Readers H^riters 
 
 (1917 I92I ) 
 By R. //. C. (J. R. OR//GE)
 
 U f OP 
 
 tNlA 
 
 SAND4SGO
 
 i
 
 READERS Gf WRITERS
 
 Readers and Writers 
 
 (1917-1911) 
 
 By 
 
 R. H. C. (A. R. Orage) 
 
 LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. 
 RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i
 
 First published in 1922 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Preface 
 
 UNDER the title of " Readers and Writers " 
 and over the initials " R. H. C." I con- 1 
 tributed to the New Age, during a period of 
 seven or eight years, a weekly literary 
 causerie of which the present volume, 
 covering the years 1917-1921, is a partial 
 reprint. My original design was to treat 
 literary events from week to week with the 
 continuity, consistency and policy ordinarily 
 applied to comments on current political 
 events ; that is to say, with equal seriousness 
 and from a similarly more or less fixed point 
 of view as regards both means and end. This 
 design involved of necessity a freedom of 
 expression rather out of fashion, though it 
 was the convention of the greatest period of 
 English literature, namely, the Eighteenth 
 Century ; and its pursuit in consequence 
 brought the comments into somewhat lively, 
 disrepute. That, however, proved not to be 
 the greatest difficulty. Indeed, within the 
 last few years an almost general demand
 
 6 PREFACE 
 
 for more serious, more outspoken and even 
 more " savage " criticism has been heard, and 
 is perhaps on the way to being satisfied, though 
 literary susceptibilities are still far from being 
 as well-mannered as political susceptibilities. 
 The greatest difficulty is encountered in the 
 fact that literary events, unlike political events, 
 occur with little apparent order, and are 
 subject to no easily discoverable or demon- 
 strable direction. In a single week every 
 literary form and tendency may find itself 
 illustrated, with the consequence that any 
 attempt to set the week's doings in a relation 
 of significant development is bound to fall 
 under the suspicion of impressionism or 
 arbitrariness. I have no other defence against 
 these charges than Plato's appeal to good 
 judges, of whom the best because the last is 
 Time. Time will pronounce as only those living 
 critics can whose present judgments are an 
 anticipation of Time's. Time will show what 
 has been right and what wrong. Already, 
 moreover, a certain amount of winnowing and 
 sifting has taken place. Some literary values 
 of this moment are not what they were 
 yesterday or the day before. A few are 
 greater ; many of them are less. My most
 
 PREFACE 7 
 
 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.G. 4. 
 December 1921.
 
 Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE 5 
 
 FONTENELLE 15 
 
 BIOGRAPHY . . . . . .16 
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS . . 17 
 
 CRITICS BEWARE 20 
 
 HENRY JAMES 22 
 
 TURGENEV 27 
 
 PLOTINUS 29 
 
 THE NEW EUROPE 31 
 
 THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM . . 32 
 
 POPULAR PHILOSOPHY .... 34 
 WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN ? . . . .36 
 
 Is NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY ? . 37 
 
 9
 
 io CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS .... 38 
 THE END OF FICTION .... 
 THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE 
 THE FATE OF SCULPTURE .... 
 
 THE Too CLEVER 
 
 HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS .... 
 MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS IN 
 
 PUBLIC 52 
 
 MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST ... 57 
 MR. EZRA POUND ON RELIGION ... 60 
 MR. POUND, CARICATURIST .... 62 
 THE ADMIRABLE VICTORIANS ... 63 
 
 FRENCH CLARTE 65 
 
 WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE ? . . .66 
 
 NATURE IN MIND 68 
 
 MR. CLIVE BELL'S POT .... 70
 
 CONTENTS ii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE CRITICISM OF POETS .... 73 
 
 " JOHN EGLINTON " 74 
 
 IRISH HUMOUR 75 
 
 THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND . . 76 
 
 MR. STANDISH O'GRADY .... 79 
 
 MR. STANDISH O'GRADY, ENCHANTER . . 80 
 
 LES SENTIMENTS DE JULIEN BENDA . . 81 
 
 CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER . . 82 
 
 NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE . . 88 
 
 S.S.S 90 
 
 STERNE CRITICISM ... . . .92 
 
 STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE ... 94 
 
 ENGLISH STYLE 95 
 
 LITERARY CULS-DE-SAC .... 98 
 
 THE DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE . 98 
 
 LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA . . 103
 
 12 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 RIGHT CRITICISM 109 
 
 MAN'S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH . . in 
 BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS . .115 
 
 " vE's " " CANDLE OF VISION " . . . 117 
 
 How TO READ 134 
 
 THE OLD COUNTRY 135 
 
 LOOKING FOR THE DAWN .... 136 
 
 FIELDING FOR AMERICA .... 139 
 
 POOR AUTHORS ! 140 
 
 ON GUARD 143 
 
 THE COMING RENAISSANCE .... 145 
 LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER . . 147 
 " SHAKESPEARE " SIMPLIFIED . . . 151 
 THE " LONDON MERCURY " AND ENGLISH . 152 
 MR. G. K. CHESTERTON ON ROME AND GER- 
 MANY 155
 
 CONTENTS 13 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE ORIGINS OF MARX .... 161 
 
 MARX AS POLITICIAN 163 
 
 JOHN MITCHEL AS THE SAME . . . 166 
 
 NORSE IN ENGLISH 167 
 
 t 
 
 THE COMEDY OF IT 168 
 
 THE EPIC SERBS 171 
 
 ERNEST DOVVSON 173 
 
 A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION . . . 175 
 
 THE NEWEST TESTAMENT .... 178 
 
 NOTHING FOREIGN 182 
 
 PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 184 
 
 PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE MYSTERIES . 185 
 
 GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS . . . 188 
 
 A CAMBRIDGE " COCOON " . . . . 190 
 
 AN OXFORD MISCELLANY .... 195 
 THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE . . .196
 
 PAG 
 
 I4 CONTENTS 
 
 THE " DIAL " OF AMERICA . . . . 199 
 
 AMERICA REGRESSING . . . 206 
 
 THE BEST is YET TO BE . . . . 209 
 
 INDEX 2I 5
 
 Readers and Writers 
 
 FONTENELLE. There is a reason that 
 Fontenelle has never before been translated 
 into English. It is not that Mr. Ezra Pound, 
 who has now translated a dozen of Fontenelle's 
 dialogues, was the first to think of it. Many, 
 readers of the original have tried their hand at 
 the translation only to discover that somehow 
 or other Fontenelle would not " go " in English 
 as he goes in French. The reason is not 
 very far to seek. Fontenelle wrote a French 
 peculiarly French, a good but an untranslatable 
 French. He must, therefore, be left and read 
 in the original if he is to be appreciated at 
 his intrinsic value. Mr. Pound has made a 
 rash attempt at the impossible in these 
 dialogues, and he has achieved the unreadable 
 through no further fault of his own. The 
 result was foregone. The dialogues themselves 
 in their English form are a little more dull 
 than are the Conversations of Landor, which 
 is to say that they are very dull indeed. 
 Nothing at the first glance could be more 
 attractive than dialogues between the great dead 
 
 15
 
 16 FONTENELLE 
 
 of the world. To every tyro the notion comes 
 inevitably sooner or later, as if it were the 
 idea for which the world were waiting. Never- 
 theless, on attempting it, the task is found to 
 be beyond most human powers. Nobody has 
 yet written a masterpiece in it. Fontenelle 
 was not in any case the man to succeed in it 
 from an English point of view. We English 
 take the great dead seriously. We expect 
 them to converse paradisaically in paradise, and 
 to be as much above their own living level as 
 their living level was above that of ordinary 
 men. Here, however, is a pretty task for 
 a writer of dead dialogues, for he has not only 
 to imitate the style, but to glorify both the 
 matter and style of the greatest men of past 
 ages. No wonder that he fails ; no wonder that 
 in the vast majority of cases he produces much 
 the same impression of his heroes as is produced 
 of them at spiritualistic seances. The attempt, 
 however, will always continue to be made. It 
 is a literary cactus-form that blooms every fifty 
 years or so. As I calculate its periodicity, 
 some one should shortly be producing a new 
 series. 
 
 BIOGRAPHY. Very few biographers have 
 been anywhere near the level of mind of their 
 subjects, and fewer still have been able to
 
 BIOGRAPHY 17 
 
 describe even what they have understood. 
 The character of a great man is so complex that 
 a genius for grasping essentials must be 
 assumed in his perfect biographer : at the same 
 time, it is so tedious in the analysis that the 
 narrative must be condensed to represent it. 
 Between the subtlety to be described, and the 
 simplicity with which it must be described, 
 the character of a man is likely to fall in his 
 portrait into the distortion of over-elaboration 
 or into the sketch. Though difficult, however, 
 the art has been frequently shown to be not 
 impossible. We could not ask for a better 
 portrait of Johnson than Boswell's. Lockhart's 
 Life of Scott is as good as we desire it to be. 
 Plato's Socrates is truer than life ; and there 
 are others. On the whole, the modern gossip- 
 ing method is not likely to become popular 
 in a cultured country. 
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS. 
 From his little brush with the Press, Dr. 
 Lyttelton has come off badly. It was not 
 because his case was bad, but because he had 
 not the moral courage to stick to his guns. 
 His case was that Parliament had practically 
 ceased to be the leader of the nation, and that 
 its place had been taken by the Press. Unfor- 
 tunately, however, the Press had come to 
 
 2
 
 i8 THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS 
 
 depend for its living upon sensationalism, with 
 the consequence that its tendency was to prefer 
 fiction to fact. A perfectly good case, I say, 
 who know more of Fleet Street than Dr. 
 Lyttelton will ever know. Every word of the 
 indictment is well within the truth. But when 
 challenged by the Press to substantiate his 
 charges, Dr. Lyttelton, instead of inviting the 
 world simply to look at the Press and to 
 contrast its reports with facts, proceeded to 
 exculpate the editors and to put the whole 
 blame on the public. It is the public, he said, 
 that is responsible, and there is no use in rating 
 the editors, who merely supplied what the public 
 wanted. But so long as public men adopt 
 this cowardly attitude nothing can possibly be 
 done, for the " public," like a corporation, has 
 neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be 
 damned. Relatively to the proprietors and 
 editors of the Press the public consists of irre- 
 sponsible individuals, who merely choose from 
 among what is laid before them. They are 
 mostly as innocent as children who deal at a 
 tuck-shop, and, perchance, buy sweets and cakes 
 that are bad for them as readily as things that 
 are good for them. The responsible parties 
 are the proprietors and editors, and, above them, 
 the law. It is not an offence to buy articles 
 at a shop that are illegally displayed for sale. 
 The public supposition is that if they are on 
 sale they can be bought. And, in fact, the
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS 19 
 
 Public Prosecutor, unlike Dr. Lyttelton, does 
 not proceed against the purchasers of illegal 
 articles, he proceeds against the vendors. In 
 the case of our newspaper proprietors and 
 editors the conditions of shop-keeping are 
 parallel ; they expose professed news and views 
 for sale, with an implied guarantee that their 
 goods are both good and fit for human con- 
 sumption. The public cannot be expected to 
 know which is which, or what is what, any 
 more in the case of news and views than in 
 the case of tea and potatoes. Rather less 
 indeed, since the ill-effects of false news and 
 unsound views are, as a rule, too long delayed 
 and too subtle to be attributed to their proper 
 causes. But the Press proprietors and editors 
 know very well. They know whether the news 
 they expose is true, or the views they vend 
 are sound. They know also that in a large 
 degree they are neither the one nor the other. 
 Yet they continue to sell them, and even to 
 expect public honours for their fraudulent deal- 
 ings. The excuses made for them are such 
 as could be made for any other fraudulent 
 industry ; that it pays, that the public swallows 
 it, that honesty would not pay, that the public 
 does not want truth and sincerity, that the 
 public must learn to discriminate for itself. 
 Reduced to a simple statement, all these mean, 
 in effect, that the Press is prepared to trade 
 on the ignorance and folly of the public. So
 
 20 THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PRESS 
 
 long as editors and proprietors are allowed to 
 sail off from responsibility under the plea that 
 they are only satisfying a public demand, so 
 long will it be possible for purveyors of other 
 forms of indecent literature and vendors of 
 other articles of public ill-fare to complain 
 that they are unfairly treated. There is likely 
 to be always a demand for fiction against fact, 
 the plausible lie against the honest truth, the 
 doctored news against the plain statement, and 
 the pleasing superficial against the strenuous 
 profound. A change of taste in these respects 
 could only be brought about by a determined 
 effort in education extending over a generation 
 and applied not only to schools, but to the 
 Press, the pulpit, and to book-publishing. But 
 because the preference now exists, and is a 
 profitable taste to pander to, it is not right to 
 acquit the Press that thrives on it. 
 
 CRITICS BEWARE. Mr. Crees, the author 
 of a new study of George Meredith, has first 
 pointed out one of the dangers in writing about 
 Meredith and then fallen into it. Everybody 
 knows what it is ; it is writing in epigram, 
 or, as Mr. Crees calls it, " miscarrying with 
 abortive epigram." That phrase alone should 
 have warned Mr. Crees how near he was to
 
 21 
 
 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 diffi- 
 culty encountered by a certain kind of intel- 
 lectual 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 rriany untruths contained in this 
 passage, some flattering and others not, to the 
 " intellectual," and they are properly expressed 
 if untruths ever can be in the style. The 
 style is one in which the truth cannot be told ; 
 and it perfectly illustrates the axiom that critical 
 writing cannot be too simple and unaffected. 
 It is a common practice for a critic to approxi- 
 mate his style to the style of his subject.; for 
 example, to write about poetry poetically, about 
 a ' : grand impassioned writer " in a grand and 
 impassioned manner. By so doing it is sup- 
 posed that a critic shows his sympathy and 
 his understanding of his subject. But the
 
 22 CRITICS BEWARE 
 
 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 Num- 
 ber " of the Little Review is devoted to essays 
 by various hands upon the works and character- 
 istics of the late novelist. The most interesting 
 essay in the volume is one by Miss Ethel Coburn 
 Mayne reporting the first appearance and subse- 
 quent development of Henry James as witnessed 
 by the writers for the famous Yellow Book, of 
 whom Miss Mayne was not the least charac- 
 teristic. 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
 
 HENRY JAMES 23 
 
 assumed that because James wrote in it, he 
 was willing to be identified with the tendency 
 of the school ; and they thought him lacking 
 in loyalty when afterwards it appeared that he 
 was powerfully hostile. But how could they 
 have deceived themselves into supposing that 
 a progress towards the ghostly could always 
 keep step with a progress towards the fleshly ? 
 The two were worlds apart, and if for a single 
 moment they coincided in an issue or two of 
 the Yellow Book, their subsequent divergence 
 was only made the more obvious. I, even I, 
 who was still young when the Yellow Book 
 began to appear, could have told its editors that 
 Henry James was not long for their world. 
 Between the method employed in, say, the 
 Death of the Lion and the method of Henry 
 Harland, Max Beerbohm, Miss Mayne herself, 
 and, subsequently, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, there 
 was, and could be, only an accidental and 
 momentary sympathy. James was in love with 
 the next world, or the next state of conscious- 
 ness ; he was always exploring the borderland 
 between the conscious and the super-conscious. 
 The Yellow Book writers were positively re- 
 actionary to him, for their borderland was not 
 between men and angels, but between men and 
 beasts. James's " contemptuous " word for Mr. 
 D. H. Lawrence which Miss Mayne still 
 groans to think of was the most natural and 
 inevitable under the circumstances. It might
 
 24 HENRY JAMES 
 
 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 cut de 
 sac, I commend to them this present essay by 
 Miss Mayne. Under the disguise of criticism 
 of Henry James, it is a confession. 
 
 Henry James's Middle Years is a frag- 
 ment of the autobiography begun some years 
 before the author's death. We are told 
 that this fragment was " dictated " by Henry 
 James and that it was never revised by 
 himself, both of which facts explain a little 
 of the peculiarity of his style. If the style of 
 the earlier books was mazy, the style of Middle 
 Years is mazier. If the earlier style consisted 
 of impressions impassionately conveyed, the 
 present is more elusive still. Henry James was 
 always difficult to pin down ; in Middle Years 
 his fluttering among words never rests a sen- 
 tence. Nobody, I am convinced, who is not 
 either a genuine devotee of Henry James or one 
 of the paper-audience his friends cultivated for 
 him, will succeed in reading through this work. 
 An infinitely leisurely mind or an infinite 
 interest in just Henry James's way of looking 
 at things is necessary to the endurance of it. 
 But given one of these, and in particular the 
 latter, and the reading of Middle Years becomes 
 an exhilarating exercise in sensing ghosts.
 
 HENRY JAMES 25 
 
 Yes, that is the phrase to describe what 
 Henry James was always after. He was always 
 after sensing ghosts. His habitat has been 
 said to be the inter -space between the real 
 and the ideal ; but it can be more accurately 
 defined as the inter-space between the dead 
 and the living. You see his vision almost 
 his clairvoyance actively engaged in this re- 
 covery of his experiences years before as a 
 young man in London. See how he revelled 
 in them, rolling them off his tongue in long 
 circling phrases. Is it not obvious that he is 
 most at home in recollection, in the world of 
 memory, in the inter-world, once more, of the 
 dead and the living? Observe, too, how only 
 a little more exaggeratedly anfractuous and 
 swirling his style becomes but not, in any real 
 sense, different under the influence of memory, 
 than when professing to be describing the 
 present. It is plain that memory differs for him 
 from present vision only in being a little more 
 vivid, a little more real. In order to see a thing 
 clearly, he had, in fact, to make a memory of 
 it, and the present tense of memory is impres- 
 sion. What I am trying to say is that Henry 
 James mentalised phenomenon ; hence that he 
 saw most clearly in the world of memory where 
 this process had been performed for him by 
 time ; and that he saw less clearly in our actual 
 world because the phenomena herein resisted 
 immediate mentalisation. The difference for
 
 26 HENRY JAMES 
 
 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. Incarna- 
 tion, embodiment, was for him a screen to be 
 looked through, got over somehow, divined into, 
 penetrated. He regarded it as a sort of magic 
 curtain which concealed at the same time that 
 under careful observation it revealed by its 
 shadows and movements the mind behind it. 
 And I fancy I see him sitting before the actual 
 sensible world of things and persons with 
 infinite patience watching for a significant 
 gesture or a revealing shadow. And such 
 motions and shadows he recorded as impres- 
 sions which became the stuff of his analysis 
 and synthesis of the souls that originated them. 
 But if that was his attitude towards the material 
 world and it is further proved by his occa- 
 sional excursions into the completely ghostly 
 may we not safely conclude that in the world 
 he now inhabits his sense of impressions is 
 more at home still. For there, as I take it, 
 the curtain is drawn, and minds and souls are 
 by one degree the more exposed to direct 
 vision. With his marvellous insight into the 
 actual, what would Henry James not make of 
 the mental and psychic when these are no
 
 HENRY JAMES 27 
 
 longer concealed by the material? On the 
 whole, nobody is likely to be happier " dead " 
 than Henry James. 
 
 TURGENEV. Both in Mr. Conrad's Introduc- 
 tion and Mr. Edward Garnett's critical study of 
 Turgenev I observe the attitude of defence. 
 They are defending rather than praising 
 Turgenev. But Turgenev has been so long the 
 victim of polemics that it is about time some 
 judge summed up the contentions and delivered 
 judgment. Neither Mr. Conrad nor Mr. 
 Garnett, however, is qualified for this task by 
 either temper or the power of judgment itself. 
 Mr. Conrad is a great writer, but he is not 
 a great critic, and as for Mr. Garnett, he is 
 not even a great writer ; and the temper of 
 both is shown in their common tendency to 
 abuse not only the plaintiff's attorney but the 
 jury as well. But there is no use in abusing 
 the jury in other words, the reading public of 
 the world even if some gain may be got by 
 polemics with this or that critic. I, am content 
 to hear Mr. Maurice Baring and M. Haumont 
 told that they are merely echoes of Russian 
 partisanship and incapable of feeling the fine 
 shades of " truth " in Turgenev ; for both 
 these writers are quite capable of hitting back. 
 But when Mr. Conrad satirically remarks that
 
 28 TURGENEV 
 
 Turgenev had qualities enough to ruin the pros- 
 pects of any writer, and Mr. Garnett echoes him 
 to the effect that Turgenev owes his " unpopu-, 
 larity " to "an exquisite feeling for balance " 
 which nowadays is " less and less prized by 
 modern opinion," I feel that the defence of 
 Turgenev is exceeding the limits of discretion. 
 For it is not by any means the case that the 
 " unpopularity " of Turgenev is confined to 
 the mob that has no feeling for balance or is 
 jealous of his possession of too many qualities. 
 Critics as good as Mr. Garnett and with no 
 Russian political prejudices against Turgenev 
 can come to the same conclusion as the innu- 
 merable anonymous gentlemen of the jury, to 
 wit, that Turgenev was a great artist on a small 
 scale whose faults were large. That is certainly 
 my own case. While I agree (or affirm, for I 
 am quite willing to take the initiative), that 
 Turgenev's art is more exquisite, more humane, 
 more European than that of any other Russian 
 writer, I must also maintain that in timidity of 
 thought, in sentimentality, in occasional petti- 
 ness of mind, he is no more of a great writer 
 than, let us say, Mr. Hall Caine. To compare 
 the whole of him with the whole of Dostoievski 
 is to realise in an instant the difference between 
 a writer great in parts and a writer great even 
 in his faults. Turgenev at his best is a Euro- 
 pean, I would rather say a Parisianised Russian ; 
 but Dostoievski, while wholly Russian, belongs
 
 TURGENEV 29 
 
 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 the first in favour of Ibsen with Norway 
 dissenting ; the world will similarly settle the 
 latter in favour of Dostoievski, with Mr. Garnett 
 dissenting. 
 
 PLOTINUS. Plotinus, of whom Coleridge 
 said that " no writer more wants, better 
 deserves, or is less likely to obtain a new and 
 more correct translation," has lately been trans- 
 lated into excellent English by Mr. Stephen 
 Mackenna (not the author of Sonia, by the 
 way). For all Coleridge's demand and Mr. 
 Mackenna's supply, however, Plotinus is not 
 likely to be read as much as he deserves. 
 Abstract thought, or thinking in ideas without 
 images, is a painful pleasure, comparable to 
 exercises designed and actually effective to 
 physical health. There is no doubt whatever 
 that mental power is increased by abstract 
 thought. Abstract thinking is almost a recipe 
 for the development of talent. But it is so 
 distasteful to mental inertia and habit that even 
 people who have experienced its immense profit
 
 30 PLOTINUS 
 
 are disinclined to persist in it. It was by 
 reason of his persistence in an exercise pecu- 
 liarly irksome to the Western mind that 
 Plotinus approached the East more nearly in 
 subtlety and purity of thought than all but a 
 few Western thinkers before or after him. In 
 reading him it is hard to say that one is not 
 reading a clarified Shankara or a Vyasa of the 
 Bhishma treatises of the Mahabharata. East 
 and West met in his mind. 
 
 Plotinus's aim, like that of all thinkers in the 
 degree of their conception, is, in Coleridge's 
 words, " the perfect spiritualisation of all the 
 laws of Nature into laws of intuition and intel- 
 lect." It is the subsumption of phenomena 
 in terms of personality, the reduction of Nature 
 to the mind of man. Conversely it will be seen 
 that the process may be said to personalise 
 Nature ; in other words, to assume the presence 
 in natural phenomena of a kind of personal 
 intelligence. If this be animism^ I decline to 
 be shocked by it on that account ; for in that 
 event the highest philosophy and one of the 
 lowest forms of religion coincide, and there is 
 no more to be said of- it. The danger of this 
 reasoning from mind to Nature and from 
 Nature to mind is anthropomorphism. We 
 tend to make Nature in our own image, or, 
 conversely, a la Nietzsche, to make ourselves 
 after the image of Nature. But the greater 
 the truth the greater is the peril of it ; and
 
 PLOTINUS 31 
 
 thinkers must be on their guard to avoid the 
 dangers, while nevertheless continuing the 
 method. Plotinus certainly succeeded in avoid- 
 ing the anthropomorphic no less than the 
 crudely animistic dangers of his methods ; but 
 at the cost of remaining unintelligible to the 
 majority of readers. 
 
 THE NEW EUROPE. It should be possible 
 before long to begin to discern some of the 
 outlines of the new continent that will arise 
 from the flood of the present war. That it 
 will be a new continent is certain, and that 
 it will contain as essential features some of the 
 aspects of the Slav soul is probable. For 
 what has been spiritually most apparent during 
 the war has been the struggle of the Slav soul 
 to find expression in the Western medium. 
 Russia, we may say, has sought to Europeanise 
 herself ; or, rather, Russia has sought to 
 impress upon Europe Russian ideas.; with this 
 further resemblance in her fate to the fate of 
 the pioneers of every great new spiritual 
 impulse, that she has been crucified in her 
 mission. The crucifixion of Slavdom, how- 
 ever, is the sign in which Russian ideals or, 
 let us say Slav ideals will in the end conquer. 
 They will not submerge our Western ideas;; 
 the new continent will be the old continent
 
 32 THE NEW EUROPE 
 
 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 radi- 
 cally changed? The reply is to be found con- 
 fusedly in the events of the Russian Revolution ; 
 in the substitution of the pan-human for the 
 national ideal, and in the attempt, this time 
 to be made with all the strength at the disposal 
 of intelligence, to create a single world-culture 
 a universal Church of men of good-sense 
 and good- will. This appears to me to be 
 the distinguishing feature of the new continent 
 about to be formed ; and we shall owe it to 
 the Slavs. 
 
 THE FASHION OF A NTI- PURITANISM. The 
 anti- Puritanism of the professed anti-Puritans 
 is very little, if any, better than the Puritanism 
 they oppose. The two parties divide the 
 honours of our dislike fairly evenly between 
 them. Puritanism is a fanatical devotion to 
 a single aspect of virtue namely, to morality. 
 It assumes that Life is moral and nothing 
 else ; that Power, Wisdom, Truth, Beauty, and 
 Love are all of no account in comparison with 
 Goodness ; and doing so it offends our judg- 
 ment of the nature of Virtue, which is that 
 Virtue is wholeness or a balance of all the
 
 THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM 33 
 
 aspects of God. Anti-Puritanism, on the other 
 hand, denies all the affirmations of Puritanism, 
 but without affirming anything on its own 
 account. It denies that Life is exclusively 
 moral, but it does not affirm that Life is any- 
 thing else ; it destroys the false absolute of 
 Puritanism, but it is silent to the extent of 
 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, be- 
 tween a one-sided truth and no truth at all. 
 We are bound to be half-hearted upon either 
 side, since the thing itself is only half a thing. 
 I am not likely to revise my opinions about 
 virtue from the school of Marx and his disciple 
 Kautsky. Marx was another flamen, a priest, 
 that is to say, of one aspect only of reality 
 in this case the economic. That the moral 
 cant of a particular age tends to represent 
 the economic interest of the dominant class, is, 
 of course, a truism ; but there is a world of 
 difference between moral cant and morality 
 and the latter is as uniform throughout all 
 history as the former is variable. Moreover, it 
 is not by any means always the case that the 
 interests of the dominant class of capitalism 
 are identical with Puritanism. The interests 
 of capitalism to-day are decidedly with anti- 
 Puritanism, in so far as the effects of anti- 
 Puritanism are to break up family life, to 
 
 3
 
 34 THE FASHION OF ANTI-PURITANISM 
 
 restrict births and to cultivate eugenics. What 
 could suit capitalism better than to atomise the 
 last surviving natural grouping of individuals 
 and to breed for the servile State? The anti- 
 Puritan propagandas of Malthusianism and 
 eugenics are not carried on, either, by Marxians, 
 but by the wealthy classes. Because he is a 
 shopkeeper, the Anglo-Saxon is to-day an anti- 
 Puritan in these matters. 
 
 POPULAR PHILOSOPHY. The difficulty of 
 popular philosophical discussion is not insuper- 
 able. It is all a matter of style. Mr. Bertrand 
 Russell, for example, manages by means of an 
 excellent style to make philosophy as easy to 
 understand and as entrancing to follow as 
 certain writers have made the equally difficult 
 subject of economics. It is, in fact, the busi- 
 ness of professional thinkers to popularise their 
 subject and to procure for their Muse as many 
 devotees as possible. In the case of Mr. 
 Bertrand Russell, his admirable style has beerr 
 put into the service of the most abominable 
 philosophy ever formulated. He is an acci- 
 dentalist 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
 
 POPULAR PHILOSOPHY 35 
 
 on a dissolving iceberg. But it is all the 
 more strange in my judgment that a man who 
 thinks thus can write as Mr. Russell writes. 
 There is a .contradiction somewhere between the 
 simple richness of his style and the Spartan 1 
 poverty of his ideas. He thinks glacially, but 
 his style is warm. I suspect that if he were 
 psycho -analysed Mr. Bertrand Russell would 
 turn out to be a walking contradiction. In. 
 a word, I don't believe he believes a word he 
 says ! That tone, that style, them there ges-, 
 tures they betray the stage-player of the spirit. 
 A philosophy written in a popular style is 
 not, of course, the same thing as a popular 
 philosophy. " From a popular philosophy and 
 a philosophical populace, good sense deliver 
 us," said Coleridge, meaning to say that a 
 philosophy whose substance and not whose 
 expression only has been adapted to the 
 populace is in all probability false and is cer- 
 tainly superficial. For in his Lay Sermons, pub- 
 lished a hundred years ago, Coleridge 
 supplemented the foregoing remark by deplor- 
 ing 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 philo- 
 sophical public.'" Between a philosophic 
 public and a philosophic populace there is the 
 same distinction as between the " public " that 
 reads, let us say, Sedlak, and the " populace "
 
 36 POPULAR PHILOSOPHY 
 
 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 Inter- 
 national Journal of Ethics, Mr. Herbert Stewart 
 makes a chivalrous attempt to deliver Carlyle 
 from the charge recently brought home to him 
 of having been a Prussian. Militarist Prus- 
 sianism, he says, rests upon a postulate which 
 would have filled Carlyle with horror, the 
 postulate, namely, that an autocracy must be 
 organised for war. I am not satisfied, how- 
 ever, that Carlyle would have been filled with 
 anything but admiration. It is true that he 
 did not adopt the Prussian error of identifying 
 Might with Right. ' Is Arithmetic," he asked, 
 " a thing more fixed by the Eternal than the 
 laws of justice are? " Could Justice or Right, 
 therefore, be allowed to vary with the amount 
 of Might at its disposal a deduction 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 assumption that Might can be 
 accumulated only by Right means. Might, he 
 said in effect, being an attribute of God, can 
 be obtained by man only as a result of some
 
 WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN? 37 
 
 virtue. Hence its possession presumes the 
 possession of a proportionate virtue, and a man 
 of Might is to that extent a man of Right also. 
 This subtlety led Carlyle into some strange 
 company for the moral fanatic he was. It 
 led him to glorify Frederick the Great and to 
 condone Frederick's crime against Silesia. It 
 led him to despise France and to defend West 
 Indian slavery. Mr. Stewart must make his 
 choice between Carlyle as a confused ethical 
 philosopher and Carlyle as a Prussian. If he 
 was not the latter, he was the former. 
 
 Is NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY? Nietzsche, 
 we are told, is being read as never before in 
 Germany. It is certain that Nietzsche was 
 taken, if taken at all, in the wrong sense in 
 Germany before the war. The Germans did 
 with him precisely what the mob everywhere 
 does with the satirist ; they swallowed his 
 praise and ignored his warnings. He is still, 
 however, more of a danger than a saviour to 
 post-war Germany, if only for the reason that 
 his vocabulary is for the most part militarist. 
 Culture is usually presented by Nietzsche in 
 the terms of combat, and the still small voice 
 of perfection is only heard in the silences of 
 his martial sentences. Now that Germany has 
 begun to re-read Nietzsche, will it read him
 
 38 IS NIETZSCHE FOR GERMANY? 
 
 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. Whit- 
 man is inimical to American culture. Dr. 
 Johnson has been a blight upon English 1 
 thought. And Nietzsche, it may well be, is 
 only a blessing outside of Germany. Art and 
 thought, it is commonly said, are beyond 
 nationality and beyond race ; and from this it 
 follows that it is only a Jiappy accident when 
 a great writer or thinker is peculiarly suited to 
 the nation in which he happens to be born. 
 He is addressed to the world why should his 
 message be specially adapted to the language 
 and people of his parentage ? A nation runs 
 risks in 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 exclusion, is always dangerous. 
 We must take the s;ood where we find it. 
 
 NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS. The English 
 mind is easily " put off " a subject, and parti- 
 cularly easily off a subject as uncongenial as
 
 NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS 39 
 
 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 con- 
 tinue 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 philo- 
 sophy in the light of psycho-analysis will gather 
 most of the remainder. 
 
 Nevertheless, the remaining fragments will 
 be worth preserving, since indubitably they will 
 be the fragments of a giant of thought. As 
 Heraclitus is represented by a small collection 
 of aphorisms, each so concentrated that one 
 would serve for an ordinary man's equipment 
 for intellectual life, the Nietzsche of the future 
 may be contained in a very small volume, 
 chiefly of aphorisms. He aimed, he said, at 
 saying in a sentence what other writers say 
 in a book, and he characteristically added that 
 he aimed at saying in a sentence what other 
 writers did not say in a book. And he very;
 
 40 NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS 
 
 often succeeded. These successes are his real 
 contribution to his own immortality, and they; 
 will, I think, ensure it. I should advise Dr. 
 Oscar Levy to prepare such a volume without 
 delay. It may be the case that Nietzsche will 
 be read in his entirety again, though I doubt 
 it ; but, in any event, such a volume as I have 
 in mind would serve either to reintroduce him 
 or handsomely to bury the mortal part of him. 
 I cannot, however, really believe that 
 Nietzsche is about to be read, 'as never 
 before, in Germany. Dr. Levy has assured 
 us, on' the report of a Berlin book- 
 seller, that this was indicated in the sales 
 of Nietzsche in Germany ; but the wish was 
 father to the deduction from the very small 
 fact. Nietzsche was, before anything else, a 
 great culture-hero ; as a critic of art he has 
 been surpassed by no man. But is there any 
 appeal in culture to a Germany situated as 
 Germany is to-day ? I am here only a literary 
 causeur. With the dinosaurs and other 
 monsters of international politics I cannot be 
 supposed to be on familiar terms. My opinion, 
 nevertheless, based upon my own material, is 
 that Germany is most unlikely to resume the 
 pursuit of culture where she interrupted it after 
 1870, or, indeed, to pursue culture at all. And 
 the reason for my opinion is that Russia is too 
 close at hand, too accessible, and, above all, 
 too tempting to German cupidity. Think what
 
 NIETZSCHE IN FRAGMENTS 41 
 
 the proximity to Germany to a Germany 
 headed off from the Western world of a com- 
 mercially succulent country like Russia really 
 means. Germans are human, even if they are 
 not sub-human, and the temptation of an El 
 Dorado at their doors will prove to be more 
 seductive than the cry from the muezzin to 
 come to culture, come to culture. Nietzsche on 
 the one side calling them to spiritual conquests 
 will be met by the big bagmen calling them, 
 on the other side, to commercial conquests. 
 Who can doubt which appeal will be the 
 stronger? Germany refused to attend to 
 Nietzsche after 1870, when he spoke to them 
 as one alive ; they are less likely to listen 
 to a voice from the dead after 1918. On 
 second thoughts, I should advise Dr. Oscar 
 Levy to publish his volume in Germany first. 
 For there he would show by one satiric touch 
 that no country needed it so much. 
 
 THE END OF FICTION. Fiction nowadays, 
 we are told, is not what it used to be. tWe 
 are told that it is the modern university. It 
 is certainly a very obliging medium. But on 
 this very account it is as delusive as it is 
 obliging. It receives impressions easily, readily 
 adapts itself to every kind of material, and 
 assumes at the word of command any and every 
 mood. But precisely because it does these
 
 42 THE END OF FICTION 
 
 things, the effects it produces are transient. 
 Lightly come, lightly go ; and if, as ha? been 
 said, fiction is the modern reader's university, 
 it is a school in which he learns everything and 
 forgets everything. Modern as I am, and 
 hopeful as I am of modernity, I cannot think 
 that the predominance of fiction, even of such 
 fiction as is written to-day, is a good sign ; 
 and when we see that it leads nowhere, that 
 the people who read much of it never read 
 anything else, and that it is an intellectual 
 cul-de-sac, our alarm at the phenomenon is the 
 greater. What kind of minds do we expect 
 to develop on a diet of forty parts fiction to 
 two of all other forms of literature? Assuming 
 the free libraries to be the continuation schools 
 of the public, what is their value if the only 
 lessons taken in them are the lessons of fiction ? 
 I will not dwell on the obvious discouragement 
 the figures are to every serious writer, for 
 the effect on the readers must be worse. 
 
 THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE. The supres- 
 sion of the display of feeling, or, better, the 
 control of the display of feeling, is the first 
 condition of thought, and only those who have 
 aimed at writing with studied simplicity, studied 
 lucidity, and studied detachment realise the
 
 THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE 43 
 
 amount of feeling that has to be trained to run 
 quietly in harness. The modern failure (as 
 compared with the success of the Greeks) to 
 recognise feeling as an essential element of 
 lucidity and the rest of the virtues of literary; 
 form is due to an excess of fiction. Just 
 because fiction expresses everything it really 
 impresses nothing. Its feeling evaporates as 
 fast as it exudes. The sensation, nevertheless, 
 is pleasant, for the reader appears to be wit- 
 nessing 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 demon- 
 strated 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 dis- 
 crimination of words the foundation of moral 
 training, and it is true enough that every stage 
 of moral progress is indicated by the degree of 
 our perception of the meaning of words. Tell 
 me what words have a particular interest for 
 you, and I will tell you what class of the world- 
 school you are in. Tell me what certain words
 
 44 THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE 
 
 mean for you and I will tell you what you; 
 mean for the world of thought. One of the 
 most subtle words, and one of the key-words 
 of culture, is simplicity. Can you discriminate 
 between natural simplicity and studied sim- 
 plicity, between Nature and Art? In appear- 
 ance 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 perfect originality with 
 the counsels given in our own day, in which 
 the aim of originality is directed to appearing 
 original you will be brought, thereby, face to 
 face with still another key-idea of Culture, 
 the relation of Appearance to Reality. All 
 these exercises in culture are elementary, how- 
 ever, in comparison with the master-problem of 
 " disinterestedness." No word in the English 
 language is more difficult to define or better 
 worth attempting to define. Somewhere or 
 other in its capacious folds it contains all the 
 ideas of ethics, and even, I should say, of 
 religion. The Bhagavad Gita (to name only 
 one classic) can be summed up in the word. 
 Duty is only a pale equivalent of it. I venture
 
 THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE 45 
 
 to say that whoever has understood the meaning 
 of " disinterestedness " is not far off under- 
 standing the goal of human culture. 
 
 THE FATE OF SCULPTURE. The art-critic 
 of The Times having remarked that " the 
 public hardly looks at the sculpture in the 
 Academy, or outside it," Mr. John Tweed, an 
 eminent sculptor himself, has now uttered a 
 public lamentation in agreement with him. 
 Sculpture to-day, he says, is an art without 
 an audience ; and he quotes a Belgian artist who 
 told him what heroes our contemporary sculp- 
 tors in this country must be to continue their 
 work in the face of a unanimous neglect. It 
 is not certain, however, that the sculptors of 
 to-day do not thoroughly well deserve fhe fate 
 to which they now find themselves condemned. 
 In the economy of the arts, or, if this phrase 
 be preferred, in the strategy of aesthetics, 
 nothing is more necessary from time to time 
 in each of the arts than an iconoclast by which' 
 I indicate not a destroyer simply, but a creator 
 of new forms. Such a pioneer is of necessity 
 a little rude to his immediate predecessors and 
 to such of his contemporaries as are sheep. 
 But in the end, nevertheless, if they will only 
 accept and recognise him, he will revive their
 
 46 THE FATE OF SCULPTURE 
 
 art for them. But in the case of sculpture the 
 two such iconoclasts as have recently appeared 
 Mr. Epstein and the late Gaudier-Brzeska 
 were instantly set upon, not by the public, but 
 by their contemporaries, and walled within a 
 neglect far more complete than the neglect 
 sculpture in general has received. Just when 
 it appeared that they might be about to re- 
 awaken public interest in carven forms, the rest 
 of the sculptors hurried to silence them, with 
 the consequence that at this moment there is 
 literally nobody engaged in sculpture in whom 
 the intelligent public takes the smallest interest. 
 As sculptors have treated sculpture, so the 
 public now treats sculptors. It is a pretty 
 piece of karma. 
 
 THE Too CLEVER. Neglect means nothing 
 very much ; success is a matter of time for 
 everything that is really classic. On the other 
 hand, deliberately to incur neglect by writing 
 for the few involves the further risk of more 
 and more deserving it. Whoever makes a 
 boast of writing for a coterie sooner or later 
 finds himself writing for a coterie of a coterie, 
 and at last for himself alone. It cannot be 
 otherwise. As the progress of the classic is 
 from the one to the many, the progress of the
 
 THE TOO CLEVER 47 
 
 romantic is from the many to the one ; and 
 the more sincerely the latter is a romantic, the 
 sooner he arrives at his journey's end. The 
 involution of aim thus brought about is obvious 
 already in the succession of works of the chief 
 writers of the Little Review. They grow 
 cleverer and cleverer, and, at the same time, 
 more and more unintelligible. I am staggered 
 by the cleverness of such a writer as Mr. 
 Wyndham Lewis, and a little more so at the 
 cleverness of Mr. James Joyce. But in the case 
 of both of them I find myself growing more 
 and more mystified, bewildered, and repelled. 
 Is it, I ask, that they do not write for readers 
 like me? Then their circle must be 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 opening chapter of Mr. James Joyce's new 
 novel, Ulysses. This is how it begins : 
 
 Stately, plump Buck Milligan came from the stairway, 
 bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay 
 crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained
 
 48 THE TOO CLEVER 
 
 gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the 
 bowl aloft and intoned. . . . 
 
 Now it is clear that such' a passage has not 
 been written without a great deal of thought, 
 and if thought were art, it might be called an 
 artistic passage. But thought is not only not 
 art, but the aim of art is to conceal thought. 
 In its perfection art is indistinguishable from 
 nature. The conspicuous thoughtfulness of the 
 passage I have quoted is, therefore, an objec- 
 tion to it ; and the more so since it provokes 
 an inspection it is unable to sustain. Chal- 
 lenged to " think " about what the writer is 
 saying, the reader at once discovers that the 
 passage will not bear thinking about. He 
 asks, for instance, whence Buck Milligan came 
 from the staircase ; how he managed to balance 
 a crossed mirror and razor on a bowl's edge 
 and, particularly, while bearing them aloft ; 
 and what mild air it was that sustained the 
 tails of a man's dressing-gown. To these ques- 
 tions deliberately provoked by the ostentatious 
 care of the writer there is either no answer or 
 none forthcoming without more thought than 
 the detail is worth. The passage, in short, 
 suffers from being aimed at a diminishing 
 coterie ; and it succeeds in satisfying, I 
 imagine, only the writer of it who is alone in 
 all its secrets. Mr. James Joyce had once the 
 makings of a great writer not a popular writer, 
 but a classic writer. To become what he was
 
 THE TOO CLEVER 49 
 
 he needed to be opened out, to be simplified, 
 to conceal his cleverness, to write more and 
 more for the world. But first in the Egoist 
 and now in the Little Review he has been 
 directed to cultivate his faults, his limitations, 
 his swaddling clothes of genius, with the result 
 that he is in imminent danger of brilliant 
 provincialism. 
 
 HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS. Mr. Ezra 
 Pound's Homage to Propertius has drawn an 
 American Professor of Latin into the pages of 
 the American magazine Poetry. Professor 
 Hales is indignant at the attempt of Mr. Pound 
 to make Propertius intelligible as well as merely 
 accessible to the modern English reader, and 
 in the name of Scholarship, he begs Mr. Pound 
 to " lay aside the mask of erudition " and to 
 confess himself nothing better than a poet. 
 .With some of Professor Hales 's literal 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 literature, what in the world does 
 it matter that Mr. Pound has spelled Punic 
 with a capital when he meant a small letter, 
 or that he has forgotten the existence of the 
 Marcian aqueduct? Mr. Pound did not set out 
 
 4
 
 50 HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS 
 
 with the intention of making a literal transla- 
 tion of Propertius. He set out with the inten- 
 tion of creating in English verse a verse re- 
 incarnation, as it were, of Propertius, a 
 " homage " to Propertius that should take the 
 form of rendering him a contemporary of 
 our own. And, secondly, all criticism based 
 on the text of Propertius is invalid unless it is 
 accompanied by a perception of the psycho- 
 logical quality of Propertius as he lived. But 
 Professor Hales, it is clear, has no sense for this 
 higher kind of criticism, for he complains that 
 there is "no hint" in Propertius's text of 
 " certain decadent meanings " which Mr. 
 Pound attributes to him. Is there not, indeed? 
 Accepting decadence in its modern American 
 meaning, Propertius can only be said to be 
 full of it. No literary critic, accustomed to 
 reading through and between an author's lines, 
 whether they be Latin, Greek, or English, can 
 doubt the evidence of his trained senses that 
 the mind behind the text of Propertius was 
 a mind which the Latin Professor of the 
 Chicago University would call decadent, if only 
 it expressed itself in English. The facts that 
 Propertius was a poet contemporary with Ovid, 
 that he wrote of the life of the luxurious Roman 
 Empire, as one who habitually lived it, that 
 he wrote of love and of his own adventures, 
 are quite sufficient to prove that he was a child 
 of his age ; and if his age was, as it un-i
 
 doubtedly was, decadent, in a professorial 
 sense, Propertius, we may be sure, shared its 
 decadence. I am not saying, it will be 
 observed, nor, I think, would Mr. Pound say, 
 that to have shared in decadence and to be 
 sympathetic to it are the same thing as to be 
 decadent in oneself. 'What, in fact, distin- 
 guishes Propertius is his aesthetic reaction 
 against decadence, against the very decadence 
 in which he had been brought up, and with 1 
 which he had sympathised. But this is not 
 to admit that " no hint of certain decadent 
 meanings " is to be found in him. On the 
 contrary, he could not very well have become 
 the aesthetic reaction against decadence without 
 importing into his verse more than a hint of 
 certain decadent meanings. In effect, Pro- 
 pertius 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 reflec- 
 tions, by his habit of sublimating his experi- 
 ences, by his criticism of decadence. But that
 
 52 HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS 
 
 reflection was only an accompaniment, or, 
 rather, sequel of Propertius's mode of life ; it 
 did not, any more than such reflection does 
 to-day, make impossible or even improbable 
 a mode of life in violent contrast with the 
 reflection made upon it. 
 
 MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS IN 
 PUBLIC. Mr. Ezra Pound has for some months 
 been the " foreign " or exile editor of the 
 Little Review ; and I gather from, the nature of 
 the contributions that he has practically com- 
 mandeered 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 camou- 
 flage 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
 
 MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS 53 
 
 that they shall be art, just art. Less explicitly, 
 but to the same effect, both Mr. Pound and 
 Mr. Wyndham Lewis subscribe to the same 
 formula. They, too, are after art, nothing but 
 art. But in other respects they define them- 
 selves more clearly. From Mr. Wyndham 
 Lewis, for instance, I gather that the aim of 
 the Little Review artists is to differentiate 
 themselves from the mob. Art would seem to 
 consist, indeed, in this differentiation or self- 
 separation. Whatever puts a gulf between 
 yourself and the herd, and thus " 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 
 individuals. 
 
 We have all heard of this doctrine ; and 
 there is no doubt that it is very seductive. 
 But to whom ? It has been remarked before 
 that the appeal of Nietzsche has often been to 
 the last persons in the world you would have 
 thought capable of responding to him ; or, 
 let us say, to the last persons that ought to 
 respond to him weak-willed, moral imbeciles, 
 with not enough intelligence to be even 
 efficient slaves. These, as' Nietzsche discovered, 
 were only too often the sort o'f person that 
 was attracted by his muscular doctrine of the
 
 54 MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS 
 
 Will to Power. It is the case likewise with 
 the doctrine of individuality. Among its 
 disciples there are, of course, the few who 
 understand it ; but the majority of them are 
 precisely the persons who prove by their 
 devotion their personal need of it. In- 
 dividuality is for these as much a cult as health 
 is a cult among the sick ; and it is to be 
 observed that they also have to take a good 
 deal of care of themselves. They must never 
 associate with the mob, they must be careful 
 what they eat in the way of 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. iWyndham 
 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 substantial common sense. Never- 
 theless, both of them, to my mind, pose as 
 invalids, and simulate all the whimperings and 
 fastidiousness of the malades imaginaires. 
 Read Mr. Lewis's letters, for example, in the 
 issues of the Little Review here under notice. 
 The writer is obviously a very clever man, 
 with a good experience and judgment of life, 
 and possessed of a powerful style. But he 
 has chosen to exhibit himself as a clever gym- 
 nast of words, with innumerable fmnicking 
 fancies against this or that lest he should be
 
 MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS 55 
 
 confused with the "mob." And Mr. Pound 
 is in much the same state. What is the need 
 of it in their case, I ask? Unlike most of 
 the other writers, neither Mr. Lewis nor Mr. 
 Pound has any need to " cultivate " an in- 
 dividuality, or to surround it with walls and 
 moats of poses. Neither has any need what- 
 ever to appear clever in order to be clever. 
 On the contrary, both of them have need to 
 do exactly the reverse namely, to cut their 
 too exuberant individuality down to the quick, 
 and to reveal their cleverness by concealing 
 it. Simplicity, as Oscar Wilde said he, of 
 course, only said it, he never really thought 
 it is the last refuge of complexity. And I 
 put it to Mr. Lewis and Mr. Pound that with 
 just a little more individuality, and with just 
 a little more cleverness, their ambition will be 
 to be indistinguishable from the mob, either by 
 their individuality or their cleverness. They 
 will not succeed in it. Individuality and 
 cleverness, like murder, will out. The aim, 
 however, of the wise possessor of either, is 
 to conceal it in subtler and subtler forms of 
 common sense and simplicity. 
 
 Among the clever poses of this type of 
 " stage player of the spirit," as Nietzsche 
 called them, is the pose of the enfant terrible. 
 They are mightily concerned to shock the 
 bourgeoisie, and are never so happy as when 
 they have said something naughty, and actually
 
 56 MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS 
 
 got it into print. Now it is, of course, very 
 stupid for the bourgeoisie to be shocked. The 
 bourgeoisie would be wiser to yawn. But it 
 argues a similar kind of stupidity anti- 
 stupidity to wish to shock them. But we 
 do not wish to shock them, they say I We 
 are indifferent to the existence of the bour- 
 geoisie 1 Our aim is simply to write freely 
 as artists, and to be at liberty to publish our 
 work for such as can understand it. Publish- 
 ing, however, is a public act ; and I agree 
 with the bourgeoisie that the art of an intimate 
 circle or group is not of necessity a public 
 art. Between private and public morality, 
 personal and public policy, individual and com- 
 munal 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 intro- 
 duction of personal considerations into public 
 policy is felt to be an intrusion ; and to treat 
 your friends as if you were legislating on their 
 behalf is an impertinence. From all this it 
 follows that to thrust all private art into the 
 public eye is to mix the two worlds. Only that 
 part of private art that is in good public taste 
 ought to be exhibited in public ; the rest is 
 for private, personal, individual consumption, 
 and ought to be left unpublished, or circulated
 
 MR. POUND AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS 57 
 
 only privately. Let the artist write what 
 pleases him ; let him circulate it among his 
 friends ; the only criterion here is personal 
 taste. But immediately he proposes to pub- 
 lish his work, he should ask himself! the 
 question : Is this in good public taste ? 
 
 MR. EZRA POUNP AS METRICIST. Under 
 the title of Ezra Pound: His Metric and 
 Poetry, a whole book really, however, only 
 an essay has been devoted to the work of 
 this literary enigma. For this honour, if 
 honour it be, Mr. Pound is indebted more 
 to what he has preached than to what he has 
 practised ; for on his actual achievement, con- 
 siderable though it is, not even in America 
 could anybody have been found to write a 
 book. Mr. Pound will not deny that he is 
 an American in this respect, if in none other, 
 that he always likes to hitch his wagon to a 
 star. He has always a ton of precept for a 
 pound of example. And in America, more 
 than in any other country save, perhaps, Ger- 
 many, it appears to be required of a man 
 that there shall be ." significant " intention, aim, 
 theory anything you like expressive of 
 direction in everything he does. There does 
 not appear to me to be anything very original
 
 58 MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST 
 
 in the creation of poetic images, or even in 
 the employment of irregular metric ; neither 
 of them can be said to constitute a new de- 
 parture 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 dis- 
 play 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 com- 
 mand Mr. Pound's approval who is not always 
 learning and experimenting. Now this, which 
 I call the good side of Mr. Pound's doctrine,
 
 MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST 59 
 
 is disliked in England, where it has for years 
 been the habit of critics to pretend that poetry 
 grows on bushes or in parsley -beds. That 
 poetry should be the practice of "a learned, 
 self-conscious craft," to be carried on by a 
 " guild of adepts," appears to Mr. Archer, for 
 example, to be a heresy of the first order. 
 How much of the best poetry, he exclaims, 
 has been written with " little technical study, 
 behind it " ; and how little necessary, therefore, 
 any previous learning is. To the dogs with 
 Mr. Pound's doctrine I Let the motto over 
 the gates of the Temple of Poetry be: -'No 
 previous experience required." It will be seen, 
 of course, how the confusion in Mr. Archer's 
 mind has arisen. Because it is a fact that the 
 " best " poetry looks effortless, he has fallen 
 into the spectator's error of concluding that it 
 is effortless. And because, again, a considerable 
 part of the work of the " learned, self-con- 
 scious craftsmen " is pedantic and artificial, he 
 has been confirmed in his error. The truth of 
 the matter, however, is with Mr. Pound. 
 Dangerous as it may be to require that a poet 
 shall be learned in his profession, it is much 
 more dangerous to deprecate his learning. By, 
 a happy fluke, it may be, a perfect poem may 
 occasionally be written " without previous 
 study " ; from too much previous study there 
 may also occasionally result only verse smelling 
 of the lamp ; but in the long run, and for the
 
 60 MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST 
 
 cultivation of poetry as an art, there is no doubt 
 that the most fruitful way is the way of the 
 craftsman and the adept. 
 
 MR. EZRA' POUND ON RELIGION, Mr. 
 Pound has been called over the coals for his 
 impolite dismissal of Mr. G. K. Chesterton 
 as a danger to English literature. But, good 
 gracious, Mr. G. K. Chesterton's reputation is 
 not so frail that it cannot take care of itself 
 against a spirited idiosyncrasy. Mr. Pound 
 has expressed his honest opinion ; but what 
 is discussion for but to elicit honest opinions, 
 and then to extract the truth from them? 
 There is undoubtedly a fragment of truth in 
 Mr. Pound's view of Mr. G. K. Chesterton's 
 influence, and it is this : that Mr. Chesterton 
 is a most dangerous man to imitate. His 
 imitators become apes. But that is not to say 
 that Mr. Chesterton is not himself a great 
 writer. Shakespeare is likewise a dangerous 
 man to imitate ; and we should only be repeat- 
 ing 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
 
 MR. EZRA POUND ON RELIGION 61 
 
 wise thing to be done is to classify good writers 
 as writers to foe imitated and writers never to 
 be imitated. Among the former are the writers 
 whom personally I prefer j for I love best the 
 men of the eighteenth century, who aimed 
 at writing as nearly as possible like the world, 
 and through whom the common genius of the 
 English language spoke. But there is pleasure 
 and profit also in the highly individualised 
 styles of the latter sort of writers, beginning, 
 let us say, with Euphues, and represented to-day 
 by Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Mr. Pound may 
 have no fancy for the unique and personally 
 conducted style of Mr. Chesterton, but it is a 
 matter entirely of taste and not of judgment. 
 Should he announce that he cannot tolerate 
 Swift or Burke or Sterne, writers of pure 
 English, then, indeed, I should join in deplor- 
 ing his judgment. As it is, I listen to his 
 remarks on Mr. Chesterton as I should hear 
 his opinions of crab -soup. 
 
 Coming to his views upon religion and upon 
 Christianity, I find myself not so much hostile 
 to Mr. Pound as bewildered by him ; and yet 
 not bewildered to the 'degree of much curiosity. 
 Certain critical views of religion are stimulate 
 ing. 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
 
 62 MR. EZRA POUND ON RELIGION 
 
 current religion than of hostility to religion 
 itself. Nietzsche and the rest, in fact, were 
 not critical of religion and of Christianity 
 because they were themselves indifferent to 
 religion, but because they were too intensely 
 concerned with the religious problem to accept 
 the popular solutions. Mr. Pound, on the other 
 hand, does not appear to me to be a serious 
 thinker on the subject. He dismisses the 
 current popular solutions not only as if they 
 were, as they mostly are, superficial and absurd, 
 but as if the problems of conscience, the soul, 
 sin, and of salvation, to which these solutions 
 are trial replies, were non-existent or trivial. 
 It is his indifference to the reality of the 
 problems, and not his criticism of the popular 
 solutions, that keeps my mind at a distance 
 from Mr. Pound's when he is writing on 
 religion. He does not so much as even irritate 
 me, he simply leaves me as indifferent to his 
 opinions as he is himself. 
 
 MR. POUND, CARICATURIST. Mr. Ezra 
 Pound comes in for it again as he always 
 does. His idiosyncrasies are the enemies of 
 his personality, and they will always, unless 
 he can amend them, militate against both his 
 work and his success. Mr. Pound appears to
 
 MR. POUND, CARICATURIST 63 
 
 love to give his readers the impression that 
 he is no end of a fire-eater, and that he is 
 a charlatan of the first -water, setting up to 
 lecture better men on the virtues he himself 
 has never cultivated. It is an absolutely 
 incorrect picture, an exceedingly bad self- 
 portrait, a malicious caricature of himself. A 
 psycho-analyst would attribute it all to -" com- 
 pensation," 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 ad- 
 mire." A sneer, celestial or mundane, is, 
 however, the last gesture of which Mr. Pound 
 is capable. If anything, he is too benignant, 
 too enthusiastic, too anxious to find excuse for 
 admiration. 
 
 THE ADMIRABLE VICTORIANS. I am pre- 
 pared to apologise if I have ever used 
 " Victorian " in a derogatory sense. But I 
 know I have not. I have too deep a respect 
 for the Victorian character ever to make light 
 of it, and especially for my own generation, 
 that can afford to laugh at so little. Mr. 
 Strachey's -" brilliant " essays, therefore, leave
 
 64 THE ADMIRABLE VICTORIANS 
 
 me laughing at him rather than with him. 
 One is impelled to take him personally, and 
 to turn the tables upon Mr. Strachey with the 
 argumentmn ad hominem. How do you com- 
 pare 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, 
 someone has only to sneer at them to provoke 
 us to their defence ; and what better defence 
 can they ask than to be compared, man for 
 man, with their critics? As a set-off to the 
 "brilliant " essays of Mr. Strachey how easy 
 it is to be brilliant nowadays ! I have recently 
 read, on the loan of his great-grandson, the 
 privately printed personal memoir of Wm. 
 Mattingly Soundy, who died in 1862, at the 
 full age of 96. For 24 years he was a member 
 of his local Congregational church, and for 46 
 years he was deacon. During nearly the whole 
 of that time he never missed a meeting, Sunday 
 or week-day, and was never known to be late, 
 though he lived two miles from the church. 
 It is the round of a machine, you may say, 
 and there is no wonder that the age was 
 mechanical. But I think of the passionate 
 mainspring that kept a " machine " going for 
 so long without a psychological breakdown. 
 What an intensity it must have had 1 What 
 a character ! If to love it is impossible, it is 
 impossible not to admire it ; and since we
 
 THE ADMIRABLE VICTORIANS 65 
 
 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 CLART. M. Vannier's La Clarte 
 Francaise does not throw much light upon the 
 mysteries of French lucidity. He accepts as 
 self-evident Rivarol's axiom that " what is not 
 clear is not French " surely worthy to be the 
 national device of France ; and he analyses 
 with admirable humour a considerable number 
 of examples of '' clarte," and the want of it. 
 But the mystery of lucidity, remains a mystery 
 still. Flaubert's practice of reading his com- 
 positions 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 i^s worst shocking. Written for the ear, and 
 meant to be read in company, French litera- 
 ture is never grand, but neither is it ever 
 silly. Its range is society, while ours is 
 solitude.
 
 66 WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE ? 
 
 WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE? There is 
 nothing particularly " masterly " from the 
 modern English point of view in Hobbes's 
 translation of Pericles 's Funeral Oration. His 
 period of English prose appears to have been 
 ill-adapted for the translation of the Greek 
 idiom of the time of Pericles. To the usual 
 cautions against translations in general, we 
 ought to add the caution against translations 
 made in dissimilar epochs. It is not at any 
 time in the history of a language that a trans- 
 lation from a foreign language can safely be 
 undertaken. In all probability, indeed, the 
 proper period for translation is no longer 
 in point of time than the period within which' 
 the original itself was written. If the Periclean 
 Age lasted, let us say, fifty years, it is within 
 a period in English history of the same length 
 that an adequate translation can be made. Once 
 let that period go by, and a perfect translation 
 will be for ever impossible. And equally the 
 result will be a failure, if the translation is 1 
 attempted before its time has come. I do not 
 think that the Hobbesian period of English 1 
 was in key with the period of Periclean Greek ; 
 nor, again, do I think that our period for per- 
 fect translation has yet come. A " master- 
 piece " of translation of Pericles's Oration is 
 still, in my opinion, to be done. But I am 
 confident that we are approaching the proper 
 period, and in proof of this I would remark on
 
 WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE? 67 
 
 the superiority of Jowett's translation over that 
 of Hobbes. Jowett, as a writer of original 
 English, nobody, I think, would compare with 
 Hobbes of Malmesbury. Hobbes was a great 
 pioneer, a creator of language ; Jowett was only 
 a good writer. Nevertheless, the idiom in 
 which Jowett wrote, was more nearly perfect 
 (that is, fully developed) English than the 
 idiom in which Hobbes wrote. And since, 
 in point of development, the correspondence 
 between Periclean Greek and Jowett's 
 English is closer than the correspondence 
 between Periclean Greek and Hobbes's English, 
 Jowett's translation is nearer the original than 
 Hobbes's. 
 
 It would be a pleasant exercise in style to 
 criticise Jowett's translation, and a still more 
 profitable exercise to amend it. To a mere 
 student of comparative values in Periclean 
 Greek and idiomatic English, some of the 
 errors in Jowett's translation are obvious. 
 Such a student needs not to refer with the 
 scholar's precision to the original Greek to be 
 able, with the approval of all men of taste, to 
 pronounce that such and such a phrase or word 
 is most certainly not what may be called 
 Periclean English. It stands to the totality, 
 of reason that it is not so. We may be certain, 
 for instance, that Pericles, were he delivering 
 his Oration in English, with all the taste and 
 training he possessed as a Greek of his age,
 
 68 WHEN SHALL WE TRANSLATE ? 
 
 would never have employed such phrases as 
 these : " commended the law-giver," " a 
 worthy thing," " burial to the dead," " repu- 
 tation . . . imperilled on . . . the eloquence," 
 " who knows the facts," " suspect exaggera- 
 tion." Pericles, we cannot but suppose both 
 from the man and his age, spoke with studied 
 simplicity, that is to say, with perfect natural- 
 ness. The words and phrases he used were 
 in all probability the most ordinary to the ear 
 of the Athenian, and well within the limits of 
 serious conversation. But such phrases as I 
 have mentioned are not of the same English 
 character ; they are written, not spoken 
 phrases, and approximate more to a leading 
 commemorative article in The Times than to 
 a speech we should all regard as excellent. It 
 would be interesting to have Lord Rosebery's 
 version of Pericles' speech, or even Mr. 
 Asquith's. Both, it is probable, would be 
 nearer the original than Jowett's, though still 
 some distance off perfection. In another fifty 
 years perfection will be reached. 
 
 NATURE IN MIND. The 'Quest contains an 
 article by Mr. G. R. S. Mead, in which he 
 suggests and, perhaps, rather more than sug- 
 gests an affinity, if not an identity, between
 
 NATURE IN MIND 69 
 
 the " laws " of nature and the " laws " of 
 mind. Ever since I read the following sentence 
 in Coleridge's Biographia Liter aria : " The 
 highest perfection of natural philosophy would 
 consist in the perfect spiritualisation of all the 
 laws of nature into laws of intuition and 
 intellect," it has been at the back of my mind 
 as an aim to keep before philosophy. Whether 
 or not there is a drummer in every age with 
 whom the active thinkers keep in step, even 
 without being aware of the fact, I can only, 
 say that more and more evidence of this 
 tendency of thought is coming to light. 
 Boutroux's Contingency of the Laws of Nature 
 may be said to have most explicitly attempted 
 the sublimation or, dare we say, the humani- 
 sation ? of the natural laws ; but Boutroux is 
 only one of many philosophers working in the 
 same direction. Other areas of study than 
 that of " pure " philosophy seem to have 
 yielded, or to be yielding, the same result. 
 Mr. Mead quotes, for instance, some recent 
 studies of Animism to show that Animism, 
 which, together with Anthropomorphism, we 
 used to dismiss as merely a primitive 
 mode of thought, may, after all, prove 
 to contain a truth, the truth, namely, that 
 Nature is living and intelligent, and, on that 
 account, not so far from human nature as we 
 had come to imagine. " The more, we 
 penetrate Matter," says Mr. Mead, " the more
 
 70 NATURE IN MIND 
 
 akin to Mind we find it to be." The world is a 
 creation of mind ; and the more either of the 
 world or of mind we understand the more we 
 understand of both. It is a thrilling idea, the 
 conception of the world of nature as being the 
 externalisation of an intelligence akin to our 
 own. At the same time, it is, like all thrilling 
 ideas, associated with considerable danger. 
 The " superstitions " connected with it are 
 perhaps best left under the shadow that has 
 been cast upon them. 
 
 MR. CLIVE BELL'S POT. Mr. Clive Bell 
 cannot escape the charge of literary insolence 
 by giving to his collection of essays the depre- 
 catory 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 
 AthencBum, in which most of them appeared, 
 was an eclectic journal with a surprising taste 
 for the bad as well as for the good. Mr. 
 Clive Bell's modesty, however, is titular only, 
 for not merely has he republished these ashes 
 of his yesterday's fire, but he imagines them 
 to be still ablaze. " It charms me," he says, 
 " to notice as I read these essays, with what 
 care and conscience they are done. ... I
 
 MR. CLIVE BELL'S POT 71 
 
 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 con- 
 cluding essays of the book are to be found 
 most clearly Mr. Clive Bell's conception of 
 Art. It is indistinguishable from what may, 
 be called the Bohemian conception. Art is 
 not moral, art is not useful, art is not a relative 
 fact ; it is an absolute to which all these other 
 things are relative. The artist, again, is not 
 a " practical " person, and it is no use expect- 
 ing of him an interest in the non -artistic affairs 
 of the world. The war, for instance ? It is 
 only a means to art, and what should be said 
 of artists who abandon the end to occupy 
 themselves with the means ? 
 
 But this Bohemian and superior attitude is 
 consistent apparently with some very mundane 
 bitterness. Mr. Clive Bell does not appreciate 
 the war, which appears to have put him con- 
 siderably out, in spite of his Kensington 
 Plympianism. He is shocked at hearing that
 
 72 MR. CLIVE BELL'S POT 
 
 "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 re- 
 naissance. " Our governing classes," he says, 
 " were drifting out of barbarism. . . . 
 ' Society ' was becoming open-minded, tired of 
 being merely decent, and was beginning to 
 prefer the ' clever ' to the ' good.' " But with 
 the war all this was interrupted probably never 
 to be resumed ; for what is the use of attempt- 
 ing to establish 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 Sardanapalian view 
 of culture in general ; it presupposes great 
 wealth, while denying that art is a luxury. 
 Art is not a luxury or an elegant amenity 
 added to life, says Mr. Clive Bell. At the 
 same time, it is only when Society is wealthy 
 that art can flourish. The contradiction is
 
 MR. CLIVE BELL'S POT 73 
 
 obvious, and it pervades Mr. Clive Bell's work. 
 It is not worth dwelling on a moment. 
 
 THE CRITICISM OF POETS. Professor Rud- 
 mose-Brown, the author of French Literary 
 Studies, is under the fatal illusion that it is 
 necessary (or, at any rate, proper), to write 
 about poetry poetically ; and his comments are 
 too often in this style : " The illimitable night 
 of his obscurity is strewn with innumerable 
 stars." But it is a style which is not only, 
 repellent in itself, but doubly repellent from its 
 association with an exposition of poetry. Dr. 
 Johnson has written about poetry in the proper 
 style. He was respectful in the very distance 
 his prose kept from poetic imagery. Cold and 
 detached he may have seemed to be, but all 
 good criticism, comment, and even appreciation 
 labour of necessity under this charge. What 
 would be said of a judge who demonstrated the 
 emotions of the persons before him ; or, 
 equally, of a judge who did not feel them ? To 
 be a critic or judge of poetry, or of any art, 
 requires, in the first instance, an intense sym- 
 pathetic power ; but, in the second instance, 
 a powerful self-restraint in expression, mani- 
 fested in poetical criticism, I should say, by 
 a prose style free from the smallest suggestion 
 of poetry.
 
 74 "JOHN EGLINTON" 
 
 " JOHN EGLINTON." Mr. " John Eglin- 
 ton " has been called " the Irish Emerson "i; 
 but the description of the " Irish Thoreau " 
 would fit him much better. He is transcen- 
 dental, like Emerson, but after a different, and 
 a less high-falutin' manner the manner of 
 transcendental common sense. On the other 
 hand, he shares with Thoreau the quality of 
 passionate independence, and what may be 
 called adventurous solitude. '-John Eglinton " 
 names his essays Anglo-Irish, and they answer 
 even more accurately to the description than 
 the compound implies ; for they are essays 
 upon the hyphen that joins them. Exactly 
 as Thoreau was most completely at home in 
 no other man's land between the world and 
 the wood, " John Eglinton " is at his easiest 
 somewhere between England and Ireland. He 
 is not Irish, nor is he English. He is not 
 Anglo-Irish either ; but, once more, the hyphen 
 between them. It is this sense of difference 
 from both elements that makes of " John 
 Eglinton " at once so attractive, so significant, 
 and so illuminating a writer and thinker. Being 
 between two worlds, and with a foot in each, 
 he understands each world in a double sense, 
 from within and from without. To each in 
 turn he can be both interpreter and critic ; 
 and in these delightful essays he is to be found 
 alternately defending arid attacking each of the 
 national elements between which his perch is
 
 "JOHN EGLINTON" 75 
 
 placed. " Candid friend " would, perhaps, be 
 a fair description of his attitude towards both 
 nations, if the phrase were not associated with 
 the disagreeable. But since " John Eglinton " 
 is anything but acid in his comments, and 
 writes of both nations in a spirit of mingled 
 admiration and judgment, I can think of nothing 
 better at the moment than my image of the 
 hyphen. He is alone between two worlds, 
 friendly but critical equally of both. 
 
 IRISH HUMOUR. Mr. Stephen Gwynn's 
 Irish Books and Irish People contains an essay 
 on " Irish Humour." Mr. Gwynn is severe 
 but just. He refers to the " damning effects " 
 of the " easy fluency of wit " and the " careless 
 spontaneity of laughter " which characterise 
 Irish humour. It would be terrible, however, 
 to have to admit that these divine qualities are 
 " defects " in the accepted sense of qualities 
 majiqu.es ; and the "defect" arises, I think, 
 not from the presence of these qualities in the 
 Irish genius, but from the absence of the 
 counterbalancing qualities of weight, high 
 seriousness, and good judgment. It would 
 almost seem that the " elder gods " departed 
 from Ireland centuries ago, leaving in sole 
 possession the " younger gods " of irresponsible
 
 76 IRISH HUMOUR 
 
 and incontinent laughter. As Mr. Gvvynn says, 
 " Irish humour makes you laugh " f ; it always 
 takes one by surprise. But the laughter has 
 no echoes in the deeper levels of consciousness ; 
 it rings true but shallow. Dogmatism on racial 
 psychology is dangerous, and I have no wish 
 to exacerbate feelings already too sore ; but, 
 as a literary critic, I venture my judgment that 
 the Irish genius, as manifested in literature 
 during the last century, is wanting in the 
 solidity that comes only from hard work. Every 
 Irishman, speaking roughly, is a born genius ; 
 but few Irishmen complete their birth by 
 " making " themselves. Wit comes to them 
 too easily to be anything but a tempting line 
 of least resistance. 
 
 THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND. -While 
 exceedingly painstaking, thorough, and well- 
 documented, Mr. Boyd's essay on The Con- 
 temporary 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
 
 THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND 77 
 
 to be rather an apprehension of what he 
 might discover were his real conclusions 
 than any inability to arrive at them ; for 
 I cannot think that upon any other ground so 
 usually decisive a mind would have been con- 
 tent to leave his readers in the dark. But what 
 then is it that Mr. Boyd may conceivably have 
 feared to discover? It is obvious enough, I 
 think, to an outsider to one, I mean, who 
 does not belong to the coterie that calls itself 
 the Irish literary movement ; it is that the 
 contemporary drama of Ireland is the history of 
 a rapid decline. 
 
 Mr. Boyd is, of course, honest with his facts, 
 and the material is thus before us for a judg- 
 ment. He does not conceal from us, for 
 instance, the illuminating circumstances that the 
 Irish dramatic movement actually began under 
 the impulse of the Continental movement, and 
 that its earliest authors were desirous, not so 
 much of creating an Irish drama, as of creating 
 a drama for Ireland. Mr. Edward Martyn, 
 who was undoubtedly the chief pioneer, was 
 himself a follower of Ibsen and aimed at writing 
 and producing what may be called Ibsen plays. 
 But this praiseworthy attempt to reintroduce the 
 world into Ireland was defeated by the 
 apparently incorrigible tendency of the native 
 Irish mind to reduce the world to the size of 
 Dublin. In rather less than two years, during 
 which time some six or seven plays were pro-
 
 78 THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND 
 
 duced, the Irish Literary Theatre, founded by 
 Martyn and Yeats, came to an end, to have its 
 place taken almost immediately by the Irish 
 National Theatre, which was formed about the 
 group of Irish players calling themselves the 
 Irish National Drama Society. But what has 
 been the consequence of this contraction of aim 
 and of interest ? That plays of some value as 
 folk-drama have resulted from it nobody would 
 deny ; but equally nobody would maintain that 
 the world has been enriched by it in its 
 dramatic literature. Ireland, in other words, 
 has accepted a gift from the world without 
 returning it ; her literary coterie has taken the 
 inspiration of the Continent and converted it 
 to a purely nationalist use. 
 
 Even against this there would be nothing 
 to be said if it succeeded ; but fortunately for 
 the world-principle it can be shown that such 
 a procedure ends in sterility. As the reader 
 turns over the pages of Mr. Boyd's faithful 
 record of the course of the drama in Ireland, 
 he cannot but be aware of a gradual obscura- 
 tion. 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 contro- 
 versies acid with personality, and through an 
 interminable undergrowth of sickly and stunted 
 productions about which even Mr. Boyd grows 
 impatient. The vision splendid with which the
 
 THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND 79 
 
 record begins dies down to a twilight, to a; 
 darkness, and finally to black night. The 
 world has once more been shut out. 
 
 MR. STANDISH O'GRADY. Mr. Standish 
 O'Grady's The Flight of the Eagle is not a 
 romance in the ordinary sense ; it is not an 
 invented story, but an actual historical episode 
 treated romantically. The period is Eliza- 
 bethan, and the story turns mainly on the 
 careers of Sir William Parrett, an English 
 " Lord-Lieutenant " of Ireland, who appears to 
 have suffered the usual fate of a popular 
 English Governor, and Red Hugh O'Donnell 
 or Hue Roe of Tir-Connall, which is now 
 Donegal. If acquaintance with Irish history 
 is ever to be made by English readers, the 
 means must be romances of this kind. History 
 proper is, as a rule, carefully ignored by the 
 average reader, who must therefore have facts, 
 if he is ever to have them, presented in the 
 form of a story. It is only by this means, and 
 thanks to Scott in the first instance, that the 
 history of Scotland has penetrated in any degree 
 beyond the border. Only by this means, again, 
 have various countries and nations been brought 
 home to the intellectually idle English reader 
 by writers like Kipling. Both as a story- writer
 
 8o MR. STANDISH O'GRADY 
 
 and as the first and greatest of the Irish his- 
 torians of Ireland, Mr. Standish O'Grady is 
 qualified to do for Ireland what Scott after his 
 own fashion has done for Scotland, namely, 
 bring his country into the historic consciousness 
 of the world. 
 
 MR. STANDISH O'GRADY, ENCHANTER. 
 The Selected Essays and Passages from Standisli 
 O'Grady is a priceless anthology of this 
 neglected author. Very few people in England 
 realise that Mr. Standish O'Grady is more than 
 any other Irishman the rediscoverer of ancient 
 and, in consequence, the creator of modern 
 Ireland. His very first work on the Heroic 
 Period of Irish history appeared in 1878 ; it 
 was published at his own expense, and had 
 a small and a slow sale ; but to-day it is the 
 inspiration of the Celtic revival. "- Legends," 
 says Mr. O'Grady, " are the kind of history 
 which a nation desires to possess." For the 
 same reason, legends are the kind of history 
 which a nation tends to produce. I am not 
 certain that it would not have been well to leave 
 the legends of ancient Ireland in their dust and 
 oblivion. They go back to remote periods in 
 time, and seem, even then, to echo still earlier 
 ages. It is possible, for instance, that Ireland 
 was a nation over four thousand years ago.
 
 MR. STANDISH O'GRADY, ENCHANTER 81 
 
 Some contend that a Buddhist civilisation 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 realised to-day, and to dwell upon 
 them is to run the risk of a psychic regression 
 from waking to dreaming. " Enchantment," 
 Mr. O'Grady tells us, " is a fact in nature." 
 So potent a charm as himself has created may; 
 have been responsible who dare say ? for the 
 recall to present-day Irish consciousness of 
 early historic experience that were best for- 
 gotten. Is it not a fact that the mood of 
 Ireland to-day is between the legendary and the 
 dreaming? Is not the "ideal" Irishman to- 
 day Cuculain of Dundalk talking and acting 
 in his sleep ? It is a question for psycho- 
 analysis. 
 
 LES SENTIMENTS DE JULIEN BENDA. 
 I thought for some time of translating Les 
 Sentiments de Critias, recently published in 
 Paris by M. Julien Benda. The style is excel- 
 lent, and M. Benda has the gifts of epigram 
 and irony ; but, upon second thoughts, the 
 inappositeness of such a style to the situation 
 in which we find ourselves forbade me. As 
 M. Benda himself says, " there is no elegance 
 
 6
 
 82 LES SENTIMENTS DE JULIEN BENDA 
 
 about the war." And success in writing about 
 it elegantly must needs, therefore, be a literary 
 failure. Critias's " sentiments," moreover, ap- 
 pear, when compared with the real senti- 
 ments evoked by the contemplation of the war, 
 a little literary. He is like a sadder and a 
 wiser Mr. Bernard Shaw flickering epigram- 
 matically over the carnage. Impeccable as his 
 opinions usually are, they are expressed too 
 lightly to be impressive, and too carefully to 
 he regarded as wholly natural. And that M. 
 Benda can do no other is evident in his Open, 
 Letter to M. Rotnain Rolland, whom he con-' 
 siders 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 indict- 
 ment is ample. But the most striking sentence 
 he achieves is that " We asked for judgment 
 and you gave us a sermon." It is pretty, but 
 it is '-art." 
 
 CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER". 
 Matthew Arnold used to say that to get his 
 feet wet spoiled his style for days. But there 
 is a far worse enemy of style than natural 
 damp ; it is too much newspaper-reading. Too 
 much newspaper not only spoils one's style, it
 
 CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 83 
 
 takes off the edge of one's taste, so that I 
 know not what grindstones are necessary to put 
 it on again. Indulgent readers, I have been 
 compelled for some weeks to read too much 
 newspaper, with the consequence that at the end 
 of my task I was not only certain that my little 
 of style was gone, but I was indifferent in my 
 taste. The explanation of the reductio ad 
 absurdutn 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 indi- 
 vidual nor does it aim at individuality. If a 
 citizen's meeting, a jury, or the House of 
 Commons were to perform the feat of making 
 its voice heard, the style of their oracles would 
 be perfect newspaper. But literature, I need 
 not say, is not made after this fashion ; nor 
 is it inspired by such performances. Litera- 
 ture, like all art, is above everything, individual: 
 expression. Gardez- vous ! I do not mean that 
 literature is a personal expression of the per- 
 sonal opinion of the writer. Oh 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 expres- 
 sion to common opinions. And since it is 
 only personal expression that provokes and 
 inspires personal expression, from newspapers 
 one can derive no stimulus to literature, but 
 only the opposite, a disrelish and a distaste.
 
 84 CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 
 
 How to recover one's health after newspaper 
 poisoning is a problem. To plunge back forth- 
 with 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 a,way the certainly-done 
 with wa3, I found, as useful a preliminary tonic 
 as any othejr 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 r ; 
 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 inde- 
 liberate way, the invalid appetite is half coaxed 
 to sit up and take proper nourishment. This 
 destruction and reconstruction I certainly found 
 recovering, and I can, therefore, commend them 
 to be included in the pharmacopoeias. 
 
 Another nourishing exercise when you are 
 in this state is the overhauling of your accumu- 
 lations of memoranda, cuttings and note-books. 
 I have sat for hours during the last few days, 
 like a beaver unbuilding its dam, turning out 
 with a view to destroying their contents, drawer 
 after drawer and shelf upon shelf. It is fatal 
 to set about the operation with any tenderness. 
 Your aim must be to destroy everything which
 
 CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 85 
 
 does not command you to spare it. The tragic 
 recklessness of the procedure is the virtue of 
 the medicine. As a matter of fact there is 
 little or nothing now left in my drawers for 
 future use. Nearly all my paper-boats have 
 been burned, including some three-decked 
 galleons which were originally designed to 
 bring me fame. No matter ; the Rubicon is 
 crossed, and to be on the other side of news- 
 paper with no more than a thin portfolio of 
 notes is to have escaped cheaply. 
 
 For the humour of it, however, I will record 
 a careful exception. It appears, after all, that 
 I was not so mad as I seemed. Perchance 
 newspaper, being only a feigned literature, 
 induces only a feigned madness. Be it as it 
 may. I 'find that my current note-book, though 
 as handy and tempting to be destroyed as any 
 other, was nevertheless destroyed only after 
 the cream of it had been whipped into the per- 
 manent book which I have kept through many, 
 rages for a good many years. The extracts 
 are here before me as I write in convalescence. 
 It is amusing to me to observe, moreover, that 
 their cream is not very rich. Much better 
 has gone into the bonfire. Why, then, did I 
 save these and sacrifice those? Look at a 
 few of them. " Nobody's anything always " is 
 there aught irrecoverable in that to have com- 
 pelled me to spare it ? '- Lots of window, but no 
 warehouse " a remark, I fancy, intended to hit
 
 86 CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 
 
 somebody or other very hard indeed but does 
 it ? Is any of the present company fitted with 
 a cap? " The judgment of the world is good, 
 but few can put it into words." That is a 
 premonitory symptom, you will observe, of a 
 remark made a few lines above to the effect 
 that literature is a personal expression of a 
 common opinion or judgment. I have plainly 
 remembered it. Apropos of the New Age, 
 I must have told somebody, and stolen home to 
 write it down, that its career is that of a 
 rocking-horse, all ups and downs but never any 
 getting forward. It is too true to be wholly 
 amusing ; let me horse-laugh at it and pass it 
 on. " A simple style is like sleep, it will not 
 come by effort." Not altogether true, but true 
 enough. The rest are not much worse or 
 better, and the puzzle is to explain why those 
 should be taken and these left. 
 
 Again apropos, may a physician who has 
 healed himself offer this piece of advice ? Read 
 your own note-books often. I have known 
 some people who ha;ve a library of note-books 
 worth a dukedom, who never once looked into 
 them after having filled them. That is collect- 
 ing 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 con- 
 versation is to be personal at all ; for in all
 
 CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 87 
 
 probability the references and quotations you 
 make without the authority of your own collec- 
 tion are hackneyed. They are the reach-me- 
 downs of every encyclopaedia. Is this the 
 reason that the vast majority of current quota- 
 tions are as worn as they are ; that a constant 
 reader, forewarned of the subject about to be 
 dealt with, is usually forearmed against the 
 tags he will find employed in it ? In any case, 
 the advice I have just given is the corrective 
 of this depressing phenomenon of modern 
 writing. You have only to trade in your own 
 note-books to be, and to give the air of being, 
 truly original. 
 
 Browsing is a rather more advanced regimen 
 for convalescence than the re-arrangement of 
 books. The latter can be performed without 
 the smallest taste for reading. It is a matter 
 of sizing them up, and any bookseller's appren- 
 tice can do it. But browsing means dipping 
 into the contents here and there ; it is both 31 
 symptom of returning health and a means to. 
 it. In the last few days I must have nibbled 
 in a hundred different pastures, chiefly, I think, 
 in the pastures of books about books. De 
 Quincey, Matthew Arnold, Bagehot, Macaulay, 
 Johnson, etc. what meadows, what lush grass, 
 what feed ! After all, one begins to say, litera- 
 ture cannot be unsatisfying that fed such bulls 
 and that so plumped their minds. It cannot 
 be only a variety of newspaper. Thus a new
 
 88 CONVALESCENCE AFTER NEWSPAPER 
 
 link with health is established, and one becomes 
 able to take one's books again. Here I should 
 end, but that a last observation in the form of 
 a question occurs to me. Is not or can not 
 a taste for literature be acquired by the same 
 means by which it can be re-acquired? Are 
 not the child and the invalid similar? In that 
 case the foregoing directions may be not 
 altogether useless. 
 
 NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. In ob- 
 servation of Nature English literature excels 
 all others. But that is by no means to say 
 that every English writer upon Nature is good. 
 The astonishing thing is that contemporary with! 
 such masters of both Nature-observation and 
 literary expression as to name but two Mr. 
 W. H. Hudson and Mr. Warde Fowler (and 
 half a dozen others could be named in the 
 same street) there should still be so many 
 writers insensible enough to perfection to write 
 about Nature when they have little to say and 
 few gifts of expression. You would think that 
 having seen the sun they would not light a 
 candle, or that if they did, nobody would look 
 at it. But the truth is that not only are many 
 candles lit, but they are all much admired 
 much more, indeed, than the suns themselves. 
 There may be a good reason for it, "namely, that
 
 NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 89 
 
 the reading public is so much in love with 
 Nature-writing that the best is not good enough 
 for us. Or, again, everybody living in the 
 country and having a pen at all, wishes to 
 write his own Nature-observations as everybody 
 wishes to write his own love -lyrics, regardless 
 of the fact that the best love -lyrics have already 
 been written. It may be so ; but the admission 
 appears to me to be over-generous. 
 
 Mr. Percy W. D. Izzard has published in 
 book form his " Year of Country Days " under 
 the general title of Homeland. The series has 
 appeared in the Daily Mail, where it appears 
 to have given pleasure to a considerable number 
 of readers. I do not doubt the fact. Even 
 the least suggestion of Nature would be a 
 relief in the stuffy and bawling atmosphere 
 of the Daily Mail. But in the form of a 
 book, in which three hundred and sixty-five of 
 them appear, they are almost intolerable. Their 
 value lay in their contrast to the surrounding 
 columns of the journal in which they were pub- 
 lished. 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 commonplace observations. 
 Nothing really exciting appears to have hap- 
 pened in the country under Mr. Izzard's ob- 
 servation. When reading Jefferies or Hudson 
 or Ward Fowler or Selous, you are made to 
 feel, in a simple walk along a hedgerow, that
 
 90 NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 something dramatic is afoot. Discovery is in 
 the air. But Mr. Izzard is never fortunate, 
 and all he has to record are the commonplaces 
 of the country-side, which I could as easily 
 reconstruct from a calendar as< gather from his 
 text. " The silver clouds are heaped together 
 in billowy masses that sail with deeps of Italian 
 blue between." How pretty 1 But the delight 
 is wanting. 
 
 S.S.S. The Simplified Spelling Society has 
 broken loose from obscurity again in the issue 
 of a Jnew pamphlet, called Breaking the Spell; 
 an Appeal to Common Sense. A preface con- 
 tributed 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. iWhy not, 
 therefore, in English ? The reasoning, how- 
 ever, is ridiculous, for it assumes that it was 
 by some deliberate and self-conscious design 
 that these languages came to :be spelled 
 phonetically, and hence that we have only to 
 follow them faithfully (and the advice of the 
 S.S.S.) in order to place our language in a 
 similar state. Language, however, is not a
 
 S.S.S. 91 
 
 product of logic and science, but of art and 
 taste. It is determined not by reason alone, 
 but by the totality of our judgment, in which 
 many other factors than reason are included. 
 To ask us to " reform " our spelling in order 
 to make it " reasonable " is to ask us to forgo 
 the satisfaction of every intellectual taste save 
 that of logic ; a procedure that would not only 
 " reform " our spelling, but all literature into 
 the bargain. It is pretended that the adoption 
 of simplified spelling would have, at worst, 
 only a passing effect upon the well-being of 
 literature. If, for example, all the English 
 classics were re -spelled in conformity with 
 phonetic rules, and their use made general, 
 very soon, we are told, we should forget their 
 original idiosyncrasies, and love them in their 
 new spelling as much as ever. But people 
 who argue in this way must have been blinded 
 in their taste in their pursuit of rationalistic 
 uniformity. Literature employs words not for 
 their rational meaning alone, not even for their 
 sound alone, but for their combined qualities 
 of meaning, sound, sight, association, history, 
 and a score of other attributes. By reducing 
 words to a rational rule of phonetic spelling, 
 more than half of these qualities would be 
 entirely, or almost entirely, eliminated. A re- 
 spelled Shakespeare, for instance, if it should 
 ever take the place of the present edition, would 
 be a new Shakespeare a Shakespeare trans-
 
 92 S.S.S. 
 
 lated from the coloured language in which he 
 thought and wrote into a language of logical 
 symbols. An exact analogy as far as any, 
 analogy can be exact for the proposal of the 
 S.S.S. would be to propose to abolish the use 
 of colour in pictorial art, and to produce every- 
 thing 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 sud- 
 denly 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 pr communicated to him by Sterne 
 himself, and he is so frank as to say that he 
 has striven to complete the work in the style 
 and manner of his late friend.- Having a 
 particular admiration for the style of Sterne, 
 which, to my mind, is the easiest ever achieved 
 in English, I have now a double resentment 
 against the presumptuous Eugenius. In the
 
 STERNE CRITICISM 93 
 
 first place, I question the man's veracity almost 
 as much as the veracity of Sterne himself is 
 to be questioned in the matter of Sterne's inten- 
 tion of completing his journey. The Journey 
 was a tour de force ; it was the result, as it 
 were, of a challenge. Sterne had made a bet 
 that he would maintain the reader's interest 
 in a series of the most trivial incidents by his 
 mere manner of writing about them. That he 
 had any other intention than that of showing 
 his power I do not for a moment believe ; 
 least of all the suggestion that he had a plan 
 of writing in his mind which required the book 
 to be finished in four sections, four and just 
 four. Eugenius's excuses that he had often 
 discussed the completion of the Journey 
 with Sterne, and had heard from him the 
 " facts, events, and observations," intended to 
 be introduced into the unwritten book, are thus 
 a mere literary device for getting his own 
 work tied to Sterne's kite. Even if Sterne 
 gave him authority for it, I should refuse to 
 believe it, since Sterne may easily have been 
 badgered into consenting ; and, in any case, 
 is not necessarily to be believed upon a matter 
 of fact. One's resentment is embittered by the 
 manner in which Eugenius makes the continua- 
 tion. It is notorious that Sterne never made 
 a statement that could definitely incriminate 
 himself. It was his whole art to leave every- 
 thing to his readers' imagination, and to put
 
 94 STERNE CRITICISM 
 
 upon them the odium of the obvious interpre- 
 tation. An admission on his part would have 
 been fatal not only to himself, but to the style 
 and intention of his work, which may, be 
 described as skating upon thin ice. Eugenius, 
 however, in spite of all the intimacy which he 
 says subsisted between himself and Mr. Sterne, 
 was so far from having appreciated the 
 elementary quality of the Journey that in 
 completing the very incident on which Book 
 Two breaks off, he falls into the blunder of 
 committing Sterne to a " criminal " confession. 
 I need not say what the confession is ; it 
 is the obvious deduction; to be drawn from 
 the description provided by Sterne himself. 
 And it is precisely on this account that I am 
 certain Sterne would never have made it. 
 
 STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE. One of my 
 correspondents must have been reading Sterne 
 at the same time that I was being annoyed 
 by Eugenius, for he has written to remind 
 me of Sterne's opinion of Love as it is under- 
 stood in France. "The French," wrote Sterne, 
 " have certainly got the credit of understanding 
 more of Love, and making it better than any 
 other nation upon earth ; but for my own part 
 I think them arrant bunglers, and in truth, 
 the worst set of marksmen that ever tried
 
 STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE 95 
 
 Cupid's patience." My correspondent recalls 
 the fact from the dark backward and abysm 
 of time that, in a discussion of Stendhal, I 
 expressed the same opinion ; and he has, no 
 doubt, supplied the parallel in order to gratify 
 me. Gratifying it is, in one sense, to find 
 oneself confirmed in a somewhat novel opinion 
 which, moreover, was thought to be original 
 as well by an observer of the penetration of 
 Sterne. But it is less gratifying when one 
 reflects that Sterne was the last person in the 
 world to have the right to talk about Love 
 at all. What should a genuine as well as a 
 professed sentimentalist have to say of Love 
 more than that in its practice the French were 
 not sentimental enough for him? But it is 
 not the defect of sentimentality that stamps 
 Love as understood in France with the mark of 
 inferiority, but the presence of too much 
 egoism a fault Sterne would never have 
 observed. 
 
 ENGLISH STYLE. The same correspondent 
 copies out for me Quincey's " fine analysis 
 of Swift's style," as follows : 
 
 The main qualification for such a style was plain good 
 sense, natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly 
 practice in the putting together of sentences so as to avoid
 
 g6 ENGLISH STYLE 
 
 mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all, 
 the advantage of a subject such in its nature as instinctively 
 to reject ornament lest it should draw attention from itself. 
 Such subjects are common ; but grand impassioned subjects 
 insist upon a different treatment ; and there it is that the 
 true difficulties of style commence, and there it is that your 
 worshipful Master Jonathan would have broken down 
 irrecoverably. 
 
 This " fine analysis " of Swift's style does 
 not appear to me to be anything more than a 
 powerful attack delivered by an apostle of the 
 opposing school. Swift and de Quincey are 
 obviously poles apart in the direction of their 
 style, and I have no doubt that I could find in 
 Swift as severe an analysis of de Quincey as 
 my correspondent has found in de Quincey of 
 Swift. At bottom the controversy carries us 
 back to the very foundations of European 
 culture. On the whole, Swift followed the 
 Greek tradition exemplified by Demosthenes 
 while de Quincey followed the Latin exempli- 
 fied by Cicero. There can be no doubt of 
 the school to which Swift belonged ; his 
 <Drapier*s Letters, for instance, were confessedly 
 modelled on Demosthenes. Likewise there can 
 be no doubt of the school which de Quincey 
 attended ; he learned his style of Cicero. The 
 question, however, is one of taste, by no means 
 a matter of non est disputandum. Which of 
 the two schools of style is capable of the 
 highest absolute development ; and, above all,
 
 ENGLISH STYLE 97 
 
 which is the most suited to the English: 
 language ? My mind is fully made up ; I 
 am for the Greek and Demosthenes against the 
 Latin and Cicero. I am for Swift against de 
 Quincey ; for the simple against the ornate. 
 
 De Quincey appears to me to fall into an 
 almost vulgar error in assuming that the style 
 of plain good sense cultivated by Swift is fit 
 only for commonplace subjects, and that 
 " grand . impassioned subjects " demand an 
 ornate style. The style of Demosthenes was 
 obviously quite as well fitted to the high' 
 subjects of his Discourse on the Crown as 
 to the details for the fitting out of an ex- 
 pedition against Philip. The Apology of Plato 
 is in much the same style, and not even de 
 Quincey would say that the subject was not 
 anything but commonplace. With 'the majority 
 of English critics, I have a horror of fine 
 writing, and especially about fine things. The 
 proper rule is, in fact, the very reverse of 
 that laid down by de Quincey ; it is on no 
 account to write upon " grand impassioned 
 subjects " in a grand impassioned style. After 
 all, as the Greeks understood, there are an 
 infinite number of degrees of simplicity, rang- 
 ing from the simple colloquial to the simple 
 grand. The ornate Latin style, with its 
 degrees of ornateness, is, on the other hand, 
 a bastard style. The conclusion seems to be 
 this : that the simple style is capable of any- 
 
 7
 
 98 ENGLISH STYLE 
 
 thing, even of dealing with " grand im- 
 passioned subjects " ; whereas the ornate style 
 is only barely tolerable in the most exceptional 
 circumstances. I would sooner trust Swift 'than 
 de Quincey not to embarrass a reader on a 
 difficult occasion, as, for the same reason, I 
 prefer Shakespeare the Greek to Ben Jonson 
 the Latinist. 
 
 LITERARY CULS -DE-SAC. A cul-de-sac oc- 
 curs in literary history when a direction is 
 taken away from the main highway of the 
 national language and literature ; when the 
 stream it represents is not part of the main 
 stream of the traditional language, but a 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. 
 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 im- 
 portance. Interest t (to turn the cat in the
 
 DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE 99 
 
 pan) is the growing end of the mind, and its 
 direction and strength are marked by a motive- 
 less 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 curiosity ; 
 utility is remote from its mind. This is what 
 I have called disinterested interest, and it is 
 this free intelligence of which it appears to 
 me that there is a diminishing amount in our 
 day. Were it not the case, the fortunes of 
 the really free Press would be much brighter 
 than they are. An organ of free opinion 
 would not need to discover a utilitarian attrac- 
 tion 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 without pro- 
 viding its readers with any commercial or 
 specialist bribe in the way of exclusive utili-
 
 ioo DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE 
 
 tarian information ; it can live, that is to say, 
 by the sale of its free intelligence. Happy 
 countries in one sense of the word ; happy 
 if also tragical ; for their existence is not 
 always, at any rate, a paradise for the rich, 
 a hell for the poor, and a purgatory for the 
 able ! 
 
 To what is due this decline amongst us of 
 free intelligence ? There are several explana- 
 tions possible, though none is wholly satisfy- 
 ing. It can be attributed to the industriali- 
 sation of our own country, a metamorphosis 
 of occupation which has been longer in being 
 in England than anywhere else. The economic 
 balance between primary and secondary pro- 
 duction has been for a longer period lost in 
 this country than elsewhere, with the conse- 
 quence that we have been the first to exhibit 
 the effects of over-industrialisation in the loss 
 of the free intelligence associated with primary 
 production. The other nations may be ex- 
 pected to follow suit as the same metamor- 
 phosis overtakes them. Another explanation 
 is the reaction against the intellectualism of 
 the nineteenth century. It is a familiar topic, 
 but it is obvious that if faith in the ultimate 
 use of intelligence is lost, men become cynical 
 in regard to the passion itself. Let us suppose 
 that every love affair always and invariably 
 ended in disappointment or disaster. Let us 
 suppose that it became the accepted belief that
 
 DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE 101 
 
 such would always be the case. Would it not 
 soon become fashionable to nip the first 
 stirrings of love in the bud, and to salt its path 
 whenever its shoots began to appear? The 
 nineteenth century reached its climax in a 
 vast disappointment with science, with the in- 
 tellect, 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 im- 
 pulse 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 ex- 
 tinguished from the planet ; the world, 
 somehow or other, must be made safe for 
 intelligence as well as for democracy. 
 
 My last guess at the origin of the phe- 
 nomenon 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
 
 102 DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE 
 
 includes, as a matter of course, the employment 
 and development of intelligence as one of the 
 most powerful aids to perfection. Fools, the 
 Indian Scriptures inform us, can enter heaven, 
 but only wise men know how to stay there. 
 And if the perfection we seek is to be last- 
 ing 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 perfectibility of the human spirit, in 
 the religious duty of perfection, might easily 
 account for the diminution of our regard for 
 one of the chief instruments of perfection, 
 namely, intelligence. Why should we strive 
 to set the crooked straight, since it is not 
 only impossible, but is no duty of ours ? And 
 why labour with the instrumental means when 
 the end is of no value ? None of these 
 explanations, however, really satisfies me. 
 
 The free Press is more severely criticised by 
 its readers than the " kept " Press by its 
 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-contradiction, in lies, in 
 chicanery of all kinds, in every form of in- 
 tellectual and other dishonesty it continues to 
 be read and " followed " as if the oracle were
 
 DECLINE OF FREE INTELLIGENCE 103 
 
 infallible. No newspaper in this country has 
 ever died of exposure ; many live by being 
 found out. The free Press, on the other hand, 
 has often for its readers not only the most 
 exigent of critics, but the most contradictory. 
 They are not only hard to please (which is a 
 merit), but their reasons for being pleased, 
 or the reverse, are bewilderingly various. 
 And, moreover, when they are pleased they 
 are usually 'silent, and when 'they are. displeased 
 they cease to buy the journal. 
 
 LITERARY .COPYRIGHT: IK AMERICA. 
 Horace Walpole used to say that the Ameri- 
 cans were the only people by whom he would 
 wish to be admired. Let me put the compli- 
 ment a little differently and say that the 
 Americans are the people among all others 
 whom we would most wish to admire most. 
 Having done so much to command our admira- 
 tion already, we are not only willing, we are 
 desirous and anxious, that they should leave 
 no amendable fault unamended in themselves. 
 Our command to them is that they should 
 become perfect. 
 
 This must be my excuse for joining in the 
 discussion concerning the law of literary copy- 
 right in America, and the effect it has on the
 
 104 LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 
 
 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 copy- 
 right laws of America, unlike those of any 
 other civilised country, with the exception of 
 ex-Tsarist Russia, require as a condition of 
 extending the protection of its copyright to 
 any work of foreign publication, that the latter 
 shall be set up, printed, and published in 
 America within a period of thirty to sixty days 
 after its publication in the country of its origin. 
 Failing such practically simultaneous publica- 
 tion in America, not only is an American 
 publisher thereafter entitled to proceed imme- 
 diately to publish the work in question without 
 the permission of the author, but the author 
 and his national publisher are not entitled to 
 demand any royalties or fees on the sale of 
 the same. In other words, as far as the 
 original author and publisher are concerned, 
 they are non-existent in America unless they 
 have made arrangements for the publication of 
 their work in America within one, or, at most, 
 two months of its original publication in their 
 own country. 
 
 Not to exaggerate in describing such a pro- 
 cedure it can be exactly characterised by no
 
 LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 105 
 
 other phrase than looting under the form of 
 law. Every author and publisher in this 
 country knows how difficult it is to arrange 
 for the simultaneous publication of works at 
 home and in America. The time-conditions 
 of publication are seldom the same in both' 
 countries. A book that is timely in this 
 country may not be simultaneously timely in 
 America, and it would be very odd if it always 
 were. 
 
 Again, a couple of months is a small period 
 of time in which to arrange to have an English 1 
 work dispatched, accepted, set up, printed, and 
 published in America. Commercial difficulties 
 of all kinds arise in the course of the trans- 
 action, and every delay brings the day of the 
 accursed shears of the American Copyright Act 
 nearer. Is an English publisher to bargain 
 with the advantage of time always on the side 
 of America, with the certain knowledge that, 
 unless he comes to terms at once, he will lose 
 everything both for himself and his author? 
 But either that or indefinitely delaying publi- 
 cation in this country is his only possible 
 course. The American Copyright Law is thus 
 seen to be a modern example of Morton's fork. 
 By requiring that the foreign author shall pub- 
 lish 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
 
 io6 LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 
 
 America, and delaying, at his own cost, the 
 publication of his book in his own country. 
 Upon either prong he is impaled. If he elects 
 for American publication he must forgo the 
 chance of the immediate market at home, and 
 if he elects for immediate publication at home 
 he must forgo the protection of American 
 copyright. 
 
 Such an ingenious device for Dick-Turpining 
 European authors cannot have been invented 
 and enforced without some presumed moral 
 justification. America cannot be conceived as 
 a willing party to the legislation of literary 
 piracy, and it was and is, no doubt, under some 
 cover of justification that the law was enacted 
 and now runs. The defence for it, I should 
 suppose, is the presumed necessity for protect- 
 ing the industry of book-making in America 
 on behalf of American authors, printers, and 
 publishers alike. Its defence, in short, is the 
 same defence that is set up for protection in 
 commercial matters in this country, namely, 
 the desirability of excluding foreign competi- 
 tion, and of encouraging home-industry. 
 Against this defence, however, there is a great 
 deal to be said that ought to weigh with the 
 American people, and that ought to weigh in 
 their calculations as well as in their taste and 
 sense of right. For, as to the latter, I take it 
 that no American would undertake to defend 
 his Copyright Law on the principles either
 
 LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 107 
 
 of good taste or common justice. It cannot be 
 in conformity with good taste for the literary 
 artists of America to procure protection for 
 themselves by penalising their European 
 confreres, and it cannot be justice to rob a 
 European author of his copyrights, or to compel 
 him to delay his publication in Europe. These 
 admissions I take for granted, and the only 
 defence left is the calculation that such a 
 Copyright Act is good for the American 
 book-making interests. 
 
 If books were like other commodities, their 
 sale, like the sale of other commodities, would 
 fall under the economic law of diminishing 
 returns. Thereunder, as their supply increased, 
 the demand for books would tend to decrease, 
 as is the case with cotton, say, or wooden 
 spoons. And upon such an assumption there 
 might be some reason for prohibiting the free 
 importation of printed books, since the imported 
 articles would compete in the home market for 
 a relatively inelastic demand. But books, it is 
 obvious, are not a commodity in this sense of 
 the word. They do not satisfy demand, but 
 stimulate it, and their sale, therefore, does not 
 fall under the economic law of diminishing 
 returns, but under the very contrary, that of 
 increasing returns. Books, there is no doubt 
 of it, are the cause of books. New books do 
 not take the place of old books ; nor do books 
 really compete, as a general rule, with each
 
 io8 LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 
 
 other. On the contrary, the more books there 
 are, the more are demanded and the more are 
 produced. The free importation of books is 
 not a means of contracting the home-produc- 
 tion of books ; it is the very opposite, the 
 most effective means of stimulating home-pro- 
 duction to its highest possible degree. If I 
 were an American author, resident in America, 
 and concerned for the prosperity of the Ameri- 
 can 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
 
 LITERARY COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA 109 
 
 its proteges, and I believe, moreover, that if 
 they were to make it, the Law would soon be 
 amended. 
 
 RIGHT CRITICISM. To abandon the aim of 
 " finality " of judgment is to let in the jungle 
 into the cultivated world of art ; it is to invite 
 Tom, Dick, and Harry to offer their opinions 
 as of equal value with the opinions of the 
 cultivated. It is no escape from this conclu- 
 sion to inquire into the " mentality " of the 
 critic and to attach importance to his judg- 
 ment 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 1 " 
 but the critical comment, " How true ! " or 
 " How false 1 " Personal preferences turn the 
 attention in the nature of the case from the 
 object criticised to the critic himself. The 
 method substitutes for the criticism of art the 
 criticism of psychology. In a word, it is not 
 art criticism at all. 
 
 It may be said that if we dismiss personal 
 preference as a criterion of art judgment, there
 
 no RIGHT CRITICISM 
 
 is either nothing left or only some " scien- 
 tific " standard which has no relevance to 
 aesthetics. It is the common plea of the idio- 
 syncrats that, inconclusive as their opinions 
 must be, and anything but universally valid, 
 no other method within the world of art is 
 possible. I dissent. A " final " judgment is 
 as possible of a work of art as of any other 
 manifestation of the spirit of man ; there is 
 nothing in the nature of things to prevent men 
 arriving at a universally valid (that is, univer- 
 sally accepted) judgment of a book, a picture, 
 a sonata, a statue or a building, any more than 
 there is to prevent a legal judge from arriving 
 at a right judgment concerning any other 
 human act ; and, what is more, such judgments 
 of art are not only made daily, but in the end 
 they actually prevail and constitute in their 
 totality the tradition of art. The test is not 
 scientific, but as little is it merely personal. 
 Its essential character is simply that it is right ; 
 right however arrived at, and right whoever 
 arrives at it. That the judge in question may 
 or may not have " studied " the history of the 
 art-work he is judging is a matter of indiffer- 
 ence. 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
 
 RIGHT CRITICISM in 
 
 asked? Who is to confirm a right judgment 
 or to dispute a wrong one ? The answer is 
 contained in the true interpretation of the mis- 
 understood saying, De gustibus non est dis- 
 putandum. The proof of right taste is that 
 there is no real dispute about its judgment ; : 
 its finality is evidenced by the cessation of 
 debate. The truth may be simply stated ; 
 a judge that is to say, a true judge is he with 
 whom everybody is compelled to agree, not 
 because he says it, but because it is so. 
 
 MAN'S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH. 
 What the circulation of the Quest is I have 
 no idea, but it should be ten times greater. 
 Is there, however, a, sufficiently large class of 
 cultured persons in England in the Empire 
 in the world? Assuming that the spread of 
 culture can be reckoned numerically as well as 
 qualitatively, can we pride ourselves on the 
 extension of culture while the number of free 
 intelligences is relatively decreasing ? But how 
 does one know that this class is really on the 
 decrease? Only by the same means that we 
 judge the number of the curious lepidoptera 
 in any area by holding a light up in the dark 
 and counting the hosts attracted by it. In the 
 case of the Quest there is no doubt whatever
 
 H2 MAN'S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH 
 
 that a light is being held up in our darkness. 
 Its articles are upon the most exalted topics ; 
 they are, for the most part, luminously written, 
 and their purity of motive may be taken for 
 granted. The Quest is the literary Platonic 
 Academy of our day. Yet it is seldom spoken 
 of in literary circles. We " good " are very 
 apathetic, and it is lucky for the devil that his 
 disciples are unlike us in this respect. They 
 see to it that everything evil shall flourish like 
 the bay-tree, while we allow the bays of the 
 intelligent to fade into the sere. 
 
 Mr Mead contributes an article on a topic 
 which has not yet been exhausted, " Man's 
 Survival of Bodily Death." Mr. Randall is 
 not the first to deny " immortality " while 
 affirming an absolute morality, nor even the 
 first to attempt to explain religion without 
 recourse to a dogma of survival. The Saddu- 
 cees 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 dis- 
 interestedness is obvious ; he pursues virtue 
 as the pupil is enjoined in the Bhagavad Gita 
 to act, namely, without hope or fear of fruit.
 
 MAN'S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH 113 
 
 I am not of the heroic breed myself, and, in 
 any case, the problem is one of fact as well as 
 of moral discipline. It may be heroic to put the 
 telescope of truth to a deliberately blinded 
 eye, but unless you suspect yourself of being 
 unable to master the fact, I see no indispens-; 
 able 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 philo- 
 sophers and their recorded religious experiences 
 in all ages, and the more material examination 
 of the spiritualistic phenomena of modern 
 psychical research. For himself, Mr. Mead has 
 chosen the former method, and I am interested 
 to observe his testimony, in a rare personal 
 statement, to the satisfaction, more or less, that 
 is possible from following this road. At the 
 same time, though without any experience in 
 the second method, Mr. Mead is explicitly of 
 the. opinion that it is one that should be em-; 
 ployed by science with increasing earnestness. 
 The difficulties are tremendous, and as subtle 
 as they are considerable. Before survival can 
 be scientifically demonstrated, a host of work- 
 ing hypotheses must be invented and 
 
 8
 
 H4 MAN'S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH 
 
 c!is:redi ed, and the utmost veracity will be 
 ic v-ssary in tiie students. With such facts 
 before us as telepathy, dissociated personality, 
 subconscious complexes, auto-suggestion and 
 suggestion, the phenomena that superficially 
 point to survival may plainly be nothing of the 
 kind. Survival, in short, must be expected 
 to be about the last rather than the first 
 psychic fact to be scientifically established. The 
 student must, therefore, be exigent as well as 
 hopeful. 
 
 There is a third method from which we may 
 hope to hear one day something to our advan- 
 tage assuming that the certain knowledge of 
 survival would be to mankind's advantage the 
 method of psycho-analysis. If psycho-analysis 
 of the first degree can make us acquainted with 
 the subconscious^ why should not a psycho- 
 analysis of the second degree make us 
 acquainted with the super-conscious ; and as 
 the language of the subconscious may be sleep- 
 ing dreams, the language of the super-conscious 
 may be waking visions. To return to Mr. 
 Mead's article, an interesting account is con- 
 tained in it of a recent census taken in America 
 by Professor Leuba of the creeds of more or 
 less eminent men. The returns for the article 
 of faith in survival and immortality are curious, 
 not to say surprising. Of the eminent physicists 
 canvassed, 40 per cent, confessed their belief 
 in man's survival of bodily death. Thereafter
 
 MAN'S SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH 115 
 
 the percentage falls through the stages of his- 
 torians 35 per cent., and sociologists 27 per 
 cent., to psychologists with the degraded per- 
 centage of 9. It is a strange reversal of the 
 procession that might have been anticipated, 
 and it expresses, perhaps, the condition of real 
 culture in America. For that the physicists 
 should be the most hopeful class of scientists 
 in America, and the psychologists the most 
 hopeless is an indication that the best brains 
 in America are still engaged in physical 
 problems. The poor psychologists are scarcely 
 even hopeful of discovering anything. 
 
 BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS. 
 " Unbounded " admiration is precisely what I 
 cannot feel for Aubrey Beardsley's work, even 
 " within its own sphere." I ought to say, 
 perhaps, " because of its sphere." Pure 
 aesthetic is a matter for contemplation only, 
 and we should be prepared upon occasion to 
 suspend every other kind of judgment. Or, 
 would it not be true to say that the purely 
 aesthetic does itself suspend in the beholder 
 every other form of judgment or reaction such 
 as the moral, the intellectual, and the prac- 
 tical? A great tragedy, for instance, is a 
 kind of focus of the whole nature of man ;
 
 n6 BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS 
 
 every faculty is engaged in it, and all are 
 lifted up and transfigured into the pure 
 aesthetic of contemplation. But one is not 
 aware, in that case, of moral or other reserva- 
 tions ; one has not to apologise for the 
 experience by pretending that the " essentially 
 repulsive and diabolic decadence " contained in 
 the tragedy is merely an expression of the age. 
 Beardsley is only " something of a genius " 
 precisely because he failed to transfigure the 
 moral and other reactions of the spectator of 
 his work. He did not occupy the whole of 
 one's mind. All the while that one's 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 " abso- 
 lute," 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
 
 BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS 117 
 
 Symons has confused in his mind the problem 
 of good and evil with the quite alien problem 
 of quantity of energy. 
 
 "^E'S" "CANDLE OF VISION." " ^'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 experience of what they 
 are writing of. " AL's " narrative, and criticism 
 of his personal experiences may be said to 
 take the form of intimate confessions made 
 pour encourager tes autres. For, happily for 
 us, he is an artist who is also a philosopher, 
 a visionary who is also an " intellectual " ; 
 and, being interested in both phases of his 
 personality, he has had the impulse and the 
 courage to express both. What the ordinary, 
 mind the mind corrupted by false education 
 would say to " ^E's " affirmations concern- 
 ing his psychological experiences, it would not 
 be difficult to forecast. What is not in- 
 vention, it would be said, is moonshine, and 
 what is neither is a pose to be explained on
 
 u8 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 
 
 some alienist hypothesis. Only readers who 
 can recall some experiences similar to those 
 described by " J " will find themselves able 
 to accept the work for what it is a statement 
 of uncommon fact ; and only those who have 
 developed their intuition to some degree will 
 be able to appreciate the spirit of truth in 
 which the Candle of Vision is written. A 
 review of such work is not to be undertaken. 
 by me, but I have made a few notes on some 
 passages. 
 
 Page 2. " / could not so desire what was 
 not my own, and what is our own we cannot 
 lose . . . Desire is hidden identity.'' This is 
 a characteristic doctrine of mysticism, and 
 recurs invariably in all the confessions. Such 
 unanimity is an evidence of the truth of the 
 doctrine, since it is scarcely to be supposed that 
 the mystics borrow from one another. But 
 the doctrine, nevertheless, is difficult for the 
 mere mind to accept, for it involves the belief 
 that nothing happens to us that is not our- 
 selves. Character in that event is destiny 
 to quote a variant of " AL's " sentence ; and 
 our lives are thus merely the dramatisation of 
 our given psychology. Without presuming to 
 question the doctrine, I feel a reserve concern- 
 ing its absoluteness. Fate appears to me to 
 be above destiny in the same sense that the 
 the old lady conceived that there was One
 
 "^'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 119 
 
 above that would see that Providence did not 
 go too far. To the extent that character is 
 destiny or, as " >E " says, desire is hidden 
 identity, a correct psychological forecast 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. 
 
 Page 3. " yE " says he " was not conscious 
 in boyhood (up to the age of sixteen or seven- 
 teen] of any heaven lying about me" " Child- 
 hood," he thinks, is no nearer the " eternally 
 young " than age may be. Certainly it 
 appears to be so in the case of " AL " him- 
 self, for the intimations of immortality which 
 Wordsworth (and the world in general) attri- 
 buted to children were only begun to be ex- 
 perienced by " JE " after his sixteenth or 
 seventeenth year. From that time onwards, as 
 this book testifies, he has been growing 
 younger in precisely those characteristics. 
 There is a good deal to be thought, if not 
 said, on this subject. Children are, I conceive, 
 rather symbols of youth than youth itself ; 
 they are unconsciously young. Age, on the 
 other hand, has the power of converting the
 
 120 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 
 
 symbol into the reality, and of being young and 
 knowing it. Unless ye become, not little 
 children, but as little children, ye shall in no 
 wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven. At the 
 same time it is comparatively rare for the 
 ordinary child, that " AL " says he was, to 
 develop childlikeness in later life. Usually a 
 return occurs to a state unconsciously ex- 
 perienced in early youth. But there appear 
 to be strata of characteristics in every mind, 
 and life is their successive revelation. With- 
 out 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 six- 
 teen, another layer came to the surface, where- 
 upon " AL " entered on another phase of 
 " desire." 
 
 Page 7. " We may have a personal wisdom, 
 but spiritual wisdom is not to speak of as 
 ours." This illustrates another characteristic 
 of the mystic that while his experiences are 
 personal, the wisdom revealed in them is always 
 attributed to " Him that taught me " in other 
 words, to something not ourselves. An egoist 
 mysticism is a contradiction in terms. Not 
 only no man is entitled to claim originality 
 for a spiritual truth, but no man can. The 
 truth is no longer true when it has a name to
 
 "M'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 121 
 
 it. " Truth bears no man's name " is an axiom 
 of mysticism. The reason, I presume, is that 
 the very condition of the appreciation of a 
 spiritual truth is the absence of the sense of 
 egoism. Such truths are simply not revealed 
 to the egoistic consciousness, and therefore can- 
 not appear as the product of human wisdom. 
 Their character is that of a revelation from 
 without rather than that of a discovery from 
 within, and the report of the matter is thus 
 objective rather than subjective. 
 
 Page 1 6. " / could prophesy from the up- 
 rising of new moods in myself that without 
 search I should soon meet people of a certain 
 character, and so I met them. . . . / accepted 
 what befell with resignation. , . . What we 
 are alone has power. . . . No destiny other 
 than we make for ourselves." I have already 
 expressed my doubts whether this is the whole 
 truth. It is, of course, the familiar doctrine 
 of Karma ; but I do not think it can be inter- 
 preted 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 con- 
 sent of the whole of the judging nature, and 
 not of its sense of justice only. Love enters 
 into it, and so, perhaps, do many other qualities 
 not usually attributed to the Supreme Judge.
 
 122 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 
 
 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." " JE's " Candle of Vision is con- 
 fessedly propagandist. It aims deliberately at 
 encouraging age to discover eternal youth, and 
 to lay hold of everlasting life. It is to this 
 end that " AL " 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 ex- 
 perience (though here, again, favour seems 
 sometimes to be shown), but it does, I think, 
 lie in the bent towards the effort involved. 
 Anybody, it is true, may by the appropriate 
 means experience the same results, but not 
 everybody has the " desire " to employ them. 
 Desire, moreover, is susceptible of many de- 
 grees of strength. Like other psychological 
 characteristics, it appears to peel off like the 
 skins of Peer Gynt's onion. What is it that I 
 really desire? Ask me to-day, and I shall 
 answer one thing. Ask me next year, and 
 it may be another. Years hence it may have 
 changed again. But desire, in the mystical 
 sense, is the desire that is left when all the
 
 "M'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 123 
 
 transient wishes or fancies have either vanished 
 or been satisfied. Only such a desire leads 
 the student to make the effort required by 
 " AL," and the possession of such a desire 
 is something like a " special gift " or 
 " genius." 
 
 Page 20. " Our religions make promises to 
 be fulfilled beyond the grave, because they have 
 no knowledge now to be put to the test. . . . 
 Mistrust the religion that does not cry out: 
 ' Test me that we can become as gods.' This 
 is an excellent observation, and accounts, to 
 my mind, for all the so-called scepticism of 
 modern times. It is usual to attribute to our 
 predecessors, the most remote as well as the 
 more recent, a quality of " faith " superior to 
 our own. They are said to have been more 
 religious than we are. I do not believe it ; 
 or, rather, I believe that they were religious 
 because they had very good reason to be ; in 
 other words, they were not only told the 
 mysteries, but they were shown them. Either 
 they or their priests had the " open vision." 
 Is it conceivable that the primitive peoples had 
 the confidence -trick played on them? Or, 
 again, is it the fact that credulity is less to-day 
 than before ? I feel sure that if our ancestors 
 were brought to belief, it was by means 
 which would equally carry conviction to the 
 present generation. To repeat myself : They
 
 124 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 
 
 believed because they were shown. " JE " 
 suggests that the after-life promises of modern 
 religion are a substitute for or an invasion of 
 present demonstration. Religions, that is to 
 say, concentrate upon the invisible because their 
 power over the visible is gone. It is not 
 the fact, however, that the earlier religions ig- 
 nored the after-death adventures of the soul ; 
 they were quite as much concerned with the 
 life beyond the grave as our own religions. 
 What they did, and what our religions fail 
 to do, was to give present guarantees for their 
 future promises. Their priests could procure 
 belief in the after-life on the strength of their 
 demonstrated power over this life. It is 
 probable, indeed, that many of the elect ex- 
 perienced " death "< before it occurred 
 physically. The Egyptian mysteries were a 
 kind of experimental death. 
 
 Page 21. Here and on the neighbouring 
 pages " AL " expounds his method of medi- 
 tation the means by which any " ordinary " 
 person may acquire spiritual experience. 
 " fiL's " method follows the familiar line of 
 the mystic schools, namely, " unwavering con- 
 centration on some mental object. " Five 
 minutes of this effort," " y " 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 " yE," I have practised
 
 "M'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 125 
 
 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 medita- 
 tion that cannot be realised by any other mental 
 exercise. The mind becomes a real organ, 
 as distinct from the personality as a physical 
 limb. And gradually one learns to acquire 
 sufficient control over it, if not to use it like a 
 master, at any rate, to realise that it can be 
 so used. I have not the smallest doubt that 
 one day men will be able to " use " their 
 minds, and thus to cease to be " used " by 
 them ; for it is obvious that at present we 
 are victims rather than masters of our mind. 
 Meditation, as a means of mind -control, is the 
 appointed method, and " /E's " personal ex- 
 perience should encourage his readers to take 
 up the discipline. 
 
 Page 41. In regard to "visions," they are 
 usually dismissed by the commonalty as pro- 
 ducts of imagination, "as if," says " AL," 
 " imagination were as easily explained as a 
 problem in Euclid." This habit of referring 
 one mystery to another, as if this latter were 
 no mystery, is very common ; and it arises, 
 no doubt, from intellectual apathy. We cannot 
 be bothered to reduce mysteries to knowledge, 
 and, moreover, the realisation that literally
 
 126 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 
 
 everything is a mystery, that we simply live in 
 mystery, is a little disconcerting. Hence our 
 preference for assuming some things, at any 
 rate, to be below the need of explanation. 
 Imagination, however, provides us with no 
 escape from the mysteries of vision, any more 
 than matter provides us with an escape from 
 the problems of spirit. " /E " raises some 
 difficult, and, probably, insoluble problems con- 
 cerning 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? " yE " 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 reconstruc- 
 tion, what of the visions that had, or appeared 
 to have, no earthly progenitors? " y's " con- 
 clusion appears to be indisputable, that " we 
 swim in an aether of deity " for " in Him 
 we live and move and have our being." 
 
 Passim. Is it possible that telepathy occurs 
 between people having the same mental " 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-
 
 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 127 
 
 stances of telepathy, but they would be tedious 
 to relate. Mental training, however, is cer- 
 tainly 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 Testa- 
 ment 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. "7s there a centre within us 
 through which all the threads of the universe 
 are drawn? " An ingenious image for a re- 
 current doctrine of mysticism, the doctrine, 
 namely, that everything is everywhere. One 
 of the earliest discoveries made in meditation 
 is the magnitude of the infinitesimal. The 
 tiniest point of space appears to have room 
 enough for a world of images ; and the 
 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, " JE's " problem is identical 
 with it. 
 
 Page 89. The Architecture of Dreams. In 
 this chapter " AL " sets himself to casting some 
 doubts (shall we say ?) on the sufficiency of 
 the Freudian theory of dreams. Dreams, ac-
 
 128 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 
 
 cording to Freud, are the dramatisation of sup- 
 pressed desires ; but what, asks " AL," " is 
 the means by which desires, suppressed or 
 otherwise, dramatise themselves?! "A mood 
 or desire may attract its affinities " ; in other 
 words, there may be a congruity between the 
 desire and the dream which serves the Freudian 
 purpose of interpretation ; but desire can hardly, 
 be said "to create what it attracts." Between 
 anger, for instance, and a definite vision of 
 conflict, such as the dream may represent, there 
 is a gulf which the theory of Freud does not 
 enable us to cross. What, in fact, are dreams? 
 Who or what carries out the dramatisation ?. 
 Assuming, with Freud, that their impulse is a 
 desire, what power shapes this desire into the 
 dream -cartoon ? " AL " throws no light on the 
 mystery, but, at any rate, he does not dismiss 
 it as no mystery at all. Its philosophical dis- 
 cussion is to be found in the Indian philosophy 
 known as the Sankhya. 
 
 Page 89. " The process must be conscious 
 on some plane " the dramatisation, that is to 
 say, must be the conscious work of some in- 
 telligent agent or quality. I am a little doubt- 
 ful of this, for reasons to be discovered in 
 the Sankhya philosophy just referred to. Is 
 the pattern taken by sand on a shaken plate 
 a "conscious" design? Are frost -flowers the 
 work of intelligence? Forms, according to the
 
 "^E'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 129 
 
 Sankhya, are the reflection in matter (Prak- 
 riti) of the activities of the spirit (Purusha) ; 
 they are consciousness visible. But it would 
 not follow that they are themselves conscious 
 or that their creation is a " conscious " 
 process. 
 
 Page 90. "Have imaginations body?" 
 In other words, are the figures seen in dream 
 and vision three-dimensional? " M " describes 
 several incidents within his experience that cer- 
 tainly seem to suggest an objective reality in 
 dream -figures, and the occasional projection of 
 dream -figures into phantasms is a further 
 evidence of it. But, once again, I would refer 
 " AL " to the Sankhya aphorisms, and to 
 Kapila's commentary on them. The question 
 is really of the general order of the relation 
 of form to thought. 
 
 Page 114. Here, and in the succeeding 
 essay, " AL " develops his intuitional thesis that 
 sound and thought have definite affinities. For 
 every thought there is a sound, and every sound 
 is at the same time a thought. The idea is, of 
 course, familiar, and, like many more in the 
 Candle of Vision, is found recurring like a 
 decimal throughout mystical and occult litera- 
 ture in all ages. The most ancient occult 
 literature dispute whether that of India or 
 Egypt is most precise on the subject, the 
 
 9
 
 130 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 
 
 general proposition being therein reduced to 
 a series of equivalents in which form, sound, 
 colour, thought, emotion, and number, all seem 
 to be interchangeable. Each of these, in fact, 
 is said to be a language a complete language ; 
 and to the initiate it is a matter of indifference 
 whether the text before him is " written " in 
 form, in colour, in number, or sound. Un- 
 fortunately, neither " AL " nor anybody within 
 our knowledge, is able to procure even the 
 skeleton key to the mystery. The records are 
 so perversely confused that I cannot believe 
 that their authors were not deliberately playing 
 a game with us. It would be rather like the 
 old initiates to " dis " their type before leav- 
 ing it to be examined by the barbarian in- 
 vaders ; and certainly nobody of ordinary 
 faculty can begin to make head or tail of the 
 " correspondences " recorded in the Indian 
 scriptures. It is the same, strangely enough, 
 with Plato, whose Cratylus deals with the re- 
 lation of verbal language to mental conception. 
 A master of simple exposition, he becomes in 
 the Cratylus, whether from design or feeble- 
 ness of understanding, as cryptic as the Indians 
 themselves. I have read the Cratylus all ways, 
 with no better result than to feel that I have 
 wasted my time. " AL " has approached the 
 problem, however, experimentally, with the aid 
 of his intuition. If, he said to himself, there 
 is really a definite correspondence between
 
 ",E'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 131 
 
 sound and idea, meditation on one or the other 
 should be able to discover it. In other words, 
 he has attempted to re -discover the lost 
 language, and to find for himself the key whose 
 fragments bestrew the ancient occult works. 
 This again, however, is no novelty, but another 
 of the recurrent ideas of mystics and would- 
 be occultists. All of them have tried it, but, 
 unfortunately, most of them come to different 
 conclusions. " AL's " guesses must, therefore, 
 be taken as guesses only, to be compared with 
 the guesses of other students. 
 
 Page 132. One of the features of the 
 Candle of Vision is the occasional ray cast by 
 " y " upon the obscure texts of the Bible. 
 The Bible, of course, is for the most part un- 
 mistakably " occult " ; and not only its stories 
 are myths (" which things are an allegory "), 
 but many of its texts are echoes of a gnosis 
 infinitely older than the Christian era. Greece, 
 it has now been established, was an infant 
 when Egypt was old ; and Egypt, in its turn, 
 was an infant when some civilisation anterior 
 to it was in its dotage. The Bible is a kind 
 of ark, in which were stored (without much 
 order, I imagine) some of the traditions of 
 the world that was about to be submerged. 
 They can be brought to life again, however, 
 and here and there, in the course of the 
 Candle of Vision, " fiL " undoubtedly rejuve-
 
 132 "JE'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 
 
 nates 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 " AL," 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 con- 
 ception is very illuminating. Moreover, it 
 brings the story of Genesis into line with the 
 genesis stories of both ancient India and the 
 most recent psychology. For modern psycho- 
 analysis, in the researches of Jung in particular, 
 is undoubtedly trembling on the brink of the 
 discovery of the divine mind which precedes 
 visible creation. The process is indissolubly 
 linked up with the psychology of imagination, 
 phantasm, and vision. 
 
 Page 137. On Power. " // we have not 
 power we are nothing, and must remain out- 
 casts of Heaven." In this chapter " JE " 
 shakes the fringes of the most dangerous 
 subject in the world, that of the acquisition of 
 " spiritual " power. I put the word under 
 suspicion, because while in the comparative 
 sense spiritual, the powers here spoken of may 
 be anything but beneficent. The instructions to 
 be found in, let us say, Patanjali, are full of 
 warnings against the acquisition of occult 
 powers before the character of the student is
 
 "/E'S" "CANDLE OF VISION" 133 
 
 "purified." We are a long way, of course, 
 from the plane of conventional goodness in the 
 use of this word purity. The conventionally 
 good may have all the characteristics of the 
 black magician (so-called) when he finds him- 
 self in the possession of power. Purity, in the 
 sense implied, connotes non -attachment, and 
 non -attachment, again, implies the non-exist- 
 ence of any personal desire even for the good. 
 Nietzsche died before he began to understand 
 himself. His pre -occupation with the problem 
 of power was undoubtedly an occult exercise ; 
 and his discovery that spiritual power needs to 
 be exercised " beyond good and evil," was 
 a hint of the progress he had made. Un- 
 fortunately for Nietzsche, his Beyond Good and 
 Evil was still not clear of the element of 
 egotism ; he carried into the occult world the 
 attachment and the desire that emphatically be- 
 long to the world of both Good and Evil. In 
 short, he attempted to take Heaven by egoistic 
 storm, and his defeat was a foregone con- 
 clusion 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 realises that without power the 
 student can do nothing. Here is the paradox, 
 the mightiest in psychology, that the weakest 
 is the strongest and the strongest the weakest. 
 I commend this chapter to Nietzscheans hi 
 particular. They have most to learn from it.
 
 134 " ^'S " " CANDLE OF VISION " 
 
 Page 153 et seq. " JE " makes an attempt 
 to systematise "Celtic cosmogony." It appears 
 to me to be altogether premature, and of as 
 little value as the " interpretation " of Blake's 
 cosmogony, which Messrs. Yeats and Ellis 
 formerly attempted. Celtic cosmogony, as 
 found in Irish legend and tradition, may be 
 a cosmogony, and perhaps one of the oldest 
 in the world (for Ireland is always with us !). 
 But the fragmentary character of the records, 
 the absence of any living tradition in them, 
 coupled with the difficulty of re -interpretation 
 in rational terms, make even " y's " effort a 
 little laborious. There is little illumination in 
 the Candle when it becomes an Irish bog -light. 
 
 How TO READ. The greatest books are 
 only to be grasped by the total understanding 
 which is called intuition. As an aid to the 
 realisation of the truth, we may fall back upon 
 the final proofs of idiom and experience. 
 Idiom is the fruit of wisdom on the tree of 
 language ; and experience is both the end and 
 the beginning of idiom. What more familiar 
 idiom is there than that which expresses the 
 idea and the experience of reading a book " be-, 
 tween the lines " ; reading, in fact, what is not 
 there in the perception of our merely logical 
 understanding? And what, again, is more
 
 HOW TO READ 135 
 
 familiar than the experience of " having been 
 done good " by reading a great, particularly a 
 great mystical or poetical work, like the Bible 
 or Milton ; still more, by reading such works 
 as the Mahabharata ? Idiom and experience 
 do not deceive us. The " subconscious " of 
 every great book is vastly greater than its 
 conscious element, as the " subconscious " of 
 each of us is many times richer in content 
 than our conscious minds. Reading between 
 the lines, resulting often and usually in a sense 
 of illuminated bewilderment difficult to put 
 into words, is in reality intuitional reading ; 
 the subconscious in the reader is put into rela- 
 tion with the subconscious of the writer. Deep 
 communicates with deep. No " interpreta- 
 tion " 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 1 The truths thus grasped will find 
 their way to the conscious mind, and one day, 
 perhaps, to our lips. 
 
 THE OLD COUNTRY. A country may grow 
 aged in mind long before it is really old in 
 history, and it may be the case with England 
 that long before she is old in history her mind 
 is becoming aged. The peculiarity of the aged
 
 136 THE OLD COUNTRY 
 
 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 appro- 
 priated by one interest or another, with the 
 consequence that every fresh idea is compelled 
 either to starve at home or to emigrate abroad. 
 America, as an intellectually youthful nation 
 (may it never grow aged 1) reaps the advantage 
 of the decline of its aged parent. Ideas that 
 cannot pick up a living in this country, owing 
 to the appropriations of energy already made, 
 may emigrate to America and flourish there. 
 
 LOOKING FOR THE DAWN. The Spring 
 issue of Art and Letters has been long enough 
 out to have had its run for its money. Conse- 
 quently I am free to say that it is not only 
 not so good as the first issue, but that the 
 descent has been steep as well as rapid. This 
 decline from the almost sublime to the more 
 than ridiculous was inevitable from the peculiar 
 characteristics of our immediately contemporary 
 epoch ; for it is the sober truth that our con- 
 temporary world does not supply youthful stuff)
 
 LOOKING FOR THE DAWN 137 
 
 enough to make more than a single issue of a 
 literary magazine of high pretension. I have 
 looked about me with the eye of an eagle 
 and the appetite of a raven to discover youthful 
 talent possibly budding into genius. A few 
 sprigs and sprays have fallen within my vision, 
 and I have counted myself recompensed for 
 hours and years of trouble. But at this present 
 moment such apparitions and premonitions of 
 the future are fewer than ever I have known 
 them to be. Whether it is that more than 
 individual collective talent has fallen in the 
 war ; whether the increasing pre-occupation 
 of men's minds with economics has propor- 
 tionately impoverished the will to literature of 
 our young men ; or whether a critical taste is 
 losing generosity, the number of fresh talents 
 just being committed to us appears utterly 
 unequal to the unequalled opportunity for 
 employing them. There never was a time 
 when it was easier for a young writer to find 
 publication in one form or another. The 
 number of new magazines projected and issued 
 recently has been legion. I have examined 
 most of them ; for it is my hobby to collect 
 the earliest specimens, and it is my unpleasant 
 opinion that most of them would be better for 
 never having been born. 
 
 They manage, or, at any rate, they are 
 beginning to manage these things better in 
 America. That America is the country of the
 
 138 LOOKING FOR THE DAWN 
 
 future is open to less doubt as a prophecy 
 when the critic has made acquaintance with 
 the new and renewed magazines now appearing 
 in that country. A tone of provinciality still 
 dominates a considerable part of the American 
 literary Press, but it is obvious that tremendous 
 efforts are being made to recover or, let us 
 say, to discover centrality. American literary 
 editors are more and more aiming to interest 
 the world of readers rather than a mere 
 province of them. I need scarcely say that 
 the world of readers is not the same thing as 
 a world of readers. A world of readers con- 
 notes large numbers, consisting chiefly of 
 readers in search of amusement ; but the world 
 of readers consists of the few in every country 
 who really read for their living, or rather, 
 for their lives. To appeal to the latter class 
 is to be " of the centre," for the centre of 
 every movement of life is not only the most 
 vital, it is the smallest element, of the whole. 
 The most recent American literary journals 
 appear to me to be endeavouring to become 
 organs for this class of reader. It is not indi- 
 cated more jplainly in the fact that they are 
 enlisting European writers than in the fact 
 that their American contributors are writing 
 to be read in Europe as well as in America. 
 America has begun to discover Europe. 
 America is on. the way to absorb Europe. In 
 the course of a few generations, if the present
 
 LOOKING FOR THE DAWN 139 
 
 American magazines may be taken as indicating 
 direction, European writers will be as intel- 
 ligible in America as in Europe.; and, perhaps, 
 more so. 
 
 FIELDING FOR AMERICA. It is very doubt- 
 ful 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, senti- 
 mentality. 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 contem- 
 poraries boasted they could carry their port 
 without showing it. And it was no less the 
 case that he carried his feelings with the same 
 well-bred ease, without displaying them, and, 
 even more, without permitting them to rule his 
 intelligence. Richardson seems born to have 
 provoked Fielding to write. He incarnated 
 everything that Fielding thought worth a nega- 
 tive. But for Richardson, Fielding would 
 possibly have never found his true metier. ; 
 Richardson was his twin opposite. Fielding,
 
 140 FIELDING FOR AMERICA 
 
 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 America. America needs Fielding ; 
 for what is America in danger of becoming 
 but a kind of Richardson continent? Our 
 eighteenth century writers are a school to which 
 American literature must go as a means of 
 escape from the Roundhead tradition which 
 otherwise America will scarcely succeed in 
 overpassing. I cannot conceive, however, that 
 Tom Jones will be popular in America yet 
 awhile. He has more resistance to encounter 
 there than in any other civilised nation. But 
 until Tom Jones can be read in America 
 without a blush, American literature will remain 
 several centuries behind English and European 
 literature. 
 
 POOR AUTHORS ! Is it a fact that the dear- 
 ness of literature alone or mainly restricts its
 
 POOR AUTHORS! 141 
 
 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 cheap- 
 ness and of the diffusion of money. Publica- 
 tion was cheap enough before the war in all 
 conscience. New novels could be brought out 
 for a shilling. Was it the common experience 
 that the best of them proved a commercial 
 success ? The best of them were nine times 
 out of ten a commercial failure. And in 
 respect of the diffusion of money, what has 
 been our experience of the direction in which 
 the diffused money has been spent? Have 
 the masses accumulated libraries ? Have they 
 patronised the arts? Have they encouraged 
 literature with discriminating taste ? Have they 
 sought out and bought the young authors, the 
 promising writers, the writers of to-morrow? 
 We know they have done nothing of the kind. 
 The diffused money has fallen, for the most 
 part, into two sets of hands, the hands of the 
 ignorant profiteers and the hands of the 
 ignorant masses. And both classes have 
 neglected literature in favour of sports and 
 furs, display and amusement. It is idle to 
 pretend that things are other than they are. 
 We need not necessarily be discouraged by 
 the fact, but it is necessary to recognise the
 
 142 POOR AUTHORS! 
 
 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 com- 
 mercially. When the public wants literature 
 as much as it wants to be entertained, there 
 will be no need for anybody's charity. 
 
 In the meanwhile, what is the young writer 
 to do ? In particular, the young novelist ? He 
 appears to be about to be among the most 
 miserable of mankind. To be published and 
 to be a commercial failure is bad enough in 
 a country like our own, where a succcs d'estitne 
 is almost a certificate for pity. But not to 
 be published at all is infinitely worse. Instead 
 of appealing to commercial publishers, how- 
 ever, is it not possible to appeal to the Guild 
 of Authors, to the fraternity whose function 
 and responsibility are the creation and encour- 
 agement of literature ? Who should be patrons 
 of literature if not men of letters themselves ? 
 And whose duty should it be, if not that of 
 novelists as a guild, to secure the succession 
 and to provide for the future princes? If
 
 POOR AUTHORS! 143 
 
 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 par- 
 ticular, of the successful men. There is no 
 lack of money among them. I should roughly 
 calculate that the income of our successful 
 novelists is more than equal to that of all our 
 publishers put together. Why should they not 
 subsidise literature? Why, out of their abun- 
 dance, should they not set aside a portion for 
 their literary posterity? 
 
 ON GUARD. As one of the thirty thousand 
 who take in and occasionally read The Times 
 Literary Supplement, I may draw attention to 
 the danger to truth its composite character is 
 always creating. Being familiar with the back- 
 ways of publishing I am not taken in, of course, 
 by the uniform use of the editorial " we " in 
 a journal like The Times Literary Supplement. 
 'We" represents a score of different people, 
 all or most of whom are as much at intellectual 
 sixes and sevens as any other score ; and the 
 editor-in-chief, whoever he may be, is just
 
 144 ON GUARD 
 
 as powerless as a sovereign is over its twenty 
 shillings. That being granted, the situation 
 is still a little strange from the fact that certain 
 sentiments are allowed to appear in the Literary 
 Supplement which, to say the least, are incon- 
 gruous with The Times and all The Times 
 stands for. Here, for instance, are three quota- 
 tions from recent issues : " Whether you beat 
 your neighbour by militarism or buy him by. 
 industrialism the effect is the same." "That 
 most false and nauseating of legends ' the 
 happy warrior.' " "The organisation of trade 
 is of secondary moment : what is of the first 
 moment is the organisation of a humane enjoy- 
 ment of its benefits." These sentiments are 
 true, and they are sufficiently strikingly put. 
 But in The Times Literary Supplement they are 
 not only incongruous, but they are in a very 
 subtle sense actually lies, and the more 
 dangerous lies from their identity with the 
 truth. It is one of the paradoxes of truth that 
 a statement is only true when it is in truthful 
 company. As the corruption of the best is 
 the worst, so evil communications corrupt good 
 statements, and a truth in bad company is the 
 worst of lies. It is a mystery not easily to be 
 understood, but the intuition may, perhaps, 
 make something of it. Is it not the fact that 
 the occurrence of statements like those just 
 quoted in The Times Literary Supplement 
 causes a feeling of nausea? On examining
 
 ON GUARD 145 
 
 the cause it will be found to lie in the 
 unconscious realisation that such statements are 
 there made for no good purpose, but are only 
 decoy ducks for the better snaring of our 
 suffrages for the real policy of The Times 
 itself. 
 
 THE COMING RENAISSANCE. The prognos- 
 tication of the approach of a new Renaissance 
 has quite naturally been received with incredu- 
 lity. Is it not the fact that civilisation is in 
 a thoroughly morbid condition bordering on 
 hysteria, and was ever the outlook for culture 
 darker than it is at this moment ? ' I have just 
 been discussing the subject with a friend who 
 laid this evidence before me with a touch of 
 reproach : how could I, in the face of sucK 
 a circle of gloom, pretend that we were even 
 possibly (which is all I affirm) on the eve of 
 a new Renaissance ? My explanation of this 
 part of the story is, however, quite simple. 
 The war has precipitated a development in 
 external events faster than the average mind has 
 been able to adapt itself to them, with the 
 consequence that the average mind has had 
 to take refuge in hysteria. For the greater 
 part of hysteria is due to nothing more than 
 an inadequacy of the mind to a given situation:; 
 
 10
 
 146 THE COMING RENAISSANCE 
 
 and when the situation as given to-day is a 
 situation that should and would, but for the 
 war, have arisen only, let us say, twenty years 
 hence, there is no wonder that in the mass of 
 the slowly developing minds of our people an 
 inadequacy to the occasion should be experi- 
 enced or that the result should appear as 
 hysteria. On the other hand, hysteria is not 
 a stable condition of the mind ; it is a transi- 
 tion 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 adaptation. This forward 
 movement is the Renaissance, and it is thus 
 from the very circumstances of gloom and 
 hysteria that we may draw the hope that a 
 fresh advance of the human spirit is about to 
 be made. 
 
 It is significant that concurrently with such 
 a social diagnosis as anyone may make, special 
 observers, with or without a bee in their bonnet, 
 are arriving at the same conclusion. There are 
 very confident guesses now being disseminated 
 by the various religious and mystic schools 
 concerning what, in their vocabulary, they call 
 the Second Advent which, however, may 
 well be the seven hundredth or the seven 
 thousandth for all we know. Attach no im-
 
 THE COMING RENAISSANCE 147 
 
 portance, if you like, to the phenomena in 
 question, but the fact of the coincidence of 
 forecast is somewhat impressive ; for while 
 it is absurd to believe the " Second Adventists " 
 of all denominations when they stand alone in 
 their prognostications, their testimony is not 
 negligible when it is supported by what amounts 
 to science. And the fact is that to-day science, 
 no less than mysticism, is apprehensive of a 
 New Coming of some kind or other. What the 
 nature of that New Coming is likely to be, and 
 when or how it will manifest itself, are matters 
 beyond direct knowledge, but the ear of science, 
 no less than the ear of mysticism, is a little 
 thrilled with the spirit of expectation. 
 
 LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER. 
 Leonardo da Vinci's name has been frequently 
 mentioned among the intelligent during the 
 last few years, and it cannot be without a 
 meaning. It may be said that his reappear- 
 ance as a subject for discussion is due to a 
 fortuitous concurrence of publishers. But acci- 
 dents of this kind are like miracles : they do 
 not happen ; and I, for one, am inclined to 
 suspect the " collective unconscious " of a 
 design in thrusting forward at this moment 
 the name and personality of the great Renais-
 
 148 LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER 
 
 sance humanist. What can we guess the design 
 to be ? What is the interpretation of this 
 prominent figure in our current collective 
 dreams ? The symbols appearing in dreams 
 are the expressive language of the unconscious 
 mind, and the appearance of the symbol of 
 da Vinci is or may be an indication that the 
 " unconscious " is " dreaming " of a new 
 Renaissance. And since the dreams of the 
 unconscious to-day are or may be the acts 
 of the conscious to-morrow, the prevalent 
 interest in Leonardo is a further possible piece 
 of evidence that we are or may be on the eve 
 of a recurrence of the Italian Renaissance. 
 
 Leonardo as an artist interests us less than 
 Leonardo as a person. That is not to say that 
 Leonardo was not a great artist, for, of course, 
 he was one of the greatest. But it is to say 
 that the promise of which he was an incarna- 
 tion was even greater than the fulfilment which 
 he achieved. There is a glorious sentence in 
 one of the Upanishads which is attributed to 
 the Creator on the morrow of His completion 
 of the creation of the whole manifested 
 universe. " Having pervaded all this," he says, 
 " I remain." Not even the creation of the 
 world had exhausted His powers or even so 
 much as diminished His self-existence. When 
 that greatest of works of art had been accom- 
 plished, He, the Creator, " remained." 
 Leonardo was, if I may use the expression,
 
 LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER 149 
 
 a chip of the original block in this respect. 
 His works, humanly speaking, were wonder- 
 ful ; 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 accom- 
 plishment. The Renaissance man is greater 
 than his work ; he pervades his work, but he 
 is not submerged in it. 
 
 I should be trespassing on the domain of 
 the psycho-analysts if I were to attempt to 
 indicate the means by which a collective 
 hysteria may be resolved into an integration. 
 Taking the Italian Renaissance, however, as a 
 sort of working model, and Leonardo da Vinci 
 as its typical figure, it would appear that the 
 method of resolution is all-round expression 
 expression in as many forms and fields as the 
 creative powers direct. Leonardo was not only 
 an artist, he was a sculptor, a poet, an epigram- 
 matist, an engineer, a statesman, a soldier, a 
 musician, and I do not know what else besides. 
 He indulged his creative or expressive 
 impulses in every direction his " fancy " 
 indicated. Truly enough he was not equally 
 successful in an objective or critical sense 
 in all these fields ; but quite as certainly he 
 owed his surpassing excellence in one or two
 
 150 LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER 
 
 of them to the fact that he tried them all. 
 The and- or non-Renaissance type of mind 
 would doubtless conclude that if Leonardo, let 
 us say, had been content to be only a painter, 
 or only a sculptor, he would have succeeded 
 even more perfectly in that single mode of 
 expression into which ex hypothesi he might 
 have poured the energy otherwise squandered 
 in various subordinate channels. But concen- 
 trations of energy of this kind are not always 
 successful ; the energies, in fact, are not always 
 convertible ; and the attempt to concentrate 
 may thus have the effect, not only of failing of 
 its direct object, but of engaging one part of 
 the total energy in suppressing another. At 
 any rate, the working hypothesis (and it did 
 work) of the Renaissance type is that a natural 
 multiplicity of modes of expression is better 
 than an unnatural or forced concentration. The 
 latter, if successful, may possibly lead to some- 
 thing 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
 
 LEONARDO DA VINCI AS PIONEER 151 
 
 unimportant ; " art happens," as Whistler used 
 to say, and it " happens," it may be added, 
 in the course of play. The play is the thing, 
 and I have little doubt that the approaching 
 Renaissance will be heralded by a revival of 
 dilettantism in all the arts. 
 
 " SHAKESPEARE " SIMPLIFIED. English 
 literary criticism lies under the disgrace of 
 accepting Shakespeare, the tenth-rate player, 
 as Shakespeare the divine author, and so long 
 as a mistake of this magnitude is admitted 
 into the canon, nobody of any perception can 
 treat the canon with respect. My theory of 
 authorship is simple, rational, and within the 
 support of common experience. All it requires 
 is that we should assume that Shakespeare the 
 theatre-manager had on his literary staff or 
 within call a wonderful dramatic genius whose 
 name we do not yet know ; that this genius 
 was as modest as he was wonderful, and as 
 adaptable as he was original ; and that, of the 
 plays passed to him for licking into shape 
 (plays drawn from Shakespeare the actor- 
 manager's store), some he scarcely touched, 
 others he changed only here and there, while a 
 few, the few that appealed to his " fancy," 
 he completely transformed and re-created in 
 his own likeness. There is nothing incredible,
 
 152 "SHAKESPEARE" SIMPLIFIED 
 
 nothing even requiring much subtlety to accept, 
 in this hypothesis. The Elizabethan age was 
 a strange age. It had very little of the passion 
 for self-advertisement that distinguishes our 
 own. It contained many anonymous geniuses 
 of whom the obscure translators of the Bible 
 were only one handful. The author of the 
 plays may well have been one of the number 
 a quiet, modest, retiring sort of man, 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 think- 
 ing the theory unimportant, I believe it throws 
 a beam of light on the psychology of genius 
 during the Elizabethan age. 
 
 THE " LONDON MERCURY " AND ENGLISH. 
 It goes without saying that the London 
 Mercury had what is called a " good Press." 
 Without imputing it to Mr. Squire for un- 
 righteousness, it is a fact that Mr. Squire has 
 a " good Press " for whatever he chooses to 
 do. He appears to have been born with a 
 silver pen in his mouth, and for quite a number 
 of years now it has been impossible to take up 
 a literary journal without finding praise of Mr. 
 Squire in it. As a poet Mr. Squire deserves 
 nearly all that is said of him ; not for the 
 mass of his work, but for an occasional poem
 
 "LONDON MERCURY" AND ENGLISH 153 
 
 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 readable- 
 ness. Finally, as a parodist he is without 
 a superior in contemporary literature. But 
 when one has said this, one has said all ; for 
 Mr. Squire is not a great or even a sound 
 critic, he is not an impressive writer, and he 
 is not a distinguished or original thinker. Time 
 and Mr. Squire may prove my judgment wrong, 
 but I do not think, either, that he will make 
 a great or an inspiring editor. Great editorship 
 is a form, of creation, and the great editor is 
 measured by the number and quality of the 
 writers he brings to birth or to ripeness. We 
 shall see in course of time whether Mr. Squire 
 is a creator in this sense. So far, he has 
 not even a dark horse in his stable. 
 
 Among the objects set out to be accom- 
 plished by the London Mercury is the advance- 
 ment of English style. It is a worthy and even 
 a momentous object, but the London Mercury 
 is not the first modern journal to venture upon 
 this quest. After all, I, in my way, during the 
 last seven years or so, have made occasional 
 references to current English style, and my 
 comments cannot be said to be distinguished 
 by any particular tenderness to bad English, 
 by whomsoever it has been written. It amused 
 me, therefore, to read sundry and divers exhor-
 
 154 "LONDON MERCURY" AND ENGLISH 
 
 tations to Mr. Squire to be severe, and, if need 
 be, " savage " in criticism, and especially when 
 I observed that some of the names appended 
 to the advice were of writers who have anything 
 but appreciated the severity, let alone the 
 " savagery," of reviews addressed to them- 
 selves. Let it pass. The thing in question 
 is English style, and nobody can be too enthu- 
 siastic 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 col- 
 loquial and the vernacular (or, let us say, the 
 idiomatic) meet and mix. The English ver- 
 nacular is the most powerful and simple 
 language that was ever written, but the danger 
 always lies in wait for it of slipping into the 
 English colloquial, which, by the same token, 
 is one of the worst of languages. The differ- 
 ence between them is precisely the difference 
 between Ariel and Caliban ; and I am not sure 
 that " Shakespeare " had not this, among other 
 things, in mind when he dreamed his myth. 
 Caliban is a direct enough creature to be 
 English, and there are writers who imagine his 
 style to be the mirror of perfection. But Ariel 
 is no less direct ; he is only Caliban transformed 
 and purified and become a thing of light. There 
 is, of course, no rule for distinguishing 
 between them ; between the permissible and 
 the forbidden use of the colloquial ; for it is
 
 "LONDON MERCURY" AND ENGLISH 155 
 
 obvious that the vernacular is finally derived 
 from the colloquial. The decision rests with 
 taste, which alone can decide what of the col- 
 loquial shall be allowed to enter into the 
 vernacular. In general, I should say, the 
 criterion is grace ; the hardest, the rarest, but 
 the most exquisite of all the qualities of style. 
 I hope one day to see English written in the 
 vernacular, with all its strength and directness, 
 but with grace added unto it. Newman, 
 perhaps, was furthest of all writers on the way 
 to it. But Newman did not always charm. 
 Now I have written the word, I would sub- 
 stitute charm for grace, and say that the 
 perfect English style, which nobody has yet 
 written, will charm by its power. 
 
 MR. G. K. CHESTERTON ON ROME AND 
 GERMANY. Hovelaque's Les Causes profondes 
 de la Guerre is either the original or a 
 plagiarism of Mr. G. K. Chesterton's theory 
 that the war was only an episode in the eternal 
 " revolt " of " Germany " against " Rome." 
 I put these words into quarantine to signify 
 that they are to be handled with care ; for it 
 is not only Germany or Rome that is in ques- 
 tion, but the psychological characteristics and 
 the relation between them which they embody. 
 Thus raised to psychological dimensions, Ger-
 
 156 G. K. C. ON ROME AND GERMANY 
 
 many and Rome become principles, types of 
 mentality : in radical opposition. Germany is 
 of one camp, Rome is of the other, and given 
 the fact of their inherent antagonism, war 
 between them is endless. Mr. Mann, a German 
 writer, has carried the subject further ; he 
 has entered into particulars. In the following 
 pairs of qualities, tabulated by Mr. Mann, the 
 first of each is to be attributed to " Germany " 
 and the other to " Rome." Heroic, rational ; 
 people, masses ; personality, individuality ; cul- 
 ture, civilisation ; spiritual life, social life ; 
 aristocracy, democracy ; romance, classicism ; 
 nationalism, internationalism. I do not know 
 how Mr. Chesterton will fare among these pairs 
 of opposites, for it appears to me that his 
 preferences are to be found at least as often 
 among the " German " group as among the 
 " Roman " group. There, however, they are, 
 as drawn up by a supporter of his general 
 theory, and we must leave him to make the 
 best of them. 
 
 There is another pair which Mr. Mann has 
 not mentioned, though it has been brought close 
 home to many of us. The German " Persius " 
 has confessed that " the lie has always been 
 one of Germany's chief weapons, both by land 
 and sea." The lie, however, is not the 
 '- Roman " way ; the " Roman " way is silence, 
 and anybody engaged in the dissemination of 
 ideas knows which of the two forms of oppo-
 
 G. K. C. ON ROME AND GERMANY 157 
 
 sition 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. 7s Rome 
 so eternal as all that, or Germany either ? We 
 have been familiarised with a view that repre- 
 sents the map of Europe as a map primarily 
 of mind ; but I can discover in such a map 
 no confirmation of the statement that it is 
 Rome and Germany that are in permanent con- 
 flict. On the contrary, what we call " formal 
 mind " in other words, the rationalistic con- 
 sciousness appears to me to distinguish 
 " Rome " quite as much as " Germany." It 
 may be true that on the whole the " Roman " 
 qualities are better integrated and that the 
 " Roman " type is more completely a " man 
 of the world." But, in comparison with a type 
 of the universal man, the man of the whole 
 world, I doubt whether it can be said that 
 the " Roman " is much more inclusive than the 
 German. Both exclude a good deal, and thus 
 the opposition between them is not of prin- 
 ciple, but of accident, the accident being that 
 the anthology of qualities which we call 
 " Rome " differs from the anthology called 
 German. It would follow from this that so far
 
 158 G. K. C. ON ROME AND GERMANY 
 
 from being in necessarily eternal conflict 
 " Rome " and " Germany " are susceptible of 
 a synthesis in which the qualities of each will 
 complement the qualities of the other. " Ger- 
 many," in other words, needs to Romanise, 
 while " Rome " needs to " Germanise." Their 
 approach to each other would mark the end of 
 the conflict. 
 
 In so far as it is true that " Germany " 
 represents the " elemental instincts " always in 
 revolt against " Rome," " the representative of 
 the supremacy of reason " (Hovelaque), there 
 are grounds for believing that a psychological 
 rapprochement is necessary to the psychic 
 health no less than to the peace of Europe. 
 Long before the war we heard, even in this 
 country, criticism of the right of reason to 
 supremacy ; and, strangely enough, it was from 
 the " Roman " Mr. Chesterton that the criticism 
 came most powerfully. " Germany," in that 
 case, may certainly be said to have taken the 
 lead in the active revolt against Rome ; but 
 it was, we must observe, against a Rome 
 already weakened from within by the dissatis- 
 faction 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 suppres-
 
 G. K. C. ON ROME AND GERMANY 159 
 
 sion of the " elemental instincts " attributed 
 to Germany. The so-called encirclement of 
 Germany was, in fact, and in psychological 
 terms, the rational encirclement of instinct ; and 
 I must again observe that it was not in geo- 
 graphical Germany alone that the encirclement 
 was felt to be oppressive, but in every " Ger- 
 many within us," in so far as each of us con- 
 tained " elemental instincts " of any kind. The 
 meaning of what I am saying is that the 
 elemental instincts, call them German, or any- 
 thing you please, cannot be permanently 
 tyrannised over by " reason ",; nor should they 
 be. Nor is it necessary that reason should 
 attempt such a dictatorship. Its rule should 
 be that of a constitutional monarch under the 
 direction of representatives, not of itself, but 
 of the elemental instincts. The practical con- 
 clusion to be drawn is that the " eternal 
 antagonism " of " Rome " and " Germany " 
 is not a necessary fact in psychology. It 
 becomes a fact only when " Rome " aims at 
 a dictatorship of reason to the inevitable isola- 
 tion 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, how- 
 ever, 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
 
 160 G. K. C. ON ROME AND GERMANY 
 
 of Germany. I have often wondered how a 
 Catholic like M. Hovelaque accommodates his 
 thesis with that fact. If the war, as he says, 
 was only an episode in the secular conflict of 
 Germany with Rome (meaning the Roman 
 Church as the spiritual successor of the Roman 
 Empire), how came it that before and during 
 the war the directors of the Roman Church 
 were pro-German? Something must surely be 
 wrong here ; ; for either the Roman Church did 
 not take that view of Germany which 
 M. Hovelaque has defined, or, as seems to 
 me more probable, the Holy See had another 
 end in view than victory over Germany, namely, 
 alliance with a prospectively victorious Ger- 
 many ! With this key, I think, the mystery is 
 unlocked for the ordinary man, however much 
 it continues sealed to the faithful. As The 
 Times Literary Supplement said : " Modernists 
 understand no better than Newman the springs 
 of Roman ecclesiastical policy, which is never 
 fanatical or idealistic, but always based on cool 
 political calculation." And, undoubtedly, the 
 " cool political calculation " of the Holy See, 
 both before and during the first years of the 
 war, was that Germany would win. If this was 
 not the case, how are we to explain the sudden 
 change over of policy when it began to appear 
 that Germany, after all, was not to be the 
 victor ? That at a certain stage in the war 
 such a change took place is well known to
 
 G. K. C. ON ROME AND GERMANY 161 
 
 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-speak- 
 ing 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 sur- 
 vive 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 con- 
 sistency, the peril of it is greater upon minds 
 lacking the inestimable virtue of common sense. 
 Marx was not himself a slave of his own in- 
 spiration ; he wajs anything but a Marxian in 
 the sense in which his followers are Marxian. 
 He had, indeed, a very sharp word for certain 
 
 ii
 
 162 THE ORIGINS OF MARX 
 
 of the disciples whose breed, unfortunately, has 
 not been extinguished by it. " Amateur 
 anarchists," he called them, who " make up 
 by rabid declarations and bloodthirsty ramp- 
 ings for the utter insignificance of their 
 political existence." Groups of his disciples, 
 answering perfectly to this description, are to 
 be found to-day in English as well as in other 
 Labour circles. In between their rampings 
 they reveal their political insignificance by in- 
 quiring of each other such elementary facts 
 about literature and history as schoolboys 
 should be ashamed to have forgotten. And 
 the surprising thing is that even these open 
 confessions induce no reaction upon their 
 conviction that they understand Marx. 
 
 It is a common supposition among Marx's 
 followers that not only has he left nothing to 
 be said on the subject of economics, but that 
 nothing was said before him. One German 
 Socialist, at any rate, has rid himself of this 
 notion, for Dr. Menger has remarked that 
 " Marx was completely under the influence of 
 the earlier English Socialists, and more par- 
 ticularly 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 ORIGINS OF MARX 163 
 
 the exception of his peculiar interpretation of 
 history in terms of economics. The theory 
 of Value as measured by labour-power, the 
 distinction between capital and capitalism, the 
 law of decreasing utility, and, above all, the 
 very phrase as well as the very idea of Surplus 
 Value all of these " Marxian " doctrines Marx 
 found in Thompson. I am not arguing that 
 Marx was the less for having been indebted 
 to his English predecessors. He would, in- 
 deed, in my opinion, have been a greater man 
 if he had borrowed more of Thompson, for 
 Thompson possessed the common sense to 
 realise that it was possible that the 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 fanatical disciples. What, on the 
 other hand, was great in Marx, was his capacity 
 for large generalisations, and his industry in 
 establishing them. In this respect he belonged 
 to the great Victorians, and, as such, he 
 deserves more credit than his present-day, 
 followers will permit him to receive. 
 
 MARX AS POLITICIAN. The centenary cele- 
 brations of Marx ought not to conclude 
 without a tribute to his astonishing political
 
 164 MARX AS POLITICIAN 
 
 insight. Philosophically Marx was confused ; 
 as an economist he has suffered from his 
 disciples ; but as a political critic he has 
 seldom been surpassed. Particular attention may 
 be drawn to his analysis of the circumstances of 
 Bismarck's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and 
 to his forecast of the consequences. Though 
 writing in London, and without our historic 
 knowledge of the Ems telegram, or our present 
 knowledge of the world -war, Marx might have 
 written his manifesto to-day ; but, in that case, 
 I doubt whether he would be published in 
 Germany, or read with much attention by 
 Marx's followers in this country. It is a 
 strange reflection, indeed, upon the fate of the 
 works of Marx that it is precisely the most 
 clear and prophetic part of them which his 
 professed followers neglect. For his dubious 
 forecasts and his riddling analyses they have 
 a reverence that transcends bibliolatry ; but, 
 concerning his most absolute and explicit 
 political policies not a word I 
 
 The war of 1870, as we all know, was 
 for Germany a declared war of defence, exactly 
 like the present war. Germany is always de- 
 fending 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
 
 MARX AS POLITICIAN 165 
 
 at war only with Napoleon and not with 
 France, the militarists inspired the German 
 liberal bourgeoisie to press for annexations in 
 the name of race and security. They dared to 
 pretend, said Marx, that the people of the two 
 provinces were burning to be annexed to 
 Germany, and they adopted without reflection 
 the excuse of the military party that a rectifica- 
 tion of the Imperial frontiers was a strategic 
 necessity. Thus, concluded Marx, they insisted 
 upon sowing in the terms of peace the seeds 
 of new wars the phrase is Marx's own. And 
 what wars, too 1 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 sig- 
 nificance 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 every- 
 where would succumb to the forces of 
 militarism and capitalism. What comment has 
 the Call or any of our contemporary Marxian 
 pacifists to make upon this ? It is not right 
 that they should ignore it, more especially when 
 it is recalled that Marx paid a tribute to the
 
 166 MARX AS POLITICIAN 
 
 English working -classes of his day, who " pro- 
 tested with all their might against the 
 dismemberment of France." 
 
 JOHN MlTCHEL AS THE SAME. Marx, 
 however, was not the only observer of the 
 events of 1870 to be moved to prophecy by 
 them. As a matter of fact, everything has 
 been foreseen. John Mitchel, the Irish 
 Nationalist, whose name is invoked by Sinn 
 Feiners to-day, was in Paris before the 1870 
 war, and wrote of the events of the war in 
 the Irish Citizen and elsewhere during its pro- 
 gress. He, too, had no illusions concerning the 
 nature of Prussian militarism, and though his 
 sympathies were mainly with France, he had 
 a word of warning for England. " Prussia," 
 he said, " cannot be England's friend. Prussia 
 has her own aspirations and ambitions ; one of 
 these is to be a great maritime power, or 
 rather the great maritime Power of Europe ; 
 and nothing in the future can be more sure 
 than that Prussia, if successful in this struggle 
 with France, will take Belgium, and threaten 
 from Antwerp the mouth of the Thames." 
 Things have not worked out exactly as Mitchel 
 prophesied, but they have worked out nearly 
 enough to justify his political clairvoyance. 
 Like Marx, he was not deceived by the events
 
 JOHN MITCHEL AS THE SAME 167 
 
 before him, and both saw in them the shadows 
 of the events which have now befallen us. I 
 remark with irony that just as the self-styled 
 followers of the economist Marx ignore the 
 political judgments of their master, the pro- 
 fessed inheritors of the Nationalist opinions of 
 Mitchel ignore his international opinions. It 
 is in this way that the garments of the great 
 are divided, and the seamless coat shredded 
 to make partisan ribbons. 
 
 NORSE IN ENGLISH. Professor C. H. 
 Herford makes a meritorious attempt to recall 
 attention to the influence and value of the 
 Norse Myths upon English Poetry. William 
 Morris was most powerfully and directly in- 
 fluenced by the Sagas, and of Morris Professor 
 Herford says that " no other English poet has 
 felt so keenly the power of Norse myth ; none 
 has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, 
 its heroism, its earth-shaking humour, and its 
 heights of tragic passion and pathos, to a 
 place in our memories, and a home in our 
 hearts." It will not do, however, for (let me 
 whisper it) who reads Morris's poetry to -day ? 
 Has he a home in our hearts ? Are his Norse 
 enthusiasms really anything to us? I am not 
 defending our generation for neglecting Morris, 
 or for being indifferent to the Norse theogony,
 
 168 NORSE IN ENGLISH 
 
 of which he was a prophet. Our age is one 
 of prose, and the passion of prose is justice 
 reasonable and regulated justice. Terrible 
 beauty, earth-shaking humour, tragic passion, 
 and so on the stuff of epic poetry are re- 
 legated nowadays to the police court. More- 
 over, the Norse mythology is not only 
 " pagan " in the sense of being non -Christian, 
 it is pagan in the sense of being sub- as much 
 as pre-Christian, differing in this respect from 
 the Indian mythology of the Mahabharata, or 
 the Egyptian mythology of the Book of the 
 Dead. We can never return to it without com- 
 mitting, an act of regression, since it is a 
 paganism of a world inferior rather than 
 superior to the " Christian " world. At the 
 same time, since we must carry all our sheaves 
 with us in order to enjoy the complete harvest 
 of the human soul, it is necessary not to drop 
 from consciousness the heroic past, albeit a 
 past to which we may not return. Let it be 
 enshrined and enjoyed in poetry and music 
 now that it is no longer possible in life. 
 
 THE COMEDY OF IT. Comedy still remains 
 a secret hid from the English mind, and not 
 all the efforts of Mr. John Francis Hope to 
 bring it into popularity will succeed where the 
 prior efforts of Meredith have failed. The
 
 THE COMEDY OF IT 169 
 
 reason, as Mr. Hope has often explained it, 
 even more clearly than Meredith, is not only 
 that the spirit of Comedy demands " a society 
 of cultivated men and women, wherein ideas 
 are current and perceptions quick " a con- 
 dition certainly not now existing but the 
 absence of three qualities, each of which, un- 
 fortunately, blooms luxuriantly among us 
 " sentimentalism, puritanism, and bacchanalian - 
 ism." Comedy, the play of the mind about 
 real ideas, is quite incompatible with any one 
 of these three vices. If you sentimentalise, 
 play is over, and equally it is over if you are 
 shocked, or if you carry the suggested humour 
 of the situation too far. But one of these 
 things the ordinary English man or woman is 
 almost bound to do ; and thus it comes about 
 that " play," the sparkle of common sense, is 
 so rare among us. 
 
 Meredith certainly worked > very hard to .instil 
 Comedy into the English mind. His essay 
 is a classic, and our only classic on the subject. 
 And he may be said to have written the whole 
 of his novels in order to illustrate his idea. 
 Meredith's novels are much more than- a mirror 
 held up in Nature ; they are a model held u|p to 
 human nature ; and, from this point of view, 
 they are only an appendix to the Essay on 
 Comedy. The serious way in which Meredith's 
 novels are read, however, is an evidence of 
 his failure, and it would be interesting to hear
 
 i;o THE COMEDY OF IT 
 
 his secret comment on the critics who acclaim 
 him as the grand portrait -painter of women. 
 Did Meredith even set himself to draw a 
 woman? Was his art not rather to "draw 
 out " a woman from the imperfect society his 
 times provided him? Were not his "portraits," 
 in fact, constructive criticisms of the women he 
 knew ? I put these opinions into interrogation 
 out of mere courtesy, for there is really no 
 doubt whatever about them. Meredith drew 
 women still to be, as he hoped they would 
 become. 
 
 " To love comedy you must know the real 
 world, and know men and women well enough 
 not to expect too much of them, though you 
 may still hope for good." That is an almost 
 complete summary of the conditions of the 
 comic spirit ; but there must be added the 
 " sense of society," the social sense, which 
 is quite as important. This also introduces 
 a considerable difficulty for us, since if " our 
 English school had not clearly imagined 
 society " in 1877, when Meredith wrote, it 
 is less than ever probable to-day. In 1877, 
 such people of intelligence as were living in 
 England were still more 'or less homogeneous 
 in their general views about life. They were 
 not eighteenth century the century of our 
 highest English social culture ; but they were 
 not yet what we have subsequently become, 
 discrete and warring atoms of intellectuality.
 
 THE COMEDY OF IT 171 
 
 It was possible when Meredith was alive for 
 a group of people to meet, and to create some- 
 thing remotely resembling a salon. The hope 
 of realising a " salon spirit " was not entirely 
 dead. To-day nothing is more improbable 
 than even an attempt to restore a salon. Not 
 only would nobody undertake to do it, but 
 to nobody would it occur that its restoration is 
 highly desirable. But the salon is, as it were, 
 the foyer of the theatre of Comedy, as the 
 theatre of Comedy is itself the foyer of the 
 Civilised Life of Brilliant Common Sense ; and 
 if we cannot re-create a salon it is perfectly 
 certain that the greater mysteries are beyond 
 us. We may continue, however, to " hope 
 for good," since that also is an essential of 
 Comedy. 
 
 THE EPIC SERBS. Kossovo: the Heroic 
 Songs of the Serbs, translated by Miss Helen 
 Rootham, has now been published for some 
 months. If there is any " epic sense " alive 
 in this country, it must surely be gratified, 
 by the appearance of these Serbian ballads, 
 which are much more truly epic fragments -than 
 ballads as we understand the term. In the 
 ballad proper the prevailing note is tragedy 
 sometimes individual, sometimes family,
 
 172 THE EPIC SERBS 
 
 sometimes clan ; but in the Serbian, as in the 
 Homeric, the tragedy expressed in the popular 
 poetry is more spacious even than the nation ; 
 the nation becomes the race, and the race 
 symbolises a psychological power, which may, 
 very well be called a god a suffering god. 
 Grimm said of these ballads that there had 
 been " nothing since Homer to compare with 
 them ; they were the best of all times and 
 nations." Goethe compared them to the Song 
 of Songs. Certainly there is something 
 Homeric in them ; and since they are sung 
 to-day, they can be regarded as unique. Long 
 dwelling on them, with a view to discovering 
 their innermost secret, convinces me, however, 
 that they differ from the Homeric mood in 
 their comparative hopelessness. Mr. Baring says 
 in his Introduction that these Serbian ballad- 
 writers " saw the world with the eyes of a 
 child and the heart of a man." "Child " is 
 a word of multiple entente ; and the differ- 
 ence between the Homeric and the Serbian 
 " childhood " is that the latter appears doubtful 
 whether it can grow up. Homer, we know, 
 occasionally let fall a sad regret that his 
 splendid heroes should still be children ; and 
 in the plays of /Eschylus the high philoso- 
 phical meditations of Homer are considerably 
 elaborated. But in these Serbian ballads there 
 does not appear to me any sign of the mind 
 of a man, however much of the heart there
 
 THE EPIC SERBS 173 
 
 may be. No Serbian Plato will ever find in 
 them such a text as the Greek Plato found 
 in Homer. It is not to be wondered at. Serbia 
 has always been on the frontier of European 
 civilisation, and perpetually in the trenches. 
 Since 1389 Serbia has been in unbroken but 
 unsubmissive captivity, and her deliverance 
 from alien bondage is only an event of yester- 
 day. But if the elements of the future are 
 contained in the quintessence of these ballads, 
 there is no sight of a new Athens in them. 
 
 ERNEST DOWSON. Mr. Arthur Symons's 
 Introduction to the reprinted Poems and Prose 
 of the late Ernest Dowson has all the 
 characteristics of the age to which both "he 
 and Dowson belonged. It is delicately apprecia- 
 tive, and not lacking in good judgment. Mr. 
 Symons says, for instance, that Dowson was 
 small enough to be overwhelmed by ex- 
 periences that would have been nourishing 
 food to a great man. But the style and 
 manner of passing judgment almost completely 
 contradict the matter of the judgment itself, 
 and leave us in doubt whether Mr. Symons 
 is not judging against his judgment. Literary 
 criticism does not need to be literature ; least 
 of all does it need to be belles-lettres. Yet Mr.
 
 174 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 Arthur Symons and his whole school seem to 
 aim at precisely this effect, that of writing in 
 the same style as the work criticised. Thus 
 we find him saying of Dowson : "all the 
 fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams 
 of a life which had so much of the swift, 
 disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius " 
 words and phrases which might have been 
 written by Dowson himself. They are apolo- 
 giastic of the person when what we ask of 
 criticism is judgment of the quality of the 
 style, and in the unfortunate identification of 
 genius with disaster and suicide they are almost 
 an incentive to the little artists to trade on their 
 neuroses. I do not know whether Mr. Symons 
 knew Dowson personally ; it is of no im- 
 portance ; 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
 
 ERNEST DOWSON 175 
 
 that, had he been asked to quote his own best 
 lines, he would have pointed, not to the 
 notorious " Cynara," which is sufficiently pretty- 
 pretty, but to these lines, in which he came as 
 near to Poe as originality permits : 
 
 Violets and leaves of vine 
 For Love that lives a day. 
 
 " One is essentially of the autumn," he wrote 
 of himself. But that is not true, for Dowson 
 was not ripe, but (I say it of course with 
 respect) rotten. He remained in the cradle 
 sucking sensations long after he should have 
 been out in the world creating sensations. Life 
 never got beyond his lips. 
 
 A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION. The writers 
 of the Venture, a literary magazine published 
 from Bristol, and written chiefly by members 
 of the Postal Service, are sincere in that they 
 are manifestly striving to acquire a good 
 English style ; and they are modest in that 
 they do not pretend to have attained to it. 
 Even better, and unlike so many current 
 " stylists," they do not say that the unreachable 
 grapes are sour, while those only which they 
 can pluck are the perfect fruit ; in. other words, 
 they do not try to pass off their defects as new
 
 176 A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION 
 
 beauties of style. Their models are good, and 
 their exercises are promising. The intro- 
 ductory note contains, however, a little cant, 
 rather out of key with the prevailing mood of 
 the journal. It demands " stalwart criticism," 
 not for itself only, but for literature in general. 
 The London Mercury appeared before the world 
 in the same austere attitude, calling in 
 prophetic tones for sterner criticism, more 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 demand such criticism, 
 and very popular on one condition that it be 
 never actually provided. For the fact is that 
 the criticism in question is really killing ; and 
 how many of those who ask for stern criticism 
 would welcome their own extinction ? 
 
 Special attention is directed to the longish 
 poem by Mr. Francis Andrews. It is entitled 
 " Mother," and the opening stanza is a,s 
 follows : 
 
 You can see from the gate which once enclosed my world 
 The tinted woods o' the hill and the white road wending, 
 And among the nearer boughs whereon my stars were hung 
 The blown and shifting wraith of the blue smoke curled. 
 
 Let us stop at that and collect our impressions. 
 It is a very dangerous subject that Mr. Andrews
 
 177 
 
 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. 1 ' The mission of Art is 
 to dry all tears, and the utmost severity and 
 serenity are needed in dealing with a pro- 
 foundly emotional subject exactly to keep the 
 tears from welling into it. That Mr. Andrews 
 has not succeeded is evident from the opening 
 stanza which I have just quoted. It is almost 
 drenched with sentiment. Listen to the rhythm 
 which is nearly a lullaby in reverie, and let us 
 ask ourselves whether it is not calculated, quite 
 apart from the words, to throw tlie reader back- 
 wards into his mother's arms. " Which once 
 enclosed my world," " and the white road 
 wending," " whereon my stars were hung," 
 " the blown and shifting wraith of blue smoke 
 curled " these are sentimental rhythms, and 
 their inevitable effect is to induce a reverie of 
 the past rather than a meditation or contempla- 
 tion of the future. The mood is backward - 
 looking, and not forward-looking, an indul- 
 gence 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 
 
 12
 
 178 A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION 
 
 this kind. In great reveries it will be observed 
 that the movement is forward and upwards. 
 The action starts from a profound sentiment, 
 but it works its way upward to a triumphant 
 assertion of spiritual realisation. Look, for in- 
 stance, at Lycidas or Adonais, both sentimental 
 in origin, but both exalted in conclusion. 
 There the song springs from a dewy bed, 
 drenched with tears, but it mounts and mounts 
 until it ends in the sky. Mr. Andrews keeps 
 well to the ground, and, as I have said, his 
 concluding stanza is only a slight variation 
 of the prelude. The influence of Kipling is 
 to be discerned at work, especially Kipling's 
 " Envoi," beginning, " There's a whisper down 
 the field." Kipling is another of the writers 
 whose sentiment is still tied to his mother's 
 apron-strings ; and his " Envoi " and " Mother 
 o' Mine " are almost as poisonous to poetry as 
 Meredith's " Love in the Valley." We need not 
 be averse to sentiment as such, but the most 
 careful discrimination between the nest and the 
 sky is essential to an aesthetic use of it. Let us 
 start in sentiment, by all means, but let us rise 
 from it as quickly as possible. 
 
 THE NEWEST TESTAMENT. Various 
 attempts have been made from time to time to
 
 THE NEWEST TESTAMENT 179 
 
 " 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' sensa- 
 tion, 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 Testa- 
 ment Greek and Exegesis at Mansfield College 
 gives us his assurance that however " start - 
 lingly unlike the familiar versions " these 
 translations by Mr. Hoare may be, they are 
 nevertheless " actual translations and not mere 
 paraphrases," and he commends the " style " 
 to the " candid judgment of the reader." The 
 prose sections, in particular, he says, are 
 " curiously reminiscent " of the " homely 
 speech in which the sayings of Jesus Christ 
 have been preserved." It may be so, but then, 
 again, it may not ; since, after all, it is not 
 a question of reproducing in colloquial English 
 the colloquial Greek of the original, but a 
 question rather of reproducing in English the 
 meaning of the Gospel writers ; and this may 
 very well require, not colloquial English, but 
 the English vernacular in its highest degree 
 of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not 
 sufficiently acquainted with the popular Greek 
 in which much of the New Testament was 
 written to pass a candid judgment on its quality
 
 i8o THE NEWEST TESTAMENT 
 
 a.s a Greek style, but if the aim of the original 
 writers was the grand style simple as it must 
 have been whether they achieved it or not, it 
 is indubitably achieved in the English of the 
 authorised translation. Assuming the original, 
 in fact, to be " faithfully " represented in the 
 colloquial English of Mr. Hoare, I unhesita- 
 tingly say that the English of the authorised 
 translation is nearer the spirit of the original 
 than the present translation, and, in that sense, 
 more fully faithful to the intentions of the 
 original authors. 
 
 It would be tedious to cite more than one 
 example, and I will take it in the very first 
 sentence of Mr. Hoare 's translation. " What 
 joy," he says, " for those with the poor man's 
 feelings ! Heaven's Empire is for them," the 
 authorised translation of which) is too familiar 
 to need quotation. I do not see what is gained, 
 setting aside the cost, by the substitution of the 
 exclamatory " What joy . . ."for the ecstatic 
 affirmation, "Blessed are the poor." Why 
 again, " the poor man," and, after that, the 
 " poor man's feelings " ? Why also " Heaven's 
 Empire " instead of " the Kingdom of 
 Heaven ",; and why " is for them " instead 
 of "theirs is"? The gain, even literally, is 
 imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning 
 has been sacrificed. " Blessed " is an incom- 
 parably more spiritual word than "joy " in 
 English, at any rate, whatever their respective
 
 originals may indicate ; and there is a plane 
 of difference between an incontinent ejacula- 
 tion such as " What joy," which resembles 
 " What fun," and has in view rather a prospect 
 than a fact and the serene and confident 
 utterance of an assured truth. Further, and 
 again without regard to the literal original, 
 " a poor man's feelings " must be miles away 
 from the intention of the original authors, since 
 it definitely conveys to us associations derived 
 from social surroundings, social reform, and 
 what not. Was this the intention of the 
 Sermon on the Mount, the very location of 
 which symbolised a state of mind above that 
 of the dwellers in the plain of common life ? 
 Was it a socialist or communist discourse ? If 
 not, the " poor man's feelings," in our English 
 colloquial sense, is utterly out of place, and 
 the original must have meant something 
 symbolically different. The substitution, again, 
 of " Heaven's Empire " for the " Kingdom of 
 Heaven " may be, as Professor Dodd assures 
 us, a more correct literal translation of the 
 original phrase ; but only a literary barbarian 
 can contemplate it without grieving over the 
 lost worlds of meaning. What is the prospect 
 of an " Empire," even Heaven's Empire, to 
 us to-day? As certainly as the phrase "King- 
 dom of Heaven " has come to mean, in English, 
 a state of beatitude, the reversion to an 
 " Empire " marks the decline of that state to
 
 i82 THE NEWEST TESTAMENT 
 
 one of outward pomp and circumstance. The 
 spiritual meaning which must have characterised 
 the intention of the Sermon on the Mount is 
 completely sacrificed in the substitution of 
 Empire for Kingdom. The volume is published 
 by the " Congregational Union of England and 
 Wales," and it serves to indicate the depths to 
 which Nonconformist taste can sink. We only 
 need now this " colloquial English " version 
 in the " nu speling " to touch bottom. 
 
 NOTHING FOREIGN. It is better for a nation 
 to " impprt " art than to go without it alto- 
 gether ; and it is the duty of its critics to 
 stimulate home -production by importing as 
 many as possible of the best foreign models. 
 That home-production may fail to find itself 
 encouraged to the point of creation is perfectly 
 possible ; inspiration may continue to be 
 wanting ; but of the two states of no home- 
 production and no imports and no home-pro- 
 duction and imports, the latter is to be 
 preferred. 
 
 " Foreign " is a word that should be em- 
 ployed 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
 
 NOTHING FOREIGN 183 
 
 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 ten- 
 dency towards cosmopolitanism, an excess of 
 which would certainly result in the complete 
 loss of essential national characteristics. On 
 the other side, and usually balancing the first, 
 we find an ever-present tendency towards insu- 
 larity 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
 
 184 NOTHING FOREIGN 
 
 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 excel- 
 lent pioneer work in a field hitherto left more 
 or less uncultivated, but it is very far from 
 being exhaustively explanatory of the facts. 
 Suppose it were possible to control dreams 
 in other words, to dream of what you will 
 would not the theory of Freud that dreams are 
 subconscious wish-fulfilments stand in need of 
 amendment ? But to control dreams is not an 
 utter impossibility. Sufficient experimental 
 work has been done in this direction to prove 
 that the gate of dreams is open to the intelli- 
 gent 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
 
 PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 185 
 
 Nevi 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 sub- 
 conscious, psycho-analysis is an instrument of 
 the highest value, but in the interpretation of 
 what it finds there, and in the conclusions it 
 draws as to their origin how the apple got 
 into the dumpling, in fact psycho-analysis 
 requires to be checked by all the knowledge we 
 have at our command. Mr. Mead has raised 
 the question of origins, but it is just as easy 
 to raise the question of interpretation. I am 
 not satisfied that the interpretation placed by 
 Jung on myths is any more than correct as far 
 as it goes, and I am disposed to think that it 
 does not go far enough. His reduction, for 
 example, of a whole group of myths to the 
 " incest " motive, appears to me, even in the 
 light of his definition of incest as the " back- 
 ward urge into childhood," to give us only a 
 partial truth, an aspect of truth. For there is 
 a sense in which an " urge into childhood "
 
 186 PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND MYSTERIES 
 
 is not backward but forward, not a regression 
 into an old, but a progression into a new 
 childhood. " Unless ye become as little 
 children, ye can in no wise enter the Kingdom 
 of Heaven." " Incest " is a strictly improper 
 term to apply to such a transformation ; the 
 new birth might suit the case better. Mr. Mead 
 takes the same view. The interpretations of 
 psycho-analysis carry us back, he suggests, to 
 the lesser mysteries ; but they need to be 
 " elevated " in the Thomist sense in order to 
 carry us back to the greater. So long as it 
 confines itself to the " body " psycho-analysis 
 must plainly be confined to the lesser mysteries, 
 for the lesser mysteries are all concerned with 
 generation. The greater mysteries are con- 
 cerned with regeneration, and, hence, with the 
 45 soul " ; and even if we assume the " soul " 
 to require a body, we are outside the region 
 of ordinary generation if that body is not the 
 physical body. The psycho-analytic interpreta- 
 tion suffers from this confinement of its text 
 to the physical body, since " the genuine myth 
 has first and foremost to do with the life of 
 the soul." 
 
 Another caution to remember is that reality 
 cannot be grasped with one faculty or with 
 several ; it requires them all. Only the whole 
 can grasp the whole. For this reason it is 
 impossible to " think " reality ; for though the 
 object of thought may be reality, all reality is
 
 PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND MYSTERIES 187 
 
 not to be thought. Similarly, it is impossible 
 to " feel "or to " will " or to " sense " reality; 
 completely. Each of these modes of experi- 
 encing reality reports us only a mode of reality, 
 and not the whole of it. Before we can say 
 certainly that a thing is true before, that is, 
 we can affirm a reality it must not only think 
 true, but feel true, sense true, and do true. 
 The pragmatic criterion that reports a thing 
 to be true because it works may be contradicted 
 by the intellectual criterion that reports a thing 
 to be true because it " thinks " true ; and when 
 these both agree in their report, their common 
 conclusion may fail to be confirmed by the 
 criterion of feeling that reports a thing to be 
 true when it " feels " true. It is from an 
 appreciation of the many-sided nature of truth, 
 and, consequently, from an appreciation of the 
 many faculties required to grasp it, that the 
 value set by the world on common sense is 
 derived. For common sense is the community, 
 of the senses or faculties ; in its outcome it is 
 the agreement of their reports. A thing is said 
 to be common sense when it satisfies the heart, 
 the mind, the emotion, and the senses ; when, 
 in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of 
 reality. Otherwise a statement may be logical, 
 it may be pleasing, it may be practical, it 
 may be obvious ; but only when it is all is it 
 really common sense. 
 
 But can we, with only our present faculties,
 
 i88 PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND MYSTERIES 
 
 however developed and harmonised, ever arrive 
 at reality? It may be that in the natural order 
 of things, humanity implies by definition a 
 certain state of ignorance, and that this state 
 is only to be transcended by the 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 
 developed the ideas of psycho-analysis to make 
 a fruitful parallel possible between them and 
 the ideas contained in Patanjali. Psycho- 
 analysis, as the name indicates, is more con- 
 cerned with analysis than with synthesis, and 
 ' Yoga," whose dominant idea is re-union or 
 synthesis, appears to be rather a complement 
 than an analogue of psycho-analysis in the 
 broad sense. Take, for example, the idea of 
 Yoga as a means to the re-union of the indi- 
 vidual with the world -soul : " Thou art That ;
 
 GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 189 
 
 Thou shalt become That." According to Jung, 
 this attempt at re-union may be nothing more 
 than a megalomaniac regressive introversion, 
 representing on a grand scale a return to the 
 mother and infantilism. Since it is separation 
 from the mother (actual and metaphorical), 
 that, in Jung's view, creates the basis of con- 
 sciousness, any attempt to become re -united 
 with the " mother " is an act of regression. 
 It is obvious from this dissonance of doctrine 
 that Yoga and psycho-analysis have not as yet 
 discovered any profound common ground ; in. 
 fact, in some respects they appear to be opposed. 
 I count myself among the increasing number 
 of enthusiastic students of psycho-analysis. It 
 is the hopeful science of the dawning era. No 
 new era appears to me to be possible without 
 it, and such a work as Dr. Ernest Jones's 
 Psycho- Analysis is one of the books most worth 
 buying at the present time. But it is elsewhere 
 that I find the best justification for my enthu- 
 siasm, in these words from an old Hermetic 
 text : " The beginning of perfection is gnosis 
 of man ; but gnosis of God is perfected per- 
 fection." 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
 
 igo GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 
 
 of despair unless at the point at which their 
 morality gives out, religion of some kind comes 
 to their aid. Psycho-analysis, I think it will 
 be found, is doomed, while it remains analysis, 
 to end in the same state of despair. It will 
 teach us all there is to be known about the 
 nature of man ; but the gnosis of man is not 
 satisfying. For it is only thereafter and when 
 man is transcended as an object of gnosis that 
 perfected perfection is possible. I would not, 
 however, hasten by a single impatient step this 
 second and completing phase of the process 
 of our learning. The gnosis of man is neces- 
 sary to the gnosis of God, and God can well 
 look after Himself and bide our time. Further- 
 more, a premature attempt to know God before 
 we are initiated into the mysteries of the gnosis 
 of man must be heavily paid for. Religion 
 without humanity is more dangerous than 
 humanity without religion. Let us then settle 
 down with concentrated attention to the problem 
 before us, the material and method of which 
 are to be found in psycho-analysis. We shall 
 be able to afford to whistle when we are 
 through that wood. 
 
 A CAMBRIDGE " COCOON." The new Cam- 
 bridge magazine, The Cocoon, cannot be 
 regarded as superfluous, the editors suggest,
 
 A CAMBRIDGE "COCOON" 191 
 
 since its point of view is unique. It is not 
 written by " theological " minds that '* esti- 
 mate affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas 
 and fixed beliefs," but by minds that^hold that 
 things " are capable of more than one truthful 
 interpretation." The second of these conten- 
 tions is true enough, but, unfortunately, the 
 new interpretations of The Cocoon, however 
 truthful, are trivial. Age, we are told, sees 
 the Moon as just a " heavenly body ", ; whereas 
 the youth who spin The Cocoon see the Moon 
 as " a wonderful cheese " or a prehistoric coin. 
 Age, again, looks at the Great Pyramid and 
 interprets it as a pyramidal structure ; but 
 our spinning youth interpret it as a " colossal 
 and awe-inspiring cube," with emphasis on the 
 awe. The difference between the interpretations 
 is, to my mind, all in favour of age. It may 
 be true that the Moon is translatable in terms 
 of cheese, and the Great Pyramid may really 
 be a cube, but the interpretations are without 
 interest or value. If The Cocoon had said 
 that the Moon might conceivably be the Devil, 
 or the Great Pyramids the psychic meeting - 
 place of the Rosicrucians, the new " inter- 
 pretation " might have had some interest. As 
 it is, we are back in the nursery, and not by 
 any means in the nursery of the race. The 
 earlier editorial affirmation is not even sense, 
 but a contradiction of sense. " To estimate 
 affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and
 
 192 A CAMBRIDGE "COCOON" 
 
 fixed beliefs," is not theological only, it is 
 only means of estimating at all. Things are 
 so and so, and the unchangeability of dogma 
 and fixity of belief are determined, or should 
 be, by the corresponding unchangeability and 
 fixity of things as they are. When we find 
 that the nature of things changes arbitrarily 
 from day to day, we may consider the advis- 
 ability of changing our belief that it is fixed 
 as rapidly as nature itself is transformed. 
 Otherwise, if anything we say is to be 
 " true," it must be because there is a fixed 
 and unchangeable nature to which our dogmas 
 and beliefs refer. The alternative is not youth 
 and imagination and " other truthful interpreta- 
 tions of things," it is nursery chatter about 
 cheese and pyramidal cubes. 
 
 Pass the articles on Balzac and D'Annunzio, 
 both of which might have been written by 
 Old Age or even by Middle Age, and let us 
 see how the state of mind calling itself Youth 
 deals with history. Remember that Cambridge, 
 where the Cocoons come from, regards itself as 
 " the nursery of the nation ".; and then listen 
 to Mr. L. J. Cheney, no doubt one of our 
 future representatives on the World-League, 
 preparing his programme. "It is stupid," he 
 says, " to write history or to study history, 
 on the assumption that we Western Europeans 
 are the salt of the earth." And Mr. H. Y. 
 Oulsham, on the same subject, remarks that
 
 A CAMBRIDGE "COCOON" 193 
 
 " we must keep the sociological aim of history, 
 in sight",; . . . "the be-all and end-all of 
 history is sociology." No wonder the Man- 
 chester Guardian the guardian, that is to say, 
 of Manchester found The Cocoon so promis- 
 ing, for the opinions expressed by Mr. Cheney 
 and Mr. Oulsham are embryos of Manchester 
 Guardian " leaders," they are so cosmopolitan 
 and so humanitarian. Apart, however, from 
 their extreme Age, bordering on decrepitude, 
 I find in them not even an unimportant 
 " truthful interpretation." It is not true that 
 sociology is the be-all and end-all of history 
 as it ought to be written ; and to deny, in the 
 name of history, that Western Europe is the 
 salt of the earth (however it may have lost its 
 savour) is just to deny and repudiate European 
 world-responsibility. Things, again, are so and 
 so, and not otherwise, let Youth interpret them 
 as it will. Europe is the responsible mind 
 of the world, and the be-all and end-all of 
 history is the fulfilment of a world-purpose 
 whose objective is more than merely human 
 sociology. If the " nursery of the nation " has 
 a different interpretation, the nursery of the 
 nation is wrong. 
 
 The Cocoon is under the impression that 
 there is something valuable in Youth in years^; 
 that Youth in years is the only kind of Youth ; 
 that Youth in years is Youth indeed. Our first 
 birth, however, is only a sleep and a forgetting, 
 
 13
 
 194 A CAMBRIDGE "COCOON" 
 
 and real Youth comes only after the second - 
 birth. The once -born are creatures of pure 
 circumstance, owing their youth to the accident 
 of time alone ; but the twice-born are self- 
 creations defying time ; they never grow old, 
 though they are always growing up. The 
 Cocoon fairly describes Youth as '' a condition 
 of energy and receptiveness "; but is Youth 
 in years necessarily of that kind? As for 
 receptiveness, we have already seen that the 
 " historians " of the " nursery of the nation " 
 either hark back or hark forward to ideas long 
 since dead. And as for " energy," barring 
 its animal manifestation in sport, the highest 
 culture demands the highest concentration of 
 energy, and where shall we find it but in the 
 twice-born? Whoever can make a turn upon 
 himself and his habits of thought is young, 
 whatever his years. On the other hand, who- 
 ever cannot be " bothered " to think afresh, 
 but contents himself with what he used to 
 think is old and lacking in energy, whatever his 
 years or his blues. 
 
 It is the fate of the once-born to become 
 pessimistic as they grow old, as it is privilege 
 of the twice-born to increase in hope as they 
 wax in youth. One of our Cocoonists, there- 
 fore, 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
 
 A CAMBRIDGE "COCOON" 195 
 
 for " the nursery of the nation," and it is 
 altogether untrue. Beautiful English prose has 
 certainly been written, but the best is yet to 
 be. Beautiful qualities of English prose we 
 have certainly had revealed to us in abundance, 
 and some of our greatest writers have succeeded 
 in making an anthology in their style of two 
 or three or even four of them ; but an English 
 prose with all its known qualities harmonised 
 and synthesised in a single style is a thing of 
 the future and not of the past. There are 
 qualities in English still unrevealed. A great 
 deal of " energy," however, will be necessary 
 to such a synthesis. Its creator must be not 
 only twice-born, but, as the Mahabharata says 
 of Indian sages, " blazing with spiritual 
 energy," for the fire of imagination to fuse 
 all the qualities of English prose into a style 
 is too intense for ordinary mortals. 
 
 AN OXFORD MISCELLANY. 4 Queen's Col- 
 lege Miscellany is filially dedicated to Walter 
 Pater and Ernest Dowson, both of whom, it 
 seems, were Queen's men in their day. Still 
 another association with these writers is sought 
 in the comparison of the college coterie from 
 which each arose with the group responsible 
 for the present miscellany. Something of the 
 nature of a cult is indicated ; and I take it
 
 196 AN OXFORD MISCELLANY 
 
 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 ominous for literature, we are re- 
 ferred 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 himself written either great prose or 
 'great poetry, and the greatest literary works 
 of the world, not excepting Shakespeare, are 
 of anonymous that is to say, of collective 
 authorship. The elevation of the group -con- 
 sciousness, however, is everything, and I need 
 not remark that a group whose highest aim is 
 to emulate Pater and Dowson, and whose con- 
 sidered " foreword " contains such termino- 
 logical ineptitudes as " team-work," " output," 
 and the " harvest " of a " refined product," 
 is not yet upon a very high plane of discourse. 
 
 THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE. A corre- 
 spondent has made the admirable suggestion 
 that a new Don Quixote be written to slay the 
 dragon of Capitalism with the pen of satire. 
 The suggestion is unconditionally free ; no ac-
 
 THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE 197 
 
 knowledgment of its source need be made ; 
 but anybody is at liberty to begin on the work 
 at once. Some excellent arguments are ad- 
 duced why the work should be undertaken. 
 Capitalism has long troubled the land, and its 
 evils are generally admitted. Reason has failed 
 to make any impression on the beast, and senti- 
 ment appears almost to be its favourite food. 
 Satire, therefore, is plainly indicated as the 
 appropriate weapon, and at its crack, my corre- 
 spondent suggests, the beast would dissolve into 
 nothing amidst universal laughter. What more 
 need be said but " Cervantes, forward I " ? 
 
 Unfortunately my correspondent proceeds to 
 weaken his appeal by affirming that Cervantes 
 himself had Capitalism in his mind when writ- 
 ing certain chapters of the First Book of Don 
 Quixote. In Chaps. 44 and 45 it appears to 
 me, he says, that Don Quixote's identity as a 
 capitalist is undoubted. Sancho Panza's 1 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 ex- 
 planation of the present financial position. .But 
 why of the " present " position, if satire is 
 capable of dissolving Capitalism in laughter? 
 Without questioning .the allegorical character of 
 the chapters referred to, which may, for all I 
 dare say, be a perfect anticipation of the
 
 198 THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE 
 
 economics of Douglas it is not encouraging to 
 our present-day Cervantes to be told that their 
 proposed method has already been tried by a 
 master only to leave the dragon of Capitalism 
 still to be tickled to death. Now one comes to 
 think of it, not even Chivalry, an even more 
 undoubted object than Capitalism of Cervantes 's 
 satire, really died of the shock, for the very 
 good reason that it was dead before Cervantes 
 rained his laughter upon it. Even Cervantes 's 
 satire killed nothing, and the task to be under- 
 taken for my correspondent is therefore greater 
 than Cervantes'. In the spirit of Squeers, I 
 can only suggest that he who spells window, 
 w-i-n-d-e-r, should clean it. My correspondent, 
 forward 1 
 
 The power of satire is usually much ex- 
 aggerated ; as a matter of fact, it is one of the 
 least effective of psychological weapons. Al- 
 most anything can turn its edge. Juvenal is 
 not reported to have done much more than incur 
 the dislike of his contemporaries ; and Swift, 
 the most serious satirist since Juvenal, never 
 effected anything by satire alone. His two 
 most immediately effective pamphlets, the 
 Drapier's Letters, and the Conduct of the 
 Allies, contained passages of satire, irony, and 
 every other sort of appeal, but neither of them 
 can be called satirical as a whole. Satire, 
 like wit, is effective in small doses given at 
 opportune moments ; but, as in the case of 
 
 S
 
 THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE 199 
 
 wit, sustained satire defeats its own object. It 
 owes what power it wields to the contrast in 
 which it stands to the prevailing mood of the 
 work in which it appears : its unexpected ap- 
 pearance therein. Surprise is the condition of 
 its doing any work at all. Surely if this were 
 not the case the satirical journals of, let us say, 
 Germany or France, would have dissolved in 
 laughter the vices aimed at long before now. 
 But satire is expected of them, is discounted 
 in advance, and positively adds to the at- 
 tractiveness of the objects satirised. I will not 
 go so far as to say that Cervantes recalled dead 
 Chivalry to life by satirising it, though the 
 crop of romances that followed Don Quixote 
 in England may almost be said to justify the 
 charge ; but it can safely be said that a satire 
 directed against Capitalism would lengthen 
 rather than contract the life of the dragon, by 
 adding amusement to its claims to exist. 
 
 THE " DIAL " OF AMERICA.' The American 
 Dial is perhaps the most fully realised of all 
 the promising literary magazines now current 
 in the world. It is in all probability 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
 
 200 THE "DIAL" OF AMERICA 
 
 its existence, in the interests of civilisation ; 
 for civilisation is the child of culture, and has 
 in general as little consideration for culture as 
 a human child for its own education. The 
 custodians of culture (or the disinterested pur- 
 suit of human perfection) are the adults of 
 the race of which civilisation is the children's 
 school : and, fortunately or unfortunately, in 
 these democratic days, their function is largely 
 under the control of their pupils. Gone are the 
 times when a Brahmanic caste can lay down 
 and enforce a curriculum of education for its 
 civilisation. Modern civilisations believe them- 
 selves to be, and possibly are, " old enough " 
 to exercise their right of selecting their 
 teachers. It cannot be said, as yet, that they 
 exercise: their choice with remarkable discretion, 
 but the process of popular self -education, if 
 slow, may at any rate be expected to be sure. 
 In any event there is no use in kicking against 
 the stars. If the forces of culture are to rule 
 modern civilisations, they must do so con- 
 stitutionally. The days of the dictatorship of 
 the intelligentzia are past. 
 
 There are two kinds of judgment which it 
 is essential for civilisation to acquire : judg- 
 ment of men and judgment of things. Things 
 are of primary importance, but so also are 
 persons. One is not before or after the other. 
 For instance, culture itself is a " thing " in 
 the philosophic sense ; it is a reality in
 
 THE "DIAL" OF AMERICA 201 
 
 the world of ideas ; but of quite equal im- 
 portance in our mixed world of ideas and in- 
 dividuals, are the actual persons and personali- 
 ties claiming to embody and direct culture. 
 Hence the transcendent importance of criticism 
 next to creation in both spheres : criticism of 
 personalities and criticism of "works." The 
 mistaking of a little man for a great man, 
 or the reverse, may easily mean the delay of 
 the work of culture for whole generations. 
 And, equally, the confusion of the objects of 
 culture with the objects of civilisation may spell 
 the ruin of a nation. Few critics realise the 
 magnitude and responsibility of their function, 
 or the degree to which personal disinterested- 
 ness is indispensable to its fulfilment. Hold- 
 ing the office of inspectors of the munitions 
 of culture, they are often guilty of " passing " 
 contraband upon the public, and, still more 
 often, of failing to ensure delivery of Culture's 
 most effective weapons. More seriousness is 
 needed, very much more, in matters of 
 criticism. We must be capable of killing if 
 we are to be capable of giving life. 
 
 The Dial is particularly to be praised for 
 its courageous criticism of great dead 
 Americans. America, like Europe, suffers from 
 necrophily, a kind of worship of the dead. 
 Indeed, as a good Injun was synonymous with 
 a dead Injun, a great American writer is 
 usually a dead American writer. All his faults
 
 202 THE "DIAL" OF AMERICA 
 
 die with him, and only his myth remains, vith 
 the result that people who would not have 
 acknowledged the existence of, let us say, 
 Whitman living, will not acknowledge a fault 
 in Whitman dead. For a nation thus under a 
 critical statute of Mortmain, the utterance of 
 what seems like blasphemy is a necessary part 
 of their education. They must know that the 
 dead great, by very virtue of their greatness 
 and the survival of their works, are still alive 
 and active, and that the same kind of criticism 
 must be kept playing on them as upon the 
 living forces. The Dial reviewers show no 
 disposition to shirk this unpleasing duty. One 
 by one, as the occasion suggests, the dead 
 great are given the honour of living criticism, 
 and treated as the immortal present which they 
 are. Since their spirits go marching on, 
 criticism must go marching along with them. 
 One of the recently so honoured dead in the 
 pages of the Dial has been Whitman ; and 
 in an essay on Whitman's Love Affairs Mr. 
 Emery Holloway throws a fresh light on an 
 old but still obscure subject. His " love 
 affairs " were obviously more matter for 
 criticism in Whitman than in some other 
 writers, since Whitman was pre-eminently an 
 autobiographical writer who sang himself. 
 What, then, does Mr. Holloway find? A little 
 surprisingly at least to readers who have not 
 already divined Whitman's secret that Whit-
 
 THE "DIAL" OF AMERICA 203 
 
 man " suffered " from love, and struggled 
 against it rather as a raw tyro than as the 
 " master of himself " of his poetic fiction. In 
 some private diaries of Whitman, quoted by 
 Mr. Holloway, we are presented with the 
 spectacle of Whitman grappling with his own 
 soul after the manner of saints mortifying the 
 flesh, or, as I would suggest, after the dis- 
 tinctively modern fashion. .Instinct was at war 
 with reason, even in Whitman, and, in the 
 end, as usually occurs with modern men, it 
 was reason that won. Mr. Holloway divides 
 Whitman's works between two periods : the 
 first, in which he sang " untrammelled natural 
 impulses " ; and a second, in which he was 
 concerned about democracy and the immortality 
 of the soul ; in short, with reason. And be- 
 tween these two periods, or worlds of discourse, 
 Mr. Holloway tells us, was a purgatory, in 
 which Whitman's soul was tried as by fire. 
 The diaries already mentioned contain some 
 of the records of Whitman's conflict with him- 
 self. Here, for example, is an entry bearing 
 all the marks of a painful resolution. " I must," 
 he says, " pursue her no more "... and re- 
 solve " to give up absolutely and for good, 
 from this present hour, the feverish, fluctuating, 
 useless, undignified pursuit of 1 64 ... 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,
 
 204 THE "DIAL" OF AMERICA 
 
 what Whitman must have gone through in 
 imagination and reality to confide to the author 
 of Leaves of Grass such a shocking confession. 
 He emerged from the experience with that past 
 behind him, but still, I think, unresolved. For 
 it was not his to reconcile instinct with reason 
 in an epigenesis ; he passed from one phase 
 to the next without carrying his sheaves with 
 him. From being within sight of real great- 
 ness, he declined to the stature of a great 
 American. 
 
 Following its faithful treatment of the Whit- 
 man 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 cor- 
 rupt ; does he succumb to falsehood and to 
 the morality of the herd? Even so his nation 
 is on the downward path. On the other hand, 
 does he maintain his integrity, even though 
 his life should pay for it ? There is a sign that 
 his nation also will battle through. From this 
 point of view, Mark Twain presents the 
 spectacle both of a tragedy and a portent. 
 Nobody can read his works without realising 
 the essential truthfulness of the man, his mar- 
 vellous capacity for intellectual honesty, his un- 
 erring perception of the norm of things. Mark
 
 THE "DIAL" OF AMERICA 205 
 
 Twain, permitted and encouraged to pass free 
 judgment upon American and human life, 
 might have been one of the cultural forces 
 of the new world ; he was one of God's best 
 gifts to America. We know, however, what 
 America did for Mark Twain ; it slowly but 
 surely emasculated him in the supposed in- 
 terests of the female (not the feminine) in the 
 American soul. Under the influence of his 
 wife who, as he said, not only " edited every- 
 thing I wrote, but edited me," under the similar 
 influence of all that was bourgeois in America 
 Mark Twain consented to " make fun " of 
 everything he held dear. Talents and powers 
 which it is spiritual death to trade, Mark Twain 
 prostituted for the amusement of a people 
 whose deepest need was high seriousness. As 
 Mr. Lovett says, Mark Twain " flattered a 
 country without art, letters, beauty or standards 
 to laugh at these things." The judgment is 
 severe, but it is just ; and Mark Twain, I 
 believe, would be the first to acquiesce in it. 
 That he preserved, in the back of his mind, 
 his spiritual vision and knowledge, there can 
 be no doubt. He sinned not only against 
 the light, but in the light. One or two reveal- 
 ing phrases in his works have escaped the 
 censorship of the female American he married. 
 " In our country," he said, " we have three 
 unspeakably precious things : freedom of 
 thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence
 
 206 THE "DIAL" OF AMERICA 
 
 never to practise either." It must be admitted 
 that this is a " snag " in the smooth current 
 of a work of amusement ; it betokened the 
 existence of depths and danger. But it is 
 nothing to the remarks let off in conversation 
 on the rare occasions when the censor was 
 absent. "I've a good mind/' he once said 
 to a friend, " to blow the gaff on the whole 
 damned human race." It is tragedy, indeed, 
 that he never did. We have the gaff blown 
 on us all too seldom, and usually by men whose 
 idiosyncrasies and abnormalities allow us to 
 ignore them. Mark Twain was such a normal 
 man that his blowing of the gaff could not 
 possibly have been attributed to a neurotic 
 complex derived from infantile suppression : it 
 would have been the judgment of man upon 
 Man. His failure to bestow this inestimable 
 gift upon America and the world we owe to 
 America, and if, as I have said, a nation 
 suffers the fate of its great men, we may be 
 sure that America will pay for it. 
 
 AMERICA REGRESSING. Just when we in 
 Europe were beginning to envy America her 
 promise, contrasting it with the winter of our 
 own discontent, " the authorities " -(as one 
 might say the furies, the parcae or the weird
 
 AMERICA REGRESSING 207 
 
 sisters) have descended upon our unfortunate 
 but deserving friend, the Little Review, and 
 suspended its mail service on account of its 
 publication of a chapter of Mr. James Joyce's 
 new novel, Ulysses. That such an absurd act 
 of puritanic spleen should be possible after and 
 before years of world-war is evidence that 
 spiritual meanness is hard to transcend ; and 
 it confirms the justice or, at least, the appre- 
 hension expressed in Mr. Ezra Pound's bon mot 
 that the U.S.A. should be renamed the 
 Y.M.C.A. Not only is the Little Review 
 perfectly harmless ; would to heaven, indeed, 
 that it were, or could be otherwise, for never 
 can any good be done by something incapable 
 of doing harm ; but the Ulysses of Mr. James 
 Joyce is one of the most interesting symptoms 
 in the present literary world, and its publication 
 is very nearly a public obligation. Such sin- 
 cerity, 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. Abound- 
 ing in every variety of crime and stupidity 
 as America is, even if Ulysses were a literary 
 crime committed in a journal of the largest 
 circulation, one more or less could not make 
 much difference to America. But Ulysses is
 
 208 AMERICA REGRESSING 
 
 no crime ; but a noble experiment ; and its 
 suppression will sadden the virtuous at the same 
 time that it gratifies the base. America, we 
 my be sure, is not going to " get culture " 
 by stamping upon every germ of new life. 
 America's present degree of cultural toleration 
 may ensure a herb-garden, but not a flower 
 will grow upon the soil of Comstock. 
 
 Among the scores of interesting experiments 
 in composition and style exhibited in Ulysses, 
 not the least novel is Mr. Joyce's attempt to 
 develop a theory bf 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 skyb rightly." In 
 such a sentence agglutination has been carried 
 beyond the ordinary level of particles into the 
 plane of words, and the effect is to present a 
 multitude of images as if they were one. Thus 
 " a new and complex knowledge of self " finds 
 its " appropriate medium of expression in terms 
 of art." I am not so sure that Mr. Joyce has 
 not carried the experiment too far, but this, 
 again, is a virtue rather than a defect in a 
 pioneer. Moreover, the world needs a few 
 studio-magazines like the Little Review, and 
 a few studio writers like Mr. James Joyce. 
 What does it matter if, in his enthusiasm, Mr. 
 Joyce travels beyond the limits of good taste,
 
 AMERICA REGRESSING 209 
 
 beyond, that is, the already cultivated, if only 
 a single new literary convention is thereby 
 brought into common use? 
 
 THE BEST is YET TO BE." One dreams 
 of a prose," says The Times Literary Supple- 
 ment, " that has never yet been written in 
 English, though the language is made for it 
 and there are minds not incapable of it, a prose 
 dealing with the greatest things quietly and 
 justly as men deal with them in their secret 
 meditations . . . the English Plato is still to 
 be. Alas, however, that The Times should be 
 just a little misled, for the " quiet " of imedita- 
 tion is not the real genius of the English 
 language, and the emphasis in the phrase, 
 " English Plato," should be on the word 
 English. Greek Plato translated into English 
 would not give us what we are seeking. What 
 we need is Plato's mind. It is characteristic, 
 however, this demand for quiet, or, rather, 
 quietism, in The Times Literary Supplement, 
 since, on the whole, the Supplement is about 
 the deadest mouse in the world of journalism. 
 Above all, it is suggested, writers must keep 
 their voices low, speak in whispers, even, 
 perhaps, a little under their breath as if in 
 meditation, in case well, in case of what? 
 Is there not a hush in the Literary Supplement 
 
 14
 
 210 THE BEST IS YET TO BE 
 
 which is not the hush of reverence for litera- 
 ture, but of fear and prudence ? 
 
 Our writer observes very acutely that prose 
 is usually thought greatest when it is nearest 
 poetry, and he properly dissents from this 
 common opinion. Prose, we should say, can 
 only be great as it differs from poetry, and 
 the greatest prose is furthest away from poetry. 
 And the difference, we are told, is the difference 
 between love and justice. The cardinal virtue 
 of poetry, he says, is love, while the cardinal 
 virtue of prose is justice. May we not rather 
 say that the difference is one of plane of con- 
 sciousness, prose being at the highest level of 
 the rational mind, and poetry at the highest 
 level of the spiritual mind? Yes, but then, 
 in all probability, The Times would regard 
 us as fanciful, for note, anything exact about 
 spiritual things is likely to be dismissed by 
 the Literary Supplement as fanciful and 
 dangerous. Again, " prose is the achieve- 
 ment of civilisation " ; in other words, it is 
 the norm of social life. True, but let me add 
 that it is the register of Culture, marking the 
 degree to which Culture has affected its sur- 
 rounding civilisation. Prose without poetry is 
 impossible, and the greatest prose presupposes 
 the culture of the greatest poetry, for the 
 "justice" of prose is only the "love" of 
 poetry with seeing eyes. Finally, we must 
 agree with our essayist when he quotes with
 
 THE BEST IS YET TO BE 211 
 
 approval the excellent observation of Mr. Sturge 
 Moore that " simplicity may be a form of 
 decadence." Simplicity is a sign of decadence 
 when it sacrifices profundity of thought to sim- 
 plicity of expression as in the classical case 
 of Voltaire, who positively dared not think 
 deeply lest he should be unable to write clearly, 
 clarity of expression being more to him (and 
 often to the French genius generally) than 
 depth of thought. And writers like Mr. 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 profound simplicity, the style of which is 
 transparent over depths ; and in this, if no 
 English writer has ever been a master, Lao 
 Tse is the world's model, at least in fragments. 
 'We must learn to distinguish between a puerile 
 and a virile simplicity, between innocence and 
 virtue ; and perhaps the first exercise in such' 
 judgment should be to put the Literary 
 Supplement in its proper place. 
 
 This brings us back to quietism and the 
 question whether the perfect English prose 
 would deal with the highest things in the spirit 
 of man's secret meditations. I do more than 
 doubt it. Secret meditation is incommunicably 
 secret ; it is thought without words, and dis- 
 posed to poetry rather than prose. I suspect 
 our writer really means rumination, in which 
 case, however, he is no better off. For the
 
 212 THE BEST IS YET TO BE 
 
 genius of the language does not run easily 
 in reverie, it is a language that loves action 
 and life. It has few cloistered virtues, and 
 to employ it for cloistered thought would be 
 to use only one or two of its many stops, and 
 those not the most characteristic. Lastly, I 
 cannot but think that the choice of " quietism " 
 as the aim of perfect English prose is a sign 
 of decadence, for it indicates the will to retire 
 into oneself, and to cease to " act " by means 
 of words. The scene it calls up is familiar 
 and bourgeois : a small circle of " cultured " 
 men week-ending in a luxurious country 
 house and confessing " intimately " their 
 literary weaknesses. It is the prevalent atmo- 
 sphere of the Literary Supplement and the 
 Spectator. It is essential that there be 
 " equality " between them, that none should 
 presume to wish to inspire another to any 
 " new way of life," that action, in short, should 
 be excluded. Once granted these conditions 
 of sterility, and the perfect prose, we are told, 
 would emerge. 
 
 The rest of us, however, have a very different 
 conception of the perfect English prose. The 
 perfect English prose will be anything but a 
 sedative after a full meal of action. It will 
 be not only action itself, but the cause of 
 action, and its deliberate aim will be to intensify 
 and refine action and to raise action to the 
 level of a fine art. Anything less than a
 
 THE BEST IS YET TO BE 213 
 
 real effect upon real people in a real world is 
 beneath the dignity even of common prose. 
 The very " leaders " in the penny journals aim 
 at leaving a mark upon events. Is the perfect 
 prose to be without hope of posterity ? On 
 second thoughts, I shall withdraw Plato from 
 the position of model in which I put him. 
 Plato, it is evident, is likely to be abused ; 
 without intending it, his mood, translated into 
 English, appears to be compatible only with 
 luxurious ease ; he is read by modern Epi- 
 cureans. And I shall put in Plato's place 
 Demosthenes, the model of Swift, the greatest 
 English writer the world has yet seen. Yes, 
 Demosthenes let it be, since Plato is being used 
 for balsam. We seek an English Demosthenes.
 
 Index 
 
 Adonais, 178 
 
 "jE," H7-34 
 
 Andrews, Francis, 176 
 
 Anglo-Irish Essays (John 
 Eglinton), 74 
 
 Apology, The (Plato), 97 
 
 Appreciations and Deprecia- 
 tions (Boyd), 76 
 
 Archer, William, 59 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 82 
 
 Art and Letters, 136 
 
 Asquith, H. H., 68 
 
 Athen&um, The, 70 
 
 Baring, Maurice, 27 
 
 Beardsley, Aubrey, 115 
 
 Beerbohm, Max, 23 
 
 Bell, Clive, 72 
 
 Benda, Julien, 81 
 
 Beyond Good and Evil 
 (Nietzsche). 133 
 
 Bhagavad Gita, The, 44, 112 
 
 Biographia Lileraria (Cole- 
 ridge), 69 
 
 Bjornson, B., 29 
 
 Blake, William, 134 
 
 Boutroux, Emile, 69 
 
 Boyd, E. A., 76 
 
 Breaking the Spell (Macan), 
 90 
 
 Brock, A. Glutton, 211 
 
 Caine, Hall, 28 
 
 Call, The, 165 
 
 Candle of Vision, The (" IE ' ). 
 117 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 36 
 
 Causes profondes de la Guerre, 
 Les (Hovelaque), 155 
 
 Cervantes, 197 
 
 Cheney, L. J., 192 
 
 Chesterton, G. K., 60, 155 
 
 Cicero, 96 
 
 Clarte Franfaise, La (Van- 
 nier), 65 
 
 Cocoon, The, 191 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 29, 35, 69 
 
 Conrad, Joseph, 27 
 
 Contemporary Drama of Ire- 
 land (Boyd), 76 
 
 Contingency of the Laws of 
 Nature, The (Boutroux), 
 69 
 
 Cratylus, The (Plato), 130 -_ 
 
 Crees, G., 20 
 
 Daily Mail, The, 89 
 
 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 96 
 
 De Quincey, 95 
 
 Dial, The, 199 
 
 Distribution of Wealth, The 
 
 (Thompson), 162 
 Dodd, Professor, 181 
 
 215
 
 2l6 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 196 
 Dostoievski, F., 28 
 Douglas, C. H., 198 
 Dowson, Ernest, 173, 195 
 Drapier's Letters, The (Swift), 
 
 96, 198 
 Dublin Review, The, 161 
 
 " Eglinton, John," 74 
 
 Egyptian Book of the Dead, 
 1 68 
 
 Ellis, Henry, 134 
 
 Epstein, Jacob, 46 
 
 Ervine, St. John, 76 
 
 Essay on Comedy, An (Mere- 
 dith ), 1 68 
 
 Euphues, 6 1 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 139 
 
 Flaubert, G., 65 
 
 Flight of the Eagle, The 
 (Standish O'Grady), 79 
 
 Fontenelle, 15 
 
 Fowler, Warde, 88 
 
 French Literary Studies (Rud- 
 mose-Brown), 73 
 
 Freud, Professor, 127 
 
 Funeral Oration, The (Peri- 
 cles), 66 
 
 Garnett, Edward, 27 
 Gaudier-Brzeska, 46 
 Gwynn, Stephen, 75 
 
 Hales, Professor, 49 
 Harland, Henry, 23 
 Haumont, M., 27 
 
 Heraclitus, 39 
 
 Herford, Professor C. H., 167 
 
 Hoare, ., 179 
 
 Hobbes of Malmesbury, 67 
 
 Holloway, Emery, 202 
 
 Homage to Propertius(Poun.d) , 
 
 49 
 
 Homeland (Izzard), 89 
 Hope, John Francis, 168 
 Hovelaque, M., 155 
 Hudson, W. H., 88 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik, 29 
 International Journal of 
 
 Ethics, The, 36 
 Irish Books and Irish People 
 
 (Gwynn), 75 
 Irish Citizen, The, 166 
 Izzard, P. W. D., 89 
 
 James, Henry, 22-7 
 Jones, Dr. Ernest, 189 
 Jonson, Ben, 98 
 Jowett, B., 67 
 Joyce, James, 47, 207 
 Jung, Professor, 185, 189 
 Juvenal, 198 
 
 Kautsky, K., 33 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 178 
 Kossova : Heroic Songs of the 
 Serbs (Rootham), 171 
 
 Landor, W. S., 15 
 
 Lawrence, D. H., 23 
 
 Lay Sermons (Coleridge), 35
 
 INDEX 
 
 217 
 
 Leaves oj Grass (Whitman), 
 
 204 
 
 Leuba, Professor, 114 
 Levy, Dr. Oscar, 40 
 Lewis, Wyndham, 47, 52 
 Little Review, The, 22, 47, 52, 
 
 63, 207 
 
 Lockhart's Life of Scott, 16 
 London Mercury, The, 152, 
 
 176 
 
 Lovett, R. A., 205 
 Lycidas, 178 
 Lyttelton, Dr., 17 
 
 Macan, Dr., 90 
 Mackenna, Stephen, 29 
 Mahabharata, The, 30, 135, 
 
 168, 195 
 Manchester Guardian, The, 
 
 193 
 
 Mann, Henry, 156 
 Martyn, Edward, 77 
 Marx, Karl, 33, 161-7 
 Mayne, Ethel Coburn, 22 
 Mead, G. R. S., 68, 112, 185 
 Menger, Dr., 162 
 Meredith, George, 20, 168, 
 
 178 
 Middle Years, The (Henry 
 
 James), 24 
 Mitchel, John, 166 
 Moore, T. Sturge, 211 
 Morris, William, 167 
 
 New Age, The, 86 
 Newman, Henry, 155 
 
 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 37- 
 4i. 53, 55, 133 
 
 O'Grady, Standish, 79-81 
 Oulsham, H. Y., 192 
 
 Patanjali, 132, 188 
 
 Pater, Walter, 195 
 
 Pericles, 66 
 
 Plato, 130, 209 
 
 Plotinus, 29 
 
 Poems and Prose (Dowson), 
 
 i?3 
 
 Pot-boilers (Clive Bell), 70 
 Pound, Ezra, 15, 49, 52-63. 
 
 104, 207 
 Pound, Ezra : His Metric and 
 
 Poetry, 57 
 Propertius, 49 
 Psycho-Analysis (Dr. Ernest 
 
 Jones), 189 
 
 Queen's College Miscellany, 
 
 A, 195 
 Quest, The, 68, ui 
 
 Rahilly, Professor A., 162 
 Randall, A. E., 112 
 Richardson, Samuel, 139 
 Rootham, Helen, 171 
 Rosebery, Lord, 68 
 Rousseau, J. J., 38 
 Rudmose-Brown, Professor, 
 
 73 
 Russell, Bertrand, 34
 
 2l8 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Sayings and Stories (Hoare), 
 
 179 
 
 Scdlak, Francis, 35 
 Selected Essays and Passages 
 
 (Standish O'Grady), 80 
 Sentiments de Critias, Les 
 
 (Benda), 81 
 Sentimental Journey, A 
 
 (Sterne), 92 
 
 Shakespeare, 60, 91, 151, 154 
 Shankara, 30 
 Shaw, G. Bernard, 82 
 Song of Songs, 172 
 Soundy, W. Mattingly, 64 
 Spectator, The, 211 
 Squire, J. C., 152 
 Stendhal, 95 
 Sterne, Laurence, 92 
 Stewart, Herbert, 36 
 Strachey, Lytton, 63 
 Swift, Benjamin, 95, 198 
 Symons, Arthur, 115, 173 
 
 Thompson, William, 162 
 Thoreau, H. D., 74 
 Times, The, 45, 145, 153 
 
 Times Literary Supplement, 
 
 The, 143, 160, 209 
 Tom Jones (Fielding), 140 
 Turgenev, 27 
 Twain, Mark, 204 
 Tweed, John, 45 
 
 Ulysses (Joyce), 47, 207 
 
 Vannier, M M 65 
 Vaughan, Henry, 184 
 Venture, The, 175 
 Voltaire, 211 
 Vyasa, 30 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 103 
 Wells, H. G., 36 
 Whitman, Walt, 38, 202 
 Whitman's Love Affairs 
 
 (Holloway), 202 
 Wilde, Oscar, 55 
 Wordsworth, William, 119 
 
 Yeats, W. B., 134 
 Yellow Book, The, 23 
 
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