---------------------------------------- ------------------- ,transcriber's ,note3 ,inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved4 ,obvious typographical errors have been corrected4 ,for a complete list1 please see the end of this document4 ---------------------------------------- ------------------- 99 99 99 99 99 ,,martin ,,secker',s ,,series ,,of ,,modern ,,monographs ,j4,m4 ,,synge ,by ,p4,p4 ,howe ,,henrik ,,ibsen ,by ,r4 ,ellis ,roberts ,,walter ,,pater ,by ,edward ,thomas ,,thomas ,,hardy ,by ,lascelles ,abercrombie ,,george ,,gissing ,by ,frank ,swinnerton ,,walt ,,whitman ,by ,basil de ,slincourt ,,william ,,morris ,by ,john ,drinkwater ,a4,c4 ,,swinburne ,by ,edward ,thomas ,each volume ,demy ,octavo1 ,cloth ,gilt1 with a ,frontispiece in ,photogravure4 ,price #gs4 #f;d4 net ,the ,athenum says3 ,we congratulate the publisher4 ,the ,spectator says3 ,mr4 ,secker's excellent series of critical studies4 ,the ,yorkshire ,observer says3 ,mr4 ,secker's admirable series4 ,the ,manchester ,courier says3 ,this excellent series4 ,the ,illustrated ,london ,news says3 ,mr4 ,martin ,secker's series of critical studies does justice to the publisher's sense of pleasant format4 ,the volumes are a delight to eye and hand1 and make a welcome addition to the bookshelf4 ,,martin ,,secker ,,publisher ,,number ,,five ,,john ,,street ,,adelphi ,,autumn ,,books ,the ,complete ,dramatic ,works of ,gerhart ,hauptmann4 #f vols4 #es4 net each4 ,vie de ,bohme3 ,a ,patch of ,romantic ,paris4 ,by ,orlo ,williams4 #aes4 net4 ,the ,art of ,silhouette4 ,by ,desmond ,coke4 #ajs4 net4 ,walt ,whitman3 ,a ,critical ,study4 ,by ,basil de ,slincourt4 #gs4 #f;d4 net4 ,walter ,pater3 ,a ,critical ,study4 ,by ,edward ,thomas4 #gs4 #f;d4 net4 ,speculative ,dialogues4 ,by ,lascelles ,abercrombie4 #es4 net4 ,dramatic ,portraits4 ,by ,p4,p4 ,howe4 #es4 net4 ,,personality ,,in ,,literature ,,by ,,the ,,same ,,author ,,modernism ,,and ,,romance ,,personality ,,in ,,literature ,,by ,r4,a4 ,,scott-,,james ,,london3 ,,martin ,,secker ,,number ,,five ,,john ,,street ,,adelphi ,first published #aiac ,,william ,,brendon ,,and ,,son1 ,,ltd41 ,,printers1 ,,plymouth4 ,,contents ,,part ,,one3 ,,literature ,,and ,,art ,,page ,,the ,,degradation ,,of ,,beauty #c ,,literature ,a ,,fine ,,art #ad ,,passions ,,spin ,,the ,,plot #db ,,the ,,popular ,,taste #ee ,,part ,,two3 ,,literature ,,and ,,modern ,,life ,,to-,,day ,,and ,,yesterday #ha ,,professional ,,politics #if ,,specialism ,,in ,,religion #ajc ,,specialism ,,in ,,war #aji ,,specialism ,,in ,,literature #aae ,,philosophy ,,and ,,justice #aba ,,part ,,three3 ,,literature ,,and ,,men ,,bernard ,,shaw #aca ,h4,g4 ,,wells #aea ,,arnold ,,bennett #agj ,,gilbert ,,chesterton #ahg ,,some ,,modern ,,poets #aif ,j4,m4 ,,synge #bbb ,,the ,,shramana ,,ekai ,,kawaguchi #bbf ,,francis ,,thompson #bce ,,part ,,one ,,literature ,,and ,,art ,i ,,the ,,degradation ,,of ,,beauty ,some time ago ,i found myself at an exhibition of ,post-,impressionist pictures1 under the gis of an artist who was himself of that persuasion4 ,indeed1 he was one of the exhibitors1 and ,i was constrained to express my opinions in the form of questions4 ,we passed before a picture which to my untutored eyes was formless1 meaningless and ugly4 ,it was by a well-known artist1 and my instructor admired it4 ,he said it was the head of a woman1 and he indicated certain hook-like marks in the painting which to him distinctly suggested the nose1 the mouth and the neck of a woman1 reduced to their simplest terms4 ,after he had fully explained the picture1 ,i asked him if the result was in any sense beautiful to him4 ,beautiful6 he exclaimed1 with something of disdain in his voice4 ,why should it be beautiful8 ,i do not require that a picture should be beautiful4 ,he had not finished1 but ,i was relieved by the first part of his reply4 ,as ,i cannot hope to appreciate more than a certain number of things in the world1 ,i am willing1 so far as pictures are concerned1 to be limited to beautiful pictures1 and to be proved ignorant and obtuse in regard to all others4 ,for the same reason ,i have long since reconciled myself to the fact that there are some branches of science and natural history which ,i shall never master4 ,i shall always endeavour to follow clever writers like ,shaw and ,brieux whose plays have1 as the former puts it1 a really scientific natural history for their basis4 ,but ,i cannot hope to acquire the whole of knowledge or reform the whole of the world1 and there are books which contain a great deal of sound knowledge and urgent opinion for which ,i have no use4 ,moreover1 ,i deny ,mr4 ,shaw's right to interfere with my enjoyment if ,i turn to literature which teaches nothing and serves no utilitarian or reforming purpose4 ,it is only when ,i am in the scientific frame of mind that ,i desire accurate natural history1 or when ,i am in the reforming frame of mind that ,i desire earnest exhortations to improve society4 ,in the same way ,i am only drawn to the ,post-,impressionists when ,i want1 not beautiful pictures1 but an agreeable sense of the impudence and imbecility of professional craftsmen4 ,but when ,i am in the mood for literature and art1 ,i demand something that shall appeal to my sense of beauty2 and ,i refuse to be shamed into believing that ,i ought to prefer scientific knowledge1 or ethical suasion1 or those particular kinds of ugliness admired by some ,realists and some ,post-,impressionists4 ,but ,i was a little disconcerted when my ,post-,impressionist artist concluded with the remark3 ,i have never yet found anyone who could tell me what he meant by beauty4 ,certainly ,i had not asked him for an exact definition1 or any definition of ,beauty in the abstract4 ,i should have been satisfied if1 for the moment1 he had taken it on trust1 as most of us take the law of gravity1 the postulates of ,euclid1 and the evidence of our senses4 ,i was not dismayed because a single ,post-,impressionist thought that beautiful is a word that has no meaning2 but because the reply came so pat upon his lips2--he was repeating1 parrot-like1 a current view2 he was adopting the fashionable attitude of scorn towards what is regarded as an ancient tyranny1 long since indicted and exploded4 ,this bland acceptance of the meaninglessness and the inefficacy of beauty is habitual to most young professionals who wield pen or pencil4 ,they have learnt it from ,mr4 ,shaw1 forgetting that when ,mr4 ,shaw demands complete freedom for the writer he also demands objective truth2 or they have learnt it from ,mr4 ,roger ,fry1 forgetting that even ,mr4 ,fry demands some kind of subjective truth4 ,every young artist like my acquaintance at the ,grafton ,gallery1 every young novelist like ,mr4 ,gilbert ,cannan1#a is encouraged by the intellectuals to accept formlessness and anarchy as evidence of a magnanimous and enlightened spirit4 ,but it is not necessary to expose this falsity in its crude and most violent forms4 ,for we may find it expressed in an almost academic way1 with philosophical aloofness1 a show of nice reasoning1 and a kind of ,epicurean sweetness in a ,romanes lecture delivered by ,mr4 ,arthur ,james ,balfour and published under the title ,criticism and ,beauty4 ,it is worth while to study so responsible a writer1 for we may be sure that he will weigh his words1 that he will not over-state his case1 or be led away by passion or fanaticism4 ,and it is assuredly interesting to examine the argument for anarchy as stated and defended by a ,conservative statesman4 ,indeed1 it is hard to believe that the author of this essay is the same ,mr4 ,balfour whom we know as the leader of the ,conservative party4 ,a statesman ostensibly so consistent in upholding order and authority in the ,church1 in adhering to time-honoured standards of government1 and in trusting the judgment of men trained in the tradition of politics1 might have been expected to hold views somewhat similar in matters of art4 ,we should have expected him to believe in the existence1 not perhaps of artistic canons1 but of artistic standards2 to be convinced that in sthetics there is an sthetic right and wrong2 to attach weight to the judgment of men of trained sensibility4 ,but it is not so4 ,he holds in the most extreme form the ancient doctrine that seeming is being4 ,art1 as such1 has for him nothing to do with truth4 ,he recognises no valid standard of excellence4 ,the only excellence in a work of art is to afford sthetic pleasure1 and the pleasure which a boy derives from a blood-curdling adventure-book or the public from a popular melodrama is1 in ,mr4 ,balfour's view1 no less sthetic than the pleasure which another may derive from contemplating a statue by ,michelangelo4 ,there is no universal standard2 no criterion2 no excellence in art except such as each man accepts for himself4 ,mr4 ,balfour does1 indeed1 make a proper distinction between art as technical dexterity and art as related to the sublime1 the beautiful1 the pathetic1 the humorous1 the melodious1 and admits that it is possible to apply an objective test to technical skill--to decide that this line scans1 that this rhyme is flawless1 that these bars in music are in such-and-such a key4 ,but he will allow no objective grounds of excellence to art in the more important sense4 ,if you say that this poem is beautiful or sublime1 you are asserting what is only true for you1 a mere personal preference which others need not be expected to share4 ,not only do men of trained sensibility differ from the uncultured1 but they differ equally from one another4 ,he cites the evidence of ,greek music to show how widely the cultured of one nation and epoch may differ from the cultured of other nations and epochs4 ,having laid it down as an axiom that our sthetic judgments are for the most part immediate1 and1 so to speak1 intuitive1 and observing that the fastidious differ among themselves1 and that their delight in fine objects is no more intense than the delight of the vulgar in coarser themes1 he proceeds to the conclusion that there can be no valid right or wrong in taste1 no absolute standard of beauty4 ,he even maintains that art is not based upon any special faculty for perceiving the true4 ,i can find no justification in experience for associating great art with penetrating insight4 ,before going further it is necessary to hint at a curious confusion in which he here involves himself--a surely rather crude confusion between sthetic1 and moral1 right and wrong4 ,being concerned to disprove the existence of the former1 he for a moment identifies it with the latter4 ,it is either1 as ,i have taken it1 a crude confusion of thought1 or an equivocating device more often used in political controversy than in the domain of art criticism--that of identifying the opinion attacked with another of an ignominious character4 ,the view which he is rejecting is thus set forth4 ,an artist is deemed to be more than the maker of beautiful things4 ,he is a seer1 a moralist1 a prophet4 ,surely he must realise that there are many who would most fervently hold that an artist must be a seer or even a prophet1 who would ridicule the idea that he must be that very different sort of thing1 a moralist4 ,and in the same way1 when he has declared categorically3 ,i can find no justification in experience for associating great art with penetrating insight1 he almost ludicrously adds1 or good art with good morals4 ,it is this confusion of the aim of the artist with the aims of other expounders--the moralist1 the philosopher1 the theologian--that vitiates his argument against the insight of the great artists4 ,why does he deny them this penetrating insight8 ,because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters4 ,optimism and pessimism2 materialism and spiritualism2 theism1 pantheism1 atheism1 morality and immorality2 religion and irreligion2 lofty resignation and passionate revolt--each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic beauty4 ,the non sequitur of this argument lies in the fact that he only shows that artists have differed in respect of what is not essential to art4 ,if he had shown that some artists have created the beautiful1 and others have created the ugly1 he would have produced evidence fatal to his opponents4 ,as it is he has denied perception of the beautiful to artists because they differ in respect of that which has no necessary connection with beauty4 ,but to leave this technical1 though not wholly unreal1 disputation4 ,there is this merit in ,mr4 ,balfour's essay3 that it states in its most extreme form a view for which there is something to be said and which has been gaining in favour in modern times4 ,it is a reaction against the view which became established in the course of the last century4 ,it was the habit of the eighteenth century to judge poetry by its form alone2 the nineteenth judged it by the spirit which inspired it1 by that which1 as ,de ,quincey puts it1 was incarnated in a work of art4 ,william ,blake literally believed that there was a real world of the imagination which was opened up to the artist in his visions1 and that was why he said3 ,learn to see through1 not with1 the eye4 ,coleridge1 too1 asserted the primacy of ,reason and imagination2 and for ,wordsworth poetry was ,reason in her most exalted form1 just as for ,keats ,beauty is truth1 truth ,beauty4 ,even so logical and prosaic a thinker as ,john ,stuart ,mill recognised that supremacy of the artist to which he himself could not attain2 the artist1 as he said in a letter to ,carlyle1 perceives truth immediately1 by intuition1 and it was his own humble function to translate the truths discerned by the artist into logic4 ,is not the distinction between mysticism1 the mysticism which is of truth1 and mere dreamery1 or the institution of imaginations for realities1 exactly this1 that mysticism may be translated into logic8 ,logic1 for ,mill1 was only the hand-servant of that art which is concerned1 not with imaginations only1 but with realities4 ,and it was in the same spirit that ,matthew ,arnold laid down his decisive verdict that literature is a criticism of life1 that it may be subjected to a universal estimate1 and that the standard is the best that has been said and thought in the world4 ,but in recent years there has been a revolt against the idea of standards or authority in art4 ,art has always been conceived as something which affords pleasure2 but now it is conceived as that which affords pleasure to anyone4 ,the democracy1 now that it has become literate1 claims the right of private judgment1 equality for its members even in matters of art4 ,and in a sense it is right4 ,nothing should be or can be acclaimed as beautiful unless it appears beautiful to the spectator4 ,there is no criterion of beauty outside the perception of beauty4 ,for each man1 that only is beautiful which affords him the experience of beauty2 and whatever does afford him that experience has given him the sthetic pleasure which is the true pleasure of art4 ,but there are many pleasurable thrills which have nothing to do with beauty or with art4 ,that is why ,mr4 ,balfour surely is wrong when he suggests that the youthful delight in blood-curdling adventures is an enjoyment of what is ,art1 and nothing but ,art4 ,but ,i agree that we are confronted with an antinomy which seems hard enough to overcome--on the one hand art is only good because some people have judged or felt it to be good2 on the other hand all sincere critics are convinced that some works are absolutely good1 that their excellence is beyond reasonable challenge1 and that those who do not perceive this excellence are lacking in fineness of perception4 ,the anarchistic side of the paradox is put in its crudest form by ,mr4 ,balfour4 ,it has been put in perhaps its finest and truest form by ,mr4 ,henry ,james3 ,art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease4 ,to justify our presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt the representational impulse4 ,in other connections our impulses are conditioned and embarrassed2 we are allowed to have only so many as are consistent with those of our neighbours2 with their convenience and well-being1 with their convictions and prejudices1 their rules and regulations4 ,art means an escape from all this4 ,wherever her shining standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over2 there it is enough simply that we please or are pleased4 ,there the tree is judged only by its fruits4 ,if these are sweet the tree is justified--and not less so the consumer4444 ,differences here are not iniquity and righteousness2 they are simply variations of temperament1 kinds of curiosity4 ,we are not under theological government4 ,it is true2 in art1 at least1 we are not under theological government1 and that was a maxim worth asserting at a time when the dicta of ,matthew ,arnold and ,ruskin were being converted into shibboleths4 ,it is necessary for happiness no less than for honesty that we should realise that poetry1 music1 and pictures are personal things2 that what they are worth to us is their sole measure of value4 ,and here it must be mentioned that ,mr4 ,balfour puts forth two hints which are inconclusive enough1 but which do dimly suggest a truer way of escape than that to which his argument leads4 ,he notes1 first of all1 that art is disinterested2 that it is not a means1 but an end in itself4 ,and1 secondly1 we feel towards beautiful things as we feel towards persons2 if they are congenial we may like or love them1 though we can assign no ground for our preference4 ,if the analogy were pursued it might lead to something like a solution of the difficulty4 ,for all fine art is beautiful expression2 it is self-expression2 it is the expression of something which the artist perceives4 ,if it strikes an answering chord in us we are satisfied2 and that fact of response means a community of perception1 of sthetic knowledge1 between the artist and the recipient1 something perhaps which is dragged from the depths of our duller natures but which burst forth in expression from the artist with his quicker and more apt perception4 ,but let it be noted that there could be no such response or sympathy conveyed from one to another by a symbol unless there were some real bond1 some existent principle possessed in common4 ,art is communicative1 but not surely a communication of nothing4 ,it communicates something which is not the less real because it is intangible and mysterious4 ,if it inexplicably affords us--as it does--an experience which some persons describe as transcendent1 then that quality in it1 which we call the sublime or the beautiful1 has at least to this extent a definite reality1 that it affords us unique experiences4 ,it is this question which ,i shall examine in the following chapter4 ,some men have not been so made that they can respond to the beauty which is summoned by art1 just as some men1 born blind1 are not touched by the light of the sun4 ,but it is of no moment to say that tastes differ4 ,men may differ about their friends1 but they do not differ about friendship4 ,they may have different codes of honour1 but a sense of honour is the same thing for a savage as it is for a bishop4 ,and so not all things are called beautiful by the same men1 but beauty is the same for all4 ,,footnotes3 #a ,see ,preface to ,round the ,corner4 7,martin ,secker47 ,,ii ,,literature ,a ,,fine ,,art ,there are many people of my acquaintance who think it almost indecent to talk of literature as a fine art4 ,they have the same distaste for the word art as others have for the name of ,god4 ,it has indeed been misused in certain sthetic circles and discussed almost unctuously1 so that it is often associated with long hair and cant1 and seems nonsensical if not disreputable to plain and honest men4 ,i remember an ,oxford don1 chiefly noted for his cricket and his knowledge of ,homer1 and in later life for his dyspepsia1 abusing a distinguished ,austrian critic who visited the ,university--,these foreigners are always talking about ,art6 ,foreigners and long-haired sthetes were one and the same thing to my atrabilious instructor4 ,the latter was an exact man4 ,no wonder he detested a word which is used so vaguely and in so many contrary senses2 which is sometimes applied to a poem or a novel as if its art were an ornamental thing separate from the poem or the novel2 or as if it were a mere synonym for style or adherence to some technical formula4 ,yet we cannot very well get on without the word1 and we certainly cannot avoid its connotation4 ,no man in his senses can deny that there is such a thing as the art of literature1 though it may seem absurd to talk about it4 ,no one1 however healthy in his tastes1 would refuse to distinguish the statement ,this is a very good book--which may mean only that it is instructive1 or useful for certain purposes--from the statement ,this1 anyhow1 is literature--which means something quite specific1 namely1 that this is a work of art4 ,the very word would become less offensive if we could be a little less vague about it1 if we could make up our minds what it is that it does mean or that we wish it to mean4 ,we all of us distinguish between good and bad in literature1 even if we regard our own judgments as fallible4 ,we are all disposed to mistrust the opinions of our contemporaries1 though we have a childlike faith in the verdict of posterity4 ,well1 what is it that will satisfy posterity1 and that ought1 a fortiori1 to satisfy us8 ,what is it1 in the domain of the delightful1 as opposed to the merely knowable1 which has value for the future1 and therefore should have more value for the present8 ,and what is it--an even more important question--which may have this kind of value for us1 whether posterity choose to value it or not8 ,that is the main point4 ,we want to find what that quality is1 in literature or any of the fine arts1 which makes it a matter of so great consideration to us4 ,what do we expect and demand from it1 if it is to be something of real moment8 ,that is one side of the question4 ,and putting the question from the other side--,what sort of process is implied in the writing of literature1 and what is the sanction of the writer8 ,it seems we are compelled to form some provisional theory of art before we can make the most modest pretensions to discuss literature4 ,for such a theory is implied in every literary discussion1 in every review of a book1 and in every appreciative or antagonistic reading of a book4 ,i myself have written hundreds of reviews of books1 and ,i certainly do not think it more presumptuous to set down what it is that ,i require1 or believe that ,i require1 in creative literature1 and what that requirement presupposes in the artist1 than to have written those hundreds of reviews4 ,i begin1 then1 from the side of our actual requirements1 and ,i lay it down as a self-evident proposition1 that if we mean anything at all by creative literature1 or literature regarded as a fine art1 we must mean something which provides us with an addition to experience1 an experience sui generis4 ,we demand that it should be something which will occupy us and engage our faculties1 something not to be approached carelessly and indolently1 but with energy and alertness of the mind2 not because it is abstruse or difficult1 but because we are demanding something which will give full play to the spirit1 which will come profoundly in contact with us when we are in fullest possession of ourselves1 which will not merely stir us1 but stir us to activity4 ,that ,i would take as an axiom4 ,if we are going to regard fiction1 for example1 as a fine art1 the artistic novel will be a book which we approach not for mere distraction1 but for activity1 mental and spiritual1 for the opportunity it affords of putting forth energy1 of giving full play to the vitality1 of going through a vital experience4 ,just as the keen golfer delights in the skilful use of eye and limb1 and is exhilarated by the difficulties and the physical exertion of the game1 so the keen reader of a book enjoys the strenuous mental exercise it affords him4 ,to some extent the mind is more elastic than the body4 ,even when it is tired it can sometimes be whipped into energy by thought1 or reading1 or talk1 whereas the body in its corresponding state cannot so readily respond with accuracy and effectiveness4 ,but the mind too--,heaven knows--may be dulled to fine issues2 and it is only when it is in well-balanced activity that it can do full justice to a work of art2 and that is no work of art which the jaded intelligence can wholly grasp4 ,anyone who enjoys pictures1 and does not care to look at them perfunctorily or in a sightseeing spirit1 knows well that he can only appreciate a picture when he allows eyes and imagination to concentrate upon it1 so that he perceives as well as sees it1 and derives a complex impression from it akin to that which the artist felt at the moment when he conceived it4 ,and in the same way with every work of art worthy of the name1 whether it be a picture1 a statue1 a poem1 a play or a novel1 it is part of its excellence to call forth activity in the mind which apprehends it4 ,but we must note that it not only calls forth activity1 but disinterested activity--and by that ,i mean an activity of the kind which is especially called forth in the fine arts1 and not that which science1 or religion1 or ethics might call forth without the aid of the arts4 ,to preserve the analogy of golf1 it may happen--and generally does happen--that the playing of golf makes the limbs more elastic and promotes general health4 ,but to take an interest in golf is not the same thing as to take an interest in the health-producing results of golf4 ,the true golfer is he who plays golf for its own sake and without any ulterior end1 without thought of consequences1 although consequences of some kind are inevitable4 ,in the same way the activity called forth in all art1 both in the artist at the time of creation and in the man who is appreciating it1 is disinterested2 he is1 in proportion as he is an artist or an appreciator of art1 concerned at the moment in nothing but the subject-matter of the artist1 and the treatment2 in making or receiving a certain effect1 without thought of the possible practical consequences which may follow through some inference drawn from the work or some psychological result attending upon it4 ,this is not a re-statement of the much-abused theory of ,art for ,art's sake1 for that theory has always tended to minimise the importance of subject-matter1 and to represent ,beauty as something aloof from the rest of life1 instead of being inseparable from the warp and woof of things social1 moral1 intellectual1 religious1 and physical4 ,when ,i say that the activity of the artist is disinterested1 ,i do not mean that he may not be concerned with any conceivable theme under the sun1 but that his business is to provide us with an experience1 and that any end he may have beyond making that experience vivid and complete is an alien end1 destroying his singleness of purpose1 wholly disruptive of his art and destructive to its energy4 ,and here we must abandon the analogy of a game of skill1 for whereas golf-balls have no interest except as things to be knocked about1 the objects with which poet1 dramatist or novelist deals are ideas1 persons1 associated things1 having character and interest of their own4 ,the experience he is to provide is primarily a spiritual experience1 an affair of the mind and the emotions4 ,and being1 as it must clearly be1 an experience sui generis1 it is obviously not derived from a mere reproduction of life2 for life cannot be reproduced excepting in life itself1 whereas art claims no more than to be an imitation1 or an envisagement1 of nature1 and its life is its own4 ,what we demand of it is that it should put into its picture something that is and is not in nature--something1 in other words1 that is only there for those who choose to see it1 but which the artist makes clearer1 awakening the perceptions to that aspect of truth which he has in view4 ,in a book called ,the ,ascending ,effort1 ,mr4 ,george ,bourne urged that the art of life consists in the realisation of choice ideas2 meaning by choice ideas those which are refined out of the commonplace and the meagre2 the ideas which are apprehended most actively1 with all the mind and all the perceptions2 the ideas which admit of relation to all other ideas1 which come into some sort of harmony with such schemes of life as we have made4 ,if this is true of the art of life1 a fortiori is it true of the fine arts from which the analogy is drawn4 ,in other words1 the artist's aim is not to reproduce the facts which make up the mass of our ordinary and undigested life1 but to substitute for the dishevelled commonplace the choiceness of an ordered interpretation4 ,only in this way can art give us an experience sui generis2 only by the refinement and re-energising of the treatment can it give us emotions vivid enough to compete in some measure with the vividness of nature4 ,implicitly all great artists must have accepted this general view of their function1 and many in one way or another have explicitly stated it4 ,as light to the eye1 even such is beauty to the mind1 said ,coleridge1 whose meaning was philosophically definite1 but in no way at variance with ,shakespeare's too hackneyed but ever memorable words3 ,spirits are not finely touched1 ,but to fine issues4 ,the fine3 the alight or luminous3 the choice--here are three ways of qualifying the objects which artists seek to present4 ,matthew ,arnold was captivated by the simile of light1 and having repeated ,amiel's passionate cry for more light1 used sweetness and light as a refrain in all his criticism4 ,walter ,pater1 to whom the beauty of the human form1 and therefore of sculpture1 was especially appealing1 loved to use such terms as shapely1 comely1 blythe1 gracious1 engaging1 to express the fine flavour#b of a work of art4 ,the quality may be manifested primarily through the intellect1 as with ,meredith2 through the senses1 as with ,swinburne2 through the perceptions1 as with ,turgeniev1 ,flaubert and ,joseph ,conrad2 or through intellect and perceptions acutely balanced1 as with ,mr4 ,henry ,james 7who gives us curiosity as the keynote72 but in any case it is that which we require an artist to bring with him--fineness1 light1 choiceness1 comeliness1 graciousness--when he visualises or focusses his object4 ,does not that untranslatable of ,homer--the shining upper air--suggest not only the physical atmosphere breathed by the gods of ,olympus and the great-hearted ,odysseus1 but also the poetic atmosphere of the ,odyssey itself8 ,we have1 then1 added a third term to our generalisation about art4 ,we now require1 as it seems1 that it should provide us with an energetic experience2 that it should be disinterested in the sense that it cannot aim at any competing1 alien end2 and thirdly1 that this experience should come from objects made beautiful in the sense of being shown in a certain light1 or made alight--in a manner which demands further inquiry4 ,and here indeed is the difficulty4 ,for we must endeavour to examine the question from the artist's standpoint1 and seek counsel from him4 ,it would be no less futile than presumptuous to lay down exact formul as to what the artist ought and ought not to do4 ,no modern critic is likely to waste his time in framing rules and canons1 which can be so easily handled by the pedant and stand condemned by the first great man who defies them4 ,aristotle did it once and for all for the ,greek drama1 and when the perspective of life widened and new forms of literature grew up to compete with drama1 his rules were destined either to shackle literature or to be thrown ruthlessly overboard in the violent revulsion against ,classicism4 ,shakespeare fortunately was guiltless of any exact knowledge of ,aristotle1 and the fact that ,corneille and ,racine1 who had no ,french ,shakespeare to precede them1 were in bondage to that influential philosopher1 had a lasting effect upon ,french literature which the mighty influence of ,hugo was insufficient to destroy4 ,but at least the example of these ,classicist writers has proved that literature itself is not only profoundly affected1 but made and unmade1 by theories of literature4 ,and ,corneille and ,racine bestowed at any rate this immeasurable benefit on their countrymen3 they taught them the lesson of form and technique--a lesson which they have never forgotten1 which is illustrated as much in fiction as in drama--in ,merime1 ,flaubert1 ,maupassant and ,anatole ,france4 ,shakespeare1 on the contrary1 whose influence on ,english literature has been supreme since the beginning of the ,romantic movement1 provided no obvious model for the student of form4 ,to the casual reader his very imagination seems to be lawlessness and extravagance1 carrying him tempestuously and recklessly into the mle of poetry4 ,but every careful reader knows that ,shakespeare was not so reckless as he seems2 observe how rigidly he conformed to the conditions prescribed by the ,elizabethan theatre and audience2 it is to the credit of his technique that he complied with these exacting conditions without cramping the finer issues of poetry and drama4 ,and in the broader sense of the term ,shakespeare's form was precisely proportionate to his genius1 though it is seen rather in the transcendence of his poetry and the management by which his persons are swept along on their own characters than in those more obvious elements of form--structure of plot1 the subservience of dialogue and incident to the dramatic purpose1 and all the minor probabilities and proprieties4 ,but it is just the obvious elements which are most noticeable to those who study form in a superficial way2 for those who imitate ,shakespeare1 or are influenced by him1 his careless freedom and extravagance often bulk larger than the expression of genius which made trifles of these defects4 ,a result is that throughout the nineteenth century ,shakespeare has been for ,english authors not always an inspiration1 but a national pretext for decrying technique4 ,and yet those who had the insight and the power to restore ,shakespeare in all his fulness to ,english readers were wholly free from this ignorance--conspicuously ,charles ,lamb and ,s4,t4 ,coleridge4 ,coleridge was indeed the first of ,englishmen to think out anything like a complete and satisfactory theory of poetry and the fine arts4 ,the supreme value of his theory comes from the fact that he was one of the few who had actually experienced those creative impulses which as a theorist he endeavoured to account for4 ,he had had the inspiration of poetry2 he had achieved it2 and to that extent he had indisputable evidence before him4 ,if only on the one hand he had extended his method a little further than he did1 and taken into consideration that formal side of art which is dear to classicism1 and on the other hand been more confident--or shall ,i say less shy8--when he considered the origin of the creative imagination1 the ideal conceiver and creator of ,natura ,naturata1 then his scheme would have been complete--probably too complete4 ,on the latter subject1 however1 he threw out hints which were broad enough1 and did not wholly shun the controversial sphere of metaphysics4 ,the critic who would avoid the heights and depths of mysticism would do well to imitate his reserve1 and exceed him in metaphysical diffidence4 ,good ,sense is the ,body of poetic genius1 said ,coleridge1 ,fancy its ,drapery1 ,motion its ,life1 and ,imagination the ,soul that is everywhere1 and in each2 and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole4 ,it is by that synthetic and magical power which he calls imagination that the poet brings the whole soul of man into activity1 and diffuses a tone and spirit of unity4 ,coleridge's theory of the ,fine ,arts presupposes his metaphysic2 and it asserts the primacy of the reason4 ,of all we see1 hear1 feel and touch the substance is and must be in ourselves3 and therefore there is no alternative in reason between the dreary 7and1 thank ,heaven6 almost impossible7 belief that everything around us is but a phantom1 or that the life which is in us is in them likewise4444 ,the artist must imitate that which is within the thing1 that which is active through form and figure1 and discourses to us by symbols4 ,he defines the beautiful as that in which the many1 still seen as many1 becomes one1 and takes as an instance3 ,the frost on the windowpane has by accident crystallised into a striking resemblance of a tree or a sea-weed4 ,with what pleasure we trace the parts1 and their relation to each other and to the whole4 ,the beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object1 whether sight or sound1 with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination1 and it is always intuitive4 ,it is that which calls on the soul 7 quasi 74 ,he conceives it to be the function of the human reason to discover the unifying idea which underlies all the variety of nature2 and thus it is that when manifold objects of sense are reduced by the imagination to order and unity the soul is satisfied1 and its experience is an experience of what is called the beautiful4 ,it is with this discovering of order in the seemingly chaotic1 in other words the discovering of beauty1 that the creative artist is concerned4 ,it is his business to inform matter with idea2 and matter symbolically used becomes the expression of the artist's thought just as for the theologian the world of nature is an expression of the thought of ,god4 ,to make the external internal1 the internal external1 to make nature thought1 and thought nature--this is the mystery of genius in the ,fine ,arts4 ,and he goes on significantly3 ,dare ,i add that the genius must act on the feeling1 that body is but a striving to become mind--that it is mind in its essence8 ,and in all the ,biographia ,literaria there is perhaps no more striking suggestion than3 ,remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants1 and thence the loveliness of the former4 ,it should be observed that ,coleridge's philosophy presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of a man1 presupposes1 that is1 that the spirit of the artist has the same ground with nature1 whose unspoken language he must learn in its main radicals4 ,it is only by reason of this bond that external nature1 the manifestation of ,natura naturans1 lends itself to the artist so that he too may manifest himself4 ,to attain this end the artist will imitate nature but not copy her4 7,what idle rivalry6 he exclaims4 ,is not a copy of nature like a wax-work figure1 which shocks because it lacks the motion and the life which we expected87 ,the artist imitates what he perceives to be essential in nature2 he takes the images which life affords him and so disposes of them as to bring to light the unities which the spirit loves2 it is he who brings order out of disorder1 imposing upon matter a form which the imagination has conceived4 ,for the purposes of the general critic of art1 ,coleridge has given us too much and too little4 ,he gives us too much3 for the acceptance of his theory in its completeness is only possible for those who can also accept his metaphysic 7his artist stands in a special relationship to that ,natura naturans which is a name for ,god74 ,it is indeed clear to me that no complete conception of the operations of art can be formed without a complete metaphysical theory2 but both are difficult to attain4 ,both lead to speculation1 controversy1 and a thousand opportunities of error4 ,and any systematically complete theory of art1 seeking as it must to account for infinity1 must1 like all metaphysical systems1 fall short of the truth by precisely the difference between infinite thought and the thought of one man--by the difference between the ,universe and ,you or ,me4 ,those who are anxious to learn what can be learnt about the creative process1 and to explain it to themselves1 not in terms of abstract thought1 but in terms of the humanly intelligible and appreciable1 may be satisfied with a lower degree of truth1 with something more certain though not fully explained4 ,we may be content if we can hit upon some least common denominator free from the controversies of metaphysics4 ,if that is our object1 ,coleridge has given us too much4 ,but he has also given us too little4 ,so generalised is his treatment that we are led to the conclusion that his perfect artist 7who cannot exist7 ought to express nothing less than the whole of himself in one single comprehensive work of art1 as the divine ,creator is conceived to have produced one harmonious expression of ,himself in the ,universe4 ,what he does not sufficiently discuss is the imperfect artist--the only artist that has yet been given to the world4 ,it is true the great genius in letters1 or any other kind of art1 can never rest content until he has bodied forth in a multitude of works all of that complex which is his conception of life4 ,but he works under the conditions of time and space4 ,his conception of life has been modified before he has had time to vanquish time4 ,in practice1 at any given moment1 he is at work upon a single aspect of life1 upon one part only of his general conception1 so that the most immediate task before him is not that of unifying nature1 but of separating1 of selecting2 and only when he has thus separated and selected can he proceed to make a unity within that restricted sphere of nature--his particular subject4 ,on this practical question1 this problem1 not of perfection but of imperfection1 ,coleridge is characteristically silent4 ,but at least we must follow him in his view that the great artist is engaged in the attempt to body forth1 through the symbols which external nature provides him1 his fundamental conceptions about life4 ,were this not so1 art would not be concerned1 as it claims to be1 with what is most important in the world1 or at least most important to the artist4 ,no man was ever yet a great poet1 he insisted1 without being at the same time a profound philosopher4 ,we may recall the dictum of ,meredith3 ,if we do not speedily embrace philosophy in fiction1 the ,art is doomed to extinction4 ,but there is a great difference between the two views4 ,a work of art which is broad enough to embrace philosophy is not the same thing as a work of art which is embraced by philosophy1 and is a complete product of the philosophical imagination4 ,meredith extolled the intellect1 which works discursively2 ,coleridge extolled the reason1 which apprehends intuitively4 ,for ,coleridge1 the intellect was only the organ by which rational conceptions and intuitions are logically applied1 and adapted to circumstance4 ,from his point of view we might conclude that the genius of ,meredith missed the greatest effects because1 applying his intellect discursively to life1 he so often refused to make it subservient to any central conception or intuition4 ,however that may be1 it is impossible to resist at least this conclusion1 that the artist in whose work we feel a background1 whose work suggests more than it directly is1 being capable of arousing numberless feelings and associations in the mind1 so that it stands veritably as a symbol of the whole of life1 is the artist par excellence4 ,much of this effect may be produced by an unconscious activity which ,coleridge recognised as a part of the activity of genius4 ,nevertheless1 whether the activity is conscious or unconscious1 it cannot do more than express what arises in1 or passes through1 the imagination of the artist2 it is his complex conception of life and the significance of life1 his definite individual outlook1 which accounts for this background to a work of art1 for this suggestiveness which makes it appealing and awakening1 for these associations which it has cunningly brought before us4 ,and whether or not we are going to allow that something less than this can be called art1 that the merely shapely 7shapely as if by accident7 ought to be included in its category1 nevertheless1 it is this which holds the highest place4 ,the answer is given by all the great authors of the world who have left their individual stamp upon their art1 who created images representative of life as they conceived it essentially to be4 ,but ,i am far from holding that those central conceptions which the artist embodies through the forms of his art are metaphysical conceptions4 ,this is where ,i should disagree with ,mr4 ,lascelles ,abercrombie1 who wrote some profoundly interesting chapters on this subject in a book on ,thomas ,hardy4 ,mr4 ,abercrombie laid it down that every great artist must have a metaphysic1 and that in bringing his subject-matter under the form conceived by his imagination his metaphysic is throughout the work consistently represented 7of course implicitly1 not explicitly72 and he suggested that we may apply a definite standard of criticism by asking3 ,how far does a work of art correspond with the artist's philosophical view of life8--this being for him another way of saying3 ,how far has the artist succeeded in imposing the desired form upon his material8 ,with the latter mode of stating the question ,i should have no quarrel4 ,but the former implies that the artist has devoted himself to metaphysical studies4 ,mr4 ,abercrombie may have meant only that every work of art presupposes a metaphysic2 but so does everything in the world4 ,the remark would scarcely have been worth making4 ,so ,i suppose him to have meant that every great artist must have subdued his mind to a definite philosophical interpretation of the ,universe1 and that in his works he shows nature and human life as parts of the cosmic scheme definitely conceived by him4 ,as it happened1 the particular novelist whom he was considering1 ,mr4 ,thomas ,hardy1 exactly answers to this description4 ,so does ,sophocles1 so does ,milton--authors specially esteemed by ,mr4 ,abercrombie4 ,homer1 too1 might perhaps be accounted for in this way2 for he had at any rate a perfectly definite conception of the relation of men to the gods of ,olympus and to the ghosts who trod the mead of ,asphodel2 and to the perfect spontaneity1 the unhesitating certainty with which ,homer bodies forth the conviction of pantheism is due much of the charm and infinite delight of the ,epics4 ,perhaps with ingenuity one might discover a metaphysic for ,shakespeare--and even if we could not discover it1 none the less it may have been there4 ,but how about ,herrick1 ,robert ,burns1 or even ,mr4 ,henry ,james8 ,are we to equip them with a metaphysic1 or exclude them from the portals of art8 ,shall we not gain more by requiring from an artist something1 definite indeed1 but less exacting and elusive than a definite scheme of the ,universe2 something which would admit1 for example1 ,calverley2 which would take some heed of the simplest of songs1 and account for ,lewis ,carroll in the same way that we can account for ,sophocles or ,milton8 ,there is surely something more essential to a man even than his codification of himself in the final terms of philosophy4 ,it is that kernel of personality which inclines him in this direction or that4 ,it is this kernel of personality which turns him in the first place to philosophy1 if he be a philosopher2 or which makes him detest abstract speculation1 if he is another kind of man4 ,it is prior to philosophy4 ,it is a condition of its being4 ,it determines1 surely1 even the character of a man's metaphysic1 setting him1 not to range like an aimless ghost of thought across the ,universe1 but to express himself accurately2 to express himself1 with the help of his intellect1 consistently4 ,now the artist1 or imaginative person1 is not seeking to express himself1 like the philosopher1 in terms of logical notions2 and he is under no obligation to express himself1 to himself1 logically1 before he proceeds to express himself imaginatively4 ,all that is essential is that the kernel of his personality1 that which determines philosophies as it determines every other achievement1 should be directly1 immediately1 expressed in the figurative language of his art4 ,this is the central1 the all-important thing1 that final1 essential1 and therefore indefinable entity which has thrust itself upon us when we say of a man that he has an interesting personality4 ,the more powerful and energetic a man is1 the more distinctive become his ways of looking at things1 his ways of thinking1 observing1 appreciating2 we discover a kind of centre of gravity in him1 or a kernel which has been developed by active experience and reflection4 ,this kernel of his character is to the rest of him1 the accidental or inessential1 what in the language of modern philosophy the real will of an individual is to the variety of his particular desires4 ,the less he concentrates1 the less is his real personality expressed2 the weaker the will1 the more evident the inessential and slovenly parts of his nature2 the weaker the intelligence1 the less adequate is his attempt to express himself4 ,the artist has not necessarily that strong personality which attempts to assert itself by influencing the action of others4 ,his is the personality which wishes to express imaginatively4 ,and by imagination ,i mean the making of images--,i mean that stretching out of the essential personality towards nature1 so that it may touch nature at as many points as possible1 fashioning it into images1 binding itself to nature1 and nature to itself1 ever seeking to expand in this contact or sympathy1 so that as far as possible the whole essential personality may be expressed through as much as possible of nature4 ,the artistic impulse1 the poetic or creative impulse1 is that which impels him to the expression of what is most really and centrally himself4 ,the world of nature as perceived by him when he is in full possession of himself assumes a form schemed by his imagination2 and it is this which he endeavours to body forth when he selects now these and now those objects to represent his conception of life4 ,we may1 then1 take it that the first essential to an artist is the imaginative impulse which makes him desire to express himself in terms of life4 ,and the second is that energetic quality by which he endeavours to express what is central to his personality1 that part of him which is his real self4 ,this is what is meant by sincerity in art4 ,and a third surely is a sort of self-detachment1 or sympathy1 or knowledge1 by means of which he is able to estimate the material in which he works4 ,the two last mentioned qualities1 taken together1 imply a sense of form1 in accordance with which the idea is embodied in the finished work of art1 and technique--the professional knowledge by the help of which this embodiment is accomplished4 ,the objection may be raised that the man who has an essentially distorted or meagre personality and succeeds exactly in expressing himself is1 according to my estimate1 entitled to the same artistic credit as a man of the loftiest ideas4 ,to that ,i reply that though the clue to his work is to be found1 in the last resort1 in his personality1 it is not by his personality that he is to be judged2 he is to be judged by his works2 and in producing these works he expresses himself1 not in terms of himself1 but in terms of external objects1 in terms of life known to all of us2 and that if he perfectly expresses distorted or meagre views of life1 the representation of life which he gives to us will itself be palpably distorted and meagre4 ,we are all capable of detecting the falsity if the facts of life are distorted before our eyes1 or represented in so dull or meagre a way that they afford us no vivid experience whatsoever4 ,an artist stands self-condemned if his interpretation fails to correspond with that outward life to which our senses are a sufficient guide4 ,indeed we have already demanded1 as a self-evident axiom1 that the artist should afford us a vivid experience1 and that which directly contradicts the truth of common sense can produce no experience except that of confusion or disgust4 ,it belongs to the first rudiments of art--the mere grammar--that an artist's convictions1 as bodied forth in sense-given symbols1 should not palpably and shockingly contradict the conditions of the sensible world2 his is the far more difficult and delicate task of expressing himself1 not by violation1 but by selection1 emphasis1 reconstruction4 ,the penalty he must pay if he refuses these terms is that of being unintelligible4 ,but granted that the artist has obeyed this law1 which is obvious to the majority of the sane1 we further demand from him that his work should be sincere1 that is to say1 that it should be consistent with his own clearest conceptions1 his most urgent convictions1 his most penetrating intuitions--in a word1 consistent with that central thing which ,i have called the kernel of his personality4 ,an artist is in this sense insincere whenever1 for example1 he inserts anything in his work which exists solely for the sake of convention--some of ,shakespeare's clown scenes were often put in solely because an ,elizabethan audience demanded them1 and they were to that extent a truckling to convention1 an insincerity4 ,they do not express the real ,shakespeare4 ,any artist not capable of entirely direct and spontaneous expression 7and probably no great art was ever completely spontaneous7 must make up his mind about himself1 about what is temperamentally real in him1 about that which is his primary raison d'tre2 and in accordance with1 and out of this kernel of himself he must interpret all that he touches4 ,by this means alone can he introduce order1 form1 unity into the indeterminate chaos of life4 ,by this means alone can life assume coherent shape under his hands1 and it is coherence and shape which alone can give us the impression of beauty1 of that coherent shapeliness of matter drawn into the semblance of a living organism4 ,it may be a very simple unity1 this microcosm of art1 like a cell compounded from protoplasm1 yet it will give us its corresponding pleasure1 so long as it is made with the sincerity of the imagination4 ,if it is merely the informing of life with the spirit of light laughter--as in ,calverley--it affords its proper pleasure--it is the spectacle of life drawn up into that kind of imagination to which laughter belongs4 ,lewis ,carroll's ,alice is in the same sense a work of art4 ,is there not throughout those two most charming of children's books an entirely consistent spirit of bonhomie and exquisite rationality--rationality of an order high enough to produce those delightful expositions of the irrational and the absurd8 ,that the author of ,alice in ,wonderland was a mathematician is exactly what we might have expected--though he was1 what mathematicians rarely are1 the artist-mathematician1 who understood the world intuitively as well as logically1 and thus manifested his spirit of laughter and logic through an inverted world of contradiction4 ,and so again1 if we take a modern author of a very different type1 such a one as ,henry ,james1 whose concern it is to state life1 with a view to throwing into relief the finer shades1 we shall observe that most of his work is characterised by a kind of intensive culture1 as opposed to that extensive method which through lack of form was abused in ,dickens1 and through obedience to form was satisfactorily applied by the poet ,swinburne at his best4 ,we may safely say that when ,swinburne was at his best1 when he was himself1 his world was a world of rhythmical energy1 of impetuous freedom and sensuous activity1 which1 translated into poetry1 was expressed through the symbols of love and sea-foam and battle2 to be true to the genius which was central to himself1 he required no pregnancy or subtle suggestiveness of phrase2 he needed no more than rhyme1 rhythm and onomatopic words1 and with these he gave all he had to give--the sense of energy remembered1 the sensuous delight of physical activity1 a world of divinely glorified sensation4 ,mature readers do not seek him often1 for there are only a few moods which he can satisfy4 ,a writer such as ,mr4 ,henry ,james stands at the exactly opposite pole4 ,it was the proper business of such a man as ,swinburne merely to affirm sensation1 and he could do it perfectly4 ,it is the proper business of ,mr4 ,james1 not to assert sensation or any experience--he could not do it with sincerity--but to question sensation1 to question emotion and sentiment2 it is his proper business to examine experience with the amused1 searching gaze of one who expects the unexpected4 ,it is his business to make experience interesting1 not1 like ,swinburne1 by multiplication1 but rather by division--by the method of the microscope which reveals in a fly's wing some unsuspected fineness of pattern and variegated brilliance of colour4 ,he himself is fond of the word curiosity2 it defines something that is central to his personality2 this1 brought into activity by the representational impulse 7which in his opinion is the one justification for the artist71 takes form in the intricate and delicately woven patterns of human temperament which are the objects of his curiosity4 ,and now we begin to see why every critic1 when considering an author's works1 almost invariably1 and instinctively1 examines not only his finished works1 but also whatever may be known about him as a man4 ,i admit1 as all would admit1 that his works must stand or fall solely on their own account2 but the critic finds that in seeking to discover the central interest and significance of an author's art his task is facilitated if once he can find the clue to his temperament4 ,this backstairs knowledge does the trick for him4 ,the bond between the man and his art is so necessary and immediate that no objectiveness of method can conceal it4 ,it was by realising this fact1 and applying his exceptionally fine critical intuition to this task1 that ,professor ,raleigh1 considering the essentials1 was able to draw a very much more convincing picture of the personality of ,shakespeare than that which was drawn1 brilliantly indeed1 by ,mr4 ,frank ,harris2 but ,mr4 ,harris1 ,i think1 devoted his attention to qualities in ,shakespeare which--whether in any sense real or not--were in any case secondary and inessential elements in the dramatist's character4 ,and this is why his criticism1 in spite of its brilliance1 was comparatively unimportant4 ,i must not be supposed to mean that the artist begins with an abstract conception1 and that he then proceeds to search for objects suitable to its concrete representation4 ,there are1 ,i know1 brilliant novelists and painters who have proceeded in that manner2 but the result1 to my mind1 seldom reveals that complete unity of object and idea which men require2 for this method is so dependent upon the intellectual fitting of facts to idea that either the facts are forced and made unreal1 or the idea is sacrificed4 ,i am told that in the case of ,mr4 ,joseph ,conrad the process is reversed2 he perceives1 as by vision1 some intense single situation--that picture1 for instance1 in ,lord ,jim1 where the ,captain looking over the side of his ship is tempted to desert his crew4 ,such a situation1 a focal point in a story1 is for the artist object and idea in one1 simultaneously presented by the imagination2 the union of matter and spirit is already there at the moment of creation2 and in that way1 ,i imagine1 most of the finest pictures1 poems1 dramas and stories have been first conceived4 ,when once that focal point has been presented in all its vividness and significance by the imagination1 it remains for the artist to mass his detail in and around it as appropriately as his invention and technique permit4 ,we have now reached conclusions which were approached from two distinct points of view4 ,starting from certain axioms or self-evident propositions1 and looking at art from the outside1 ,i suggested that it must provide us with an energetic experience which we value for its own sake without thought of consequences or alien interests1 an experience which has a fineness or an illuming quality of its own4 ,and examining the same question from the inside--from the side of the mental processes implied in the act of creation--,i have tried to adapt the conclusions of ,coleridge to a view which should not pre-suppose his metaphysic1 and have asked what is implied in this fineness or illuming quality in a work of art1 this which is called beautiful4 ,and when we learnt that all creative art comes from the imagination of the artist projecting itself upon the material of life1 ,i concluded that the two things essential to the creative imagination were knowledge and sincerity--knowledge of life itself1 so that the artist can use an intelligible language and speak in terms of things real to everyone--and sincerity1 meaning conformity with that which is essential or central in the artist himself4 ,art is thus a representation of actual life in terms of the artist4 ,it must be real1 and it must be ideal4 ,it is the act of genius to be able to give us in one and the same creation a representation of nature and an expression of the artist's personality4 ,this is the new thing which genius constantly adds to the sum-total of human experience--it is the old stuff of life quickened and illuminated by the new incarnation4 ,and thus the stuff of life itself is increased1 and succeeding artists start with a wider range of material4 ,we shall not find any actual artist completely satisfying the demand4 ,for the difficulties of form are endless1 and sounds1 colours1 words are obstinate materials when they are to be made the vehicle of ideas2 and even the artist in the full tide of the creative impulse must always find that he has expressed something less than his intention and has strayed into the pathless wastes of the inessential4 ,but it is the business of the critic to give him credit for all that is attempted in the sincere spirit of the imagination1 and at the same time1 in sympathy with the actualities of nature2 for on the union of these two depends the truth which is the beauty of art4 ,but the artist himself is not necessarily concerned with these theories4 ,his main business is intercourse with life1 and also the envisaging of life rather by meditation as ,coleridge says1 than by observation4 ,he has to beware of the facts which overcame ,coleridge himself1 when he sacrificed the divinity of his art to that philosophy which banished the god4 ,well were it for me1 he exclaims1 if ,i had continued to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface1 instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths4 ,the shaping spirit of imagination which impelled him to unrivalled poetry in his youth was starved in him1 not only because of his ill-health1 his poverty1 his drugs and laziness1 but equally because he denied expression to fancy1 and the love of nature and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds4 ,for him perhaps it was a poor compensation that through this denial he was able to leave us a unique interpretation of his sthetic and creative experience4 ,,footnotes3 #b ,the word flavour in this connection was constantly used by the late ,canon ,ainger4 ,,iii ,,passions ,,spin ,,the ,,plot ,if the reader has borne with my audacity in generalising about the main functions of imaginative literature1 he will be willing to pursue a further and plainer question concerning its subject-matter4 ,it is time to discuss a little more fully what ,i mean by that energetic experience which a work of art can give us4 ,for the sake of simplicity ,i will confine myself to a single issue--to that kind of energetic experience invariably afforded by that small body of imaginative literature which the world has agreed to regard as supreme4 ,if we can understand how literature in its greatest examples provides us with an addition to life1 we can1 if we are in the mind to do so1 extend the inquiry to the lighter and less intense experiences of secondary literature4 ,by supreme literature ,i mean the literature which has proved itself to be supreme--supreme by virtue of its conquest over time and over changes in thought and environment4 ,the ,iliad and the ,odyssey are in a language which we should have to learn if only for the sake of these two epics2 they still profoundly interest us1 they present emotions which can still move us2 without ,homer1 the society which they describe would have vanished from human knowledge2 through ,homer1 it is an intimate and cherished part of our experience4 ,this kind of supremacy belongs1 ,i think1 to schylus and ,sophocles1 and might perhaps be attributed to the ,gospel of ,s4 ,mark1 if that book may be considered as imaginative literature4 ,virgil and ,dante--in part at least--are of this order1 as also are ,milton1 in ,samson ,agonistes and the earlier books of ,paradise ,lost1 and ,goethe in the first part of ,faust4 ,and there are few besides ,mr4 ,shaw who would deny such supremacy to the tragedies of ,shakespeare4 ,now these authors have survived1 and are likely to survive1 for a variety of reasons4 ,but what is common to them all1 and what makes us set especial store on them1 is not merely that they have in large measure achieved what they set out to do 7lesser artists have done that71 but that they have set out to do a big thing1 to give us the most intense kind of experience that we can have4 ,in other words1 they have produced the fineness which emerges through the intensity of human passion1 and it is in proportion to their fine realisation of passion that we find them most moving4 ,i am not1 of course1 using the word passion in its modern vulgarised sense4 ,for just as the word romance is often degraded to signify no more than a petty love affair1 so the word passion has been appropriated to the amorous1 sexual pre-occupation which is the only intense feeling of many jaded moderns4 ,humanity1 however devitalised1 however incapable of varied passions1 does not lose the love passion so long as it has the animal instinct of the fly and the rudimentary human instinct to idealise4 ,but a race must be strangely incurious if the only romance it can conceive is the romance of a youth and a maid1 and its only passion the passion of sexual desire4 ,yet such is the state of mind--to judge by the common usage of words--of the major portion of modern society4 ,needless to say1 ,i am not wishing to disparage the literature of love1 whether it be poetry1 fiction1 or of any other kind4 ,english people least of all can afford to belittle it1 for if we eliminated it half of our best lyrical poetry would go4 ,for we count it a distinction in ,english poetry that upon this theme the changes have been rung so finely and to such exquisite effect4 ,but much of the fineness of love poetry is to be distinguished from the fineness of the emotion of love4 ,lovelace declares to his ,lucasta3 ,true1 a new mistress now ,i chase1 ,the first foe in the field2 ,and with a stronger faith embrace ,a sword1 a horse1 a shield4 ,that is in the true spirit of ,english love poetry1 which does not so idealise the amorous passion as to make it1 in the modern emasculate manner1 a substitute for valour1 faith1 honour2 it is not opposed to the manly virtues2 it may be the song which a warrior sings to the clank of a sword1 a horse1 a shield4 ,but let us for a moment examine this matter of passion with which great creative literature is so evidently concerned4 ,no acute physical pain or thrilling sensuous delight is ever dignified with the name of passion1 in the significant sense of the word2 the essence of passion is mental1 or spiritual2 emotion made intense by idealism turned in a definite direction1 that is to say1 by the idealising of an object which a man has set before himself4 ,the meaning the word has acquired is almost the opposite of passivity2 it implies a state of the soul in unrest1 a state requiring action4 ,passion is a suffering where the mind assails the body and torments it with an ideal imperative2 and it is the double tragedy of passion that the will may not be strong enough1 as in the case of ,hamlet1 to translate that imperative into action2 and second1 as we have it in ,faust1 that the object1 when attained1 proves to be not the thing that was desired4 ,in a great passion the mind is set upon an object which it idealises beyond the possibility of complete satisfaction1 and there is suffering because the will is thwarted and cheated of its ideal4 ,macbeth's passionate ambition to be a king1 encouraged in him by the witches' chant1 is an ambition for something that no being a king can satisfy2 and the tragedy of his passion lies in the painful effort by which he wins his object and the painful disillusion when it turns to dust4 ,the passions with which literature deals run side by side with actions that are impelled by ideals4 ,the richest mind is that which can idealise every kind of activity1 which can see what we call poetry in every commonplace1 which can read destiny in apparently petty desires1 which widens the vision of life by seeing in every action man in relation to the ,universe4 ,in art and in life passions are limited by the bounds of our perceptive imagination2 by the extent to which we are capable of seeing and feeling things intensely4 ,if we only see or feel ambition as a petty and sordid thing1 in a petty and sordid person1 we cannot make a tragic passion of ambition2 if jealousy is a little vice with no more than small results it cannot be the theme of imaginative literature2 if the religious ideal cannot be conceived as possessing the whole soul1 we cannot appreciate the religious passion of a ,john ,inglesant2 if revenge is no more than spite there can be no ,hamlet1 nor a ,lear if arrogance is unmixed with love and honour4 ,if1 to-day1 the passion of love is treated more often than any other emotion1 that is probably because the one capacity for intense experience1 which never seems to desert the human race1 is the capacity to identify the sex impulse with an ideal4 ,the great artist is not confined to this one channel of idealism4 ,he sees branching out in every direction all the human activities intensified or refined by a spirituality which the lesser person sees only under the stress of love4 ,but this fact is to be noticed1 that whether it is love of a woman1 whether it is ambition1 whether it is love of humanity1 whether it is religious zeal1 revenge1 or anything else whatsoever on a great scale1 passion implies idealism1 an object set before the mind in its spiritual or imaginative capacity1 and that the intensity of the passion is enhanced by the difficulty of the quest4 ,great passion1 then1 is a kind of critical union1 or rather half-union1 of body and soul4 ,it is the perpetual effort of the body to become soul1 the real to become ideal2 the painful and ever frustrated effort of the individual to become universal2 or conversely1 the painful condition of the human soul which sees its ideal shattered and its glory reduced to dust and ashes4 ,its character is a problem for religion no less than for sthetics4 ,it is ,browning who declares3 ,but priests ,should study passion2 how else cure mankind1 ,who come for help in passionate extremes8 ,the dramatist and the novelist need no more than the power to create such a passion2 for the greater includes the less2 it is not achieved in art1 unless plot1 narrative1 style1 and all the subsidiary devices have served to expose it in its reality and its intensity4 ,this is presumably what ,dumas pre meant in the lines which ,henley quotes from him3 ,all he wanted was 'four trestles1 four boards1 two actors1 and a passion4' ,the passionate hero either strains towards an idealised object1 or he still proclaims his yearning after the ideal by the lamentations with which he curses his ill-fate4 ,throughout ,greek tragedy there is an undercurrent of protest against inexorable ,fate which is set against the realisation of the ideal4 ,the passion of ,prometheus sums up the perpetual agony of the human race in its perpetual striving to rise beyond its limitations4 ,the tragic irony of the ,greeks is but the expression of the tragedy of passion in its pitiful reaction from hope1 the intensity of feeling with which men see desire defeated and ideal unattainable4 ,so1 too1 in the most intense moments the characters of ,shakespeare become ironical3 ,misery makes ,sport to mock itself4 ,and we can readily understand1 what some persons have thought strange1 that ,ophelia's language should become coarse1 like ,lear's1 in the full tide of bitterness4 ,it is the reaction after the perception of a spiritual beauty4 ,the beauty seems broken2 the earth and its foulness remain1 and the anguished spirit sees the foulness exaggerated by contrast with its ideal4 ,lear1 who had seen his daughters as paragons1 sees them now as centaurs2 he1 who had adored their filial devotion1 compares them now to the most obscene things which can besmirch the sight2 nothing is too shameful to express the fall from that ideal4 ,we see1 then1 why it is that the highest forms of literature are necessarily concerned with pain4 ,it is not merely that art requires intensity of feeling1 and that the emotion of pain is the most intense we know4 ,it is because the highest literature must necessarily be concerned with human beings in their most profound aspirations1 in their most deeply experienced strivings each after his own ideal1 according to his own conception of what will satisfy him2 and it is because in the nature of things such an ideal is more than experience can satisfy that the anguish of striving and the anguish of failure are the subjects of art4 ,a play such as ,marlowe's ,tamburlaine can never be regarded as great drama4 ,amid scenes of magnificence and splendid savage rhetoric ,tamburlaine passes on from triumph to triumph1 the incarnation of the conquering will4 ,there are numberless detached passages of what we may call lyrical poetry--for a lyrical poem expresses no more than a moment's mood1 a single phase of the sequence which is passion4 ,but there is no passionate sequence in ,tamburlaine2 it is a monotonous record of much-vaunted triumphs4 ,we do not feel the painful struggle2 there is no prospect of defeat2 there is no storm and stress of an ideal at stake1 a human being battered by circumstance4 ,we may1 if we are brutal enough1 bow down before ,tamburlaine's ,juggernaut car2 but he does not touch our emotions2 he is not a tragic hero4 ,tragedy has no interest in supermen2 unless1 indeed1 like ,chapman's ,bussy d',ambois1 the hero has the courage of the superman with the limitations of the rest of humanity4 ,but if the superman is not a possible subject for great art1 neither is the crawling earthworm4 ,many modern authors and critics seem to consider that because tragic passion is always painful1 therefore pain is the essential thing in tragedy4 ,it is this grossly false assumption that is responsible for many disasters in contemporary literature2 it is the deep-lying error in much of our so-called intellectual drama and intellectual fiction4 ,i have heard authors and critics complain that the public will not read certain books or go to certain plays because they are painful or grim4 ,if it had been because these books or plays were passionate that the public had refused to attend1 ,i should have understood the complaint4 ,pain without passion may be scientifically interesting1 but it has no artistic content1 no high emotional significance4 ,indeed1 it is not true to suppose that the public dislikes the spectacle of the painful or the ugly4 ,all know something of the fascination which disturbed ,leontius1 the son of ,aglaion1 who1 coming up from the ,pirus1 observed dead bodies on the ground2 and desiring to look at them and loathing the thought opened his eyes wide1 exclaiming1 ,there1 you wretches1 take your fill of the horrid sight6 ,if anyone doubts this let him recall that a painful and sordid episode in the law-courts fascinates the public just as it is fascinated by the crude villainies of ,east-end melodrama2 and that the most highly moralised section of the public can be stirred to attend to the persecution of ,congo natives or ,macedonian ,christians only by the most appalling stories of massacre1 outrage1 and various forms of extreme suffering4 ,surely it is not because they are concerned with painful subjects that many of the intellectual dramatists have failed--failed1 ,i mean1 not only with the very ignorant public1 but also with more discriminating audiences4 ,in some cases1 which it is not my business here to specify1 they have failed because the authors have set their hearts on a problem outside the subject of their art1 and the art has suffered in consequence2 for only disinterested art has the power to move us4 ,in some cases they have failed because the authors have held theories which ,i believe to be fatal to literature4 ,the narrow view of what is called ,realism has been an adjunct to intellectual faddism and propagandism1 and has served to sterilise literature4 ,the great ,realists have never been mere ,realists2 they have never thought that to produce art it is sufficient merely to reproduce fact4 ,the word ,truth has been introduced in the most shameless fashion4 ,it is true that there are men without arms and legs and noses1 but to delineate such a creature with exquisite accuracy is not to produce a faithful rendering of life4 ,it is true that there are drab1 sordid1 expressionless lives1 without happiness1 without hope1 without ideals4 ,to describe these lives in all their miserable detail may be of infinite value for social and reforming purposes4 ,it may be the duty of every one of us to study these sores in the body politic for the existence of which we are collectively responsible4 ,it may be craven cowardice not to open our eyes wide to these painful and hideous facts1 which cry out to be removed and prevented4 ,and if any person whose enthusiasm in life it is to abolish them hits upon an artistic device for calling attention to them1 he is justified by his object4 ,but let us nevertheless be frank about the matter4 ,his object is the removal of abuses4 ,to stir emotions in a fine way is not his primary end and aim2 it is for him only a means to something else4 ,we are not condemning him when we say that his object is not the object of the creative artist1 who is concerned with life not in its partial aspects1 but as a whole4 ,but he on his part has no right to complain if he fails4 ,the truth with which he is concerned is a scientific case1 not an artistic truth4 ,he has failed to stir our emotions because the attempt to stir emotions was only a dodge on his part2 he was playing a trick on us1 for a laudable end1 and if we are not taken in the fault is not ours4 ,drama1 fiction1 poetry1 and the other fine arts cannot tolerate even the best-intentioned insincerity4 ,there is here no arbitrary dogma or canon of art1 but merely an assertion of the simple fact that you cannot achieve two wholly different ends at one and the same time1 that success is dependent upon singleness of aim and enthusiasm4 ,it is true that there is no subject whatsoever that may not lend itself to treatment4 ,but it must be treated for its own sake1 disinterestedly4 ,literature will not move us greatly unless it is concerned with great emotions4 ,it will not move us finely except in the presence of an ideal4 ,for in the great passions of literature1 as in the great passions of life1 there is always an ideal at stake1 an ideal that is more than the attainable1 a grasping at a fulness of satisfaction which is more than experience can afford4 ,i am making no appeal for what is misunderstood by the term ,art for ,art's sake1 or for that typically ,french view the expression of which ,i may take from the younger ,dumas' ,affaire ,clemenceau3 ,savez-vous ce que c'est que l'art8 ,c'est le ,beau dans le vrai1 et1 d'aprs ce principe1 l'art s'est cr des rgles absolus1 que vous chercheriez en vain dans la nature seule4 ,si la nature seule pouvait le satisfaire1 vous n'auriez qu' mouler un beau modle de la tte aux pieds1 pour faire un chef d'uvre4 ,ou1 si vous excutiez cette ide1 vous ne produiriez qu'un grotesque4 ,le talent consiste complter la nature1 recueillir et l ses indications merveilleuses1 mais partielles1 les rsumer dans un ensemble homogne et a donner cet ensemble une pense ou un sentiment1 puisque nous pouvons lui donner une me4 ,i am in sympathy with that view so far as it implies that the artist cannot be content with a slavish reproduction of isolated facts taken from nature2 and that he sets his gaze upon le ,beau dans le vrai1 which ,i should like to render1 not the beautiful in the true1 but the ,ideal in the true4 ,but ,i am not in sympathy with it so far as it implies a formal beauty which the artist discerns in accordance with a principle mysteriously and exclusively artistic1 existing in a region remote from life4 ,art is not a sacred mystery into which only the initiated can penetrate4 ,it is not concerned with beauties drawn from a peculiar and exclusive artistic ,absolute4 ,literature deals with life1 but in life in an intense manifestation1 with that passionate life which attains its richness1 its breadth1 its tremendous lustiness through the desire for something more than normal life can give4 ,nobody can object that these ideals are not real1 that they are not true to life1 and indeed the most vital part of life4 ,the passions they call forth in men are the most real1 the most vivid1 the most illuminating2 they widen and refine experience2 they bring us into a larger universe1 they add to the stature of personality1 they are the means of growth4 ,literature is an expansion of the mind out of the narrower truth into the larger4 ,it despises no experience1 but drags to light its hidden resources1 its unexpected wealth4 ,it is profoundly interested in experience on its intense1 that is to say1 its passionate side4 ,the original mind1 not content to find poetic value in a single emotion such as that of love1 finds it on all sides1 discovering interests here1 there1 and everywhere4 ,if it concentrates on one of these for the purposes of a poem1 a play1 a novel1 it neglects1 of course1 no adventitious aid which gives reality to the persons1 sufficiency to their motives1 contrast1 relief1 atmosphere--all that is expressed by the ordinary jargon of criticism4 ,to sum up3 great creative literature does not deal with things painful or otherwise merely because they are facts of life4 ,its business is the intensification of life1 to bring home to us its myriad finenesses2 it achieves this end by presenting persons passing through the intense experiences which we call passions2 and these are conditions of the spirit in which an idealised object encourages1 thwarts1 or tantalises the seeker1 and dejects him utterly if the reality turns out to be less than the ideal4 ,the inquiry opens a question for the metaphysician--,what is the source of this ideal element which enters into every object passionately sought1 and so transcends realisation that the object cannot be attained without a sense of loss8 ,,iv ,,the ,,popular ,,taste ,if anything is worse than bad literature it is the tedious ,pharisaism of the man of culture4 ,how flattering to the self-esteem to cast a supercilious eye upon the melodramatic1 sentimental1 unbeautiful books which constitute the mass of modern literature6 ,the mass of modern literature is provided for the mass of men and women1 but history has proved that a small and educated public may embrace stupidities not less desiccating than the stupidity of the million4 ,a cultured public in the eighteenth century which could tolerate ,colley ,cibber gains nothing by comparison with an uncultured public which delights in ,hall ,caine4 ,an author who attempted a poetic drama in the eighteenth century had to conform to the rules1 but his compliance with convention is worth no more to literature than the libertinism of the modern reporter4 ,the correct taste of that period is sufficiently flagellated in ,swift's ,recipe to make an ,epic ,poem1 wherein he makes it manifest that epic poems may be made without genius1 nay without learning or much reading4444 ,it is easily brought about by him that has a genius1 but the skill lies in doing it without one4 ,to this day there exists an oligarchy of academic persons whose taste is almost exactly on a par with the taste most in evidence two hundred years ago4 ,they are the people who estimate literature by its correctness rather than by its fineness or power1 who are impregnable in their little fortress of pedantry1 and are for ever secure against the attacks of original genius4 ,if1 then1 we find that there is much in modern popular literature that we dislike1 this is a very different thing from saying that we prefer the technical banalities dear to the pedant1 or would set up the standard of a barren culture4 ,the popular taste is something not to be scoffed at1 but to be accounted for4 ,to complain of it is wasted effort2 to explain it would be something to the purpose4 ,and this we can only do by keeping in mind that vital ideal which in spite of every set-back the world has contrived to preserve1 and endeavouring to discover what it is--short of that ideal1 or remote from it--that the modern public wants3 what taste it is that hundreds of modern authors are trying to satisfy4 ,it is evidently a very various taste1 for it is the taste of the whole people4 ,everyone in the modern civilised state has been taught to read1 and almost everyone has had the written word thrust upon him2 so that reading has become a habit4 ,at every turn the eye falls upon the printed advertisement1 the printed leaflet1 the hand-written letter2 and the habit which is developed by the necessities of life has intertwined itself also in the amenities4 ,newspapers1 and weekly and monthly periodicals1 adapt themselves to the tastes of every class in the community4 ,the time is still far distant when books will be universally and systematically read2 but the number of volumes annually distributed has increased at least tenfold in the last generation2 and a large proportion of this literature must find its way to strata of society which fifty years ago read nothing at all4 ,it would be too much to expect that these millions of recruits to the reading public would be drawn to that literature which can be classed with the fine arts4 ,one would no more expect them to admire it than one would expect a child of five to admire ,hamlet4 ,the astonishing thing is1 not that so few people appreciate the best literature1 as that so many--under direction--are open to its influence1 as we may see from the immense sales of those popular volumes which ,mr4 ,ernest ,rhys and others guarantee to be genuine classics4 ,unfortunately1 in the case of recently written books1 ,mr4 ,rhys is not always at hand4 ,in such cases there is little direction for docile disciples of culture excepting such as is given in newspaper reviews1 and reviews are as likely to misdirect and confuse as to encourage and guide4 ,but although this considerable and growing public of ambitious readers already exists1 and may some day come to the support of original literature1 it is at present easily swamped by that heterogeneous public for which the largest number of books are provided4 ,that majority1 in the nature of things1 is unable to give the concentrated attention1 still less the selective appreciation1 which literature of the higher order requires4 ,there is nothing to encourage them to concentrate4 ,the newspaper1 the popular magazine1 the theatre1 the moving-picture show1 and the whole shifting1 rapid panorama of modern life discourage concentration4 ,there are readers who can only give the odds and ends of their time to reading4 ,most of them are devoting the best efforts of their brain and attention to their business1 household duties1 their social and domestic affairs1 and they turn to books only when their minds are fatigued and in need of repose4 ,that is to say1 they read not for a renewal of activity1 but for distraction4 ,with them1 books satisfy the desire1 not for an enhancement of life1 but for the forgetting of it4 ,their literature is at the most a stimulant which excites without giving active play to their faculties2 it presents nothing which connects with life or ideas1 nothing even to call forth the effort demanded by their practical affairs4 ,there are others1 for the most part women not of the working class1 who support with apparent earnestness the purveyors of popular fiction and biography1 and even patronise poetry and genteel social philosophy4 ,amongst them are to be found those to whom the sterner actualities of life are unfamiliar and repugnant1 for whom the practice of trifling with books is rather an ornament than an occupation1 a mode of killing time rather than using it4 ,they1 too1 read to be distracted1 choosing an emasculate literature which panders to their essential dilettantism4 ,now those who regard literature as an important thing1 playing a significant part in the life of a nation1 must1 as ,i have already indicated1 seek in it something more positive than a distraction from life2 for them it must be an addition to life4 ,it must provide experience compounded of the same stuff as other experience2 but not having the vividness which the direct impact of life carries with it1 it must gain its vividness by an intensity1 a fineness1 an interest of its own--by a distinctive quality distilled into it from the personality of the writer4 ,it is imagination which achieves this1 the faculty so apprehensive of life that it can fashion life into images which are projections of the artist1 his own stamp upon the stuff of life4 ,to such an author literature cannot be a mere amusement or profession4 ,it deals with what he conceives to be the most essential things in the world2 it is his rendering of the world1 his perspective2 and it is just in so far as he has made this1 his ideal and real world1 appreciable also to us1 that he has succeeded in his art4 ,such imaginative reconstruction of the facts of life1 such impregnation of life with fineness1 calls for alertness of faculty in the reader1 demands from him something of that eagerness to perceive which characterises the artist himself4 ,but how can the tired worker seeking distraction1 or the idle dilettante seeking only a drug or a stimulant1 muster that alertness of faculty and that eagerness to perceive which are needed for the appreciation of art8 ,it is not to be expected4 ,a coarser appeal will produce all that such minds are able to assimilate4 ,for good reading1 like good writing1 requires the energy of men not robbed of leisure1 men who can enjoy some respite from the commonplace4 ,and yet it often happens1 as we shall see1 that those who have succeeded in distracting the many have put into their work some fineness which commends it also to the few4 ,it is only in theory that there is a fixed boundary between works of art and the works which ,philistines enjoy4 ,in practice1 merit and demerit exist side by side2 works crude in conception reveal a hundred finenesses1 and works fine in conception reveal crudenesses of execution4 ,and just as there are authors who mingle good and bad in their books1 so too there are readers who enjoy certain kinds of excellence though they can be vulgarly excited by the cruder devices4 ,and again there are persons who appreciate to some extent genuine works of art1 who in moments of fatigue or jaded appetite can be diverted by the mere appeal to sensation4 ,the clever publisher knows well that the public for whose distraction he caters is divided into many classes1 and that these classes must be attracted each in a special way4 ,for the purposes of my argument ,i group these under five different heads1 which are probably not exhaustive and certainly not mutually exclusive1 but correspond1 ,i think1 to the five chief means of exciting and distracting the multitude4 ,the two largest classes constantly overlap1 consisting3 firstly1 of those whose love of sensation is satisfied by violent incident2 and secondly1 of those who are especially susceptible to the sentimental appeal4 ,to a third class belong those who take pleasure in the agitations of sex feeling2 and to a fourth1 those whose sense of humour is tickled by the sallies of the literary clown4 ,the fifth class--a very large one--consists of those who are of a habit of mind to be excited by sensations which can be associated with religion and morality4 ,it is useless to name as a sixth class those who are moved by intellectual ideas1 for so small a class is not the objective of the popular author4 ,i4 ,all novels must to some extent depend upon incident and arrangement of incident1 but there is a kind of novel which only interests through the excitement of events in their nature fictitious1 even when accidentally true4 ,any really good book which may be spoken of as a novel of incident will invariably prove to be very much more4 ,to take the case of ,fielding's ,tom ,jones1 one observes that it is an imitation of life which is neither a slavish copying nor a make-believe1 but a vivid representation of eighteenth-century ,england as ,fielding saw it2 it is a book which presents characters1 and itself has a character4 ,its atmosphere is quite unmistakable4 ,it is not a slice out of the eighteenth century--there can be no real slice out of life excepting in life itself4 ,it is ,fielding's rendering of the eighteenth century1 in particular it is his assertion of the physicality 7if ,i may use the term7 of life1 a direct assertion of the boisterous physical vitality which1 as ,fielding presents it and as ,marlowe presented it1 acquires value for the spirit and is acceptable to the imagination4 ,it is the original pagan assertion of life1 which finds its opposite in ,euripides' conception of the ascetic ,hippolytus2 an assertion which ,propertius repeated in the language of mockery when he speaks of a lena as ,docta vel ,hippolytum ,veneri mollire negantem4 ,even ,euripides himself was so infected with the pagan view that he sees a sort of ,nemesis pursuing the hero whom the slighted ,aphrodite reproaches with lack of reverence--religious reverence--for her power4 ,this primitive pagan view1 crude1 non-moral1 but essentially sincere1 animates the story of ,tom ,jones and gives it a character which is lacking in the popular novel of incident4 ,tom ,jones was and is a popular book4 ,but ,i hope ,i am not wronging the larger mass of mankind when ,i say that those 7of the majority7 who like ,fielding do not like him for his unique excellences2 they would be equally pleased if puppets instead of vital persons had passed along the same course of exciting events2 and that there are others who would not read him even if he began writing to-day1 because his picture of life is too consistent with his imagination1 and this very tenacity would perturb and irritate the trivial4 ,nevertheless he would have many readers among a large minority1 just as ,mr4 ,arnold ,bennett has to-day--readers who can appreciate a story which is direct1 vivid1 and mainly external in treatment4 ,but the largest public is for writers like ,mr4 ,cutcliffe ,hyne or ,mr4 ,william ,le ,queux4 ,these more nearly represent the popular ideal in a novel of incident4 ,for the former ,i have some respect4 ,he shows ingenuity in his concoction of improbable plots4 ,in ,captain ,kettle there is at least some attention to character--of a freakish kind--and something of atmosphere which gives it a mock-romantic interest4 ,it holds the multitude by reason of the thrilling sensations extracted from incidents wholly unlike anything possible in their lives1 but near enough to reported facts to be able to astonish and excite them4 ,such improbable but ingeniously contrived events are enough to distract them1 and if there be more in ,mr4 ,hyne's stories imparted by his personal eagerness and honesty1 it escapes them1 or at least does not annoy them4 ,but this finer quality has been lacking in such of ,mr4 ,le ,queux's books as ,i have chanced to read4 ,i may have been unlucky in my selection1 and there may be admirable qualities in those of his novels which ,i have not read4 ,but in the three or four volumes known to me ,i found that the persons were puppets1 moving in unnatural situations1 meeting sensational adventures which constituted all that there was of an improbable and slenderly connected plot4 ,we all know the sort of book4 ,but what is it that makes this1 and others like it1 popular8 ,there were scenes of spurious passion4 ,there were incidents in which action assumed the proportions of prodigy4 ,there was vague sensation4 ,in one of his novels ,i found an introduction by ,lord ,roberts warning ,englishmen to prepare for the ,german invasion planned by ,mr4 ,le ,queux for #aiaj6 ,history has not yet revealed the horror and devastation of that war2 but this horror and devastation lent to ,mr4 ,le ,queux's book the interest which it required4 ,yet the novel which is read mainly for the thrill of the incident may be written in a far finer spirit4 ,most historical novels depend mainly upon the vigour of the action4 ,the very best historical novelists must be excepted2 in ,scott1 for example1 as in ,fielding1 there is so much which depends on character and atmosphere that there is always much more than thrilling incident to hold the attention4 ,in the books of a modern writer like ,mr4 ,ford ,madox ,hueffer1 at his best1 there is an artistry of composition1 a synthetic quality in the romance1 a unity of pictorial effort which give to them a quality of design and exquisiteness2 they are a distillation of ,mr4 ,hueffer's romantic personality4 ,but if we consider ,mr4 ,stanley ,weyman1 we are taking a novelist in whom everything depends upon the thrill of incident4 ,still1 he has made of his work a fine craft4 ,he uses words conscientiously4 ,he has exceptional skill in tracing his ingenious plots4 ,he has read history carefully1 and for the most part adheres faithfully to facts--though ,i believe he is not so well instructed in ,german as in ,french history4 ,the scrupulousness which refines his work gives quality to his narrative1 and he can be read with pleasure by persons of exacting taste4 ,and1 again1 we might take the case of ,richard ,dehan1 author of ,the ,dop ,doctor4 ,that writer is not innocent of the crudest melodrama4 ,she is diffuse1 extravagant1 formless4 ,but she has imagined and created certain characters4 ,she has at moments touched profoundly that most rudimentary of all emotions--the war-emotion--an emotion which may be experienced intensely by every member of an energetic community1 and therefore affords the basis of a real popular art--just as certain universal sentiments afforded the basis of folk-songs1 which were constantly taken up and moulded into fine artistic forms4 ,the ,dop ,doctor is a book compounded of vulgar sensationalism on the one hand1 and a strange imaginative vigour and actuality on the other4 ,but the sensibility of the crudest and1 it is to be feared1 the 7at present7 largest strata of society can be touched1 as we have seen1 by the sheer extravagance of the novel of incident1 by action distorted out of the proportions of life and made astonishing1 by violent assaults upon the reader calculated to arouse him like pistol-shots1 since a more moderate appeal would escape his attention4 ,just as a donkey with a hard mouth can only be guided by violent jerks upon the reins1 so a dull sensibility can only be awakened by the harshest literary appeal4 ,style in such cases must adapt itself to the subject4 ,redundant words are heaped up where one would suffice for the trained intelligence4 ,a multitude of violent1 flamboyant phrases assist to the excitement of fever4 ,it is possible1 indeed1 that some rudimentary art-feeling lurks behind this pandemonium of crude literature1 more probably in cases where lawlessness is the result not of indolence1 but of some sort of vigour and spontaneity4 ,but it should be remembered that the mimetic impulses in which art among primitive races is supposed to originate1 are not themselves art2 and continually to whet the appetite with such primitive exercises is to perpetuate the rudimentary condition and stifle the finer faculties4 ,,ii4 ,the sentimental absurdities of ,pyramus and ,thisbe are the occasion of some apt criticism which ,shakespeare puts into the mouths of ,hippolyta and ,theseus3 ,,hippolyta4 ,this is the silliest stuff that e'er ,i heard4 ,,theseus4 ,the best in this kind are but shadows2 and the worst are no worse1 if imagination amend them4 ,,hippolyta4 ,it must be your imagination then1 and not theirs4 ,shakespeare is commenting on the sentimentality which is generally pleasing to ,quince1 ,snug1 ,bottom1 and the like4 ,if he is mistaken it is in suggesting that this sickliness is confined to the company of carpenters and bellows-menders1 and is not equally to be found among those of the high estate of ,hermia1 ,helena1 and ,hippolyta herself4 ,but it would never have done to admit so much before an audience of tinkers and tailors1 splendidly patronised by a few young bloods of noble birth4 ,sentiment is distinguished from sentimentality precisely as ,shakespeare suggests4 ,the one is concerned with real emotions1 the other with shadows4 ,the first is informed by the imagination1 the second is devoid of it1 and is divorced alike from intellect and common sense4 ,to touch the chord of sentiment justly and truly is one of the most difficult things in literature4 ,shakespeare himself by no means always succeeded4 ,there is often an affectation in his lighter love-scenes which destroys the impression of sincerity4 ,even in life one may see how at any time the note of sentiment may be turned to absurdity by the least discordant element4 ,the lover whose tender expressions are wholly pleasing to his lady may become an object of ridicule before an uninvited audience4 ,everyone can remember some occasion when a whole company of persons1 wistfully alluding to a recent death1 has suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter1 betraying1 not lack of respect for the dead1 but ridicule at some falsity of expression4 ,sentiment is one of the everyday emotions1 fine and light in its texture1 requiring the tenderest and most delicate treatment1 and often it must pass off in laughter4 ,it is something less than passion4 ,it is not concerned with tragedies or crises1 but the subtlest apprehensions of what comes and goes at every moment of life4 ,it must never be treated as if it were passion1 or the slender threads of which it consists will snap1 and ridicule will justly reveal the unbalanced judgment of the sentimentalist4 ,nor must it ever be far from laughter1 or it will collapse under its own strain1 and we may be betrayed into thinking that the cynic is the best judge of life4 ,it is the imagination exercising itself among things real1 but not of the first order of importance4 ,if you attribute to them that importance1 you are guilty of false sentiment4 ,the facts of life convict you4 ,see how delicately ,charles ,lamb could hold the balance in such an essay as ,dream ,children4 ,great-grandmother ,field is just in her place1 upright1 graceful1 and the best of dancers2 and ,alice's little right foot plays its involuntary movement in the nick of time2 and when ,uncle ,john died1 the children fell a-crying at the narrative and asked about the mourning which they were wearing4 ,it is all just important enough1 just trivial enough1 to carry its fragile burden of sentiment--so much1 and no more4 ,the charm is complete4 ,conceive what ,dickens would have made of the story if he had been writing it6 ,how sickly a fantasy of ,paul ,dombeys and ,little ,nells and garrulous wild waves he would have conjured up for his dream children6 ,his dream children--the good ones1 at any rate--were little old people1 monstrosities1 freaks4 ,reality rejects monstrosities1 and what reality rejects is no subject for literature--strictly speaking1 is no subject at all--save when1 like goblins and fairies1 it assumes the quasi-reality of fantasy and dreams4 ,i remember a story by a popular modern writer1 ,mr4 ,e4 ,temple ,thurston4 ,it appeared in a volume entitled ,thirteen4 ,the author arranged his story with skill4 ,he led up to his dnouement with admirable stage-management4 ,the story was about a little boy who understood that his father wanted a shop and fifty pounds to buy it with4 ,this amiable child sallies forth from his poor quarter of the city and tramps to the distant regions where rich people live4 ,nothing doubting1 he asks for fifty pounds4 ,he receives sixpence4 ,he exchanges it for a pair of braces and an insurance ticket4 ,he drowns himself with exquisite deliberation1 and on the merits of his death and the insurance ticket the fifty pounds are forthcoming4 ,the defects of the story are obvious4 ,the little boy has no proper place in this world1 and his drowning1 so far from being pathetic1 was the best thing that could happen to him4 ,for he was a freak1 a monstrosity4 ,even those who may not accept this view must at least agree that he ought to have known better1 and deserved a whipping rather than the reward of martyrdom and sentimental praise4 ,but even if we assume that the boy is a possible creature1 and that his act in begging for the money was beautiful and moving1 we cannot escape the objection that the fatal ending is pitched in a discordant note of tragedy4 ,the tragic conclusion is appropriate to a tale of passion1 or to a tale which arouses a sense of the most urgent things in life4 ,but to turn a slender sentiment into a thing of tragedy is to pass the limits of sentiment2 it cannot carry the burden4 ,the conclusion is not true enough to be even shocking4 ,it is merely disgusting4 ,how is it that this mimicry of sentiment proves effective in moving the multitude1 when the real thing so often fails to please8 ,the answer1 ,i think1 is1 that the artistic imagination can neither express itself through distorted objects1 nor can it confuse in one blurred series of images the trivial and the urgent2 its business being to see life with such sense of proportion as the concentrated artistic vision of the artist ensures4 ,but careless readers do not see objects until they are exaggerated out of resemblance to life2 the adjustments of the artistic vision are too delicate to reach their perceptions4 ,mr4 ,thurston's little boy is seen to be very good1 and to the sentimentalist his mere goodness is beautiful4 ,when he tramps across ,london his fatigue is sad1 and the sadness of it is beautiful4 ,when the rich gentleman gives him sixpence instead of fifty pounds1 the reader sheds happy1 thoughtless tears1 and his beautiful death at the end is all that he requires as the final assault upon his feelings4 ,the phrase1 of course1 is ,stevenson's1 and it can hardly be avoided4 ,popularity rewards the writer who can assault the feelings of his readers1 and anyone who uses a more delicate method must be content with a smaller circle of readers4 ,it is in this manner1 amiably enough1 that ,miss ,ella ,wheeler ,wilcox can conquer ,america with sentimental poems1 as ,ian ,maclaren once conquered ,england with sentimental stories4 ,they touch us where the intellect and the common sense are in abeyance1 and the moral sense is steeped in false sentiment4 ,thus it was that when a sort of torpor came upon the intellect and the common sense of ,mr4 ,a4,c4 ,benson1 he1 who had been formerly a scholar and a friend of literature1 became merely a sentimentalist4 ,the author of ,the ,sick-a-bed ,lady 7,eleanor ,halliwell ,abbott7 is for the same reason esteemed as highly in ,america as the author of ,letters to ,my ,son is esteemed in ,england4 ,the trowel is the instrument with which these honours--and these fortunes--are won4 ,,iii4 ,it might seem that the popular literature of love ought to have been treated under the same head as that of sentimental literature4 ,but it will become clear not only that there can be a popular erotic literature of a quite different order1 but that ,i might have subdivided this class into two3 one concerned with the popular literature of passion1 the other with that of sensualism4 ,there is1 of course1 a sentiment of love which is sufficiently considered in the last section4 ,but ,i have made a distinction between sentiment and passion1 which for my view is important2 and ,i must add the further and more obvious distinction between the love passion1 which is an intense emotional experience affecting the imagination no less than the senses1 and that sex feeling1 which in essence is merely sensual4 ,leaving out of count1 then1 the sentiment of love1 we have an obvious distinction between the literature which deals with the love passion and the literature which deals with sensual desire4 ,but ,i do not propose any grandmotherly legislation which permits one subject to the artist and relegates the other to the pornographer4 ,for it is clear that an author may deal well or ill with a subject intended to yield genuine passion 7though in the latter case the popular interest will attach to the sensational character of the incidents rather than to the treatment of passion as such1 and a book of this kind may be considered as ,i have already considered the novel of incident74 ,and1 again1 an author may deal well or ill with the sensations of sex2 those sensations can provide material for fine art4 ,it is a matter of treatment4 ,upon feelings of this sort ,maupassant based some of his most felicitous stories4 ,but ,maupassant did not use sexual incidents for the sake of sex feeling2 for him such incidents were various symbols1 flickering images1 of life1 incarnations of the brooding spirit of cynicism and scorn4 ,we have already seen that to ,fielding1 for whom they were of less special significance on their own account1 they were presented as assertions of boisterous physical eagerness1 of delight in energetic life for its own sake4 ,it has already become obvious that the tendency of the most popular literature is to substitute the cruder sensations for the higher emotions and sentiments4 ,we have seen how incident is liked for the mere sensation it can afford2 how sentiment is turned into sentimentality4 ,as a rule1 in discussing inferior literature the higher emotions need be taken little into account4 ,but in the case of love it is different4 ,the average man1 by reason of his pre-occupation and his averageness1 is little affected by a variety of fine emotions2 the hard facts of life smother them4 ,but everyone can observe that the emotion of love is not only an emotion to which most men at a certain age are susceptible1 but that it seems to present itself1 at some time or another1 in a form finer than that of any other feeling entertained by average men4 ,i believe that all observers would agree that innumerable men and women who cannot be touched in a subtle way by any other emotion--unless we except1 especially in primitive men1 the emotion of war2 and then it is rather intense than subtle--can be and are so touched by the emotion of love4 ,here1 then1 we might expect to find the basis for a literature which may be both widely popular and at the same time finely imagined4 ,within certain limits ,i believe the love passion does afford such a basis4 ,if we can imagine an artist confining himself to this single issue1 relying on no finenesses outside it1 then we might have a work of art which men and women1 representing in other respects any degree of imagination and dullness1 might all almost equally enjoy4 ,in practice it is seldom that an artist is content to confine himself so exclusively to this issue2 it is not in the nature of the imaginative temperament to limit itself in that way4 ,but ,i think we have an example approximating to the supposed type in ,emily ,bront's ,wuthering ,heights4 ,the strenuousness of the love emotion is in this book rendered with consummate power1 and hence the hold it has over men of intelligence and over fools4 ,but in almost every other respect the novel is sheer rhetoric1 crudeness1 and unshapeliness4 ,the novel 7or popular biography7 which deals not with the emotion of love but the sex sensation1 requires little discussion4 ,if the object of the writer is to treat such a theme with imaginative criticism1 well and good4 ,if he intends only to reproduce the sensation1 he is a pornographer4 ,,iv4 ,it is extraordinary that there should be so little humorous literature distributed among the ,english-speaking peoples1 for a sense of humour is a boon which has been allotted to a very large minority of the human race1 and some sense of the ridiculous to the majority4 ,it is through his sense of what is ridiculous in life1 and his power of presenting it imaginatively1 that ,dickens seems to have acquired not only a permanent place in ,english literature1 but a popularity quite unique among standard ,english novelists4 ,the jocularity of ,mark ,twain is equally dexterous1 but it is not so completely imagined as the humour of ,dickens2 it springs more often from situation than from character1 and to that extent belongs more to the accidents than to the essentials of life4 ,mr4 ,w4,w4 ,jacobs deserves a higher place than is usually accorded to him in contemporary literature4 ,his short stories are excellently contrived within their limits2 the humour springs from situation and character conjoined4 ,when a clever writer is content to confine himself primarily to the ridiculous in life1 it is possible for him to make his effect both for the million and the more exacting few4 ,as ,wuthering ,heights was popular because it was little more than a brilliant presentation of the love passion1 so ,many ,cargoes and ,light ,freights are popular as well as excellent because they aim at nothing but the broad effect of laughter4 ,mr4 ,jacobs is inferior to ,dickens because he is a humorist and nothing more1 and also because he has an infinitely narrower range4 ,his art is one which presents but a single aspect of life1 and suggests no ambition to exhibit a large grasp upon life as a whole4 ,but he succeeded exactly in what he set out to do4 ,but have any of ,mr4 ,jacobs' books1 or any of ,dickens'1 enjoyed greater popularity than fell to ,mr4 ,jerome's ,three ,men in a ,boat8 ,in this book the humour sprang in no sense out of character2 nor did it even spring out of situations contrived with especial skill4 ,it consisted of a series of ludicrous impressions such as that of a man sitting on a pat of butter4 ,well1 a man sitting on a pat of butter is a funny thing--when it happens naturally in life4 ,but a collection of incidents1 each of which might be funny if it happened among the accidents of life1 are a poor source of entertainment when strung together without the life which makes them real4 ,it should be remembered that what is an accident in life ceases to be an accident when it is invented in a story4 ,a writer must needs supply from the imagination something which may give the artistic effect of accident4 ,even farce misses its true effects if it contains no verisimilitude4 ,to see your friend sitting on a pat of butter is amusing2 to listen to an invented account of besmeared garments is not amusing2 for it misses the amusing point--which was the fact of its happening4 ,but the admirers of ,three ,men in a ,boat see only trousers and butter1 trousers and butter2 and they find nothing offensive in the manner in which this incongruity has been thrust upon their sight4 ,their complacent minds receive this funny visual impression because they do not perceive the glaring artifice which for another banishes the humour4 ,v4 ,morality among the ,anglo-,saxon races is a popular theme4 ,it can cover a multitude of artistic sins4 ,religion is popular in all countries1 and is not always associated with good morals2 but in ,england and the ,united ,states good religion and good morals fall under the same hierarchy4 ,both have their corresponding sensations and emotions4 ,we may see them violently operative at revival meetings1 distracting agents which are sometimes indeed so powerful as to lead to extraordinary reactions4 ,it is difficult to attain the same violence with the written as with the spoken word1 but if any living novelist has succeeded in attaining the effect of pandemonium through the use of religious and moral subjects1 it is ,miss ,marie ,corelli4 ,as proxime accessit ,i might name ,mr4 ,hall ,caine4 ,by the same methods ,mr4 ,guy ,thorne 7alias ,ranger ,gull7 attained1 with the pulpit assistance of the ,bishop of ,london1 a sensational popular success in ,when it was ,dark4 ,there have also been many fine writers who did not aim at spurious effects1 but received praise by reason of their moral tone in circles where they would never have received it on the grounds of literary excellence4 ,if ,george ,eliot had not been a moralist she would not have been so popular in ,england4 ,if ,ruskin had not been primarily a preacher he could never have wielded his vast influence4 ,tennyson was beloved as much for his moralism as for his sweetness2 and to-day so admirable a writer as ,mr4 ,john ,galsworthy is1 even in serious circles1 regarded as a serious novelist mainly because he is a critic of morals4 ,mr4 ,john ,masefield wrote many novels and plays in which he showed singular fineness of feeling and beauty of style4 ,but when he wrote a poem called ,the ,everlasting ,mercy--a story of thrilling incident with an admirable moral--lo6 his popular reputation was made6 ,people could understand a story of sensational incident4 ,they could understand the moral4 ,they flattered themselves that they were enjoying poetry6 99 99 99 99 99 ,if anyone should reproach me with adopting the tone of that odious thing the superior person1 and should declare that ,i underestimate the intelligence and good sense of the majority of readers1 my reply is that the finest literature is not that which is most read1 and ,i am compelled to conclude that the finest ideas are not those which are most often embraced4 ,to assert this is not to disparage the common sense and the practical intelligence of the mass of mankind4 ,i believe that they are capable of vast activity and eagerness1 much of which runs to waste through the fatigues of excessive labour2 much1 through lack of training and mental stimulus1 can find no congenial outlet through the mysterious processes of art4 ,the outlet which the majority of men find for their superfluous energy is not through the channel of fine ideas4 ,such literature as they read is for distraction and not for the vigorous use of their faculties4 ,it cannot be otherwise4 ,that is the condition imposed by the fragmentary education alone vouchsafed to the majority of men and women1 giving them no more than that modicum of learning which is a dangerous thing4 ,and it is a matter of supreme importance because this new reading habit of the million has turned the energies of authors and publishers from the few to the many4 ,it has introduced into the literary profession a demagogic habit1 and has set up a quantitative instead of a qualitative standard4 ,,part ,,two ,,literature ,,and ,,modern ,,life ,i4 ,,to-,,day ,,and ,,yesterday #a4 ,we must read what the world reads at the moment1 said ,dr4 ,johnson1 giving the remark an ironical meaning when he added1 ,a man will have more gratification for his vanity in conversation from having read modern books than from having read the best works of antiquity4 ,nevertheless1 one great difference between the time of ,dr4 ,johnson and the world of to-day is1 that whilst the former lived in perpetual admiration of antiquity1 we live in perpetual admiration of ourselves4 ,though ,johnson agreed that ,pope's poetry was not talked of so much after his death as in his lifetime1 he declared that it had been as much admired since his death as during his life4444 ,virgil is less talked of than ,pope1 and ,homer is less talked of than ,virgil2 but they are not less admired4 ,but in the intellectual circle which is most before the public to-day there is a tendency to despise the traditions of ,english literature and to worship only the idol of originality4 ,in a paper largely devoted to literary matters ,i recently read a statement to the effect that many authors1 indifferent to books1 neither buy nor read them1 whilst others positively dislike them4 ,mr4 ,shaw's quarrel with ,shakespeare has been of long standing1 but at least ,mr4 ,shaw has done his old-fashioned rival the honour of reading him4 ,mr4 ,arnold ,bennett1 on the other hand1 who is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant contemporary novelists1 has declared1 not without pride1 that the only novel of ,dickens that he had ever read was ,little ,dorrit1 and this but recently1 and that he considered him a greatly overrated novelist4 ,the conclusion is not surprising1 and the living author is no doubt confirmed in his opinion that the works of ,mr4 ,bennett are of vastly superior merit4 ,this modern self-confidence is undoubtedly a healthy sign of intellectual activity and eagerness4 ,it goes to show that authors are scrutinising keenly the life that is going on around them2 that they are interested in facts and things1 and seeking to give them a larger reality in terms of ideas2 and we see that they are finding a similar response from the reading public4 ,it was not without significance that all through the period of the great ,coal ,strike publishers reduced their output of books to the smallest possible dimensions1 and especially refrained from issuing books of the highest class4 ,i do not believe that this was merely due to the fact that in times of economic crisis there is a lack of pocket-money with which to purchase literature4 ,the fact surely was that much of the attention which in many circles is given to modern books was drawn away by the stirring events that were happening in our midst4 ,the study and contemplation of the ,coal ,strike were of precisely the same nature as the study and contemplation of original contemporary literature4 ,for that literature in its most characteristic forms is concerned with the problems and the structure of modern society4 ,if at the time of the ,coal ,strike we had inquired what ,english plays had recently called forth the most criticism and interest in intellectual circles1 we should probably have named1 first1 ,mr4 ,galsworthy's ,justice1 and secondly1 his ,strife4 ,the latter was concerned with a situation exactly similar to that developed by the ,coal ,strike4 ,the action of the drama took place in the middle of a great strike4 ,mr4 ,galsworthy presented typical characters representing owners and men1 both acting on principle1 both determined and irreconcilable1 stubborn and loyal1 both betraying human qualities fundamentally the same4 ,i am not for the moment concerned with the conclusion drawn by the dramatist1 but with the fact that the serious attention which is given to modern literature and drama is the same sort of attention as that given to the great social questions of our time4 #b4 ,to search for hidden unities in the literature of an age is often to distort facts in the interest of theory4 ,but there may come a point--and ,i think the most notable literature of the year preceding the ,coal ,strike marks such a point--when certain salient facts emerge so violently and so repeatedly from the written page that no one but the blindest can ignore or deny them4 ,if one should take six books written in that period by six authors who are fairly representative of contemporary ,english literature--,e4,m4 ,forster1 ,arnold ,bennett1 ,h4,g4 ,wells1 ,granville ,barker1 ,bernard ,shaw1 and ,john ,galsworthy--there would be found one truth about them so obvious that it has been remarked by dozens of reviewers4 ,it is that they are concerned with the same social problems as those which fall under the science of sociology2 that they advocate1 criticise1 or imply reforms scarcely less directly than do those for whom social reform is a profession4 ,but this1 ,i think1 is scarcely the most satisfactory way of putting the matter4 ,the same truth may perhaps be expressed in wider and more significant terms by saying that the characteristic literature of to-day is the literature of change4 ,the most vigorous writers are generally those who respond most to their environment1 in the same sense that to such men everything must be full of suggestion1 interesting1 and matter for the interpretative mind2 though the greatest of all are those who nourish themselves at all the sources of inspiration1 in the past and the present1 in the seen and the unseen4 ,the latter are in consequence not so purely representative of their own special time as are those vigorous1 active minds which fill a secondary place in the world's literature1 but bulk largest to their contemporaries4 ,shakespeare is not so representative of the ,elizabethans as is ,marlowe or ,chapman4 ,probably if a greater number of ,greek plays survived we should find that ,sophocles is less characteristically ,athenian than ,euripides4 ,and in the same way ,mr4 ,joseph ,conrad is not so representative of the contemporary world as is ,mr4 ,bernard ,shaw or ,mr4 ,wells4 ,but it is in men of the latter type that we shall find the qualities by which their epoch is differentiated from others1 the qualities which to some extent appear in the greatest1 which appear far more abundantly in those biggest only in contemporary estimation--which in any case mark the trend of thought and the peculiar contribution of the time4 ,the literature produced by men of this type is most profoundly impressed by what may be called the spirit of change4 ,the briefest consideration of contemporary literature is sufficient to prove how powerfully these minds have been moulded1 either by observing this fact of change or contemplating its possibility4 ,the fact itself may perhaps best be illustrated by the case of ,mr4 ,edmund ,gosse and the story told in his memorable book1 ,father and ,son4 ,as a piece of biography alone that book stands high1 for the fine drawing of the mind and character of the father4 ,but the noticeable point lies in the vivid contrast between the father and son1 the transition from the hard-headed1 scrupulous1 rigid1 narrow-minded ,puritan1 who is so typical of the ,victorian age1 to the broad-minded1 cultured littrateur of to-day4 ,there is the fact of change--the ,rev4 ,philip ,gosse of forty years ago has become the ,mr4 ,edmund ,gosse of to-day4 ,if we would see how this actual change in the outward and inward order of the world has affected novelists we may turn to ,mr4 ,arnold ,bennett1 ,mr4 ,wells1 or ,mr4 ,e4,m4 ,forster4 ,in ,clayhanger1 as in ,old ,wives' ,tales1 ,mr4 ,bennett traces the progression of the ,english world from the generation of our grandfathers to our own generation2 he shows this change creeping upon us at an accelerated pace1 catching the older inhabitants unawares1 a visible change in bricks and mortar1 in widening streets1 in enlarged factories1 in the introduction of trams which in due course became electric trams2 and a change no less decisive in customs and habits1 the older folk marvelling at the new-fangled independence of the young2 the whole being nothing less than a revolution which has descended with the sure but imperceptible advance of a glacier1 so that within living memory the face and character of ,england have been altered4 ,in ,milestones he has more recently given us another account of the same historic progression4 ,and an exactly similar idea has captured the imagination of ,mr4 ,wells4 ,in ,the ,new ,machiavelli1 as in ,tono-,bungay and other books1 he tells the story of the rapidly evolving world in which his heroes have grown up2 of the ever-spreading suburbs stretching out their tentacles north and south and east and west1 of the mushroom houses which arose without order or system1 of the changing system of education1 the changing ideas towards parents--everything spasmodic1 growing1 muddled4 ,similarly1 ,mr4 ,e4,m4 ,forster1 in ,howard's ,end1 shows the old house so dear to the heart of ,mrs4 ,wilcox1 as the symbol of permanence in an unfixed society which is homeless1 restless1 changing4 ,even if we look abroad we shall find something of this same sense of the transformation in the order of things2 in ,america1 ,mr4 ,winston ,churchill has written a series of novels to illustrate the successive phases in the ,american character2 and in ,france authors like ,m4 ,paul ,bourget and ,m4 ,ren ,bazin emphasise respectively the change from aristocracy to democracy1 and from the reverence of orthodoxy to the revolutionary secular spirit4 ,in a somewhat different way ,mr4 ,galsworthy1 ,mr4 ,shaw1 and ,mr4 ,granville ,barker are affected by the fluidity of their environment4 ,of ,mr4 ,galsworthy ,i shall have something more to say1 and need merely point out for the moment that in ,fraternity1 ,strife1 and especially ,justice1 the author is not merely indicating but advocating changes which1 instead of being left to accident1 are to be guided in accordance with a definite human purpose4 ,mr4 ,shaw is so minded that he preaches against change wherever he perceives it1 and clamours for it when he perceives it not4 ,thus in ,the ,doctor's ,dilemma and the ,preface to it1 finding himself confronted with great changes in medical science1 he denounces medical progress and its pretensions as a superstition and a fraud4 ,in ,getting ,married1 on the other hand1 finding that the public is still often content with old-fashioned ideas of sex relations and home life1 he ridicules home life as we understand it1 on the ground that it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo4 ,i am not accusing him of any real inconsistency in thus alternating between conservative and revolutionary dogmas4 ,he would doubtless hold that changes ought to have been made where there have been none1 and that those which have occurred have not followed the course which he1 or men gifted with similar foresight1 would have prescribed4 ,it may be objected that the influence of change upon literature is not only felt by our contemporaries1 but has affected the literature of all times2 that it is the function of men of letters to be ahead of their contemporaries and to initiate ideas which are productive of change2 that the history of literature is the history of the progress of thought and imagination2 and that therefore the present age does not differ in this respect from others4 ,to which ,i would reply that whilst other literatures have represented or initiated change1 there has never been a time when so many of the best creative intellects have consciously concerned themselves with this process1 making change of conditions either their artistic subject or their deliberate practical object4 ,the reason1 of course1 is obvious2 there never has been a time when the world was undergoing such a startling and rapid transformation4 ,it is true1 the economic1 material1 scientific1 and moral changes in the ,athens of the fifth century came about quickly and drastically1 and the reconstitution of intellectual and moral ideas mooted by the ,sophists found a profound expression in the dialectic of the drama4 ,how far the ,elizabethans were influenced by the revival of learning and science1 the discovery of the new world and the expansion of commerce1 is a question ,i need not embark upon4 ,but it will not be disputed that the face of the world has never in any known period of history been so changed out of all recognition as it has been by the scientific and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century4 ,the barbarian invasions which put an end to ,imperial ,rome can have had no outward and visible effect comparable to that of the invasion of the machine4 ,what wonder that the superficial1 hurried reader of to-day finds little to satisfy him in the literature of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries1 the former so much concerned either with religion or pleasure1 the latter with the moral virtues or their opposites6 ,the ,renaissance did not reach its moral consummation till the time of the ,french ,revolution1 its intellectual consummation till the nineteenth century1 its material consummation till the twentieth century and thereafter4 ,the growth of science first affected the imagination1 for it was an emancipating idea2 its first offspring was ,romanticism and the idea of liberty and democracy4 ,but science as it progressed in the nineteenth century came1 first with the machine and the whip1 then with the machine and the moralist1 at its elbow4 ,but wherever and however it came1 it transformed with lightning rapidity1 just in that way in which ,mr4 ,wells1 ,mr4 ,bennett1 ,mr4 ,forster1 and ,mr4 ,winston ,churchill1 the ,american1 have indicated2 till the mere fact of its transforming became so remarkable and absorbing that that fact has almost exhausted the attention of three-fourths of the artists and intellectuals of our age4 ,so habituated then have we become to rapid change in the conditions of life that the first thing we postulate is further change4 ,the rustic accustomed to the same food every day of his life does not criticise his fare2 it is the epicure1 accustomed to variety1 who is critical of the menu4 ,the active mind which witnesses perpetual variety must be perpetually critical4 ,to be aware that the conditions of to-day are different from the conditions of yesterday and of to-morrow is1 according to the temperament of the beholder1 to lament the past or to hasten the future4 ,in this respect the ,radical and the ,conservative are alike1 that it is the perception of change which determines them1 though it determines them in different ways1 the one being affected by hope1 the other by fear4 ,both are discontented with the present1 the one because it falls short of the future1 which he imagines1 the other because it has departed from the security of the past1 which he idealises4 ,and1 as we have seen1 even the creative artist cannot escape from the fascination of this ever-changing environment1 where the unsystematised present obtrudes its fresh discontents1 and the unknown future is pregnant with possibilities of good and the alternative of unimaginable evil4 ,all perceive that something must be done to direct the plunging course of this hydra-headed democracy which1 as its onrush is in any case irresistible1 may at any moment deviate from the path and fling itself headlong to perdition4 ,when the guns are firing and the battle is joined and the cries of the wounded fill the air1 there are not many who can sit down in the midst1 like the ,german philosopher at the battle of ,austerlitz1 to contemplate the ,absolute4 ,most of them1 even though their function is art1 rush out to join the mle2 and this is why they incur the censure of the reviewers1 making fiction and drama a branch of sociology4 ,but one seems to hear1 distinguishable occasionally amidst the din1 a low1 faint murmur4 ,this way madness lies4 ,is man1 the master of his soul1 to be thus enslaved to his conditions8 ,is he to be tossed hither and thither by changes which he did not create1 by ideas to which he did not subscribe1 by a tempest he never wished to combat8 ,is there no quiet place of refuge wherein he may be at peace to live as his ancestors lived1 and to cherish the humble ambitions which they cherished8 ,the answer1 in a certain sense1 is ,no4 ,the conventions which served their purpose have in many cases lost their meaning2 the duties our ancestors performed have lost their usefulness2 the old bottles will not hold the new wine which our generation serves to us4 ,and this is one reason why so many people rate and gibe at what they call the muddle-headed ,british public2 because it cannot change its ideas so quickly as it is forced to change its conditions of life4 ,but is there not an important significance in the very fact which makes our intellectuals desperate with indignation1 the fact that you cannot change the public mind so rapidly as you can change its tramway services1 its government1 or the place--the cellar1 the crust of the earth1 or the sky--in which it is to be housed8 ,it is easier to take a man up in an aeroplane than it is to make him agree that his neighbour ought to run away with his wife1 or that his sons ought not to read ,thucydides4 ,even amongst those writers whom ,i have named there is beginning to arise a half-formed consciousness that amid all these changes in circumstances we must be careful how we admit changes in character and in mental calibre2 a consciousness that we are in need of some fixed point by which the world may be enabled to retain its sanity4 ,now there are two classes of people who believe in permanence3 those who think that the world is the same always because they are too silly to open their eyes2 and the very small class of those who have felt profoundly that all things are changing in something more than the ,heraclitean sense1 who have yet penetrated to the necessity of a permanence1 of an organic human continuity1 underlying the multiplex circumstances and ideas of our life4 ,and this brings me back to ,mr4 ,forster and ,mr4 ,galsworthy4 ,howard's ,end1 the old-fashioned house which gives its name to ,mr4 ,forster's novel1 is contrasted with the new buildings which are occupied and vacated1 which spring up on all sides and are vicariously inhabited1 which draw nearer and nearer to the garden and the wych-elm of ,howard's ,end4 ,it is the symbol of permanence1 of the old order which connects the past with the present1 the personal and individual with the cosmopolitan and indifferent2 it is the something sacred which neither an individual nor a nation can afford to neglect4 ,mr4 ,forster1 impressed as he is with the need of change1 directed instead of haphazard1 nevertheless perceives that there are permanent elements1 belonging to character1 in our blood and our tradition1 which cannot be ignored without peril4 ,mr4 ,galsworthy1 in ,the ,patrician1 is no longer the mere antagonist of the established order of things4 ,he seems to have attained a sort of optimism strangely at variance with his earlier views2 to have declared that running through all these conflicts1 revolutions1 and evolutions there is and has been a certain national sense1 a sort of collective reasonableness1 which is constantly making itself felt1 and being expressed in its best form by the leaders of opinion1 the aristocrats of nature2 that the torrent runs1 as it were1 between solid banks2 that in the long run character triumphs over confusion4 #c4 ,it would be folly to regret that the drama of modern life1 of our swiftly evolving modern society1 has become absorbingly interesting to so many of the best brains of the time4 ,although we may detect a serious limitation to literature1 a didacticism alien to the disinterested spirit of art1 still we cannot fail to see that a new sort of vitality1 belonging rather to the moral sense than the intellect or the perceptions1 has been infused into imaginative literature4 ,something1 at least1 which is fresh and real and vital has been introduced1 exclusive of much that we have been accustomed to regard as excellent1 but serving surely to give a distinctive and far from negligible character to the typical literature of our time4 ,that typical literature1 in its most important manifestations1 is concerned with the events that are happening around us here and now--with ideas1 largely partisan1 that give meaning to them--with the purposes that direct and determine them4 ,criticism1 if it is to be vital criticism1 cannot dissociate itself from those ideas1 nor look on with sublime indifference to opinions as to the true and the false1 the desirable and the undesirable4 ,but when we have said that1 we are also bound to recognise the drawbacks and serious limitations of the modern tendency4 ,it includes--and we come back to the point at which we started--a tendency to dissociate modern writing from the continuous stream of ,english and world literature4 ,incidentally the didacticism of modern writers1 and their absorption in the affairs of the moment1 have not only served to make a breach between themselves and ,english literature as a whole1 to the detriment of their perspective1 but have also set a gulf between themselves and those of another school1 for whom world literature is more important than the literature of to-day1 for whom erudition and interest in the past are not to be lightly dismissed as academicism4 ,i can imagine no greater disaster to letters than a breach between the literary originator and the man of learning4 ,such a breach can only mean that learning is cast back upon itself1 loses humanity1 and becomes academic2 and that the author who despises or ignores erudition1 and with it the sense of human continuity and permanence for which it ought to stand1 tends to become opinionative and shallow4 ,his work must lack the imaginative range1 the mellowness1 the beauty which cannot take form through instinct alone1 which cannot be expressed by those who have not lovingly studied the models of antiquity and our own literature1 who have not sought contact with the life of other times as well as with the life of to-day4 ,the great gain to literature in recent years is that it is more closely related to action and those general ideas which lead to action4 ,its great corresponding defect--and this is immeasurable--is its loss in form1 in universality1 in that disinterestedness which is essential to art4 ,erudition1 when it is humane1 and even when it is merely academic1 has1 at any rate1 always that disinterestedness which is essential alike to science and art4 ,if it is humane--as it was1 on the whole1 in the ,elizabethan age--its whole moral support1 vast in this age of idol-worshippers1 will be on the side of disinterested art and literature4 ,we do not hope1 or wish1 that all authors should be men of learning--they should be of all sorts4 ,but if authors and men of learning continue to be removed in sympathy1 interests1 and ideals1 it is a sign that both are in a bad way4 ,,ii ,,professional ,,politics ,take my word for this1 reader1 and say a fool told it you1 if you wish3 that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture1 hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition4 ,these words were written by an irresponsible fellow before the days of responsibility were inaugurated2 before politicians had become a race apart1 admired or execrated according to the temperament of the beholder2 before writers were solemnly divided into men-of-letters1 novelists1 littrateurs1 journalists1 hacks1 and professors2 before physicians had become a close corporation of certificated benefactors2 not1 indeed1 before lawyers had learnt to trade on human litigiousness1 but before they had won the respect of the public for the disinterested exercise of their talents4 ,the days of specialism have added to the sum-total of human knowledge2 but they have diminished intercourse1 they have made men more inaccessible to one another1 they have promoted new groupings1 new atmospheres1 new officialdoms1 new barriers and water-tight compartments4 ,the professional spirit has affected and infected the whole of modern society2 we see its results in what we call the disappearance of wit1 or the loss of the conversational faculty1 or the didactic habit1 or anything else implying regret for the individualism of the past4 ,it means that our several callings have separated us1 have made us into creatures of our profession1 have established us on our own particular pedestals on which1 as good statues1 we must remain1 and that our common humanity is an insufficient link between us4 ,our special knowledge1 our special habit1 our special highly-esteemed reputation1 sets up a barrier which cuts us off from our fellows and destroys community of feeling4 ,the politician of mediocre capacity may know enough to cut a figure among his political associates only by judicious silence1 or by talkativeness on those subjects of which others are ignorant4 ,but put him among his non-political friends1 and he is an oracle of wisdom upon the law and the ,constitution4 ,the doctor1 who has forgotten his scientific principles but has picked up some empirical knowledge1 has the advantage of experience and authority as against the layman for whom he prescribes4 ,the lawyer1 the civil servant1 the professional theologian1 and the diplomat are in the same position4 ,they all know enough of their subject to be superior to those who know next to nothing of it4 ,they know enough to have pedestals of their own2 to be on their guard2 to have a reputation to maintain2 to conceal the dram of folly2 to be1 to that extent1 artificial in their relations with men4 ,they dare not betray the laughable blunder1 which1 said ,charles ,lamb1 is the test your neighbour giveth you that he will not betray or over-reach you4 ,in the case of the chartered accountant1 or the stockbroker1 or the pedlar1 this special knowledge is not so damning a thing4 ,no accountant1 be he ever so limited1 can be wholly contented with accountancy as an explanation or sum-total of life2 nor can the broker1 however absorbed in his business1 admit to his friends that the manipulating of stocks and shares is the only matter which should consume the interest of mortals4 ,it is otherwise with the politician1 the priest1 the man of letters1 the professional philosopher1 and even the lawyer and the soldier4 ,there is nothing human which may not enter into politics1 religion or philosophy1 or become the subject of literature2 the human complexion of the ,state may be transformed by the professional prejudice of the lawyer or the soldier4 ,consider how1 for democratic purposes1 the ,member of ,parliament is made4 ,there is no need to pay undue attention to the amusing exaggerations and distortions of ,mr4 ,belloc and ,mr4 ,cecil ,chesterton4 ,the ,member of ,parliament has been supported in his constituency by a group of local politicals who have a healthy enthusiasm for the party war-cry4 ,the serious candidate is too experienced1 too professional1 to share those enthusiasms in precisely that form which they assume1 at election time1 in the minds of his supporters4 ,i do not mean that he is less enthusiastic than they1 a less whole-hearted backer of his party1 but that1 from the nature of his political experience1 politics presents itself to him under a perspective which cannot be theirs4 ,he leaves his constituency a specially ordained champion of political truth2 he arrives at ,westminster a unit in the crowd4 ,if we follow our member to ,westminster we shall soon find that he has fallen into the ,parliamentary manner2 that his ideas are grouped around the ideas familiar to the ,house of ,commons2 that he has taken its tone1 and that his habits are becoming gradually assimilated to the habits of those few with whom he especially associates himself4 ,let us attend a meeting of some propagandist committee comprising a number of expert politicians--,members of ,parliament1 or others4 ,we shall find there the bond of a common knowledge1 a common sympathy1 a common approach towards a given subject1 a common jargon4 ,we shall be aware of the fact that we have come into a particular1 highly-specialised atmosphere1 where the familiar language of ordinary life1 the familiar ideas1 would be intrusions1 meriting nothing but frowns or compassionate smiles4 ,and the same thing is true of most corporate journalism and most corporate religion4 ,the atmosphere is highly specialised2 it is binding2 and those who live in it believe it to be co-extensive with the whole of life4 ,let us bind ourselves by ,tolstoy2 let us agree to loosen ourselves by ,nietzsche2 but1 in any case let us agree to love our neighbour on the principle of a close corporation4 ,the main influences which shape the modern world operate1 for the most part1 through intellectual groups2 each group can only be appealed to in a language familiar to it2 it can only act on principles 7consciously accepted or presupposed7 which are its very special property2 you can never touch it to the quick1 in its corporate and active capacity1 without accepting or appearing to accept its collective prejudices4 ,its differentia is that which separates it from the unit of common humanity4 ,thus we come to something more difficult to analyse than specialisation of work--a specialisation of sentiment1 habits and morals1 which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere which they have appropriated1 and so limited as to be blind in the broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken4 ,and yet it is through these groups1 keen-eyed in one direction1 blind in others1 that the intellect1 the reforming zeal1 the earnestness1 the idealism of the age1 have to pass before ideas and vague aspiration can be transformed into action or effective influence4 ,these groups are the main-drainage-system of modern life2 they are the ordinary channels through which the business of the world has to pass1 and its organised thought be directed4 ,take any one of these groups1 and consider its differential character1 its mode of apperception1 its thos1 and you find it something deformed1 twisted1 strained in one direction1 like a tree by the sea-shore4 ,but take a few score of them1 and imagine their qualities fused together1 and the result would accord with the ideals of common humanity--ideals vaguely conceived1 perhaps1 but generous4 ,it is just because the qualities of these groups1 in politics1 religion1 social work1 and to a lesser extent in literature1 are not and cannot be fused together1 but on the contrary1 stand apart in water-tight compartments1 so that the whole is like an elaborate system of checks to make each part inoperative1 that1 at a time when the whole community is strangely alive with good will1 the actual social achievement is beyond measure disappointing4 ,the test of success or failure is the degree of satisfaction afforded to the common man4 ,by the common man ,i do not mean the inferior man1 but the man who has not specialised himself out of his common humanity4 ,if there is any interest which an honest lawyer can share with an honest fisherman1 a decent cockney with a decent ,bedouin ,arab1 he does it in virtue of this nobler commonness2 it may include the interests of good fellowship1 of delight in song or nature1 of a belief in ,god1 and a host of indescribable interests which do not belong to the mechanism and compulsory organisation of life2 it includes some dram of folly1 some capacity for laughable blunder in intercourse between men4 ,culture may break in upon this commonness and destroy it4 ,but it need not be so4 ,shakespeare has this commonness in a high degree2 so have ,johnson1 and ,goldsmith1 and ,lamb2 all great artists have had it when their culture has not crazed them1 or when they have not lifted themselves into an almost mystical absorption in exercising some gift of austere1 monumental expression2 in which case1 like ,milton1 they scarcely belong to the category of humans2 their food is ambrosial1 and their wine is nectar4 ,the task of the inspired politician has become harder in proportion as the problem of government has become more intricate and more specialised4 ,he must work through his machinery1 which includes not only the administrative machine1 but all those groups1 in and out of ,parliament1 limited by their ethical and sentimental specialities4 ,he must be professional enough to appreciate the ground of their excellences1 and common enough to discard their limitations4 ,it is only when there are several such men1 powerful enough to leaven politics and lead politicians1 that modern democracy can have any shadow of reality--men who understand the rank and file of humanity1 conversant also with the complicated machine and the contending groups of narrowly defined ideals1 men fired with that constructive imagination which crystallises in common sense4 ,,iii ,,specialism ,,in ,,religion ,it is significant that the name ,religion of ,humanity was given to a set of tenets which strictly speaking contained no religion at all4 ,positivism gained ground in middle-,victorian ,england not merely because ,science and the theory of ,evolution were in the ascendant1 but still more because it was recognised that the orthodox ,churches were out of harmony with modern life2 that they were ministering neither to modern humanitarian feeling nor to humanity4 ,positivism survives to this day in the person of ,mr4 ,frederic ,harrison and a few others 7including several of the leaders of the ,young ,turkish party72 but it would by this time have been a powerful creed if it had been really a creed1 if it had anything spiritual and credible to offer to those who are outraged by the professional neglect1 self-absorption1 and intellectual insincerity of the ,churches4 ,everyone is aware of the failure of the ,churches to touch modern life2 to escape from their grooves2 to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations of old-fashioned formul instead of finding vital1 human1 developing expressions of the spiritual craving of man4 ,even ,mr4 ,george ,cadbury is aware of this failure1 as he showed by his zeal for the inquiry into church attendance some years ago1 an inquiry which has been repeated this year with results unsatisfactory to the ,churches4 ,the question has been debated again and again1 and inquirers have been unable to make up their minds whether it is the ,churches that are not good enough for the people1 or the people who are not good enough for the ,churches4 ,it is a question of the priority of the chicken or the egg4 ,it is not known whether public sentiment is depraved because it is alienated from the ,churches1 or whether the ,churches are depraved because they have excluded so many of the most powerful moral forces of the time4 ,certain it is that they have offended by their exclusiveness2 by the narrowing down of interest2 by the cliquishness of those who are specialists in piety or ritual4 ,we may observe their habit of mind in that narrow ,victorian sect which converted ,mr4 ,gosse's strong-willed and in many ways lovable father into an intolerant tyrant 7as set forth in ,father and ,son72 that lax and snobbish branch of the ,anglican ,church which failed to capture ,mr4 ,bernard ,shaw in his youth1 because it stood only for a class prejudice2 and those strange types of ,christianity which1 as ,mr4 ,lowes ,dickinson expresses it1 find no disharmony between belief in a ,power that is supposed to have created the stars and the tiger and the sentimental1 almost erotic character of many ,christian hymns3 ,jesu1 lover of my soul1 ,let me to ,thy bosom fly4 ,the evidence of those who have been estranged from the ,churches is worth considering4 ,we see that ,mr4 ,gosse was driven from them in his youth by their sectarian narrowness and unwillingness to face intellectual inquiry2 ,mr4 ,shaw by the flippancy of the ,irish ,church1 its class prejudice1 its false respectability2 ,mr4 ,lowes ,dickinson1 among other reasons1 because at a time when men are learning to adapt the processes of ,nature to their ends1 when it becomes them to dwell less and less upon their weaknesses and more and more upon their strength1 the orthodox ,christians assert that we are miserable sinners1 that there is no health in us1 when they ought to be too busy demonstrating in fact the contrary4 ,members of the general public in one way and another have become accustomed to regard religion with an uneasy constraint2 there are harmless things which must not be said in the presence of a priest2 there is a pastorality about the minister which implies a flock and a coterie2 and ,englishmen seldom mention the name of ,god without an appearance of apology or secret shame4 ,religion has become largely a matter of cliques1 coteries1 associations--of specialism in codes and casuistry4 ,i will not press the question whether the history of the ,christian ,church has not been the history of the perversions of ,christianity4 ,a distinguished ,chinese author not long ago indicted the alleged un-,christian methods of our missionaries in ,china2 ,dr4 ,halil ,halid1 a ,turk1 has pointed out that it is in the ,christian countries that the ,christian virtues of humility and disdain of wealth are least in evidence4 ,what concerns us now is the feeling in formally ,christian countries that in spite of ,christianity the ,christian ,churches have not taught that the ,kingdom of ,heaven is on earth2 they have not taught toleration and love2 they have urged us to ignore the present world in the interests of the next2 and because their own followers have refused to do anything of the kind they have isolated religion from practical life4 ,i agree that many ,churches1 seeking to adapt themselves to modern needs1 have organised social clubs1 carried on political crusades1 and rendered useful service in rescue work2 but even so they have rather tended to distinguish between themselves in their spiritual capacity and themselves in their secular capacity4 ,the majority of people do not seem to find in the religious services of the ,churches a note that touches their practical needs or their spiritual ideals4 ,the most successful popular appeal has been made by those organisations which have endeavoured to add to the zest of life by exciting music1 tuneful hymns1 and buoyant rhetoric4 ,in our unprecedented age of incessant change1 continuous revolution1 and swift innovation1 we have become accustomed to the idea that the social order can and must be altered1 that men must take things into their own hands4 ,the fatalism of the old orthodoxy is not for a people who see that things are accomplished by the human will2 such people are naturally impatient with those who entreat the ,deity to do for them what they can very well do for themselves4 ,the last of the great fatalists in ,english literature is ,mr4 ,thomas ,hardy4 ,he was moved by the downfall of the old settled civilisation and the purposeless1 vexing changes which swept like a hurricane on a nation now suddenly made conscious of its evil lot4 ,he was aware of the modern vice of unrest at a time when the human will had not yet set itself to direct and organise change4 ,thus it was that he came to pronounce the last word about ,fatalism1 and1 in so doing1 to reduce it to absurdity4 ,the ,first ,cause1 as ,sue ,fawley perceived it1 worked automatically like a somnambulist1 and not reflectively like a sage2 she blamed things in general1 because they are so horrid and cruel6 ,whatever one's theological views may be1 no one to-day tolerates in the drama of life any god-of-the-machine4 ,in ,greece1 art and religion went hand in hand1 and this was possible because gods were like men and manifested themselves through ,nature1 not in a sphere outside ,nature4 ,no civilisation prior to our own experienced so rapid an evolution as ,athens in the fifth century ,b4,c42 but when that century was over1 it was still possible for a philosopher to draw robust symbolical illustrations from the old mythology4 ,the ,modernists to-day are only applying a law of history when they say that religion must evolve with the evolution of human culture4 ,in the first thirteen centuries1 the ,christian ,church did in practice change and adapt itself to civilisation4 ,as long as the world was conservative1 a conservative ,church could keep pace with it4 ,the first cataclysm came at the time when civilisation was again rapidly changing1 and ,christianity only emerged torn and divided by the ,reformation4 ,but the world to-day is being altered far more rapidly than at the time of the ,renaissance4 ,it turns from the ,churches1 not because it is tired of the spiritual life1 or of other-worldliness1 but because1 just as it demands of literature and art that they should appeal to the modern mind and heart1 so it can be content with nothing less from religion4 ,and it is just because the ,churches have been too conservative1 because they tend to tradition1 formul1 conventions1 and manners which1 retained beyond their time1 assume the garb of unreality1 that they are abandoned or slighted by the people--as they must continue to be slighted--until new prophets arise to present universal truths in a new and practical form2 to endeavour to preach religion as the great man of letters endeavours to represent beauty and truth4 ,,iv ,,specialism ,,in ,,war ,england is very near to the ,continent of ,europe1 and we are accustomed to thinking of ,western civilisation as one4 ,yet every time we cross the ,channel we are reminded in some fresh way of the foreignness of foreign countries4 ,the dwelling-houses of ,france1 for instance1 are different from the dwelling-houses of ,england in respect of the important fact that they are all to some extent fortified houses4 ,great and small houses alike are evidently built with a view to defence from within4 ,if you take a country walk anywhere in ,normandy you find that the gardens of the country houses have massive gates and high walls1 the front door is like a portcullis1 and the window shutters are barricades4 ,the smallest cottages have great doors and window shutters1 and if there is a garden1 it is two to one that the wall is a real wall4 ,and not only in the country districts1 but in the towns1 pre-eminently in ,paris itself1 each house or block of flats is so constructed as to defy the violent intruder4 ,it strikes us strangely1 as we walk through the cities of ,france and reflect upon the reasons for these square doors and these guarded windows4 ,we have suffered no recent invasion1 we have had no bloody revolution4 ,during the whole of the nineteenth century our island has known nothing more violent than the ,peterloo massacre or the ,chartist riots4 ,we have constantly had wars1 but they have been distant wars1 a matter for the hireling soldier1 and not often dragging in the volunteer civilian4 ,if we were disgusted when we heard the true story of the ,crimea1 we soon forgot the story4 ,we were shocked again by the facts of the ,boer ,war2 we had not thought that so many men could be so quickly killed1 so many millions of money whittled away4 ,but even the ,south ,african ,war never remotely seemed to threaten the security of our own islands4 ,for the most part1 the policeman has been enough4 ,a light bolt and a key guard us against petty burglars2 we walk abroad unarmed--at the worst1 we comment on the fact that it is well to carry a stick if we walk alone in ,epping ,forest4 ,we have abolished duelling4 ,we have forbidden prize-fights4 ,even the horse-whip has ceased to be the patrician's mode of redressing wrong4 ,for assault1 libel1 slander1 we have a remedy in the law courts4 ,even in our punishment of criminals1 if occasionally we have to put a man out of the way by discreetly hanging him1 we never subject him to the degradation of a whipping4 ,youthful barbarians at public schools still roll about and pummel one another1 but the organised1 stand-up fight1 such as was fought in ,tom ,brown's schooldays1 is discouraged2 public opinion is against it4 ,from infancy we are taught to be peaceful1 law-abiding citizens4 ,most of us1 then1 know very little about physical violence4 ,the shedding of blood is an unfamiliar spectacle4 ,if a man is knocked down by a motor-bus1 we may or we may not feel human sympathy1 but certainly we are physically shocked by the gruesome sight4 ,we send men to the gallows1 but we no longer watch their agony on ,tyburn ,hill4 ,we despatch men to a frontier war1 but we know little about their wounds4 ,and yet1 as of old1 our martial ardour is aroused and we glow with patriotic pride when a regiment of soldiers marches past to the sound of music4 ,as of old1 the thought of any great ,european war excites us1 even fascinates us4 ,we know enough1 indeed1 to assure ourselves that a great war would mean economic ruin1 that even a distant war between two foreign countries1 such as ,turkey and ,italy1 or ,turkey and ,bulgaria1 will probably react unfavourably on our own trade4 ,yet the thought of a great war still profoundly interests the mass of ,englishmen2 they are fascinated2 they almost long for news of the great1 decisive1 bloody battle which means a sensation1 a spectacle1 an acquaintance with something doing1 a something strange1 gruesome1 violent1 and vast4 ,i am not saying that the people of this country approved of the war which ,italy thought good to wage against ,turkey1 or were pleased at the horrible slaughter in the ,balkans4 ,it is obvious1 on the contrary1 that they strongly disapproved4 ,the ,great ,illusion1 so effectively exposed by ,norman ,angell1 is no longer universally entertained4 ,capital has learnt the horrors of war1 and organised labour has emphatically declared against it4 ,and yet1 though there were few ,english people who would not have stopped the ,turco-,italian war and mitigated the horrors of the ,balkan war if they could have done so1 it is manifest that there were few who did not revel in the sensation1 just as some years ago even our most philanthropic classes deplored and revelled in the spectacle of ,macedonian atrocities4 ,a fire at a theatre1 an appalling railway accident1 and especially murder on a vast1 heroic scale1 attracts1 in these peaceful days1 certainly not less than in the days when barbarism was customary4 ,now1 violence and brutality are obviously one thing to a peaceful people and a very different thing to people accustomed to violence in their daily lives4 ,upon a man of sedentary occupation a prize-fight must have a very different effect from that which it will have upon men accustomed to the use of their fists4 ,it is worth asking3 ,what is this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace8 ,what is this emotion which leads men to be heroic by proxy8 ,is it surviving physical excellence which reveals itself in this way1 or is it a cumbrous atavistic relic like the appendix which the doctors remove8 ,we see1 for instance1 enormous crowds gathering at the football matches where professional players show their prowess1 and muscles trained and hardened for the fray4 ,we know that there was a crowd looking forward to the ,wells-,johnson contest4 ,contrast these events with a cricket match1 where there is practically no violence4 ,whatever be the reason1 any sportsman will testify to the fact that the crowd which goes to see cricket is generally a cricketing crowd1 but that the crowd which goes to a cup-tie football match is by no means in the same way a footballing crowd4 ,in other words1 so far as the onlookers are concerned1 the cricket match is more truly a sporting event than is the professional football match or the ,wells-,johnson contest4 ,whatever the answer be1 it is certain that when we beat the big drum of patriotism and set the guns firing1 the thrill which it arouses in the vocal populace is different from the thrill in a people accustomed to violence and blood4 ,we say the vocal populace1 remembering that there is a portion of the population1 very important to the community and growing in power1 which is not facile in the art of self-expression4 ,that portion of the population was in evidence at the time of the great ,coal ,strike1 when it seemed actually on the verge of rebellion1 when it actually committed violence to the horror and surprise of our peaceful middle classes4 ,the fact is that the very poor are never so far from the violent life as are members of other classes4 ,violent deaths are not infrequent in factories1 in coal-mines1 in great building-works1 in dockyards4 ,the life of deprivation makes the passion of anger frequent2 among the poor blows are often exchanged1 and the police are seldom called upon to interfere4 ,necessarily1 from the nature of the case1 the poor are more familiar with violence than are their richer and more conventional neighbours2 it is a natural thing for the more ignorant of them to fall back upon physical force1 as they did at ,liverpool4 ,and so1 too1 just as they are more accustomed to petty war1 they are less interested in war between nations4 ,in ,italy it was the working-men who protested against the war with ,turkey4 ,but it seems that the more educated and the more organised we become1 the more we leave our affairs to be managed by professionals4 ,when a nation declares for war1 it declares for a war to be waged by its professionals1 and it turns them on to do a job which1 according to civilised practices1 is a dirty job4 ,and when it is fired with patriotic pride for achievements won in the field it is exercising its emotions on something it cannot understand or realise1 for the simple reason that the violence of war is strange1 distantly horrible1 fascinating1 but unfamiliar4 ,it has never directly entered into our experience4 ,v ,,specialism ,,in ,,literature ,some time ago ,mr4 ,brander ,matthews made the original suggestion in the ,north ,american ,review that books should be written for the benefit of the reader4 ,the suggestion is not on the face of it paradoxical1 but it will be rank heresy to those who blame the public for not bowing down before the sacrosanctity of the serious author4 ,he admits that a book ought to be rich with the full flavour of the author's personality2 primarily it ought to express him2 but secondarily--and this is ,mr4 ,brander ,matthews' point--it is for the sole benefit of the reader4 ,i think we may go a little further than ,mr4 ,matthews1 and find a second reason why certain authors fail to find favour with the general reader4 ,in the case which ,mr4 ,matthews seemed to be considering there are authors who have every qualification for writing except that they cannot write4 ,secondly1 there are authors who1 in the ordinary literary sense of the term1 can write1 who have gathered knowledge and formed seriously-grounded opinions about life1 who are nevertheless so out of touch with the broad1 common interests of men that they invariably fail to make a strong emotional or imaginative appeal4 ,every reader is acquainted with the tiresome writer who has a great deal to say but labours infinitely in the saying of it4 ,in a crude1 energetic1 excessively eulogised novel published in ,america a few years ago--,queed--we were introduced to an economist engaged upon a work so learned that he knew there were only three persons in ,america capable of understanding it4 ,there is1 doubtless1 something to be said for an appreciative audience of three2 but it is safe to assert that even the exact sciences might be made more widely intelligible4 ,i am1 however1 thinking primarily of those studies which have some claim to rank as literary studies4 ,it is through literature that the historian1 the biographer1 the sociologist1 and the philosopher must make their contributions to knowledge4 ,yet how much research and how much acute thinking are wasted because the student has not the means of making his subject alive for others1 has not the reconstructive imagination by means of which truth is communicated6 ,it is because he cannot write4 ,but this being able to write is not a matter of putting words and clauses together with correctness and elegance4 ,that much the mere scholar generally understands1 and it is because he thinks it sufficient that he fails4 ,what is wanted is a quality of mind which is too often excluded from the specialist by his habit of thought4 ,a few years of journalism1 said ,mr4 ,w4,b4 ,yeats on one occasion1 is an invaluable discipline for the man of letters4 ,no one is more fully alive to the defects of journalism than ,mr4 ,yeats--its frequent looseness1 prejudice1 obviousness1 and dissipation of interest4 ,but1 in spite of that1 he saw that the good journalist's faculty of addressing himself directly to the subject in hand1 of stating it clearly and in its essentials without waste of words1 of so escaping his own particular mould of thought that he may be easily intelligible to a variety of minds1 required a discipline and a broadening invaluable to the man who really has something to say4 ,the specialist is inclined to lack the broad outlook of one who is interested in many things2 he acquires a jargon of his own2 his mind runs in the narrow channel to which that jargon corresponds2 the language he uses becomes stilted and dead4 ,there is no tonic in the truths he tries to proclaim1 no relevance to the rest of knowledge4 ,in other words1 what he has to say may be scientifically valuable1 but he fails to convey it to any but his fellow-specialists4 ,mr4 ,brander ,matthews points out that the great students are those who have combined the ,teutonic thoroughness with the ,french comprehensiveness and lucidity4 ,gibbon and ,mommsen are the great examples to which he points4 ,england surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid1 but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition1 with its intelligible common sense1 than the romantic or transcendental tradition1 with its mysticism and obscurity4 ,locke1 ,berkeley1 and ,hume1 the most lucid of philosophers1 are scarcely easier to follow than ,john ,stuart ,mill1 ,huxley1 and ,leslie ,stephen4 ,but it is hardly necessary to enter a caveat against supposing that lucidity of expression is precisely proportional to clearness of thought4 ,the philosophy of ,kant did not admit of the simple language of ,hume1 and ,t4,h4 ,green and ,mr4 ,bradley are not to be blamed if they are more difficult to understand than ,sir ,leslie ,stephen4 ,the second aspect of the question is more important1 especially at a time when we are constantly reminded that the public is indifferent to the finest creative literature now produced4 ,the fault may be with the public1 and it may also be with the authors4 ,it is worth remembering that this is a time when special forms of expression are being made to do work which once belonged to other forms4 ,fiction1 for example1 is being made to carry the load of philosophic psychology1 of poetry1 of the economic1 moral1 or political treatise4 ,drama is often used as a vehicle for truths which were once left to the pulpit1 the political platform1 or the lecture hall4 ,both of them1 in the case of the extreme realists1 are being used as the store-room or the dissecting chamber of the experimental scientist4 ,supposing that an author's facts are supremely important1 his discernment most acute1 his ideas significant1 still1 before we condemn the public unheard1 we are compelled to ask of him3 ,have you given to this material a form which it will accept8 ,have you addressed the public in a language which has a wide human appeal8 ,are you1 in fact1 a master of that higher technique which implies an understanding1 not only of the fine essences of truth1 but the broad1 common facts of human nature8 ,it is just because they are not masters of this higher technique that many exponents of so-called intellectual fiction and intellectual drama are doomed to failure4 ,i am well aware that such arguments as this must be qualified4 ,for ,i have not forgotten that what are now the commonplaces of culture were once the unintelligible obscurities of a sage4 ,much that we now apprehend at a glance1 all that makes our cultural birthright1 was only acquired by slow and arduous processes1 in which the pioneers were laughed to scorn4 ,the original mind sees things in a new light1 and his language is to us strange and unfamiliar1 and we do not learn it till our eyes and ears have become accustomed4 ,and there are others who do not stand conspicuously in the main stream of mental progress1 who1 nevertheless1 remote and perhaps secluded as they are1 have a vision rarefied1 subtle1 strange not only in their own times1 but for all times4 ,those men have their own communication to make to those anxious to add to the fineness of their perception1 or merely perhaps to the oddness of experience4 ,if some sting of truth reaches the mind through writing obscure to the general1 through language which may be barbarous in form1 an author has justified himself2 and it would be idle to follow ,mr4 ,brander ,matthews in his quotation from the ever-pleasing ,lord ,chesterfield3 ,speak the language of the company you are in2 speak it purely and unloaded with any other4 ,for1 after all1 is it not open to the author to choose his company8 ,if his receptions are ill-attended1 that may not reflect ill on those who accept the invitation4 ,not everyone will read the poems of ,mr4 ,doughty2 ,mr4 ,doughty has made it hard for them2 but if they do1 they are repaid4 ,not everyone will tolerate the finesse of ,mr4 ,henry ,james2 but among those who can understand him1 assuredly ,mr4 ,james is in very good company4 ,,vi ,,specialism ,,in ,,philosophy ,,and ,,justice ,in the play called ,justice1 ,mr4 ,galsworthy attacked the professional mechanism of ,english law in much the same way as the late ,william ,james attacked professional philosophy4 ,these two kinds of specialism1 or departmentalism1 may therefore conveniently be treated together2 for ,i may leave ,mr4 ,galsworthy and ,william ,james to conduct the attack1 contenting myself with the task of linking up their forces4 ,both ,professor ,james and ,mr4 ,galsworthy appealed against the machine--the one against the machine of thought which is divorced from common perception1 the other against the machine of the law which has no contact with the needs of persons4 ,we1 said ,william ,james1 meaning the ,pragmatists1 or the ,humanists1 turn to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be constituted1 with as good a conscience as rationalists are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual abodes4 ,in ,justice the young advocate who appears for the defence is not so much pleading for the client under the law1 as arraigning the present legal system1 setting up a new conception of law based upon common sense1 human insight1 and a morality finer than legalism4 ,gentlemen1 he says1 men like the defendant are destroyed daily under our laws for want of that human insight which sees them as they are1 patients1 and not criminals4444 ,justice is a machine that1 when someone has once given it the starting push1 rolls on of itself4 ,is this young man to be ground to pieces under this machine for an act which at the worst was one of weakness8 ,this attempt to get back to something that satisfies the human mind1 the human idea of good1 is to be seen equally in these two thinkers who belong to different countries and different traditions4 ,the word satisfactory continually occurs in ,professor ,james' writings4 ,humanism1 he says1 conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory1' has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigour and finality4 ,he wishes to break with that view of philosophy which says the anatomy of the world is logical1 and its logic is that of a university professor4 ,he is one of those who1 having been a lifelong student of philosophy and psychology1 has the energy to know that1 however theoretically perfect may be the logical system evolved by thought1 that system will not be sufficient to prevent a man from saying1 ,after all1 am ,i sure of it8 ,the only things of which we are sure are those things which we directly experience4 ,we know the appearance of a tree1 because we see it2 we know the emotion of pity or love1 because we have felt it2 we know that what we call tigers exist in ,india1 because acquaintances have seen them1 and direct experience has taught us that their evidence is satisfactory1 and if we went to ,india their testimony could be found true by the evidence of our own senses4 ,what becomes our warrant for calling anything reality8 ,the only reply is--the faith of the present critic or inquirer4 ,at every moment of his life he finds himself subject to a belief in some realities1 even though his realities of this year should prove to be his illusions of the next4 ,the most we can claim is1 that what we say about cognition may be counted as true as what we say about anything else4 ,nothing is true for him unless it has reference to the world which we know1 which we accept on faith1 by the practical evidence of our senses1 or1 it might be added1 our desires1 our aspirations1 our intuitions4 ,nothing is ruled out so long as it can be pinned down at any moment to what is real1 to what is individual4 ,demonstration in the last resort is to the senses4 ,contemned though they may be by some thinkers1 these sensations are the mother-earth1 the anchorage1 the stable rock1 the first and last limits1 the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of the mind4 ,to find such sensational termini should be our aim with all higher thought4 ,they end discussion1 they destroy the false conceit of knowledge1 and without them we are all at sea with each other's meaning4 ,if two men act alike on a percept1 they believe themselves to feel alike about it2 if not1 they may suspect they know it in differing ways4 ,we can never be sure we understand each other till we are able to bring the matter to this test4 ,this is why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air2 they have no practical issue of a sensational kind4 ,truth1 then1 for the ,pragmatists is that which has practical consequences4 ,a belief is held to be true when it is found to work4 ,transcendent ideas have no validity except as ideas unless they are found to have a cash value in practical life1 that is to say1 unless they refer to1 and are operative in1 the world of immediate experience4 ,reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions1 and the struggle for 'truth' in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as possible the old4 ,you may talk of ,absolutes as much as you like1 you may contemplate the fundamental categories of the mind1 you may dwell upon the a priori conceptions to which all our experiences must conform1 but the fact remains1 says ,professor ,james1 turning his back on all transcendental idealism1 the concrete truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine4 ,the true is the opposite of whatever is instable1 of whatever is practically disappointing1 of whatever is useless1 of whatever is lying and unreliable1 of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported1 of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory1 of whatever is artificial and eccentric1 of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account4 ,here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth--truth saves us from a world of that complexion4 ,what wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling6 ,in particular what wonder that all little provisional fools' paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison with its bare pursuit6 ,when ,absolutists reject humanism because they feel it to be untrue1 that means that the whole habit of their mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality1 in comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible youths4 ,their own subjective apperceiving mass is what speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject our humanism--as they apprehend it4 ,just so with us humanists1 when we condemn all noble1 clean-cut1 fixed1 eternal1 rational1 temple-like systems of philosophy4 ,i am not here seeking to examine closely1 still less to criticise1 ,professor ,james' pragmatic doctrines4 ,what ,i am concerned to show is that we have in him a trained philosopher adopting towards the theory of knowledge a point of view strangely similar to that which ,mr4 ,galsworthy takes up towards the social ethics of modern ,england4 ,is it not ,mr4 ,galsworthy's function to condemn all noble1 clean-cut1 fixed1 eternal1 rational1 temple-like systems of morality and etiquette8 ,professor ,james' rationalist antagonists are exactly like the administrators of law and order criticised by ,sweedle in the play3 ,they've forgot what human nature's like4 ,just as your ,hegelian wishes for nothing but the perfection of knowledge1 and leaves you in an inconceivable1 unknowable ,absolute1 so1 according to ,falder1 who has been in prison1 ,nobody wishes you any harm1 but they down you all the same4 ,in precisely the same way as ,professor ,james pleads for a view of truth which rests on the unfailing vividness of finite experience1 so ,mr4 ,galsworthy pleads for a justice which shall be applicable1 not to an infinite number of imaginary cases1 but to the individual1 to the person whom we might chance to know1 and meet1 and work with--to the necessitous human being4 ,he pleads for a law which shall be elastic1 not rigid2 dealing with men1 not cases2 for which mercy shall come to be a part of the idea of justice4 ,that which is good enough for human beings in their dealings one with another ought not to be too good for the law4 ,intercourse with concrete reality is ,professor ,james' requirement for the truth of an idea2 intercourse with human beings is ,mr4 ,galsworthy's requirement as the basis of social morality and of law4 ,that does not of course mean that the legislator must be acquainted with all those for whom he legislates any more than that we can directly experience the facts of history which we claim to know4 ,but every rule--in knowledge1 in morality1 in law--must be referable to this test of intercourse4 ,let your judgment of human beings be such as you would award to those who are sufficiently human to be among your friends4 ,let it be directed solely towards the well-being of the individual so far as that is consistent with the well-being of society4 ,again and again ,mr4 ,galsworthy has shown us how stereotyped views1 abstractions of the human mind1 settle down upon classes and individuals and warp their judgments and their conduct4 ,in ,fraternity he showed how the idea of class differences becomes an obsession in the human mind1 obliterating the truer idea of human community1 of those common qualities in character which are not skin-deep1 like class1 but fundamental4 ,in ,strife he showed how the idea of the rights of an employer1 of the rights of a workman1 is an abstraction hiding from master and workman the human bond which human intercourse would have revealed4 ,in ,justice1 again1 he showed how that lowest of all existing codes1 the legal code1 erects a temple-like abstraction of the law to which all individuals1 however different they may be1 however various their requirements1 are made to conform4 ,we may notice that in the cases both of the philosopher and the dramatist there is a return to what ,i may call a rudimentary common sense4 ,professor ,james' views come as a reaction in the course of the long evolution of ideas4 ,if on the one side we had not had thinker after thinker who emphasised the necessity of approaching reality as a relation of the conscious mind1 and on the other side sceptics who asserted that there is nothing knowable but the continuum of disconnected sensations which present themselves--a blind array of atoms--there would be no meaning in a thesis like that of ,professor ,james1 which refutes the follies of the two extremes1 and stands upon a ground which is very nearly a denial of the possibility of philosophy4 ,in like manner ,mr4 ,galsworthy's ethics are only valuable as a chain in the progress of morality and institutions4 ,primitive society conceived punishment as an antidote to the horrors of unchecked violence4 ,medival law devised fearful penalties for the forger1 because forgery was a fearful menace to the stability of a commerce not yet backed by a high commercial morality4 ,but now we have reached the time when we are menaced by the machinery set up by our ancestors4 ,the law works with a violence and a brutality which were invented in1 and proper to1 an age of violence and brutality2 and we are confronted with the daily spectacle of judges compelled to administer an antiquated and ferocious law1 which awards to the criminal the double penalty of chastisement and shame4 ,the old barbarism clings to the machine and works havoc4 ,and because it is old1 and because we are accustomed to it1 we tolerate it4 ,we do not put it to the test1 which must be a personal test3 ,how does it work in the case of this individual and of that8 ,is the application of these rules satisfactory when they are made to operate on the human beings for whom they were devised8 ,has this code any social cash value when it is brought to bear on the lawyer's clerk who forged a cheque to save a woman8 ,i have not considered ,professor ,james' merits as a dialectician1 or ,mr4 ,galsworthy's as a dramatist4 ,i have attempted to hint at that quality in them which is called humanism1 humanism in thought1 humanism in ethics--the quality which makes men seek to judge ideas1 institutions and things by what they are worth to human beings for their most pressing1 their most vital needs4 ,it is evident that this same humanism is beginning to manifest itself in politics1 religion and even literary criticism4 ,clearly it tends at all times to set up individual conviction against authority1 freedom against discipline4 ,it has as its virtue the quality of being opposed to red tape1 professionalism1 departmentalism pedantry1 officiousness1 intolerance1 lethargy1 and the tyranny of custom2 it has its dangers in that1 resting as it does in the last resort on the personal and the concrete1 it tends in ill-balanced minds to neglect the value of ancient and dear illusions1 and to degenerate into chaos and caprice4 ,chaos1 however1 is not so much to be feared as those little provisional fools' paradises of belief exposed so brilliantly by ,william ,james4 ,,part ,,three ,,literature ,,and ,,men ,i ,,bernard ,,shaw ,it is doubtful if any person in ,england exercises so many-sided and so considerable an influence as that of ,mr4 ,bernard ,shaw4 ,it is not that his books are read by very many thousands of readers2 that his plays have long runs or can compete in popularity with those of ,mr4 ,barrie or the ,gaiety ,theatre2 that his lectures and speeches are reported so fully as those of an ordinary ,cabinet ,minister2 that his letters to the newspapers are as numerous as those of ,mr4 ,algernon ,ashton or ,dr4 ,clifford in his prime4 ,he seldom demonstrates his power by passing ,acts of ,parliament or organising garden parties4 ,he figures less often in the ,social and ,personal columns than ,sir ,h4 ,beerbohm ,tree4 ,he is not so well known in the law courts as ,mr4 ,horatio ,bottomley4 ,yet there is no other man in ,england who is so conspicuous in so many spheres of activity1 and wherever he appears he is always facile princeps in the public eye4 ,everyone who has any knowledge of him is compelled to think about him1 and those who have no direct knowledge of him--so insidious is his influence--are to be found constantly thinking in terms of ,bernard ,shaw4 ,the active1 talking1 persuading1 book-writing1 lecturing1 propagandist population of ,england has been bitten by him2 it re-writes and popularises him2 it even talks his jargon when it is criticising him4 ,it began by regarding him as a brilliant and witty writer whom no one could take seriously2 it now regards him as a serious1 and indeed responsible1 thinker whose wit is a matter of harmless inspiration1 and often a tactical advantage4 ,mr4 ,shaw1 in fact1 has thrust himself upon ,english public life4 ,wherever anything is doing or being talked about he is in the thick of it4 ,whenever he rises to speak1 he is supreme4 ,he sweeps away all the false issues in a few sentences2 he attacks the very heart of the problem under discussion1 and makes the most practical proposals4 ,he can cover a hostile argument with ridicule1 and drive it out of the field with good-tempered laughter4 ,but his method is not only that of raillery4 ,he is remorselessly logical4 ,he can pursue the logical sequence of his case1 and set it forth with a fusillade of perfectly relevant and illuminating instances and analogies4 ,he never loses his thread like ,mr4 ,chesterton2 he never wanders off into vague rhetoric like ,mr4 ,wells4 ,he chases his enemies and his subject until he has subdued the first and set forth the second so that it shines with crystal clearness4 ,there is no man in ,england who can state a case1 on the platform or in the ,press1 with such perfect lucidity1 such logical order1 with such brightness and lightness1 or with such force as ,mr4 ,bernard ,shaw4 ,he is the greatest debater in ,england1 the greatest pamphleteer1 the most observable personality in public life4 ,that is not all4 ,as an organiser there is no one who has more driving power4 ,he can set himself to committee work1 and keep every member of a committee active1 himself included4 ,he can1 when necessary1 pester responsible persons till they are goaded into action4 ,whilst his attention is always fixed on the central object1 he has an eye for the most trifling details4 ,he is a first-rate business man4 ,he knows as much about the trade of publishing as any publisher4 ,he refuses to employ a literary agent1 and personally transacts the business of placing his work--and sometimes that of his friends--in the literary and dramatic market all over the world4 ,also he is a man personally benevolent4 ,no one was ever less sentimental or romantic1 but he is charitably disposed to everyone whom he does not regard as a fool4 ,if we examine the records of ,mr4 ,shaw's life we shall see that it has been spent somewhere mid-way between the lives of the man-of-action and the man-of-letters4 ,he has been primarily and essentially a critic of the current ideas about existing facts1 the ideas which are pre-supposed in the typical and habitual activities of our modern world4 ,he has been1 almost invariably1 a destructive critic--a critic of that rare kind which is able to win attention because he himself is so active in this ,vandal work of his1 because he can make his critical attack in so many different ways1 because there seem to be a greater vital force and spirit in his pulling down of gods than ever existed in the gods themselves4 ,socrates1 one would suppose1 was not more insistent and unexpected in his gadfly attacks upon the ,athenian sophists than is ,mr4 ,shaw in his raids upon the ,pharisees of sophisticated ,london4 ,his biography1 when it is written1 will be a very fascinating and a very large book1 and ,mr4 ,shaw himself thinks that it will be identical with the history of his time4 ,there is already in existence a book which claims to be an authorised ,critical ,biography2 and1 needless to say1 it was written by an ,american--,dr4 ,archibald ,henderson--who stepped in with superb confidence and compelled ,mr4 ,shaw to criticise1 overhaul1 and contribute to his daring enterprise4 ,you can force my hand to some extent1 said ,mr4 ,shaw1 for any story that you start will pursue me to all eternity4 ,this valiant ,american describes with gusto the active1 talking1 debating1 propagating1 protesting life that ,mr4 ,shaw has lived4 ,it has not been a domestic life2 not even a specially literary life4 ,we feel it has been a life in which there has been little privacy or intimacy1 that it has seldom been wholly shut off from the market-place and the theatre2 that if he is a man entirely destitute of company manners1 this is because he has lived always in company4 ,he was1 of course1 born in ,ireland1 not very far from ,dublin4 ,his parents were ,protestants belonging to that middle class which is hampered by social pretensions and insufficient worldly means4 ,he was taught at ,protestant schools1 where he was expected to believe that ,roman ,catholics are socially inferior persons1 who will go to hell when they die1 and leave ,heaven in the exclusive possession of ladies and gentlemen4 ,at the age of fifteen he went into a land office and helped to collect rents1 without realising1 it is to be presumed1 that he was contributing to an iniquitous system4 ,he studied pictures in the ,irish ,national ,gallery1 became interested in music through his mother and her friends1 and made his first appearance in print when moved to protest against the evangelistic services of ,sankey and ,moody4 ,at the age of twenty he turned his back upon ,ireland1 and started a literary career in ,london4 ,in the first nine years of consistent literary drudgery he succeeded in earning six pounds4 ,to put it frankly1 ,mr4 ,shaw was not born to succeed as a mere man of letters1 and assuredly not as a writer of romances4 ,his own statement that he exhausted romanticism before he was ten years old is historically inaccurate4 ,he started a literary career early1 but at twenty-nine he was still a romantic young man who had written reams of romantic literature1 and had signally failed4 ,he was right to abandon romance2 it had never inspired him1 and it was entirely natural and human that he should ever after disown and abuse this treacherous mistress4 ,it is characteristic that what really did inspire him and set him moving upon the course ever after to be his own was an event unconnected with those personal1 intimate issues of experience which usually feed the flame of imaginative art4 ,it was a debating speech by ,henry ,george which aroused the reforming ardour thenceforward essential and characteristic in ,mr4 ,shaw1 a speech which sent him to ,karl ,marx1 and made him a man with some business in the world4 ,henry ,george sent him to ,karl ,marx1 and ,karl ,marx sent him to that group of clever people among whom were ,graham ,wallas1 ,hubert ,bland1 ,sidney ,olivier1 and--of main importance--,sidney ,webb4 ,quite the cleverest thing ,i ever did in my life1 ,mr4 ,shaw is reported to have said to his ,american interviewer1 was to force my friendship on ,webb1 to extort his1 and keep it4 ,mr4 ,sidney ,webb was then1 as now1 the constructive encyclopdist1 the man who1 wherever he went1 knew more than anybody present4 ,the truth of the matter is that ,webb and ,i are very useful to each other4 ,we are in perfect contrast1 each supplying the deficiency in the other4444 ,as ,i am an incorrigible mountebank1 and ,webb is one of the simplest of geniuses1 ,i have always been in the centre of the stage1 whilst ,webb has been prompting me1 invisible1 from the side4 ,it was this singular union more than anything else which gave direction and motive force to the propaganda carried on by the ,fabian ,society for a quarter of a century1 whilst to ,mr4 ,shaw personally it gave the consistency of thought and definiteness of aim which underlie all his later work4 ,we cannot1 of course1 neglect the intellectual influence of ,ibsen and ,nietzsche1 ,wagner and ,samuel ,butler1 the individualists and aristocrats who corrected the mob-sentiment of old-fashioned socialism2 but these and similar influences matured in him through his ,fabianism4 ,bernard ,shaw1 of the ,fabian ,society1 ceased to be a private citizen4 ,he became a man of affairs1 destined1 thenceforward1 to live in the publicity of debating-halls1 among those ideas which reformers and politicians have actually socialised1 removing them from the privacy of human experience and turning them into public property--like parks1 open spaces1 and wash-houses4 ,i do not mean that he treated this public property as other1 and more conventionally-minded1 men habitually treat it4 ,mr4 ,shaw walks down the ,strand as if it were his private bridle-path4 ,he walks across an ,insurance ,bill or a ,national ,theatre scheme or a policy for giving self-government to ,englishmen as a man who might be treading the weeds in his own garden4 ,but the intellectual stage-properties were all prepared for him and presented ready-made in those times when he went night after night to lecture in the city and suburbs of ,london4 ,he had1 indeed1 the social cosmopolitanism which made him dissociate himself from small literary coteries and gain a practical knowledge of publicly-minded men4 ,but one cannot fail to see that his long experience of lecturing1 debating1 setting up arguments1 and parrying verbal attacks--which made him the best debater in ,england1 and turned him1 as ,dr4 ,henderson has suggested1 from a doctrinaire into a practical opportunist--served not only to endow him with his consistency as a thinker and his excellence in expounding ideas1 but also confirmed him in his defects as a humanist4 ,his continual intercourse with the innumerable fixed ideas of societies and committees1 his debater's habit of attacking whatever fixed idea he encounters1 have had the effect of organising his own mind along the lines of such fixed ideas1 theses1 positions and oppositions as could be defended or countered by his boundless resource in argument1 wit1 and raillery2 and it followed that his interpretation of life was likely to resolve itself into the debater's generalisations1 the partialities and half-truths which ignore what is individual1 personal1 intimate1 and finest--for the finest things in life are those which cannot be generalised1 which are individual and unique1 which admit of being stated but not argued4 ,it follows also that his strength is in attack and in destructive criticism4 ,the only important positive ideas for which he stands are the ,supermannish idea of the duty of every man to be himself to the utmost1 and a generous democratic idea of freedom1 in accordance with which every self-respecting man and woman should be given the opportunity to work out his or her own destiny fully1 unhampered by the tyrannies of caste1 prestige1 sentimental traditions1 false codes1 and effete moral obligations4 ,but these ideas are of very considerable magnitude4 ,they are capable of almost infinite extension and application to life4 ,and it should be observed that1 though ,mr4 ,shaw thinks mainly about obvious public questions--politics1 the professions1 the institution of marriage1 patriotism1 public oratory1 public health1 etc41 he has nothing in common with the unimaginative public man who merely criticises proposals and policies4 ,he is always interested in the state of mind which produces proposals and policies4 ,when he pleads for the abolition of the ,dramatic ,censorship before a ,royal ,commission1 he gives us not only the most effective practical exposure of the ,censorship that has ever been written1 but also a far-reaching philosophical analysis of liberty as freedom to express and propagate ideas4 ,my reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals1 he says in the ,rejected ,statement1 the presentation of which to the ,royal ,commission affords one of those delightful true stories that only a ,shaw can make so damaging4 ,i write plays with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my opinion in these matters4 ,that he has to a large extent already converted the intellectuals--whether by his plays or by other means--is beyond question4 ,many of the most powerful writers of the last ten years have concentrated their efforts on exposing the tyranny of the established idea and the established moral code4 ,such diverse writers as ,mr4 ,wells1 ,mr4 ,galsworthy1 ,mr4 ,granville ,barker1 ,mr4 ,cunninghame-,graham1 ,mr4 ,belloc1 and ,mr4 ,chesterton have written books the motives of which have been satire1 divine anger1 sva indignatio1 directed against the established moral codes or intellectual habits of the time4 ,mr4 ,shaw1 who originally followed the obscure ,samuel ,butler1 showed the way for the others4 ,his method was1 and is1 to combine argument with the more telling weapon of ridicule4 ,in his ,preface to ,blanco ,posnet he exposes and ridicules the ,dramatic ,censorship1 just as in ,getting ,married he exposes and ridicules the popular conception of happy domestic life1 and in like manner in ,the ,doctor's ,dilemma the superstition that the faculty of medicine is infallible4 ,the picture of concerted professional fraud given us in ,the ,doctor's ,dilemma is not too exaggerated for the purposes of a debating argument2 but in his long essay on the subject he gives a far more reasonable statement of the case4 ,he does not treat the doctor as a murderer1 or a pickpocket1 or a human vulture1 or even a cold-blooded cynic2 he explains what is likely to happen to the ordinary1 moderately decent1 normal man1 without any special moral or intellectual equipment1 who becomes a doctor4 ,as to the honour and conscience of doctors1 they have as much as any other class of men1 no more and no less4 ,and what other men1 he adds characteristically1 dare pretend to be impartial where they have a strong pecuniary interest on one side8 ,he analyses the psychology of the practitioner and the specialist4 ,he shows how much guesswork there must be where even the most distinguished differ2 in what manner we are all handed over1 bound1 to the tender mercies of the men who are often poor1 overworked1 unscientific1 and1 if they are specialists1 prejudiced by exclusive study of one disease4 ,what he says about the surgeon and the specialist is nearer to the truth than what he says about the general practitioner4 ,long experience of all sorts of illnesses is more valuable for the curing of simple diseases than much so-called scientific knowledge2 and1 as it happens1 the life of the general practitioner who comes into sympathetic contact with so many men and women of different types is one which does promote certain healthy cynicisms and human decencies singularly lacking in the specialist on the one side and the routine-driven hospital nurse on the other4 ,but there we have the individual equation4 ,mr4 ,shaw is good at considering general cases2 he is never1 in his writing1 much concerned about individuals4 ,the essay which preceded ,getting ,married is stronger in its attack than in its reconstructive proposals2 and the essay is better than the play1 because ,mr4 ,shaw can present arguments more effectively than persons1 and arguments are more suited to essays than to plays4 ,it is interesting to find him confessing that young women come to me and ask me whether they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with4 ,mr4 ,shaw1 of course1 urges them on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding-ring4 ,he should not have been surprised4 ,he1 if anyone1 should have known that if you attack an existing morality1 the public will inevitably think you are advocating the corresponding immorality as popularly understood2 and one suspects that ,mr4 ,shaw has1 from this natural misunderstanding1 more to answer for than he himself dreams of4 ,when he calls himself an immoralist1 he means that he is the true moralist2 that he is going to substitute for a decayed1 outworn1 conventional1 and stupid morality1 a morality based upon a rational human principle--a morality that will make society better and more tolerable4 ,in this particular essay he asks us to get rid of the idea that the family1 as at present constituted1 is the highest form of human co-partnership4 ,the people who talk and write as if the highest attainable state is that of a family stewing in love continuously from the cradle to the grave can hardly have given five minutes' serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition4 ,home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo4 ,its grave danger to the nation lies in its narrow views1 its unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous concupiscences1 its petty tyrannies1 its false social pretences1 its endless grudges and squabbles1 its sacrifice of the boy's future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he should be in training for his adult life 7remember the boy ,dickens and the blacking factory71 and of the girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents1 its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted ages1 with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like young people1 and the young hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people1 and all the other ills1 mentionable and unmentionable1 that arise from excessive segregation4 ,it sets these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of honour and virtue1 whilst any criticism of or revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice4 ,but when ,mr4 ,shaw begins to reconstruct1 and thinks that the whole matter can be solved by such simple--and so far as they go1 excellent--economic expedients as making women economically independent1 and legitimising children1 he ceases to be persuasive4 ,there comes a point when brilliant cleverness and sheer logic from necessity miss the truth4 ,it is precisely the cut-and-dried ,fabian side of ,mr4 ,shaw which blinds him to facts of a certain sort--the fact1 for instance1 that for certain human needs no ingenious1 or invented1 rational remedy is possible2 that in certain departments of life where the great instincts are concerned the accumulated conscious and subconscious experience of thousands of years of mankind have produced a kind of instinctive knowledge which logic cannot tamper with2 which is bound up with human nature and is near to a thousand subtle truths never yet brought within the scope of scientific knowledge2 which it is dangerous to attack by a brutal frontal assault1 as if the issue were a single and simple debating issue2 which is defied only under just such penalties as ,mr4 ,shaw himself alludes to4 ,it is already evident why ,mr4 ,shaw is far better as lecturer1 debater1 pamphleteer1 and writer of critical essays than as writer of either romances or plays4 ,he is primarily a social reformer1 like ,henry ,george and ,karl ,marx1 though he brings more wit1 cleverness1 driving power1 and intellectual agility to bear upon his subjects4 ,he is interested in public morality and affairs1 in generalities rather than individuals1 in ideas about life rather than in life at first hand4 ,he sees through the intellect rather than through the perceptions4 ,he is concerned to prove and to teach rather than to show4 ,he has made very few characters in his plays1 for the simple reason that he handicaps his persons by treating them as ideas rather than as persons4 ,this is to say1 that as an artist he is never disinterested2 he is more concerned with the case which his puppets are set up to prove than with a situation for its own sake4 ,in ,csar and ,cleopatra he did for once allow a subject to exist for its own sake4 ,he had no axe to grind1 primarily1 on behalf of society and its morals4 ,it is not perhaps the cleverest of his plays1 but it is the play which is most a play2 and if it is not a great play1 that is because ,mr4 ,shaw is not a great dramatist--he has not allowed himself to be a great imaginative artist--he turned his back upon imaginative art at the age of twenty-nine4 ,in the cleverest of his plays there is1 indeed1 always one real person1 and that person is none other than himself4 ,in ,man and ,superman1 in ,arms and the ,man1 and in ,john ,bull's ,other ,island1 the hero is in each case nothing more nor less than a new impersonation of ,bernard ,shaw4 7,in ,john ,bull's ,other ,island ,i take ,larry ,doyle as the hero47 ,the hero is a man who on every possible occasion either gets up and argues with extraordinary fluency and good sense as if he were a very brilliant young man in a debate1 or else is forced into the sort of action which that brilliant debater would have advocated4 ,broadbent1 in ,john ,bull's ,other ,island1 is not a person at all2 he is a brilliantly conceived caricature of ,english stupidity2 he is a general idea1 not an individual4 ,even ,keegan1 who has been extolled as a romantic and unusual figure among the ,shavian dramatis person1 is a chorus rather than a character1 and essentially ,shavian in that his ideals are vegetarian1 and that his language is couched in such terms as-- ,how will you drag our acres from the ferret's grip of ,matthew ,haffigan8 ,how will you persuade ,cornelius ,doyle to forego the pride of being a small landowner8 ,how will ,barney ,doran's millrace agree with your motor-boats8444 ,perhaps ,i had better vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own business than for a foolish patriot who has no mind and no business4 ,that is not the way in which priests1 madmen1 or idealists talk in ,ireland4 ,it is the way they talk at the ,fabian ,society4 ,the present writer is fully aware of the great work which ,mr4 ,shaw has done4 ,he yields to no one in his admiration for the strength of character and the spirited eagerness which have made him so effective in his onslaught upon pernicious illusions1 in making people look beyond the formula and refuse to be blinded by social taboos4 ,but it is just because his influence is so great and in many respects beneficial that we ought to be on our guard against a man who may not always mesmerise us to our advantage4 ,and it is in the matter of the drama and the fine arts in general that ,mr4 ,shaw is proving a dangerous ,messiah4 ,he has done much to cleanse the ,augean stables of the ,english theatre4 ,he has discredited though he has not destroyed the artificial drawing-room play2 he has poured ridicule upon the so-called well-made play which ,scribe1 ,sardou1 and their school could concoct for the delight of ,frenchmen2 he has exposed the insignificance of the accidents and catastrophes1 and the coming down of the curtain on a hero slain or married4 ,he has compelled sensible people to look to the theatre for something more than sentiment1 romance1 ingenuity2 for something relevant to the larger issues of life4 ,that he has done2 and it is doubtful if any ,english-speaking and ,english-writing man now alive1 excepting ,mr4 ,shaw1 could have done it with any thoroughness4 ,but having freed us from these old tyrannies of the stage1 he has not rested there4 ,he has imposed new tyrannies of his own which are sanctioned either by his own extraordinary influence or by that swing of the ,time-,spirit of which he is the visible pendulum4 ,he is very persuasive1 and puts his case so well that he is able to blind us to false issues4 ,he states his case in the ,preface which he wrote to ,three ,plays by ,brieux4 ,brieux is for him the greatest ,french dramatist since ,molire2 and more important because whilst ,molire was content to indict human nature1 ,brieux devotes his energy to an indictment of society4 ,his fisticuffs are not aimed heavenward3 they fall on human noses for the good of human souls4 ,when he sees human nature in conflict with a political abuse he does not blame human nature1 knowing that such blame is the favourite trick of those who wish to perpetuate the abuse without being able to defend it4 ,he does not even blame the abuse3 he exposes it1 and then leaves human nature to tackle it with its eyes open4444 ,you do not go away from a ,brieux play with the feeling that the affair is finished or the problem solved for you by the dramatist4444 ,you come away with a very disquieting sense that you are involved in the affair1 and must find the way out of it for yourself and everybody else if civilisation is to be tolerable to your sense of honour4 ,all this is unmistakable4 ,mr4 ,shaw regards the theatre primarily and essentially as a substitute for the pulpit1 as a convenient lecture-hall for the propaganda of ,shavian socialism4 ,he takes it for granted that there is to be a social problem2 that fisticuffs are to be aimed at somebody's nose as they were in those delightful games of play in which he indulged as a young and earnest ,fabian2 that the audience is to come away tuned up to social endeavour just as people come away from ,revival meetings tuned up to the tasks of spiritual salvation4 ,this is well enough4 ,upon two conditions1 ,i agree that there would be no objection to ,mr4 ,shaw or any other dramatist using the theatre as a means of reforming men2 these conditions being1 firstly1 that he is able to do it--which ,i doubt2 and secondly1 that he should not insist that this use of the theatre is the only proper and legitimate use4 ,mr4 ,shaw has not yet been able to use the theatre in this way1 and still less1 ,brieux4 ,brieux's influence in ,france is mainly due to the fact that he is a brilliant and eloquent lecturer4 ,mr4 ,shaw's influence in ,england is due to his essays1 speeches1 conversations1 personal vehemence1 and ubiquity4 ,people go to see his plays because they are very witty2 they understand them and think they are convinced by them only when they have read and digested his far more convincing ,prefaces4 ,the reason why it is impossible to be profoundly interested in his plays is because he is not profoundly interested in them himself4 ,he evidently wrote them without being excited about his persons1 their experiences1 or the emotions which the situation drew from them2 he was excited about his case1 about the moral or social truth which his puppets could be made to illustrate4 ,there is much ingenious arrangement1 much plausible argument1 and abundant wit4 ,what really does delight us is the often irrelevant wit of the conversation1 and this because ,mr4 ,shaw himself delights in irrelevant wit2 it is only when he is writing wittily and irrelevantly that he is disinterested1 that he is doing something for its own sake1 that he is writing in the only way in which an artist can write effectively4 ,but in so far as he is aiming at something other than a significant presentation of life--and he generally is--he is attempting to indict society1 to show up abuses1 to expose political and social sores2 he is ceasing to be interested in his subject1 his persons1 his play2 he is forcing human nature out of itself2 he is distorting it2 he is making it unreal2 he is creating monsters--and no dramatist1 no artist of any kind1 can deal effectively with monsters4 ,when he writes a play1 ,mr4 ,shaw attempts to do two completely different things at one and the same time--to present life1 and to deduce an arguable and preconceived conclusion about life4 ,if he has not completely failed1 that is because he has not completely lived up to his theories4 ,it is not ,mr4 ,shaw's fault that so many of the cleverest younger writers of the time allow themselves to be led away by his example4 ,but that they are so led away--not only in drama1 but in the kindred art of fiction--is a fact so important that it requires statement4 ,mr4 ,shaw is entitled to his own opinion that what we want as the basis of our plays and novels is not romance1 but a really scientific natural history2 he is quite right1 if he feels it to be his own particular function1 to spend his whole force in indicting society4 ,but how terrible a loss in human interest and vitality if all our creative artists are to occupy themselves in this process of indictment--indictment being at all times the antithesis of fair criticism and presentment4 ,i would venture to suggest that human life1 roughly speaking1 may be divided into two great parts1 one of which is completely tabooed by ,mr4 ,shaw4 ,these two parts or aspects of life may be named and envisaged in a hundred different ways4 ,aristotle called them the practical and the theoretic4 ,the ,roman ,church called them the temporal and the spiritual4 ,the social philosophers called them the ,state and the ,individual4 ,they may be called ,science and ,art1 ,politics and ,poetry1 ,public and ,private1 ,social and ,personal1 ,public ,work 7,shaw7 and ,the ,will of ,god1 ,philanthropy and ,friendship1 ,justice and ,mercy1 ,humanitarian and ,human4 ,each second term in these categories is cut clean out of modern life by ,mr4 ,shaw4 ,when he says that ,ibsen was to the last fascinating and full of a strange moving beauty1 he says it as if he were reproaching ,ibsen4 ,his whole influence is thrown on to the side of an austere common sense which destroys emotion because it may become fanaticism1 which laughs at sentiment because it may be perverted into nonsense1 which is as ,puritanically cruel to the insidious blandishments of romance as ,plato was cruel to the poets4 ,is it fanciful to imagine that it is with the ,irishman as ,i have always fancied it was with the ,greek philosopher1 that by reason of his own knowledge of the dangerous burning fever of poetry1 from his own susceptibility to its enchantments1 he decided to crown the poets with garlands and banish them to another city8 ,that1 indeed1 is an idle fancy4 ,mr4 ,shaw exists to prove that there are ,irishmen who do not suffer from the intoxication of beauty1 who are not susceptible to the windy ardours of romance4 ,nevertheless ,mr4 ,shaw1 too1 has his romance4 ,he learnt it in the eager1 fighting days when he held up the standard of ,fabianism before the blinking eyes of suburban audiences2 when he learnt to detest the silly ways of silly people whose silliness was feebly glorified under the names of morality1 religion1 sentiment1 and patriotism2 whose qualities he soon found himself exposing in the manner habitual to the trained debater4 ,but this was no ordinary debater4 ,there were conviction1 sincerity1 and even romantic--,god save the word6--romantic zeal behind this fire of argument1 laughter1 repartee4 ,life had become for him1 as he said to ,dr4 ,henderson1 a sort of splendid torch1 which ,i have got hold of for the moment4 ,it became his business to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations4 ,,ii ,h4,g4 ,,wells ,mr4 ,shaw has said that his biography will be the history of his time4 ,in like manner we might say of ,mr4 ,wells that his life has represented the ,english life of his time4 ,the former has touched this ,english life at a thousand points1 but he has touched it from the outside4 ,the latter has been an integral part of it1 a part which has sprung into consciousness of itself1 so that he has written from within outwards4 ,inevitably in writing about the ,england of his time he has found himself writing about that ,england of which he himself is symbolic4 ,mr4 ,shaw is amazingly clever in generalising about ,england1 in reducing ,england to formul1 in expressing the ideas which her life and society have stirred in his logical mind4 ,but ,mr4 ,wells has felt this national life within himself2 he has known it by conscious and subconscious experience1 this experience being with him a kind of instinct developing into self-knowledge1 and so into a more objective and philosophical perception4 ,you can tell from ,mr4 ,shaw's light1 debonair1 and laughing manner1 just as you might guess from his rather hard and unemotional writing1 that experience of living has laid no heavy toll upon his temperament4 ,how different that nervous and slightly self-conscious manner of ,mr4 ,wells1 that exterior geniality which never wholly possesses the man1 a cover1 as it were1 to those inner springs of consciousness to which he has evidently referred the world6 ,it was strange when these two men1 presenting so marked a contrast1 confronted each other at the ,fabian ,society--that association of well-informed1 constructive1 slightly academic ,socialists to which both at the time belonged4 ,it was evident that ,bernard ,shaw1 supported by ,sidney ,webb1 standing for a perfectly clear-cut policy and program1 should win the day against a man whose appeal was essentially to something not clear-cut1 not defined1 but to instinct and psychology4 ,i have been told that ,mr4 ,wells was never able to put forward a coherent program1 to state an intelligible case--but all that ,i know for certain is that it was not intelligible to the ,fabians4 ,it is probable enough that his program1 as a program1 was defective1 for whilst it is perfectly easy to define a simple1 definite1 not widely inclusive policy of action1 it is far harder to define that side of the life of a nation which belongs to temperament and instinct4 ,this was what ,mr4 ,wells had in mind2 but the social reformers to whom he addressed himself preferred a definite scheme touching the surface of life to an indefinite scheme which aimed at the centre4 ,so ,mr4 ,wells ceased to be a ,fabian1 and became a ,tory-,socialist4 ,i suggest that ,mr4 ,wells' life and activity may be taken as symbolical of the life of his time4 ,he has told his own story again and again in his novels2 it is his own story that he has been telling when he unfolds his ideas about the society in which we live4 ,he1 more than any other considerable living writer1 seems to have been born to realise within the microcosm of his own experience the social evolution which most of us see in the macrocosm of the nation--an evolution which has been observed by ,mr4 ,bennett with equal clearness1 but in a less personal and subjective way1 with more detachment4 ,all of us know from the study of history in what way ,england has changed in the last hundred years--how scientific thought suddenly gained a new importance when it was applied to industry--how the shell of feudalism survived its vitality when the great factory towns began to dominate the country--how all the classes were shuffled and left unsettled--how the cities spread out in disorderly suburbs and slums1 without plan or direction--how men and women became factory workers and office workers without knowing why1 most of them scantily educated1 housed as the competing jerry-builders thought fit1 and flung into the maelstrom of competitive labour4 ,all this we knew in a certain sense1 but it was ,mr4 ,wells more than anyone else who made us aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible effective way1 the imaginative way4 ,it may almost be said that he gave it to us as an impressionistic account of his own life4 ,he had lived in all this2 the social system1 or lack of system1 had expressed itself in him2 and finally he became conscious of all those elements about him and in him which had left their deep impression4 ,most of us have had an experience in some way similar1 though not many of us have been so intimately acquainted with so many classes1 so many varieties of people1 or have felt our experiences so acutely4 ,he was singular in that he found his way to an expression of those effects which the national life had had upon him--that is to say1 upon a man who had been brought up in a lower middle-class family in the ,victorian era1 who had watched the ,london suburbs creeping outwards1 who had lived among shop-assistants1 who had studied science in laboratories1 who had aspired to something more fruitful for the spirit4 ,he did not become aware of these significances all at once4 ,the first eager desire to express himself and create took the form of those early romantic stories--,the ,invisible ,man1 ,the ,descent of the ,martians1 ,the ,time ,machine1 etc4--stories in which his knowledge of science and ,jules ,verne were not yet allied to a philosophic enthusiasm for human beings in society4 ,then he began to be conscious of the great problems of society1 and generalised about them in his romantic1 ingenious1 philosophically imaginative way in such books as ,anticipations1 ,a ,modern ,utopia1 etc41 until he began to realise that that personal method which he had adopted in ,kipps was the best method of expressing the consciousness now awake in him of his own life1 of his relations with the people he had met and the country he had lived in1 and of the vague1 restless desires--desires cast in the mould of this material world1 yet half mystical in their nature--which had first made him percipient1 then critical and dissatisfied1 then critical and irritable1 then critical and religious1 and afterwards--it remains to be seen4 ,it was in ,tono-,bungay that ,mr4 ,wells achieved an unquestionable success4 ,when he wrote that book it seemed that all the experiences of which hitherto he had been only partially conscious became clear to him2 that all the clever but unrelated literary efforts which he had hitherto made found here their clue and connecting link1 their inspired synthesis4 ,long before this he had written astonishing1 ingenious1 philosophic1 shrewd1 suggestive books1 but he had achieved no success on this scale4 ,here he seemed to have brought together all the threads of his many intellectual energies1 and woven them into a single fabric fit for wear-and-tear and adornment4 ,at the first he had written romances such as ,jules ,verne would have been glad to write2 he had gone on to project new worlds constructed after analysis of the present1 or in anticipation of the future1 or ideally from the ideal2 he had written comic stories and weird stories1 and one or two true stories2 and he had turned to economics and political science with reforming zeal4 ,but here we have it all again1 not in parts1 but as a comprehensive whole1 in a novel which asks us to consider every class in the social ladder in modern ,england1 which questions the whole organisation of our society1 which raises central questions about birth1 marriage1 religion1 death1 and survival1 and presents the whole as a personal and human affair4 ,mr4 ,wells set himself to this task in his own queer1 plodding1 ,english way4 ,to the niceties of style and form he paid little attention4 ,he tells the story as best he can1 in his own slangy1 cumbrous1 ,latin-,english1 but idiomatic way--there is little selection or self-suppression1 but he makes his points4 ,he draws from a copious store4 ,considered as social satire1 it is an exposure of the silliness and futility of our system of competitive capitalism superimposed on feudalism4 ,or you may take it as a book of adventure1 and find our hero and his erratic uncle plunging into orgies of hazardous exploits and achievements4 ,or you may take it as a novel of love1 and languish with the hero in a misdirected amour1 and burn with him in a glorious1 futile1 and tragic affection4 ,or you may take it as a novel of ,england1 of the many currents of ,english life joining in one vast stream on which the barque of the narrator floats4 ',this1' it came to me1 'is ,england4 ,this is what ,i wanted to give in my book4 ,this6' ,and this1 the vision which comes to ,mr4 ,wells through a kind of instinct about the life he has experienced and sought to convey--the vague dream that haunts and baffles him--the desired1 intangible1 dimly-felt1 but unknown thing--is offered as a kind of mystical solution to the insoluble problem of an imperfect world4 ,the title--it is typical of ,mr4 ,wells--suggests at once the farcical element in the whole thing4 ,tono-,bungay--a quack medicine1 slightly injurious rubbish sold at one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle1 including the ,government stamp4 ,we can only approach ,tono-,bungay1 which is modern and representative of our whole industrial system1 by way of something prior to it--the old social order which exists only as a tradition1 which is maintained as a vast1 stupid1 demoralising pretence1 undermined by ,tono-,bungayism4 ,the old order1 in ,mr4 ,wells' language1 is called the ,bladesover ,system1 ,bladesover being the house where ,i1 ,george ,ponderevo1 the housekeeper's son--one of the many incarnations of the author himself--was born1 brought up1 and acquired his first impressions of life4 ,the great house1 the church1 the village1 and the labourers1 and the servants in their stations and degrees seemed to me1 ,i say1 to be a closed and complete social system4 ,about us were other villages and great estates1 and from house to house1 interlacing1 correlated1 the gentry1 the fine ,olympians1 came and went4 ,the country towns seemed mere collections of shops1 marketing-places for the tenantry1 centres for such education as they needed1 as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so4 ,i thought this was the order of the whole world4 ,all this fine appearance was already sapped4 ,george himself1 as a boy1 had already begun to question the final rightness of the gentlefolks1 declaring his rebellion by resolving to marry a viscount's daughter and blacking the eye of her half-brother4 ,he is transported to the house of ,nicodemus ,frapp1 baker1 of ,chatham1 where he again rebels1 this time against the threat of being burned for ever in ,hell4 ,thence he is taken to the house of his uncle ,ponderevo1 chemist1 of ,wimblehurst1 a small town dominated1 like ,bladesover1 by the landed gentry tradition4 ,and he finds in this uncle1 whose name is soon to become a household word throughout the country1 a veritable embodiment of the new spirit which is invading the ,bladesover system and altering ,england4 ,mr4 ,ponderevo is restless and discontented4 ,he does not like ,wimblehurst4 ,one rubs along4 ,but there's no development--no growth4 ,they just come along here and buy pills when they want 'em--and a horse-ball or such4 ,they've got to be ill before there's a prescription4 ,that sort they are4 ,you can't get 'em to launch out1 you can't get 'em to take up anything new4 ,mr4 ,ponderevo1 being bankrupt1 moves to ,london1 and in the course of time ,george1 now a student of science1 follows him4 ,new vistas of life open up in the midst of this vast1 overgrown1 purposeless1 dingy city4 ,nobody since ,dickens has given us the impression of ,london in all its multitudinous1 dismal-gay activities as ,mr4 ,wells gives it us4 ,but it is no longer the ,london of ,dickens4 ,it is a great1 stupid giantess1 a city of ,bladesover 444 parasitically occupied1 insidiously replaced by alien1 unsympathetic1 and irresponsible elements4 ,it was a chaotic mass of houses built for the middle-class ,victorian families4 ,and even while these houses were being run up3 ,means of transit were developing to carry the moderately prosperous middle-class families out of ,london2 education and factory employment were whittling away at the supply of rough hard-working1 obedient girls who would stand the subterranean drudgery of these places2 new classes of hard-up middle-class people such as my uncle1 employees of various types1 were coming into existence1 for whom no homes were provided4 ,none of these classes have ideas of what they ought to be1 or fit in any legitimate way into the ,bladesover theory that dominates our minds4 ,it was nobody's concern to see them housed under civilised conditions1 and the beautiful laws of supply and demand had free play4 ,it was such a ,london1 such an ,england1 which offered itself invitingly to the predatory ambitions of ,mr4 ,ponderevo1 so that out of a simple concoction of drugs and water he was able to capture the money of hundreds of thousands who fondly believed that ,tono-,bungay would give them new vigour and zest in life4 ,mr4 ,wells describes to us the sudden rise and development of ,mr4 ,ponderevo1 to whose fortunes those of ,george are linked2 he tells us how he grows in importance1 how he moves into houses larger and larger to suit his new place in the social scale1 how vast a position he comes to hold in the financial world of ,london1 in the philanthropic world1 and1 of course1 in the social world4 ,it is whilst he is interesting us in ,george and his associates that ,mr4 ,wells makes us aware also of the higher unit of society and the whole strange fraud of modern life1 the pretence that there has been no change when conditions have radically changed and are still changing4 ,the theory of the old order broods over the new1 chaotic1 haphazard world which flings people up and down1 sets their whole life--birth1 marriage1 possessions1 happiness--at the mercy of mere chance4 ,in the love interest which is an important part of the story he presents the modern treatment of marriage and sex as another disastrous example of muddling and disorder4 ,but he does not dwell long or didactically on each of these problems4 ,they arise naturally and inevitably1 as a part of human life1 in the course of his story of adventure and love4 ,he does not pretend to solve the perplexing questions4 ,the hero feels that he is like a man floundering in a universe of soap-suds1 up and down1 east and west4 ,i can't stand it4 ,i must get my foot on something solid or--,i don't know what4 ,behind it all1 in its chaos and ugliness1 he does not lose the sense of something other and better1 a vague but insistent ideal cherished by the spirit4 ,there is something links things for me1 a sunset or so1 a mood or so1 the high air1 something there was in ,marion's form and colour1 something ,i find and lose in ,mantegna's pictures1 something in the lines of these boats ,i make4 ,there1 evidently enough1 is something that the artist1 the poet even1 wants4 ,it is the mystical need1 the desideratum1 expressed in terms of this world's goods--,marion's form and colour1 ,mantegna's pictures1 the lines of a boat4 ,if there is any solution here1 let it be noted that it is essentially an individual1 a personal solution1 the artist's solution of the world-problem in terms of what is personally significant to individuals4 ,but when applied to men and women in the mass1 how thin and watery this ideal becomes1 how unsubstantial and shadowy1 how unsuited to the collective needs of society1 which are practical and material4 ,every man in his public1 social capacity must necessarily express his ideals in a material and practical form2 the mystical side can only find expression in the private life1 in the personal way which is the way of art and individual intercourse4 ,but when ,mr4 ,wells became dimly aware of the personal equation in life and the personal ideal1 he1 who had already dedicated himself to the treatment of social problems and men in the mass1 attempted1 by mystical contradiction1 to identify the private and the public1 the ideal with the material1 the free with the bound4 ,to make my meaning clearer1 ,i will recall again the incident at the ,fabian ,society4 ,it is just as if ,mr4 ,wells had gone to that mixed gathering of austere and flippant socialists1 and had said1 ,we want something to link things for us2 we must remember the things that men cherish most of all1 a sunset or so1 a mood or so1 the high air4 ,when we are settling the women's question1 we must not forget that ,marion cares more about her form and colour than about her vote2 and if we are nationalising the great masters1 let us remember that there is something we may find and lose in a single ,mantegna more important to us than all the galleries in the world4 ,the derelict ',victory1' with her romantic lines1 means as much to the nation as the biggest ,dreadnought in the world4 ,and we can imagine ,mr4 ,shaw getting up to question the novelist4 ,will ,mr4 ,wells explain to us how the ,state is going to preserve ,marion's colour8 ,does he propose to arrange sunset effects on ,primrose ,hill8 ,will he describe the apparatus by which he intends to capture and bottle the high air1 and distribute it for public consumption8 ,and where are we to look for the something to be found in ,mantegna's pictures when he has been so unfortunate as to lose it8 ,mr4 ,wells1 naturally enough1 broke with the ,fabian ,society2 and at the same time1 discovering the inadequacy of his remedy1 broke with the whole social order1 resigned himself for a time to sheer irritation1 and took his revenge upon the world in ,the ,new ,machiavelli4 ,he devoted his brilliant powers to satirising the whole public life of ,great ,britain1 in the same breath lampooning the public persons with whom he had been personally associated1 and defending himself against certain personal charges which had been brought against him4 ,it was an effective book4 ,it occasioned not a little gossip1 excitement1 scandal1 and even heart-burning4 ,though the author announced that the persons in the novel were composite characters1 not to be taken as likenesses of real persons1 and though no doubt there were scenes and conversations which he had invented and incidents which he had transposed1 nevertheless in many essentials the story was photographic4 ,mr4 ,wells himself was never1 like his hero ,remington1 either at ,cambridge or in ,parliament1 but he came under the same educational1 social1 and political influences which determined ,remington's character and career4 ,remington's friends1 who are exposed in all the intimacy of private life to the public gaze1 were once1 under other names1 the friends of ,mr4 ,wells4 ,no one who has any acquaintance with public personages in ,london can fail to identify those apostles of social organisation1 ,mr4 ,bailey and his wife ,altiora4 ,equally transparent are the young ,liberals1 ,edward and ,willie ,crampton4 ,if the novelist has caricatured these persons he has seen to it that he has never distorted them out of recognition4 ,the realism with which he describes these and a score of popularly esteemed public men is applied also to their womenkind2 ,isabel is not spared2 nor is ,margaret1 ,remington's wife4 ,here1 then1 we have what is at the same time ,remington's ,apologia for his errors1 and his revenge upon the society which decided to discredit him4 ,he presents himself as an unarmed1 discredited man1 whose power with the pen cannot be checked2 a man half out of life already because of the red blaze that came out of my unguarded nature1 and closed my career for me2 a man who cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him1 and to those who have heard already some crude inaccurate version of our story and why ,i did not take office1 and have formed your partial judgment on me4 ,remington's reply to the man who urges him to hush up the scandal gives a colour of personal disinterestedness to the story4 ,it's our duty to smash now openly in the sight of everyone4 ,i've got that as clear and plain--as prison whitewash4 ,i am convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now--,i mean it--until every corner of our world knows this story1 knows it fully1 adds it to the ,parnell story and the ,ashton ,dean story and the ,carmel story and the ,witterslea story1 and all the other stories that have kicked man after man out of ,english public life1 the men with active imaginations1 the men of strong initiative4 ,to think this tottering1 old-woman-ridden ,empire should dare to waste a man on such a score6 ,but ,mr4 ,wells intends something more than to explain the state of mind which led a distinguished politician and moralist1 a married1 middle-aged man1 to victimise--that is the worldly way of looking at it--a beautiful young girl who had fallen in love with his genius4 ,here we have the life-story and character of ,remington portrayed at full length--,remington an individual product of our social environment--,remington in relation to the vast national processes which have been changing ,england from the muddle of the ,victorians to the muddle of to-day--a ,remington clever enough to see our representative institutions stripped of their hollowness and their cant2 quick to pierce through the shell of ,liberalism1 not perhaps quite to the kernel of it1 but to the insincere part of it2 quick to see a profound psychological meaning in the ,suffragette movement1 and to distinguish between the outer bearing of public men and the individuality behind it--the hinterland4 ,the whole was a brilliant analysis of ,england in macrocosm and microcosm welded into the life-story of ,remington4 ,and his hero is not like one of ,mrs4 ,humphry ,ward's puppets1 set up to be a great politician4 ,remington as a thinker is almost a great man2 he is a profound analyst of society on its human side2 he is a gifted critic of public institutions2 even his absurd perversity in trying to invent a constructive1 motherhood-endowing ,toryism is the perversity of a versatile and clever man whose action is precipitated by bitterness or pique4 ,but the extraordinary thing about ,the ,new ,machiavelli is1 that this envisaging of ,england in her social1 political1 and intellectual life1 this acutely and almost diabolically observed crowd of real persons1 this minute psychology1 this exact history1 this elaborate philosophy--all are subservient to the purpose of explaining how it was that ,remington was driven into the net of sex1 and ,isabel was enabled to darn his socks4 ,parturiunt montes4 ,is it thus that ,remington will make himself immortal in literature1 the twentieth-century ,benvenuto ,cellini1 swaggering1 in a self-conscious1 twentieth-century way1 through the tale of his glorious peccadilloes8 ,or is it to be a ,jonathan ,wild1 memorable as the hero of a hundred magnificent felonies with which a ,fielding or a ,wells could glorify a sturdy vagabond8 ,but ,remington writes in bitterness4 ,his pen is steeped in the gall of ,swift4 ,he feels rancour against ,altiora1 against the ,cramptons1 against all the ,pinky-,dinkies who prescribe morals for a genius erratic in his desires4 ,the successive mental stages by which ,remington emerges had been set forth before in other books4 ,they are here brought together and surveyed in a comprehensive whole4 ,he is anxious to strip off the disguises of human nature1 and to expose1 in each of the persons arrayed before us1 the self-behind-the-frontage4 ,in the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of ,altiora ,bailey1 and was envied and discussed1 praised and depreciated1 in the ,house and in smoking-room groups1 you really have as much of a man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice4 ,his ideal is the individual who lives and acts in the full light of that self-behind-the-frontage--the hinterland1 as he calls him2 and his literary method in this book is to expose the emptiness of the shop-window1 to cast his satire upon the poor show4 ,the weakness of his attacks is that the ideal with which he would illuminate his background is shifty1 uncertain1 ill-realised2 being undetermined1 the function that is allotted to the human ideal is actually left to chance1 to accidental impulse rather than to conscious will--to human frailty rather than to human strength4 ,hence it is that he declares the rights of sex where its claims are weakest2 now applauds the conduct of ,remington1 now apologises for it2 now explains elaborately that his mere sensual side would assert itself1 now that sex never appealed to him without an admixture of the ideal2 now cries out for discussion and public enlightenment on this subject1 and now acknowledges that ,remington1 who had discussed it for years1 acted on impulse1 in the dark4 ,how uncertain it all is1 how mixed in its motives1 how brilliantly bewildering in its conclusions--and yet how clever6 ,it was probably a passing phase in ,mr4 ,wells' history1 an unhappy phase for him1 presumably1 but inevitable4 ,in the uneasy period of irritation and defiance he lost none of his skill in self-portraiture1 in projecting himself upon the canvas of modern life4 ,it was that vein of undefined ,romanticism in him1 according so ill with the life of public affairs1 that put him out of harmony with himself4 ,such an ideal as he had formed for himself could never by its nature completely satisfy any but the solitary recluse1 and had little to give to man in his social capacity1 still less to the man whom he depicted in ,marriage1 irritated1 frustrated1 drained of his higher energies by the irritating calls of society4 ,long before1 in ,a ,modern ,utopia1 he had prescribed for his ,samurai rulers a periodical course of solitude and meditation in the desert4 ,in the book which1 while ,i write1 is the last of his books--,marriage--he comes back to the same idea4 ,he depicts a hero full of scientific ardour and intellectual ambition who finds that in the social life there is nothing to satisfy his deepest needs1 and that only in turning his back on the world of people and flying to commune with ,god1 nature1 and himself1 in solitude1 can he attain the mystical peace he longs for4 ,the social world which becomes an obsession to ,trafford1 his hero1 is made to swarm about him through the inevitable net of marriage--although it is marriage to a fascinating woman whom he still loves4 ,at first he had sacrificed his scientific ideal to the domestic and material needs4 ,he had abandoned research in order to make ,marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness4 ,the comfortable house1 the artistic surroundings1 the social pleasures1 and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity seemed destined to live4 ,he sees the impulses under which men and women seek to escape from the petty1 weakly stimulating1 competitive motives of low-grade and law-abiding prosperity4 ,marriage is the social bond which has involved him in this4 ,marjorie herself has become the feminine embodiment of that urgent life of getting on1 of just doing1 which seeks to trammel1 stifle1 and kill the spirit and higher intelligence of man4 ,through marriage the earthy sociality of life had thrust itself upon him1 and was killing what was apprehensive1 curious1 spiritually and intelligently aspiring within him4 ,he rebels4 ,he flies to the wintry wilds of ,labrador1 and takes ,marjorie with him4 ,there1 in a merely fantastic but brilliantly described scene1 amid the thrilling dangers of a wild solitude and a grim winter1 they discover themselves4 ,they come near to one another in moments of peril1 deprivation1 and self-sacrifice4 ,he passionately asserts1 she passionately agrees1 that we can't do things4 ,we don't bring things off6 444 ,the real thing is to get knowledge and express it 444 ,this ,being--using its eyes1 listening1 trying to comprehend it4 ,every good thing in man is that--looking and making pictures1 listening and making songs1 making philosophies and sciences1 trying new powers1 bridge and engine1 spark and gun4 ,at the bottom of my soul1 that4 ,he sees man without eyes for those greater things1 but we've got the promise--the intimation of eyes4 ,this is not1 it is to be feared1 a very satisfactory solution for the average man or woman who is suffering either from destiny unrealised or from the milder malady of nerves4 ,the medical or the spiritual adviser who should prescribe a course of ,labrador whenever we are physically or spiritually run down would be of little use to the majority of us4 ,we see here the monkish side of ,mr4 ,wells' temperament deliberately torturing the social and worldly side of him1 the spirit suggesting to the flesh and the devil that they ought to be content with spiritual contemplation4 ,the mystic has the final word in those humorous-passionate conversations in which first and last things are discussed by the man and the woman in the wild--the man and woman1 still comparatively young1 about to return to a new life in civilisation4 ,but what will they become when they return8 ,what will ,marjorie do when the shops once again lie temptingly before her1 and when her aunt ,plessington's guests once more besiege her1 and social life presents itself again in its garish variety8 ,is this visit to the wild more decisive than marriage itself8 ,will their brief vision of ,god1 their intellectual and spiritual conversion1 make them live happily ever after8 ,mr4 ,wells1 at least1 should know that it will not2 he will surely be bound to write another novel to show the final stage of ,marjorie and ,trafford1 the renewed conflict1 within them and between them1 of the world and the spirit4 ,for it is a conflict without end1 a conflict which ,mr4 ,wells1 as he goes on writing the history of his own most interesting self in relation to his own most interesting environment1 must contrive to present to us in each new book that he writes4 ,,iii ,,arnold ,,bennett ,mr4 ,arnold ,bennett has often been spoken of as if he were a sort of revised edition of ,mr4 ,wells4 ,in reality the contrast which these two writers present is far more remarkable than the resemblance4 ,the important works of ,mr4 ,wells came first in order of time1 and ,mr4 ,bennett would readily admit that he owes much to the other's imaginative pictures of a changing civilisation4 ,he belongs also1 like ,mr4 ,wells1 to the essentially ,english tradition of fiction4 ,in spite of an admiration for ,french literature which has had a refreshing effect upon his style1 he has written many of his novels as ,fielding1 ,smollett1 ,dickens1 and ,thackeray wrote theirs--out of the abundance of his imagination1 from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life in all its profusion1 in its littleness and its greatness1 a colossal whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes the selection4 ,in his longer books he has adopted the epic rather than the dramatic method of writing fiction4 ,he will often indulge his fancy for insubordinate episodes1 so long as they are in some way characteristic4 ,he loves abundance of description--there is scarcely any novelist who is more precise in describing all the minuti of a place or the physical traits of a person4 ,this sort of profusion is very ,english2 and ,mr4 ,wells1 too1 is essentially ,english4 ,the two men were born at about the same time4 ,they came from families which belonged1 broadly speaking1 to the same social class4 ,they have both of them written with perfect frankness of the sort of people they have known intimately in their youth4 ,and there1 ,i think1 the resemblance ends4 ,the contrast is far more striking4 ,all the most important of ,mr4 ,wells' books have been written about himself4 ,mr4 ,bennett has never written about himself excepting in an early book like ,the ,man from the ,north1 in certain inferior books of his middle period1 and when he is deliberately writing his impressions of places1 as in his book about ,america4 ,it is always the personality of ,mr4 ,wells with which ,mr4 ,wells is most concerned1 and the world as related to him4 ,the personality of ,mr4 ,bennett is kept in the background4 ,he is an interested observer1 and he gives what he has seen or believes that he has seen--he reports faithfully as one who might be held responsible for the actuality of his vision4 ,men and women1 places and things1 are all to him curious phenomena which it will be worth his while to note1 to try to understand1 to record in so far as they are significant4 ,mr4 ,wells has an extraordinary intellectual capacity of interpreting his own impressions1 and lighting upon truths by some romantic or instinctive process of his own4 ,mr4 ,bennett has a very much harder sense of fact4 ,he understands romance1 but he is not himself romantic4 ,his interests are all in the understanding and interpreting of the significant facts of life1 and he cares very little for the pleasure of living outside that kind of living which is artistic perception4 ,and yet he has so much practicality and common sense--the sense of fact which in his art stands him in such good stead--that he has even been prepared to sacrifice his art to the main practical necessities of life4 ,at any rate1 it is upon this hypothesis that we must explain some of the very poor books which he perpetrated before it became worth his while to protect his reputation--the only other possible explanation being that1 as he writes at all times and in all moods1 much of his work might be expected to be below his proper level4 ,but ,mr4 ,bennett is not only extraordinarily versatile in his observations of people1 places1 books--anything whatsoever that he comes upon--but he has the faculty always of seeing objects as if he saw them for the first time2 that is to say1 he brings imaginative curiosity to bear upon them4 ,he is not personally distressed1 like ,mr4 ,wells1 about the evil fate of the world any more than he would be elated by its good fortune4 ,but he is interested4 ,he looks for character1 and he finds it4 ,he looks for situation1 and he makes it4 ,he can be content with a light comic situation1 as in ,helen with the ,high ,hand1 and the result is admirable4 ,he can present with equal skill profoundly poignant situations1 such as occur in ,clayhanger and ,hilda ,lessways4 ,he is aware of the fact that life is a spectacle2 and that to make it interesting you must make it vivid1 you must show it as something that is intense and passionate4 ,and he is also aware of the fact that the feeling of intensity and passion may be elicited from a sense of the monotonous1 the trivial1 and the vapid2 that tragic effect may be gained by the spectacle of men seeking an ideal which is beyond their powers1 or grasping at an ideal which proves unworthy1 or indifferent to an ideal which we see to be within their reach4 ,it may be taken as certain that1 with or without the example of ,mr4 ,wells1 ,mr4 ,bennett must inevitably have been affected by the sense of the changing conditions of modern life1 and the passing of the generations from one set of habits to another4 ,for it must be remembered that he was born and brought up in the ,potteries in the middle and later ,victorian periods2 that as a young man he left those provinces1 and in course of time found himself engaged in the profession of literature at a safe distance from them4 ,he wrote about all sorts of subjects--and in every sort of style--articles1 didactic books1 fantasies1 novels--but as a good journalist he at length discovered that on one subject he was a specialist1 that to his accounts of one part of the world he could supply local colour--that part of the world being1 of course1 the ,five ,towns of the ,potteries4 ,he made this region his own4 ,he adopted it for literary purposes4 ,and in writing ,anna of the ,five ,towns1 ,tales of the ,five ,towns1 ,the ,grim ,smile of the ,five ,towns1 and his more famous later novels he naturally found himself describing the ,potteries as they were when he was a young man1 but as they no longer are to-day4 ,what was more natural than that1 as he passed from the last generation to the present1 writing in the present about the remarkably different past1 he should become supremely impressed with the very fact of the transition--that fact of changing and growing old which dominates ,the ,old ,wives' ,tale1 and supplies him with his theme in the play of ,milestones8 ,in ,the ,old ,wives' ,tale he presents a series of pictures which make us realise that there are men and women about us who were brought up in a world so totally unlike ours that we regard it as purely historical4 ,he has brought out this fact in a way that may cause misgivings even to those who are still considered young4 ,he takes us back to the most vivid memories of our childhood4 ,he recalls to us what ,england was like and what people were like in an age when electric trams were unknown1 when bicycles were rare1 when the retail trader was a person who could still call his soul his own4 ,he has shown us people born in one world and growing old in another4 ,he has presented to us the fantastic but true panorama of certain persons who were young and idealistic1 who became middle-aged and practical1 who are now old and acquiescent2 of persons who were born mid-,victorians1 who became later-,victorians1 who to this day survive grotesquely among the moderns--and again young men and women of to-day who themselves will survive to a derelict old age among people as unlike us as we are unlike the heroes of ,mrs4 ,ward ,beecher ,stowe4 ,no one of us will attain a ripe old age without experiencing three different generations marked by three different sets of habits1 sentiments1 ideals4 ,mr4 ,bennett's subject is the tragi-comedy of growing old4 ,the author presented his people1 and the places in which they lived1 in all the minuti of their and its existence4 ,he combined the realistic modern method with the bitter1 ironical1 sententious method of ,thackeray4 ,there is nothing in the first half of this book which ,thackeray would have done better1 and ,thackeray never illustrated a law of life remorselessly working itself out as ,mr4 ,bennett has done4 ,his mind and his perceptions are at work simultaneously4 ,he is alternately humorous and grim1 but is too philosophical1 interested1 and detached ever to be bitter4 ,that was the world our fathers were born in--he shows it to us--that is what our fathers are among us to this day--and again we have the picture4 ,you cannot step twice into the same river1 said ,heraclitus4 ,you cannot go back to the town you were born in1 ,mr4 ,bennett means to say2 and his book makes his meaning clear4 ,two sisters1 ,constance and ,sophia1 are the girls1 women1 widows whom we see growing up from the 'fifties to the latter part of the first decade of the twentieth century4 ,when we meet them first they are young girls--fifteen and sixteen--rather like racehorses1 quivering with delicate1 sensitive1 and luxuriant life2 exquisite1 enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood2 innocent1 artful1 roguish1 prim1 gushing1 ignorant1 and miraculously wise--at an age when if one is frank1 one must admit that one has nothing to learn3 one has learnt simply everything in the previous six months4 ,these two young people are unconscious of the miraculous age which is us4 ,they lived in the ,potteries before the ,potteries had acquired that big black spot on the map which now dignifies and degrades their existence4 ,they lived in and around the important draper's shop in ,the ,square1 under the wing of their respected parents1 the once active citizen1 now paralytic1 ,mr4 ,baines1 and ,mrs4 ,baines1 the ruler1 the dictator of the household and of the morals of all its members4 ,in the first stage we see ,constance and ,sophia subject to this parental rule4 ,they take castor oil when they are bidden4 ,they do not leave the house without the sanction of ,mrs4 ,baines4 ,they must not1 needless to say1 realise the fact that marriageable young men are real facts4 ,they must pay attention to the shop1 preserving a proper distance from the assistants4 ,they must be careful that ,maggie1 the servant1 does not overhear familiar conversations4 ,they must not go into the drawing-room except on ,sunday afternoons4 ,they must wait upon the paralytic father with proper punctilio4 ,and they must be quiet and attentive when ,mrs4 ,baines is directing their morals4 ,then ,mr4 ,baines dies1 because ,sophia has been looking out of the window at a dashing commercial traveller2 and ,mr4 ,bennett soliloquises3 ,john ,baines had belonged to the past1 to the age when men really did think of their souls1 when orators by phrases could move crowds to fury or to pity1 when no one had learnt to hurry1 when ,demos was only turning in his sleep1 when the sole beauty of life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity1 when hell really had no bottom and a gilt-clasped ,bible really was the secret of ,england's greatness4 ,mid-,victorian ,england lay on that mahogany bed4 ,ideals had passed away with ,john ,baines4 ,it is thus that ideals die2 not in the conventional pageantry of honoured death1 but sorrily1 ignobly1 while one's head is turned4 ,but the generation of the ,baineses does not give place easily2 it tries to shut its ears to the knocking at the door1 insistently as it may knock in the whimsical1 assertive personality of ,sophia4 ,the romantic commercial traveller whose fault it was that ,mr4 ,baines died a premature1 though1 scientifically speaking1 a belated death1 is the symbol of the new influence which ,mrs4 ,baines is too out-of-date to resist4 ,sophia runs away with the commercial traveller1 makes him marry her1 and is translated from ,the ,square to ,paris4 ,poor ,sophia6 ,she is the victim of being half a generation ahead of her time1 a suffragette before it was an honour to be a martyr to the cause4 ,but in ,constance the old influences are stronger4 ,she persists like a piece of old furniture which survives the relic-hunters and the broker's men4 ,she marries that trusted servant1 ,mr4 ,povey1 who has such a head for inventing tickets and labels and sign-boards1 who himself outdistances ,mr4 ,baines as railway trains outdistance stage coaches1 and as aeroplanes will outdistance motor-cars4 ,the married couple naturally displace ,mrs4 ,baines1 and ,constance notices her mother shortly after the honeymoon--,poor dear6 she thought1 ,i'm afraid she's not what she was4 ,incredible that her mother could have aged in less than six weeks6 ,constance did not allow for the chemistry that had been going on in herself4 ,and so they go on1 till ,mr4 ,povey is forty next birthday1 though1 dear innocent soul1 he scarcely notices it as we notice it tragically in these days of quick living4 ,and ,constance buries her mother1 and becomes engrossed in ,cyril1 her son1 and scarcely observes how the atmosphere in the ,potteries gets blacker and blacker1 and the trains run nearer and more frequently1 and the electric trams replace the horse trams1 linking up the ,five ,towns of the ,district4 ,and ,mr4 ,povey too gets buried1 and ,constance's son goes to ,london1 and her hair grows white1 and at last--at last ,sophia comes back to live with her in the old house in the modern ,potteries4 ,and still those two old women are living there together4 ,i shall not dwell upon the career of ,sophia--who has pursued her life in ,paris very wisely1 shrewdly1 circumspectly1 not to say commercially1 thus showing how honest bourgeois ancestry can triumph over the flightiest of modern temperaments4 ,suffice it that she is now an aged widow1 a contemporary of the ,crimean veterans1 living to this day in comfortable and old-maidish sobriety in the ,potteries1 hardly conscious of the fact that aeroplanes are an innovation4 ,it is ,mr4 ,bennett1 not the ,sophias1 who makes us conscious of the strange1 portentous progress of evolution2 of the lapse of time2 the changing mind of man2 the desperate love of what has been2 the inevitableness of what is to come1 of what is to replace us1 and put us1 too1 on the shelf among outworn things4 ,in ,clayhanger and ,hilda ,lessways1 the first two books of a trilogy which1 at the time when ,i write1 is still unfinished1 ,mr4 ,bennett again presents the process of the generations1 but he has given us a more intense dramatic interest1 he has singled out a few persons for more significant characterisation2 he has focussed his picture better1 concentrated the interest1 and produced emotional tension4 ,the reason why ,pickwick retains its place as the first of ,dickens' novels is that it is almost the only book he wrote which had a really satisfactory hero--an individual character4 ,clayhanger has two such persons--,edwin1 and ,darius his father1 as well as a dozen or more of interesting subordinate characters4 ,there are other things with which ,mr4 ,bennett is concerned in this book beside the transition from youth to old age1 from ,victorian to ,edwardian4 ,but he does not let us forget this transition4 ,to ,edwin1 ,darius was exactly the same father1 and for ,darius1 ,edwin was still aged sixteen4 ,they both of them went on living on the assumption that the world had stood still in those seven years between #ahgc and #ahhj4 ,if they had been asked what had happened during those seven years1 they would have answered1 ',oh1 nothing particular4' ,ordinary1 humdrum life1 an integral part of the national life1 enacting by slow1 imperceptible changes the processes of the ,time-,spirit1 still occupies ,mr4 ,bennett's attention4 ,he has again traced for a score of years the lives of a group of people belonging to the risen1 well-to-do tradesman class in the latter part of the ,victorian era4 ,with the successive cross-sections of life which he draws for us he again makes us look backwards and forwards to the ,england of yesterday and the ,england of to-morrow3 the ,england which has been revolutionising its conditions of life once or twice in every generation1 and has been giving its persons different food for ideas1 different standards to act upon1 different habits to conform to or revolt against3 people whose parents were nurtured in the sweated atmosphere of factories before the ,factory ,acts1 and whose sons will be the people of #aiac4 ,he shows us a whole generation of persons who1 living through these prodigious changes and being asked what has happened1 reply1 ,oh1 nothing particular4 ,but though the score of people in the ,potteries with whom we are concerned are but individually selected from the swarm that is provincial ,england1 they are none the less intensely individual4 ,darius ,clayhanger1 the hero's father1 the man who has emerged from the pit1 and by sheer obstinacy in work has made himself well off with his printing shop1 stands out clear as life with all his idiosyncrasies4 ,hard1 plain-spoken1 without conscious ideals1 satisfied with the status quo 7since the ,corn ,laws were passed71 unelastic1 relentless1 he is yet capable of bursting out emotionally in a manner that displeases his more guarded son4 ,we have memorable persons in ,big ,james1 the foreman2 ,mr4 ,shushions1 the aged ,primitive ,methodist2 ,aunt ,clara1 the lady whose business in life was tact2 ,mr4 ,orgreave1 the architect2 ,janet ,orgreave1 his daughter2 and others who come familiarly in and out4 ,all of these persons whom ,i have mentioned1 completely different as one is from another1 are none the less normal provincial characters4 ,they have a natural place in the ,five ,towns2 their ambition does not stretch out beyond the finite limits of ,bursley unless it be to the mild ecstasies of conventional religion or the generous aspiration which accompanies song4 ,but the hero1 ,edwin ,clayhanger1 is something different4 ,in the head of ,edwin the boy a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire4 ,but would the atmosphere of the ,potteries be damp enough to quench that flame8 ,or did that flame burn intensely enough to survive so that his spirit should rise out of the commerce1 the routine1 the unaspiring neighbourly atmosphere which is the dull clay of life8 ,he longed to be an architect4 ,he did not understand architecture1 he was unaware of its finest possibilities1 but something in him akin to the art-impulse made him long to be an architect4 ,but his father stamped out that ambition4 ,he entered his father's works1 and1 however rebellious at heart1 was continually submissive to his overmastering will4 ,but once1 when the routine was settling down upon him1 illumined only a little by vaguely directed reading1 his soul was burst out of its environment by a passionate love which grew in a day2 which seemed to win success2 but was thwarted by the woman who1 without a word1 incomprehensibly1 jilts him4 ,the years pass on--,mr4 ,bennett's transitions make us imagine forlorn1 almost intolerable passages of years in which the human soul trudges stupidly and wearily towards death1 discussing muffins and tea whilst the ,cosmos is plotting upheavals for the sole benefit of stupidity in the mass--and ,edwin1 suffering at his father's hands1 triumphing over him in old age1 is becoming an ordinary inhabitant of ,bursley1 working1 resting1 taking his ease4 ,sometimes the smouldering flame bursts out in him again1 and he would perceive that he had been nothing1 achieved nothing1 that he had been a mere spendthrift of time and years4 ,and there was he1 ,edwin1 eating bacon and eggs opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at ,bleakridge4 ,but the flame breaks out once more4 ,art had had no chance to claim him for its own1 and ,love had cheated him4 ,but when he discovers ,hilda1 and ,hilda's son1 and ,hilda's misery--,hilda1 with her passion for ,victor ,hugo1 obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night6-with her1 love1 passion1 pity1 intensity of living come back to him4 ,it is interesting to turn from ,clayhanger to the story of ,hilda ,lessways4 ,this story has not quite the distinctive note which ,mr4 ,bennett struck in the two preceding novels4 ,what we miss is1 first of all1 the local colour which is the author's speciality1 most of the scenes being laid in ,brighton or ,london2 and second1 that detached manner which enabled ,mr4 ,bennett to present his persons as if he were himself indifferent to their fate1 with the result that they stand or fall entirely on their own merits4 ,here we feel that he is a partisan4 ,he has taken up ,hilda's case4 ,he is evidently prepared to champion her against all the world4 ,hence the very femininity of the heroine which he has so cleverly created1 to some extent colours the book itself1 as if by a kind of sympathy between author and heroine4 ,the perfervid woman has sometimes communicated too much of her fervour to the very language of the author4 ,but in other respects the book shows an advance in ,mr4 ,bennett's art4 ,for the first time in his life he has resisted the temptation to overwhelm us with the wealth of invention which his fertile mind is busy upon4 ,he has pruned away the unessential details4 ,he has cut away the delightful but irrelevant details which even in ,the ,old ,wives' ,tale and in ,clayhanger threatened to shatter the perspective2 and has concentrated on the matter in hand with enormous advantage to the dramatic sharpness and distinctness of his story4 ,he has made a further gain in intensity by using the story of ,clayhanger as a background to the present story4 ,the technical difficulty in all creative literature is a difficulty of language and symbols--the difficulty of so speaking to the reader that he may see moods1 moments1 situations1 concurrences of life and forces of passion in the fine1 dry1 intense light in which the author has seen them4 ,that is the infinite difficulty of all literature--to find a language and to create an atmosphere which may become familiar to the reader without becoming commonplace4 ,how much do we gain in the reading of ,shakespeare by the fact that from the sheer poetry of the thing we have been compelled to read him a score of times6 ,how fully the ,greek dramatists understood that to be instantly appreciated they must deal with stories every detail of which was stored with friendly associations for the audience6 ,mr4 ,bennett elicits something of this effect of the marvellous from the familiar by putting the life-story of ,hilda ,lessways on a foreground behind which lies the already familiar story of ,edwin ,clayhanger4 ,we remember ,clayhanger living in the printing shop in the ,potteries2 his uncouthness1 his shyness1 his pertinacity2 his desire to be an architect and to live the imaginative life1 thwarted by his grim old father2 and the manner in which ,hilda dawned upon him1 entered into his experience in a brief rapture of passion1 and disappeared1 leaving ,clayhanger to grope again with the commonplaces4 ,and in this new story we see the life of the girl1 the woman2 she1 too1 groping among the commonplaces1 with her heart set upon a wider experience1 till a moment comes when her story coincides with and is complementary to that of ,clayhanger4 ,the speeches which we heard her make in the earlier story are heard again here1 with greater comprehension2 the apparently trifling words which fell from the lips of ,clayhanger1 scarcely heeded1 are heard again now1 and heard as they sounded to ,hilda1 grasping after a purpose and a fulfilment of herself4 ,mr4 ,bennett has endeavoured to examine the mind and heart of this woman from the inside4 ,whether the machinery of the emotions1 the will1 and the intellect really do work out just like this is a matter harder for a man to decide than for a woman2 but to me ,mr4 ,bennett's account seems plausible4 ,what is mainly important is that ,hilda1 whether she is psychologically true to life or not1 is1 at any rate1 a conceivable person4 ,she is presented as one more example of the spirit too large for its habitation4 ,cooped up with her mother in a little house in the ,five ,towns1 she was in trouble not the less acute because the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what4 ,hilda1 maturing1 steadfast1 idealistic1 with a desperate readiness to live through the inferior things of life if she could not now grasp the best1 with a vitality which enables her to emerge again and again from tragedy that for most people would be final1 is a contrast to her rather futile1 fussy1 merely experienced mother4 ,hilda flings herself into the work of a provincial newspaper office with the ardour of her idealism4 ,here was something she had set her mind on1 and the practical quest was a religious passion1 tragic in its way because the real result of the work was so paltry and sordid4 ,what was she8 ,nothing but a clerk at a commencing salary of fifteen shillings per week6 ,ah6 but she was a priestess6 ,she had a vocation which was unsoiled by the economic excuse4 ,she was a pioneer4 ,no young woman had ever done what she was doing4 ,she was the only girl in the ,five ,towns who knew shorthand4 ,and ,mr4 ,bennett succeeds in interesting us in the ambitious1 speculative ,cannon mainly by reason of the pathetically inadequate objects on which he lavishes the passion of his energies and his ideals--on a newspaper1 a corrupt thing--on a boarding-house1 a centre of triviality4 ,and ,miss ,gailey1 whose heart is set on her hot-water bottle and her cup of tea1 and the easing of her rheumatism1 interests us profoundly1 because it is such death-in-life which may prove tragically destructive to the ascendant nature of a ,hilda4 ,mr4 ,bennett is not afraid of the drab side of life4 ,but he never shows peevishness on the one side nor bloodless romanticism on the other4 ,he sees this drab side1 and he sees the passion of life--the aspiring human always trying to be more than it is1 or can be1 in some desperate1 foolish way4 ,this is the tragedy and the hopefulness of tragedy which ,mr4 ,bennett has grasped4 ,to possess a keen faculty of observation by which to present life exactly and realistically1 and at the same time to re-imagine these facts so that the vividness1 the intensity1 the pitiful passion of life are what we mainly remember--to combine these two qualities as ,mr4 ,bennett combines them is to hold a unique position in contemporary literature4 ,,iv ,,gilbert ,,chesterton ,it has often been pointed out that the intellectuals--the people whose business it is to formulate opinions in ,parliament1 ,press1 and ,pulpit--are not really expressing public opinion2 they are only expressing the opinion of the intellectuals4 ,perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say that every civilised or semi-civilised human being may be divided into two persons1 the one an individual who chooses1 walks1 eats1 feels1 and imagines in a private and personal way2 the other a sort of official person who registers formal opinions when called upon to do so4 ,the latter corresponds to the intellectual1 and is the dominant element in the souls of the ruling classes2 whilst the former--the instinctive1 the spontaneous1 the common-sense element--dominates the man in the street4 ,it would not be far wrong to describe ,mr4 ,chesterton's philosophy as a sort of sublimated public opinion minus the opinion of the intellectuals4 ,to get at what ,i mean ,i must for the moment ask the reader to think of ,mr4 ,chesterton as an abstraction4 ,let him conceive an ,englishman1 unlike any existing ,englishman1 who has never heard of ,darwin or ,spencer2 who has never been impregnated with the theory of induction or analytical psychology2 an ,englishman who has never read or heard of ,macaulay1 ,froude1 ,carlyle1 ,ruskin1 ,bagehot1 ,mill1 ,seeley1 or ,mr4 ,frederic ,harrison2 who has read none of the poets since ,milton2 who has never been asked to consider the ,reform ,bill or the ,education ,bill1 the ,oxford ,movement or the sthetic ,movement1 ,realism or ,impressionism1 ,non-,resistance or the ,will to ,power1 ,mr4 ,bernard ,shaw or ,mr4 ,aylmer ,maude1 the ,primrose ,league or the ,labour ,party1 ,mr4 ,yeats or even ,mr4 ,o',finnigan4 ,let us imagine that this agreeable abstraction is in the habit of moving about among other abstractions like himself2 that he knows a horse when he sees it 7even if he cannot ride it72 that he is accustomed to hospitable inn-parlours where you may discuss any philosophy so long as it is not a system2 that he has a chivalrous admiration for women2 that he likes sunshine and adores the moon2 that he believes in ,god1 the respectability of wives1 ballad poetry1 good fellowship1 and good wine4 ,and now1 having stripped ,mr4 ,chesterton so that he is no longer even an attenuated ghost of himself1 let us re-clothe him and present him decent and as he is4 ,we must imagine this abstracted personage1 ignorant and therefore unbiassed1 suddenly introduced to all the learned jargon of the day4 ,he still retains his simple views about things out of date1 and is called upon to pronounce views upon entirely new matters--aristocracy and democracy1 religion and scepticism1 art and morality1 ,tolstoy and ,nietzsche4 ,a welter of odd ideas and delirious fanaticisms is suddenly sprung upon his simple consciousness4 ,he finds all the intellectual circles in ,england working themselves into a fury about ideas1 factitious ideas1 which positively did not exist for him when he was a happy abstraction4 ,naturally1 in his brief visit to the unabstracted world he has not time to study in detail all the philosophies which have been invented for the purpose of debate4 ,but he goes round from circle to circle1 listens to this argument and to that1 notices the effect which the various philosophies have upon the characters of their exponents1 and himself enters into the fun of debate as if he had never been an abstraction at all4 ,he accepts the terminology which he finds ready made1 but of course uses it in his own way--he is obviously unable to take anything for granted like the people who have always been intellectuals4 ,he continually comes across queer verbal usages1 and feels bound to declare that what we call free-thinking is not what we call free2 that what we call certainties are also what we call uncertain2 that aristocrats are unaristocratic2 that doubters are dogmatists2 and that tradition is an extension of the franchise4 ,and then the world1 having never been out of its own generation1 having never been anything so shocking as an abstraction1 dismisses ,mr4 ,chesterton with the smiling remark that he is1 after all1 a brilliant writer of paradoxes4 ,let us for a moment put aside our own intellectual prejudices1 our preconceptions1 and follow ,mr4 ,chesterton along his path of common sense4 ,he himself1 in his book on ,orthodoxy1 throws over the intellectuals4 ,it is not that he refutes them--that would be a denial of his own method2 nor that he has completely studied them--that would be a denial of his own character2 but he does show us what havoc their methods may work upon the mind1 what an overthrow of our workaday notions1 our most vivid and keen impressions4 ,if all the things that we seem to know the best1 the emotions most natural to men fighting peoples or proud mothers1 or first love or fear upon the sea--if all these things stand for nothing1 if they are not to be thought about by our philosophers1 what have we got left8 ,the cosmos8 ,the cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in4 ,he finds that the great popular thinkers--and it is right that he1 a potent popular writer1 should concern himself with these rather than with the systematic philosophers who observe conventions incomprehensible to the common mind--are each and all of them prone to follow exclusively some strange bent of thought1 leading by pure reason to one of those awful conclusions which tend to make a man lose his wits3 ,tolstoy1 for instance1 reaching an unthinkable doctrine of self-sacrifice1 ,nietzsche an equally unthinkable doctrine of egoism1 ,ibsen1 ,haeckel1 ,mr4 ,shaw1 ,mr4 ,mc,cabe--that never-to-be-forgotten ,mr4 ,mc,cabe--each of them by sheer force of logic betrayed into insanity4 ,just as ,i am affected by the maniac1 so ,i am affected by most modern thinkers4 ,that unmistakable mood or note that ,i hear from ,hanwell1 ,i hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning to-day2 and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses than one4 ,they all have exactly that combination we have noted2 the combination of one expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense4 ,they are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far4 ,but a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern4 ,they see a chess-board white on black1 and if the universe is paved with it1 it is still white on black4 ,like the lunatic1 they cannot alter their standpoint1 they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white4 ,madness1 he says1 is reason used without root1 reason in the void4 ,madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness4 ,for he notes how some of the rationalists1 in doubting everything1 have cast doubt even on the validity of thought4 ,the complete sceptic says1 ,i have no right to think for myself4 ,i have no right to think at all4 ,the intellect has destroyed1 but has not constructed2 there is no proposition which is not doubted1 no ideal which is not an object of attack2 there is no rebel who has a sure faith in his own revolt1 no fanatic except the fanatic about nothing4 ,where are the common things--the things we used to know and care about--the self-contradictory things if you like1 but the realities--the things which make men kill their enemies1 go gladly to the stake1 or shut themselves in a hermitage8 ,all these are things which1 ,mr4 ,chesterton thinks1 the intellectual is willing to throw overboard at the bidding of intellect4 ,but he would rather throw over intellectualism4 ,he prefers to abide by the test of the imagination1 the test of fairyland4 ,the only words that ever satisfied me as describing ,nature are the terms used in the fairy books1 'charm1' 'spell1' 'enchantment4' ,they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery4 ,a tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree4 ,water runs down-hill because it is bewitched4 ,the so-called laws of nature are not one whit less mysterious because of their uniformity4 ,and again3 ,it is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead2 a piece of clock-work4 ,mr4 ,chesterton supposes exactly the opposite4 ,because children have abounding vitality1 because they are in spirit fierce and free1 therefore they want things repeated and unchanged4 ,they always say1 ',do it again2' and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead4 ,for grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony4 ,but perhaps ,god is strong enough to exult in monotony4 ,it is possible that ,god says every morning1 ',do it again' to the sun1 and every evening1 ',do it again' to the moon4444 ,repetition may go on for millions of years1 by mere choice1 and at any instant it may stop4 ,is not this1 someone will say1 only the ,religio ,medici over again8 ,is it not more than two and a half centuries since ,sir ,thomas ,browne said3 ,that there was a deluge once seems not to me so great a miracle as that there is not one always2 and where ,i cannot satisfy my reason1 ,i love to humour my fancy2 and ,i can answer all the objections of ,satan and every rebellious reason1 with that odd resolution ,i learned of ,tertullian1 ,certum est quia impossibile est8 ,yes1 it has all been expressed in the ,religio2 but it is no small matter that1 in spite of ,spencer1 ,karl ,marx1 ,nietzsche1 and ,mr4 ,sidney ,webb1 there should still be a modern and a popular way of using the thoughts of ,sir ,thomas ,browne4 ,mr4 ,chesterton has been driven into this apparent reaction by the scientific thinkers to whom he was introduced with the scantiest preparation4 ,it was ,huxley and ,herbert ,spencer and ,bradlaugh who brought me back to ,orthodox theology4 ,his supernaturalism1 which he identifies with orthodox ,christianity1 ,i should prefer to call the ,romance of ,christianity--,romance implying not falsity1 but the desirable and the ideal4 ,he deliberately takes that which he and other people admire or want as the standard of truth4 ,i want to love my neighbour not because he is ,i1 but precisely because he is not ,i4 ,the heart of humanity1 especially of ,european humanity1 is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the ,trinitarian idea1 the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice4444 ,mr4 ,chesterton defends what he calls ,christianity not so much on the ground that it is credible1 but on the ground that it is satisfying1 that it is agreeable4 ,i say what he calls ,christianity1 for his argument is prone to fall into a vicious circle2 he arbitrarily calls all that is satisfying to him by the name of ,christianity4 ,it endorses1 he says1 a first loyalty to things and enjoins the reform of things2 it commands a man not only to look inwards1 but to look outwards4 ,god is a part of the cosmos1 and yet he is distinct from it and from us1 or we could not worship him4 ,christianity commands us to desire to live1 and it commands us to be glad to die 7and this contradiction1 he says1 like all the others1 is human1 just as the virtue of courage is human2 for does not courage mean a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die874 ,it is against compromise1 against the dilution of two things neither of which is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour2 it endorses the extremes of pride and humility1 anger and love1 mercy and severity4 ,it is full-blooded1 allowing place for every human emotion1 directing anger against the crime1 and love towards the criminal4 ,and he draws a fanciful and grotesque picture of the ,christian ,church as a heavenly chariot whirling through the ages fierce and fast with any war-horse1 swerving to left and right1 so as exactly to avoid enormous obstacles4 ,i shall not examine this fanciful picture4 ,the ,christian ,church may have indulged every extreme in human life1 but the ,christianity of the ,bible takes sides more definitely4 ,and as for the ,catholic ,church1 embracing as it did so many seemingly contradictory elements1 it is nevertheless true that at one time it failed to satisfy human nature because it was too ascetic1 and at another time it caused bloody revolt because it was worldly and luxurious4 ,i need not pursue this question1 for the orthodoxy which ,mr4 ,chesterton defends is not the teaching of the ,christian ,churches4 ,at first sight it seems to be anarchy modified by mysticism and friendship for persons4 ,but it is more than that4 ,negatively it is a protest against false culture and cant1 and we cannot fail to see that it is at the same time a protest against that virtue which is the predecessor of false culture--the incessant1 arduous effort to seek truth with the help of the intellect and the reason4 ,positively1 it champions the spiritual perceptions on the one hand1 and the physical sensations on the other--the excellences of the manifold activities of the human body and soul4 ,both in his view provide the proper avenues of truth4 ,every spiritual emotion and every animal passion are in themselves good and excellent4 ,for him the struggle of life resolves itself into a romantic game1 with immortality as its conclusion4 ,the one discipline which he upholds1 the only precept he has really taken from ,christianity1 is that arising from love for your neighbour4 ,that unnamable quality in life which in every deeper feeling and every keen perception lights the spirit and charges it with intuitive knowledge is in his philosophy the love of ,god and the source of the love for persons4 ,v ,,some ,,modern ,,poets ,a few years ago it was the fashion to lament the dearth of promising authors1 especially poets4 ,but since then we have assured ourselves that we are still1 after all1 a poetical people4 ,the reproach against the age was taken as a challenge by dozens of young adventurers1 who resolved to prove in their own persons that the twentieth century was not without poets4 ,tiny volumes of verse fluttered forth from the press4 ,poetry ,societies were started1 and ,poetry ,reviews1 and men and women met in the darkened hall of ,clifford's ,inn to hear ,mr4 ,sturge ,moore declaim sonorous verses4 ,publishers began to advertise new genius1 and reviewers began to attend to poetry as if it were really a serious business4 ,the opening pages of ,the ,english ,review were devoted to poems which seemed to be appreciated in proportion to their ever-increasing length4 ,mr4 ,john ,masefield had a success such as had been attained by no poet since ,stephen ,phillips in his prime4 ,it is true that ,mr4 ,w4,h4 ,davies might have starved if he had not received a ,government pension2 that ,mr4 ,yeats--,i believe ,i am right--never entertained the idea of supporting himself by poetry2 that ,mr4 ,doughty has not so much as been heard of by one ,englishman in a thousand4 ,nevertheless1 poetry has now become a mentionable subject in decent society2 and it is no longer synonymous with ,tennyson or ,mr4 ,kipling4 ,it has become a modern thing1 lending itself to new experiments1 a possible vehicle for new ideas1 a means even of becoming notorious on a grand scale4 ,but before considering some of these younger authors who represent newer phases in poetry ,i should like to dwell a little upon the work of an elder--one who is not by any means so exquisite a poet as ,mr4 ,robert ,bridges1 who cannot compare in creative vigour with the greater poets who were contemporary with him1 nor with his junior1 ,mr4 ,w4,b4 ,yeats--but interesting for purposes of comparison because his poetry1 even his quite recent poetry1 has in it the ring of a past age1 of a poetic ideal to which we are not likely to return in this century4 ,i allude to ,mr4 ,edmund ,gosse1 whom we all think of as a distinguished student and critic of literature1 but it is very seldom that we hear any allusion to his poetical work4 ,anyone who has the patience to turn over these pages1 he says in the ,preface to his ,collected ,poems1 will not need to be told that the voice is not of #aiaa--;it is of #ahgb1 or of a still earlier date--since my technique was determined more than forty years ago1 and what it was it has remained4 ,when first ,i read these words they sounded strangely to me4 ,it was only the other day that he began to edit a distinguished literary page for a daily paper4 ,still more recently ,i heard him speaking on a public platform4 ,his activity does not seem to be a thing of yesterday1 and it was he who wrote the most intimate and1 perhaps1 the most interesting biographical study of recent years2 as editor and critic he is still amongst active living writers4 ,in reading his later poems we can see how keen is his desire to retain sensibility to the full1 not to become stereotyped by the past1 or blind to the newer beauties4 ,he is conscious of the passage of the ,time-,spirit and the changed ways of men1 and the passionate desire of all vital minds to be fully percipient to the last4 ,so1 if ,i pray for length of days1 ,it is not in the barren pride ,that looks behind itself1 and says1 ,the ,past alone is deified6 ,nay1 humbly1 shrinkingly1 in dread ,of fires too splendid to be borne-- ,in expectation lest my head ,be from its ,orphic shoulders torn-- ,i wait1 till1 down the eastern sky1 ,muses1 like ,maenads in a throng1 ,sweep my decayed traditions by1 ,in startling tunes of unknown song4 ,in the #cej pages of the ,collected ,poems there is nothing which were better omitted4 ,even the mere literary experiments1 the rondeaus1 the sestinas--the literary jokes in which every poet indulges--are neatly turned4 ,mr4 ,gosse has attempted1 and succeeded with1 a great variety of metres4 ,his diction is almost unfailingly good2 indeed1 it is the very regularity and faultlessness of his verse that sometimes jars4 ,it is the work of a man many-sided in his nature1 many-sided in his moods4 ,he can find himself in the atmosphere of a ,coleridge1 a ,wordsworth1 a ,keats1 a ,rossetti1 a ,branger1 and often his form insensibly glides into that of the precursor whose spirit he for the moment assimilates4 ,he is by no means a mere imitator4 ,his feeling is his own2 but his genius seems to be rather assimilative than strictly creative4 ,scores of his poems have the beauty and the value of the literature written by the great poets1 when they were not in their greatest moods4 ,and perhaps it is precisely the many-sidedness of ,mr4 ,gosse's tastes and interests which has left him so few decisive poetic successes4 ,he has ranged through literature with a catholic taste4 ,he has helped to create reputations--the reputations1 for instance1 of ,ibsen and ,stevenson4 ,there have been many calls upon his literary instinct1 and it is not surprising that the most uniformly successful of his poems are those in praise of the great men of letters whom1 with his faculty for friendship1 he made his friends4 ,in the poems on these men--,ibsen1 ,ruskin1 ,stevenson1 ,henry ,sidgwick1 ,rossetti1 and unnamed friends who have departed--there is dignity1 fineness1 and the pathos of a regret for that which he shared with them1 though he lacked the power1 or more probably the opportunity1 fully to express it4 ,but not in vain beneath this lofty shade ,i danced awhile1 frail plaything of the seas2 ,unfit to brave the ampler main with these2 ,yet1 by the instinct which their souls obeyed1 ,less steadfast1 o'er the trackless wave ,i strayed1 ,and follow still their vanishing trestle-trees4 ,the beauties of literature1 of many kinds and in many languages1 the feeling and perception of friendship1 nature1 and the whole life-process through which men pass to a green memory or to oblivion--these are to be found here1 the full-bodied expression of a personality--for poetry is that1 or nothing4 ,it is no defect in it that it is of #ahgb--that there is a certain formality1 a kind of austerity1 even1 in its flippancies4 ,it is meditative poetry4 ,it is poetry which is essentially concerned with the emotions1 the fancies1 or the reflections1 the very personal and secluded reflections1 of a mind still concerned about the private ways of the spirit4 ,the emotions1 the operations of the mind1 and the objective things of life--they are the concern of ,mr4 ,gosse as they were the concern of ,tennyson1 ,browning1 ,arnold1 ,morris1 and many poets before them4 ,for the most part the men of that age adhered to the traditions of poetry1 whether they were romantic or classical4 ,at any rate on the formal side most of them--,browning is an exception--remained faithful to the accepted types4 ,on the inner side it was an age which was much concerned about its soul1 about nature1 and about persons--yes1 about persons4 ,whatever we may think about the ,victorian age1 from its literature at least we should conclude that it was an age when men valued friendships4 ,and so its best poetry was essentially emotional1 personal and subjective4 ,now ,i do not suggest that in the poetry of our younger men there is emerging a single new type with a few distinctive characteristics which can be contrasted with ,victorian poetry4 ,on the contrary1 if there is anything which we should particularly remark1 it is the absence of such typical traits1 it is the extraordinary diversity of type2 men are experimenting with verse1 attempting to revive old forms and invent new1 to restore the spirit of antiquity or to ride abreast of the practical spirit of the time4 ,men like ,mr4 ,w4,b4 ,yeats and ,a4,e4 sought to unite the ancient and1 as they believed1 essential ,irish spirit with the spirit which is manifested throughout the stream of ,english lyrical poetry4 ,in ,mr4 ,yeats there was more romanticism than he would care to admit1 though the ,elizabethan ideal which he cherished and his own power of concentration did much to subdue and chasten the insubordinate1 vaguely aspiring spirit which in lesser ,celtic poets turns to froth1 with no undercurrent of human truth to give significance to its flaky beauty4 ,fiona ,macleod is the classic instance of this frothy ,celtic spirit which is unstayed by human truth or relevance to life2 and there is much of this in contemporary ,irish poetry4 ,mr4 ,yeats is not wholly free from it1 but he was conscious of the evil tendency1 and subdued it1 and the body of fine poetry which stands to his name1 taken as a whole1 is unequalled for clarity1 feeling1 beauty and felicity of expression by any large body of poetry standing to the name of any other living poet4 ,but the ,time-,spirit is active1 or fickle perhaps1 and ,mr4 ,yeats has already almost ceased to be a quite modern poet4 ,he1 like ,mr4 ,gosse1 formed his technique in the nineteenth century1 and the twentieth century is casting about with feverish energy for a new technique and new things to express4 ,mr4 ,william ,watson belongs quite as much to the past as does ,mr4 ,gosse1 though it might be said of him that he could belong to any age that knew its ,milton and its ,wordsworth4 ,in him assuredly there was no attempt at inventiveness2 he has always repudiated the idea that the poet should seek to innovate4 ,he stands for austerity and discipline in thought1 style1 and diction1 for a fine exactness which in his case was compatible with the old passion for the idea of freedom no less than with that private1 self-communing spirit which the ,victorians loved to express4 ,such a poet as ,mr4 ,maurice ,hewlett1 antiquarian as he often is in the subjects he treats1 is much more modern in spirit4 ,in style and technique he is one of those who have gone back1 as men for four centuries have constantly gone back1 to the manner of the ancient ,greeks4 ,just as that clever experimenter in verse1 ,mr4 ,ezra ,pound1 has created something of an effect by repeating the very metres1 melodies1 and mannerisms of the ,provenal troubadours1 so ,mr4 ,hewlett1 modelling his style upon the far finer ,greek originals1 produced an effect which was better than ,mr4 ,pound's in proportion as the ,greek tragedians are superior to the troubadours4 ,in his execution he has really recaptured much of the manner of the great ,greek tragedians4 ,in ,the ,death of ,hippolytus there is something of the aloofness1 the blitheness1 the thrust of phrases1 the grimness1 the sedateness which we associate with ,greek drama4 ,if he has little of the passion or fluency of ,swinburne1 he has some of his phrase-making skill1 and he is free from that rhythmical lilt which in ,swinburne was often excessive4 ,we shall never be carried away as by the music of ,atalanta in ,calydon1 but we are often arrested by grim echoes from the actual ,greek1 apt translations1 as they might be1 from an existing original4 ,but though ,mr4 ,hewlett has been clever enough to adapt the technique of ,greek poets to his own purpose in poetical drama1 nevertheless in his treatment of subject1 in thought and feeling1 we may see1 rather by his defects than by his excellences1 how entirely modern he is4 ,in ,minos1 ,king of ,crete1 the first play in his trilogy ,the ,agonists1 we may find ourselves at the outset not a little irritated by his habit of stage-managing with a view to a public that likes sensational and scenic effects4 ,shakespeare used thunder and lightning at the beginning of ,the ,tempest1 but only a very modern modern poet could use these devices as an introduction to tragedy4 ,but it is more to the point that his treatment of ,pasiphae is not only one that would have been impossible to the ,greeks1 but would have been impossible to any literary age which had not been so led away by modern theories of realism as to believe that any sort of monstrosity1 being conceived as actual1 might be made also an object of sympathetic emotion4 ,pasiphae is a creature of monstrous1 unnatural lust1 so vile1 and so inhuman in its vileness1 that it is impossible to conceive that human sympathy should be enlisted in her affair1 as if it were a normal and humanly pitiable lapse from virtue4 ,no ,greek tragedian ever did attempt1 or ever would have attempted1 to arouse pity for a creature whose grotesque story expressed the ,greek abomination for ,phnician barbarism4 ,nothing but the ,philistine1 or in this case ,phnician1 realism of the twentieth century1 can account for ,mr4 ,hewlett's attempt to elicit fine feeling from an abnormal and nauseous incident4 ,it has always seemed to me that the transition from the ,victorian ,age to the experimental age which followed it was marked by the ,south ,african ,war4 ,for a dozen years before that war there had been restless movements in the very heart of the nation2 the men who were to be most conspicuous at the close of the century were leavening the nation or being leavened themselves4 ,joseph ,chamberlain appeared as the embodiment of the transitional spirit in the political arena4 ,in journalism the movement took shape in the person of ,alfred ,harmsworth4 ,in literature the man of the moment was ,rudyard ,kipling4 ,these three fateful embodiments of the ,time-,spirit seemed to dominate ,england and shake her clean out of her fin-de-sicle complacency4 ,england could never be the same again1 after those three men had been at the helm1 for however short a period4 ,the course was deflected2 the reckoning lost4 ,austere1 dignified ,whigs would appear again in politics1 but never again would their austerity and dignity represent our political system4 ,sonorous1 sober1 highly judicious journalists might still succeed in producing1 at great loss1 a journal expressing themselves and their views1 but no considerable section of the nation would ever again hang upon their words4 ,and even in poetry1 which lies so much nearer to the roots of human nature1 and might therefore be expected to vary less with the fashions of a time1 we cannot but perceive that the private1 personal utterances of an ,arnold1 a ,tennyson1 a ,browning1 a ,rossetti1 would have less chance of being heard in the din of to-day1 however sweet the expression1 however intimately moving to the spirit4 ,there is a poet belonging to the younger generation who has written lyrics of exquisite grace and charm1 who can deal half playfully1 half seriously with the lightest of subjects1 and make it delicate and entrancing2 who can touch the deeper note of the romantic poets and make of it something grim1 perplexing1 haunting2 or can produce in a few stanzas an intimate feeling for persons portrayed in some suggestive aspect4 ,mr4 ,walter ,de la ,mare is well known to a small circle of literary persons1 but neither his poems nor his prose-writings have been widely read as they should have been4 ,mr4 ,rudyard ,kipling would perhaps shudder at the thought1 but it is evident--is it not to his credit8--that he was essentially a democrat4 ,he made his appeal to the average man4 ,his ballads were written about ordinary men and ordinary things2 the feelings they portrayed were the feelings of everyday life1 feelings which everyone without distinction might feel in a vigorous and perhaps boisterous way4 ,wordsworth never really brought poetry back to the common1 everyday life of simple folk4 ,long ago ,coleridge pointed out that this was a popular superstition about ,wordsworth shared by the poet himself4 ,but to a far greater extent ,mr4 ,kipling did make his appeal to the common stock of everyday and average emotion--the emotion of the average man4 ,he was not interested1 as the great ,victorian poets had been1 in the lonely way of the spirit2 in the more personal emotions2 or in nicety of expression4 ,for him it was the corporate spirit that counted--the instinct1 not for friendship1 but for fellowship4 ,he had sentiment in abundance1 but he approached sentiment with that sort of nervous braggadocio with which the schoolboy conceals his softer feelings4 ,a clever ,american critic1 ,mr4 ,bliss ,perry1 alludes to that commonness of mind and tone which ,mr4 ,bryce declared to be inevitable among masses of men associated1 as they are in ,america1 under modern democratic government4 ,this commonness of mind and tone1 says ,mr4 ,perry1 is often one of the penalties of fellowship4 ,it may mean a levelling down instead of a levelling up4 ,the loud stridency of ,mr4 ,kipling's voice is perhaps one of the penalties which has to be paid for the democratic sentiment of fellowship4 ,that there should be some levelling down is sure to follow when the poet finds himself absorbed in the common emotions of common life1 and speaking to the common man4 ,but there need not necessarily be that coarseness of sentiment1 that crudity of thought1 that bigotry of limited sympathy1 mis-called patriotism1 which has debased the level of so much of ,mr4 ,kipling's writing4 ,i should say that ,mr4 ,g4,k4 ,chesterton owes more than he supposes to the influence1 direct or indirect1 of ,mr4 ,kipling2 that though his opinions1 his sympathies1 his conclusions are all diametrically opposed to those of the elder writer1 still there is something in common between the two which is essentially a democratic quality1 the final standard being that of reference to commonness1 normal feeling1 the common man4 ,mr4 ,chesterton wrote a very stirring poem in his ,ballad of ,king ,alfred1 a ballad which appealed to patriotism1 fellowship1 and those broad1 profound emotions which underlie the common sense of a people4 ,it was far nearer to the spirit of the ,barrack ,room ,ballads than he1 ,i am sure1 would be willing to admit4 ,mr4 ,kipling did this great thing1 if not for literature1 at least for men and men-of-letters4 ,he expressed emotions in language which was as far as possible from the language of stheticism4 ,this meant1 perhaps1 that he could not express very subtle or unusual emotions1 that his perceptions were broad rather than fine2 but he at least taught the world that there were certain profound manly feelings which might be expressed without the preliminary unmanning of stheticism2 and his distinction lies in the fact that he uttered them with vehemence and intensity4 ,in ,victorian times the average citizen thought of poetry as a somewhat weak-minded1 effeminate pursuit--as very often it was4 ,the poet who might be persuaded of the sublimity of his calling had necessarily to steel himself against the abuse of the matter-of-fact persons who have no traffic in poetry2 and in so doing he lost the advantage of that bracing though insufficient criticism by which the sane1 practical man influences many of the arts2 that is to say1 the readers and upholders of poetry everywhere agreed to put the poet beyond the reach of a criticism from which prose can never be wholly exempt4 ,the matter-of-fact view being put out of court in the judgment of poetry1 the poet was encouraged to believe that he was not concerned with the same universe as that of common fact4 ,i have heard literary critics speak of romantic or highly imaginative novels1 saying3 ,it is all delicate fancy and imagination2 it is not concerned with realities2 it is sheer poetry--as if poetry were not concerned with realities6 ,i have heard people criticise the prose works of ,mr4 ,a4,c4 ,benson3 ,this is all too musical1 and sentimental1 and self-centred2 this sort of thing cannot be done in prose2 it should be done in poetry--as if nonsense becomes less nonsensical by means of metre or rhyme6 ,this easy-going view of the function of the poetic art has borne an ample harvest of nonsense4 ,i could1 were it worth while1 name many living bards who consider that any sort of fancy or feeling is good enough for poetry so long as it be prettily or gracefully handled1 who would thus degrade poetry to the position of the easiest1 as it has for long been the least prized1 of the fine arts4 ,this havoc has been wrought1 in part1 by what ,i may call the doctrine of the sensitive soul4 ,keats is the classic example of the poet who lived and died through sensitiveness4 ,it was a weakness inherent in the romantic movement which1 though it had so much that was enchantingly strange and beautiful to give to the world1 bequeathed to it also a consciousness of its nerves and a pride in its very defects4 ,when ,coleridge had taught his successors to glorify the poetic perception and vision1 to give to the secret feelings a new warrant and value1 they came to think it boorish to conceal their fine feelings1 and they acquired the habit of expressing feelings which the common man scarcely experiences without a sense of shame4 ,the poet came to be essentially the man who felt acutely1 and anything that was a feeling came to have a sort of value of its own as denoting poetic sensitiveness4 ,hence the excessive softness1 the indefiniteness1 the languishing and the effeminacy which since the beginning of the nineteenth century have been tolerated in poetry because poetry was supposed to be the proper vehicle for such weakness4 ,it is significant that the most admired poem of ,keats begins with a sentiment which we should agree to detest in a prose-writing3 ,my heart aches1 and a drowsy numbness pains ,my sense1 as though of hemlock ,i had drunk---- ,i contend that as this sentiment would be intolerable in prose1 so also it is not to be suffered in poetry4 ,now1 the ,kipling epoch did introduce a certain hardness1 or masculinity1 into the cultured life of the country which gave an opportunity for escape from the querulousness and the vagueness which had become poetic habits among ,english poets and lovers of poetry4 ,i say the ,kipling epoch1 for ,mr4 ,kipling himself never had the self-discipline1 perhaps had not the sense of form1 to achieve much durable poetry1 and his very masculinity turned at last into an unmasculine shriek4 ,he marked no more than the transition period4 ,mr4 ,chesterton is a part of it4 ,he1 too1 is lacking in sense of form and diction1 and could never have been a considerable poet1 though there is in his writings abundant evidence of poetic feeling4 ,what ,i am concerned to observe is that his ballad poetry1 too1 is marked by that essentially masculine note which seemed to have died out of ,english poetry--unless ,browning and ,morris be taken as exceptions4 ,mr4 ,hilaire ,belloc comes at the latter end of the transition period4 ,when a man has only written a few poems it is injudicious to say of him that he is a great poet4 ,but1 at any rate1 ,mr4 ,belloc has written a few poems which belong to the great order of lyrical verse1 and in ,the ,south ,country he surpasses anything that ,kipling or ,henley achieved1 anything perhaps that any ,english lyrical poet has written this century4 ,if that is not a great poem1 then ,i for one will abjure great poetry1 and be content with the less4 ,there is all ,mr4 ,kipling's sense of fellowship1 a thousand times refined1 and in alliance with all the most vital emotions of life1 the sense for concrete1 simple things1 the sense for things remembered1 of tragedy expected but not feared1 the feeling for men1 as men2 for places1 as places2 for things1 as things2 for the emotions1 as the ironies of life2 for the ludicrous1 as the surface aspect of the pathetic--for the whole male side of existence which poetry for a hundred years has been inclined to ignore4 ,it is quite evident in the very early poetry of ,mr4 ,john ,masefield that the loudly reverberating ballads of ,rudyard ,kipling had had their effect upon him2 that something of their sheer vehemence and lustiness had mingled with his own feeling for the tropical seas into which he had adventured1 with the vivid sense of men and things in strange places which had wrought upon his imagination1 as years before they had wrought upon ,mr4 ,conrad4 ,needless to say1 ,mr4 ,masefield in most respects stands at the opposite pole of temperament from ,mr4 ,kipling4 ,he is a lyrical poet whose poetry springs not so much from intense interest in the lusty vigour of common life as from an intense feeling for sheer beauty1 for that exquisite refinement which may be extracted from life2 and it may be mingled with equally intense pain when the beauty is removed4 ,he is1 perhaps1 more nearly akin to the type to which ,keats belonged4 ,but certainly the arrival of the spirit represented by ,kipling1 added to the discipline of his own early adventures1 braced him and energised him2 and almost his first literary effort took the form of ballad poems uniting a fineness and sweetness which were entirely his own with a kind of lusty vigour which was superimposed4 ,it is easy enough to see the influence of ,kipling in a ballad such as that which begins3 ,spanish waters1 ,spanish waters1 you are singing in my ears1 ,like a slow sweet piece of music from the grey forgotten years2 ,telling tales1 and beating tunes1 and bringing weary thoughts to me ,of the sandy beach at ,muertos1 where ,i would that ,i could be4 ,those early ballads had some of the emotional vigour without the characteristic defects of ,kipling1 and in many cases a charm which was entirely his own4 ,but he very early shook off what there was of that ,kipling influence4 ,it was superficial and transitory4 ,mr4 ,kipling1 as ,i have said1 represented a transition period2 and another--an experimental period--has followed4 ,it is probable that ,joseph ,conrad became a far more potent influence on the imagination of ,mr4 ,masefield than any one other author2 though he was assuredly not content to follow any single example1 and began steadily to experiment and to strike out his own line4 ,it was unfortunate that the craze for experiment and innovation should1 for a time--probably a brief time--have had so strange and uncouth an effect upon so fine and sensitive a genius4 ,mr4 ,masefield was--and is--a lyrical poet1 fitted to express the personal emotions which lyrical poetry can support4 ,but he became obsessed with the conviction that poetry ought to be made to do something else than suggest feelings and ideas in a beautiful way2 that it ought to serve a social purpose2 that it ought to become a direct contributory force to the social morality of the time2 that it ought to concern itself with practical modern questions in a practical way2 that it ought to present actual life1 realistically4 ,the same feeling affected a lesser poet1 ,mr4 ,wilfrid ,wilson ,gibson1 who1 being a story-teller in verse and a moralist1 has been acclaimed as a powerful poet in both ,england and ,america4 ,mr4 ,gibson has not yet shown that he is a considerable poet4 ,but ,mr4 ,masefield undoubtedly does possess the poetic talent1 perhaps even genius1 which ,mr4 ,gibson has not yet revealed4 ,but the most recent poems of the former have been praised for just the same reasons that ,mr4 ,gibson's have been praised4 ,the ,new ,york ,outlook said of ,mr4 ,gibson3 ,he is bringing a message which might well rouse his day and generation to an understanding of and a sympathy with life's disinherited--the overworked masses4 ,mr4 ,masefield's ,the ,everlasting ,mercy and his series of realistic poems of the same order have been lavishly eulogised in exactly the same way--and for a similar reason4 ,each of these poems contains a rousing story2 each subserves the purpose of an excellent moral4 ,they are realistic enough1 but only in rare passages are they beautiful4 ,nothing1 said ,shelley1 can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse4 ,i have felt that ,mr4 ,masefield's long narrative poems might equally well have been expressed in prose4 ,i believe this to be no more than a passing phase in ,mr4 ,masefield4 ,a poet who could write the charming lyrical poem which1 by a curious accident1 was published at the end of ,the ,everlasting ,mercy in the ,english ,review will not long be content to write sensational tracts2 we may even be glad that these tracts have been written if they bring the public to attend to the more significant work of so finely gifted an author4 ,but ,i am very far from suggesting that the effort made by ,mr4 ,gibson and ,mr4 ,masefield to bring poetry into touch with modern life is without significance4 ,it represented reaction against the querulousness1 the vagueness1 the mere prettiness which have so often resulted in nauseous verse4 ,it had its source in the same impulse which led ,j4,m4 ,synge to create his finest imaginative effects by means of a severely realistic method4 ,and still earlier ,mr4 ,doughty1 who holds a solitary position in modern poetry1 had expressed himself in the only way that was natural to him1 through an archaic language1 the language in which he thought1 which lent itself to the hard1 vivid1 and superbly brutal images belonging to his primitive1 barbarian1 and as it were primeval theme4 ,mr4 ,doughty belongs neither to our own nor to any other age1 but he has not been without influence upon men of our time4 ,to appreciate ,the ,dawn in ,britain or ,adam ,cast ,forth is to long for the hardness and masculinity which have been rare in ,english poetry for a hundred years2 to feel that what poetry needs is more grit and more brain2 and to plead for these is to plead for more poetry1 for a stronger imagination4 ,there is one among the younger poets who has given promise of satisfying these needs1 though it remains to be seen whether he may not perhaps be over-weighted on the side of intellect4 ,but in ,mary and the ,bramble and ,the ,sale of ,st4 ,thomas he has shown us how the poetic imagination ripens into food for adults when virility and intellect have gone to the making of it4 ,there is no mere prettiness in ,mr4 ,abercrombie's writing4 ,the wearisome refrain of sex1 disappointed or desirous1 neither has part in the argument nor supplies him with images or asides4 ,innumerable things and events upon the earth appeal to him because of that full-bodied experience which they carry to the wakeful and the zestful1 experience which is manifold1 which fills all the chinks of memory1 which may recall pain1 which may be charged with pathos1 but is never morbid2 beautifully he masses vigorous impressions of sense under a large imaginative idea4 ,here there is no pale1 languishing phantom of beauty1 but that which men delight in without the verbal distractions of the sthete4 ,in ,mary and the ,bramble he has taken an intellectual idea and treated it allegorically1 and essentially poetically4 ,the ,virgin ,mary in his story symbolises the upward meaning mind1 fastened in substance1 yet pure and seemly to the ,lord2 and the bramble which clutches her and seeks to smirch her purity is the folly1 the muddiness1 the stupid cruelty of the world which mocks at all vision1 at all idealism--it is the mortal trying to drag down the immortal part of man4 ,mary is the love of beauty1 or of ,god2 the bramble is the stupidity and grossness of the practical world4 ,but ,mary1 in her rapt girlhood1 with her eyes like the rain-shadowed sea1 is not the less sweet because she stands for an idea4 ,through meadows flowering with happiness ,went ,mary1 feeling not the air that laid ,honours of gentle dew upon her head2 ,nor that the sun now loved with golden stare ,the marvellous behaviour of her hair1 ,bending with finer swerve from off her brow ,than water which relents before a prow2 ,till in the shrinking darkness many a gleam ,of secret bronze-red lustres answered him4 ,and when the ,spirit of ,life vaunts itself in her1 ,not vain his boast2 for seemly to the ,lord1 ,blue-robed and yellow-kerchieft1 ,mary went4 ,there never was to ,god such worship sent ,by any angel in the ,heavenly ways1 ,as this that ,life had utter'd for ,god's praise1 ,this girlhood--as the service that ,life said ,in the beauty and the manners of this maid4 ,never the harps of ,heaven played such song ,as her grave walking through the grasses long4 ,i cannot dwell upon the subject of ,the ,sale of ,st4 ,thomas4 ,the dialogue between ,thomas and the captain gives opportunity for description and metaphor almost ,elizabethan in their ferocity1 though the reflections of ,thomas have a spiritual quality which is entirely modern4 ,we hear ,of monkeys1 those lewd mammets of mankind4 ,and of flies staring ,out of their little faces of gibbous eyes4 ,and there are lines such as ,men there have been who could so grimly look ,that soldiers' hearts went out like candle flames ,before their eyes1 and the blood perisht in them1 which might be placed side by side with ,marlowe's3 ,the frowning looks of fiery ,tamburlaine ,that with his terrour and imperious eies1 ,commands the hearts of his associates4 ,and we may contrast these vehement records of things with the more philosophic passages3 ,thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight ,to pore only within the candle-gleam ,of conscious wit and reasonable brain2 ,but search into the sacred darkness lying ,outside thy knowledge of thyself1 the vast ,measureless fate1 full of the power of stars1 ,the outer noiseless heavens of thy soul4 ,we may well think that the immediate future of poetry depends upon men of the stamp of ,mr4 ,abercrombie1 men for whom poetry is neither a plaything nor a sweet-sounding expression of desire or anguish or vague dreams2 but a serious attempt to grapple with life through combined experience1 thought1 and vision4 ,long ago ,meredith urged that if fiction was to go on living1 it must give us brain-stuff and food-stuff4 ,but no poet has since arisen to make some similar claim for poetry2 to urge that within its proper sphere and in its own appropriate way it should attack the larger life of man with intelligence1 with common sense1 and with virile passion4 99 99 99 99 99 ,mr4 ,w4,h4 ,davies stands apart from them all4 ,i should not like to try to account in any way for ,mr4 ,davies any more than he could account for a singing-bird by describing the trees among which it lived4 ,his poetry is unlike any other poetry that is written to-day4 ,it is fresh and sweet like a voice from a younger and lustier world4 ,it is charged with no clarion message of prophecy2 it is burdened with no exactly formulated philosophy of life4 ,there is no rhetoric in it1 no rhodomontade4 ,it is the melody of a man's voice singing for the pleasure of singing1 now vehemently1 from the sheer delight in things physical and outward1 now sadly1 as some evanescent object induces melancholy1 now in a naively reflective way1 as past or future brings memories or expectations4 ,he never reaches quite the exquisite melodies of ,herrick1 but when he writes of love he is as simple as ,herrick1 and he is more direct1 more heart-whole1 less of the perfect singer1 perhaps1 but more of the lover4 ,if he writes with wide-eyed wonder at the simpler marvels of life1 it is in the manner of ,blake in ,songs of ,innocence1 where outwardness of manner and lyrical simplicity leave an impression of something unearthly in its strangeness4 ,occasionally in the slight extravagance of his imagery we can see that the influence of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets has not left him unscathed1 as when he likens love to the influence of spring opening up navigation4 ,but it is a sure instinct which has taken him to the simpler lyrical poets and led him to mould his style on theirs4 ,his interests lie in the purely personal affairs of the heart2 the simpler emotions may be best expressed in those lyrical forms in which the older ,english literature is pre-eminent1 which eschew the fervid rhythms of the soulful nineteenth century4 ,but he is not merely imitative4 ,sometimes in the same poem we see him1 now conforming to the manner of the traditional love-poet1 now revivifying it or bursting through it with images and ideas that are wholly personal to himself4 ,she had two eyes as blue as ,heaven1 ,ten times as warm they shone2 ,and yet her heart was hard and cold ,as any shell or stone4 ,her mouth was like a soft red rose ,when ,phbus drinks its dew2 ,but oh1 that cruel thorn inside ,pierced many a fond heart through4 ,she had a step that walked unheard1 ,it made the stones like grass2 ,yet that light step has crushed a heart1 ,as light as that step was4 ,those glowing eyes1 those smiling lips1 ,i have lived now to prove ,were not for me1 were not for me1 ,but came of her self-love4 ,yet1 like a cow for acorns that ,have made it suffer pain1 ,so1 though her charms are poisonous1 ,i moan for them again4 ,in any other poet the cow and the acorns would be an intolerable extravagance2 but not so from ,mr4 ,davies1 who knows and loves all beasts of the field2 who knows what it is to tramp over stones and to tread the grass1 so that his stones like grass rings freshly1 while the dew-drinking ,phbus is stale4 ,but if he seems to belong to an older tradition1 and to have little in common with the self-conscious modern poet1 that is only because his life has kept him away from the fashions and fashionable ideas which are the intellectual superficies of our time1 which distinguish the culture of one age from the culture of another4 ,he loves with the strength of intimate friendship the unchanging things in the natural world1 the sea1 things that grow1 and animals and birds4 ,and he is acquainted with the other unchanging things--love1 the desire for food1 hatred of death1 friendship4 ,he is also too keen in his sympathies and interests not to be modern in the sense1 for instance1 that the romantic appeal has had its effect on him1 or that the ugly facts of modern life have stirred and pained him4 ,there is a great variety of emotions registered in his poems4 ,there is the grim ballad called ,treasures4 ,there is a bold union of magical romanticism and sensuous passion in the poem beginning3 ,i met her in the leafy woods1 ,early a summer's night2 ,i saw her white teeth in the dark1 ,there was no better light4 ,there is a remarkable confidence and elation in the little poem ,the ,elements1 wherein he identifies himself with ,nature--it could only be quoted entire4 ,and he records his impression of a tramcar which sweeps along ,westminster in the twilight carrying its load of sleeping men to work4 ,he can also write in a vein wholly unlike that of his simple and more characteristic lyrical verses4 ,thus he describes his childish impressions of a mariner no good in port or out1 as his granddad said3 ,and all his flesh was pricked with ,indian ink1 ,his body marked as rare and delicate ,as dead men struck by lightning under trees1 ,and pictured with fine twigs and curled ferns2 ,chains on his neck and anchors on his arms2 ,rings on his fingers1 bracelets on his wrist2 ,and on his breast the ,jane of ,appledore ,was schooner rigged1 and in full sail at sea4 ,he could not whisper with his strong hoarse voice1 ,no more than could a horse creep quietly2 ,he laughed to scorn the men that muffled close ,for fear of wind1 till all their neck was hid1 ,like ,indian corn wrapped up in long green leaves2 ,he knew no flowers but seaweeds brown and green1 ,he knew no birds but those that followed ships1 ,full well he knew the water-world2 he heard ,a grander music there than we on land4 ,all of it is the intensely personal and direct poetry of a man of many moods1 many sympathies1 but happily removed from the cramping effects of current fashions of thoughts1 and talk about thought4 ,he has lived in the open air and among simple people1 but always companioned by the poets4 ,and so we have in him a singer fresh and unspoilt1 writing from impulse1 probably with little conscious technique1 about things which he knows and the immediate experiences of life4 ,,vi ,j4,m4 ,,synge ,four volumes1 none too thick1 contain the collected works of the man who is coming to be regarded as the greatest of ,irish dramatists4 ,as we turn over the pages1 and observe that they contain no more than six plays--three of them very short--a few ,poems and ,translations1 the volume on the ,aran ,islands1 and a volume of miscellaneous studies of his experiences among the folk of ,wicklow1 ,kerry1 and the ,congested ,districts1 it is to feel wonder that a man with so profound an imagination1 so wide a knowledge of the folk1 and such genius for creation1 should have produced only this for his life-work4 ,and then we remember the lamentable fact of his early death--he was born in #ahga--;and the no less important fact that he was one for whom experience of living counted equally with the experience of art1 and that he wrought as few ,english authors work1 being at the pains to write and re-write till he had the result to his mind4 ,and so in these four volumes there is nothing whatever to regret--nothing that can be passed over as dull or indifferent1 nothing that has not both a hard basis of actuality and also an intensity of imagination that lifts it into the region of poetry4 ,in one of his later moments of self-consciousness he uttered a sentence of criticism worthy to be treasured by the modern poet1 and perhaps by the ,irish poet especially4 ,it may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal4 ,what would we not give to have ,synge's brutality introduced into the over-idealised and sonorous poetry of ,mr4 ,yeats8 ,he does not mean the brutality of our ,english realists1 or ugliness1 sheer fact1 mis-called truth1 without beauty2 what he wants is fidelity to common truth1 a realisation of the root1 primitive facts--the most grim primitive facts--that hard basis of fact which must be accepted before the imagination can bear fruit4 ,one of the most singular qualities of ,synge is the extraordinary common sense which sustains the gruesomeness of his tragic imagination on the one side1 and his no less gruesome humour on the other4 ,it holds together this humour and this grimness which are so truthfully united in his work4 ,it is the common sense of the old-fashioned poet1 the common sense which is all-pervading in ,homer's ,odyssey--based upon a strong1 keen sense for the concrete1 ordinary things of life4 ,it is this which makes him find the masterly conclusion to ,riders of the ,sea1 when old ,maurya1 lamenting the death of her sons1 comforts herself1 ,no man at all can be living for ever1 and we must be satisfied2 it is this which gives ,naisi the ancient love of life1 ,it's a hard and bitter thing leaving the earth2 which produces so admirable a proverb as1 ,who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over82 and enables ,pegeen1 in ,the ,playboy of the ,western ,world1 to perceive1 if only from pique1 the preposterousness of her infatuation--,there's a great gap1 she says--and this is the gist of the matter--between a gallous story and a dirty deed4 ,but never does such common sense stay the flight of the poetic dream4 ,pegeen may know the difference between a gallous story and a dirty deed1 but that does not stop her from breaking out into wild lamentations3 ,oh1 my grief1 ,i've lost him surely4 ,i've lost the only ,playboy of the ,western ,world4 ,it is by never departing far from the high-road of common fact that ,synge suggests to us the fascinations1 the dangers1 and romance of the by-paths4 ,i think that when he travels a very long way from that high-road he does not hold us with so firm a hand4 ,beautiful as is the prose-poetry of ,deirdre of the ,sorrows1 and fine as is the idealised portrait of ,deirdre1 yet1 as a whole1 this play does not grip so well as his other1 even his slighter1 plays4 ,is it not because he is moving away from the common life1 which he knows so well how to light up into the uncommon atmosphere of the grim1 the fanciful1 the romantic1 into the already half-conventionalised art atmosphere of the old heroic ,saga8 ,most of his success in ,deirdre of the ,sorrows is due to the fact that he has treated ,deirdre as if she were just one of the peasant women whom he has known2 but the ready-made plot has hampered him1 and he is shut off from the use of those little brutalities which give savour to his modern plays4 ,the actual life is not there to secure him1 and he falls into the characteristic ,irish vagueness in praising the poet-hero--even ,pegeen1 in ,the ,playboy1 had spoken of poets as fine1 fiery fellows with great rages when their temper's roused 7it is just so that the ,irish poets like to be pictured2 and ,mr4 ,jack ,yeats1 in a drawing usually much admired1 has transformed ,synge himself into just such a fine1 fiery fellow of the tradition74 ,in ,deirdre of the ,sorrows1 ,synge could not1 of course1 free his mind from the traditional story1 or from the poetry of all the poets who have sung of ,deirdre2 but should ,deirdre herself1 at the tragic moment when her lover lies dead1 be thinking of the way there will be a story told of a ruined city and a raving king and a woman will be young for ever8 ,this is like many ,irish poets1 but it is not worthy of ,synge4 ,it was his genius to be able to tell the stories that have not been traditionalised1 and to tell them in a wonderful dialect which may or may not be true to any actual speech1 but which1 unlike the jargon that is affectation in many ,irish writers1 used by him1 has the power of affecting us as the old ,ionic could move those who spoke in ,attic ,greek4 ,it helps us to get into the fanciful and grotesque atmosphere which he conjured up out of the most real life4 ,in all his modern plays there are character1 dramatic intensity1 fidelity to the folk life--and that life1 with its brutality and its delicacy1 attains the utmost that life can hold1 seen through the poetic vision of ,synge1 made poignant and vivid by his imagination4 ,,vii ,,the ,,shramana ,,ekai ,,kawaguchi ,books are like places of entertainment in that they often afford a pleasure wholly different in kind from that intended by the author4 ,an original and cultured gentleman of my acquaintance has a habit of visiting suburban music-halls1 and deriving therefrom a delight exquisite beyond the dreams of the artists who forgather at the ,wormwood ,scrubs ,empire4 ,in like manner there are books which have come to be accepted as classics on the ground of excellences not aimed at by their authors1 not necessarily because the authors were artless1 but because their conscious art had no relation to the quality in them which pleases4 ,pepys was a first-rate ,admiralty official and a desirable boon companion1 but to his many excellences1 known to himself no less than to his friends1 that of being a master in ,english literature would never have been added4 ,a still better example is the ,little ,flowers of ,st4 ,francis of ,assisi4 ,we read them now because of what we are accustomed to call their human interest1 because they show us the robust1 ordinary1 fleshly1 and ideal side of pious medival ,catholics2 they appeal to us humorously and pathetically2 they are tragi-comedies of the transcendental life4 ,but they were written to commemorate the pious acts of the saints1 and the authors would have been shocked to think that they were contributing to the profane delight of the general and possibly heretical reader4 ,in the same way the ,journal of ,john ,wesley is a delight to many people to whom ,wesley's peculiar excellences make no appeal4 ,he was a great evangelist1 a powerful emotional influence1 a considerable thinker1 a scholar1 a robust man1 and a gentleman of the ,church of ,england4 ,but when we have named all these qualities we have scarcely begun to account for the endless delight of his ,journal4 ,that which he consciously aimed at is not that which gives all of us pleasure4 ,to books of this class ,i should be disposed to add that of the ,shramana ,ekai ,kawaguchi1 a distinguished ,japanese priest1 scholar1 and traveller1 who wrote a book entitled ,three ,years in ,tibet4 ,it must not be supposed that the ,shramana is a simple or unsophisticated writer1 or that he has not studied literary effects2 but his intentional effects have the charm of navet to an ,english reader1 and his narrative is wholly unstudied in respect of all that delights us in it4 ,such a book as this makes us distrustful of all our standards4 ,it is an example of art as unconscious as that of the song of some vain1 but for the moment solitary1 child4 ,it declares to us that ,nature1 when we can bring to it our own appreciation1 is the first thing1 and that the idealism of art is the second-best with which we content ourselves when ,nature1 with its direct appeal1 is in abeyance4 ,the ,shramana accomplished a journey which has few parallels in the history of travel4 ,he spent three years residing and travelling in the uplands of ,tibet1 after the exclusion of strangers had become a rigorous policy1 and before the ,british punitive expedition had inspired fear of the long-handed foreigner4 ,he had with him no organised escort of men and mules such as accompanied ,sir ,sven ,hedin in his more recent and better advertised expedition4 ,he went alone and in disguise1 as ,burton went on his pilgrimage to ,mecca2 on intimate terms with the natives as ,mr4 ,doughty was with the ,arabs2 a mendicant as ,arminius ,vambery has been in ,asiatic ,turkey and ,persia4 ,and he had an advantage which none of these travellers had1 one which he did not scruple to use to the utmost--he was a ,buddhist1 like the ,tibetans1 and not only a ,buddhist1 but an exceptionally learned priest1 possessed of a knowledge of things holy which he used with a religious fervour tempered with ,odysseian guile4 ,he was no missionary1 but he carried the true ,buddhism about with him in ,tibet as discreetly as ,borrow carried his ,bibles in ,spain2 and his style has a curious resemblance to that of our ,english gipsy4 ,with everyone whom he meets he converses on religion1 philology1 love1 or the stars1 in the gayest argumentative manner1 and these dialogues come as interludes to adventures as thrilling as any that ever fall to the lot of man4 ,in a few paragraphs he will dwell on the almost inconceivable perils he experienced from mountains1 floods1 storms1 and famine1 and in the next he is dryly recording the discourse of a holy lama1 the wayside gossip of robbers1 or the passionate advances of a love-sick maiden1 against whose enticements he steeled himself with the fortitude becoming to his profession4 ,he tells us with what joy he preached the simpler truths of ,buddhism to the attentive nomads1 and in the next page remarks somewhat inconsistently3 ,i had my own reasons for being painstaking in these preachings4 ,i knew that religious talks always softened the hearts of my companions1 and this was very necessary1 as ,i might otherwise have been killed by them4444 ,fortunately my sermons were well received by my companions4 ,his whole journey was necessarily a long and systematic tissue of deception1 but when set on by robbers he disdains to preserve his worldly trash by a concealment of the truth4 ,when his friends in ,lhassa discover that he is not1 as he has been supposed to be1 a ,chinaman1 but a foreigner from ,japan1 he begs them to save themselves and send him in fetters to the ,dalai ,lama2 but sacred meditation and a supernatural voice add themselves opportunely to the persuasions of his friends1 and with this divine sanction he makes good his escape4 ,the book1 indeed1 has a fourfold value2 it reveals artlessly and perfectly the character of the ,shramana ,ekai ,kawaguchi1 and that is worth knowing in itself4 ,secondly1 it unfolds the emotional and intellectual aspects of ,japanese ,buddhism1 showing this religion both on its theological side and as a practical working influence4 ,thirdly1 it introduces us to a host of ,tibetan persons1 one after another1 presenting not a vague1 impressionist account of them1 but individuals with whom he lived on intimate equal terms in daily social intercourse4 ,and in the fourth place it gives us what we may take to be an authoritative account of the whole social system of ,tibet--the priesthood and religion1 administration1 finance1 trade1 and the relations between the sexes and castes4 ,having in #ahia given up the rectorship of a monastery in ,tokyo1 he lived for some years as a hermit and devoted himself to the study of ,buddhistic books in the ,chinese language4 ,in the course of his studies he learnt that there were ,tibetan translations of the sacred text which1 though inferior in general meaning to the ,chinese1 were superior as literal translations4 ,he determined1 therefore1 to undertake a journey to the forbidden land and travel there alone as a mendicant priest4 ,the many presents his friends offered him before his departure he declined to accept1 save in the form of sincerely given pledges 7and the sum of #dcj yen1 mentioned subsequently74 ,from a fisherman he exacted the promise to discontinue the cruel habit of catching fish2 from a poultry-man he secured a promise not to kill fowls2 and from immoderate smokers ,i asked the immediate discontinuance of the habit that would end in nicotine poisoning4 ,about forty persons willingly granted my appeal for this somewhat novel kind of farewell presents4 ,we are reminded of ,john ,wesley's exhortations to his followers to abstain from the pernicious habit of drinking tea--,i proposed it to about forty of those whom ,i believed to be strong in faith2 and the next morning to about sixty more1 entreating them all to speak their minds freely4 ,they did so2 and in the end saw the good which might ensue4 ,in many moments of dire peril experienced by the ,shramana in ,tibet1 these effective gifts1 it seems1 contributed largely toward my miraculous escapes4 ,before he could begin the most arduous part of his journey it was necessary that he should serve an apprenticeship of no less than three years in ,darjeeling and ,nepaul1 studying the ,tibetan language and grammar1 and ,tibetan ,buddhism1 befriending beggars with the double object of bestowing charity and gaining information1 and ascertaining the possible routes across the ,himalayas4 ,then one day he was conducted to the summit of a lofty and unguarded pass1 whence1 on ,july #d1 #aijj1 with his luggage on his back1 alone1 he stepped on to the soil of ,tibet1 and entered upon an unknown and apparently interminable wilderness4 ,in his wanderings over mountains1 deserts1 and rivers there was no form of hardship and danger which he had not to encounter4 ,now he spent a night in the open1 nearly frozen by snow1 the pain of the cold being interrupted only by the abstraction of meditation and the joy of composing utas 7short poems74 ,now he was nearly drowned in fording a river1 from which he was saved at the moment he was expressing a desire to be born again4 ,now he was overtaken by a sandstorm1 now bereft of his money1 now nearly perishing of hunger4 ,but from every danger he emerged triumphant4 ,when he approached the tents of nomads or pilgrims and had pointed his staff at the threatening dogs1 he was generally received with hospitality1 and on one occasion he fell in with a party of robbers who were undergoing a period of penance at ,manasarova1 and made him their guest for two months4 ,they approach the sacred peak of ,kailasa3 ,it inspired me with the profoundest feelings of pure reverence1 and ,i looked up to it as a natural mandala1 the mansion of a ,buddha and ,bodhisattvas4 ,filled with soul-stirring thoughts and fancies ,i addressed myself to this sacred pillar of nature1 confessed my sins1 and performed to it the obeisance of one hundred and eight bows4 ,i also took out the manuscript of my twenty-two desires1 and pledged their accomplishment to the ,buddha4 ,i then considered myself the luckiest of men1 to have thus been enabled to worship such a holy emblem of ,buddha's power and to vow such vows in its sacred presence1 and ,i mused3 ,whate'er my sufferings here and dangers dire1 ,whate'er befalls me on my onward march1 ,all1 all1 ,i feel1 is for the common good ,for others treading on ,salvation's path ,the night of my performance of these devotional practices must have been a matter of wonder and mystery to my companions4 ,they had been watching me like gaping and astonished children1 and were all intensely curious to know why ,i had bowed so many times1 and read out such strange ,chinese sentences4 ,i was glad to explain to them the general meaning of my conduct and they seemed to be deeply struck with its significance4 ,they said they had never known the ,chinese ,lamas were men of such ,bodhisattvic mind6 ,the upshot was that they asked me to preach to them that night1 a request to which ,i was very glad to accede4 ,the preaching which followed1 which ,i purposely made as simple and as appealing to the heart as possible1 seemed to affect them profoundly1 and to make the best possible impression on them2 so much so that they even shed tears of joy4 ,the preaching over1 they said in all sincerity that they were glad of companionship1 and even offered to regard me as their guest during the two months which they intended to spend in pilgrimage to and round the ,kang ,rinpoche4 ,they thought that their pilgrimage over such holy ground1 while serving such a holy man as ,i now was to them1 would absolve them completely from their sins4 ,it was during this pilgrimage that there occurred the tender episode already alluded to1 from which the ,shramana1 though neither a block of wood1 nor a piece of stone1 emerged even more creditably than ,john ,wesley when similarly tempted in ,georgia4 ,i can give no account here of his arrival in ,lhassa1 the reputation he gained as a ,chinese physician1 his kindly reception by the ,dalai ,lama1 or his intimate friendships with the apothecary and the ex-,minister of ,finance4 ,he gives a vivid picture of the life of the different classes of priests and monks1 and the corrupt state of the ,tibetan hierarchy4 ,he describes the rudimentary system of education1 the harsh and haphazard administration1 the brutality of punishments1 the system of espionage1 the free position of women and the practice of polyandry1 the filthy personal habits of the people1 their superstitions1 their occupations1 their festivals4 ,i do not dwell upon these matters1 partly because many of the features described are common to other oriental countries1 but mainly because ,i am here considering the peculiar excellence of the book as a book of travel1 a human document--as the phrase goes--a record of experience which has taken the stamp of a most interesting personality4 ,,viii ,,francis ,,thompson ,in ,the ,blue ,bird of ,maeterlinck we are told of a child who puts on a magic hat and turns a fairy diamond and sees all that was ugly and sordid transformed into something transcendently beautiful4 ,there was no need for ,francis ,thompson to find a magic hat2 the poetic instinct which was always with him gave him the insight into another poet's nature2 he saw through1 around1 and beyond those unlovely passages in the life of ,shelley which made ,matthew ,arnold1 for once so strangely an adherent of ,mrs4 ,grundy1 exclaim1 ,what a set6 ,what a world6 ,there are few appreciations in the ,english language comparable to his essay on ,shelley4 ,fixing his eyes on what seems to him essential in the man1 ,thompson finds that everything else explains itself to the observer who will see with the poet1 who can understand his sufferings1 and imagine his delights4 ,and so his essay is no ordinary study in criticism4 ,he sets himself1 indeed1 as ,pater would have done1 to find what it is that makes the specific worth of the poet4 ,but there is no laborious calculating of values2 rather a lavish pouring forth of the just meed of praise1 an interpretation1 a vindication of ,shelley1 like ,swinburne's vindication of ,blake1 in language less passionate1 perhaps1 but more perfect in its melody1 and more significant in its imagery1 responding to its theme with tremulous beauty4 ,mr4 ,wyndham1 ,i think1 did not go far from the truth when he said that this is the most important contribution to pure letters written in ,english during the last twenty years4 ,for in a certain sense it seems to reach an even greater height than ,thompson's poetry4 ,for whilst he has written exalted poetry1 thought-compelling poetry1 magnificent in diction and appealing to the deeper emotions1 there is in this essay a simplicity which was often lacking in the former1 and a passionate pleading which combines the cogent lucidity of a ,newman with the other-worldness of a ,st4 ,francis4 ,if it has a fault1 it is that of being too rich in its imagery1 too lavish of its judgments1 too overbearing in its vision of beauty1 so that some critics will say that it is too poetical for prose4 ,it is1 indeed1 the prose of a poet1 and such as only a poet would or could write2 but its harmony1 its structural balance1 its masterly transitions are1 save in a few cases1 those which are proper to prose4 ,there is1 perhaps1 something a little forced in the opening passage in which he commends the services of poetry to the charity of the ,church1 paragraphs which were designed to conciliate the editor of the ,dublin ,review4 ,he passes to consider the defect which has mildewed all the poetry written since ,shelley1 the predominance of art over inspiration1 of body over soul4 ,not1 he holds1 that inspiration has been lacking--the warrior is there1 but he is hampered by his armour4 ,we are self-conscious to the finger-tips2 and this inherent quality1 entailing on our poetry the inevitable loss of spontaneity1 ensures that whatever poets1 of whatever excellence1 may be born to us of the ,shelleian stock1 its founder's spirit can take among us no reincarnation4 ,an age that is ceasing to produce child-like children cannot produce a ,shelley4 ,for both as poet and man he was essentially a child4 ,to the last1 he exclaims1 he was the enchanted child4 ,and he explains what he means in words that may seem fantastic3 ,it is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism2 it is to believe in love1 to believe in loveliness1 to believe in belief4 ,and he suggests that ,shelley never could have been a man1 for he never was a boy4 ,and the reason lay in the persecution which over-clouded his school days4 ,he was a grown-up child when he sailed his paper boats on the ,isis1 when in his loves he gave way to that straying1 strange and deplorable1 of the spirit1 when he rebelled petulantly but not ungenerously against the order of the world1 and when he soared with the cloud or the skylark like the child-like peoples among whom mythologies have their rise4 ,in his poetry he is still at play1 save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch1 and his playthings are those which the gods give their children4 ,the universe is his box of toys4 ,he dabbles his fingers in the day-fall4 ,he is gold-dusty with his tumbling amidst the stars4 ,he makes bright mischief with the moon4 ,and1 in the same1 full way1 ,thompson explains in what sense ,shelley was a poet of ,nature2 in what manner images poured naturally from his lips as they ought to have done1 but never did1 pour from the lips of the metaphysical poets2 by what instinctive perception of the underlying analogies1 the secret subterranean passages1 between matter and soul1 he was able to make such imaginative play with abstractions2 and1 finally1 how in his shorter poems he forgets for a while all that ever makes his verse turbid2 forgets that he is anything but a poet1 forgets sometimes that he is anything but a child4 ,and all the time the essayist is dropping phrases which surely are unforgettable1 striking us alike by their truth and their pregnance--this beautiful1 wild1 feline poetry1 wild because left to range the wilds4--,his ,muse has become a veritable ,echo1 whose body has dissolved from about her voice4--,he stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and the invisible1 and could shift the points as he willed4 ,his thoughts became a mounted infantry1 passing with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse4 ,even to-day1 five years after his death1 ,thompson has not attained the full fame which he merits4 ,it is true his very first book won the highest praise from critics no less distinguished than ,coventry ,patmore1 ,mr4 ,arthur ,symons1 and ,mr4 ,h4,d4 ,traill1 and long before his death it was no small circle of admirers who looked eagerly for each new poem from his pen4 ,yet his genius is not of that kind which instantly communicates itself to a generation4 ,living apart in a spiritual atmosphere of his own1 his heart divested of the desires which form half the life of most men1 his gaze was fixed on the inner mysteries of the spirit and on those outer forms which are the vehicles of beauty4 ,the very language he used was as far remote as possible from the brutish jargon we inherit4 ,he belonged to the hierarchy of the poets of all ages1 and pressed into his service lovely1 half-forgotten words which made his poetry seem strange and bizarre to those who were too much immersed in the language and literature of their day4 ,and those subtler minds who instantly perceived its beauty1 and saw how his language and his imagery often recalled those of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals1 such as ,crashaw1 too readily perhaps asserted a bond between his thought and theirs4 ,like them1 it is true1 he turned his back on the delusive splendours of the world2 he accepted and expressed in song the divine ordinance of the universe4 ,but he was afflicted with the pain of modern doubt2 fear and speculative curiosity struggled with his faith2 sometimes the sheer beauty of the external world1 so far from proving the divine beauty1 seemed to him as a possible refuge in his vain flight from the ,hound of ,heaven4 ,he cannot be allocated to a single school4 ,in his reading he had ranged through the poets of all ages1 and he had assimilated a mighty variety of emotions1 and we may see how his form shows the influence now of one poet1 now another--,milton1 ,cowley1 ,shelley1 ,hood1 ,poe1 and ,rossetti--yet each influence1 as it came upon him1 was passed through the crucible of his own defined temperament1 and the resultant is wholly his own1 a creature which speaks of half-suppressed emotion1 yet fantastically rich in phrase1 rhythm1 and image4 ,his study of all the poets seems to have opened to him more avenues of beauty than were open to any poet of the middle seventeenth century4 ,there is in his blood the fantastical romance of the ,elizabethans2 the love of spiritual contemplation which marked the seventeenth-century mystic2 the passionate adoration of ,nature and the open air which came with the early nineteenth century2 modern introspectiveness2 and that habit of symbolism with which ,rossetti and his school have made us familiar4 ,sometimes his pregnant phrases1 his literary imagery1 his stately1 sweeping rhetoric1 and the note of underlying melancholy would lead us to compare him with ,virgil rather than with any modern poet4 ,under this dreadful brother uterine1 ,this kinsman feared1 ,tellus1 behold me come1 ,thy son stern-nursed2 who mortal-mother-like1 ,to turn thy weanlings' mouth averse1 embitter'st1 ,thine over-childed breast4 ,now1 mortal-sonlike1 ,i thou hast suckled1 ,mother1 ,i at last ,shall sustenant be to thee4 ,here ,i untrammel1 ,here ,i pluck loose the body's cerementing1 ,and break the tomb of life2 here ,i shake off ,the bur o' the world1 man's congregation shun1 ,and to the antique order of the dead ,i take the tongueless vows4 ,but those last lines3 ,and to the antique order of the dead ,i take the tongueless vows4 we cannot compare with any model4 ,they stand by themselves1 unsurpassable1 lines such as are only to be found here and there even in the great poets4 ,the more one reads this poetry of ,thompson's the more one discovers that it is something essentially individual4 ,harmonies that one may miss on a first reading become more apparent and more insistent as one reads again1 and the exquisite1 haunting melody of his verse pursues us1 and its faultless1 rich rhythms seem to create new patterns of form4 ,one may miss not a little of his thought1 because the engrossing beauty of the language lays hold of the senses4 ,in almost every poem one finds some lingering phrase3 ,whatso looks lovelily ,is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain4 ,or3 ,the little sweetness making grief complete4 ,often he shows that exact sense of lyrical fitness which ,milton pre-eminently possessed1 and1 second only to him1 ,shelley4 ,we see it in the passage which begins3 ,suffer me at your leafy feast ,to sit apart1 a somewhat alien guest1 ,and watch your mirth1 ,unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth4 ,the ,hound of ,heaven1 ,i think1 has rightly been pronounced his greatest poem1 for whilst in its wealth of melody1 its magnificence of imagery1 and its pathos1 it is unsurpassed1 it reveals also the finest depths of his thought as he takes us down the labyrinthine ways of his mind's flight4 ,but next to that ,i would put ,the ,making of ,viola1 a poem which no other1 except ,rossetti or his sister ,christina1 could have written3 ,i ,the ,father of ,heaven4 ,spin1 daughter ,mary1 spin1 ,twirl your wheel with silver din2 ,spin1 daughter ,mary1 spin1 ,spin a tress for ,viola4 ,angels4 ,spin1 ,queen ,mary1 a ,brown tress for ,viola6 ,,ii ,the ,father of ,heaven4 ,weave1 hands angelical1 ,weave a woof of flesh to pall ,weave1 hands evangelical-- ,flesh to pall our ,viola4 ,angels4 ,weave1 singing brothers1 a ,velvet flesh for ,viola6 ,,iii ,the ,father of ,heaven4 ,scoop1 young ,jesus1 for her eyes1 ,wood-browned pools of ,paradise-- ,young ,jesus1 for the eyes1 ,for the eyes of ,viola4 ,angels4 ,tint1 ,prince ,jesus1 a ,dusked eye for ,viola6 ,it may be that he will always be a poet for the few2 that his mystical1 esoteric spirit1 finding its proper expression in baffling imagery and elusive1 other-worldly rhythms1 will never be wholly congenial to the many4 ,but his place is assured2 for he had no traffic with the things of a day or the language of a day4 ,the beauty which haunts his prose and his verse is of that universal order which can hardly fade by the mere passing of time4 ,only a change in the human spirit can make it dim4 ,,note ,many of the foregoing chapters are based upon articles which have been published in periodicals4 ,my thanks are due to the ,editors of the following journals1 which ,i name in the order of my indebtedness3--,the ,english ,review1 ,the ,nation1 ,the ,daily ,news1 ,the ,north ,american ,review1 ,the ,british ,review1 and ,the ,athenum4 ,,the ,,complete ,,dramatic ,,works ,,of ,gerhart ,hauptmann ,,authorized ,,edition ,,in ,,six ,,volumes ,it is generally conceded that ,gerhart ,hauptmann is the most notable dramatist of the present day4 ,his work combines literary1 psychological and dramatic interest in greater measure than that of any other contemporary writer1 and the award of the ,nobel prize in literature was a public recognition of his genius4 ,an authorized translation of his dramas makes it possible at last for ,english people to study and enjoy ,hauptmann4 ,excellent translations of a few plays had already been made and these1 by arrangement with the respective translators1 will be adapted to the present edition1 but new translation will be made whenever it seems necessary in order to maintain the highest standard4 ,the editor of the edition is ,professor ,ludwig ,lewisohn4 ,he supplies a general introduction to ,hauptmann's works in ,volume ,i1 and a briefer introduction to each succeeding volume4 ,,contents ,volume ,i ,social ,dramas ,before ,dawn ,the ,weavers ,the ,beaver ,coat ,the ,conflagration ,volume ,,ii ,social ,dramas ,drayman ,henschel ,rose ,bernd ,the ,rats ,volume ,,iii ,domestic ,dramas ,the ,reconciliation ,lonely ,lives ,colleague ,crampton ,michael ,kramer ,volume ,,iv ,symbolic and ,legendary ,dramas ,hannele ,the ,sunken ,bell ,henry of ,aue ,volume ,v ,symbolic and ,historical ,dramas ,schluck and ,jau ,and ,pippa ,dances ,charlemagne's ,hostage ,volume ,,vi ,later ,dramas in ,prose ,the ,maidens of the ,mount ,griselda ,gabriel ,schilling's ,flight ,each ,volume ,crown #hvo4 ,price ,five ,shillings net ,,two ,,new ,,volumes ,,in ,,this ,,series ,,walt ,,whitman ,a ,,critical ,,study ,,by ,,basil ,,de ,,selincourt ,,walter ,,pater ,a ,,critical ,,study ,,by ,,edward ,,thomas ,each ,volume ,demy ,octavo4 ,with a ,frontispiece ,portrait in ,photogravure4 ,price #gs4 #f;d4 net4 ,,uniform ,,with ,,people ,,and ,,questions ,,dramatic ,,portraits ,by ,p4,p4 ,,howe ,throughout this book a particular point of view has been adhered to1 from which the drama is looked upon as a separate art from literature1 and from which especial attention is paid to the manner of its practice4 ,thus nearly all the plays of the dramatists passed under review are to be studied in book form1 but they are spoken of here1 as far as possible1 in terms of their actual presentation in the theatre4 ,the dramatists include ,pinero1 ,henry ,arthur ,jones1 ,henry ,james1 ,oscar ,wilde1 ,bernard ,shaw1 ,barrie1 ,hubert ,henry ,davies1 ,granville ,barker1 ,hankin1 ,galsworthy and ,masefield4 ,it is a book for all playgoers who have done their playgoing in the ,english theatre of the last twenty-five years4 ,the portraits which illustrate it are from camera studies by ,mr4 ,e4,o4 ,hopp1 reproduced by a new process which does full justice to his original prints4 ,large ,crown #hvo4 ,price #es4 net4 ,,new ,,fiction ,,sinister ,,street ,by ,,compton ,,mackenzie ,author of ,carnival4 ,,the ,,story ,,of ,,louie ,by ,,oliver ,,onions ,author of ,the ,debit ,account4 ,,hands ,,up6 ,by ,,frederick ,,niven ,author of ,the ,porcelain ,lady4 ,,telling ,,the ,,truth ,by ,,william ,,hewlett ,author of ,uncle's ,advice4 ,,undergrowth ,by ,f4 and ,e4 ,,brett ,,young ,a ,first ,novel4 ,,the ,,bankrupt ,by ,,horace ,,horsnell ,a ,first ,novel4 ,,the ,,fool',s ,,tragedy ,by ,a4 ,,scott ,,craven ,a ,first ,novel4 99 99 99 99 99 ---------------------------------------- ------------------- ,typographical errors corrected in text3 ,page #cc3 poietic replaced with poetic ---------------------------------------- -------------------