dress'd for sleep, close not thy eyes 
 Up with the curtains; give thy soul the wing 
 In some good thoughts; so when the day shall rise 
 And thou unrak'st thy fire, those sparks will bring 
 New flames; besides where these lodge, vain heats mourn 
 And die; that bush where God is shall not burn. 
 
 Vaughan's lines are not great poetry, but they contain 
 a useful psychological hint. 
 
 * * 
 
 Psycho-Analysis and the Mysteries 
 
 It would be unwise to make a dogma of any of the 
 present conclusions of psycho-analysis. As a means 
 of examining the contents of the subconscious, psycho- 
 analysis is an instrument of the highest value, but in 
 "the interpretation of what it finds there, and in the 
 conclusions it draws as to their origin how the apple
 
 Psycho-Analysis and the Mysteries 153 
 got into the dumpling, in fact psycho-analysis re- 
 quires to be checked by all the knowledge we have at 
 our command. Mr. Mead has raised the question 
 of origins, but it is just as easy to raise the question 
 of interpretation. I am not satisfied that the inter- 
 pretation placed by Jung on myths is any more than 
 correct as far as it goes, and I am disposed to think 
 that it does not go far enough. His reduction, for 
 example, of a whole group of myths to the "incest" 
 motive, appears to me, even in the light of his defi- 
 nition of incest as the "backward urge into child- 
 hood," to give us only a partial truth, an aspect of 
 truth. For there is a sense in which an "urge into 
 childhood" is not backward but forward, not a re- 
 gression into an old, but a progression into a new 
 childhood. "Unless ye become as little children, ye 
 can in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven." "In- 
 cest" is a strictly improper term to apply to such a 
 transformation; the new birth might suit the case 
 better. Mr. Mead takes the same view. The inter- 
 pretations of psycho-analysis carry us back, he sug- 
 gests, to the lesser mysteries; but they need to be 
 "elevated" in the Thomist sense in order to carry us 
 back to the greater. So long as it confines itself to 
 the "body" psycho-analysis must plainly be confined to 
 the lesser mysteries, for the lesser mysteries are all 
 concerned with generation. The greater mysteries 
 are concerned with regeneration, and, hence, with the 
 "soul"; and even if we assume the "soul" to require 
 a body, we are outside the region of ordinary genera- 
 tion if that body is not the physical body. The psy-
 
 154 Readers and Writers 
 
 cho-analytic interpretation suffers from this confine- 
 ment of its text to the physical body, since "the genuine 
 myth has first and foremost to do with the life of 
 the soul." 
 
 Another caution to remember is that reality cannot 
 be grasped with one faculty or with several; it requires 
 them all. Only the whole can grasp the whole. For 
 this reason it is impossible to "think" reality; for 
 though the object of thought may be reality, all reality 
 is not to be thought. Similarly, it is impossible to 
 "feel" or to "will" or to "sense" reality completely. 
 Each of these modes of experiencing reality reports 
 us only a mode of reality, and not the whole of it. 
 Before we can say certainly that a thing is true be- 
 fore, that is, we can affirm a reality it must not only 
 think true, but feel true, sense true, and do true. 
 The pragmatic criterion that reports a thing to be t r ue 
 because it works may be contradicted by the Intel- 
 lectual criterion that reports a thing to be true because 
 it "thinks" true; and when these both agree in their 
 report, their common conclusion may fail to be con- 
 firmed by the criterion of feeling that reports a thing 
 to be true when it "feels" true. It is from an ap- 
 preciation of the many-sided nature of truth, and, 
 consequently from an appreciation of the many facul- 
 ties required to grasp it, that the value set by the 
 world on common sense is derived. For common 
 sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in 
 its outcome it is the agreement of their reports. A 
 thing is said to be common sense when it satisfies the 
 heart, the mind, the emotion, and all the senses; when,
 
 Gently with Psycho-Analysis 155 
 in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality. 
 Otherwise a statement may be logical, it may be 
 pleasing, it may be practical, it may be obvious; but 
 only when it is. all is it common sense. 
 
 But can we, with only our present faculties, however 
 developed and harmonized, ever arrive at reality? 
 It may be that in the natural order of things, humanity 
 implies by definition a certain state of ignorance, and 
 that this state is only to be transcended by the over- 
 passing of the "human" condition. Psycho-analysis 
 is still only at the beginning of its discoveries, but 
 on the very threshold we are met by the problem of 
 the nascent or germinal faculties of the mind. Are 
 there in the subconscious "yearning to mix themselves 
 with life," faculties for which "humanity" has not yet 
 developed end-organs? If this be so, as our fathers 
 have told us, the next step in evolution is to develop 
 them. 
 
 *** 
 
 Gently with Psycho-Analysis 
 
 I am doubtful whether we have sufficiently devel- 
 oped the ideas of Psycho-analysis to make a fruitful 
 parallel possible between them and the ideas contained 
 in Patanjali. Psycho-analysis, as the name indicates, 
 is more concerned with analysis than with synthesis, 
 and "Yoga," whose dominant idea is re-union or syn- 
 thesis, appears to be rather a complement than an 
 analogue of Psycho-analysis in the broad sense. Take,
 
 156 Readers and Writers 
 
 for example, the idea of Yoga as a means to the re- 
 union of the individual with the world-soul: "Thou 
 art That; Thou shalt become That." According to 
 Jung, this attempt at re-union may be nothing more 
 than a megalomaniac regressive introversion, repre- 
 senting on a grand scale a return to the mother and 
 infantilism. Since it is separation from the mother 
 (actual and metaphorical), that, in Jung's view, 
 creates the basis of consciousness; any attempt to be- 
 come re-united with the "mother" is an act of regres- 
 sion. It is obvious from this dissonance of doctrine 
 that Yoga and Psycho-analysis have not as yet dis- 
 covered any profound common ground; in fact, in 
 some respects they appear to be opposed. 
 
 1 count myself among the increasing number of 
 enthusiastic students of psycho-analysis. It is the 
 hopeful science of the dawning era. No new era ap- 
 pears to me to be possible without it, and such a work 
 as Dr. Ernest Jones's Psycho- Analysis is one of the 
 books most worth buying at the present time. But 
 it is elsewhere that I find the best justification for my 
 enthusiasm, in these words from an old Hermetic text: 
 "The beginning of perfection is gnosis of man; but 
 gnosis of God is perfected perfection." Psycho- 
 analysis thus appears to be the beginning of the gnosis 
 of man, and, in this sense, the beginning of perfection. 
 But it is only the beginning. Mere morality, how- 
 ever psychological, is no substitute for religion; and 
 the most profoundly and sincerely moral of men 
 Ibsen, for example end in a state of despair unless 
 at the point at which their morality gives out, religion
 
 A Cambridge "Cocoon" 157 
 
 of some kind comes to their aid. Psycho-analysis, I 
 think it will be found, is doomed, while it remains 
 analysis, to end in the same state of despair. It will 
 teach us all there is to be known about the nature of 
 man; but the gnosis of man is not satisfying. For 
 it is only thereafter and when man is transcended as 
 an object of gnosis that perfected perfection is pos- 
 sible. I would not, however, hasten by a single 
 impatient step this second and completing phase of 
 the process of our learning. The gnosis of man is 
 necessary to the gnosis of God, and God can well look 
 after Himself and bide our time. Furthermore, a 
 premature attempt to know God before we are initi- 
 ated into the mysteries of the gnosis of man must be 
 heavily paid for. Religion without humanity is more 
 dangerous than humanity without religion. Let us 
 then settle down with concentrated attention to the 
 problem before us, the material and method of which 
 are to be found in psycho-analysis. We shall be able 
 to afford to whistle when we are through that wood. 
 
 * * 
 
 A Cambridge "Cocoon" 
 
 The new Cambridge magazine, The Cocoon, cannot 
 be regarded as superfluous, the editors suggest, since 
 its point of view is unique. It is not written by "theo- 
 logical" minds that "estimate affairs in relation to 
 unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs," but by minds 
 that hold that things "are capable of more than one
 
 158 Readers and Writers 
 
 truthful interpretation." The second of these conten- 
 tions is true enough, but, unfortunately, the new in- 
 terpretations of The Cocoon, however truthful, are 
 trivial. Age, we are told, sees the Moon as just a 
 "heavenly body"; whereas the youth who spin The 
 Cocoon see the Moon as "a wonderful cheese" or a 
 prehistoric coin. Age, again, looks at the Great 
 Pyramid and interprets it as a pyramidal structure; 
 but our spinning youth interpret it as a "colossal and 
 awe-inspiring cube," with emphasis on the awe. The 
 difference between the interpretations is, to my mind, 
 all in favour of age. It may be true that the Moon is 
 translatable in terms of cheese, and the Great Pyramid 
 may really be a cube, but the interpretations are with- 
 out interest or value. If The Cocoon had said that 
 the Moon might conceivably be the Devil, or the 
 Great Pyramids the psychic meeting-place of the 
 Rosicrucians, the new "interpretation" might have had 
 some interest. As it is, we are back in the nursery, 
 and not by any means in the nursery of the race. The 
 earlier editorial affirmation is not even sense, but a 
 contradiction of sense. "To estimate affairs in re- 
 lation to unchangeable dogmas and fixity of things 
 as they are." When we find only means of estimating 
 at all. Things are so and so, and the unchangeability 
 of dogma and fixity of belief are determined, or should 
 be, by the corresponding unchangeability and fixity 
 of things as they are. When we find that the nature 
 of things changes arbitrarily from day to day, we may 
 consider the advisability of changing our belief that 
 it is fixed as rapidly as nature itself is transformed.
 
 A Cambridge "Cocoon" 159 
 
 Otherwise, if anything we say is to be "true," it must 
 be because there is a fixed and unchangeable nature 
 to which our dogmas and beliefs refer. The alterna- 
 tive is not youth and imagination and "other truthful 
 interpretations of things," it is nursery chatter about 
 cheese and pyramidal cubes. 
 
 Pass the articles on Balzac and D'Annunzio, both 
 of which might have been written by Old Age or even 
 Middle Age, and let us see how the state of mind 
 calling itself Youth deal with history. Remember 
 that Cambridge, where the Cocoons come from, re- 
 gards itself as u the nursery of the nation"; and then 
 listen to Mr. L. J. Cheney, no doubt one of our future 
 representatives on the World-League, preparing his 
 program. "It is stupid," he says, "to write history 
 or to study history on the assumption that we Western 
 Europeans are the salt of the earth." And Mr. H. 
 Y. Oulsham, on the same subject, remarks that "we 
 must keep the sociological aim of history in sight"; 
 . . . "the be-all and end-all of history is sociology." 
 No wonder the Manchester Guardian the guardian, 
 that is to say, of Manchester found The Cocoon so 
 promising, for the opinions expressed by Mr. Cheney 
 and Mr. Oulsham are embryos of Manchester Guar- 
 dian "leaders," they are so cosmopolitan and so hu- 
 manitarian. Apart, however, from their extreme 
 Age, bordering on decrepitude, I find in them not 
 even an unimportant "truthful interpretation." It is 
 not true that sociology is the be-all and end-all of 
 history as it ought to be written; and to deny, in the 
 name of history, that Western Europe is the salt
 
 160 Readers and Writers 
 
 of the earth (however it may have lost its sa- 
 vour) is just to deny and repudiate European world- 
 responsibility. Things, again, are so and so, and 
 not otherwise, let Youth interpret them as it will. 
 Europe is the responsible mind of the world, and the 
 be-all and end-all of history is the fulfilment of a 
 world-purpose whose objective is more than merely 
 human sociology. If the "nursery of the nation" has 
 a different interpretation, the nursery of the nation is 
 wrong. 
 
 The Cocoon is under the impression that there is 
 something valuable in Youth in years; that Youth in 
 years is the only kind of Youth ; that Youth in years is 
 Youth indeed. Our first birth, however, is only a 
 sleep and a forgetting, and real Youth comes only 
 after the second-birth. The once-born are creatures 
 of pure circumstance, owing their youth to the accident 
 of time alone; but the twice-born are self-creations 
 defying time; they never grow old, though they are 
 always growing up. The Cocoon fairly describes 
 Youth as "a condition of energy and receptiveness" ; 
 but is Youth in years necessarily of that kind? As 
 for receptiveness, we have already seen that the 
 "historians" of the "nursery of the nation" either 
 hark back or hark forward to ideas long since dead. 
 And as for "energy," barring its animal manifestation 
 in sport, the highest culture demands the highest con- 
 centration of energy, and where shall we find it but 
 in the twice-born? Whoever can make a turn upon 
 himself and his habits of thought is young, whatever 
 his years. On the other hand, whoever cannot be
 
 A Cambridge "Cocoon" 161 
 
 "bothered" to think afresh, but contents himself with 
 what he used to think is old and lacking in energy, 
 whatever his years or his blues. 
 
 It is the fate of the once-born to become pessimistic 
 as they grow old, as it is the privilege of the twice-born 
 to increase in hope as they wax in youth. One of our 
 Cocoonists, therefore, must be prematurely old in the 
 former sense, since he lifts up his lamentation that 
 "the beauty of English prose is already mainly a 
 thing of the past." It is not a sentiment for "the 
 nursery of the nation," and it is altogether untrue. 
 Beautiful English prose has certainly been written, but 
 the best is yet to be. Beautiful qualities of English 
 prose we have certainly had revealed to us in abun- 
 dance, and some of our greatest writers have succeeded 
 in making an anthology in their style of two or three 
 or even four of them; but an English prose with all 
 its known qualities harmonized and synthesized in a 
 single style is a thing of the future and not of the past. 
 There are qualities in English still unrevealed. A 
 great deal of "energy," however, will be necessary to 
 such a synthesis. Its creator must be not only twice- 
 born, but, as the Mahabharata says of Indian sages, 
 "blazing with spiritual energy," for the fire of imagina- 
 tion to fuse all the qualities of English prose into a 
 style is too intense for ordinary mortals. 
 
 *%
 
 1 62 Readers and Writers 
 
 An Oxford Miscellany 
 
 A Queen's College Miscellany is filially dedicated 
 to Walter Pater and Ernest Dowson, both of whom, 
 it seems, were Queen's men in their day. Still another 
 association with these writers is sought in the com- 
 parison of the college coterie from which each arose 
 with the group responsible for the present miscellany. 
 Something of the nature of a cult is indicated; and I 
 take it that the various items of the miscellany are 
 "corporate" as well as individual. The fore-word 
 says as much. In a vocabulary that seems most om- 
 inous for literature, we are referred to a "literary 
 team" whose "output" is here presented, and to an 
 attempt to "prove that team-work is possible in prose 
 and poetry." And the miscellany is the first "har- 
 vest" of "the refined product." My opinion of 
 "team-work" is certainly that it is possible both in 
 prose and poetry. No individual has ever by him- 
 self written either great prose or great poetry, and 
 the greatest literary works of the world, not excepting 
 Shakespeare, are of anonymous that is to say, of 
 collective authorship. The elevation of the group- 
 consciousness, however, is everything, and I need not 
 remark that a group whose highest aim is to emulate 
 Pater and Dowson, and whose considered "foreword" 
 contains such terminological ineptitudes as "team- 
 work," "output," and the "harvest" of a "refined 
 product," is not yet upon a very high plane of 
 discourse. 
 
 * 
 * *
 
 The Impotence of Satire 163 
 The Impotence of Satire 
 
 A correspondent has made the admirable sug- 
 gestion that a new Don Quixote be written to slay the 
 dragon of Capitalism with the pen of satire. The 
 suggestion is unconditionally free; no acknowledgment 
 of its source need be made; but anybody is at liberty 
 to begin on the work at once. Some excellent argu- 
 ments are adduced why the work should be under- 
 taken. Capitalism has long troubled the land, and 
 its evils are generally admitted. Reason has failed 
 to make any impression on the beast, and sentiment 
 appears almost to be its favourite food. Satire, 
 therefore, is plainly indicated as the appropriate 
 weapon, and at its crack, my correspondent suggests, 
 the beast would dissolve into nothing amidst universal 
 laughter. What more need be said but "Cervantes, 
 forward!"? 
 
 Unfortunately my correspondent proceeds to 
 weaken his appeal by affirming that Cervantes him- 
 self had Capitalism in his mind when writing certain 
 chapters of the First Book of Don Quixote. In 44 
 and 45 it appears to me, he says, that Don Quixote's 
 identity as a capitalist is undoubted. Sancho Panza's 
 identity with the mass of Labour is equally undoubted; 
 and the middle classes are represented by a number of 
 ladies and gentlemen, a canon, a judge, and a doctor. 
 These chapters standing by themselves would be a 
 good allegorical explanation of the present financial 
 position. But why of the "present" position, if satire
 
 164 Readers and Writers 
 
 is capable of dissolving Capitalism in laughter? With- 
 out questioning the allegorical character of the chap- 
 ters referred to, they may, for all I dare say, be a 
 perfect anticipation of the economics of Douglas 
 it is not encouraging to our present-day Cervantes to 
 be told that their proposed method has already been 
 tried by a master only to leave the dragon of Capi- 
 talism still to be tickled to death. Now one comes 
 to think of it, not even Chivalry, an even more un- 
 doubted object than Capitalism of Cervantes's satire, 
 really died of the shock for the very good reason 
 that it was dead before Cervantes rained his laughter 
 upon it. Even Cervantes's satire killed nothing, and 
 the task to be undertaken for my correspondent is 
 therefore greater than Cervantes's. In the spirit of 
 Squeers, I can only suggest that he who spells window, 
 w-i-n-d-e-r, should clean it. My correspondent, 
 forward ! 
 
 The power of satire is usually much exaggerated; 
 as a matter of fact, it is one of the least effective of 
 psychological weapons. Almost anything can turn its 
 edge. Juvenal is not reported to have done much 
 more than incur the dislike of his contemporaries ; and 
 Swift, the most serious satirist since Juvenal, never 
 effected anything but satire alone. His two most im- 
 mediately effective pamphlets, the Drapier's Letters, 
 and the Conduct of the Allies, contained passages of 
 satire, irony, and every other sort of appeal, but 
 neither of them can be called satirical as a whole. 
 Satire, like wit, is effective in small doses given at op- 
 portune moments ; but, as in the case of wit, sustained
 
 The "Dial" of America 165 
 
 satire defeats its own object. It owes what power it 
 wields to the contrast in which it stands to the pre- 
 vailing mood of the work in which it appears: its un- 
 expected appearance therein. Surprise is the condi- 
 tion of its doing any work at all. Surely if this were 
 not the case the satirical journals of, let us say, Ger- 
 many or France, would have dissolved in laughter 
 the vices aimed at long before now. But satire is 
 expected of them, is discounted in advance, and posi- 
 tively adds to the attractiveness of the objects 
 satirized. I will not go so far as to say that Cer- 
 vantes recalled dead Chivalry to life by satirizing it, 
 though the crop of romances that followed Don 
 Quixote in England may almost be said to justify ( the 
 charge; but it can safely be said that a satire directed 
 against Capitalism would lengthen rather than con- 
 tract the life of the dragon, by adding amusement to 
 its claims to exist. 
 
 *** 
 
 The "Dial" of America 
 
 The American Dial is perhaps the most fully 
 realized of all the promising literary magazines now 
 current in the world. It is in all probability consider- 
 ably in advance of the American reading public for 
 whom it is intended, but it is all the better on that 
 account. Culture is always called upon to sacrifice 
 popularity, and, usually, even its existence, in the in- 
 terests of civilization; for civilization is the child of
 
 1 66 Readers and Writers 
 
 culture, and has in general as little consideration for 
 culture as a human child for its own education. The 
 custodians of culture (or the disinterested pursuit of 
 human perfection) are the adults of the race of which 
 civilization is the children's school: and, fortunately 
 or unfortunately, in these democratic days, their func- 
 tion is largely under the control of their pupils. Gone 
 are the times when a Brahmanic caste can lay down 
 and enforce a curriculum of education for its civiliza- 
 tion. Modern civilizations believe themselves to be, 
 and possibly are, "old enough" to exercise their right 
 of selecting their teachers. It cannot be said, as yet, 
 that they exercise their choice with remarkable dis- 
 cretion, but the process of popular self-education, if 
 slow, may at any rate be expected to be sure. In any 
 event there is no use in kicking against the stars. If 
 the forces of culture are to rule modern civilizations, 
 they must do so constitutionally. The days of the 
 dictatorship of the intelligentia are past. 
 
 There are two kinds of judgment which it is es- 
 sential for civilization to acquire: judgment of men 
 and judgment of things. Things are of primary im- 
 portance, but so also are persons. One is not before 
 or after the other. For instance, culture itself is a 
 "thing" in the philosophic sense; it is a reality in the 
 world of ideas; but of quite equal importance in our 
 mixed world of ideas and individuals, are the actual 
 persons and personalities claiming to embody and 
 direct culture. Hence the transcendent importance 
 of criticism next to creation in both spheres : criticism 
 of personalities and criticism of "works." The mis-
 
 The "Dial" of America 167 
 
 taking of a little man for a great man, or the reverse, 
 may easily mean the delay of the work of culture for 
 whole generations. And, equally, the confusion of the 
 objects of culture with the objects of civilization may 
 spell the ruin of a nation. Few critics realize the 
 magnitude and responsibility of their function, or the 
 degree to which personal disinterestedness is indis- 
 pensable to its fulfilment. Holding the office of 
 inspectors of the munitions of culture, they are often 
 guilty of "passing" contraband upon the public, and, 
 still more often, of failing to ensure delivery of Cul- 
 ture's most effective weapons. More seriousness is 
 needed, very much more, in matters of criticism. We 
 must be capable of killing if we are to be capable of 
 giving life. 
 
 The Dial is particularly to be praised for its coura- 
 geous criticism of great dead Americans. America, 
 like Europe, suffers from necrophily, a kind of wor- 
 ship of the dead. Indeed, as a good Injun was syn- 
 onymous with a dead Injun, a great American writer is 
 usually a dead American writer. All his faults die 
 with him, and only his myth remains, with the result 
 that people who would not have acknowledged the 
 existence of, let us say, Whitman living, will not ac- 
 knowledge a fault in Whitman dead. For a nation 
 thus under a critical statue of Mortmain, the utterance 
 of what seems like blasphemy is a necessary part of 
 their education. They must know that the dead great, 
 by very virtue of their greatness and the survival of 
 their works, are still alive and active, and that the 
 same kind of criticism must be kept playing on them
 
 1 68 Readers and Writers 
 
 as upon the living forces. The Dial reviewers show 
 no disposition to shirk this unpleasing duty. One by 
 one, as the occasion suggests, the dead great are given 
 the honour of living criticism, and treated as the 
 immortal present which they are. Since their spirits 
 go marching on, criticism must go marching along 
 with them. 
 
 One of the recently so honoured dead in the pages 
 of the Dial has been Whitman; and in an essay on 
 Whitman's Love Affairs Mr. Emery Holloway throws 
 a fresh light on an old but still obscure subject. His 
 "love affairs" were obviously more matter for criti- 
 cism in Whitman than in some other writers, since 
 Whitman was pre-eminently an autobiographical 
 writer who sang himself. What, then, does Mr. Hol- 
 loway find? A little surprisingly at least to readers 
 who have not already divined Whitman's secret that 
 Whitman "suffered" from love, and struggled against 
 it rather as a raw tyro than as the "master of him- 
 self" of his poetic fiction. In some private diaries of 
 Whitman, quoted by Mr. Holloway, we are presented 
 with the spectacle of Whitman grappling with his own 
 soul after the manner of saints mortifying the flesh, 
 or, as I would suggest, after the distinctively modern 
 fashion. Instinct was at war with reason, even in 
 Whitman, and, in the end, as usually occurs* with 
 modern men, it was reason that won. Mr. Holloway 
 divides Whitman's works between two periods: the 
 first, in which he sang "untrammelled natural im-< 
 pulses"; and a second, in which he was concerned about 
 democracy and the immortality of the soul; in short,
 
 The "Dial" of America 169 
 
 with reason. And between these two periods, or 
 worlds of discourse, Mr. Holloway tells us, was a pur- 
 gatory, in which Whitman's soul was tried as by fire. 
 The diaries already mentioned contain some of the 
 records of Whitman's conflict with himself. Here, 
 for example, is an entry bearing all the marks of a 
 painful resolution. "I must," he says, "pursue her 
 no more" . . . and resolve "to give up absolutely and 
 for good, from this present hour, the feverish, fluctu- 
 ating, useless, undignified pursuit of 164 . . . avoid 
 seeing her or any meeting whatever from this hour 
 forth, for life." The reader is to be pitied who does 
 not understand, however dimly, what Whitman must 
 have gone through in imagination and reality to con- 
 fide to the author of Leaves of Grass such a shocking 
 confession. He emerged from the experience with 
 that past behind him, but still, I think, unresolved. 
 For it was not his to reconcile instinct with reason in 
 an epigenesis; he passed from one phase to the next 
 without carrying his sheaves with him. From being 
 within sight of real greatness, he declined to the stat- 
 ure of a great American. 
 
 Following its faithful treatment of the Whitman 
 myth, the Dial examines the case of Mark Twain. 
 It is undoubtedly a pathological case, and not only 
 Mark Twain but America was the victim in it. A 
 nation suffers the fate of its great men; as is their 
 odyssey so is the odyssey of the nation to which they 
 belong. Does a great man in any nation become 
 corrupt; does he succumb to falsehood and to the 
 morality of the herd? Even so his nation is on the
 
 I jo Readers and Writers 
 
 downward path. On the other hand, does he maintain 
 his integrity, even though his life should pay for it? 
 There is a sign that his nation also will battle through. 
 From this point of view, Mark Twain presents the 
 spectacle both of a tragedy and a portent. Nobody 
 can read his works without realizing the essential 
 truthfulness of the man, his marvellous capacity for 
 intellectual honesty, his unerring perception of the 
 norm of things. Mark Twain, permitted and en- 
 couraged to pass free judgment upon American and 
 human life, might have been one of the cultural forces 
 of the new world; he was one of God's best gifts to 
 America. We know, however, what America did for 
 Mark Twain; it slowly but surely emasculated him 
 in the supposed interests of the female (not the fem- 
 inine) in the American soul. Under the influence of 
 his wife who, as he said, not only "edited everything 
 I wrote, but edited me," under the similar influence 
 of all that was bourgeois in America Mark Twain 
 consented to "make fun" of everything he held dear. 
 Talents and powers which it is spiritual death to trade, 
 Mark Twain prostituted for the amusement of a 
 people whose deepest need was high seriousness. As 
 Mr. Lovett says, Mark Twain "flattered a country 
 without art, letters, beauty or standards to laugh at 
 these things." The judgment is severe, but it is just; 
 and Mark Twain, I believe, would be the first to ac- 
 quiesce in it. 
 
 That he preserved, in the back of his mind, his 
 spiritual vision and knowledge, there can be no doubt. 
 He sinned not only against the light, but in the light.
 
 America Regressing 171 
 
 One or two revealing phases in his works have escaped 
 the censorship of the female American he married. 
 "In our country," he said, "we have three unspeak- 
 ably precious things : freedom of thought, freedom of 
 speech, and the prudence never to practise either." 
 It must be admitted that this is a "snag" in the smooth 
 current of a work of amusement; it betokened the 
 existence of depths and danger. But it is nothing to 
 the remarks let off in conversation on the rare occa- 
 sions when the censor was absent. "I've a good mind," 
 he once said to a friend, "to blow the gaff on the 
 whole damned human race." It is tragedy, indeed, 
 that he never did. We have the gaff blown on us all 
 too seldom, and usually by men whose idiosyncrasies 
 and abnormalities allow us to ignore them. Mark 
 Twain was such a normal man that his blowing of the 
 gaff could not possibly have been attributed to a neu- 
 rotic complex derived from infantile suppression: it 
 would have been the judgment of man upon Man. His 
 failure to bestow this inestimable gift upon America 
 and the world we owe to America, and if, as I have 
 said, a nation suffers the fate of its great men, we may 
 be sure that America will pay for it. 
 
 * * 
 
 America Regressing 
 
 Just when we in Europe were beginning to envy 
 America her promise, contrasting it with the winter of 
 our own discontent, "the authorities" (as one might
 
 172 Readers and Writers 
 
 say the furies, the parcae or the weird sisters) have 
 descended upon our unfortunate but deserving friend, 
 the Little Review, and suspended its mail servke on 
 account of its publication of a chapter of Mr. James 
 Joyce's new novel, Ulysses. That such an absurd act 
 of puritanic spleen should be possible after and be- 
 fore years of world-war is evidence that spiritual 
 meanness is hard to transcend; and it confirms the 
 justice or, at least, the apprehension expressed in Mr. 
 Ezra Pound's bon mot that the U. S. A. should be re- 
 named the Y. M. C. A. Not only is the Little Review 
 perfectly harmless: would to heaven, indeed, that it 
 were, or could be otherwise, for never can any good 
 be done by something incapable of doing harm; but 
 the Ulysses of Mr. James Joyce is one of the most 
 interesting symptoms in the present literary world, 
 and its publication is very nearly a public obligation. 
 Such sincerity, such energy, such fearlessness as Mr. 
 Joyce's are rare in any epoch, and most of all in our 
 own, and on that very account they demand to be 
 given at least the freedom of the Press. What the 
 giant America can fear from Mr. Joyce or from his 
 publication in the Little Review passes understanding. 
 Abounding in every variety of crime and stupidity as 
 America is, even if Ulysses were a literary crime com- 
 mitted in a journal of the largest circulation, one more 
 or less could not make much difference to America. 
 But Ulysses is no crime; but a noble experiment; and 
 its suppression will sadden the virtuous at the same 
 time that it gratifies the base. America, we may be 
 sure, is not going to "get culture" by stamping upon
 
 America Regressing 173 
 
 every germ of new life. America's present degree of 
 cultural toleration may ensure a herb-garden, but not 
 a flower will grow upon the soil of Comstock. 
 
 Among the scores of interesting experiments in 
 composition and style exhibited in Ulysses, not the 
 least novel is Mr. Joyce's attempt to develop a theory 
 of harmonics in language. By compounding nouns 
 with adjectives and adjectives with adverbs, Mr. Joyce 
 tries to convey to the reader a complex of qualities 
 or ideas simultaneously instead of successively. 
 "Eglintoneyes looked up skybrightly." In such a 
 sentence agglutination has been, carried beyond the 
 ordinary level of particles into the plane of words, 
 and the effect is to present a multitude of images as 
 if they were one. Thus "a new and complex knowl- 
 edge of self" finds its "appropriate medium of ex- 
 pression in terms of art." I am not so sure that Mr. 
 Joyce has not carried the experiment too far, but this, 
 again, is a virtue rather than a defect in a pioneer. 
 Moreover, the world needs a few studio-magazines 
 like the Little Review, and a few studio writers like 
 Mr. James Joyce. What does it matter if, in his en- 
 thusiasm, Mr. Joyce travels beyond the limits of good 
 taste, beyond, that is, the already cultivated, if only 
 a single new literary convention is thereby brought 
 into common use? 
 
 ***
 
 174 Readers and Writers 
 
 The Best is Yet to Be 
 
 "One dreams of a prose," says The Times Literary 
 Supplement, "that has never yet been written in Eng- 
 lish, though the language is made for it and there are 
 minds not incapable of it, a prose dealing with the 
 greatest things quietly and justly as men deal with 
 them in their secret meditations . . . the English 
 Plato is still to be." Alas, however, that The Times 
 should be just a little misled, for the "quiet" of medi- 
 tation is not the real genius of the English language, 
 and the emphasis in the phrase, "English Plato," 
 should be on the word English. Greek Plato trans- 
 lated into English would not give us what we are 
 seeking. What we need is Plato's mind. It is char- 
 acteristic however, this demand for quiet, or, rather, 
 quietism, in The Times Literary Supplement, since, 
 on the whole, the Supplement is about the deadest 
 mouse in the world of journalism. Above all, it is 
 suggested, writers must keep their voices low, speak 
 in whispers, even, perhaps, a little under their breath 
 as if in meditation, in case well, in case of what? 
 Is there not a hush in the Literary Supplement which 
 is not the hush of reverence for literature, but of 
 fear and prudence? 
 
 Our writer observes very acutely that prose is 
 usually thought greatest when it is nearest poetry, and 
 he properly dissents from this common opinion. 
 Prose, we should say, can only be great as it differs 
 from poetry, and the greatest prose is furthest away
 
 The Best is Yet to Be 175 
 
 from poetry. And the difference, we are told, is the 
 difference between love and justice. The cardinal vir- 
 tue of poetry, he says, is love, while the cardinal virtue 
 of prose is justice. May we not rather say that the 
 difference is one of plane of consciousness, prose be- 
 ing at the highest level of the rational mind, and poetry 
 at the highest level of the spiritual mind? Yes, but 
 then, in all probability, The Times would regard us 
 as fanciful, for note, anything exact about spiritual 
 things is likely to be dismissed by the Literary Supple- 
 ment as fanciful and dangerous. Again, "prose is 
 the achievement of civilization"; in other words, it is 
 the norm of social life. True, but let me add that it 
 is the register of Culture, marking the degree to which 
 Culture has affected its surrounding civilization. 
 Prose without poetry is impossible, and the greatest 
 prose presupposes the culture of the greatest poetry, 
 for the "justice" of prose is only the "love" of poetry 
 with seeing eyes. Finally, we must agree with our es- 
 sayist when he quotes with approval the excellent ob- 
 servation of Mr. Sturge Moore that "simplicity may 
 be a form of decadence." Simplicity is a sign of 
 decadence when it sacrifices profundity of thought to 
 simplicity of expression as in the classical case of 
 Voltaire, who positively dared not think deeply lest 
 he should be unable to write clearly, clarity of ex- 
 pression being more to him (and often to the French 
 genius generally) than depth of thought. And writers 
 like Mr. Glutton Brock are just as certainly symptoms 
 of the decadence of simplicity in our own time and 
 place. On the other hand, I still dream of a pro-
 
 176 Readers and Writers 
 
 found simplicity, the style of which is transparent over 
 depths; and in this, if no English writer has ever been 
 a master, Lao Tse is the world's model, at least in 
 fragments. We must learn to distinguish between a 
 puerile and a virile simplicity, between innocence and 
 virtue ; and perhaps the first exercise in such judgment 
 should be to put the Literary Supplement in its 
 proper place. 
 
 This brings us back to quietism and the question 
 whether the perfect English prose would deal with 
 the highest things in the spirit of man's secret medi- 
 tations. I do more than doubt it. Secret meditation 
 is incommunicably secret; it is thought without words, 
 and disposed to poetry rather than prose. I suspect 
 our writer really means rumination, in which case, 
 however, he is no better off. For the genius of the 
 language does not run easily in reverie, it is a language 
 that loves action and life. It has few cloistered vir- 
 tues, and to employ it for cloistered thought would be 
 to use only one or two of its many stops, and those 
 not the most characteristic. Lastly, I cannot but 
 think that the choice of "quietism" as the aim of per- 
 fect English prose is a sign of decadence, for it indi- 
 cates the will to retire into oneself, and to cease to 
 "act" by means of words. The scene it calls up is 
 familiar and bourgeois: a small circle of "cultured" 
 men week-ending in a luxurious country house and con- 
 fessing "intimately" their literary weaknesses. It is 
 the prevalent atmosphere of the Literary Supplement 
 and the Spectator. It is essential that there be 
 "equality" between them, that none should presume
 
 The Best is Yet to Be 177 
 
 to wish to inspire another to any "new way of life," 
 that action, in short, should be excluded. Once 
 granted these conditions of sterility, and the perfect 
 prose, we are told, would emerge. 
 
 The rest of us, however, have a very different con- 
 ception of the perfect English prose. The perfect 
 English prose will be anything but a sedative after a 
 full meal of action. It will be not only action itself, 
 but the cause of action, and its deliberate aim will be 
 to intensify and refine action and to raise action to 
 the level of a fine art. Anything less than a real 
 effect upon real people in a real world is beneath the 
 dignity even of common prose. The very "leaders" 
 in the penny journals aim at leaving a mark upon 
 events. Is the perfect prose to be without hope of 
 posterity? On second thoughts, I shall withdraw 
 Plato from the position of model in which I put him. 
 Plato, it is evident, is likely to be abused; without 
 intending it, his mood, translated into English, ap- 
 pears to be compatible only with luxurious ease; he 
 is read by modern Epicureans. And I shall put in 
 Plato's place Demosthenes, the model of Swift, the 
 greatest English writer the world has yet seen. Yes, 
 Demosthenes let it be, since Plato is being used for 
 balsam. We seek an English Demosthenes.
 
 Index 
 
 Adonais, 146 
 "JE," 93-107 
 Andrews, Francis, 145 
 Anglo-Irish Essays (John Eglin- 
 
 ton), 55 
 
 Apology, The (Plato), 75 
 Appreciations and Depreciations 
 
 (Boyd), 57 
 Archer, William, 
 Arnold, Matthew, 63 
 Art and Letters, 109 
 Asquith, H. H., 50 
 Athenaum, The, 52 
 
 Baring, Maurice, 14 
 Beardsley, Aubrey, 91 
 Beerbohm, Max, 10 
 Bell, Clive, 52 
 Benda, Julien, 62 
 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietz- 
 sche), 106 
 
 Bhagavad Gita, The, 29, 89 
 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 
 
 5 
 
 Bjornson, B., 15 
 Blake, William, 107 
 Boutroux, Emile, 51 
 Boyd, E. A., 57 
 
 Breaking the Spell (Macan), 69 
 Brock, A. Glutton, 175 
 
 Causes profondes df la Guerre, 
 
 Les (Hovelaque), 126 
 Cervantes, 163 
 Cheney, L. J., 159 
 Chesterton, G. K., 43, 126 
 Cicero, 75 
 Clarte Franqaise, La (Vannier), 
 
 47 
 
 Cocoon, Thf, 157 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 15, 21, 50 
 
 Conrad, Joseph, 13 
 
 Contemporary Drama of Ireland 
 (Boyd), 57 
 
 Contingency of the Laws of Na- 
 ture, The (Boutroux), 51 
 
 Cratylus, The (Plato), 104 
 
 Crees, G., 7 
 
 Daily Mail, The, 68 
 
 De Quincey, 74 
 
 Dial, The, 165 
 
 Distribution of Wealth, The 
 
 (Thompson), 132 
 Dodd, Professor, 149 
 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 163 
 Dostoievski, F., 15 
 Douglas, C. H., 164 
 Dowson, Ernest, 142, 162 
 Drapier's Letters, The (Swift), 
 
 75, 164 
 Dublin Review, The, 131 
 
 Caine, Hall, 15 "Eglinton, John," 55 
 
 Candle of Vision, The ("IE"), Egyptian Book of the Dead, 137 
 
 93-107 Ellis, Henry, 107 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 21 Epstein, Jacob, 30 
 
 179
 
 i8o 
 
 Index 
 
 Ervine, St. John, 57 
 
 Essay on Comedy, An (Meredith), 
 
 139 
 Euphues, 44 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 112 
 
 Flaubert, G., 47 
 
 Flight of the Eagle, The (Stan- 
 dish O'Grady), 60 
 
 Fontenelle, 3 
 
 Fowler, Warde, 68 
 
 French Literary Studies (Rud- 
 mose-Brown), 54 
 
 Freud, Professor, 102 
 
 Funeral Oration, The (Pericles), 
 48 
 
 Garnett, Edward, 13 
 Gaudier-Brzeska, 30 
 Gwynn, Stephen, 56 
 
 Hales, Professor, 33 
 Harland, Henry, 10 
 Haumont, M., 14 
 Heraclitus, 25 
 Herford, Professor C. H., 136 
 
 Hoare, (., 147 
 
 Hobbes of Malmesbury, 49 
 
 Holloway, Emery, 168 
 
 Homage to Propertius (Pound), 
 
 33 
 
 Homeland (Izzard), 68 
 Hope, John Francis, 138 
 Hovelaque, M., 126 
 Hudson, W. H., 68 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik, 15 
 
 International Journal of Ethics, 
 
 The, 21 
 Irish Books and Irish People 
 
 (Gwynn), 75 
 Irish Citizen, The, 135 
 Izzard, P. W. D., 68 
 
 James, Henry, 9-13 
 
 Jones, Dr. Ernest, 156 
 Jonson, Ben, 76 
 Jowett, B., 49 
 Joyce, James, 31, 172 
 Jung, Professor, 156 
 Juvenal, 164 
 
 Kautsky, K., 19 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 146 
 Kossova: Heroic Songs of the 
 Serbs (Rootham), 140 
 
 Landor, W. S., 3 
 
 Lawrence, D. H., 10 
 
 Lay Sermons (Coleridge), 21 
 
 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 169 
 
 Leuba, Professor, 90 
 
 Levy, Dr. Oscar, 25 
 
 Lewis, Wyndham, 31, 36 
 
 Little Review, The, 9, 31, 36, 45, 
 
 172 
 
 Lockhart's Life of Scott, 5 
 London Mercury, The, 123, 144 
 Lovett, R. A., 170 
 Lycidas, 146 
 Lyttelton, Dr., 5 
 
 Macan, Dr., 69 
 Mackenna, Stephen, 15 
 Mahabharata, The, 16, 108, 137, 
 
 161 
 
 Manchester Guardian, The, 159 
 Mann, Henry, 126 
 Martyn, Edward, 58 
 Marx, Karl, 19, 131-135 
 Mayne, Ethel Coburn, 9 
 Mead, G. R. S., 50, 88, 153 
 Menger, Dr., 132 
 Meredith, George, 8, 138, 146 
 Middle Years, The (Henry 
 
 James), n 
 Mitchel, John, 135 
 Moore, T. Sturge, 175 
 Morris, William, 137
 
 Index 
 
 181 
 
 New Agf, The, 66 
 Newman, Henry, 126 
 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 23-26, 
 37, 39, 106 
 
 O'Grady, Standish, 59-61 
 Oulsham, H. Y., 159 
 
 Patanjali, 106, 155 
 
 Pater, Walter, 162 
 
 Pericles, 48 
 
 Plato, 104, 174 
 
 Plotinus, 15 
 
 Poems and Prose (Dowson), 142 
 
 Pot-Boilers (Clive Bell), 52 
 
 Pound, Ezra, 3, 33, 36-45. 81, 172 
 
 Pound, Ezra: His Metric and 
 
 Poetry, 40 
 Propertius, 33 
 Psycho-Analysis (Dr. Ernest 
 
 Jones), 156 
 
 Queen's College Miscellany, A, 
 
 162 
 Quest, The, 50, 88 
 
 Rahilly, Professor A., 132 
 Randall, A. E., 88 
 Richardson, Samuel, 112 
 Rootham, Helen, 140 
 Rosebery, Lord, 50 
 Rousseau, J. J., 23 
 Rudmose-Brown, Professor, 54 
 Russell, Bertrand, 20 
 
 Sayings and Stories (Hoare), 147 
 
 Sedlak, Francis, 21 
 
 Selected Essays and Passages 
 (Standish O'Grady), 60 
 
 Sentiments de Critias, Les (Ben- 
 da), 62 
 
 Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 
 
 Shakespeare, 43, 70, 122, 125 
 Shankard, 16 
 Shaw, G. Bernard, 62 
 Song of Songs, 140 
 Soundy, W. Mattingly, 46 
 Spectator, The, 176 
 Squire, J. C., 123 
 Stendhal, 73 
 Sterne, Laurence, 71 
 Stewart, Herbert, 21 
 Strachey, Lytton, 46 
 Swift, Benjamin, 74, 164 
 Symons, Arthur, 91, 142 
 
 Thompson, William, 132 
 Thoreau, H. D., 55 
 Times, The, 30, 117, 124 
 Times Literary Supplement, The, 
 
 115, 130, 174 
 
 Tom Jones (Fielding), 113 
 Turgenev, 13 
 Twain, Mark, 169 
 Tweed, John, 30 
 
 Ulysses (Joyce),' 32, 172 
 
 Vannier, M., 47 
 Vaughan, Henry, 152 
 Venture, The, 144 
 Voltaire, 175 
 Vyasa, 16 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 81 
 Wells, H. G., 21 
 Whitman, Walt, 23, 168 
 Whitman's Love Affairs (Hollo- 
 way), 1 68 
 Wilde, Oscar, -38 
 Wordsworth, William, 95 
 
 Yeats, W. B., 107 
 Yellow Book, The, 9
 
 DC SOUTHERN REGIONAL UBRARY F AOUTY 
 
 A 000138475 9