{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_65992/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_65992","id":"gutenberg_65992","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65992","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Art","Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism"],"text":"PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS\n\n\n\n\n_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_\n\n\n  A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING: STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE.\n      1909\n\n  EDGAR ALLAN POE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1910\n\n  THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN. 1911\n\n  OSCAR WILDE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1912\n\n\n\n\n  PORTRAITS\n\n  AND\n\n  SPECULATIONS\n\n  BY\n\n  ARTHUR RANSOME\n\n  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED\n  ST. MARTIN\u2019S STREET, LONDON\n  1913\n\n\n\n\n_Copyright_\n\n\n\n\n  TO\n\n  JOHN MASEFIELD\n\n\n\n\nNOTE\n\n\nOf the Essays in this book, \u201cArt for Life\u2019s Sake\u201d appeared in _The\nEnglish Review_; \u201cThe Poetry of Yone Noguchi,\u201d[1] \u201cRemy de Gourmont,\u201d\nand \u201cAloysius Bertrand\u201d in _The Fortnightly Review_; \u201cKinetic and\nPotential Speech,\u201d in _The Oxford and Cambridge Review_. The papers\non Daudet and Copp\u00e9e were prefixed to collections of stories by these\nwriters: I thank the publishers, Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack, for\npermission to reproduce them here.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n                                                                    PAGE\n  ART FOR LIFE\u2019S SAKE                                                  1\n\n  ALOYSIUS BERTRAND                                                   35\n\n  ALPHONSE DAUDET                                                     57\n\n  THE RETROSPECTION OF FRAN\u00c7OIS COPP\u00c9E                                71\n\n  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE                                                 87\n\n  WALTER PATER                                                       129\n\n  REMY DE GOURMONT                                                   161\n\n  THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI                                         187\n\n  KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH                                       207\n\n\n\n\nART FOR LIFE\u2019S SAKE\n\n\n\n\nART FOR LIFE\u2019S SAKE\n\n\nIt is not yet fifty years since one or two men of genius, followed\npresently by a score of men of talent, noisier, shriller in voice than\nthemselves, preached a theory of art new in this country, shocking to\nour prejudices at that time, and imported from some French artists and\nfrom a German philosopher. This was the doctrine of art for art\u2019s sake.\nBaudelaire had written: \u201cPoetry ... has no other end than itself; it\ncan have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly\nworthy of the name of a poem, as that which has been written solely\nfor the pleasure of writing a poem.\u201d Whistler, that butterfly of\nletters, who had borrowed his sting from the wasp, directed it with gay\ndespair against the granite face of the British public. Rossetti and,\nwith certain qualifications, Pater, illustrated the theory in their\npractice, as Whistler did also; and Wilde, a little later than they,\nremarked: \u201cAll art is quite useless,\u201d and \u201cThere is no such thing as a\nmoral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That\nis all.\u201d\n\nWith this doctrine of art for art\u2019s sake we are now dissatisfied. We\nobject to it, not for the sake of \u201cmorality,\u201d against which it was\npartly directed, nor yet for the sake of \u201cnature,\u201d but for the sake of\nart, whose function it limits rather than glorifies. We have seen the\nschool of art, if we may speak of a school of art, that carried the\nbanner on which those words were inscribed, tire and fall away as the\nnineteenth century drew to its close, until now the tattered banner,\nwith words almost illegible, is carried only by a schoolboy who joined\nthe procession late and marches on, unconscious that the parade is\nover, that he is marching alone, and that nobody is looking at him.\nYet the demonstration was successful; its promoters, who stitched\nthe banner with gaiety, hope, and defiance, themselves painted and\nwrote fine things, and men are working to-day whose work would have\nbeen impossible if, in the course of its march, that small, daring\nprocession had not walked seven times round a city of Jericho and blown\nsilver trumpets under its walls.\n\nSome battle-cries are no more than an irrelevant but inspiriting noise.\nMost of them, however, are related to something fought for, (St. George\nand Merry England!), something that, it is hoped, will superintend\nthe fight (God with us!), or something that is fought against (A bas\nMarat!). The knight who shouted, \u201cTwo red roses across the moon\u201d on a\nsultry day when--\n\n   \u201c... the battle was scattered from hill to hill\n    From the windmill to the watermill.\u201d\n\nmay have been incomprehensible to his enemies, but was not\nincomprehensible to himself, and \u201cArt for Art\u2019s sake!\u201d forty and fifty\nyears ago, a surprising, rather ridiculous phrase in the ears of the\nearly Victorians who then survived, was something very different for\nthe men who were fighting to destroy a petrified mental attitude\ntowards art in general. We must first understand what they fought\nagainst before we have the right to speak of the meaning of their\nbattle-cry.\n\nThey fought, primarily, against a moral valuation of art. They fought,\nsecondly, against \u201cnature\u201d ... against, that is to say, a crude\nconception of the relation between nature and art; against, to put\nthat crude conception in its crudest form, the supposition that he\nwho looked at a picture could find something in the external world,\nby its resemblance to which the picture should be judged. It would\nbe a fascinating task to show that the too faithful imitation of\nexternal things is an impediment to the highest functions of art, and,\non the other hand, that imitation in some kind, in some degree, is\nan essential part of that function. But I do not wish to be tempted\ninto discussion of the true relation between art and nature, though a\nsolution of that problem will, perhaps, suggest itself to those who\nread this paper to its end. I am here chiefly interested in art\u2019s\nrelation to ourselves. Nature for the moment is outside the discussion,\nthough, in justice to the artists for art\u2019s sake, I must point out\nthat their revolt was not against \u201cmorality\u201d alone. When we hear\nWilde\u2019s gay proclamation that \u201cLife imitates Art far more than Art\nimitates Life,\u201d we must take care to hear also, from Whistler, more\nserious, that \u201cNature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all\npictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music,\u201d and that\nthe artist \u201cin all that is dainty and lovable ... finds hints for his\nown combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at\nhis service, and to him is nought refused.\u201d We must not imagine that\nthe revolt was merely playful.\n\nAgainst \u201cnature\u201d and against \u201cmorality.\u201d In an age when the painter of\n\u201cDerby Day\u201d assisted Ruskin by saying that he could not \u201csee anything\nof the true representation of water and atmosphere in the painting of\n\u201cBattersea Bridge,\u201d they upheld the superiority of art to \u201cnature.\u201d\nIn an age when Dickens was praised for his reforms of the workhouse\nand blamed for his love of low life, when novelists were judged by the\ndeeds, no, by the manners of the persons of their fiction, when poets\nwere judged by their private lives, they protested the irrelevance\nof all such things to the question at issue, which was the goodness\nor badness of the work of art to be judged. We must not blame their\nformula, but the ideas against which it was directed, for the bad\nmanners, the morality that they hoped would be regarded as immorality,\nfor the unpublishable private lives, that were the excesses after\nvictory. We may, perhaps, smile as we observe how accurately they\nbalance those other excesses against which they were a reaction.\n\nThe question, no longer how to conquer, became how to use the victory,\nand we had the common spectacle of veterans and retired camp-followers\ntrying to live up to the battle-cry of their youth, and, unable to\nfree themselves from the habit of their excesses, committing these\nexcesses with less and less gusto and more and more skill. But skill,\neven so acquired, is not valueless. The battle-cry, after opening a\nprimrose path to charlatans, after turning \u201cmorality\u201d into \u201cimmorality\u201d\nas a spectre ruling over art, remained the stimulus to an improved\ntechnique, a scrupulousness, an economy of effect, a delicacy in\nthe handling of material, a care for melody and counterpoint, an\nintolerance of careless workmanship, for which for a long time it will\nbe our privilege to be grateful.\n\nArt, however, cannot live by perfection of technique alone, nor yet by\nthe repetition of remembered excesses. A new generation of artists,\nworking in a new environment, inspired by new aims, and threatened\nby new dangers, requires a new formula, or a restatement of the old.\nThese artists of our own generation look at the faded banner with the\nremains of reverence, or, in their dislike of the mistakes it made\npossible, with a suspicion of contempt. In the turbulence of valuations\nin this century, in the different, sharply defined attitudes of men\non such questions as property, labour, capital, the position of women\nin the State, marriage, education, or the Church, they see a herd of\nconflicting moralities. Involved in one or other of these conflicts,\nperhaps in many of them, they cannot but believe, suspect, or hope that\nart also must speak for or against, as tribune or as patrician, as\nChurchman or as secularist, and, if the conflict be important to them,\nthe excellence of an artist must seem to be determined, at least in\npart, by the views that he expresses. How then can art \u201chave nothing to\ndo with morality\u201d? They are, however, sufficiently critical to see that\nit is possible that a work of art may be good for a democrat, bad for\nan aristocrat, and yet, somehow, good in itself. Was there something in\n\u201cArt for Art\u2019s sake\u201d after all?\n\nOf the men whose names I mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay\none had founded his views on those of a philosopher, and so, whatever\nmay be his rank among those dogmatists, we are able to examine the\nbackground of reasoning on which he saw his own dogmatic statements. It\nis in that reasoning, and not in the cheerful taunts of the battlefield\nthat we are likely to learn how it was that the formula of \u201cArt for\nArt\u2019s sake\u201d seemed to be justified, and how it is that the formula is\nfundamentally inadequate. Baudelaire\u2019s proclamation, Pater\u2019s practice,\nWhistler\u2019s blue-feathered, silver-tipped darts point us to no analysis.\nThe analysis that made Wilde\u2019s paradoxes possible is open to our view\nin the pages of Kant.\n\nNow Kant said that what was called beautiful was the object of a\ndelight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate\nreference to our own circumstances or possible circumstances, so far\nfrom being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our\njudgment. Upon our judgment of what? The beautiful. How many crimes\nhas that word committed, how many discussions it has obscured, how\nmany it has closed at the very moment of their fertility. Not the\nleast of its knaveries has been this substitution of a condition of\nart for the function of art, which, as I hope to show, is life itself.\nA work of art suggests the achievement of the beautiful. That may be\nits immediate object. It is not its ultimate object. It may be an\nessential condition. It is not a function. Art for art\u2019s sake means the\nsubstitution of condition for function, and, as the beautiful can never\nbe a function of anything, the implicit denial that art has a function\nat all. \u201cAll art is quite useless.\u201d\n\nBut that is not what we believe. And the reason why the theorists of\nart for art\u2019s sake were both right and wrong was that they did not want\nart for the sake of anything irrelevant to the artistic phenomenon, but\nwere a little ungenerous in their interpretation of that phenomenon.\nThey saw that moralities, private lives, reforms, interests, had\nnothing to do with the attempted achievement of the condition of the\nbeautiful, but, having seen that, forgot, in their hurry for battle,\nthat the work of art persists beyond this achievement or attempted\nachievement; forgot that, will he nill he, the artist\u2019s work cannot\nbut bear the impress of his personality, and forgot that through that\nfact all the things they wished to rule out of the discussion had their\nrightful place in it.\n\nThe question is, what is their rightful place? And to answer it we must\nfirst satisfy ourselves as to the nature of the artistic phenomenon.\n\nA work of art is a collaboration between two artists, whom, for\npurposes of reference, I shall call the speaker and the listener. But,\nbefore it is a collaboration, a re-creation, in which form we commonly\nknow it, it is an independent act performed by the speaker alone. He,\nas first creator, isolates some from the flux of impressions in which\nhe lives. It is as if he were to arrest that flux, and momentarily to\nstop its flow. He holds back the sun and the moon in their courses,\nand, for a moment, the world stands motionless before him, embodied in\nthe dominating impressions given him by a single moment of its and his\nexistence. This one moment he disentangles from all others; the world,\nthe universe, at that moment, for him, he fashions into a memory,\nclearer than life, and owing its clarity to his refusal to allow it to\nhave a before or an after, an above or a below, other than those which\nitself implies. He isolates that moment with its implications. The\nresulting clarity is as if he had suddenly stopped the cross-currents\nof a stream, and the stream, losing the opaqueness of its tangled\nmotion, had become crystal. He isolates that moment by surrounding\nit with his own consciousness, while other moments fly past taking\nwith them shreds of that tattered veil, no more.... There is a choice\nof moments, and because the choice is not reasonable, but determined\nby the moment itself, the speaker feels himself inspired. That which\nattracts him, seduces him, compels him to catch it as it passes and\nhold it fast, instead of letting it break free and join the myriad\nothers with their worthless trophies of incomplete comprehension, is\na moment whose impressions present themselves as melody, gesture,\nwords, shape, or ordered colour, or the promise of such. Two bars\nare heard as it goes by, a significant arm swings out of the flood, a\njumble of words, like those of a sleeper, startle his mind, the ghost\nof an unpainted picture wakes his eyes.... These things are pledges.\nHe seizes them and, warily, lest he lose them, listens for the rest\nof the melody, watchfully draws out of the flood the figure whose\ngesture had seemed to be the moment itself, pieces the brittle words\ntogether, and shapes the picture in his brain. He allows the moment\nto redeem the pledge it has given, his care being not to impede it by\nforestalling its further appearance with something contradictory to\nthe original fragment, something that the character of that fragment\nhas not determined. He seeks only to be true to the original promise,\nand the good artist is known by the fact that it is impossible to tell\nwith what he began, the bad artist by the fragment he has surrounded\nwith baser metal that does not ring with its note, or the phantom whose\nvitality he has blurred by clothing it with flesh uninformed by its\npeculiar vitality.\n\nThe process of the speaker in the first creation of a work of art is\na process of finding out. He is engaged in _knowing_ the uttermost\nimplications of the fragment of impression caught by him from the flux\nof unconscious or semi-conscious life. He is making the whole of that\nimpression his own by his profound, his complete consciousness of it.\nThat is why the artist can never understand those people, not artists,\nwho ask him how he can prefer art to life; imitation to the real thing.\nHe cannot believe that such people mean what they say. In his humility\nhe assumes that they too have the modesty to admit to themselves that\ntheir life is unconscious, or semi-conscious, and he believes that this\nprocess of _knowing_, of becoming conscious, is the intensest form of\nliving that there is.\n\nThen, when the work of art is as we know it, we, the listener,\ncollaborate with that other artist, the speaker, and from what he has\nsaid, in stone, music, paint or words, try to reconstruct the fragment\nof life that he has made his own and to share his consciousness of\nit. Accurately speaking, this is impossible. We become conscious of a\nmoment of life different from his. We cannot give his words the precise\natmosphere they had for him, we cannot see with exactly his eyes, or\nhear with his ears, we are without his private and individual memory.\nWe can but be inaccurate translators. We can, however, perceive,\nuncertainly, that he has been successful himself in allowing a moment\nof life to redeem the pledge it had given him, that his work does not\ncontradict itself, and so is true to the original inspiration bedded\nin it or clothed by it. And this perception suggests to us that, if it\nwere possible, we should find, certainly, what we already believe, that\nhis share in the collaboration is perfect. We then say that a work of\nart is beautiful; the wistfulness with which we sometimes say it, the\ntears that sometimes dim our eyes as we close a book or turn from a\npicture that we believe to be beautiful, and the sadness that has often\nbeen associated with the name of beauty, are due to the half-conscious\nknowledge that our share in the collaboration is imperfect, since we\ncan never stand exactly where he stood.\n\nOur judgment of the beautiful then depends on our belief that, were\ncertain unalterable facts altered in the constitution of the universe\nand of ourselves, we should be sharing a perfect expression, an\nexpression, that is to say, in perfect unity with itself. Art then for\nart\u2019s sake, perfection of expression first. But what is this expression\nin perfect unity with itself, but a moment of conscious living,\nisolated from all else, lifted from the unconscious flux and given\nus--to live?\n\nLet us rewrite the half-obliterated formula. Let us write it now: Art\nfor Life\u2019s sake, and raise a party cry from its momentary usefulness\ninto a proud suggestion of the noble function of art. This function is\nnot merely to teach us how to act, as was supposed by the old critics,\nwho recommended Homer for the heroism of his heroes, though, as we\nshall see, they were not wholly wrong, nor yet merely to teach us\nhow to order our lives, though it may do that by suggestion. Art is\nitself life. Its function is to increase our consciousness of life,\nto make us more than wise or sensitive, to transform us from beings\noverwhelmed by the powerful stream of unconscious living to beings\ndominating that stream, to change us from objects acted upon by life\nto joyful collaborators in that reaction. By its means we become\nconscious gainers by life\u2019s procreative activity. No longer hiding\nour faces from that muddied storm that sweeps irresistibly from the\nfuture to the past, a medley of confused figures, a babel of cries of\njoy, of laughter, of sorrow, of pain, by its means we lift our heads,\nand, learning from the isolation of moments in eternity, to imagine\nthe isolation of all such moments, we conquer that storm, and accept\npain, joy, laughter or sorrow, with equal gratitude, in our continually\nrealised desire to feel ourselves alive.\n\nLet us examine from this point of view the fundamental quarrel between\nthe theorists of \u201cArt for Art\u2019s sake\u201d and the moralists. What are their\nrespective beliefs?\n\n_The Moralist._--The noblest end of being is to be good. All human\nactivities must serve this end or be pernicious. Art, the most\neloquent, the most powerful of pleaders, cannot, without violating the\ntrust that humanity puts in her, turn devil\u2019s advocate. Let the artist\nbe as skilful an artist as he can, but let him make a right use of his\nexcellence. In peace we ask no more of a good shot than that he hit\nthe bull\u2019s eye of a target. But we live in times of war between the\nhosts of good and of evil. The fight is to the death, and we admire the\ngood shot if he fire from among the ranks of angels, and fear him if we\nsee that his skill is at the service of our opponents, who in age-long\nbattle have shown themselves merciless and strong.\n\n_The Artist for Art\u2019s sake._--Morality in art is an accident of no\nimportance. We hear the battle of which you speak, but do not take\npart in it, though we listen sometimes to the music of its trumpets\nfar away, and see the red glow it throws up to the sky. But morality\nconcerns our circumstances or possible circumstances, and so has\nnothing to do with the beautiful, which is art\u2019s sole concern. A work\nof art that declares its sympathy with one or other party to your\nbattle is one whose creator has looked aside to ends other than beauty.\nIt is therefore a failure as a work of art. Art must not be limited to\nedifying subjects. There is nothing that may not become beautiful in\nthe hands of an artist. Church and lupanar, angel and courtesan, are of\nequal value in his eyes. They are material, no more, and he will not\ntolerate that morality should hamper him by dictating the choice or\nuse of his material. A work of art is independent of morality.\n\n_To these two we reply, believing that art is for life\u2019s sake._--When\na man tells you that his work of art has nothing to do with morality,\nask him, With whose morality has it nothing to do? He will be compelled\nto admit that the morality of which he is thinking is the morality he\nattributes to somebody else. Morality is a code of values, differing in\neach individual, and dictated to each individual by his character and\nhis environment. No artist, no human being, escapes morality, and the\ncode of values that is his will be one of the determining influences\non an artist\u2019s vision of life. If, perchance, he is so uncritical as\nto believe that he has nothing to do with morality, that belief will\nitself share in giving his work a moral value. There is no escape\nfrom morality in art. If, therefore, we choose to consider ourselves\nas one of a band of people whose moralities are more or less similar,\nand to regard their average morality, their average code of values as\nimportant, we shall be perfectly justified in judging art by what we\nsuppose to be its effect on that average morality. But we must not\nforget that we are then regarding artists as a regiment from which we\nare engaged in picking out the traitors and the loyalists--and that it\nis a regiment whose immediate business is not war, a regiment which\ndoes not know that it is enlisted.\n\nLet us now consider the nature of the moral influence which the speaker\nexerts upon the listener. It will not be surprising if we find that it\nhas a direct bearing upon the point under discussion.\n\nThe artist whose act of conscious living is the work of art cannot\nalter his personality without disloyalty to the moment of life that\nunder his hands is simultaneously becoming conscious and becoming\nexpression. His personality, and with it his morality, is already\ninvolved; any dishonesty blurs his vision, and the crystal whose\nincreasing clarity was his delight becomes for ever opaque. Here and\nnowhere else must we find the origin of the artist\u2019s distrust of\nmorality. He means by it not \u201cmorality,\u201d but any morality other than\nhis own at the time of artistic creation or _knowing_. A work of art\nis always the expression of _a_ morality, the morality of its creator\nat the moment when he began its creation, a morality that has ceased\nto exist, since its creator has been changed to a greater or less\ndegree by the very fact of its creation. Returning to our metaphor\nof speaker and listener, we may say that the listener, who tries as\nnearly as possible to share the moment of conscious life that was the\nspeaker\u2019s, to stand where he stood, and think what he thought, does, in\ncontemplation of the work of art, share to some extent in the morality,\nthat momentary morality we have described, of another man.\n\nBesides this fundamental morality of a work of art, it may hold other\nmoralities which are also not without their influence. Codes of values\nmay themselves be the material of artistic creation. A code of values\nforeign to the speaker may enter into the moment of conscious life\nthat is his work of art. Plato and Socrates were different men with\ndifferent moralities. The Socrates of Plato\u2019s Dialogues, however\nPlatonized, is not Plato, and, as well as the fundamental morality of\nthose dialogues, the morality of those speeches which are supposed\nto be Socratic has its separate influence upon us. Anatole France\nplays with the Abb\u00e9 J\u00e9r\u00f4me Coignard, and with Jacques Tournebroche,\nand beside the morality of _La R\u00f4tisserie de la Reine P\u00e9dauque_ we are\noffered these other moralities included in it and ruled by it.\n\nThere would seem to be little else but morality in art, and its\ninfluence would seem to be so largely as to be almost exclusively\nmoral. But observe what actually happens. Have you not noticed,\nin reading a book, that you insensibly pick out and offer to your\ndigestion those of the accidental moralities in it that seem to be\ncousins of your own. You linger over the sayings of Coignard, if\nyou feel that in some mood or other you could have said them. You\naccept with gratitude the follies, the humours of M. Bergeret, if\nyou recognise in him a kinship, however distant, with yourself. In\nlistening to a play you side, at least in simpler moods, with the\ncharacter whose code of values approximates to that by which you are\nin the habit of weighing your actions and those of others. These minor\njudgments are independent of your judgment of the work of art, though\nhere too a similar instinct bids you prefer those artists in whom you\nrecognise, let us say, the full development of some one possibility\nthat your personality contains. And, since our temperament thus picks\nand chooses among the moralities that art offers, because it is like\nParacelsus\u2019 alchemist, situate in the stomach of man, digesting the\nfood that is good for him and rejecting the poison, art does not so\nmuch alter our morality as increase our consciousness of it. It is\nan individualising influence on morality, essentially hostile to the\naveraging of codes of values. It seeks uniqueness, not uniformity, and\nso does not so much spread moralities abroad as cherish and grow to\ntheir full strength the moralities it finds among its listeners. In\nthis sentence the moralists and the artists for art\u2019s sake come to an\nunderstanding.\n\nLeaving now the question of its moral influence, let me give an\nexample, of the simplest nature, to show what I mean by the conscious\nliving that is art. I find one in the following exquisite poem, \u201cThe\nHappy Child,\u201d by William Davies:\n\n   \u201cI saw this day sweet flowers grow thick,\n    But not one like the child did pick.\n\n    I heard the pack-hounds in green park,\n    But not one like the child heard bark.\n\n    I heard this day bird after bird,\n    But not one like the child has heard.\n\n    A hundred butterflies saw I,\n    But not one like the child saw fly.\n\n    I saw the horses roll in grass,\n    But no horse like the child saw pass.\n\n    My world this day has lovely been,\n    But not like what the child has seen.\u201d\n\nRossetti believed that \u201cPoetry should seem to the hearer to have\nbeen always present to his thought, but never before heard,\u201d and\nthe statement that this has been accomplished (so just, sometimes,\nis popular instinct) is the commonest praise accorded to individual\nworks of art. Many of Mr. Davies\u2019 readers must have said, rightly,\nbut, critically speaking, with imperfect accuracy, \u201cNow that expresses\nwhat I have always felt.\u201d They should have said, \u201cThat enables me\nto feel what I always could have felt.\u201d For they have never truly\nfelt it. That wistful, regretful moment, now articulate, was carried\nunhappily past them in the general flux of incompletely conscious\nlife. They suspected a possibility of feeling something, of knowing\nwhat they dimly felt, but it eluded them in the tangled currents of\nthe stream, and they did not detain it, _know_ it, and make it part\nof themselves. Mr. Davies has not so allowed it to escape; he warily\nnetted it in his consciousness, _learnt_ it accurately and fully, and\nwrote that poem, thus isolating it for ever from unconsciousness. And\nwe, reading those words, collaborate with him in the re-creation of\nthe work of art for whose notation they serve, and, with our memories\nbehind us, not his, ourselves win out of the river of unconsciousness\nsuch a moment, different a little from his, our own, filled delicately\nwith our vitality, and giving us, for the vitality we have given it,\nan increased consciousness of the life that is in ourselves. The\nconscious life of art does not imply what is known with contempt as\nself-consciousness, which means a hampering inability to forget not\nself but other people\u2019s eyes. It implies a new reading of the Delphic\ncommand, \u03b3\u03bd\u1ff6\u03b8\u03b9 \u03c3\u03b5\u03b1\u03c5\u03c4\u03cc\u03bd. It does not mean Know thy opinions only, nor\nyet, Know what are thy desires, but Know thy life, not thy biography\nbut thy living, thine innumerable acts of life.\n\nI took my example from a short poem of extreme simplicity, and, as I\nhave again and again in this essay spoken of \u201cmoments\u201d of conscious\nlife, a scrupulous reader might well conclude that I concerned myself\nonly with what is commonly known as lyrical art, or that I should\npresently offer a proof of Croce\u2019s theory that all art is essentially\nlyrical. I agree with Croce, and perhaps go further than he in\nbelieving, for reasons with which I will not burden this discussion,\nthat all lyricism in art is dramatic, in that it involves a dramatic\nconception of himself by the author. His care is, that his creation\nshall be wholly determined by one moment, not by a series, and for\nthis reason, he is compelled as he works to refer continually to\nhimself as he was at that moment. For if a work of art were to be\nrepresentative of more than one moment, it would be representative\nof more than one man. It would not be homogeneous, and could not be\nbeautiful. This applies not only to a song or a picture, but to those\nworks of art which are in appearance the most elaborate, the least\nuniform, the least determined by a single moment. A play, whose reading\nor performance may occupy hours, during which a number of characters\nwhom we accept provisionally as human, as separate entities, live\nimaginary lives before us, is, no less than a song, the result of\nbecoming completely conscious of a single moment. The duration of the\nreading is in no way affected by the duration of the moment of life\nthat set the author playing with his marionettes. A moment of life such\nas would, for a poet, become articulate in a song, may require from a\nplaywright that he represent it to himself in persons talking, a clash\nof personalities, a breaking of personalities by destiny, a series\nof events explicable within itself, not resembling any one moment of\nhis life, but in their totality representing his means of _knowing_ a\nmoment, and the means he offers us whereby, as nearly as we may, we\nshall share that knowing. When a play is not the artist\u2019s learning a\nmoment of his own life, it is mere scaffolding, resembling a building\nat dusk, or at a sudden first sight, but presently found out to be\nempty and fraudulent, when with contempt we leave it to oblivion.\nPassage of time, intricacy of construction, apparent multiplicity of\nimagined lives do not affect the question.\n\nJohn Masefield did not by a sudden effort of genius conceive \u201cNan,\u201d\nscenes, persons, and dialogue in a moment. One moment, however,\ndetermined its conception, and implied all that is in the play. Let me,\nwith deference, suggest what may have happened. He heard a story that\naffected him with a mixture of emotions. If he had not been an artist,\nhe would probably have done no more than repeat the story to others as\nit was told to him, and wonder idly if it produced the same mixture of\nemotions in them. Instead, he lingered with it, and let the unconscious\nflux flow on unobserved while he brooded over this one emotional\nmoment, becoming more and more clearly conscious of the emotions it\ncontained as they, in the formative processes of his mind, came to be\nrepresented by persons and actions and words. His mind was not making\nbut discovering, following the implications of the original emotional\nmoment, careful only to be true to that, and rejecting proffered\nrepresentations solely on account of their inaccuracy. His skill was\nshown only in so dealing with the flood of representations that no\none particle of it should contradict another, should hamper the full\nrealisation of that moment. His greatness was shown in the profundity\nwith which he realised that moment, and the depth to which he could\nfollow its implications.\n\nTherein, by the way, is suggested the criterion of greatness that is\ncontained in the doctrine that art is for life\u2019s sake. The theory of\nart for art\u2019s sake left its holders at a loss before the question \u201cIs\nno man greater than another, if his works are beautiful, if he is an\nequally skilful artist?\u201d They knew that he was, but their theory could\nnot tell them why, and they had to take refuge in cynicism. The theory\nof art for \u201cmorality\u2019s\u201d sake was no more satisfying. It suggested that\nthe greatest artist was he who preached the most good, and so left its\nholders in speechless difficulty before a comparison of Rossetti and\nDr. Watts. The theory of art for life\u2019s sake has a clear answer, and\noffers a valid test. That man is the greatest artist who makes us the\nmost profoundly conscious of life. Shakespeare is set above Herrick,\nwho was a better technician, and Leonardo above Murillo, who painted\nmore devotional subjects, on grounds with which men, neither as\nartists nor as moralists, need quarrel.\n\nArt for Art\u2019s sake was a battle-cry, and, to understand it, we had\nto understand what those who used it fought. Art for Life\u2019s sake is\nalso a battle-cry, though it includes in those four words a suggestion\nnot only of the function of art but of its nature. Let us review the\nenemies we attack with those words upon our lips. What do we fight\nagainst? What are the misunderstandings which in our time encourage the\nproduction of false, of secondary art, and obscure the excellence of\nthe finest?\n\nWe fight first against a political valuation of art, that imagines\npoetry, pictures and music as auxiliaries in the reconstruction or\nconservation of the state, and judges them by their efficiency as\npolitical pamphlets.\n\nWe fight secondly against an educational valuation of art, that judges\nworks of art by the accuracy of the facts they happen to embody, the\naccuracy of the pictures they paint of this or that form of life, the\nclearness with which they illustrate generalisations.\n\nWe fight thirdly against the valuation of art by its technical skill,\nby the beauty that is a universal condition of its being. These things\ncannot afford a scale of comparison for works of art, but only a\nguarantee that they are worthy of judgment. We should not fight against\nthis valuation if it showed itself in practice capable of so useful an\noffice. It is, however, not sufficiently selective, but allows itself\nto be tricked by things built in imitation of perfect building, things\nwhose form is not identical with their content, things which manifest\nmore skill than vitality. This, our old ally, since it made our battle\npossible, is now our subtlest enemy.\n\nOur battle is far from being easy, for we fight not to kill but to\nmake captive, and it is easier and safer to fight to kill. We fight\nnot to destroy those valuations, but to destroy their pre-eminence.\nRecognising (1) that a work of art has a political, comparable to its\nmoral, influence, (2) that it always embodies knowledge, (3) that it\nis nothing if it does not wake in us the feeling that we are near the\nachievement of the beautiful, we wish to deny none of these facts,\nbut to prevent any one of them from being taken as the foundation\nof a criterion of art. We wish to set over them a criterion of art\nthat shall include them all. Above technique, above opinion, above\ninformation, we set life, of the special kind that is here described,\nwhose conscious vitality is to unconscious vitality what living is to\nexistence.\n\nWhat, then, do we ask ourselves after experiencing a work of art.\n\nWe ask one thing only, though, perhaps, in many forms: Has it given\nus an increased consciousness of life, or has it merely had in view\none or other of those valuations whose supreme authority we reject?\nIs its title to the name of art merely that it is an illustration of\na doctrine that has elbowed out the doctrine it illustrates, merely\nthat it gives us a clear idea how some people live, merely that it\nhas a skin-deep appearance of unity? Or is it a piece of conscious\nlife, separated watchfully from the flux of living, a piece of\n_knowing_ carried out by the artist, which we are allowed to share?\nDoes it give us a new possession by making us aware of something we\npossess. We do not ask an artist for opinions, for facts, for skill,\nalone. We have the right to ask for more. We ask him for ourselves;\nwe ask him for life. \u201cPoetry enriches the blood of the world\u201d by the\npractice it affords of living consciously. Vain learning, opinion,\nskill, impoverish it. We ask from an artist opportunities of conscious\nliving, which, taken as they come, multiply the possibilities of their\nrecurrence, turn us into artists, and help us to contract the habit of\nbeing alive.\n\n  1912.\n\n\n\n\n  ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:\n  A ROMANTIC OF 1830\n\n\n\n\n  ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:\n  A ROMANTIC OF 1830\n\n\nIn the preface to _Petits Po\u00e8mes en Prose_, Baudelaire makes respectful\nreference to a little-known book: \u201cJ\u2019ai une petite confession \u00e0 vous\nfaire. C\u2019est en feuilletant pour la vingti\u00e8me fois au moins, le fameux\n_Gaspard de la Nuit_, d\u2019Aloysius Bertrand (un livre connu de vous, de\nmoi et de quelques-uns de nos amis, n\u2019a-t-il pas tous les droits \u00e0\n\u00eatre appel\u00e9 fameux?), que l\u2019id\u00e9e m\u2019est venue de tenter quelque chose\nd\u2019analogue, et d\u2019appliquer \u00e0 la description de la vie moderne, ou\nplutot d\u2019_une_ vie moderne et plus abstraite, le proc\u00e9d\u00e9 qu\u2019il avait\nappliqu\u00e9 \u00e0 la peinture de la vie ancienne, si \u00e9trangement pittoresque.\u201d\nHe speaks of Bertrand as \u201cmon myst\u00e9rieux et brillant mod\u00e8le,\u201d though,\nremembering the teaching of Poe, he adds that he is ashamed to have\nmade something so different from _Gaspard de la Nuit_, since he holds\nthat the highest honour of a poet is to accomplish exactly what he\nset out to perform. A writer who wrote prose poems good enough to be\nread \u201ctwenty times at least\u201d by Baudelaire, good enough to suggest an\nimitation, a writer but for whom the _Petits Po\u00e8mes en Prose_ would not\nhave been written, or would have been written differently, is more than\na literary curiosity. I was led to examine his book, and, presently, to\nfind an interest in the man himself as well as in his accomplishment.\nM. Anatole France was good enough to direct me in my search for\ninformation. My friend, M. Champion, of the Quai Malaquais, generously\nput his bibliographical knowledge at my disposal. The files of\nforgotten magazines and newspapers and essays by Sainte-Beuve, Charles\nAsselineau, and M. Leon S\u00e9ch\u00e9 combined to build in my mind a portrait\nof this picturesque and luckless Romantic, a portrait blistered here\nand there, obliterated in patches, but not without vitality.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nLouis-Jacques-Napoleon Bertrand, who took the name of Ludovic and later\npreferred that of Aloysius, was born on April 20, 1807, at C\u00e9va, in\nPiedmont. Hugo was born in 1802, and Gautier in 1811. He was a child\nof that old grey-haired army of which Musset speaks in the _Confession\nd\u2019un Enfant du Si\u00e8cle_. His mother was an Italian, his father a\nFrenchman of Lorraine, an old soldier described by his son, in a fiery\nletter to a newspaper which had insulted him, as \u201conly a patriot of\n1789, only an officer of fortune, who at eighteen rushed to pour out\nhis blood on the banks of the Rhine, and, at fifty, counted thirty\nyears of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds.\u201d At the age of seven\nthe young Bertrand was brought to France. He grew up at Dijon, learned\nin youth of the great things that were being done in Paris, and read\nHugo, Nodier, Hoffmann, and Scott, all of whom helped him to turn the\nmodern Dijon into a medi\u00e6val city of dreams.\n\nEarly in 1828, a few young men of Dijon founded a newspaper, _Le\nProvincial_, to be a mouthpiece for their enlightened generation. It\nendured for a few months, and Bertrand contributed prose and verse to\nit, including a first draft of a prose poem that, in a much altered\nform, was printed in _Gaspard de la Nuit_. The paper was not unnoticed\nin Paris, and when it died and Bertrand left Dijon for the capital, he\nfound some doors already open to him. He was twenty-one, penniless,\nwith rolls of manuscript in his pocket, and a shy eagerness to read\naloud from them.\n\nTwo portraits of him remain, one by Sainte-Beuve and the other by\nVictor Pavie. Sainte-Beuve describes him as \u201c... a tall, thin young\nman of twenty-one, with a yellow and brown complexion, very lively\nlittle black eyes, a face mocking and sharp without doubt, rather\nwretched perhaps, and a long, silent laugh. He seemed timid, or rather\nuncivilised....\u201d\n\nVictor Pavie says: \u201cHis awkward walk, his incorrect and unsophisticated\ncostume, his lack of balance and of aplomb, betrayed that he had newly\nescaped from the provinces. One divined the poet in the ill-restrained\nfire of his timid and wandering eyes. As for the expression of his\nface, a lofty taste for beauty was combined in it with a somewhat\nuncivilised taciturnity....\u201d\n\nBeside these pictures let me print Bertrand\u2019s portrait of the imaginary\nGaspard de la Nuit: \u201cA poor devil whose exterior announced nothing but\npoverty and suffering. I had already noticed in the garden his frayed\novercoat, buttoned to the chin, his shapeless hat that never brush had\nbrushed, his hair long as a weeping-willow, combed like a thicket, his\nfleshless hands like ossuaries, his mocking, wretched, and sickly face;\nand my conjectures had charitably placed him among those itinerant\nartists, violin-players and portrait-painters, whom an insatiable\nhunger and an unquenchable thirst condemn to travel the world in the\nfootsteps of the Wandering Jew....\u201d It is different from the portraits\nof himself, but not more different than would be such a Germanicised\ncaricature as might have been made by Hoffmann.\n\nBertrand\u2019s life in Paris was hidden from the celebrated men whom he\nmet at Nodier\u2019s evening receptions and in Sainte-Beuve\u2019s study. He\nshowed himself for a moment, recited some of his verses \u201cd\u2019une voix\nsautillante,\u201d and disappeared. He had no money, and probably suffered\nfrom that lack of confidence which can only be removed by a banking\naccount. Sainte-Beuve, who saw him two or three times and gave him a\ncopy of the _Consolations_, with the inscription \u201cMon ami Bertrand,\u201d\nspeaks of him threading lonely streets with the air of Pierre\nGringoire, the out-at-elbows poet of _Notre Dame de Paris_. He paints\nwhat must be an imaginary portrait of the young and penniless genius\nleaning on the window-sill of his garret, \u201ctalking for long hours with\nthe pale gilliflowers of the roof.\u201d\n\nUnable to earn a living in Paris, he went back to Dijon in 1830, where\nhe contributed to a Liberal newspaper, _Le Patriote de la C\u00f4te-d\u2019Or_.\nIn spite of his poverty, his blood was young and proud, and as he\nwalked the streets of Dijon he must have felt himself a representative\nof that exuberant young Parisian manhood that was putting _Hernani_\non the stage and sending _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ to the press. A\nrival paper jeered at him, and he was able to reply: \u201cJe pr\u00e9f\u00e8re vos\nd\u00e9dains \u00e0 vos suffrages,\u201d and to quote a letter from Victor Hugo to\nexplain his independence. Hugo had written: \u201cJe lis vos vers en cercle\nd\u2019amis, comme je lis Andr\u00e9 Chenier, Lamartine et Alfred de Vigny: il\nest impossible de poss\u00e9der \u00e0 un plus haut point les secrets de la\nfacture.\u201d With such a testimonial in his pocket he need not care for\nthe scorn or the approval of a provincial journalist.\n\nAt this time his Liberalism was as ardent as his youth. Asselineau\nquotes a fiery article praying for war, bloody war, against the Holy\nAlliance: \u201cIt is time to throw the dice on a drum; and, should we all\nperish, the honour of France and of liberty shall perish not.\u201d But, as\nwas not unnatural, he presently left France and liberty to take care of\nthemselves, and, full of new plans for literary achievement, returned\nhopefully to Paris, where he was joined by his mother and sister. He\nwas again unable to earn a living. The last lines of a piteous letter\nwritten to Antoine de Latour in September 1833, show how miserable was\nhis condition:\n\n    \u201cSi je te disais que je suis au point de n\u2019avoir bient\u00f4t plus de\n    chaussures, que ma redingote est us\u00e9e, je t\u2019apprendrais l\u00e0 le\n    dernier de mes soucis: ma m\u00e8re et ma s\u0153ur manquent de tout dans\n    une mansarde de l\u2019h\u00f4tel des Etats-Unis qui n\u2019est pas pay\u00e9e. Qu\u2019est\n    ce pour toi qu\u2019une soixantaine de francs (mon Dieu, \u00e0 quelle\n    humiliation le malheur me contraint!). Quelques pi\u00e8ces d\u2019argent\n    dans une bourse, pour nous c\u2019est un mois de loger, c\u2019est du pain!\n\n   \u201cEt je te dois d\u00e9j\u00e0 cinquante francs! J\u2019en pleure de rage.\n      Mon camarade de coll\u00e8ge!!!\n   \u201cJe cherche une place de correcteur d\u2019\u00e9preuves dans une imprimerie.\u201d\n\nIt is not known whether the money was sent him, nor whether he found\nemployment as a proof-reader.\n\nIn such poverty, in such dejection, he put together the book that\npreserves his memory, dreaming, when he could forget his empty stomach\nand the holes in his shoes, of the prose that Baudelaire was to\nimagine after him, \u201cune prose po\u00e9tique, musicale sans rhythme et sans\nrime, assez souple et assez heurt\u00e9e pour s\u2019adapter aux mouvements\nlyriques de l\u2019\u00e2me, aux ondulations de la r\u00eaverie, aux soubresauts de\nla conscience.\u201d He would not, perhaps, have thought of sudden starts\nof conscience, for his was a simpler soul than Baudelaire\u2019s, and he\nnever felt that the portrait he was drawing might be only the portrait\nof a portrait. He was born in 1807 and not in 1821, and, with the\nRomantic joy in colour and local colour, he had more than the Romantic\nsimplicity. His fantasies are prefaced by quotations, and these are\ntaken from Scott, Hugo, Byron, folk-song, the Fathers of the Church,\nScottish ballads, Charles Nodier, old chronicles, Lope de Vega,\nFenimore Cooper, the cries of the night watchmen, Lamartine, Coleridge,\nChateaubriand, a medley of the Romantics and the writers and things\nthat they admired. They sometimes mistook the picturesque for the\nbeautiful, and so did Bertrand. He was a man who thought with his eyes.\nHe was not an analyst.\n\nSo far indeed did his visual conception of life carry him that he\nrepresents, better than any other French writer, the tendency, new at\nthat time, to identify literature with painting. Hoffmann, in Germany,\nhad written _Fantasy-pieces after the manner of Callot_. Leigh Hunt,\nin England, amused himself, in _Imagination and Fancy_, by cutting\nlittle bits out of Spenser and proposing them as subjects to the\nghosts of Titian and Rubens. Bertrand used words like oil-colours,\nand in _Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies \u00e0 la mani\u00e8re de Rembrandt et\nde Callot_, wrote what, if he had had a palette and brush, he might\nvery well have painted. If he thought through his eyes, his eyes had\nbeen trained by the painters, and he was proud to offer his book as a\nseries of engravings after imaginary pictures, or etchings from plates\nthat had never been bitten.\n\n\u201cArt,\u201d he says in his preface, \u201chas always two antithetical faces; it\nis a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image\nof Rembrandt, and the other that of Jacques Callot.... Rembrandt is\nthe white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his\nretreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes\nhis eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of\nbeauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in\npenetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other\nhand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the\nsquare, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his\ncarbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache....\nNow, the author of this book has envisaged art under this double\npersonification, but he has not been too exclusive, and presents,\nbesides fantasies in the manners of Rembrandt and of Callot, studies\nafter Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Durer, Peeter Neef, Breughel\nde Velours, Breughel d\u2019Enfer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator Rosa,\nMurillo, Fusely, and many other masters of different schools.\u201d\n\nBertrand\u2019s book is one of the documents that must be studied by any\nhistorian of the grotesque who would trace the re-awakening of a spirit\nin art that had dozed during the eighteenth century, a spirit quite\ndifferent from that of Hogarth, with which it is sometimes confounded.\nBertrand\u2019s was not the noble, the sublime conception of the grotesque\nthat ruled the finer drawings and much of the poetry of William Blake.\nIt was akin to that whose love of a gargoyle brought it to life and\nsent Quasimodo to haunt the dark and winding stairs of the towers of\nNotre Dame. Bertrand contrasts Rembrandt and Callot, but does not see\nthat in the mind of the man \u201cwho consumes himself in penetrating the\nmysterious symbols of nature\u201d there is the essence of the feeling for\nthe grotesque, which, in such men as Callot, having forgotten its\norigins, too often becomes mere sport, shadows flung on a wall by a\nwill-o\u2019-the-wisp instead of by a philosopher\u2019s lamp. But in _Gaspard\nde la Nuit_ this feeling is groping towards consciousness, recognising\nits food in the etchings alike of Rembrandt and of Callot, of Salvator\nand of Durer, noticing the more obvious differences between them, but\nas yet incapable of a more sensitive distinction. It is interesting to\nnotice that he takes suggestions from the Breughel[2] whose wild and\nenergetic picture made Flaubert, ten years later, set to work on _The\nTemptation of St. Anthony_.\n\nBertrand\u2019s book is made up of six series of fantasies, labelled\n\u201cFlemish School,\u201d \u201cOld Paris,\u201d \u201cThe Chronicles,\u201d like the rooms in a\npicture-gallery. The usual form of the pieces is that of a small number\nof carefully balanced paragraphs, mostly single sentences, sometimes\nlinked by refrains of movement or meaning. Some have minute prologues\nand epilogues. Some are like prose-ballades, finished by an _envoi_.\nFew cover more than two or three pages in a small book of large type.\nEach one is complete in itself, and built of a firm, noun-ful prose,\nricher in colour than in subtlety.\n\nThey were written by a man to whom sustained effort was impossible,\na man elusive, _fugace_, who could not settle in one place or in one\nmood, and perhaps found in these little scraps of goldsmithery the\nnearest approach to permanence and solidity in his life. He was a\nhunter of the moment, and these fantasies are the only trophies of his\nchase. Their form seems made for him and he for it, and he needed no\nmodels for the gait of his soul.\n\nBertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble\npersonality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming\nthat owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else.\nHis was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet.\nHe felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all\nhe could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of\ndreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams\nwith their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a\ncottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights\nwhile the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a study as\nFaustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in\nhis dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their\nphantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a\nMessire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait\nby Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo\u2019s reconstruction, and the old\nDijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to\nkeep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered\nhim her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes\nof the moon.\n\nThis is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries:\n\n    \u201cLE CLAIR DE LUNE.\n        \u201c\u2018R\u00e9veillez-vous gens qui dormez\n          Et priez pour les tr\u00e9pass\u00e9s.\u2019\n                   --_Le cri du crieur de nuit._\n\n\u201cOh! qu\u2019il est doux, quand l\u2019heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de\nregarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d\u2019or!\n\n\u201cDeux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fen\u00eatre, un chien hurlait dans le\ncarrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer vaticinait tout bas.\n\n\u201cMais bient\u00f4t mon oreille n\u2019interrogea plus qu\u2019un silence profond. Les\nl\u00e9preux \u00e9taient rentr\u00e9s dans leurs chenils, aux coups de Jacquemart qui\nbattait sa femme.\n\n\u201cLe chien avait enfil\u00e9 une venelle, devant les pertuisanes du guet\nenrouill\u00e9 par la pluie et morfondu par la bise.\n\n\u201cEt le grillon s\u2019\u00e9tait endormi, d\u00e8s que la derni\u00e8re bluette avait\n\u00e9teint sa derni\u00e8re lueur dans la cendre de la chemin\u00e9e.\n\n\u201cEt moi, il me semblait,--tant la fi\u00e8vre est incoh\u00e9rente,--que la lune,\ngrimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!\u201d\n\n    \u201cMOONLIGHT.\n          \u201c\u2018Wake, men who sleep,\n            And pray for the dead.\u2019\n               --_Cry of the night-watchman._\n\n\u201cOh! how pleasant it is, when the hour trembles in the belfry, at\nnight, to look at the moon, whose nose is shaped like a golden\ncarolus![3]\n\n\u201cTwo lepers were complaining under my window, a dog was howling at the\ncross-ways, and the cricket on my hearth was prophesying in a whisper.\n\n\u201cBut soon my ear no longer questioned anything but a profound silence.\nThe lepers had gone back into their kennels, at the sound of Jacquemart\nbeating his wife.[4]\n\n\u201cThe dog had fled away up an alley, before the halberds of the watch,\nrain-soaked, and wind-frozen.\n\n\u201cAnd the cricket had fallen asleep, as soon as the last spark had put\nout its last glimmer in the ashes of the fire-place.\n\n\u201cAnd, as for me, it seemed to me--fever is so incoherent--that the\nmoon, wrinkling her face, put out her tongue at me like a man who has\nbeen hanged.\u201d\n\nThe moon put out her tongue at her faithful admirer, and helped him\nneither to honey-dew nor to the milk of Paradise. His biographers\ndo not agree as to the way he lived during his few remaining years.\nSainte-Beuve says that he was a private secretary, and that he wrote\nin various inconspicuous newspapers. M. S\u00e9ch\u00e9, to whom we owe a great\ndeal of new information, thinks that these employments are not likely\nto have held Bertrand for long. About 1835, he found in Eug\u00e8ne Renduel\na publisher for _Gaspard de la Nuit_. He sold the right to print\nan edition of 800 copies, of which 300 were to be called \u201cKeepsake\nFantastique,\u201d for the sum of 150 francs. The money was paid and the\nmanuscript was put into the publisher\u2019s desk, where, for some reason\nor other, it remained for a very long time. Its publication was\npromised from year to year. In a letter written to David d\u2019Angers, in\n1837, Bertrand says: \u201c_Gaspard de la Nuit_, ce livre de mes douces\npr\u00e9dilections, o\u00f9 j\u2019ai essay\u00e9 de cr\u00e9er un nouveau genre de prose,\nattend le bon vouloir d\u2019Eug\u00e8ne Renduel pour para\u00eetre enfin cet\nautomne....\u201d Bertrand did not make the gallant figure in poverty that\nwas made, for example, by Richard Steele, who turned bailiffs into\nliveried footmen, as Whistler is said to have done more recently; but\nonce, at least, he showed a smiling face to misfortune, even if the\nsmile was a little awry. In 1840, the book being still unpublished,\nhe called on his publisher and left a sonnet on him, as an ordinary\nperson might leave a visiting-card. A more charming protest against\nprocrastination was surely never written:\n\n   \u201cQuand le raisin est m\u00fbr, par un ciel clair et doux,\n    D\u00e8s l\u2019aube, \u00e0 mi-coteau rit une foule \u00e9trange:\n    C\u2019est qu\u2019alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange,\n    Ma\u00eetres et serviteurs, joyeux, s\u2019assemblent tous.\n\n    A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous?\n    Le matin vous \u00e9veille, \u00e9veillant sa voix d\u2019ange,\n    Mon comp\u00e8re, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange;\n    Nous avons une vigne--eh bien, vendangeons nous!\n\n    Mon livre est cette vigne, o\u00f9, pr\u00e9sent de l\u2019automne,\n    La grappe d\u2019or attend pour couler dans la tonne,\n    Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.\n\n    J\u2019invite mes voisins, convoqu\u00e9s sans trompettes,\n    A s\u2019armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes.\n    Qu\u2019ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.\u201d\n\nSix months later Bertrand was dead. At least once he had known for\nseveral months the inside of a public hospital. He was attacked by\nphthisis. David d\u2019Angers obtained a grant of 300 francs for him and the\npromise of a post as librarian; but he was not to leave the hospital\nagain. David, who was himself ill, did all that could be done for him,\nsent him oranges, and made portraits of him before and after death,\nand saw to it that his grave-clothes were not of the coarseness deemed\nfitting for the bodies of the poor. David alone followed his bier,\nand, no doubt, supplied Sainte-Beuve with the material for his picture\n(in the introduction to the first edition of _Gaspard de la Nuit_,\npublished in 1842 by Victor Pavie, who bought the rights from Renduel\nfor the sum originally paid):--\u201cIt was the eve of Ascension; a terrible\nstorm was rumbling; the Mass for the dead had been spoken, and the\nfuneral procession did not come. The priest had ended by leaving; the\nonly friend present watched the abandoned remains. At the end of the\nchapel a sister of charity was decorating an altar with garlands for\nthe next day\u2019s feast.\u201d\n\nSo ended a life that was like a thread blown in the wind, swung this\nway and that, without weight, and at last torn from its weak hold and\nwhirled away over the edge of the world. Bertrand\u2019s life was that of\nthe real Bohemian, whose struggle is not the less difficult because his\nhead is high and his eyes, instead of seeing where he is going, are\nfull of magnificent things. Bertrand was like a man trying to speak\nhigh poetry when his enemy has him by the throat. He saw, and wrote,\nand wrestled, in a breath; his achievement was scarcely recognised\ntill he was overthrown. And that achievement, such as it was, that\nlittle flame he contrived to light before going out himself, kindled a\ngreater, and in its brighter luminosity almost became invisible. But\nwhen we look back from the _Petits Po\u00e8mes en Prose_ to this little\nbook that suggested their creation, we find that it is not without an\nindependent interest, personal as well as historical. Bertrand himself\nwas somebody, and no book so well as his lets us share the day-dreams\nof 1830.\n\n  1911.\n\n\n\n\nALPHONSE DAUDET\n\n\n\n\nALPHONSE DAUDET\n\n\nDaudet\u2019s was the scintillant, flamelike vitality that makes its\npossessor the youngest in whatever company he may find himself.\nAnatole France writes of him that he believes no human creature ever\nloved nature and art with a more ardent and more generous affection,\nor enjoyed the universe with more delight, more force, and more\ntenderness. Even in old age and suffering, he brought merriment with\nhim when he limped into the big room that Edmond de Goncourt called his\n\u201cgrenier,\u201d and kept for talk and friendship. If the room had been sad\nor silent, it woke to laughter when this invalid came in and began to\nspeak. Men felt themselves more alive in his presence. This vitality\nis different from the physical and mental momentum of a Balzac. It is\na lambent flame rather than a conflagration; light without heat. It\nscorched no one, not even Daudet himself, who made it into a public\nentertainer. He could use it at will; it did not impel him into a\nrestless activity. I can imagine that indolent people felt ill at ease\nwith Balzac in the room, as if from a fear that he might go off like\na dynamite bomb. Daudet\u2019s vitality was gentle, and insinuated itself\ninto his listeners\u2019 veins, so that when they left they had the pleasant\nsensation of having themselves been more than usually vivacious. \u201cI\nhave missed my vocation,\u201d he said; \u201cI should have been a merchant of\nhappiness.\u201d It was a vocation that he had not missed. A merchant of\nhappiness was precisely what he was, since one kind of happiness is a\nchildish enjoyment of everything that may occur. Children run about\nall day, without forethought, and play at being all sorts of things,\nand chatter and fall asleep, still chattering, in the middle of a\nsentence. They wake next morning to perform a variation ever so blithe\non yesterday\u2019s performance. Daudet lived just so, and was able to share\nhis life with other people.\n\n_Le Petit Chose_ is the story of his childhood. It is the tale of a\nlittle boy whose father is an unsuccessful man of business, a little\nboy with a parrot and a dream of Robinson Crusoe, who is transplanted\nfrom his south to a northern manufacturing town, a child who becomes\nan usher in a school where his youth and his poverty make him butt of\nboys and masters alike, where he writes love-letters for a gymnastic\ninstructor, and suffers in his stead for their success, a child who\ngoes to Paris at seventeen to join his brother in poverty and hope,\nand to write a poem about blue butterflies. The book is almost true\nto history, except that, unlike Daudet, _le Petit Chose_ ends as\npartner in a china shop, regretfully resigning his blue butterflies to\nmarry the daughter of the china shop\u2019s proprietor. The real tale of\nhis shyness and pathetic adventures, that Daudet was never tired of\ntelling, since it was his own, goes on in other books. There is in them\nall a _joie d\u2019\u00e9crire_ as much as _joie de vivre_. He rejoices in every\nmisfortune of his childhood, because, in describing it, he finds an\nopportunity for life as a young man. His life as a child had been told\nto himself as a fairy tale. He had told ingenious lies to excuse his\ntruant days on the river, killing off a Pope to hide, in his family\u2019s\nexcitement, his lateness for a meal. He told lies to himself to excuse\nthe sordid appearances of his existence, and now he had a chance of\ntelling lies again, and so living another romance. Daudet\u2019s writing\nwas always a means of living for him. His own life could be multiplied\nindefinitely by the glosses he put upon it. He is not, like Copp\u00e9e,\na disillusioned man remembering dreams, paining himself with the\nmemory of the boy he was. Daudet, far from envying that boy of whom he\nwrites, seems to be still identical with him, and tells his escapades\nas if they were yesterday\u2019s, as indeed they might be. Even when he\ntries to write disillusioned novels, he sits in a rosy cloud, and is\nirrepressibly happy in spite of them. He never knows whether pain or\npleasure is the more enjoyable. Either is an aid to living, and perhaps\nthe former gives life a keener taste.\n\nMen of this kind do not spend their vitality altogether for nothing.\nMore than others they need affection and applause. A face of\ndisapproval in their audience is enough to wither their wings, and they\nask for goodwill, if only to help them to continue the performance.\n_Le Petit Chose_, like most of Daudet\u2019s work, like his life, and his\nother representations of his life, conversational or on paper, is an\nappeal to be loved. He asks to be seen as he sees himself, and asks\nvery successfully. It is this, I think, that makes it easy to forgive\nhim his sins against pure art; this that accounts for his friends\u2019 love\nof him, and also for the popular success that made him feel a little\nuncomfortable among them. His greed of affection made him not very\nfastidious; he was glad to be loved by his baker as well as by Edmond\nde Goncourt.\n\nDaudet acquired the habit of being lovable. He made his own life into\na fairy tale, and, since it was the surest way to gratitude, soon\nfound it difficult to see the lives of others in any different way.\nHe copied his men and women from nature, as he said, but each one\nof them readily became _le Petit Chose_, and he his affectionate,\nrose-spectacled biographer. When his novels are laid aside, and we\nlook at their backs, we forget their extraordinary observation, and\nsee characters exaggerated by a man who is anxious to persuade; and\nwhen these characters have faded away into framed drawings like those\ntaken from back numbers of _Punch_, we remember little of the books\nbut a spirit that asks love and gives it, is ready to understand more\nthan there is to be understood, and to make excuses for those who are\nwithout them. We think of Daudet as the tenderest possible biographer\nfor ourselves, and at the same time feel a little shrinking from the\nidea of being exhibited with such emphasis. Some of the novels, with\nwhich we are not here particularly concerned, do their best to dispel\nthe atmosphere of rose-leaves and sunshine, involving us in a swift and\nkeen analysis of unkind and unpleasant motives. But when we close even\nthese, little is left of them but their author\u2019s charm, and the memory\nof those incidents or descriptions, in which, freed from the burden of\nan ambitious task, he loosens the bridle of his romancing vitality.\n\nHis books are not so consistent as his character. They are always most\nsatisfactory when most directly concerned with it. This is partly\nbecause he wrote of himself in anecdotes, and his inspiration was\nfacile and short-winded rather than persevering. The effects he secures\nin his writings are the same as those he won in conversation, snatches\nof colour and feeling, like the studies in an artist\u2019s notebook,\noften better than when repainted into pictures. Ambition perhaps\nobstructed his talent in setting it to do other men\u2019s work, however\nwell he may have been able to do it. He was not a novelist, although he\nmade himself one. His big books, in which he describes many lives and\nkinds of life, are already being sieved out by time, and the work by\nwhich his name will be remembered is reducing itself to his real and\nimaginary reminiscences and his short stories. In these he does not\nmingle contradictory ingredients; while his novels, even the best, are\ntoo much like battle-grounds between Queen Mab and Zola.\n\nIn his short stories he is perfectly at ease. His talent was no eagle\nfor long flights, but one of his own blue butterflies. It flew far only\nwith effort, and tired as it flew, drooping its wings or flapping them\nirregularly. But in the short tales no flight was so long as to tire\nit. It was happy and at ease, opened its wings with grace, and as it\ndropped, folded them with all imaginable delicacy. In the _Contes du\nLundi_ he reconciled his powers and his ambition. He was a romancer, a\n_conteur_, a _causeur_, and romantic anecdotes refuse to be fettered\nto a strict and steady veracity. He wished to be a painter after\nnature, to be accurate, to be real, to be mistaken for reality. There\nare moments, but only moments, when the two kinds of truth, that these\npowers and this ambition severally suggest, coalesce in a truth that\nis charming and, at the same time, almost photographic. In the novels\nthe truth disintegrated into opposing masses. In short stories he was\nable to combine them. His brief, flashing sketches, with their curious\nair of stereoscopic perspective, are seldom in the least unreal. Yet,\npoignant little things, unforgettable, however slight, they are not\nthe probabilities of life but its possibilities. They are the lies\nthat ought to be true. The story of the Alsatian schoolmaster, or that\nof the siege of Berlin, with the old colonel, in his worn uniform,\nstanding on the balcony to welcome the victorious French, and seeing\ninstead the Uhlans of the advance guard, and hearing the triumphal\nmarch of Schubert, as the Prussians enter Paris; all these minute\nthings are too dramatic, too pathetic, not to be allowed their moment\nof existence. Daudet writes them, and they bring tears to our eyes,\ntears that, unfortunately, we must submit to a rather cruel analysis.\n\nTears, and also laughter. Daudet with his firm belief in the ultimate\nvictory of all good and pleasant people, and the corresponding\npunishment of the bad and unkind, enjoyed, like many happy-minded\nmen, a highly developed faculty of pity. It was one of his means of\nbeing alive, and this man, who \u201cdied of having loved life too well,\u201d\nneglected none of the exercises that made his nerves tingle and his\nheart beat. He lived in being sorry for people and things, and he\nlived in being glad. Another group of his short stories is made up\nof pure fairy tales that dance before the eyes, their words running\nand tripping after each other, like a band of elves on midsummer\u2019s\neve. They are southern tales of old Provence that he read in the\ngrasshopper\u2019s library under the blue sky, where the librarians sing all\nday, and there are gossamers for bookmarks. Their heartsome feeling is\nthat of the old song:\n\n   \u201cSur le pont d\u2019Avignon\n    Tout le monde danse en rond.\u201d\n\nEven when he brings the elves to town, as in _Un R\u00e9veillon dans le\nMarais_, when, into the old courtyard of the mansion that has been\nturned into a mineral water factory, he introduces cavaliers and ladies\nof the ancient time, fairies now, being dead so long, he brings with\nthem half a memory of the farandole, and makes them drunk with seltzer.\n\nLaughter and tears; it is by these that we remember Daudet. His art\nis that of wearing his heart on his sleeve. \u201cHere,\u201d he seems to say,\n\u201cis a sad tale to make you cry (I cried myself in making it), and\nhere is a merry one to make you laugh (my pen quivered with merriment\nas I wrote it down for you).\u201d Laughter and tears tempted him perhaps\ntoo strongly. He was accustomed to tell his stories many times before\nhe wrote them. They shaped themselves, like folktales, in successive\nrecitations, until the inessentials fell away from them and they won\neconomical and immediate effects. The danger of such a manner of\ncomposition is a confusion of ends. The only safe audience for a writer\nis that undiscoverable and absolute judge, who, from his niche in our\nconsciousness, signs now and again his knowledge that such and such\nan expression is truly expressed, is really expression and not an\nincomplete and muffling mask. That other audience, whose lips open,\nwhose eyes smile or weep as we read to them, is not a judge of art.\nIts values are not aesthetic. Its most obvious criticisms are those of\nlaughter and tears, and these are written too clearly not to become\nmore important to us than they should. How can the jocund tale be bad\nthat made you laugh? How can that sad one fail that sent your kerchief\nto your eyes? There may be imperfections in them; yes, but by removing\nthem, I must be careful not to lose that laughter or those tears. And\nso, almost inevitably, the tears and laughter come to seem the ends of\nart instead of its by-products. And they are not the wistful tears that\ndew the eyelashes before a perfect work, nor the impersonal laughter\nthat rings out like a spring song because some man has made a new thing\nwell for the eternal gods to see.\n\nMost Frenchmen are performers; and the Frenchman from the south is he\nwho wins the greatest joy from his performance. I remember a big bare\nstudio in the Boulevard Vaugirard, where a crowd of students, poets,\nsculptors, painters, and their women, used to be merry together and\ndrink coffee (if there was coke for the stove), and eat Olibet biscuits\n(if there was money to buy them). Among us were two curly-headed\nProven\u00e7als, whose voices had a more persuasive abandon than ours to\nwhatever they wished to say. There was a balcony in the studio with a\nladder fastened to it, so that the artist might climb to his bed. One\nof the Proven\u00e7als used to stand up, leaning on the ladder, and sing us\nold songs of his country, while his friend sat on the lower steps and\ndropped the deeper notes of a silver flute into their proper places\nin the melody. The songs were sometimes joyful, sometimes sad. More\nthan once, when some pathetic tune or words made his audience weep, I\nhave seen the flute-player, unable to restrain his happiness, caper\nabout the studio with his instrument. Something of Daudet was in the\nflute-player and something of the flute-player in Daudet.\n\n  1909.\n\n\n\n\nTHE RETROSPECTION OF FRAN\u00c7OIS COPP\u00c9E\n\n\n\n\nTHE RETROSPECTION OF FRAN\u00c7OIS COPP\u00c9E\n\n\nSome writers seem to represent single moods of life. Most men grow\nfrom childhood to old age, passing from illusion to disillusion (in\nwhich illusion does no more than turn its coat), then to resignation\n(a kind of agnostic attitude towards their own sensations), and,\nfinally, perhaps, end in the most obstinate illusion of all. But there\nare writers who seem to stop at this or that point in the road, to\ntake up their stand there, and to date from that resting-place all\nthe monologues that they allow humanity to overhear. The work of the\ngreatest artists is sent off from every post-office on the journey, or,\nif their work is done in age, it holds proof that they have travelled\nall the way. Copp\u00e9e hesitates on the brow of that hill from which\ncan be seen for the last time the sunlit country of youth. Already\ndisillusioned, he looks back, and spends his life in regretting the\npast. All his work has a retrospective glamour, and where he writes\njoyously of the present, it is easy to feel that the joy is a religious\njoy, and that his work is a memorial rite, re-enacting something that\nhas long since faded away.\n\nHe took this attitude when very young. There are, indeed, men whose\neyes have always been turned back, men whose earliest memory is a\nregret for the memory earlier still that they have lost. In the\nprologue to _Le Reliquaire_, published in 1866, he wrote:\n\n   \u201cEt de m\u00eame que, tous les soirs,\n    Ils font autour du reliquaire\n    Fumer les l\u00e9gers encensoirs.\n    D\u00e9daignant le douleur vulgaire\n    Qui pousse des cris importuns,\n    Dans ces po\u00e8mes je veux faire\n    A tous mes beaux r\u00eaves d\u00e9funts,\n    A toutes mes ch\u00e8res reliques,\n    Une chapelle de parfums\n    Et de cierges m\u00e9lancoliques.\u201d\n\nIn building for his fair dead dreams a chapel of sad perfumes and\nmelancholy candles, he spent the better part of his life. His prose\nwas written later than his verse, but years did not alter the object of\nhis architecture.\n\nHe was sometimes assailed by other moods, but did not allow himself\nto yield to them. He had succeeded young; it is possible that having\ncharmed already, he was half afraid of losing by any change the odour\nand the essence impossible to analyse, in which he knew that he could\ntrust, and which, once at any rate, had been personal to himself. There\nremain, however, the indications of occasional faith in mutability.\nSometimes he flung himself boldly in the direction whither life would\nhave taken him. But the feeling of boldness, of experiment, that\npervades, for example, _Le Coupable_, is enough to show that he was ill\nat ease. The story is that of a man who leaves his mistress, a Parisian\ngrisette. She has a child, who, born in the gutter, grows up among the\nvicious and finds his way to a penitentiary, and, at last, committing a\nserious crime, is brought for judgment before his father. The father,\nlearning his identity, tells the whole story, and asks whether he\nhimself, rather than his son, is not the true _coupable_. Copp\u00e9e finds\nin it an opportunity for a study of society from below, for much close\nand accurate description, and for a very searching account of the\nreformatory system. It is a clever book, but somehow Copp\u00e9e has dropped\nout of it.\n\nI do not mean that all Copp\u00e9e\u2019s best work is to be known by an\natmosphere of sentimental yearning for the past. His mood is much more\ndelicate. He writes as a man whose illusions are gone, but he does not\noften cry aloud,\n\n    \u201cH\u00e9las! les beaux jours sont finis.\u201d\n\nHe only says that there have been fine days. By fine days he means days\nof enthusiasm and of a simple heart. He has once walked with the world\nfar below his feet; but, now that its wisdom has risen over his head,\nhe cannot recover that old enthusiasm by pretending to be ignorant.\nKnowing too much, his only care is to preserve as a touchstone the\nmemory of his lost unwisdom. He does not often more directly express\nhis regret. But it is a recognition of his regretfulness that makes his\nstories bitter to the very young, half-conscious of their youth, and\npained by all that helps to waken them to simultaneous knowledge and\nloss of it.\n\nIn _Toute une Jeunesse_ he confesses that his hero, \u201cpersonnage\nimaginaire dans une action imaginaire, sent la vie comme je la sentais\nquand j\u2019\u00e9tais un enfant, et quand j\u2019\u00e9tais un jeune homme.\u201d Much of\nthe imaginary action follows very closely the course of his own life,\nand it is possible in reading it to watch the fine days and then the\ngradual realisation that they had been fine. Am\u00e9d\u00e9e Violette, born in\na little flat in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, behind the gardens of\nthe Luxembourg, the son of a government clerk, loses his mother very\nyoung, and grows up in loneliness, except for the little girls next\ndoor. He goes to school in the rue de la Grande Chaumi\u00e8re, turning out\nof the other. There is a plane-tree in the schoolyard, which allows\nthe schoolmaster to offer a garden on his prospectus. The assistant\nmasters are grotesque and wretched. The head of the principal is like\nthe terrestrial globe that stands on the desk in his study to impress\nhis pupils\u2019 parents. Am\u00e9d\u00e9e grows up, spending fine evenings in long\nwalks through Paris with his father, the widower, who takes gradually\nto absinthe for the sake of forgetfulness. He grows up in the quarter,\nstudies at the university, solitary in the midst of its gregarious\nfrivolity, partly from poverty, partly from love of the child with\nwhom he used to play. He leaves the university with a degree, and is\ntaken on in the same office as his father, as a supernumerary clerk.\nSo many hours a day disappear from his life, and he wakens only in the\nevenings, which he spends in rhyming, and on Sundays when he writes\nall day without leaving his room. He has a few friends who count him\nalmost a hermit. A young actor takes him to the Caf\u00e9 de S\u00e9ville in the\nBoulevard Montmartre, where he introduces him to Paul Sillery, a poet\nand editor of an unpopular review--Catulle Mend\u00e8s, perhaps. The caf\u00e9 is\nfull of men with beards, politicians, and men with hair, poets. Sillery\nrecognises a poet in him, and when the actor recites one of his poems\nwith success at a charity performance in a theatre, sends him to a\npublisher--no doubt Lemerre, who published the Parnassians. His first\nvolume is printed and successful. He has come so far when his youth is\ntaken from him. His nearest friend betrays him, and he has to compel\nhim to marry the girl he has so long loved himself. He passes through\nvarious more or less empty adventures. The Franco-Prussian war leaves\nthe girl a widow with a boy, and his friend\u2019s last wish is that they\nshould marry. The wish is fulfilled: Am\u00e9d\u00e9e, married to a woman he has\nloved from childhood, has a wife whose heart is buried with his friend.\nIt is all so different from its promises. The poet is left with the\nconsolation of his art, and the book ends: \u201cH\u00e9las! ta jeunesse est\nfinie, pauvre sentimental! Les feuilles tombent! Les feuilles tombent!\u201d\n\nThe leaves fall on the paper as Copp\u00e9e writes. It is always autumn in\nhis books, because he is always thinking of spring. But _Toute une\nJeunesse_ lets us into more of his secrets than this. It is full of\nlove for Paris, and obsessed by the contrast between rich and poor, or\nrather between appearances and the other appearances they hide. Life\nis very much like one of those Japanese nests of coloured boxes; you\nopen the little round scarlet wooden cylinder, and there is a green one\ninside. You open that and find a blue. Within the blue is a scarlet\none again. It is so with life. No state of disillusionment is final.\nThere is always another behind it which will turn what seemed to be an\nunemotional acceptance of life as it is into a regretted and fantastic\ndream. Copp\u00e9e is less conscious of the infinite endurance of mutability\nthan of his regret for particular yesterdays. He must put all he writes\nof in the scarlet box. Paris for him is always the Paris of 1866. He\nfelt, he said, like Madame de Sta\u00ebl, \u201cla nostalgie de son cher ruisseau\nde la rue du Bac,\u201d but the gutter he yearned for flowed in the days\nwhen he was young. It is this that gives some of his work an appeal\nthat has nothing to do with its merit. For there are many to whom Paris\nrepresents the days when they were young, many to whom the names tune\nthe pulses to a quick and joyous march, names like the rue Notre Dame\ndes Champs, twisting grey street, whose pavements still beat with the\nairy tread of new generations of dreamers. It is the same throughout.\nWhen he talks of buying books at the Od\u00e9on, we do not watch an old man\nchoosing what he wishes, and paying for it from a pocketful of money\nthat he has not counted. We see the Copp\u00e9e of 1864, or ourselves of\nten years ago; boys, with the price of the book, and perhaps ten sous\nfor dinner, spending nevertheless an hour in looking at all the other\nbooks on the stalls, and then buying the one for which we had come with\nthe swift manner of those who have walked straight to the bookshop,\nand, having got what they want as expeditiously as possible, are going\nstraight off again. We see that dead Copp\u00e9e, or ourselves, sitting\namong the nurse-maids in the gardens opposite, cutting the leaves with\na clasp-knife from a fair. The Caf\u00e9 de Seville, once a meeting-place\nfor men of beards and men of hair, is made a tryst for Copp\u00e9e and his\ndead youth. And when he says that for the Parisian the seasons come to\ntown, and that, in a green and rose sunset, he can find the autumn\u2019s\nmorbid melancholy, and, in a sunny morning in the Luxembourg gardens,\nall the divine joyousness of spring, we know of what Parisian he is\nspeaking.\n\nHis obsession by the contrast between rich and poor reduces to the\nsame sentiment. He does not hate the rich because they are rich; he is\nonly sorry for them if money has taken away from them something they\nmight have had in poverty. He is not sorry for the poor because they\nare poor, but only if their poverty expresses the lack of something\nthat, with money, they think they might have had. He has come to regard\nillusions as the only sterling coin. In the two contrasted tales of\n\u201cThe Italian Organ\u201d he seems to weigh rich and poor in opposite scales,\nand to find a balance between them. One tune of the organ reminds a\npoor clerk\u2019s wife of the days before she married, when she was the\nprettiest girl at the cheap dances, and Monsieur Fred, amusing himself,\nfilled her head with dreams. Riches have carried him away from her,\nand she has grown paler, and married Jules with the stiff collar and\nthe india-rubber-cleaned gloves. It is very sad. Another tune reminds\nthe Countess of the days before she married, when as la Belle Adah of\nthe American Circus, she reigned in her own place. The Count fell in\nlove with her, pursued her, married her, and trained her to be a lady.\nShe spends her mornings in visiting institutions, and there is a vicar\nwaiting on her in the drawing-room. It is very sad. But the sorrow\nof both these women is not for their riches or their poverty. It is\nmourning for a life that can never be lived. Copp\u00e9e\u2019s love for the poor\nis unlike Daudet\u2019s. Daudet loves the poor because they are brave and\npicturesque. Copp\u00e9e sees in them the simpleness of heart and the power\nof dreaming that were his when he was poor himself, that is to say,\nwhen he was young. The poor invented Christianity.\n\nVery little happens in Copp\u00e9e\u2019s short stories. In some of them nothing\nhappens at all. Things are remembered and set down, and from those\nnotes rises less a tale than the suggestion of a story that might have\nbeen told. Now it is old Mother Bernu, who saw Marie Antoinette carried\nto the guillotine in a white shirt, and is thrown up by a careless\nTime to take the little Copp\u00e9e out for walks. Now it is a couple of\nold bachelors talking of might-have-beens. Now, \u201cMon Ami Meurtrier,\u201d\na swaggering athletic clerk, is discovered to be the mildest of men,\nattending to his mother\u2019s lap-dog, and mixing good coffee. In most of\nthe stories it is more than usually evident that the author is the real\nhero. \u201cThe White Frock\u201d is the tale of a lame child whose only white\ndress is worn at her first communion. All her friends wear a second\non their wedding days, and she will never be married. It is really\nthe tale of a man who passes daily through a little street, and, in\nwatching the street change, beards whiten, and children marry, sees his\nown youth passing from him, and, in the little lame girl, a melancholy\npiece of childhood\u2019s jetsam whose dream will never be realised, never\nbe destroyed. There was a little boy who lived near the gardens of the\nLuxembourg, and walked there in the spring, when the trees were caught\nin a net of fluttering green, and in the summer heat, when those long\nwalks were patterned black and white with sun-thrown shadows, and in\nthe autumn, when the leaves were rusty gold, and fell to the ground to\nmake a pleasant trampling place for children\u2019s feet, and in the winter,\nwhen, over the round steel pond, the grey stone Queens of France looked\nmournfully at the straight-fronted palace. He walked there, intimate\nwith all the moods of the garden, his eyes awake with possibilities,\nrhyming verses that perhaps would never be published, and finding the\nworld a fairy-tale with so many ends from which to choose that it was\nfortunate it would not finish soon. He was always alone there, in the\nmidst of the students, girls and nurse-maids. He and the sparrows\nseemed to have the garden to themselves. The others did not seem to\nmatter. And this boy never left the study of Fran\u00e7ois Copp\u00e9e. If Copp\u00e9e\nlooked up from his desk he was there, almost reproachful, a ghostly\nboy with clear and truthful eyes, walking under the trees, in ragged\nclothes, rhyming verses for himself. The wisdom of the world turned to\ndross beside his golden ignorance, and the man who had grown up felt,\nlike the loiterer along the quays, a continuous pride and pain in\nthinking of the days when the sunset had shone for him alone.\n\n  1909.\n\n\n\n\nFRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE\n\n\n\n\nFRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE\n\nAN ESSAY IN COMPREHENSION\n\n_To I. C. R._\n\n\nPhilosophy in the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the\ntremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of\ndialectic. A philosopher\u2019s pride is in the impersonal nature of his\nthought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery,\non which the maker\u2019s name is the only sign that it was once a daring,\npersonal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of\nthe body of a man. Its maker, when it is finished, would wish to wipe\nthe filings and the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste,\nand, folding his arms, to watch it in independent activity. The reason\nof this ambition is to be found neither in modesty, nor yet in vanity,\nbut in a ruling intellectual concept, the concept of absolute truth.\nIf the true is universally true, if a thing either _is_, or _is not_,\nthen the personality of the thinker either is grit in the wheels, or,\nby the necessity of its presence and assistance, betrays the weakness\nof the thought whose truth or untruth can in no way be affected by the\nexistence or non-existence of its discoverer. This Nietzsche resolutely\ndenied, and denied in two ways.\n\nFirst, he denied the absolute nature of truth, asserting that the\nword \u201ctrue\u201d was merely a title given by men to opinions, and that\nthe justice of its application was, in a broad sense, to be judged\npragmatically. A pragmatist before William James, he said: \u201cThe\nfalseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is\nhere, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The\nquestion is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving,\nspecies-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally\ninclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic\njudgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us; that\nwithout a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of\nreality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable,\nwithout a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers,\nman could not live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a\nrenunciation of life, a negation of life.\u201d[5]\n\nSecondly, he denied that the personality of the thinker was a\ndisturbing factor in his thought. It was, on the contrary, the\nguarantee that once at least that thought had been true. \u201cNow\nphilosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders; to\nall later philosophers they are usually a single big mistake, and\nto feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths.... Therefore many\ndisapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs....\nWhoever, on the contrary, finds any pleasure at all in great men\nfinds pleasure also in all such systems, be they ever so erroneous,\nfor they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal\ntouch and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the\nphilosopher, just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can\nform conclusions as to the soil. _That_ mode of life, of viewing human\naffairs at any rate, has existed once, and is therefore possible.\u201d He\nwrote that quite early in his career in his little book on early Greek\nphilosophy, a history like the dawn setting on fire the tips of the\ndistant mountains, then the nearer, and at last throwing on the ground\nbehind him the shadow of the observer. For Nietzsche, the mountain\npeaks are those fragments of the crumbled systems which are personal\nto their authors, and, even if refutable as philosophy are irrefutable\nas particular and individual revelations. It is a delightful little\ngathering of philosophers and, perhaps, more important than has yet\nbeen admitted, in its promise of Nietzsche\u2019s habit of thought, his\nimpatience of dialectic, his dislike of the Parmenidean mind, his trust\nin the poetic, the particular. \u201cWhat verse is to the poet,\u201d he says,\n\u201cdialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order\nto hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.\u201d From this view\nhe never departed. In _Beyond Good and Evil_ he repeats his belief in\nthe personal character of thought: \u201cIn each cardinal problem there\nspeaks an unchangeable \u2018I am this\u2019; a thinker cannot learn anew about\nman and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully--he can only\nfollow to the end what is \u2018fixed\u2019 about them in himself.\u201d And again in\n_Zarathustra_: \u201c\u2018This is now my way--where is yours?\u2019 Thus did I answer\nthose who asked me \u2018the way.\u2019 For _the_ way--it doth not exist.\u201d\n\nAnd so, for Nietzsche, truth is infinitely variable, minted afresh\nby each man and dependent upon his image and superscription for a\nguarantee of its particular validity. It was for this reason that\nhe despised the elaborate stage-play of reasoning. He believed that\nto exhibit ideas in a white light and at a mean temperature, when\nthey offered themselves in the glow of the morning or in the heat of\nnoon, was to strip them of their credentials. He insisted that his\nown thoughts were true in relation to himself, and preserved their\nconcreteness by way of preserving the conditions of their truth. He\nrefused the step from the concrete to the abstract as a step into\nannihilation, and in this way identified himself with the poets. To\nmisunderstand him here is to misread him everywhere.\n\nWe are examining, then, in Friedrich Nietzsche a man whose view of\ntruth demanded the personal presence of the thinker as guarantee of\nthe thought. Consequently, though for reasons I have already given it\nis usual on the part of philosophers and their critics to rule the\npersonality of a thinker out of a discussion of his thought, here,\nat least, we are justified in glancing at a man\u2019s character before\nwe examine the ideas that will help us to fill it out to approximate\nverisimilitude.\n\nNietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, went mad in January 1889, and\ndied on August 25, 1900. His father was a country parson, simple,\nupright, patriotic and monarchical. He found joy in the coincidence of\nhis son\u2019s birthday with that of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and this\ncircumstance gave Nietzsche his names. His mother was a young woman of\nhigh spirits and great physical energy, so exuberant and so lovable\nas to be described as \u201ca gorgeous savage\u201d by her mother-in-law. His\nfather, \u201cpreordained to pay only a flying visit--a gracious reminder\nof life rather than life itself,\u201d died in his six and thirtieth year,\nbefore Nietzsche was five. A grandmother, two aunts and his mother\npresided over a pious happy childhood, from which he emerged as a model\nschoolboy, laughably virtuous, walking slowly home in a rainstorm\nin spite of his mother\u2019s frenzied urging, and rebuking this urging\nwith pained austerity: \u201cBut, mamma, in the rules of the school it is\nwritten, \u2018On leaving school boys are forbidden to jump and run about\nin the streets, but must walk quietly and decorously to their homes.\u2019\u201d\nThis sedateness persisted with him, although he could so completely\nforget himself in playing with children, that when he was twenty-six\nand a professor, he was laughed at and told he was only fourteen. He\nalways dressed with notable nicety. Though he said, with pride, that\nhe would rather be a satyr than a saint, he had a dignity that belongs\nrather to holiness than to lust. Children and old women loved him. The\nfruit-sellers in the Turin market-place hurried to pick out for him\ntheir finest grapes. He had gentle manners, a beautiful voice, and a\nprofound sense of the politeness that an aristocrat owes to himself.\nHe clung to the legend that he was the descendant of Polish noblemen,\nand was proud of being mistaken by Poles for a Pole, that Frenchman\namong the Slavs. His favourite books were the courteous unruffled\nFrench moralists of the seventeenth century, and the works of Stendhal,\nwho resembled them in wearing a sword and in his love of fine manners.\n\nHis precarious health gave him extreme sensitiveness to his physical\ncondition. He believed that clear thinking was only possible in dry air\nand on hills. His highest praise for his work was that it was mountain\nthought. He composed in the open air and in motion, and advised other\npeople to follow his example. \u201cRemain seated as little as possible,\nput no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the\naccompaniment of free bodily motion--nor in one in which even the\nmuscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in\nthe intestines.\u201d\n\nHe seized on Flaubert\u2019s \u201cOn ne peut penser et \u00e9crire qu\u2019assis,\u201d with a\ncry: \u201cHere have I got you, you nihilist? A sedentary life is the real\nsin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking\nhave any value.\u201d\n\nHe defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that\n\u201capart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of\nsuch a creature.\u201d A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was\ndetrimental to him, \u201cas the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.\u201d A healthy\nman, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses \u201cthe\nwill to health,\u201d and \u201cis strong enough to make everything turn to his\nown advantage.\u201d He found in convalescence \u201ca pale delicate light and\na sunshine happiness,\u201d \u201ca feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect,\nand haughtiness.\u201d From the combination of his ill-health and his\nhealthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche\nlearnt, he says, \u201cto look upon healthier concepts and values from the\nstandpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret\nwork of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is\nladen and rich with the richness of life.\u201d He mentions \u201cthe sweetness\nand spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of\nblood and muscle,\u201d and remembers the unusual dialectical clearness he\nenjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious\nthan most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain.\nWhen the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of\nSilvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition\nof this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added\nthe exultant postscript: \u201c6000 feet beyond man and time!\u201d\n\nSuch, sketched as briefly as possible, is the physiological background\non which we must set his work.\n\nThe greater part of that work (which fills seventeen volumes in the\nEnglish translation) is made up of short numbered paragraphs, arranged\nunder general headings. The lectures and poems are, indeed, the only\nexceptions, for though _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays called\n_Thoughts out of Season_, are less disintegrated than later books,\nwe can perceive, in their numbered sections, the promise of sections\nshorter and continually shortening to the brief \u201cMaxims and Missiles\u201d\nat the beginning of _The Twilight of the Idols_. Even _Thus Spake\nZarathustra_ was built in a similar manner, though disguised by\nthe rush of prophecy and a more definite general scheme. Nietzsche\nallowed such constructive power as he had to atrophy. He was never a\nsystematic thinker, but, because his paragraphs are not such separate\nand individual observations like those of Chamfort or Vauvenargues;\nbecause they were often written in swift succession, one after another,\nthere is a dangerous possibility that in reading them we may feel we\nare reading notes for a book which the author has not troubled to piece\ntogether into the superficial form to which we are accustomed. We may\nresent this, but we are more likely to grow weary of the constant\nchange of subject, of the staccato iteration of ideas without prologues\nor epilogues to awaken slowly and lull again to repose our sluggish\nbrains. It is well to remember that we have learnt to read too fast,\nand that Nietzsche foresaw our discomfort. \u201cHe that writeth in blood\ndoth not want to be read but learnt by heart.... It is no easy task\nto understand unfamiliar blood. I hate the reading idlers.\u201d We cease\nto feel the superficial confusion and inconsistency of those ten\nthousand paragraphs when we become better aware of the half-dozen\nideas that were the parents of that numerous family. We are then able\nto trace a paragraph\u2019s pedigree, and to place it in a larger scheme\nthan that of the volume in which it happens to be printed. No reader\nof Nietzsche can have failed to notice that his books, different in\ndetail, different in application, yet often seem coincident with each\nother. Nor is this due to chance repetitions that would betray an\nuncritical improvisation. It is an accurate indication of Nietzsche\u2019s\nhabit of mind. His books were gleanings, and, after his mature work\nbegan, they were gleanings from fields almost uniformly sown. The\nseasons varied and the sower\u2019s arm was irregular in its swing, but\nthe harvest was always from a field that had been fertilised by a\nfairly uniform mixture of ideas. The ideas of the pragmatic nature of\ntruth, of Eternal Recurrence, of the Will to Power, of the Superman,\nand of master and servant morality, yield in book after book a new\ncrop of lesser ideas, applied, amplified, restricted or illustrated in\npsychological observation. For this reason I do not intend, in what can\nbut be a short essay, any detailed criticism of Nietzsche\u2019s books,\nbut rather to note the results of such criticism. The reading of his\nbooks, unless it be impatient, careless, and unworthy, is a process of\ndiscovering what were those half-dozen ideas that separated Nietzsche\nfrom the thinkers of his time, stimulated his brain until at last it\nbroke, and during many years kept him in the lonely joyful ecstasy of\ncontinual exploration.\n\n\u201cThe first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it,\u201d\nbut they often so obscure it as to postpone its eventual utility.\nSome of the half-dozen ideas I have mentioned have been so often\ncaricatured that it is extremely difficult to recognise them without\nthe exaggeration with which we have been made familiar. It is not\neasy to state another man\u2019s ideas. To fail is to do him an injury. To\nsucceed is not unlike taking the words out of his mouth, which is rude.\nBut I am neither a translator of Nietzsche nor an opponent. I wish to\nunderstand, not to persuade. And, for understanding, such statement is\ndesirable.\n\nNietzsche neither escapes nor attempts to escape the contradictions\nin the form of thought that make logic and life battledores to toss\nlaughter at each other like a shuttlecock. He is a determinist and\nyet gives advice, the giving of which presupposes a belief in free\nwill and a possible choice. He seeks to influence others, and, in his\nmanner at least, forgets that the logical determinist should only allow\nhimself to say: \u201cCircumstances compel me to make certain statements,\nwhich, in the form of circumstances, may or may not share in the sum of\ncircumstances that compel you to actions and thoughts which in their\ntotality I cannot conceive.\u201d That is not the view of his own activity\nwhich dictates the eager vivid combination of argument and incantation\nthat makes Nietzsche\u2019s books. He is free, in that he has the illusion\nof freedom. The illusion of freedom is one of the determining\ncircumstances. Its effect is to make it unnecessary to remember in\npractice that circumstances determine.\n\nWe need not therefore hesitate over the inconsistency apparent between\nsome of Nietzsche\u2019s ideas. We do better to notice it as characteristic\nof his thought, and simply to state his ideas, remembering, if we will,\nthat they belong to different circles of consciousness; some to that\nwider circle that includes the universe and with it determinism, and\nsome to that smaller circle, concentric with the first, and including\nonly the area of practical activity. Let us be determinists first and\nexamine the Nietzschean universe.\n\nThe idea of Eternal Recurrence seems to have had for Nietzsche\nsomething of the hypnotic character of those ideas that made Poe write\nof his _Eureka_: \u201cWhat I here propound is true: therefore it cannot\ndie;--or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will\n\u2018rise again to the Life Everlasting.\u2019\u201d Indeed the idea itself is not\nunlike that of Poe, who, untrained alike in philology and philosophy,\nexpressed himself in a manner that would have given Nietzsche exquisite\npain:\n\n    \u201cGuiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the\n    law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in\n    entertaining a belief--let us say, rather, indulging a hope--that\n    the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for\n    ever, and for ever, and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into\n    existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of\n    the Heart Divine?\u201d (Poe\u2019s _Eureka_.)\n\nNow Nietzsche would not have spoken of a \u201cHeart Divine,\u201d even\nexplaining, as Poe did, that this heart was our own; but he did\ncontemplate a perpetually self-renewing Universe. Only--and herein\nlay the importance of his idea to himself--he saw it renewing itself\nin every detail, in every minutest action of the minutest of its\nindividual parts, at every moment of its cycle. Every moment of the\nfuture being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner\nor later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in\nevery detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a\nsimilar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. He said:\n\n    \u201cIf the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy,\n    as a definite number of centres of energy--and every other concept\n    remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows therefrom that\n    the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations\n    in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In\n    infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must\n    once have been realised; not only this, but it must have been\n    realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between\n    every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every\n    other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone,\n    and since every one of these combinations would determine the\n    whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely\n    identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown\n    to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself\n    an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all\n    eternity.\u201d\n\nNietzsche, hypnotised by this idea, believed it new, but there is a\nclear suggestion of it in the third book of Lucretius\u2019 poem:\n\n   \u201cNam cum respicias immensi temporis omne\n    Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai\n    Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,\n    Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta\n    Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:\n    Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:\n    Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque\n    Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.\u201d\n\nLines which Mr. Cyril Bailey in his translation of Lucretius[6]\nadmirably renders as follows: \u201cFor when you look back over all the\nlapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are\nthe motions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these\nsame seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same\norder as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our life\u2019s\nmemory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have\nwandered everywhere far astray from sense.\u201d\n\nThe character of Nietzsche\u2019s thinking appears in his application of\nthis idea. It is for him \u201cthe great disciplinary thought,\u201d and he\nleaps the gulf between determinism and free will in the most careless\nmanner, to remark: \u201cThe question which thou shalt have to answer before\nevery deed that thou doest--Is this such a deed as I am prepared to\nperform an infinite number of times?--is the best ballast.\u201d It does\nnot matter to him at all that a determinist idea is to be used as a\nstandard of choice by a being whose free will he assumes. His thoughts\nare all thoughts for himself to live with. He is conscious of them not\nas abstractions, but particularly, as concrete things, combinations of\nideas with their effects. He is able to speak of Eternal Recurrence as\n\u201cthe most oppressive thought,\u201d and to consider \u201cthe means of enduring\nit.\u201d I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas.\n\nMoving now in a smaller circle of consciousness, let us examine\nNietzsche\u2019s view of the world and man and man\u2019s activity within this\neternally recurring universe. \u201cThe world,\u201d he says, \u201cas we know it, is\nrepresentation and erroneous representation: the world, if we could\nknow it, might well give us a sensation of disillusion, \u2018so full of\nmeaning, so deep, so wonderful, bearing happiness and unhappiness in\nits bosom,\u2019 is the world that we unconsciously create.\u201d In Nietzsche\u2019s\nworld we come at once to the third of his ruling ideas (the first\nbeing his idea of truth, the second, Eternal Recurrence). A regiment\nof artillery, galloping to war, filled Nietzsche (who was at the\ntime serving as assistant to the field surgeon) with disgust at the\nconception of a dull struggle for life that dictated most nineteenth\ncentury thought. Schopenhauer, at that time still his master, had\nsupposed that the motive of man was the will to live. But, as the\nregiment of artillery thundered to battle, Nietzsche answered, No; the\nwill to power, in which that other will may or may not be included.\nMen are willing to risk existence; they are not ready to risk power,\nunless in hope of increased intensity of power, or of an increased area\nover which to exercise it.\n\nBut the Will to Power is to be found in races as well as in\nindividuals; it is the motive not of races only but of humanity.\nHumanity wills to power, wills to the continual re-creation of itself\nas a species ever more powerful; wills, as Nietzsche puts it, the\ncreation of the Superman. This is the fourth of his ideas. Here, again,\nNietzsche\u2019s concrete habit of thought exposed him to misunderstanding,\nnot only by his disciples, but also by himself. He did not at first\nimagine the Superman as a suddenly appearing demi-god whose path\nwas to be made smooth by the human sacrifices of the \u201cdown-goers.\u201d\nHe saw him as the result of a long continued and conscious will to\npower, working through many generations, and gradually evolving a\nsuperior type. Much of his writing is devoted to making conscious this\nparticular application of the will. But the idea of a superior type\nshone with such effulgence as to dazzle his eyes, and to blind him to\nthe slow evolution which he would never have denied. He could say with\nSeannchan, the poet:\n\n   \u201cThe stars had come so near me that I caught\n    Their singing. It was praise of that great race\n    That would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,\n    With a high head, and open hand, and how,\n    Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.\u201d\n\nSupermen were no longer men, but something different. The long series\nof gradually improving types vanished in the conception of their\nresult, itself to be improved upon, and it became possible for him to\nspeak of Man and Superman as two distinct beings, forgetting the series\nof beings no less distinct implied by the development of one into the\nother.\n\nHere, too, it is profitable to notice how Nietzsche translated an idea\nfrom speculation into life. The hypothesis of the future Superman\nallowed him a noble view of friendship. He has often been compared\nto Whitman, partly, no doubt, because the rhythmical _Zarathustra_\nreminded his readers of the triumphant, unrhymed movement of the\nsooth-saying _Leaves of Grass_. But his friendship is very different\nfrom Whitman\u2019s. Whitman\u2019s the hand-grip, the smile at meeting, the\nlarge tolerance, the collaboration in simple things; Nietzsche\u2019s a\nfriendship more exacting. He would have thought Whitman\u2019s friend a\nneighbour, and he said, \u201cNot the neighbour do I teach you, but the\nfriend. Let the friend be the festival of earth to you, and a foretaste\nof the Superman,\u201d and \u201cLet the future and the farthest be the motive of\nthy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.\u201d\nA friend for Nietzsche was one who fulfilled desires that he could not\nrealise himself. Not the least profound of his observations was this:\n\u201cOur faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in\nourselves.\u201d His own friendship with Wagner provides a commentary of\nfact. Begun in the belief that Wagner was bringing to earth such an\nart as that of which Nietzsche dreamed, and ended in the disillusion\nconfirmed by \u201cthe preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness, and strong\npepper\u201d in the first performances at Bayreuth, it was at once the\ngreatest inspiration and the greatest disappointment of his life.\nNietzsche, who had published _The Birth of Tragedy_ to serve Wagner,\nwrote _The Case of Wagner_ to destroy him, or, perhaps, to cleanse\nhimself of a mistaken admiration. But listen to his clear-sighted\ncomment: \u201cI gained an insight into the injustice of _idealism_, by\nnoticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I\nhad cherished of him.\u201d\n\nNietzsche\u2019s fifth ruling idea is most clearly expressed in the book\nthat he wrote for his friend. He summed it up in the words Amor Fati,\nthe acceptance of life, be it what it might, a joyful \u201cyea-saying\u201d\nto all its pronouncements, written in the most cruel facts though\nthey might be. Now this, as he pointed out, is the attitude of the\ntragic artist, whose work is the expression not of pity but of a\nproud acquiescence, an acquiescence that is an intellectual conquest.\nHe wished men to be artists in their attitude towards life, and\nthis desire brought his writings on art nearer to \u201cthe business and\nbosoms of men\u201d than the discreet distance from these things usually\npreserved by aesthetic theory. His _Birth of Tragedy_ was not merely\nan historical speculation, but offered for the criticism of life\nwords that Nietzsche applied for the moment to the criticism of art.\nThese words were \u201cApollonian\u201d and \u201cDionysian.\u201d The latter word has\nbeen persistently applied to Nietzsche himself, though he saw \u201cin the\nfraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian\nas well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.\u201d What does he mean by this\nantithetical conception? Let me answer by two quotations:\n\n    1. \u201cIt is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two\n    art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in\n    the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between\n    the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of\n    music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies\n    were parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance,\n    and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful\n    births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which\n    is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term \u2018Art\u2019; till\n    at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they\n    appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually\n    generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic\n    tragedy.\u201d\n\n    2. \u201cIn contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts\n    from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of\n    every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities\n    of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the\n    living and conspicuous representatives of _two_ worlds of art which\n    differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo\n    stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the _principium\n    individuationis_ through which alone the redemption in appearance\n    is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus\n    the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the\n    Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.\u201d\n\nHe conceives these as \u201cthe separate art-worlds of dreamland and\ndrunkenness,\u201d and makes for himself a parable about the Apollonian\nartist in dreams and the Dionysian artist in ecstasies, comparable to\nBlake\u2019s poem of \u201cThe Mental Traveller,\u201d in which there is just such an\nalternation of conquest and captivity:\n\n   \u201cAnd if the babe is born a boy\n      He\u2019s given to a woman old,\n    Who nails him down upon a rock,\n      Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.\n\n    She binds iron thorns around his head,\n      She pierces both his hands and feet,\n    She cuts his heart out at his side,\n      To make it feel both cold and heat.\n\n    Her fingers number every nerve,\n      Just as a miser counts his gold;\n    She lives upon his shrieks and cries,\n      And she grows young as he grows old.\n\n    Till he becomes a bleeding youth,\n      And she becomes a virgin bright;\n    Then he rends up his manacles,\n      And binds her down for his delight.\u201d\n\nIt is a fine pictorial expression of the formative processes of\nconsciousness, the domination of the unconscious flux by the shaping of\nthe knowing intellect, and the escape of that flux, the overbalancing\nof the intellect by the onrush of unrealised impressions. I do\nnot think it has or can have any deeper significance in aesthetic\ncriticism. It was, however, of considerable service to Nietzsche in the\ncriticism of life. In life, he would be, for the moment, a worshipper\nof Dionysus, seeking less to control life than to live--because\nDionysus, he felt, was being a little neglected. In a \u201cDionysian age\u201d\nhe would have left ecstasy below him and worshipped the placid Apollo,\nshaping dreams untroubled by the turmoil in the valleys. In such an age\nas that for which he hoped, such an age as that of Greek tragedy, he\nwould have stormed Olympus at the head of the Dionysian revellers, and\nconquered the Dionysian ecstasy to bind it captive in the service of\nApollo.\n\nThere remains Nietzsche\u2019s distinction between good and evil and good\nand bad. His conception of morality resembles his conception of\ntruth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not\nman for them. He goes further, believing that they were made and\nare continually being re-made _by_ man. \u201cThere is no such thing as\nmoral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena,\u201d which\ninterpretation a free and healthy man should make in accordance with\nhis own nature. The morality generally current in his time Nietzsche\nbelieved to be slave morality, as opposed to aristocratic or ruler\nmorality, and he attributed its prevalence to the spreading of the\nChristian religion. He believed that good was invented by those who\npossessed it. \u201cThe judgment \u2018good\u2019 did _not_ originate among those to\nwhom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves;\nthat is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the\nhigh-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that\ntheir actions were good: that is to say of the first order, in\ncontradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the\nplebeian.\u201d The code of honour, the list of deeds that a gentleman\nforbids himself, would, I suppose, be considered by Nietzsche as a\nsurvival of this original morality. He weighs \u201cmoral interpretations\u201d\nof phenomena in the same scale as he weighs \u201ctruths,\u201d asking, \u201cHave\nthey up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being?\u201d His\nhostility to Christianity may be traced to his answer to this question.\nThe replacement of the aristocratic judgment of actions done, by the\nplebeian judgment on actions suffered, the substitution of the slave\u2019s\npoint of view for that of the ruler, and its half-hearted adoption\nby those who should rule were impediments to that ruling, and checks\nto the will to power in which he recognised the mainspring of human\nactivity. He found then that the common morality was hostile to the\nhighest development of humanity, a frustration of its highest hopes\nby hampering the will to power of \u201cthe highest men,\u201d and proceeded\nto call those who had ears to listen \u201cbeyond good and evil,\u201d begging\nthem to make their own interpretation of phenomena, and not to accept\nthat of men whose submission to themselves should be part of their\nnatural ambition. The morality of \u201cthe small\u201d is, he says, a handicap\nto greater men, because \u201cvirtue for them is what maketh modest and\ntame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man\u2019s\nbest domestic animal.\u201d He delights accordingly in using as terms for\npraise the words that \u201cthe small\u201d use in condemnation. He speaks, for\nexample, of the \u201cwidespread heaven of clear _wicked_ spirituality,\u201d a\nspirituality beyond the good and evil of the tame. Yet he would not\nabolish the tame, nor lighten their shackles. \u201cFor must there not be\nthat which is danced _over_, danced beyond? Must there not, for the\nsake of the nimble, the nimblest--be moles and clumsy dwarfs?\u201d It is\nnot Nietzsche\u2019s fault that his books have stimulated \u201cmoles and clumsy\ndwarfs\u201d to the grotesque exercise of trying to dance over themselves.\nHe did not write for them, and told them so. He insisted at all times\nthat he wrote \u201cfor higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant and\nmerrier, for such as are built squarely in body and soul.\u201d And his\nwritings are intended to teach such \u201claughing lions\u201d to \u201cbecome what\nthey are,\u201d unimpeded by the morality that a thousand hands offer them\nfrom below. He has not the vain, foolish hope of doing away with\nmoralities, but asks each of his \u201chigher men\u201d to be true to his\nown. If he goes \u201cbeyond good and evil,\u201d he is to carry with him his\nprivate scale of good and bad, with which he is to measure his deeds in\naccordance with the will to power that leads him and his descendants to\na higher, a more laughing perfection.\n\nAfter the brief statement of these ideas, we can examine with better\nhope of understanding the general character of Nietzsche\u2019s thought. It\nwas not \u201csystematic\u201d in the usual sense, but it seems to me foolish to\ndescribe as \u201cunsystematic\u201d a method of thinking whose formula was as\nsimple as his. He used the ideas I have catalogued precisely as the\nalchemists hoped to use the philosopher\u2019s stone for the transmutation\nof metals. Applying them severally or together to a very large number\nof statements he noted the resulting reactions, and found that they\nturned truisms into popular fallacies. His books accordingly became\ncorrections of Pseudodoxia. He saw, for example, that if the Will\nto Power be substituted for the Will to Live, and Ruler for Slave\nMorality, the common judgments of men on everything in the world that\nis capable of moral interpretation are in some way changed. He was\nnot content to leave others to find out in what way. He called this\nchange a \u201ctransvaluation of values,\u201d and wished thus to transvaluate\nall values, and so to offer to other men and to himself a new\nrepresentation of the world in the light of his own ideas, a task so\nSisyphean that it is in itself a sufficient explanation of the collapse\nof his brain. His madness was not promised by his work, any more than a\nbroken neck is promised by riding to hounds. Nor did the vivid summer\nlightning of his mind destroy him or even threaten destruction. His\nmadness was a catastrophe, not the culmination of a disease. His method\nof thought, the continual endless application of his ideas, allowed him\nto think too fast. No sedate erection of a system kept his brain to a\nnormal speed. Its disaster was like that of an engine which \u201craces,\u201d\nas engineers say, breaks its crankshaft, or so whirls its flywheel as\nto allow it to satisfy its centrifugality. All men build worlds for\nthemselves, but they borrow from each other, and are content to fill\nwith hasty scene-painting the gaps in their construction. No man is\ncapable of building in innumerable fragments a world complete and\nhomogeneous. Nietzsche\u2019s mind, working with frenzied, unchecked speed\nin this perilous attempt, ran suddenly amok, and snapped, and with its\nsnapping his life ends. The automaton that fed and slept and was not\nsure if it had written books, was not Nietzsche, though it prolonged\nhis physical existence. For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the\nten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the\nmonths of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the\nheat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to\nexplain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness\nas the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he\nlost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to\nrefuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation.\n\nNietzsche\u2019s applications of his ideas in book after book are not frigid\nillustrations, but sentences, maxims, aphorisms, and observations\nof great psychological subtlety, earning a place beside those of\nLa Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, or Stendhal by the guarantee of a\nscale of values peculiar to their author. I think it not impossible\nthat Nietzsche will one day be remembered chiefly as a psychologist\nand moralist, a late nineteenth century representative of a great\ntradition, and that the ideas which are now a noise in men\u2019s ears,\nand, misunderstood, obscure our views of him, will then be remarked\nmerely as explanatory of his psychology\u2019s private and individual tone.\nThe Superman will be mentioned in a note appended to his observations\non friends and friendship, and his theory of the Will to Power tucked\naway in small print for those who wish more clearly to understand his\nremarks on self-development or war.\n\nI have not spoken of Nietzsche as an artist. That prose, now\nhammer-welded, now silver filigree, dancing, walking, running in\ntime with his ideas and moods, is not the least of his achievements.\nWhen he wrote: \u201cOne day it will be said of Heine and me that we were\nby far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever\nexisted, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in\nthis language an incalculable distance behind us,\u201d he was not far\nfrom the truth. _Thus spake Zarathustra_, that Ossianic poem of a\nhero of thought, _Ecce Homo_, in the self-assertion of which is not\nonly pride, but pride a little hurt that it should have so to assert\nitself, those paragraphs of witty and profound psychology, the noble\nessays on Schopenhauer and History, the muddled processional triumph of\n_The Birth of Tragedy_; whatever be our view of his ideas, we cannot\nbut admire the artist who made these things. His very thought has an\naesthetic value, as he saw himself, due, no doubt, to its concreteness;\nin reading his books we are translated to the tops of mountains, where\nthere is a dry wind, a warm sun, and snow not yet melted. Far below us\nare valley and vineyard and a sea with no haze. Our lungs are so full\nthat we cannot commit \u201cthe sin against the Holy Spirit\u201d; we cannot sit\nstill. There is dancing, there is singing in the air, and, as we turn\nto more sedate philosophy, it is as if we were suddenly to leave sun,\nwind, and valley for the cloistered dust of a dark room.\n\nIn his own eyes, however, Nietzsche the artist, like Nietzsche the\nthinker, was the humble, reverent servant of Nietzsche the educator.\nIn childhood he made respectful word-portraits of his schoolmasters.\nWhen he went to the universities, he said he was spending his time in\ndiscovering the best means of teaching instead of in learning what was\nusually taught in such places. His professorship was a symbol of his\nlife, and he only resigned it to sit on mountain tops and teach. No\nman since Plato has had such a boundless dream of education. Milton\ndesiring his pupils to be good for peace and for war, strong men behind\ntheir bows, skilful with the lute, learning to \u201crepair the ruins of\ntheir first parents by regaining to know God aright,\u201d until \u201cthey\nhave confirmed and solidly united the whole body of their perfected\nknowledge, like the last embattling of a Roman legion\u201d: Ascham with his\nlonger list of exercises, \u201cnot only comely and decent, but also very\nnecessary for a courtly gentleman to use,\u201d and his more detailed scheme\nof learning: neither of these looked so far as he, neither of them\nhoped to educate more than men of a city or of a nation, and for the\nservice of that limited community. Nietzsche dreamed of the education\nof mankind in its highest men, and, where Milton and Ascham feared for\nlack of teachers, he feared nothing so much as the scarcity of worthy\npupils. \u201cCompanions did the creating one seek, and children of _his_\nhope, and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he\nhimself should first create them.\u201d\n\nIn his early dissatisfaction with the educational methods of the German\nuniversities, there was more than a mere pedagogic discontent. In his\nattack on the pseudo-culture of such men as Strauss, in his exposure of\nthe abuse of history, in his farewell to \u201cSchopenhauer as Educator,\u201d he\nlearnt more and more clearly what it was that he was seeking. He sought\nto educate \u201chigher men\u201d to be themselves, to free them from impediments\nto their growth, and failing that, to let them perceive the impediments\nand attack them, and so weaken the enemies long trained to devour them\nshould they show themselves. For his \u201chigher men,\u201d and for no others,\nhe found the ballast of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, to replace\nthe misleading strings of the morality of the downtrodden. For their\nsakes he destroyed the divine right of the judgments of good and of\nevil; theirs was to be the Amor Fati, the cheerful acceptance of life,\ntheirs the Dionysian ecstasy, and theirs the Apollonian calm. For them\nhe invented his watchword: \u201cMan is something that is to be surpassed.\u201d\nHe did not expect to find such pupils, but only to make their advent\npossible, to prevent them from being strangled at birth. In the\nmeantime he spoke on to the empty benches, and, however extravagant,\ndaring, impossible his dream may have been, it is yet a privilege for\nus to sit and listen in that school of phantom Titans.\n\nI shall close this essay with a quotation that seems to me to sum up\nin its final sentences all that is best in Nietzsche\u2019s teaching, the\nultimate advice on which all his work is a commentary:\n\n    \u201cAh! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then\n    they disparaged all high hopes.\n\n    Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the\n    day had hardly an aim.\n\n    \u2018Spirit is also voluptuousness,\u2019 said they. Then broke the wings\n    of their spirit; and now it creepeth about and defileth where it\n    gnaweth.\n\n    Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now.\n    A trouble and a terror is a hero to them.\n\n    But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in\n    thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!\u201d\n\nThe man who wrote this has been called irreverent, because his choice\nof things to revere was not identical with his accuser\u2019s. But in\nthese sentences there is proof of his reverence for something more\nprofound, more important to mankind, than churches, than submissions\nto authority, a thing that men are not accustomed openly, if at all,\nto reverence, that quest of the Holy Grail on which all men set out,\nthough most turn back, and very few pursue it till they die. It is a\nquest whose goal is in each moment of seeking. Of this he was indeed\nreverent, of the glowing cheek and kindled eye of intellectual youth,\nof unsoiled ambition, of the flame alight before the altar of the\npotential hero, who is alive for a little while in every man, and whose\ncontinuance of life is the measure of each man\u2019s nobility.\n\n  1912.\n\n\n\n\nWALTER PATER\n\n\n\n\nWALTER PATER\n\n\nWalter Pater was brought up at Enfield, where he was near London, and\nknew from his earliest years \u201cthose quaint suburban pastorals\u201d that\ngather \u201ca certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great\ncity, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid\nlight on dome and bleached stone steeples.\u201d Something of that weighty\natmosphere, and with it something of that rapid light, I find in his\nwork, whether he is writing of the Italians of the Renaissance, of\nMontaigne, of the Greek philosophers, of the Dutch van Storck, or the\nGerman Carl of Rosenmold.\n\nThe external facts of his life may be shortly dismissed. He \u201cwas fond,\u201d\nas a child, \u201cof organising little processional pomps,\u201d and a meeting\nwith Keble strengthened for a time his boyish resolve to enter the\nChurch. That part of his temperament which sought satisfaction in\nsuch a course found it, perhaps, in the hieratic character of his\nprose. He read Ruskin when he was nineteen, but his appreciations were\ntoo independent of Ruskin\u2019s sanction to allow us to recognise the\ndeep influence that is popularly attributed to the older man. Ruskin\nbelieved that he had \u201cdiscovered\u201d Botticelli, but he first spoke of him\nin the Oxford lectures of 1871, and Pater\u2019s essay had been published in\nthe _Fortnightly Review_ the year before. Pater went from the King\u2019s\nSchool at Canterbury to Queen\u2019s College, Oxford, took a Second Class in\nthe Final Classical Schools, and, in 1864, was elected to a fellowship\nat Brasenose. He lived at Oxford thenceforward, with only occasional\nperiods of residence in London. In different long vacations he knew\nHeidelberg, Dresden, and various parts of France, and, in 1869, four\nyears before the publication of _The Renaissance_, travelled in Italy.\nHe died at Oxford after a life of unhurried labour on July 30, 1894.\n\nThere are some words that one would never use in speaking of him. \u201cJoy\u201d\nis one of them; \u201cdespair\u201d is another. They would be represented by the\nless exuberant \u201cpleasure,\u201d and the less violent \u201cregret.\u201d His was a\npersonality in half tones, lit by the pallid glow of a heavy sky, or by\nthe \u201cpeculiar daylight\u201d he noticed in the church at Canterbury, that\ndaylight which \u201cseemed to come from further than the light outside.\u201d\nYet his mind was not without intensity, though this was expressed\nmore by its freedom of invasion than by any obvious hardness of line\nor brilliance of colour. When he said, \u201cI should be afraid to read\nKipling, lest he should come between me and my page next time I sat\ndown to write,\u201d he was confessing an unnecessary carefulness. But his\nvery fear was not due to uncertainty of himself. It was that of the\njealous acolyte who will not expose the sacred glimmer of a votive\nlamp to even momentary comparison with a flash of limelight, sure as\nhe may be of the lamp\u2019s superior persistence, dignity, and, for him,\nsignificance. Pater set a high value on his own personality, which in\na world of relative truth, was perhaps the only thing that he could\ntrust. He tended it, protected it from undue disturbance, even from\nthe contagion of others, fed it from time to time with victories ...\nhis essays are the carefully prepared conquests of other personalities\nby his own ... and strengthened it always in the habit of a private\nsupremacy, a supremacy that neither sought nor needed external\nacknowledgment.\n\nIt would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of his work, or,\nmore exactly, of the mental attitude reflected in his work, on the\nliterature of the end of the last century and of the beginning of our\nown. He was a landmark in the history of consciously rhythmical prose,\nthe first English preacher (though very quietly) of the doctrine of\nart for art\u2019s sake, the exponent of an unusually precise technique,\nthe first example of a man whose life was consciously lived for art\u2019s\nsake; a man who, though he disguised the fact by many professions of\nhedonism, found in art the finest means of living, and preferred,\nwith something of his childish love for processional pomps, to meet\nlife only when it came to him, decorous, arranged, unified to single\npurposes, instead of with the medley of motives from which the artist\ndisentangles it.\n\nHis ideas have come to be more noticeable in other books than in his\nown. He seemed to deprecate too exuberant agreement. He did not like to\nstir his audience to an unbecoming enthusiasm. This is, perhaps, one\nreason why he has seldom been considered as a thinker. But another\nreason was more potent. \u201cThe sensible vehicle\u201d of his expression almost\nannulled his abstract thought. Pater is the best illustration of the\nway in which ideas can be obliterated by the personality of which they\nwere a part. He has never been compared to Nietzsche. Yet no student of\nPater\u2019s _ideas_ could avoid such a comparison, fantastic as it may seem\nto those to whom it has not occurred to refuse, for critical purposes,\nto adopt his attitude towards thought; to refuse, that is, \u201cto assign\nvery little to the abstract thought and much to its sensible vehicle or\noccasion.\u201d Even this attitude, if we examine it closely, is not unlike\nthe Nietzschean demand for the personal touch in a theory before the\ntheory itself. Elsewhere the resemblance is clearer. In _Plato and\nPlatonism_ he says: \u201cStill in the discussion even of abstract truths it\nis not so much what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after\nall really tells.\u201d In smaller things he offers a parallel, strange from\none who lived as he lived, to Nietzsche\u2019s outburst against sedentary\nthinking: \u201cIt might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that\npromoted movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate\nparturitions of the mind.\u201d In more important things--things more\nimportant to Nietzsche--Pater offers a similar aloof parallel, as if\nfrom another planet. Before _The Birth of Tragedy_ was written, Pater\nhad distinguished Apollo and Dionysus, for his own purposes and in his\nown way, as the particular deities of opposed artistic tendencies.\nAt one with Nietzsche in his conception of the relative nature of\ntruth, though he shrank from carrying it to battle _\u00e0 l\u2019outrance_,\nhe says almost what Nietzsche says of the evil influence of \u201cthe\nideal,\u201d \u201cthe absolute,\u201d on European thought, though, more eclectic,\nincapable of partisanship, he does not let it disturb his admiration\nof Plato. Mildly, as if it did not matter, he murmurs what Nietzsche\nshouted: \u201cThe European mind will never be quite sane again....\u201d And\nhe traces its insanity, as Nietzsche might have traced it, through\nthe Neo-Platonists, _The Imitation_, Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche,\nLeibnitz, Berkeley. \u201cBy one and all it is assumed, in the words of\nPlato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable, is the note of\nthe superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing steadily,\nas one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite unattainable)\ncondition of either, which in truth can only be attained by the\nsuppression of all the rule and outline of one\u2019s own actual experience\nand thought.\u201d And, in his criticism of the Sophists, he shows that he\nis aware, smilingly perhaps, of the theory of two moralities, one of\nthe ruler and another of the ruled. He says of the Sophists: \u201cAnd if\nold-fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better\nthan they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that\nwas not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for\nthe control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent\nto it, in regard to one\u2019s self? \u2018It will break up--this or that ethical\ndeposit in your mind, ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear,\nwhen exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the\nvulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such\npresuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to\nknow their place.\u2019\u201d This may seem like ironic criticism of Nietzsche\nbefore the fact, but it has not been noticed as such, even by\nNietzscheans, and that is a proof of the completeness with which Pater\nmade negligible what he said, beside the manner, the personal quality,\nof himself saying it.\n\nYet these and many other neglected ideas were of real importance to\nthe personality that obscures them now. Pater owed much of the slow\nrhythm of his mind to his careful observation of his own philosophic\nattitude. It is easy to talk of a battle in his mind between metaphysic\nand art; but no such battle was fought. Pater never lost his interest\nin philosophies, and that interest never interfered with his interest\nin art, but was rather its ally, an essential element in the mental\ntemper of all his work. He shared Nietzsche\u2019s dislike of dialectic,\nbecause in approaching the condition of mathematical speculation\nphilosophy denudes itself of personality. He disliked, for example,\nSpinoza\u2019s Euclidean demonstrations, \u201cthe dry bones of which rattle in\none\u2019s ears,\u201d but was enabled to use finely, in _Sebastian van Storck_,\nthat one of Spinoza\u2019s sayings in which the man seems to be epitomised:\n\u201cWhoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return.\u201d\n\u201cPhilosophic truth,\u201d for him, \u201cconsists in the philosophic temper.\u201d\nHe finds that \u201cperhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of\nseriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but\nfrom a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade\nof unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which\nmay be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract\nquestions.... Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them.\u201d\nThat was said in the first of his printed papers. In the last book\nof his that was published in his lifetime, he says of the essay: \u201cIt\nprovided him (Montaigne) with precisely the literary form necessary\nto a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable\nnot as a general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a\nparticular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully\nthose random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself\nwith suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to\nthe very last asking: _Que scais-je?_ Who knows?--in the very spirit of\nthat old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined\nsense of one\u2019s ignorance.\u201d The essay, we must not forget, was the form\nchosen by himself.\n\nNowhere does he better illustrate his conception of philosophic truth,\nof the philosophic temper, than in that harmony of essays, written for\ndelivery as lectures, and printed as _Plato and Platonism_. Philosophy\nclothes herself with humanity, or rather retains the clothes of which\ndialectic would deprive her, and we watch her as a human being, are\nnervous for her in the difficult places, as she threads her way through\nthe lives of men and the history of a nation. Pater is engaged in\nportraiture, not in exposition, so humane has his subject become. The\nthree philosophers whose images are impressed upon the theories of\n\u201cthe flux,\u201d of \u201cthe one,\u201d and of \u201cnumber,\u201d Heraclitus, Parmenides,\nPythagoras, are no longer outline drawings, like illustrations in a\nclassical dictionary, but coloured and modelled with something of\nBlake\u2019s enthusiastic vision, softened and quieted, till the enthusiasm\nis like summer lightning behind the hills, clear and bright but without\nmenace for his general intention. Their portraits, inset in the \u201cPlato\u201d\nlike the vignettes that encircle the central picture in those old\nengraved frontispieces, are curiously suggestive of paragraphs of\nNietzsche\u2019s _Early Greek Philosophy_. They are ruled by just such a\nconception of truth, but are without the spirit of proselytism, so\ninconsistent with it, and yet so characteristic of the man who preached\nrather than denounced his version of the Eternal Recurrence. It is\nhard to know which is most admirable--the delicate disentangling of\nSocrates from Plato, the clearly visualised picture of the Sophists\n(there never was a book on philosophy so full of concrete vision),\nthe synthesis of Plato\u2019s personality, lover, seer, observer, \u201cwho has\nlingered too long in the brazier\u2019s workshops\u201d to be able to speak of\n\u201cdumb matter,\u201d or the beautiful appreciation of the method of the\ndialogues and of the often travestied aims of Socratean talk, which\nrepresent both the \u201cdemand for absolute certainty, in any truth or\nknowledge worthy of the name,\u201d and Plato\u2019s method of learning and\nteaching, the essential quality of these conversations with himself\nbeing their endlessness. Then there is the dream, to the making of\nwhich has gone so much knowledge content to be hidden by the perfection\nof its service, of the city of Lacedaemon in Sparta, so necessary a\nprelude to the account of Plato\u2019s dreamed republic. Finally, perhaps\nbecause dearest to himself, there is the chapter on Plato\u2019s aesthetics,\nwhich, to Pater, were not what some have made them, but of immediate\nimport to men living their lives, and suggested a purpose, a hope \u201cto\nget something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of\ncontrol, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic\nor impassioned acts.\u201d It is, in a sense, a white heat of decorum\nfor which he asks, a scrupulousness, a patience which is \u201cquite as\nmuch as fire, of the mood of all true lovers.\u201d He is really asking\nfor self-conscious life, for the kind of life that is only given by\nart, whether by the contemplation of the work of artists or by the\nprivate acts of artistic creation, which we all perform, more or less\noften, and which are indeed processes of becoming conscious acts of\nscrupulous, observant and comprehensive living. I can think of no book\nbetter fitted to lead a student into philosophy, and I am not sure that\nit is not also the best book with which to begin the study of Walter\nPater. It is certainly the book that made the most various demands upon\nhis personality.\n\nMore than any other writer of his time he was justified in speaking\nof \u201cthe irrepressible conscience of art.\u201d For many he is, I suppose,\nchiefly interesting as the man who brought into English literary\nworkshops the craftsman\u2019s creed of Flaubert. This importation of his\nwas not a mere translation and expansion of the few sentences from\nFlaubert that appear in his essay on \u201cStyle.\u201d Those sentences and his\ncomments upon them, do but form, in the structure of that essay, a\npendant to, an illustration of, Pater\u2019s original remarks, which are\nthemselves a complete, if resolutely non-technical, exposition of\nhis own clearly comprehended methods. It is possible that Pater saw,\na little more circumspicuously than he, what it was that Flaubert\nbelieved. At any rate that belief is here unified with the suggestions\nof earlier writers, and given corollaries whose implication in it\nFlaubert never troubled to see. The theory is, briefly stated, as\nfollows: Literature will fulfil the condition of all good art \u201cby\nfinding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the\nterm to its import.\u201d Its first, indeed, accurately speaking, its only\nobject is truth, the exact fitting of words to meaning, which involves\nthe watchfulness over the whole that will guard details from being made\ninexact by the reflected light of other details; and this involves\nalso a loving scholarship in the precise meanings and implications of\nthe words used.\n\nHe accepts De Quincey\u2019s distinction between \u201cthe literature of power\nand the literature of knowledge,\u201d with the comment, \u201cin the former\nof which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of\nfact, whether past or present.\u201d In the fine art of literature, the\nidentity sought between words and meaning is an identity between words\nand the thing they represent in its private atmosphere, with its\nparticular meaning to the particular mind that thinks it. Throughout\nhis works is scattered evidence of the importance that Pater attributed\nto this particularity of thought, dependent on the thinker and his\ncircumstances, the personality of thought which is really the guarantee\nof its uniqueness, and in a sense, not only of its truth but of its\nartistic rightness. In _The Child in the House_, for example:\n\n    \u201cIn later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much\n    in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal\n    elements in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it;\n    and, in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to\n    the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.\u201d\n\nAnd, in the essay on \u201cStyle\u201d we are considering:\n\n    \u201c... just in proportion as the writer\u2019s aim, consciously or\n    unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not\n    of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his\n    work _fine_ art....\u201d\n\n    \u201cLiterary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative\n    or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or incident--is the\n    representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific\n    personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.\u201d\n\nLet me attach to these another quotation from the same essay, to\nillustrate his use of the word \u201csoul,\u201d the keyword of his belief:\n\n    \u201cMind and soul;--hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinction\n    is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes\n    in conflict, with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an\n    instance of preponderating soul embarrassed, at a loss, in an era\n    of preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul\n    is a fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing\n    language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of,\n    with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some\n    inexplicable inspiration.\u201d\n\nWhen we talk of words it is, if possible, better to talk in terms of\nspeech than thus indirectly in terms liable to debate, of the nature\nof man, which, in this case at least, have led a careful writer into\ninaccuracy. Blake was neither embarrassed nor at a loss. He thought\nall the rest of the world was. A sort of diffidence would not allow\nPater to admit that he was thinking neither of soul nor of mind but\nof a quality in Blake\u2019s language, a quality markedly less evident in\nthe work of his contemporaries. Whenever Pater uses the word soul in\nthis sense he is thinking of the magical power in contradistinction\nfrom the practical power of words. Blake\u2019s words say more by what\nthey carry with them in suggestive atmosphere, than by what they\nsay. His speech is highly _potential_; and when Pater talks of soul\nin literature he is talking of the potential element in the language\nof literature, the element so noticeable in the language of his own\nworks. His insistence on truth, not only in the merely kinetic speech,\nthe thing said, but also in the potential speech that gives the thing\nsaid its atmospherical particularity, distinguished his own work, and\ndeeply influenced the writers who followed him--Wilde, Dowson, perhaps\nMr. Yeats, at least in his prose, certainly Mr. Arthur Symons. It was\nan indigenous spring of the tendency that, in France, has been called\nSymbolist, with which the last of the younger writers I have mentioned\ndefinitely allied himself. Pater\u2019s expressed admirations for modern\nFrench books are only such as suggest his ignorance of the best writers\nin a later generation than that of Flaubert, who was, of course, not\ntwenty years his senior. He does not seem to have read those younger\nmen whose ideas so closely resembled his own, so closely that Frenchmen\noften claim Pater\u2019s most obvious disciple[7] for a pupil of the school\nof Mallarm\u00e9.\n\nWith his care in the use of words, he had also a care for structure,\nand for similar reasons. He says, as in a cruder way Poe had said long\nbefore, but not with such close significance:\n\n    \u201cThe term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes,\n    in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple\n    sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural\n    member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity\n    with its subject and with itself:--style is in the right way when\n    it tends towards that.\u201d\n\nThose words embody in technical wisdom the profoundest understanding of\nthe aims of art and of the nature of artistic creation.\n\nHis practice was not quite on the level of his theory. His details\nsometimes fail to preserve a unity of tone and rhythm with the whole\nof which they are a part. Sometimes too, the effort to preserve that\nunity compels the whole to a chafing monotone. An over-zealous pursuit\nof accuracy sometimes allowed those careful sentences to encumber\nthemselves with adjectival burs, and a too visual method of composition\nsometimes cost them their harmony with the music it was their business\nto maintain, and even brought that music to an abrupt stop. \u201cPater,\u201d\nMr. Benson says, who knew him, \u201cwhen he had arranged his notes, began\nto write on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank; and in\nthese spaces he would insert new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then\nthe whole was re-copied, again on alternate lines, which would again\nbe filled; moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at his\nown expense in print, that he might better be able to judge of the\neffect....\u201d Such a method, however careful the writer might be to make\ncontinual appeal to his ear, could not but allow the eye to assume too\ngreat a share in that collaboration in which ear should be the sole\ndictator and eye the ear\u2019s obedient servant. It would make it difficult\nto reject pleasant, exact phrases put in on those alternate lines, even\nif they made the sentences top-heavy with their own distinguished,\nhighly specialised meaning. They would make this top-heaviness hard to\nperceive, and, if perceived, erroneously attributable to the visible\ncrowding and elaboration of the written page. The setting up in print,\nwhile useful as a guide to the general outline, would only confirm\nthese sentences in their condition. Nobody who has tried to read Pater\naloud can be without instances when the reading became difficult,\nbreathless, impossible, even while the words demanded admiration for\ntheir subtle accuracy and perfect choice. Let me give no more than two\nexamples of the awkward constructions Pater allowed himself. I shall\ntake them from the least decorative of his works, from a book actually\nwritten for oral delivery. On page 35 of _Plato and Platonism_[8] there\nis this sentence:\n\n    \u201cFrom Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek\n    religious poets, that most abstract and arid of formul\u00e6, _Pure\n    Being_, closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and\n    suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal\n    ball, as he says; \u2018The Absolute\u2019; \u2018The One\u2019; passed to his\n    fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking, doubtless in the true spirit of\n    philosophy, for the centre of the universe, of his own experience\n    of it, for some common measure of the experience of all men.\u201d\n\nNow there are 37 words in 8 clauses, needing 5 commas and 3 semi-colons\nto make up the subject of that sentence. The underlining of the words\n_Pure Being_ seems to me a manifest concession to the eye.\n\nOn page 32 of the same book there is a characteristic construction\npartly due to a wish to preserve in his writing, tapestried as it might\nbe, a flavour of conversational speech, and, for all that, dependent on\nthe visibility of print, demanding a swift review of the beginning of\nthe sentence as the reader arrives at its end:\n\n    \u201cThat which _is_, so purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing\n    at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:--Parmenides and the\n    Eleatic School were much preoccupied with the determination of the\n    thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.\u201d\n\nSuch sentences are blemishes, not because of inaccuracy, for their\naccuracy is their excuse, but because they trouble our reception of\nthe whole, as a whole, by drawing too much attention to themselves.\n\nWith all his care for shapely building, for unity of impression,\nhe could not avoid occasional over-insistence on details, rather\npleasant than otherwise, unlike the troubling halts of his failures\nin sentence-making. Indeed, I am not sure that we can describe as a\nfault what was characteristic of a whole manner of vision, and due\nnot to carelessness but to the peculiar gift of a rare intimacy of\nimagination. In his imaginary portraits (which include not only the\nbook of that name, but \u201cEmerald Uthwart,\u201d \u201cThe Child in the House,\u201d\n\u201cApollo in Picardy,\u201d \u201cGaston de Latour,\u201d \u201cMarius the Epicurean,\u201d\nand, less obviously, most of his critical work) we can observe his\nway of laying hold of small, separate facts, and expanding them, as\nGaston expanded the poems of Ronsard, \u201cto the full measure of their\nintention.\u201d His was never a sweeping, large-rhythmed, narrative\nimagination; I fancy, even, that Pater felt a danger of losing himself\nwhen he had to say that something happened, and more than once, when\nhis characters were compelled to significant, visible action, he did\nindeed lose himself ... for a sentence or two it is as if not Pater\nspoke but another. There was a danger of things happening in _Gaston\nde Latour_, the most lovable of his books. For seven chapters Pater\nput them off, and then, as they crowded up on the horizon, and became\nimminent, he laid the story aside before they could overwhelm him and\ncarry him off his feet.[9]\n\nPater\u2019s imagination loved not action but intellectual circumstance,\nand the significance not of deeds but of the promise of deeds yet\nunperformed. The story of Marius, the story of Gaston, as far as it\nhad been carried, was the story of exceptional character in particular\nintellectual environment; and for us, perhaps, the interest lies as\nmuch in the one as in the other. When I think of the second of those\ntwo books, I think less of that scrupulous, finely strung youth than of\nMontaigne, whose portrait, in the old tower above his open house, seems\nto me at least equally important. Now to offer the reader a choice\nbetween the part and the whole is not the way of the perfect artist.\nAgain, it is idle to say that the narrative of \u201cMarius the Epicurean\u201d\nis broken by the inclusion of that lovely rendering of the tale of\nCupid and Psyche. It is idle to point to that tale as an interruption,\nwhen there is nothing for it to interrupt, nothing that is not already\nin repose. In Pater\u2019s books it is the reader who moves from one\ncontemplation to another, and, in \u201cMarius,\u201d quite naturally, from Pisa\nand the boy\u2019s education there, and his friendship with Flavian, to the\ntale they read together on hot Italian afternoons.\n\nIn a way the inclusion of that tale is an illustration on a large\nscale of Pater\u2019s invariable manner of using detail. It was the work of\nanother man, and, before placing it in his book, Pater made it his own\nby translating it into a prose which, if purposely and also necessarily\na little different from that of the rest of the book, was yet his.\nJust so smaller details, fragments of observation of external nature,\nfor example, are not directly set upon the page, with no more than the\nimprint of the hands that plucked them to give them a spurious unity\nwith the rest. They are all translated, idiomatically, until they are\nso wholly his that it seems he has looked within for them and not\nwithout. The light through the arched windows of the old church, the\nspires of London, the burial vault of the Dukes of Rosenmold: these\nthings are so intimately imagined, so completely veiled in Pater\u2019s mood\nthat when we recognise them in life we accuse ourselves of plagiarism\nbecause we cannot see them other than as he saw them, and they come to\nus, almost, as remembered sentences.\n\n\u201cThe Golden Book\u201d takes its place in \u201cMarius\u201d as a single touch in the\nportrait of a time: a fragment, carefully chosen, of the local colour\nof ideas. Just so Pater uses details more minute. Irrelevant as they\nmay seem, to a careless observer, irrelevant as perhaps they were\nbefore he had translated them, they help in the painting of the mood of\na man, as that story in the painting of a mood of the ancient world,\nin each case a mood of Pater\u2019s own, half borrowed from, half lent to,\nman or world. This mutual creation is like that which happens in the\ncontemplation of a work of art. It is criticism, and, even when Pater\nis not criticising what are known as works of art, he is criticising\nnot the world, or a period or a man, but works of art he has already\nmade, privately, for himself. He used \u201cthe finer sort of memory,\nbringing its object to mind with a quiet clearness, yet, as sometimes\nhappens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary\nretrospect.\u201d He believed that criticism was a form of creation: for him\nit was often a second stage of creation, for he had given artistic form\nto his material before, in contemplation of it, he began the criticism\nthat he offers us in its place. I do not know that this is, accurately\nspeaking, possible, but it is at least a fable that very fairly\nrepresents the process whereby, in Pater\u2019s books, life comes to seem at\nonce so ordered, so tapestried, so aloof and yet so intimately known.\n\nI speak there of life in general, of the flux without, a turmoil\nuntil it has been arrested by one of those personal acts of artistic\ncreation which it is the function of art to make more frequent, more\nhabitual. The turbulent nature of the flux itself is disguised alike\nin his critical and his more obviously imaginative work. For his\ncritical essays tend always to become imaginary portraits, no less\nthan his studies in Greek mythology. They are not portraits of men\nas Pater believed them to be, but reproductions of their aspect in\nsudden side-lights that change them, specialise them, and for those\nreaders who are vainly looking for a general view, simplify them a\nlittle too far. But what sometimes seems to be the reduction of a\ncomplex personality to a simple formula--Michelangelo, for example, to\nthe repeated _ex forti dulcedo_--is not so intended. It is rather the\nreduction of a personality to the expression of a single mood. There is\nwarp and woof in Pater\u2019s essays, and the shuttle must thread parallel\nlines and not a maze as it weaves what is meant less as the portrait\nof a man than as the pattern of a mood. Pater never sacrificed his\nown personality to his nominal subject. He sacrificed his sitter, not\nhimself. Nothing is more remarkable in _Marius the Epicurean_ (where it\nwould have been easier to disclaim the writer\u2019s own time, to waive the\ncenturies that separated him from his supposed material) than Pater\u2019s\nresolute modernity. He will not allow us to forget the distinction in\ncircumstances that makes so subtle the relation between subject and\nobject. He will strip off nothing that has been brought him by the\nyears between Marius and himself. Deliberately, he sees Marius with\neyes enriched by those centuries, and, with the later knowledge that\ncan compare Apuleius to Swift or to Th\u00e9ophile Gautier, takes pleasure\nin a reference to Wilhelm Meister and remarks that Marius thinks in\nthe vein of St. Augustine. And so, caring more for the point of view\nfrom which he sees them than for the actual objects, that can be seen\na thousand ways, he has no wish to \u201csay the last word\u201d on Lamb, on\nPico, on Sir Thomas Browne. He does say it, however, on those men in\nthose moods, or, more truly, on the moods in which he saw them. We\noften leave an essay of Pater\u2019s with a new appreciation of someone\nelse; but that is not because Pater has told us anything, but because,\nin reproducing the mood of his essay we have given ourselves a mood\nin which that other, Botticelli, Ronsard, Giorgione, can be more than\nusually significant.\n\nThus, though it is as a critic that Pater lives and will live, it is\nas a critic of a kind that he may almost be said to have invented.\nHis criticism is aesthetic and personal. Though compelled to offer a\nprofusion of theories, he is impatient of them, submits himself to a\nwork of art, and criticises that work not by showing what he feels,\nbut by a reproduction of the mood which that work induces in him. His\ncriticism, always indirect, is always creative, since the reproduction\nof a mood, unlike the recording of opinions, is itself a work of art.\nIt has the validity of his own temperament and circumstances, lyrical\nas opposed to abstract truth. We can never say of him that he was\nwrong, unless in the theories that he could not avoid but considered\nunimportant. We can only say that he was different--from ourselves,\nfrom someone else. We read this critic as we read a poet, collaborating\nwith him in the reproduction of a mood, in the searching knowledge of\nthe fragment of life that was coloured for him by this or that book\nor picture. The book or picture becomes a secondary matter, and the\nfirst is the rapid light, the weighty atmosphere that he had made his\nown. After reading him I remember his words on Montaigne: \u201cA mind for\nwhich truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as a general\nconclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal\nexperience.\u201d\n\n  1912.\n\n\n\n\nREMY DE GOURMONT\n\n\n\n\nREMY DE GOURMONT\n\n\nI\n\nM. de Gourmont lives on the fourth floor of an old house in the Rue\ndes Saints-P\u00e8res. A copper chain hangs as bell-rope to his door. The\nrare visitor, for it is well known that for many years he has been a\nsolitary and seldom receives even his friends, pulls the chain and\nwaits. The door opens a few inches, ready to be closed immediately,\nby a man of middle size, in a monk\u2019s brown robe, with a small, round,\ngrey felt cap. The robe is fastened with silver buckles, in which are\nset large blue stones. The admitted visitor walks through a passage\ninto a room whose walls are covered with books. In the shadow at the\nback of the room is a loaded table. Another table, with a sloping\ndesk upon it, juts out from the window. M. de Gourmont sits in a big\nchair before the desk, placing his visitor on the opposite side of\nthe table, with the light falling on his face so that he can observe\nhis slightest expression. In conversation he often disguises his face\nwith his hand, but now and again looks openly and directly at his\nvisitor. His eyes are always questioning, and almost always kindly.\nHis face was beautiful in the youth of the flesh, and is now beautiful\nin the age of the mind, for there is no dead line in it, no wrinkle,\nno minute feature not vitalised by intellectual activity. The nose\nis full and sensitive, with markedly curved nostrils. There is a\nlittle satiric beard. The eyebrows lift towards the temples, as in\nmost men of imagination. The eyes are weighted below, as in most men\nof critical thought. The two characteristics are, in M. de Gourmont,\nas in his work, most noticeable together. The lower lip, very full,\ndoes not pout, but falls curtain-like towards the chin. It is the lip\nof a sensualist, and yet of one whose sensuality has not clogged but\nstimulated the digestive processes of his brain. Omar might have had\nsuch a lip, if he had been capable not only of his garlands of roses,\nbut also of the essays of Montaigne.\n\nHe was born in a ch\u00e2teau in Normandy on 4th April 1858. Among his\nancestors was Gilles de Gourmont, a learned printer and engraver of\nthe fifteenth century. He has himself collected old woodcuts, and in\n_L\u2019Ymagier_ amused himself by setting the most ancient specimens of\nthe craft, among which he is proud to show some examples of the work\nof his family, side by side with drawings by Whistler and Gauguin. He\ncame to Paris in 1883, when he obtained a post in the Biblioth\u00e8que\nNationale. Huysmans was \u201csous-chef de bureau \u00e0 la direction de la\nS\u00fbret\u00e9 g\u00e9n\u00e9rale,\u201d and M. de Gourmont, who made his acquaintance through\nthe dedication of a book, used to call for him between four and five\nof the afternoon, and walk with him across the river to a caf\u00e9, that\nhas since disappeared, where he listened to the older man\u2019s rather\nsavage characterisations of men, women, movements and books. A few\nyears later he was held to be lacking in patriotism, and relieved of\nhis post on account of an article urging the necessity of Franco-German\nagreement. He wrote incessantly. _Merlette_, a rather na\u00efve and awkward\nlittle novel, published in 1886, did not promise the work he was to\ndo. It was no more than an exercise, well done, but no more, the\nwork of a good brain as yet uncertain of its personal impulse. But\nabout this time he was caught in the stream of a movement for which\nhe had been waiting, for which, indeed, the art of his time had been\nwaiting, the movement that was introduced to English readers by Mr.\nArthur Symons\u2019s admirable series of critical portraits.[10] In 1890 he\npublished _Sixtine_, dedicated to Villiers de l\u2019Isle Adam, who had died\nthe year before. In 1892 appeared _Le Latin Mystique_, a book on the\nLatin poets of the Middle Ages. He has always been \u201ca delicate amateur\nof the curiosities of beauty,\u201d though the character that Mr. Symons\ngave him has since become very inadequate. He edited G\u00e9rard de Nerval,\n_Aucassin et Nicolette_, and Rutebeuf\u2019s _La Miracle de Th\u00e9ophile_,\nand wrote _Lilith_, 1892, and _Th\u00e9odat_, a dramatic poem in prose\nthat was produced by my friend M. Paul Fort at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre d\u2019Art on\nDecember 11th of the same year. Several other curious works of this\nperiod were united later in _Le P\u00e8lerin du Silence_. I extract from the\nbibliography by M. van Bever, printed in _Po\u00e8tes d\u2019aujourd\u2019hui_, a\nlist of the more important books that have followed these very various\nbeginnings: _Le Livre des Masques_, 1896; _Les Chevaux de Diom\u00e8de_,\n1897; _Le II^{me} Livre des Masques_, 1898; _Esth\u00e9tique de la langue\nfran\u00e7aise_, 1899; _La Culture des Id\u00e9es_, 1900; _Le Chemin de Velours_,\n1902; _Le Probl\u00e8me du Style_, 1902; _Physique de l\u2019Amour_, 1903;\n_Une Nuit au Luxembourg_, 1906; besides four volumes of literary and\nphilosophical criticism, and four volumes of comment on contemporary\nevents.\n\nAll this mass of work is vitalised by a single motive. Even the\ndivisions of criticism and creation (whose border line is very dim)\nare made actually one by a desire common to both of them, a desire not\nexpressed in them, but satisfied, a desire for intellectual freedom.\nThe motto for the whole is written in _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_:\n\u201cL\u2019exercice de la pens\u00e9e est un jeu, mais il faut que ce jeu soit\nlibre et harmonieux.\u201d I am reminded of this sentence again and again\nin thinking of M. de Gourmont and his books. There must be no loss of\nself-command, none of the grimaces and the awkward movements of the\nfanatic, the man with whom thought plays. The thinker must be superior\nto his thought. He must make it his plaything instead of being sport\nfor it. His eyes must be clear, not hallucinated; his arms his own,\nnot swung with the exaggerated gestures of the preacher moved beyond\nhimself by his own words. M. de Gourmont seems less an artist than a\nman determined to conquer his obsessions, working them out one by one\nas they assail him, in order to regain his freedom. It is a fortunate\naccident that he works them out by expressing them, twisting into\ngarlands the brambles that impede his way.\n\n\nII\n\nM. de Gourmont almost immediately left the half-hearted realism\nof _Merlette_, and, just as in his scientific writings he is more\nprofoundly scientific than the men of science, so in his works of\nthis period he carried to their uttermost limits the doctrines of\nthe symbolists. In his critical work the historian must look for the\nmanifestoes and polemics of the group that gathered in Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s\nrooms in the Rue de Rome. The theories are in _Id\u00e9alisme_, published\nin 1893, and in such essays as his defence of Mallarm\u00e9, written\nin 1898, and included in the _Promenades Litt\u00e9raires_. Of their\npractice he supplies plenty of examples. \u201cNommer un objet, c\u2019est\nsupprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du po\u00e8me qui est faite du\nbonheur de deviner peu \u00e0 peu; le sugg\u00e9rer voil\u00e0 le r\u00eave.\u201d Mallarm\u00e9\nwrote that in 1891, and during the \u2019nineties Remy de Gourmont was\npublishing mysterious little books of poetry and prose, of which\nsmall limited editions were issued on rare paper, in curious covers,\nwith lithographed decorations as reticent as the writing. There is\nthe _Histoire tragique de la Princesse Ph\u00e9nissa expliqu\u00e9e en quatre\n\u00e9pisodes_, a play whose action might be seen through seven veils, a\nplay whose motive, never stated directly, is, perhaps, the destruction\nof the future for the sake of the present. There is _Le Fant\u00f4me_, the\nstory of a _liaison_ between a man and a woman if you will, between the\nintellect and the flesh if you will, that begins with such an anthem\nas might have been sung by some of those strange beings whom Poe took\n\u201cinto the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets\nand heartsease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns.\u201d\nThe man--is it a man?--who tells the story, ends with a regret for\nsomething too real to be visible, something that is seen because it is\nnot visible: \u201cJe me sentais froid, j\u2019avais peur--car je la voyais, sans\npouvoir m\u2019opposer \u00e0 cette transformation doloureuse--je la voyais s\u2019en\naller rejoindre le groupe des femmes ind\u00e9cises d\u2019o\u00f9 mon amour l\u2019avait\ntir\u00e9e--je la voyais redevenir le fant\u00f4me qu\u2019elles sont toutes.\u201d There\nis _Le Livre des Litanies_, with its elaborate incantation, from which\nI take the beginning and end:\n\n    \u201cFleur hypocrite,\n\n    \u201cFleur du silence.\n\n    \u201cRose couleur de cuivre, plus frauduleuse que nos joies, rose\n    couleur de cuivre, embaume-nous dans tes mensonges, fleur\n    hypocrite, fleur du silence.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n    \u201cRose am\u00e9thyste, \u00e9toile matinale, tendresse \u00e9piscopale, rose\n    am\u00e9thyste, tu dors sur des poitrines d\u00e9votes et douillettes, gemme\n    offerte \u00e0 Marie, \u00f4 gemme sacristine, fleur hypocrite, fleur du\n    silence.\n\n    \u201cRose cardinale, rose couleur du sang de l\u2019Eglise romaine, rose\n    cardinale, tu fais r\u00eaver les grands yeux des mignons et plus d\u2019un\n    t\u2019\u00e9pingla au n\u0153ud de sa jarreti\u00e8re, fleur hypocrite, fleur du\n    silence.\n\n    \u201cRose papale, rose arros\u00e9e des mains qui b\u00e9nissent le monde, rose\n    papale, ton c\u0153ur d\u2019or est en cuivre, et les larmes qui perlent sur\n    ta vaine corolle, ce sont les pleurs du Christ, fleur hypocrite,\n    fleur du silence.\n\n    \u201cFleur hypocrite,\n\n    \u201cFleur du silence.\u201d\n\n\nIII\n\nThese, and other things like them, made it possible for M. de Gourmont\nto proceed in the discovery of himself. He drank his mood to the dregs,\nleaving no untried experiment to clog his mind with a regret as he\nmoved on. \u201cI have always been excessive,\u201d he says; \u201cI do not like to\nstop half-way.\u201d He follows each impulse as far as it will take him,\nlest, by chance, he should leave some flower untasted in a bypath he\nhas seen but not explored. Unlike most authors, he never has to copy\nhimself, and does not feel bound, because he has written one book whose\nprose is malachite green, to produce another of the same colour. \u201cUn\nartiste,\u201d said Wilde, \u201cne recommence jamais deux fois la m\u00eame chose\n... ou bien c\u2019est qu\u2019il n\u2019avait pas r\u00e9ussi.\u201d The surest way to fail in\nan experiment is to make it with a faint heart. M. de Gourmont always\nburns his boats.\n\nSome preoccupations, however boldly attacked, are not to be conquered\nat a blow. The preoccupation of sex is unlike that of a theory of\nart. Conquered again and again by expression, it returns with a new\nface, a new mystery, a new power of building the intellect, a new\nGorgon to be seen in the mirror of art and decapitated. As the man\nchanges so does Medusa vary her attack, and so must he vary the manner\nof her death. Now he will write a _Physique de l\u2019Amour_, and, like\nSchopenhauer, relieve himself of the problem of sex by reducing it to\nits lowest terms. Now he will conquer it by the lyrical and concrete\nexpression of a novel or a poem. Sex continually disturbs him, but\nthe disturbance of the flesh is always, sooner or later, pacified by\nthe mind. All his later novels are, like _Sixtine_, \u201cromans de la vie\nc\u00e9r\u00e9brale.\u201d _Sixtine_ is the story of a writer\u2019s courtship of a woman\nno more subtle than himself, but far more ready with her subtlety. It\ndisplays the workings of a man\u2019s mind and the states of emotion through\nwhich he passes, by including in the text, as they were written, the\nstories and poems composed under the influence of the events. The man\nis intensely analytic, afterwards. Emotion blurs the windows of his\nbrain, and cleans hers to a greater lucidity. He always knows what\nhe ought to have done. \u201cNul n\u2019avait \u00e0 un plus haut degr\u00e9 la pr\u00e9sence\nd\u2019esprit du bas de l\u2019escalier.\u201d More than once the woman was his, if\nhe had known it before he left her. Finally, she is carried off by a\nrival whose method he has himself suggested. The book is a tragedy\nof self-consciousness, whose self-conscious heroine is a prize for\nthe only man who is ignorant of himself, and, in the blindness of\nthat ignorance, is able to act. But there is no need to analyse the\nframeworks of M. de Gourmont\u2019s novels. Frameworks matter very little.\nThey are all vitalised by an almost impatient knowledge of the subtlety\nof a woman\u2019s mind in moments of pursuit or flight, and the impotence of\na man whose brain seeks to be an honest mediator between itself and his\nflesh. His men do not love like the heroes of ordinary books, and are\nnot in the least likely to suggest impossible ideals to maidens. They\nare unfaithful in the flesh nearly always. They use one experience\nas an anaesthetic for the pain they are undergoing in another. They\nseek to be masters of themselves by knowledge, and are unhappy without\nthinking of suicide on that account. Unhappiness no less than joy is\na thing to be known. They fail, not getting what they want, and are\nvictorious in understanding, with smiling lips, their non-success.\n\n\nIV\n\nOne afternoon, in the Rue des Saints-P\u00e8res, M. de Gourmont confirmed\nthe impression already given me by his books and his eyebrows. \u201cI\nhave always been both _romanesque_ and _critique_.\u201d Side by side he\nhas built separate piles of books. While writing the curiosities\nof symbolism that are collected in _Le P\u00e8lerin du Silence_, he was\npreparing the _Livres des Masques_, two series of short critical\nportraits of the writers of his time, which, in the case of those\nwho survive, are as true to-day as when they were written. It has\nbeen so throughout. In the one pile are little volumes of poetry like\n_Les Saintes du Paradis_, and such romances as those we have been\ndiscussing; in the other are works of science like the _Physique de\nl\u2019Amour_, books benevolently polemical like _Le Probl\u00e8me du Style_, and\ncollections of criticism in which an agile intelligence collaborates\nwith a wakeful sense of beauty.\n\nIn this critical work, as in what is more easily recognised as\ncreative, M. de Gourmont builds for freedom. He will be bound\nneither by his own preoccupations nor by other men\u2019s thoughts. It is\ncharacteristic of him that his most personal essays in criticism are\n\u201cDissociations of Ideas.\u201d The dissociation of ideas is a method of\nthought that separates the ideas put into double harness by tradition,\njust as the chemist turns water into hydrogen and oxygen, with which,\nseverally, he can make other compounds. This, like most questions of\nthought, is a question of words. Words are the liberators of ideas,\nsince without them ideas cannot escape from the flux of feeling into\nindependent life. They are also their gaolers, since they are terribly\ncohesive, and married words cling together, binding in a lover\u2019s\nknot the ideas they represent. All men using words in combination\nabet these marriages, though in doing so they are making bars of\niron for the prisons in which they speculate on the torn fragment of\nsky that their window lets them perceive. Nothing is easier than,\nby taking words and their associations as they are commonly used,\nto strengthen the adherence of ideas to each other. Nothing needs a\nmore awakened intelligence than to weaken the bonds of such ideas\nby separating the words that bind them. That is the method of M. de\nGourmont. He separates, for example, the idea of St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9\nand that of \u201cdecadence,\u201d the idea of glory and that of immortality,\nthe idea of success and that of beauty. It is, too, a dissociation of\nideas when he inquires into the value of education, these two ideas of\nworth and knowledge being commonly allied. The method, or rather the\nconsciousness of the method, is fruitful in material for discussion,\nthough this advantage cannot weigh much with M. de Gourmont, whose\nbrain lacks neither motive power nor grist to grind. It is, for him, no\nmore than a recurrent cleaning of the glasses through which he looks at\nthe subjects of his speculation.\n\nHe speculates continually, and, if questions are insoluble, is not\ncontent until he has so posed them as to show the reason of their\ninsolubility. He prefers a calm question mark to the more emotional\nmark of exclamation, and is always happy when he can turn the second\ninto the first. He is extraordinarily thorough, moving always in mass\nand taking everything with him, so that he has no footsteps to retrace\nin order to pick up baggage left behind. Unlike Theseus, he unrolls no\nclue of thread when he enters the cavern of Minotaur. He will come out\nby a different way or not at all. The most powerful Minotaur of our\nday does not dismay him. Confident in his own probity, he will walk\ncalmly among the men of science and bring an _Esth\u00e9tique de la langue\nfran\u00e7aise_, or a _Physique de l\u2019Amour_, meat of unaccustomed richness,\nto lay before their husk-fed deity.\n\nIn criticism, as in creation, he does not like things half-done. The\nstory of the origin of one of these books is the story of them all.\nThere is a foolish little work by M. Albalat, which professes to teach\nstyle in twenty-seven lessons. M. de Gourmont read it and smiled; he\nwrote an article, and still found something to smile at; he wrote a\nbook, _Le Probl\u00e8me du Style_, in which, mocking M. Albalat through a\nhundred and fifty-two courteous pages, he showed, besides many other\nthings, that style is not to be taught in twenty-seven lessons, and,\nindeed, is not to be taught at all. Then he felt free to smile at\nsomething else.\n\nM. de Gourmont is careful to say that he brought to the _Esth\u00e9tique de\nla langue fran\u00e7aise_, \u201cni lois, ni r\u00e8gles, ni principes peut-\u00eatre; je\nn\u2019apporte rien qu\u2019un sentiment esth\u00e9tique assez violent et quelques\nnotions historiques: voil\u00e0 ce que je jette au hasard dans la grande\ncuve o\u00f9 fermente la langue de demain.\u201d An aesthetic feeling and some\nhistorical notions were sufficiently needed in the fermenting vat\nwhere the old French language, in which there is hardly any Greek, is\nbeing horribly adulterated with brainless translations of good French\nmade by Hellenists of the dictionary. M. de Gourmont is in love with\nhis language, but knows that she is rather vain and ready to wear all\nkinds of borrowed plumes, whether or not they suit her. He would take\nfrom her her imitation ostrich feathers, and would hide also all\nribbons from the London market, unless she first dye them until they\nfall without discord into the scheme of colour that centuries have made\nher own. Why write \u201chigh life,\u201d for example, or \u201cfive o\u2019clock,\u201d or\n\u201csleeping\u201d? Why shock French and English alike by writing \u201cLe Club de\nRugby\u201d on a gate in Tours? A kingfisher in England flies very happily\nas martin-p\u00eacheur in France, and the language is not so sterile as to\nbe unable to breed words from its own stock for whatever needs a name.\n\n_Physique de l\u2019Amour; Essai sur l\u2019instinct sexuel_, \u201cqui n\u2019est qu\u2019un\nessai, parce que la mati\u00e8re de son id\u00e9e est immense, repr\u00e9sente\npourtant une ambition: on voudrait agrandir la psychologie g\u00e9n\u00e9rale de\nl\u2019amour, la faire commencer au commencement m\u00eame de l\u2019activit\u00e9 m\u00e2le\net femelle, situer la vie sexuelle de l\u2019homme dans le plan unique de\nla sexualit\u00e9 universelle.\u201d It is a book full of illustration, a vast\ncollection of facts, and throws into another fermenting vat than that\nof language some sufficiently valuable ideas. It lessens the pride\nof man, and, at the same time, gives him a desperate courage, as it\nshows him that even in the eccentricities of his love-making he is not\nalone, that the modesty of his women is a faint hesitation beside the\nterrified flight of the she-mole, that his own superiority is but an\naccident, and that he must hold himself fortunate in that nature does\nnot treat him like the male bee, and toss his mangled body disdainfully\nto earth as soon as he has done her work. M. de Gourmont\u2019s books do not\nflatter humanity. They clear the eyes of the strong, and anger the weak\nwho cannot bear to listen to unpalatable truths.\n\n\nV\n\nM. de Gourmont\u2019s most obvious quality is versatility, and though, as I\nhave tried to point out, it is not difficult to find a unity of cause\nor intention in his most various expressions, his lofty and careless\npursuit of his inclinations, his life of thought for its own sake, has\nprobably cost him a wide and immediate recognition. That loss is not\nhis, but is borne by those who depend for their reading on the names\nthat float upward from the crowd. Even his admirers complain: some\nthat he has not given them more poems; others that his _Physique de\nl\u2019Amour_ stands alone on its shelf; others that a critic such as he\nshould have spent time on romances; others, again, that a writer of\nsuch romances should have used any of his magnificent power in what\nthey cannot see to be creative work. M. de Gourmont is indifferent to\nall alike, and sits aloft in the Rue des Saints-P\u00e8res, indulging his\nmind with free and harmonious play.\n\nIn one of his books, far more than in the others, two at least of\nhis apparently opposite activities have come to work in unison.\nAll his romances, after and including _Sixtine_, are vitalised by\na never-sleeping intellect; but one in particular is a book whose\nessence is both critical and romantic, a book of thought coloured like\na poem and moving with a delicate grace of narrative. _Une Nuit au\nLuxembourg_[11] was published in 1906, and is the book that opens most\nvistas in M. de Gourmont\u2019s work. A god walks in the gardens behind the\nOd\u00e9on, and a winter\u2019s night is a summer\u2019s morning, on which the young\njournalist who has dared to say \u201cMy friend\u201d to the luminous unknown in\nthe church of Saint-Sulpice, hears him proclaim the forgotten truth\nthat in one age his mother has been Mary, and in another Latona, and\nthe new truth that the gods are not immortal though their lives are\nlong. Flowers are in bloom where they walk, and three beautiful girls\ngreet them with divine amity. Most of the book is written in dialogue,\nand in this ancient form, never filled with subtler essences, doubts\nare born and become beliefs, beliefs become doubts and die, while\nthe sun shines, flowers are sweet, and girls\u2019 lips soft to kiss.\nWhere there is God he will not have Love absent, and where Love is he\nfinds the most stimulating exercise for his brain. Ideas not new but\ngathered from all the philosophers are given an aesthetic rather than a\nscientific value, and are used like the tints on a palette. Indeed, the\nbook is a balanced composition in which each colour has its complement.\nEpicurus, Lucretius, St. Paul, Christianity, the replenishment of the\nearth by the Jews; it is impossible to close the book at any page\nwithout finding the mind as it were upon a springboard and ready to\nlaunch itself in delightful flight. There are many books that give a\nspecious sensation of intellectual business while we read them. There\nare very few that leave, long after they are laid aside, stimuli to\nindependent activity.\n\n\nVI\n\n\u201cIl ne faut pas chercher la v\u00e9rit\u00e9; mais devant un homme comprendre\nquelle est sa v\u00e9rit\u00e9.\u201d We must not seek in a man\u2019s work for the truth,\nsince there are as many truths as brains; but it is worth while to\ndefine an answer here and an answer there out of the many. What is the\nanswer of Remy de Gourmont? _Quelle est sa v\u00e9rit\u00e9?_ Of what kind is his\ntruth? Does he bring rosemary for remembrance or poppy for oblivion?\nNot in what he says, but in the point from which he says it, we must\nlook for our indications. His life, like _Sixtine_, is a \u201croman de la\nvie c\u00e9r\u00e9brale.\u201d It is the spectacle of a man whose conquests are won\nby understanding. For him the escape of mysticism was inadequate, and\nan invitation to cowardice. He would not abdicate, but, since those\nempires are unstable whose boundaries are fixed, conquer continually.\nThe conquests of the mind are not won by neglect. It is not sufficient\nto refuse to see. The conqueror must see so clearly that life blushes\nbefore his sober eyes, and, understood, no longer dominates. Remy de\nGourmont has suffered and conquered his suffering in understanding\nit. He would extend this dominion. He would realise all that happens\nto him, books, a chance visitor, a meeting in the street, the liquid\nbars of light across the muddy Seine. He would transmute all into the\nmercurial matter of thought, until, at last impregnable, he should\nsee life from above, having trained his digestive powers to the same\nperfection as his powers of reception. Although one of the Symbolists,\nhe has moved far from the starting-point assigned to that school by\nMr. Symons. His books are not \u201cescapes from the thought of death.\u201d The\nthought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow\nto be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious\ngame. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind\nagainst the universe which it creates, has come to seem more important\nto him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured.\nIt has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his\ndesire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the\nunity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. His later\nbooks have been the by-products of a more intimate labour. He has left\nthem by the road whose end he has not hoped to reach, whose pursuit\nsuffices him. They wake in the reader a desire which has nothing to\ndo with art. This desire--a desire for intellectual honesty--and with\nthat, perhaps, for intellectual gaiety, is the characteristic gift of\nhis work. It is never offered alone. He accompanies it with criticism,\nwith witty epilogues, serious dissertations, and licentious little\nstories; but it is not so much for the sake of these things as for the\nstimulus of that desire that we turn, and seldom in vain, to M. de\nGourmont\u2019s books.\n\n  1911.\n\n\n\n\nTHE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI\n\n\n\n\nTHE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI\n\n\nSo-shi, a Chinese philosopher, dreamed that he was a butterfly, and, in\nthe moment of waking, asked himself: \u201cAre you So-shi who has dreamed\nthat he was a butterfly, or are you a butterfly who is dreaming that he\nis So-shi?\u201d That question is continually repeated in the works of Yone\nNoguchi, who seems, indeed, to have the freedom of two worlds, and to\nfind reality as often in one as in the other. Noguchi is for ever in\ndoubt of his own existence, suspicious of appearances, and searching\nfor the reality in things beyond touch or description. \u201cMy soul,\u201d he\nwrites:\n\n   \u201cMy soul, like a chilly winged fly, roams about the sadness-walled\n        body, hunting for a casement to fly out.\n    Lo, suddenly, an inspired bird flies upright into the atom-eyed sky!\n    Alas, his reflection sinks far down into the mileless bottom of the\n        mirrory rivulet!\n    Is this world the solid being?--or a shadowy nothing?\n    Is the form that flies up the real bird? or the figure that sinks\n        down?\u201d\n\nAnd again:\n\n   \u201cThe world is not my residence to the end!\n    Alas, the moon has lost her way, harassed among the leaf-fellows on\n        the darkling hill-top!\n    Isn\u2019t there chance for my flying out?\u201d\n\nThe world is not too much with this poet of Japan who writes in our\nlanguage, and it is interesting to compare this symbolist of a nation\nof conscious symbolists with the few men who in France and England have\nturned an unconscious but almost universal practice into a theory of\npoetry.[12]\n\nBut I must not, in my care for his work, pretend that the poet is the\nimmaterial floating fairy that he almost seems to be. \u201cI have cast the\nworld,\u201d he says, \u201cand think me as nothing,\n\n   \u201cYet I feel cold on snow-falling day,\n    And happy on flower day.\u201d\n\nLet me, before saying more, set down such facts as I know about his\nphysical existence.\n\nYone Noguchi was born in Japan about 1876. He was in America before\nhe was twenty, and, in company with a few other Japanese students,\nsuffered extreme poverty, and the starvation which those who have not\ntried it consider so efficacious a stimulant to the soul. He made some\nfriends among American writers, and stayed for a time with Joaquin\nMiller. In 1897 he published _Seen and Unseen: or Monologues of a\nHomeless Snail_, and in the next year _The Voice of the Valley_, a\nlittle book inspired by a stay in the Yosemite. In 1902 he came to\nEngland, and lived with Mr. Yoshio Markino (who had not then realised\nhimself and London in his water-colours) in poor lodgings in the\nBrixton Road. From these lodgings he issued a sixteen-page pamphlet of\nverse printed on brown paper, which drew such notice that the Unicorn\nPress (an unfortunate little firm that published some very good books,\nsome bad ones, and died) produced a volume, called, like the pamphlet,\n_From the Eastern Sea_, and containing, besides those sixteen pages\nof poetry, other verses from the American books and a number of new\npieces. The cover of this edition was designed by Mr. Yoshio Markino.\nI knew Noguchi at this time, and often walked with him along the\nEmbankment in the evenings, or under those \u201clamp-lights of web-like\nstreets bathed in the opiate mists,\u201d that he and Yoshio Markino have\nused so delicately in their several arts. I remember him as a small\nman, though perhaps not noticeably small by Japanese standards, with\nblack hair less orderly and geometrical in growth than most Japanese\nhair, and a face of extraordinary sensitiveness, high-browed but with\nbroadly set eyes, and a mouth like a woman\u2019s, like that of a woman\ncontrolling some almost tearful emotion. Even in the handling of a\ncigarette, whose end he stripped of its paper so that the tobacco might\nserve in the making of another (we were almost penniless in those\ndays), there was a delicacy that made it impossible not to recognise\nthat he was a man who lived more finely than most. His conversations\nwere of poetry, of the principles of the particular poetry he held\nthat it was his to write, and of the works of those English poets he\nhad read. \u201cI hate your Longfellow,\u201d he said, \u201cand I love your Keats,\u201d\nand in contrasting the two he was, perhaps, defining to himself an\nimportant tendency of his own.\n\nHe left London in 1903, and went to New York and then to Japan. He had\nsome difficulties there, difficulties, I believe, of misunderstanding\non the part of his own countrymen. He crossed to the mainland and\ntravelled in China for a year, and perhaps longer. In 1906 he published\n_The Summer Cloud_ in Tokio, and, in June last year, he sent me a\ntwo-volume book in a blue case with small ivory fastenings, printed by\nthe Valley Press in Kamakura. This book, _The Pilgrimage_, has been\nissued in England by Mr. Elkin Mathews.\n\nThese five books do not contain a large body of verse, but they contain\nverse whose interest for us is not concentrated in the nationality of\nthe writer. The title of the brown-paper pamphlet published in the\nBrixton Road is _From the Eastern Sea_, \u201cby Yone Noguchi (_Japanese_),\u201d\nbut though that word aroused a careless curiosity, the curiosity was\nturned into something more valuable by qualities less incidental. The\nimagery of Noguchi\u2019s verse is Japanese in feeling, just as the imagery\nin Synge\u2019s plays is Irish, and that of Verlaine\u2019s poetry French, but\nthe imagery in any one of these three cases would have been worthless\nif the man who used it had been merely Japanese, Irish, or French, and\nnot a man of genius with the gift of setting words free with living\nbreath. Our concern is not with the nationality of this writer, but\nwith his conception of the poet, and with his poetry.\n\nNoguchi wrote his first book in 1896, and so had not read Mr. Arthur\nSymons\u2019 _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, which was issued three\nyears later. He would have found there an account of poets not unlike\nhimself, and of a poetry nearer than Keats\u2019 to his own, and further\nremoved than Keats\u2019 from that of the hated Longfellow.\n\nSymons, writing of Verlaine, says: \u201cIs not his whole art a delicate\nwaiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they\nare, which is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us,\nand a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily,\nexperience taught nothing; or rather it taught him only to cling the\nmore closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate\npart of our spiritual life.\u201d Noguchi lives almost continuously in those\nmoods; experience with him is momentary rather than cumulative; and his\naim, expressed more than once in his verse, is only to keep himself a\nvessel as clear as possible for the unsullied transference of those\nmoments from the bowl of life to that of art. It will not be difficult\nto make from his verses a portrait of his ideal poet, and, in writing\nof a man not yet very widely known, I believe I shall best be doing my\nduty by him in quoting his own words as often as I can. In _The Poet_\nhe says:\n\n   \u201cThe roses live by the eating of their own beauty and then die.\n    His song is the funeral chant for his own death of every moment.\u201d\n\nAnd again, of himself:\n\n   \u201cI sing the song of my heart-strings, alone in the eternal muteness,\n        in the face of God.\u201d\n\nAnd again:\n\n   \u201cThe God-beloved man welcomes, respects as an honoured guest, his own\n        soul and body in his solitude.\n    Lo! the roses under the night dress themselves in silence, and\n        expect no mortal applaud--content with that of their voiceless\n        God.\u201d\n\nAnd again:\n\n   \u201cO, wash me and wash me again with thy light,\n    And burn my body to a flame of soul!\n    It is this moment that I conquer the intervention of flesh,\n    And its rebellions that worked in me at unexpected time.\n    It\u2019s not too much to say I am a revelation or a wonder,\n    Winging as a falcon into the breast of loveliness and air.\u201d\n\nAnd again:\n\n                 \u201c... What a bird\n    Dreams in the moonlight is my dream,\n    What a rose sings is my song.\u201d\n\n\u201cO, to lose the world and gain a song,\u201d he cries, and then, \u201cI am glad\nto be no-man to-day, with the laughter and dance of the sea soul.\u201d His\nthoughts fall like leaves in autumn \u201con the snowy cheeks of his paper.\u201d\nHis is the poetry of self-abnegation, of identification of himself\nwith the world. His soul dances \u201con the silver strings\u201d of the rain.\n\u201cWe,\u201d he sings, are \u201chappy to be biographers of each other, I and a\nbird.\u201d He flies himself as a kite, to be lifted or let fall by the\nwinds that do not move at all those whose pride is in their sage and\nmeasured footsteps on the ground.\n\nIn the last of his volumes there are a few specimens of Japanese\nseventeen-syllabled verse, _hokku_, and in a note Noguchi writes that\nsuch a poem \u201cin Japanese mind, might be compared with a tiny star, I\ndare say, carrying the whole sky at its back. It is like a slightly\nopen door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy. Its value\ndepends on how much it suggests. The Hokku poet\u2019s chief aim is to\nimpress the reader with the high atmosphere in which he is living.\u201d\nThe Hokku poet, like Noguchi, never writes of the thing about which\nhe is writing. The emotions he wishes to express are too subtle for\ndescription in words, and can only be written of in the spaces between\nthe lines, just as between the petals of a flower we may find dreams\nthat the flower has never known, and the suggestions of something less\nponderable than the earth in which it had its roots. An example of\nHokku poetry will illustrate the method of all Noguchi\u2019s:\n\n   \u201cWhere the flowers sleep,\n    Thank God! I shall sleep to-night.\n    Oh, come, butterfly.\u201d\n\nThat is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl\nto be dissolved in the wine of a mood. Pearls are not wine, nor in\nthemselves to be thought of as drink, but there is a kind of magic in\nthe wine in which they are dissolved.\n\nIn Noguchi\u2019s poems there is the co-operation between silence and speech\nof which Carlyle was thinking when he wrote: \u201cIn a Symbol there is\nconcealment and yet revelation: here therefore by Silence and Speech\nacting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be\nitself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their\nunion be!\u201d In many poems of the French symbolists the Speech is almost\nmeaningless, except in the Silence that is covered by its melody.\nIn Noguchi both Speech and Silence are full of a charm that we can\nscarcely find in life but in fortunate rare moods. He writes:\n\n   \u201cI am stirring the waves of Reverie with my meaningless but\n        wisdom-wreathed syllables.\u201d\n\nBut he is incapable of denying his own charm to the carefully-worded\naccompaniment of the Silence with which he is really concerned. He sees\nthe world with eyes too guileless not to make it alive, even when using\nit as an invocation. He sees ideas too clearly not to make them, even\nin a spell, independently vivid for his listeners. For an example of\nthe one take this picture:\n\n   \u201cAlas, the mother cow, with matron eyes, utters her bitter heart,\n        kidnapped of her children by the curling gossamer mist!\u201d\n\nFor an example of the other, this idea:\n\n   \u201cThe Universe, too, has somewhere its shadow; but what about my\n        songs?\n    An there be no shadow, no echoing to the end--my broken-throated\n        lute will never again be made whole.\u201d\n\nHe is a poet whose flame has been so scrupulously tended as to flicker\nwith the slightest breath. He is as many-mooded as the combinations\nbetween sunshine and shadow. His poetry actually _is_ the thing that\nhas induced a mood in him, trimmed of all that he has had to remove\nfor himself, and so made into something between nature and that pure\nelevation of mind from which Noguchi feels. This quality of pale\nflame-like emotion is common to all his poems, extraordinarily various\nas they are.\n\nSometimes he speaks with grandeur, as in these lines:\n\n   \u201cWhen I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill,\n    The universe seems built with me as its pillar!\n    Am I the God upon the face of the deep, nay deepless deepness in the\n        beginning?\u201d\n\nSometimes wistfully:\n\n   \u201cAlas! my soul is like a paper lantern, its paste wetted off under\n        the rain.\n    _My love, wilt thou not come back to-night?_\n    Lo, the snail at my door stealthily hides his horns.\n    _Oh, put forth thy honourable horns for my sake!\n    Where is Truth? Where is Light?_\u201d\n\nSometimes questioning:\n\n   \u201cMy poetry begins with the tireless songs of the cricket, on the lean\n        grey-haired hill, in sober-faced evening.\n    And the next page is Stillness----\n    And what then, about the next to that?\n    Alas, the God puts his universe-covering hand over its sheets!\n    _Master, take off your hand for the humble servant!_\n    Asked in vain:----\n    How long for my meditation?\u201d\n\nBut it is impossible with the quotations permissible in an article to\ngive an adequate presentment of a poet whose poems are so separate\nthat a hundred of them do not suffice for his expression. Noguchi has,\nlike Verlaine, escaped the wisdom of experience; his latest moods are\nas sky-clear as his first, different though they are in technique and\nin feeling. Each one of them is a glint of light from a diamond; it is\nimpossible, but in seeing innumerable glints together, satisfactorily\nto perceive the diamond itself.\n\nNoguchi\u2019s technique is his own, though it would be possible to find\nin reminiscent phrases suggestions of influence. A man using English\nwords with something of the surprising daring of the Irish peasants\non whose talk Mr. Synge modelled his prose, using them, too, like a\nforeigner who has fallen in love with them, he is able to give them a\nmorning freshness newer and stranger than is given them (though the\nwords of all fine writers are newly discovered) by men whose ancestors\nhave bandied them about. He uses them in short and long lines that,\nin his later books, learn more and more of rhythm. Rhyme he has not\nattempted, and it would, I think, have hampered the butterfly-flash\nof his verse from thought to thought. In _The Summer Cloud_ many of\nthe poems of his early books are altered to prose simply by the plan\nof their printing. The type is differently set on the page and they\nare called prose poems. I do not know what led Noguchi to make this\nexperiment, but it proved that the irregular, broken lines in which his\npoems were originally published had a real power over the effect the\nwords produced. The spaces between the lines were a kind of thought\npunctuation, and the mind needed these moments between the little,\nbreathless, scarcely-worded sighs that make his poems. In reading\nthem aloud it becomes clear that the ritual of the line-spacing was\nmore important than that of commas or full-stops. Noguchi\u2019s songs are\nlike bird flights, timing themselves with the pulse of the mind that\nfollows them. His ideal is a poetry of pure suggestion whose melody\nshall be of thought, capricious and uncertain as the mind, but only\nwith the mind\u2019s caprice, the mind\u2019s uncertainty. The following poem was\nprinted as prose in _The Summer Cloud_, and as it stands here in _The\nPilgrimage_.\n\n   \u201cLittle Fairy,\n    Little Fairy by a hearth,\n    Flight in thine eyes,\n    Hush on thy feet,\n    Shall I go with thee up to Heaven\n    By the road of the fire-flame?\n\n    Little Fairy,\n    Little Fairy by a river,\n    Dance in thy heart,\n    Longing at thy lips,\n    Shall I go down with thee to \u201cFar-Away,\u201d\n    Rolling over the singing bubbles?\n\n    Little Fairy,\n    Little Fairy by a poppy,\n    Dream in thy hair,\n    Solitude under thy wings,\n    Shall I sleep with thee to-night in the golden cup\n    Under the stars?\u201d\n\nIt is easy, in reading it aloud, to recognise that its form is not\naccidental, but follows, breath for breath, the movements of the mind.\n\nBut who shall analyse charm, or separate the tints of the opal? In\nwriting of Noguchi, I am writing of something that can only be defined\nby itself. I can only take shred after shred from the cloak of gossamer\nhe has woven for himself, and only hope in doing so to persuade other\nreaders to buy his books and find for themselves a hundred shreds\nas beautiful as these. The frontispiece to _The Pilgrimage_ is a\nreproduction of a drawing by Utamaru, a thing of four pale colours and\na splash of black, and made as light as wind by curves as subtle and as\nindefinable as those traced by worshipping stars round the object of\ntheir adoration. I had forgotten that it is the picture of a girl, and\nthat fact is, indeed, as immaterial as the titles of Noguchi\u2019s poems.\nIn looking at it, I forget not only its subject, but the book in which\nit is, for this art, of poet or painter, Verlaine, Noguchi, Utamaru,\nWhistler, frees us, infecting us with its own freedom, from the world\nwhich is too much with us, for the exploration of that other world of\ndream which, unless we, too, are children, is with us so fitfully, and\nso seldom.\n\n   \u201cBeckoned by an appointed hand, unseen yet sure, in holy air\n    We wander as a wind, silver and free,\n    With one song in heart, we, the children of prayer.\n\n    Our song is not of a city\u2019s fall;\n    No laughter of a kingdom bids our feet wait;\n    Our heart is away, with sun, wind, and rain:\n    We, the shadowy roamers on the holy highway.\u201d\n\n  1909.\n\n\n\n\nKINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH\n\n\n\n\nKINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH\n\n\nDefinitions, like mythologies, wear out. It is then important to\nreplace them. Aladdin\u2019s wife had a choice, but we have none. We must\nchange our old lamps for new, or sit in the dark. A natural philosopher\nwho retained the mythological definition of thunder could not speak\nof lightning to young men who had learnt of electricity without an\nair of irrelevance of which he might be quite unconscious. Not so his\nlisteners, who would brush his explanations impatiently aside as soon\nas they knew the beliefs on which he based them. Whenever historians\nor critics seem irrelevant, we are safe in assuming a difference\nbetween their definitions and our own. When they seem irrelevant to\nmany people beside ourselves, we can go further and assume that their\ndefinitions are either worn out or not yet accepted. Sometimes, of\ncourse, they are without definitions either old or new, but then they\nneed not trouble us, for they disappear like cuttle-fishes in the\ndarkness of their own ink. There is at the present day a widespread\ndissatisfaction with historians of literature. It is impossible not to\nfeel that their dicta do not matter, that their sense of perspective\nis wrong or uncertain, that their books are of no use to us except as\nbibliographies. A new definition of literature is needed, that shall\ngive them some scale, some standard to which they can refer. For\nwithout such standard or scale, they can do no more than gossip, or\njudge poetry by its passion, by its sense, by its smoothness, or by\nany other half-remembered scrap from a definition that is no longer\nadequate.\n\nIf we would get rid of these irrelevancies, and write histories of\nliterature that shall deal with the matter of which they propose to\ntreat, we must find a new standard of values, and to find that we\nmust make a new definition. We must have a statement of the nature of\nliterature applicable not to the books of one nation of one time only,\nbut to those of all nations and of all times. It must supply us with\nterms in which we can state the aims of widely different schools and\nwriters, with regard to their medium and not to any accidental quality.\nIf it is to do that we must escape from the prejudices of our own time\n(which may be invisible to us) by seeking our formula in a definition\nof the medium common to all writers, a statement of the function of\nwords in combination.\n\nTo make such a statement I have borrowed two epithets from the\nterminology of physical science. Energy is described by physicists\nas kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted.\nPotential energy is force that a body is in a position to exert.\nApplying these terms to language, without attempting too strict\nan analogy, I wish to define literature, or rather the medium of\nliterature, as a combination of kinetic with potential speech. In\nthis combination the two are coincident. There is no such thing in\nliterature as speech purely kinetic or purely potential. Purely kinetic\nspeech is prose, not good prose, not literature, but colourless\nprose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that M. Jourdain\ndiscovered he had been speaking all his life. It says things. An\nexample of purely potential speech may be found in music. I do not\nthink it can be made with words, though we can give our minds a taste\nof it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a\npoem in a language that we do not understand. The proportion between\nkinetic and potential speech and the energy of the combination varies\nwith different works and the literature of different ages. There is no\nliterature to which it is impossible to apply the formula. Let us try\nto clarify it by example and particularisation.\n\nIt may be asked, what of ballad poetry in which there is much so stated\nas to approach purely kinetic speech? Does not the admitted power\nof a sea-song, a song whose words are utterly trivial, disprove our\nassertion? It does not; for to such songs or chanties the music to\nwhich they are sung has given a quality of potential speech, without\nwhich they would be worthless and speedily forgotten. In that case\nthe words and the melody respectively represent kinetic and potential\nspeech. It has been very truly said that a prima-donna can turn the\nalphabet to poetry by the emotional power of her voice.\n\nIt may further be asked by any one who has not clearly apprehended my\nmeaning (and this would be more than excusable), Do I mean to suggest\nthat literature is not literature unless it contains a double meaning?\nand, if so, do I not find in allegory the most perfect example of the\nsimultaneous existence of kinetic and potential speech? This would\nindeed be a _reductio ad absurdum_. I must answer, that allegory\n(though it may represent the result of an early guess at the nature of\nart) is not necessarily poetry. There is, indeed, a gross and obvious\nduality of meaning in such a work as _The Fa\u00ebrie Queene_. The tale\nwritten on the paper enables us to reconstruct another. But that other\nmight have been written with no greater difficulty. It does not aid,\nand may clog with external preoccupations, the tale that we sit down\nto read. It is an impertinent shadow, a dog that keeps too closely at\nour heels. Hazlitt rebukes those who think that the allegory of _The\nFa\u00ebrie Queene_ will bite them. We are more afraid that it will lick our\nhands, and all we ask is, that it will allow itself to be forgotten.\nAn acrostic sonnet may be a good sonnet, but we are not likely to\nperceive its excellence if we are intent upon the initial letters of\nthe lines. No; allegory may be a rude attempt to copy in things said\nthe duality of poetic speech. The old delight in conscious allegory may\nbe comparable to the modern delight in conscious symbolism. But we must\nnot forget for a moment that the resemblance is only one of analogy.\nWhen Spenser writes of Mammon\u2019s cave:\n\n   \u201cBoth roof, and floor, and walls were all of gold\n    But overgrown with rust and old decay,\n    And hid in darkness that none could behold\n    The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day\n    Did never in that house itself display,\n    But a faint shadow of uncertain light;\n    Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away;\n    Or as the moon cloth\u00e9d with cloudy night,\n    Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.\u201d\n\nWhen he writes thus, we do not, in our search for potential speech,\nhave to remember that he is writing of the love of money. Away with\nsuch tedious recollections. The stanza is like a picture by Rembrandt\nof an alchemist\u2019s laboratory, where dusty alembic and smouldering\nfire mean far more than themselves. The lines say something, but we\nhear much for which they have not words. \u201cThe moon cloth\u00e9d with cloudy\nnight,\u201d is not richer in suggestion than that same description. Not in\nthe allegory but in the words themselves, their order and their melody,\nmust we find, if they are to be literature, that combination of kinetic\nand potential speech.\n\nLet me take another example of fine poetry, and show that it does\nperform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the\nfirst stanza of Blake\u2019s \u201cThe Tiger\u201d:\n\n   \u201cTiger! Tiger! burning bright\n    In the forests of the night,\n    What immortal hand or eye\n    Could frame thy fearful symmetry?\u201d\n\nIt is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four\nlines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The\nkinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed\ntiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and\non either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the\nphosphorescence of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear.\nAnd who shall speak in fit terms of its potentiality? That glowing\nimage, that surprised address; not in the enumeration of such things\nshall we come upon its secret.\n\nThe test of a formula is, that it shall fit. It must enable us to\nco-ordinate scattered knowledge, and throw into a clear perspective\nthe jumble of loose statements and scraps of information whose\nvalue we cannot but recognise, although they have remained outside\nprevious schemes and done little more than disturb the equilibrium of\nonce-established theories. It is a comfort and a joy to a thinker when\nhe can say that a formula of his has almost been proposed by minds that\nhave approached his problem along roads other than his own. When he can\nfind statements, true in themselves but inadequate, pegging out, as\nit were, the ground from which his formula has been dug, he can feel\nthat it is no mere chance that has given it a momentary appearance of\nusefulness. He can speak of it with the solid confidence that it has\nbehind it the collaboration of his predecessors.\n\nWe can bring such confidence to the use of this formula of kinetic\nand potential speech, for to whatever problem of literary theory or\nphenomenon of the history of literature we apply it, we find that it\nhas been almost stated by those who have separately considered that\nproblem or phenomenon. It smelts the ore that they have dug, and forges\na weapon for the attack not of one problem, but of all.\n\nFor example; though kinetic speech may be translated without loss from\none language to another, potential speech would not be potential but\nkinetic if we were able to express it otherwise than by itself. This is\nwhat Shelley means when he denies the possibility of the translation\nof poetry, though he does not perceive the full reason, but only that\nthe poetic quality of a poem is partly dependent on a succession\nof inimitable sounds. His statement, incomplete though it is, is a\nrecognition of the duality of poetic speech. He does not for a moment\ncontend that we cannot render the meaning; he sees that the meaning is\nnot all. The body is one thing and the soul is another. If we leave the\nsoul behind we have nothing but dead matter, fit for manure or food.\nLife, or poetry, delicate-footed, mysterious, gracious with knowledge\nof her mystery, is passed away and we cannot recapture her.\n\nSometimes, indeed, she goes without our interference, and disappears\nonly because of our neglect. There are poems that many men cannot\nperceive to be poetry. There are others, once poetry, now no longer\nso. Let us apply our formula to these phenomena, and first to the\nvarying popularity of poetry, since our solution of this question will\nhelp us in solving the other. We shall find that the nearer poetry\napproaches to kinetic speech, the more easily is it apprehended by the\nmultitude. Kinetic speech secures its effects by the presentation of\nfacts, situations and stories, which are stuff not so fine as to slip\nthrough the coarse meshes of the general understanding. This explains\nthe immediate and wide popularity of such poets as Longfellow, Scott,\nand Macaulay. Because prose, as a rule, depends more nearly on its\nkinetic than on its potential utterance, it is, as a rule, the more\nwidely read. When, as in the hands of some nineteenth century writers,\nit emphasizes the potential element of speech it correspondingly\nnarrows its public. Whenever poetry of high potentiality is read by a\nlarge public it will be found that its potential speech is condoned\nfor them or hidden from them by more than usually vigorous kinetic\nspeech. For potential speech secures its effects by suggestion. There\nis a bloom on its wings that a callous retina does not perceive. It\nis like a butterfly that has visited flowers and scatters their scent\nin its flight. The scent and the fluttering of its bloom-laden wings\nare more important than the direction or speed of its flying. It is\nalways easier for the public to say, how fast, or where it is going\nthan to notice these delicate things. The kinetic speech of a poem is\nunderstood by all; the potential depends for its apprehension upon\nthe taste and knowledge of the reader. Words must have for us the\nassociations that they had for the poet. We must be able to see them\nwith his eyes, hear them with his ears, and taste their scents with\nnostrils not dissimilar to his. In time these things change. Unpopular\npoetry becomes quite popular, and indeed, no longer poetry, as it\nloses, through usage or forgetfulness, its proximity to the condition\nof potential speech. Accents are shifted from one to another syllable,\nand we should be deaf to the melody if we were unable to replace them.\nNew meanings gather round the words, and they come back from later\ntravels disguised in strange perfumes. The kinetic speech may be\ndisturbed, but the potential has disappeared in a jargon of new sounds,\na quarrel of new memories, and a chaos of new odours. Sometimes indeed,\nit is as if it had never existed.\n\nIn this light it is easy to understand the curious business of\ncriticism, and to formulate an account of what occurs when poetry dies,\nor falls asleep like the princess in the wood, to be awakened after\ntwo centuries by a critic\u2019s kiss. The Elizabethan dramatists lost\ntheir potential and were judged only by their kinetic speech during\nthe eighteenth century. They were considered coarse and bloody-minded,\nbecause there is rapine and murder in their plays. Lamb restored to\nthem the potentiality they had lost and turned bleak rock to flowering\ncountry. Spenser had become a mere monger of allegory, until Hazlitt\nand Leigh Hunt reconstituted him poet by discovering for themselves\nand others the attitude that restores to his kinetic its lost\npotential speech. Writers of Wordsworth\u2019s generation realised, at least\nsubconsciously, that a poem is not independent of knowledge. They tried\nto help us by printing at the head of a poem information about the\ncircumstances of its conception. When a poet tells us that a sonnet was\ncomposed \u201con Westminster Bridge\u201d or \u201csuggested by Mr. Westell\u2019s views\nof the caves, &c. in Yorkshire,\u201d he is trying to ease for us the task\nof aesthetic reproduction to which his poem is a stimulus. He is trying\nto ensure that we shall approach it as he did, and hear as well as the\nkinetic the potential speech that he values. There is a crudity about\nsuch obvious assistance, and it would be quite insufficient without\nthe wider knowledge on which we draw unconsciously as we read. But the\ncrudity of those pitiable scraps of proffered information is not so\nremarkable as the dulness of perception that can allow a man to demand\nof a poem that it shall itself compel him accurately to enjoy it. It\nis possible that much of the old poetry that now seems to us no more\nthan direct speech was once wrapped in a veil of suggestion. It is the\ncritic\u2019s business to rediscover those forgotten veils and to restore to\nthe kinetic the magic of potential speech.\n\nThe formula of kinetic and potential speech illumines not only the\ncritic\u2019s business but also that of the historian. It enables him to\nlink together in a single scheme the prose of Goldsmith with that of\nPater and the poetry of the eighteenth century with poetry, like that\nof the Symbolists of the nineteenth, so different as to seem completely\nunrelated. It enables him to explain a phenomenon that he has usually\nalluded to as a mere curious accident, the fact that there have been\nages when poetry has been popular and others in which it has been the\npossession of a few. It will, I think, be found that this periodicity\ncoincides with a general variation between kinetic and potential\nspeech. In the eighteenth century, when poetry was often rhymed prose,\nwhen the common standard of poetry was good sense, when she gave advice\nand said things, and did not seem to realise that there were things\nshe could not say, when, in short, the kinetic almost overwhelmed the\npotential, then poetry was a popular form of literature. In other\nages, when poetry has approached the condition of potential speech\nand so has needed for its appreciation such knowledge as that lately\ndiscussed, it has not swelled the publisher\u2019s purse so swiftly as forms\nof literature that happened to be more nearly kinetic and so more\neasily enjoyed.\n\nThe eighteenth century poets and the Symbolists alike come under our\ndefinition and can be classed by the formula that depends upon it.\nI have suggested that the eighteenth century poets cared mostly for\nkinetic speech, and, indeed, carried their appreciation of it so high\nas sometimes to forget that poetry could do anything but speak wisely\nand well. Few schools have suffered a greater variety of imperfect\nand bungling definitions than that of Symbolism. The Symbolist aims\nhave been described as \u201can escape from the thought of death,\u201d and\n\u201cintimacy with spiritual things.\u201d Nowhere has there been a definition\nthat has shown their relation to the aims of poetry in general. But,\nwhen Mallarm\u00e9 says: \u201cNommer un objet, c\u2019est supprimer les trois quarts\nde la jouissance du po\u00e8me qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu \u00e0\npeu; le sugg\u00e9rer, voil\u00e0 le r\u00eave,\u201d he is saying, in other words, that\npoetry depends on potential speech. The Symbolists sought to write\npoetry that should be purely potential, and in the revision of certain\nof his poems Mallarm\u00e9 tried to eliminate bit by bit the whole structure\nof kinetic speech that had been in them. The eighteenth century aims\ncarried to their extreme would have meant bad prose; the Symbolist\naims carried to their extreme would have meant (as they sometimes did)\nunintelligibility. Poetry is made by a combination of kinetic with\npotential speech. Eliminate either and the result is no longer poetry.\n\nI do not propose the words kinetic and potential as terms of abuse or\npraise, though in different ages there have been artists who would have\nused them so. The eighteenth century poets would have used kinetic\nas a term of praise; the Symbolists would have used it as a term\nof abuse. The fact that different schools would have set different\nvalues on the words is itself a proof that they may be serviceable\nto historians and critics. Literature does indeed vary between these\nextremes, its kinetic quality preserving it from nonsense, its\npotential quality separating it from bad prose. Some sort of relevancy\nwould be discoverable in any history that set itself to trace these\nvariations. Some sort of relevancy is obvious in all criticism that\nattempts (as all good criticism does) the enhancement of the potential\nand the clarification of the kinetic element in such literature as\nhappens to be its subject. In any case, an adoption of the definition\nof literature that this essay upholds would make ridiculous the\nclassification of books by their subjects and of writers by their\nopinions, on which so many intellects have wasted time and vitality\nworthy of a more profitable employment.\n\n  1911.\n\n\n  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.\n  Edinburgh & London\n\n\n\n\nFOOTNOTES\n\n\n[1] After passing this note for press, I learn that this essay has been\nreprinted at Tokyo in a new edition of Mr. Noguchi\u2019s _The Pilgrimage_.\n\n[2] For the reputation of Breughel d\u2019Enfer is based on his imitations\nof his father, Breughel le Vieux, to whom is attributed the _Temptation\nof St. Anthony_ at Genoa.\n\n[3] A piece of money coined by Charles VIII.\n\n[4] Figures that strike the hour on the clock-tower at Dijon.\n\n[5] The quotations in this essay are taken from Dr. Oscar Levy\u2019s\nadmirable English edition of Nietzsche, translated by Drs. W. A.\nHaussmann and M. A. M\u00fcgge, Messrs. Paul V. Cohn, Thomas Common, J.\nM. Kennedy, A. M. Ludovici and H. B. Samuel, and Miss Helen Zimmern:\neighteen volumes published by Mr. T. N. Foulis.\n\n[6] Clarendon Press. 1910.\n\n[7] Oscar Wilde.\n\n[8] These references are to the page-numbers in Messrs. Macmillan\u2019s\nlibrary edition.\n\n[9] His inability to tell a story was perhaps the reason of, or,\nat least supplies a commentary upon, his readiness to admire the\nnarratives of M. Filon, Octave Feuillet, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and to\nadmire them, quite ingenuously, for the story\u2019s sake, like the ordinary\nreader of novels.\n\n[10] _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, 1899.\n\n[11] An English translation was published in 1912 by Messrs. Stephen\nSwift.\n\n[12] When I wrote this article I was still hypnotised, like the\nsymbolists themselves, with the idea that symbolism was a method. My\nlater article on kinetic and potential speech contains what I believe\nto be a more accurate account of the significance of what is called\nthe \u201csymbolist movement.\u201d It did not turn a practice into a theory,\nbut merely emphasized one of the two inseparable functions of words\nwhen combined in poetic speech, and emphasized it at the expense of the\nother.\n\nJapanese poets have always insisted on the potential element in poetic\nspeech. Its intensity has always been for them the test of a poem.\nNoguchi, except in that he is a Japanese poet who happens to write in\nEnglish, is not an innovator but the heir to a long Japanese tradition.\n\n\n\n\nTranscriber\u2019s Notes\n\n\nPunctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a\npredominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they\nwere not changed.\n\nInconsistent use of accent marks has not been remedied.\n\nSimple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation\nmarks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left\nunbalanced.\n\nPage 167: A superscript is represented as ^{me}.","title":"Portraits and Speculations","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":39389}