Introductory material (continued 2)

Again apropos, may a physician who has healed himself offer this piece of advice? Read your own note-books often. I have known some people who have a library of note-books worth a dukedom, who never once looked into them after having filled them. That is collecting mania pure and simple. From another offensive angle what a confession of inferior taste is made in preferring the note-books of others to one’s own. A little more self-respect in this matter is clearly necessary if your conversation is to be personal at all; for in all probability the references and quotations you make without the authority of your own collection are hackneyed. They are the reach-me-downs of every encyclopædia. Is this the reason that the vast majority of current quotations are as worn as they are; that a constant reader, forewarned of the subject about to be dealt with, is usually forearmed against the tags he will find employed in it? In any case, the advice I have just given is the corrective of this depressing phenomenon of modern writing. You have only to trade in your own note-books to be, and to give the air of being, truly original.

Browsing is a rather more advanced regimen for convalescence than the re-arrangement of books. The latter can be performed without the smallest taste for reading. It is a matter of sizing them up, and any bookseller’s apprentice can do it. But browsing means dipping into the contents here and there; it is both a symptom of returning health and a means to it. In the last few days I must have nibbled in a hundred different pastures, chiefly, I think, in the pastures of books about books. De Quincey, Matthew Arnold, Bagehot, Macaulay, Johnson, etc.—what meadows, what lush grass, what feed! After all, one begins to say, literature cannot be unsatisfying that fed such bulls and that so plumped their minds. It cannot be only a variety of newspaper. Thus a new link with health is established, and one becomes able to take one’s books again. Here I should end, but that a last observation in the form of a question occurs to me. Is not or can not a taste for literature be acquired by the same means by which it can be re-acquired? Are not the child and the invalid similar? In that case the foregoing directions may be not altogether useless.

Nature in English Literature.—In observation of Nature English literature excels all others. But that is by no means to say that every English writer upon Nature is good. The astonishing thing is that contemporary with such masters of both Nature-observation and literary expression as—to name but two—Mr. W. H. Hudson and Mr. Warde Fowler (and half a dozen others could be named in the same street) there should still be so many writers insensible enough to perfection to write about Nature when they have little to say and few gifts of expression. You would think that having seen the sun they would not light a candle, or that if they did, nobody would look at it. But the truth is that not only are many candles lit, but they are all much admired—much more, indeed, than the suns themselves. There may be a good reason for it, namely, that the reading public is so much in love with Nature-writing that the best is not good enough for us. Or, again, everybody living in the country and having a pen at all, wishes to write his own Nature-observations as everybody wishes to write his own love-lyrics, regardless of the fact that the best love-lyrics have already been written. It may be so; but the admission appears to me to be over-generous.

Mr. Percy W. D. Izzard has published in book form his “Year of Country Days” under the general title of Homeland. The series has appeared in the Daily Mail, where it appears to have given pleasure to a considerable number of readers. I do not doubt the fact. Even the least suggestion of Nature would be a relief in the stuffy and bawling atmosphere of the Daily Mail. But in the form of a book, in which three hundred and sixty-five of them appear, they are almost intolerable. Their value lay in their contrast to the surrounding columns of the journal in which they were published. Take away that background and let them stand by themselves, and they are seen to be what they are—pale, anæmic, and not very knowledgeable commonplace observations. Nothing really exciting appears to have happened in the country under Mr. Izzard’s observation. When reading Jefferies or Hudson or Ward Fowler or Selous, you are made to feel, in a simple walk along a hedgerow, that something dramatic is afoot. Discovery is in the air. But Mr. Izzard is never fortunate, and all he has to record are the commonplaces of the country-side, which I could as easily reconstruct from a calendar as gather from his text. “The silver clouds are heaped together in billowy masses that sail with deeps of Italian blue between.” How pretty! But the delight is wanting.

S.S.S.—The Simplified Spelling Society has broken loose from obscurity again in the issue of a new pamphlet, called Breaking the Spell; an Appeal to Common Sense. A preface contributed by Dr. Macan rehearses all the old “reasons” for simplifying our spelling with as little attention as ever to the real reasons against it. “Spelling,” we are told, “should be the simplest of all arts.” It is so in Spanish, in Italian, in Welsh, and in Dutch, and it was so in Greek and Latin. Why not, therefore, in English? The reasoning, however, is ridiculous, for it assumes that it was by some deliberate and self-conscious design that these languages came to be spelled phonetically, and hence that we have only to follow them faithfully (and the advice of the S.S.S.) in order to place our language in a similar state. Language, however, is not a product of logic and science, but of art and taste. It is determined not by reason alone, but by the totality of our judgment, in which many other factors than reason are included. To ask us to “reform” our spelling in order to make it “reasonable” is to ask us to forgo the satisfaction of every intellectual taste save that of logic; a procedure that would not only “reform” our spelling, but all literature into the bargain. It is pretended that the adoption of simplified spelling would have, at worst, only a passing effect upon the well-being of literature. If, for example, all the English classics were re-spelled in conformity with phonetic rules, and their use made general, very soon, we are told, we should forget their original idiosyncrasies, and love them in their new spelling as much as ever. But people who argue in this way must have been blinded in their taste in their pursuit of rationalistic uniformity. Literature employs words not for their rational meaning alone, not even for their sound alone, but for their combined qualities of meaning, sound, sight, association, history, and a score of other attributes. By reducing words to a rational rule of phonetic spelling, more than half of these qualities would be entirely, or almost entirely, eliminated. A re-spelled Shakespeare, for instance, if it should ever take the place of the present edition, would be a new Shakespeare—a Shakespeare translated from the coloured language in which he thought and wrote into a language of logical symbols. An exact analogy—as far as any analogy can be exact—for the proposal of the S.S.S. would be to propose to abolish the use of colour in pictorial art, and to produce everything in black and white. The colour-blind would, no doubt, be satisfied in the one case, and, in the other, the word-blind would be equally pleased. Fortunately, both proposals have the same chance of success.

Sterne Criticism.—Everybody knows that Sterne’s Sentimental Journey broke off suddenly in the second book at the crisis of a Shandian incident. What everybody does not know—I confess I only learnt it myself a few days ago—is that Sterne’s Editor “Eugenius” not only concluded the incident, but carried on the journey to the extent of another two books. He did this, he informs us, from notes and materials left or communicated to him by Sterne himself, and he is so frank as to say that he has striven to complete the work in the style and manner of his late friend. Having a particular admiration for the style of Sterne, which, to my mind, is the easiest ever achieved in English, I have now a double resentment against the presumptuous Eugenius. In the first place, I question the man’s veracity almost as much as the veracity of Sterne himself is to be questioned in the matter of Sterne’s intention of completing his journey. The Journey was a tour de force; it was the result, as it were, of a challenge. Sterne had made a bet that he would maintain the reader’s interest in a series of the most trivial incidents by his mere manner of writing about them. That he had any other intention than that of showing his power I do not for a moment believe; least of all the suggestion that he had a plan of writing in his mind which required the book to be finished in four sections, four and just four. Eugenius’s excuses that he had often discussed the completion of the Journey with Sterne, and had heard from him the “facts, events, and observations,” intended to be introduced into the unwritten book, are thus a mere literary device for getting his own work tied to Sterne’s kite. Even if Sterne gave him authority for it, I should refuse to believe it, since Sterne may easily have been badgered into consenting; and, in any case, is not necessarily to be believed upon a matter of fact. One’s resentment is embittered by the manner in which Eugenius makes the continuation. It is notorious that Sterne never made a statement that could definitely incriminate himself. It was his whole art to leave everything to his readers’ imagination, and to put upon them the odium of the obvious interpretation. An admission on his part would have been fatal not only to himself, but to the style and intention of his work, which may be described as skating upon thin ice. Eugenius, however, in spite of all the intimacy which he says subsisted between himself and Mr. Sterne, was so far from having appreciated the elementary quality of the Journey that in completing the very incident on which Book Two breaks off, he falls into the blunder of committing Sterne to a “criminal” confession. I need not say what the confession is; it is the obvious deduction to be drawn from the description provided by Sterne himself. And it is precisely on this account that I am certain Sterne would never have made it.

Sterne on Love in France.—One of my correspondents must have been reading Sterne at the same time that I was being annoyed by Eugenius, for he has written to remind me of Sterne’s opinion of Love as it is understood in France. “The French,” wrote Sterne, “have certainly got the credit of understanding more of Love, and making it better than any other nation upon earth; but for my own part I think them arrant bunglers, and in truth, the worst set of marksmen that ever tried Cupid’s patience.” My correspondent recalls the fact from the dark backward and abysm of time that, in a discussion of Stendhal, I expressed the same opinion; and he has, no doubt, supplied the parallel in order to gratify me. Gratifying it is, in one sense, to find oneself confirmed in a somewhat novel opinion—which, moreover, was thought to be original as well—by an observer of the penetration of Sterne. But it is less gratifying when one reflects that Sterne was the last person in the world to have the right to talk about Love at all. What should a genuine as well as a professed sentimentalist have to say of Love more than that in its practice the French were not sentimental enough for him? But it is not the defect of sentimentality that stamps Love as understood in France with the mark of inferiority, but the presence of too much egoism—a fault Sterne would never have observed.

English Style.—The same correspondent copies out for me Quincey’s “fine analysis of Swift’s style,” as follows:—

The main qualification for such a style was plain good sense, natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in the putting together of sentences so as to avoid mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all, the advantage of a subject such in its nature as instinctively to reject ornament lest it should draw attention from itself. Such subjects are common; but grand impassioned subjects insist upon a different treatment; and there it is that the true difficulties of style commence, and there it is that your worshipful Master Jonathan would have broken down irrecoverably.

This “fine analysis” of Swift’s style does not appear to me to be anything more than a powerful attack delivered by an apostle of the opposing school. Swift and de Quincey are obviously poles apart in the direction of their style, and I have no doubt that I could find in Swift as severe an analysis of de Quincey as my correspondent has found in de Quincey of Swift. At bottom the controversy carries us back to the very foundations of European culture. On the whole, Swift followed the Greek tradition—exemplified by Demosthenes—while de Quincey followed the Latin—exemplified by Cicero. There can be no doubt of the school to which Swift belonged; his Drapier’s Letters, for instance, were confessedly modelled on Demosthenes. Likewise there can be no doubt of the school which de Quincey attended; he learned his style of Cicero. The question, however, is one of taste, by no means a matter of non est disputandum. Which of the two schools of style is capable of the highest absolute development; and, above all, which is the most suited to the English language? My mind is fully made up; I am for the Greek and Demosthenes against the Latin and Cicero. I am for Swift against de Quincey; for the simple against the ornate.

De Quincey appears to me to fall into an almost vulgar error in assuming that the style of plain good sense cultivated by Swift is fit only for commonplace subjects, and that “grand impassioned subjects” demand an ornate style. The style of Demosthenes was obviously quite as well fitted to the high subjects of his Discourse on the Crown as to the details for the fitting out of an expedition against Philip. The Apology of Plato is in much the same style, and not even de Quincey would say that the subject was not anything but commonplace. With the majority of English critics, I have a horror of fine writing, and especially about fine things. The proper rule is, in fact, the very reverse of that laid down by de Quincey; it is on no account to write upon “grand impassioned subjects” in a grand impassioned style. After all, as the Greeks understood, there are an infinite number of degrees of simplicity, ranging from the simple colloquial to the simple grand. The ornate Latin style, with its degrees of ornateness, is, on the other hand, a bastard style. The conclusion seems to be this: that the simple style is capable of anything, even of dealing with “grand impassioned subjects”; whereas the ornate style is only barely tolerable in the most exceptional circumstances. I would sooner trust Swift than de Quincey not to embarrass a reader on a difficult occasion, as, for the same reason, I prefer Shakespeare the Greek to Ben Jonson the Latinist.

Literary Culs-de-sac.—A cul-de-sac occurs in literary history when a direction is taken away from the main highway of the national language and literature; when the stream it represents is not part of the main stream of the traditional language, but a backwater or a side stream. There have been dozens of such private streams in the course of our literary history, and I am not denying for an instant that their final contribution to the main stream has been considerable.

The Decline of Free Intelligence.—Pure intelligence I should define as displaying itself in disinterested interest in things; in things, that is to say, of no personal advantage, but only of general, public, or universal importance. Interest (to turn the cat in the pan) is the growing end of the mind, and its direction and strength are marked by a motiveless curiosity to know; it reveals itself, while it is still active, as a love of knowledge for its own sake. Later on it often appears that this motiveless love had a motive; in other words, the knowledge acquired under its impulse is discovered in the end to “come in handy,” and to have been of use. But the process of acquiring this knowledge is for the most part, indeliberate, unaware of any other aim than that of the satisfaction of curiosity; utility is remote from its mind. This is what I have called disinterested interest, and it is this free intelligence of which it appears to me that there is a diminishing amount in our day. Were it not the case, the fortunes of the really free Press would be much brighter than they are. An organ of free opinion would not need to discover a utilitarian attraction for its free opinions, but would be able to command a sale on its own merits. Such, indeed, is the case in several European countries, notably in France, Italy, and Germany. I am told that it is the case also in Bohemia (in which country there is not only no illiterate, but no un-read adult) and in the provinces of Yugo Slavia. In these countries a journal of opinions can live without providing its readers with any commercial or specialist bribe in the way of exclusive utilitarian information; it can live, that is to say, by the sale of its free intelligence. Happy countries—in one sense of the word; happy if also tragical; for their existence is not always, at any rate, a paradise for the rich, a hell for the poor, and a purgatory for the able!

To what is due this decline amongst us of free intelligence? There are several explanations possible, though none is wholly satisfying. It can be attributed to the industrialisation of our own country, a metamorphosis of occupation which has been longer in being in England than anywhere else. The economic balance between primary and secondary production has been for a longer period lost in this country than elsewhere, with the consequence that we have been the first to exhibit the effects of over-industrialisation in the loss of the free intelligence associated with primary production. The other nations may be expected to follow suit as the same metamorphosis overtakes them. Another explanation is the reaction against the intellectualism of the nineteenth century. It is a familiar topic, but it is obvious that if faith in the ultimate use of intelligence is lost, men become cynical in regard to the passion itself. Let us suppose that every love affair always and invariably ended in disappointment or disaster. Let us suppose that it became the accepted belief that such would always be the case. Would it not soon become fashionable to nip the first stirrings of love in the bud, and to salt its path whenever its shoots began to appear? The nineteenth century reached its climax in a vast disappointment with science, with the intellect, with intellectualism. The fifth act of the thrilling drama inaugurated after the French Revolution closed in utter weariness and ennui. It was no wonder that the twentieth century opened in a return to impulse and in a corresponding reaction from intellectuality. That the reaction has gone too far is the very disease we are now trying to diagnose; for only an excessive reaction towards impulse and away from thought can account for the poverty of free intelligence. Sooner or later, the pendulum must be set free again, if not in this country, then in America, or in some of the countries whose rebirth we are now witnessing. It cannot be the will of God that free intelligence should be extinguished from the planet; the world, somehow or other, must be made safe for intelligence as well as for democracy.

My last guess at the origin of the phenomenon is the decline of the religious spirit. Religion, I conceive, is the study and practice of perfection, and it is summed up in the text: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” This impossible and infinite aim includes, as a matter of course, the employment and development of intelligence as one of the most powerful aids to perfection. Fools, the Indian Scriptures inform us, can enter heaven, but only wise men know how to stay there. And if the perfection we seek is to be lasting and incorruptible, it is certain that an infinite amount of intelligence will be necessary to its accomplishment. The loss of the belief in the perfectibility of the human spirit, in the religious duty of perfection, might easily account for the diminution of our regard for one of the chief instruments of perfection, namely, intelligence. Why should we strive to set the crooked straight, since it is not only impossible, but is no duty of ours? And why labour with the instrumental means when the end is of no value? None of these explanations, however, really satisfies me.

The free Press is more severely criticised by its readers than the “kept” Press by its clientèle. The reason is, no doubt, that in comparison with the “kept” Press it protests its freedom and sets itself up on a pedestal. Every “excuse” is consequently denied to it, and the smallest complaint is enlarged to a grievance. The “kept” Press may be caught in flagrant self-contradiction, in lies, in chicanery of all kinds, in every form of intellectual and other dishonesty—it continues to be read and “followed” as if the oracle were infallible. No newspaper in this country has ever died of exposure; many live by being found out. The free Press, on the other hand, has often for its readers not only the most exigent of critics, but the most contradictory. They are not only hard to please (which is a merit), but their reasons for being pleased, or the reverse, are bewilderingly various. And, moreover, when they are pleased they are usually silent, and when they are displeased they cease to buy the journal.

Literary Copyright in America.—Horace Walpole used to say that the Americans were the only people by whom he would wish to be admired. Let me put the compliment a little differently and say that the Americans are the people among all others whom we would most wish to admire most. Having done so much to command our admiration already, we are not only willing, we are desirous and anxious, that they should leave no amendable fault unamended in themselves. Our command to them is that they should become perfect.

This must be my excuse for joining in the discussion concerning the law of literary copyright in America, and the effect it has on the literary relations of this country and America. I must agree with Mr. Pound that the literary relations of our two countries are bad, and that much of this estrangement, if not all of it, is due to remediable causes lying at present on the American book of statutes. The actual facts of the situation are simple. The copyright laws of America, unlike those of any other civilised country, with the exception of ex-Tsarist Russia, require as a condition of extending the protection of its copyright to any work of foreign publication, that the latter shall be set up, printed, and published in America within a period of thirty to sixty days after its publication in the country of its origin. Failing such practically simultaneous publication in America, not only is an American publisher thereafter entitled to proceed immediately to publish the work in question without the permission of the author, but the author and his national publisher are not entitled to demand any royalties or fees on the sale of the same. In other words, as far as the original author and publisher are concerned, they are non-existent in America unless they have made arrangements for the publication of their work in America within one, or, at most, two months of its original publication in their own country.

Not to exaggerate in describing such a procedure it can be exactly characterised by no other phrase than looting under the form of law. Every author and publisher in this country knows how difficult it is to arrange for the simultaneous publication of works at home and in America. The time-conditions of publication are seldom the same in both countries. A book that is timely in this country may not be simultaneously timely in America, and it would be very odd if it always were.

Again, a couple of months is a small period of time in which to arrange to have an English work dispatched, accepted, set up, printed, and published in America. Commercial difficulties of all kinds arise in the course of the transaction, and every delay brings the day of the accursed shears of the American Copyright Act nearer. Is an English publisher to bargain with the advantage of time always on the side of America, with the certain knowledge that, unless he comes to terms at once, he will lose everything both for himself and his author? But either that or indefinitely delaying publication in this country is his only possible course. The American Copyright Law is thus seen to be a modern example of Morton’s fork. By requiring that the foreign author shall publish his work in America within one or two months of its publication at home, the law compels him to make a choice (in the majority of cases) between forfeiting his copyright in America, and delaying, at his own cost, the publication of his book in his own country. Upon either prong he is impaled. If he elects for American publication he must forgo the chance of the immediate market at home, and if he elects for immediate publication at home he must forgo the protection of American copyright.

Such an ingenious device for Dick-Turpining European authors cannot have been invented and enforced without some presumed moral justification. America cannot be conceived as a willing party to the legislation of literary piracy, and it was and is, no doubt, under some cover of justification that the law was enacted and now runs. The defence for it, I should suppose, is the presumed necessity for protecting the industry of book-making in America on behalf of American authors, printers, and publishers alike. Its defence, in short, is the same defence that is set up for protection in commercial matters in this country, namely, the desirability of excluding foreign competition, and of encouraging home-industry. Against this defence, however, there is a great deal to be said that ought to weigh with the American people, and that ought to weigh in their calculations as well as in their taste and sense of right. For, as to the latter, I take it that no American would undertake to defend his Copyright Law on the principles either of good taste or common justice. It cannot be in conformity with good taste for the literary artists of America to procure protection for themselves by penalising their European confrères, and it cannot be justice to rob a European author of his copyrights, or to compel him to delay his publication in Europe. These admissions I take for granted, and the only defence left is the calculation that such a Copyright Act is good for the American book-making interests.

If books were like other commodities, their sale, like the sale of other commodities, would fall under the economic law of diminishing returns. Thereunder, as their supply increased, the demand for books would tend to decrease, as is the case with cotton, say, or wooden spoons. And upon such an assumption there might be some reason for prohibiting the free importation of printed books, since the imported articles would compete in the home market for a relatively inelastic demand. But books, it is obvious, are not a commodity in this sense of the word. They do not satisfy demand, but stimulate it, and their sale, therefore, does not fall under the economic law of diminishing returns, but under the very contrary, that of increasing returns. Books, there is no doubt of it, are the cause of books. New books do not take the place of old books; nor do books really compete, as a general rule, with each other. On the contrary, the more books there are, the more are demanded and the more are produced. The free importation of books is not a means of contracting the home-production of books; it is the very opposite, the most effective means of stimulating home-production to its highest possible degree. If I were an American author, resident in America, and concerned for the prosperity of the American book-making profession, craft, and industry, I should not be in the least disposed to thank the American Copyright Law for the protection it professes to give me. The appetite for books, upon which appetite I and my craft live, grows, I should say, by what it feeds on. Addressing the Copyright Act as it now exists, I should say to it: “In discouraging the free importation of foreign books, and in alienating the good-will of foreign authors and publishers, you are robbing foreign authors (that is true), but, much worse, you are depriving my public of the stimulus necessary to its demand for my books. Since we authors in America have a vital interest in increasing literary demand, and the more books the more demand is created, our real protection lies in freely importing books, and not in placing any impediment in their way. Intending to help us, you—the Copyright Law—are really our enemy.” I cannot see what reply the Copyright Law could make to this attack upon it by its protégés, and I believe, moreover, that if they were to make it, the Law would soon be amended.

Right Criticism.—To abandon the aim of “finality” of judgment is to let in the jungle into the cultivated world of art; it is to invite Tom, Dick, and Harry to offer their opinions as of equal value with the opinions of the cultivated. It is no escape from this conclusion to inquire into the “mentality” of the critic and to attach importance to his judgment as his mentality is or is not interesting. In appraising a judgment I am not concerned with the mentality, interesting or otherwise, of the judge who delivers it. My concern is not with him, but with the work before us; nor is the remark to be made upon his verdict the personal comment, “How interesting!” but the critical comment, “How true!” or “How false!” Personal preferences turn the attention in the nature of the case from the object criticised to the critic himself. The method substitutes for the criticism of art the criticism of psychology. In a word, it is not art criticism at all.

It may be said that if we dismiss personal preference as a criterion of art judgment, there is either nothing left or only some “scientific” standard which has no relevance to æsthetics. It is the common plea of the idiosyncrats that, inconclusive as their opinions must be, and anything but universally valid, no other method within the world of art is possible. I dissent. A “final” judgment is as possible of a work of art as of any other manifestation of the spirit of man; there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent men arriving at a universally valid (that is, universally accepted) judgment of a book, a picture, a sonata, a statue or a building, any more than there is to prevent a legal judge from arriving at a right judgment concerning any other human act; and, what is more, such judgments of art are not only made daily, but in the end they actually prevail and constitute in their totality the tradition of art. The test is not scientific, but as little is it merely personal. Its essential character is simply that it is right; right however arrived at, and right whoever arrives at it. That the judge in question may or may not have “studied” the history of the art-work he is judging is a matter of indifference. Neither his learning nor his natural ignorance is of any importance. That he is or is not notoriously this, that, or the other, is likewise no concern. All that matters is that his judgment, when delivered, should be “right.” But who is to settle this, it may be asked? Who is to confirm a right judgment or to dispute a wrong one? The answer is contained in the true interpretation of the misunderstood saying, De gustibus non est disputandum. The proof of right taste is that there is no real dispute about its judgment; its finality is evidenced by the cessation of debate. The truth may be simply stated; a judge—that is to say, a true judge—is he with whom everybody is compelled to agree, not because he says it, but because it is so.

Man’s Survival of Bodily Death.—What the circulation of the Quest is I have no idea, but it should be ten times greater. Is there, however, a sufficiently large class of cultured persons in England—in the Empire—in the world? Assuming that the spread of culture can be reckoned numerically as well as qualitatively, can we pride ourselves on the extension of culture while the number of free intelligences is relatively decreasing? But how does one know that this class is really on the decrease? Only by the same means that we judge the number of the curious lepidoptera in any area—by holding a light up in the dark and counting the hosts attracted by it. In the case of the Quest there is no doubt whatever that a light is being held up in our darkness. Its articles are upon the most exalted topics; they are, for the most part, luminously written, and their purity of motive may be taken for granted. The Quest is the literary Platonic Academy of our day. Yet it is seldom spoken of in literary circles. We “good” are very apathetic, and it is lucky for the devil that his disciples are unlike us in this respect. They see to it that everything evil shall flourish like the bay-tree, while we allow the bays of the intelligent to fade into the sere.

Mr. Mead contributes an article on a topic which has not yet been exhausted, “Man’s Survival of Bodily Death.” Mr. Randall is not the first to deny “immortality” while affirming an absolute morality, nor even the first to attempt to explain religion without recourse to a dogma of survival. The Sadducees did it before him; and the Confucians managed somehow or other to combine ancestor-worship with a lively denial of their continued existence. There is, moreover, an ethical value in the denial which almost makes the denial of survival an act of moral heroism. For if a man can pursue the highest moral aims without the smallest hope of personal reward hereafter, and, still less, here, his disinterestedness is obvious; he pursues virtue as the pupil is enjoined in the Bhagavad Gita to act, namely, without hope or fear of fruit. I am not of the heroic breed myself, and, in any case, the problem is one of fact as well as of moral discipline. It may be heroic to put the telescope of truth to a deliberately blinded eye, but unless you suspect yourself of being unable to master the fact, I see no indispensable virtue in its wilful denial. At all risks to my morality I should prefer to keep my weather-eye open for such evidences of survival as may loom up behind the fog.

Premising that “no high religion can exist which is not based on faith in survival,” Mr. Mead proceeds to examine the two forms of inquiry which conceivably promise conclusions: the comparative study of the mystic philosophers and their recorded religious experiences in all ages, and the more material examination of the spiritualistic phenomena of modern psychical research. For himself, Mr. Mead has chosen the former method, and I am interested to observe his testimony, in a rare personal statement, to the satisfaction, more or less, that is possible from following this road. At the same time, though without any experience in the second method, Mr. Mead is explicitly of the opinion that it is one that should be employed by science with increasing earnestness. The difficulties are tremendous, and as subtle as they are considerable. Before survival can be scientifically demonstrated, a host of working hypotheses must be invented and discredited, and the utmost veracity will be necessary in the students. With such facts before us as telepathy, dissociated personality, subconscious complexes, autosuggestion and suggestion, the phenomena that superficially point to survival may plainly be nothing of the kind. Survival, in short, must be expected to be about the last rather than the first psychic fact to be scientifically established. The student must, therefore, be exigent as well as hopeful.

There is a third method from which we may hope to hear one day something to our advantage—assuming that the certain knowledge of survival would be to mankind’s advantage—the method of psycho-analysis. If psycho-analysis of the first degree can make us acquainted with the subconscious, why should not a psycho-analysis of the second degree make us acquainted with the super-conscious; and as the language of the subconscious may be sleeping dreams, the language of the super-conscious may be waking visions. To return to Mr. Mead’s article, an interesting account is contained in it of a recent census taken in America by Professor Leuba of the creeds of more or less eminent men. The returns for the article of faith in survival and immortality are curious, not to say surprising. Of the eminent physicists canvassed, 40 per cent. confessed their belief in man’s survival of bodily death. Thereafter the percentage falls through the stages of historians 35 per cent., and sociologists 27 per cent., to psychologists with the degraded percentage of 9. It is a strange reversal of the procession that might have been anticipated, and it expresses, perhaps, the condition of real culture in America. For that the physicists should be the most hopeful class of scientists in America, and the psychologists the most hopeless is an indication that the best brains in America are still engaged in physical problems. The poor psychologists are scarcely even hopeful of discovering anything.

Beardsley and Arthur Symons.—“Unbounded” admiration is precisely what I cannot feel for Aubrey Beardsley’s work, even “within its own sphere.” I ought to say, perhaps, “because of its sphere.” Pure æsthetic is a matter for contemplation only, and we should be prepared upon occasion to suspend every other kind of judgment. Or, would it not be true to say that the purely æsthetic does itself suspend in the beholder every other form of judgment or reaction—such as the moral, the intellectual, and the practical? A great tragedy, for instance, is a kind of focus of the whole nature of man; every faculty is engaged in it, and all are lifted up and transfigured into the pure æsthetic of contemplation. But one is not aware, in that case, of moral or other reservations; one has not to apologise for the experience by pretending that the “essentially repulsive and diabolic decadence” contained in the tragedy is merely an expression of the age. Beardsley is only “something of a genius” precisely because he failed to transfigure the moral and other reactions of the spectator of his work. He did not occupy the whole of one’s mind. All the while that one’s æsthetic sense was being led captive by his art, several other of one’s senses were in rebellion. His command (his genius, in short) was not “absolute,” but only a quite limited monarchy. This is not to deny that he was an artist; it is to deny only that he was one of the greatest of artists. Other artists owe him a greater debt than the world at large. He was a great art-master, but not a master of art. The doctrine of Mr. Arthur Symons is dangerous. Juggling with the terms good and evil is always dangerous, since in a prestidigital exhibition of them, one can so easily be made to look like the other. Demon est Deus inversus. The paradoxical truth about the matter, however, is that evil is good only so long as it is regarded as evil. The moment it is thought of as good it is nothing but evil. Mr. Arthur Symons has confused in his mind the problem of good and evil with the quite alien problem of quantity of energy.

“Æ’s” “Candle of Vision.”—“Æ’s” Candle of Vision is not a book for everybody, yet I wish that everybody might read it. Rarely and more rarely does any artist or poet interest himself in the processes of his mental and spiritual life, with the consequence, so often deplored by Mr. Penty, that books on æsthetics, philosophy, and, above all, psychology, are left to be written by men who have no immediate experience of what they are writing of. “Æ’s” narrative, and criticism of his personal experiences may be said to take the form of intimate confessions made pour encourager les autres. For, happily for us, he is an artist who is also a philosopher, a visionary who is also an “intellectual”; and, being interested in both phases of his personality, he has had the impulse and the courage to express both. What the ordinary mind—the mind corrupted by false education—would say to “Æ’s” affirmations concerning his psychological experiences, it would not be difficult to forecast. What is not invention, it would be said, is moonshine, and what is neither is a pose to be explained on some alienist hypothesis. Only readers who can recall some experiences similar to those described by “Æ” will find themselves able to accept the work for what it is—a statement of uncommon fact; and only those who have developed their intuition to some degree will be able to appreciate the spirit of truth in which the Candle of Vision is written. A review of such work is not to be undertaken by me, but I have made a few notes on some passages.

Page 2. “I could not so desire what was not my own, and what is our own we cannot lose.... Desire is hidden identity.” This is a characteristic doctrine of mysticism, and recurs invariably in all the confessions. Such unanimity is an evidence of the truth of the doctrine, since it is scarcely to be supposed that the mystics borrow from one another. But the doctrine, nevertheless, is difficult for the mere mind to accept, for it involves the belief that nothing happens to us that is not ourselves. Character in that event is destiny—to quote a variant of “Æ’s” sentence; and our lives are thus merely the dramatisation of our given psychology. Without presuming to question the doctrine, I feel a reserve concerning its absoluteness. Fate appears to me to be above destiny in the same sense that the old lady conceived that there was One above that would see that Providence did not go too far. To the extent that character is destiny or, as “Æ” says, desire is hidden identity, a correct psychological forecast would be at the same time a correct temporal forecast. And while this may be true, in the abstract and under, so to say, ideal conditions, I cannot yet agree that everything that happens to the individual is within his character. The unforeseeable, the margin of what we call Chance, allows for events that belong to Fate rather than to Destiny.

Page 3. “Æ” says he “was not conscious in boyhood (up to the age of sixteen or seventeen) of any heaven lying about me.” “Childhood,” he thinks, is no nearer the “eternally young” than age may be. Certainly it appears to be so in the case of “Æ” himself, for the intimations of immortality which Wordsworth (and the world in general) attributed to children were only begun to be experienced by “Æ” after his sixteenth or seventeenth year. From that time onwards, as this book testifies, he has been growing younger in precisely those characteristics. There is a good deal to be thought, if not said, on this subject. Children are, I conceive, rather symbols of youth than youth itself; they are unconsciously young. Age, on the other hand, has the power of converting the symbol into the reality, and of being young and knowing it. Unless ye become, not little children, but as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven. At the same time it is comparatively rare for the ordinary child, that “Æ” says he was, to develop childlikeness in later life. Usually a return occurs to a state unconsciously experienced in early youth. But there appear to be strata of characteristics in every mind, and life is their successive revelation. Without knowing anything of the facts, I surmise that “Æ’s” heredity was mixed, and that the first layer or stratum to appear was that of some possibly Lowland Scot ancestry. When that was worked through, by the age of sixteen, another layer came to the surface, whereupon “Æ” entered on another phase of “desire.”

Page 7. “We may have a personal wisdom, but spiritual wisdom is not to speak of as ours.” This illustrates another characteristic of the mystic that while his experiences are personal, the wisdom revealed in them is always attributed to “Him that taught me”—in other words, to something not ourselves. An egoist mysticism is a contradiction in terms. Not only no man is entitled to claim originality for a spiritual truth, but no man can. The truth is no longer true when it has a name to it. “Truth bears no man’s name” is an axiom of mysticism. The reason, I presume, is that the very condition of the appreciation of a spiritual truth is the absence of the sense of egoism. Such truths are simply not revealed to the egoistic consciousness, and therefore cannot appear as the product of human wisdom. Their character is that of a revelation from without rather than that of a discovery from within, and the report of the matter is thus objective rather than subjective.

Page 16. “I could prophesy from the uprising of new moods in myself that without search I should soon meet people of a certain character, and so I met them.... I accepted what befell with resignation.... What we are alone has power.... No destiny other than we make for ourselves.” I have already expressed my doubts whether this is the whole truth. It is, of course, the familiar doctrine of Karma; but I do not think it can be interpreted quite literally. There is what is called the Love of God, as well as the Justice of God, and I would venture to add, with Blake, the Wrath of God. Judgment is something more than simple justice; it implies the consent of the whole of the judging nature, and not of its sense of justice only. Love enters into it, and so, perhaps, do many other qualities not usually attributed to the Supreme Judge. In interpreting such doctrines we must allow for the personal equation even of the highest personality we can conceive.

Page 19. “None needs special gifts of genius.” “Æ’s” Candle of Vision is confessedly propagandist. It aims deliberately at encouraging age to discover eternal youth, and to lay hold of everlasting life. It is to this end that “Æ” describes his own experiences, and offers to his readers the means of their verification. He is quite explicit that no “special gifts” or “genius” are necessary. “This do and ye shall find even as I have found.” The special gift of genius does not, I agree, lie in the nature of fact of the experience (though here, again, favour seems sometimes to be shown), but it does, I think, lie in the bent towards the effort involved. Anybody, it is true, may by the appropriate means experience the same results, but not everybody has the “desire” to employ them. Desire, moreover, is susceptible of many degrees of strength. Like other psychological characteristics, it appears to peel off like the skins of Peer Gynt’s onion. What is it that I really desire? Ask me to-day, and I shall answer one thing. Ask me next year, and it may be another. Years hence it may have changed again. But desire, in the mystical sense, is the desire that is left when all the transient wishes or fancies have either vanished or been satisfied. Only such a desire leads the student to make the effort required by “Æ,” and the possession of such a desire is something like a “special gift” or “genius.”

Page 20. “Our religions make promises to be fulfilled beyond the grave, because they have no knowledge now to be put to the test.... Mistrust the religion that does not cry out: ‘Test me that we can become as gods.’” This is an excellent observation, and accounts, to my mind, for all the so-called scepticism of modern times. It is usual to attribute to our predecessors, the most remote as well as the more recent, a quality of “faith” superior to our own. They are said to have been more religious than we are. I do not believe it; or, rather, I believe that they were religious because they had very good reason to be; in other words, they were not only told the mysteries, but they were shown them. Either they or their priests had the “open vision.” Is it conceivable that the primitive peoples had the confidence-trick played on them? Or, again, is it the fact that credulity is less to-day than before? I feel sure that if our ancestors were brought to belief, it was by means which would equally carry conviction to the present generation. To repeat myself: They believed because they were shown. “Æ” suggests that the after-life promises of modern religion are a substitute for or an invasion of present demonstration. Religions, that is to say, concentrate upon the invisible because their power over the visible is gone. It is not the fact, however, that the earlier religions ignored the after-death adventures of the soul; they were quite as much concerned with the life beyond the grave as our own religions. What they did, and what our religions fail to do, was to give present guarantees for their future promises. Their priests could procure belief in the after-life on the strength of their demonstrated power over this life. It is probable, indeed, that many of the elect experienced “death” before it occurred physically. The Egyptian mysteries were a kind of experimental death.

Page 21. Here and on the neighbouring pages “Æ” expounds his method of meditation—the means by which any “ordinary” person may acquire spiritual experience. “Æ’s” method follows the familiar line of the mystic schools, namely, unwavering concentration on some mental object. “Five minutes of this effort,” “Æ” says, “will at first leave us trembling as at the end of a laborious day.” I can testify that this is no exaggeration, for, like “Æ,” I have practised meditation after the methods prescribed. It is no easy job, and after months of regular practice I was still an amateur at the simplest exercises. There is no doubt, however, about the benefit of it. Much is learned in meditation that cannot be realised by any other mental exercise. The mind becomes a real organ, as distinct from the personality as a physical limb. And gradually one learns to acquire sufficient control over it, if not to use it like a master, at any rate, to realise that it can be so used. I have not the smallest doubt that one day men will be able to “use” their minds, and thus to cease to be “used” by them; for it is obvious that at present we are victims rather than masters of our mind. Meditation, as a means of mind-control, is the appointed method, and “Æ’s” personal experience should encourage his readers to take up the discipline.

Page 41. In regard to “visions,” they are usually dismissed by the commonalty as products of imagination, “as if,” says “Æ,” “imagination were as easily explained as a problem in Euclid.” This habit of referring one mystery to another, as if this latter were no mystery, is very common; and it arises, no doubt, from intellectual apathy. We cannot be bothered to reduce mysteries to knowledge, and, moreover, the realisation that literally everything is a mystery, that we simply live in mystery, is a little disconcerting. Hence our preference for assuming some things, at any rate, to be below the need of explanation. Imagination, however, provides us with no escape from the mysteries of vision, any more than matter provides us with an escape from the problems of spirit. “Æ” raises some difficult, and, probably, insoluble problems concerning imagination itself. What is it in us that imagines? How does it cast thoughts into form? Even allowing (which we cannot) that imagination is only “the re-fashioning of memory,” what re-fashions and transforms out of their original resemblance the memories of things seen? “Æ” has had many visions, some of which, no doubt, he could trace to recollected impressions; but, leaving aside once more the difficulty involved in this reconstruction, what of the visions that had, or appeared to have, no earthly progenitors? “Æ’s” conclusion appears to be indisputable, that “we swim in an æther of deity”—for “in Him we live and move and have our being.”

Passim. Is it possible that telepathy occurs between people having the same mental “wavelength”? Coincidences (another Mesopotamian word, by the way) are too frequent to be accountable on any other supposition than that of an established communication. Like many another, I could give some remarkable instances of telepathy, but they would be tedious to relate. Mental training, however, is certainly a means to this end; for in proportion as the mind is brought under control, its susceptibility to thoughts from outside palpably increases. The experience of the Old Testament prophet who knew the plans of the enemy before they were uttered is not unique, even in these days. It will be far less uncommon in the days to come.

Page 54. “Is there a centre within us through which all the threads of the universe are drawn?” An ingenious image for a recurrent doctrine of mysticism, the doctrine, namely, that everything is everywhere. One of the earliest discoveries made in meditation is the magnitude of the infinitesimal. The tiniest point of space appears to have room enough for a world of images; and the mediæval discussion concerning the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle was by no means ridiculous. If I am not mistaken, “Æ’s” problem is identical with it.

Page 89. The Architecture of Dreams. In this chapter “Æ” sets himself to casting some doubts (shall we say?) on the sufficiency of the Freudian theory of dreams. Dreams, according to Freud, are the dramatisation of suppressed desires; but what, asks “Æ,” is the means by which desires, suppressed or otherwise, dramatise themselves? “A mood or desire may attract its affinities”; in other words, there may be a congruity between the desire and the dream which serves the Freudian purpose of interpretation; but desire can hardly be said “to create what it attracts.” Between anger, for instance, and a definite vision of conflict, such as the dream may represent, there is a gulf which the theory of Freud does not enable us to cross. What, in fact, are dreams? Who or what carries out the dramatisation? Assuming, with Freud, that their impulse is a desire, what power shapes this desire into the dream-cartoon? “Æ” throws no light on the mystery, but, at any rate, he does not dismiss it as no mystery at all. Its philosophical discussion is to be found in the Indian philosophy known as the Sankhya.

Page 89. “The process must be conscious on some plane”—the dramatisation, that is to say, must be the conscious work of some intelligent agent or quality. I am a little doubtful of this, for reasons to be discovered in the Sankhya philosophy just referred to. Is the pattern taken by sand on a shaken plate a “conscious” design? Are frost-flowers the work of intelligence? Forms, according to the Sankhya, are the reflection in matter (Prakriti) of the activities of the spirit (Purusha); they are consciousness visible. But it would not follow that they are themselves conscious or that their creation is a “conscious” process.

Page 90. “Have imaginations body?” In other words, are the figures seen in dream and vision three-dimensional? “Æ” describes several incidents within his experience that certainly seem to suggest an objective reality in dream-figures, and the occasional projection of dream-figures into phantasms is a further evidence of it. But, once again, I would refer “Æ” to the Sankhya aphorisms, and to Kapila’s commentary on them. The question is really of the general order of the relation of form to thought.

Page 114. Here, and in the succeeding essay, “Æ” develops his intuitional thesis that sound and thought have definite affinities. For every thought there is a sound, and every sound is at the same time a thought. The idea is, of course, familiar, and, like many more in the Candle of Vision, is found recurring like a decimal throughout mystical and occult literature in all ages. The most ancient occult literature—dispute whether that of India or Egypt—is most precise on the subject, the general proposition being therein reduced to a series of equivalents in which form, sound, colour, thought, emotion, and number, all seem to be interchangeable. Each of these, in fact, is said to be a language—a complete language; and to the initiate it is a matter of indifference whether the text before him is “written” in form, in colour, in number, or sound. Unfortunately, neither “Æ” nor anybody within our knowledge, is able to procure even the skeleton key to the mystery. The records are so perversely confused that I cannot believe that their authors were not deliberately playing a game with us. It would be rather like the old initiates to “dis” their type before leaving it to be examined by the barbarian invaders; and certainly nobody of ordinary faculty can begin to make head or tail of the “correspondences” recorded in the Indian scriptures. It is the same, strangely enough, with Plato, whose Cratylus deals with the relation of verbal language to mental conception. A master of simple exposition, he becomes in the Cratylus, whether from design or feebleness of understanding, as cryptic as the Indians themselves. I have read the Cratylus all ways, with no better result than to feel that I have wasted my time. “Æ” has approached the problem, however, experimentally, with the aid of his intuition. If, he said to himself, there is really a definite correspondence between sound and idea, meditation on one or the other should be able to discover it. In other words, he has attempted to re-discover the lost language, and to find for himself the key whose fragments bestrew the ancient occult works. This again, however, is no novelty, but another of the recurrent ideas of mystics and would-be occultists. All of them have tried it, but, unfortunately, most of them come to different conclusions. “Æ’s” guesses must, therefore, be taken as guesses only, to be compared with the guesses of other students.

Page 132. One of the features of the Candle of Vision is the occasional ray cast by “Æ” upon the obscure texts of the Bible. The Bible, of course, is for the most part unmistakably “occult”; and not only its stories are myths (“which things are an allegory”), but many of its texts are echoes of a gnosis infinitely older than the Christian era. Greece, it has now been established, was an infant when Egypt was old; and Egypt, in its turn, was an infant when some civilisation anterior to it was in its dotage. The Bible is a kind of ark, in which were stored (without much order, I imagine) some of the traditions of the world that was about to be submerged. They can be brought to life again, however, and here and there, in the course of the Candle of Vision, “Æ” undoubtedly rejuvenates a Biblical text, and restores to it its ancient meaning. “He made every flower before it was in the field, and every herb before it grew.” This points, says “Æ,” to the probability that the Garden of Eden was the “Garden of the Divine Mind,” in which flowers and herbs and all the rest of creation lived before they were made—visible! Such a conception is very illuminating. Moreover, it brings the story of Genesis into line with the genesis stories of both ancient India and the most recent psychology. For modern psycho-analysis, in the researches of Jung in particular, is undoubtedly trembling on the brink of the discovery of the divine mind which precedes visible creation. The process is indissolubly linked up with the psychology of imagination, phantasm, and vision.

Page 137. On Power. “If we have not power we are nothing, and must remain outcasts of Heaven.” In this chapter “Æ” shakes the fringes of the most dangerous subject in the world, that of the acquisition of “spiritual” power. I put the word under suspicion, because while in the comparative sense spiritual, the powers here spoken of may be anything but beneficent. The instructions to be found in, let us say, Patanjali, are full of warnings against the acquisition of occult powers before the character of the student is “purified.” We are a long way, of course, from the plane of conventional goodness in the use of this word purity. The conventionally good may have all the characteristics of the black magician (so-called) when he finds himself in the possession of power. Purity, in the sense implied, connotes non-attachment, and non-attachment, again, implies the non-existence of any personal desire—even for the good. Nietzsche died before he began to understand himself. His pre-occupation with the problem of power was undoubtedly an occult exercise; and his discovery that spiritual power needs to be exercised “beyond good and evil,” was a hint of the progress he had made. Unfortunately for Nietzsche, his Beyond Good and Evil was still not clear of the element of egotism; he carried into the occult world the attachment and the desire that emphatically belong to the world of both Good and Evil. In short, he attempted to take Heaven by egoistic storm, and his defeat was a foregone conclusion and a familiar tragedy in occult history. “Æ,” like his authorities, is full of warning against the quest of power. At the same time, like them, he realises that without power the student can do nothing. Here is the paradox, the mightiest in psychology, that the weakest is the strongest and the strongest the weakest. I commend this chapter to Nietzscheans in particular. They have most to learn from it.

Page 153 et seq. “Æ” makes an attempt to systematise “Celtic cosmogony.” It appears to me to be altogether premature, and of as little value as the “interpretation” of Blake’s cosmogony, which Messrs. Yeats and Ellis formerly attempted. Celtic cosmogony, as found in Irish legend and tradition, may be a cosmogony, and perhaps one of the oldest in the world (for Ireland is always with us!). But the fragmentary character of the records, the absence of any living tradition in them, coupled with the difficulty of re-interpretation in rational terms, make even “Æ’s” effort a little laborious. There is little illumination in the Candle when it becomes an Irish bog-light.

How to Read.—The greatest books are only to be grasped by the total understanding which is called intuition. As an aid to the realisation of the truth, we may fall back upon the final proofs of idiom and experience. Idiom is the fruit of wisdom on the tree of language; and experience is both the end and the beginning of idiom. What more familiar idiom is there than that which expresses the idea and the experience of reading a book “between the lines”; reading, in fact, what is not there in the perception of our merely logical understanding? And what, again, is more familiar than the experience of “having been done good” by reading a great, particularly a great mystical or poetical work, like the Bible or Milton; still more, by reading such works as the Mahabharata? Idiom and experience do not deceive us. The “subconscious” of every great book is vastly greater than its conscious element, as the “subconscious” of each of us is many times richer in content than our conscious minds. Reading between the lines, resulting often and usually in a sense of illuminated bewilderment difficult to put into words, is in reality intuitional reading; the subconscious in the reader is put into relation with the subconscious of the writer. Deep communicates with deep. No “interpretation” of an allegorical kind need result from it. We may be unable at once to put into words any of the ideas we have gathered. Patience! The truths thus grasped will find their way to the conscious mind, and one day, perhaps, to our lips.

The Old Country.—A country may grow aged in mind long before it is really old in history, and it may be the case with England that long before she is old in history her mind is becoming aged. The peculiarity of the aged mind is not that it cannot think, but that it cannot think new thoughts. All its energy runs in grooves, and there is none to spare for the cutting of a new road into new ideas. There is little and less “free mind” in England. Like the commons and the commonwealth, all the mind-energy has been appropriated by one interest or another, with the consequence that every fresh idea is compelled either to starve at home or to emigrate abroad. America, as an intellectually youthful nation (may it never grow aged!) reaps the advantage of the decline of its aged parent. Ideas that cannot pick up a living in this country, owing to the appropriations of energy already made, may emigrate to America and flourish there.

Looking for the Dawn.—The Spring issue of Art and Letters has been long enough out to have had its run for its money. Consequently I am free to say that it is not only not so good as the first issue, but that the descent has been steep as well as rapid. This decline from the almost sublime to the more than ridiculous was inevitable from the peculiar characteristics of our immediately contemporary epoch; for it is the sober truth that our contemporary world does not supply youthful stuff enough to make more than a single issue of a literary magazine of high pretension. I have looked about me with the eye of an eagle and the appetite of a raven to discover youthful talent possibly budding into genius. A few sprigs and sprays have fallen within my vision, and I have counted myself recompensed for hours and years of trouble. But at this present moment such apparitions and premonitions of the future are fewer than ever I have known them to be. Whether it is that more than individual—collective talent—has fallen in the war; whether the increasing pre-occupation of men’s minds with economics has proportionately impoverished the will to literature of our young men; or whether a critical taste is losing generosity, the number of fresh talents just being committed to us appears utterly unequal to the unequalled opportunity for employing them. There never was a time when it was easier for a young writer to find publication in one form or another. The number of new magazines projected and issued recently has been legion. I have examined most of them; for it is my hobby to collect the earliest specimens, and it is my unpleasant opinion that most of them would be better for never having been born.

They manage, or, at any rate, they are beginning to manage these things better in America. That America is the country of the future is open to less doubt as a prophecy when the critic has made acquaintance with the new and renewed magazines now appearing in that country. A tone of provinciality still dominates a considerable part of the American literary Press, but it is obvious that tremendous efforts are being made to recover or, let us say, to discover centrality. American literary editors are more and more aiming to interest the world of readers rather than a mere province of them. I need scarcely say that the world of readers is not the same thing as a world of readers. A world of readers connotes large numbers, consisting chiefly of readers in search of amusement; but the world of readers consists of the few in every country who really read for their living, or rather, for their lives. To appeal to the latter class is to be “of the centre,” for the centre of every movement of life is not only the most vital, it is the smallest element, of the whole. The most recent American literary journals appear to me to be endeavouring to become organs for this class of reader. It is not indicated more plainly in the fact that they are enlisting European writers than in the fact that their American contributors are writing to be read in Europe as well as in America. America has begun to discover Europe. America is on the way to absorb Europe. In the course of a few generations, if the present American magazines may be taken as indicating direction, European writers will be as intelligible in America as in Europe; and, perhaps, more so.

Fielding for America.—It is very doubtful whether anybody reads Fielding nowadays. Nevertheless, like all the eighteenth century writers, he is more than worth all the time we waste on certain contemporaries. There is nothing of the “damned literary” about Fielding; but also there is nothing of what usually goes with the absence of letters, sentimentality. Fielding’s letters, one feels, were absorbed into his blood; they did not remain like crumbs on the lips after a barbarian repast. Fielding could carry his letters as his contemporaries boasted they could carry their port—without showing it. And it was no less the case that he carried his feelings with the same well-bred ease, without displaying them, and, even more, without permitting them to rule his intelligence. Richardson seems born to have provoked Fielding to write. He incarnated everything that Fielding thought worth a negative. But for Richardson, Fielding would possibly have never found his true métier; Richardson was his twin opposite. Fielding, however, must always pay the penalty of being a reactionary, of requiring a stimulant; he is no creator, for the stuff of creation was not native to him. He is an amusing causeur with his eye always upon Richardson; a man of the world telling a story à la Richardson, but with the explanations common to the class of English gentlemen. He is put among the English Men of Letters in the series edited by Lord Morley, and now he is receiving attention in America. America needs Fielding; for what is America in danger of becoming but a kind of Richardson continent? Our eighteenth century writers are a school to which American literature must go as a means of escape from the Roundhead tradition which otherwise America will scarcely succeed in overpassing. I cannot conceive, however, that Tom Jones will be popular in America yet awhile. He has more resistance to encounter there than in any other civilised nation. But until Tom Jones can be read in America without a blush, American literature will remain several centuries behind English and European literature.

Poor Authors!—Is it a fact that the dearness of literature alone or mainly restricts its sale? Is it certain that either cheap publication or (what amounts to the same thing) a generous diffusion of money among the masses would ensure the success of, let us say, good first novels—in the present state of public taste? We have had some experience both of cheapness and of the diffusion of money. Publication was cheap enough before the war in all conscience. New novels could be brought out for a shilling. Was it the common experience that the best of them proved a commercial success? The best of them were nine times out of ten a commercial failure. And in respect of the diffusion of money, what has been our experience of the direction in which the diffused money has been spent? Have the masses accumulated libraries? Have they patronised the arts? Have they encouraged literature with discriminating taste? Have they sought out and bought the young authors, the promising writers, the writers of to-morrow? We know they have done nothing of the kind. The diffused money has fallen, for the most part, into two sets of hands, the hands of the ignorant profiteers and the hands of the ignorant masses. And both classes have neglected literature in favour of sports and furs, display and amusement. It is idle to pretend that things are other than they are. We need not necessarily be discouraged by the fact, but it is necessary to recognise the facts. And the facts in the present case are that the people who have the money (much or little) do not care a shilling for literature and accept no responsibility for its existence. Their excuse for the moment is that literature is too dear; but it would be all the same if it were cheap. I have never observed that rich or poor have complained that their sports and amusements are too dear. Nobody appeals to cinema-proprietors or yachting entrepreneurs to pity their clients and ruin themselves commercially. When the public wants literature as much as it wants to be entertained, there will be no need for anybody’s charity.

In the meanwhile, what is the young writer to do? In particular, the young novelist? He appears to be about to be among the most miserable of mankind. To be published and to be a commercial failure is bad enough in a country like our own, where a succès d’estime is almost a certificate for pity. But not to be published at all is infinitely worse. Instead of appealing to commercial publishers, however, is it not possible to appeal to the Guild of Authors, to the fraternity whose function and responsibility are the creation and encouragement of literature? Who should be patrons of literature if not men of letters themselves? And whose duty should it be, if not that of novelists as a guild, to secure the succession and to provide for the future princes? If publishers are willing to assume the burdens of literature—always heavy in proportion to the ignorance of the public—let them by all means. So much the more honour to them. But the proper shoulders for the burden, in the absence of an enlightened public, are the shoulders of the Guild of Letters, the shoulders, in particular, of the successful men. There is no lack of money among them. I should roughly calculate that the income of our successful novelists is more than equal to that of all our publishers put together. Why should they not subsidise literature? Why, out of their abundance, should they not set aside a portion for their literary posterity?

On Guard.—As one of the thirty thousand who take in and occasionally read The Times Literary Supplement, I may draw attention to the danger to truth its composite character is always creating. Being familiar with the back-ways of publishing I am not taken in, of course, by the uniform use of the editorial “we” in a journal like The Times Literary Supplement. “We” represents a score of different people, all or most of whom are as much at intellectual sixes and sevens as any other score; and the editor-in-chief, whoever he may be, is just as powerless as a sovereign is over its twenty shillings. That being granted, the situation is still a little strange from the fact that certain sentiments are allowed to appear in the Literary Supplement which, to say the least, are incongruous with The Times and all The Times stands for. Here, for instance, are three quotations from recent issues: “Whether you beat your neighbour by militarism or buy him by industrialism—the effect is the same.” “That most false and nauseating of legends—‘the happy warrior.’” “The organisation of trade is of secondary moment: what is of the first moment is the organisation of a humane enjoyment of its benefits.” These sentiments are true, and they are sufficiently strikingly put. But in The Times Literary Supplement they are not only incongruous, but they are in a very subtle sense actually lies, and the more dangerous lies from their identity with the truth. It is one of the paradoxes of truth that a statement is only true when it is in truthful company. As the corruption of the best is the worst, so evil communications corrupt good statements, and a truth in bad company is the worst of lies. It is a mystery not easily to be understood, but the intuition may, perhaps, make something of it. Is it not the fact that the occurrence of statements like those just quoted in The Times Literary Supplement causes a feeling of nausea? On examining the cause it will be found to lie in the unconscious realisation that such statements are there made for no good purpose, but are only decoy ducks for the better snaring of our suffrages for the real policy of The Times itself.

The Coming Renaissance.—The prognostication of the approach of a new Renaissance has quite naturally been received with incredulity. Is it not the fact that civilisation is in a thoroughly morbid condition bordering on hysteria, and was ever the outlook for culture darker than it is at this moment? I have just been discussing the subject with a friend who laid this evidence before me with a touch of reproach: how could I, in the face of such a circle of gloom, pretend that we were even possibly (which is all I affirm) on the eve of a new Renaissance? My explanation of this part of the story is, however, quite simple. The war has precipitated a development in external events faster than the average mind has been able to adapt itself to them, with the consequence that the average mind has had to take refuge in hysteria. For the greater part of hysteria is due to nothing more than an inadequacy of the mind to a given situation; and when the situation as given to-day is a situation that should and would, but for the war, have arisen only, let us say, twenty years hence, there is no wonder that in the mass of the slowly developing minds of our people an inadequacy to the occasion should be experienced or that the result should appear as hysteria. On the other hand, hysteria is not a stable condition of the mind; it is a transition to a more complete adaptation to reality, or, in the alternative, to complete disintegration. But what is to be expected from the present situation? Not, surely, disintegration in the general sense, though it may take place in individual cases, but a forward movement in the direction of adaptation. This forward movement is the Renaissance, and it is thus from the very circumstances of gloom and hysteria that we may draw the hope that a fresh advance of the human spirit is about to be made.

It is significant that concurrently with such a social diagnosis as anyone may make, special observers, with or without a bee in their bonnet, are arriving at the same conclusion. There are very confident guesses now being disseminated by the various religious and mystic schools concerning what, in their vocabulary, they call the Second Advent—which, however, may well be the seven hundredth or the seven thousandth for all we know. Attach no importance, if you like, to the phenomena in question, but the fact of the coincidence of forecast is somewhat impressive; for while it is absurd to believe the “Second Adventists” of all denominations when they stand alone in their prognostications, their testimony is not negligible when it is supported by what amounts to science. And the fact is that to-day science, no less than mysticism, is apprehensive of a New Coming of some kind or other. What the nature of that New Coming is likely to be, and when or how it will manifest itself, are matters beyond direct knowledge, but the ear of science, no less than the ear of mysticism, is a little thrilled with the spirit of expectation.

Leonardo da Vinci as Pioneer.—Leonardo da Vinci’s name has been frequently mentioned among the intelligent during the last few years, and it cannot be without a meaning. It may be said that his reappearance as a subject for discussion is due to a fortuitous concurrence of publishers. But accidents of this kind are like miracles: they do not happen; and I, for one, am inclined to suspect the “collective unconscious” of a design in thrusting forward at this moment the name and personality of the great Renaissance humanist. What can we guess the design to be? What is the interpretation of this prominent figure in our current collective dreams? The symbols appearing in dreams are the expressive language of the unconscious mind, and the appearance of the symbol of da Vinci is or may be an indication that the “unconscious” is “dreaming” of a new Renaissance. And since the dreams of the unconscious to-day are or may be the acts of the conscious to-morrow, the prevalent interest in Leonardo is a further possible piece of evidence that we are or may be on the eve of a recurrence of the Italian Renaissance.

Leonardo as an artist interests us less than Leonardo as a person. That is not to say that Leonardo was not a great artist, for, of course, he was one of the greatest. But it is to say that the promise of which he was an incarnation was even greater than the fulfilment which he achieved. There is a glorious sentence in one of the Upanishads which is attributed to the Creator on the morrow of His completion of the creation of the whole manifested universe. “Having pervaded all this,” he says, “I remain.” Not even the creation of the world had exhausted His powers or even so much as diminished His self-existence. When that greatest of works of art had been accomplished, He, the Creator, “remained.” Leonardo was, if I may use the expression, a chip of the original block in this respect. His works, humanly speaking, were wonderful; they were both multitudinous and various. Nevertheless, after the last of them had been performed, Leonardo remained as a great “promise,” still unfulfilled. That is the character of the Renaissance type, as it is also the character of a Renaissance period; its promise remains over even after great accomplishment. The Renaissance man is greater than his work; he pervades his work, but he is not submerged in it.

I should be trespassing on the domain of the psycho-analysts if I were to attempt to indicate the means by which a collective hysteria may be resolved into an integration. Taking the Italian Renaissance, however, as a sort of working model, and Leonardo da Vinci as its typical figure, it would appear that the method of resolution is all-round expression—expression in as many forms and fields as the creative powers direct. Leonardo was not only an artist, he was a sculptor, a poet, an epigrammatist, an engineer, a statesman, a soldier, a musician, and I do not know what else besides. He indulged his creative or expressive impulses in every direction his “fancy” indicated. Truly enough he was not equally successful in an objective or critical sense in all these fields; but quite as certainly he owed his surpassing excellence in one or two of them to the fact that he tried them all. The anti- or non-Renaissance type of mind would doubtless conclude that if Leonardo, let us say, had been content to be only a painter, or only a sculptor, he would have succeeded even more perfectly in that single mode of expression into which ex hypothesi he might have poured the energy otherwise squandered in various subordinate channels. But concentrations of energy of this kind are not always successful; the energies, in fact, are not always convertible; and the attempt to concentrate may thus have the effect, not only of failing of its direct object, but of engaging one part of the total energy in suppressing another. At any rate, the working hypothesis (and it did work) of the Renaissance type is that a natural multiplicity of modes of expression is better than an unnatural or forced concentration. The latter, if successful, may possibly lead to something wonderful; but if unsuccessful, it ends in hysteria, in unresolved conflicts. The former, on the other hand, while it may lead to no great excellence in any direction (though equally it may be the condition of excellence) is, at any rate, a resolution of the internal conflict. We shall be well advised to deny ourselves nothing in the region of æsthetic creation. Let us “dabble” to our hearts’ content in every art-form to which our “fancy” invites us. The results in a critical sense may be unimportant; “art happens,” as Whistler used to say, and it “happens,” it may be added, in the course of play. The play is the thing, and I have little doubt that the approaching Renaissance will be heralded by a revival of dilettantism in all the arts.

“Shakespeare” Simplified.—English literary criticism lies under the disgrace of accepting Shakespeare, the tenth-rate player, as Shakespeare the divine author, and so long as a mistake of this magnitude is admitted into the canon, nobody of any perception can treat the canon with respect. My theory of authorship is simple, rational, and within the support of common experience. All it requires is that we should assume that Shakespeare the theatre-manager had on his literary staff or within call a wonderful dramatic genius whose name we do not yet know; that this genius was as modest as he was wonderful, and as adaptable as he was original; and that, of the plays passed to him for licking into shape (plays drawn from Shakespeare the actor-manager’s store), some he scarcely touched, others he changed only here and there, while a few, the few that appealed to his “fancy,” he completely transformed and re-created in his own likeness. There is nothing incredible, nothing even requiring much subtlety to accept, in this hypothesis. The Elizabethan age was a strange age. It had very little of the passion for self-advertisement that distinguishes our own. It contained many anonymous geniuses of whom the obscure translators of the Bible were only one handful. The author of the plays may well have been one of the number—a quiet, modest, retiring sort of man, thankful to be able to find congenial work in reshaping plays to his own liking. That, at any rate, is my surmise, and so far from thinking the theory unimportant, I believe it throws a beam of light on the psychology of genius during the Elizabethan age.

The “London Mercury” and English.—It goes without saying that the London Mercury had what is called a “good Press.” Without imputing it to Mr. Squire for unrighteousness, it is a fact that Mr. Squire has a “good Press” for whatever he chooses to do. He appears to have been born with a silver pen in his mouth, and for quite a number of years now it has been impossible to take up a literary journal without finding praise of Mr. Squire in it. As a poet Mr. Squire deserves nearly all that is said of him; not for the mass of his work, but for an occasional poem of almost supreme excellence. As a literary causeur, of whom The Times said in compliment that “he never makes you think,” he has the first and great qualification of readableness. Finally, as a parodist he is without a superior in contemporary literature. But when one has said this, one has said all; for Mr. Squire is not a great or even a sound critic, he is not an impressive writer, and he is not a distinguished or original thinker. Time and Mr. Squire may prove my judgment wrong, but I do not think, either, that he will make a great or an inspiring editor. Great editorship is a form of creation, and the great editor is measured by the number and quality of the writers he brings to birth—or to ripeness. We shall see in course of time whether Mr. Squire is a creator in this sense. So far, he has not even a dark horse in his stable.

Among the objects set out to be accomplished by the London Mercury is the advancement of English style. It is a worthy and even a momentous object, but the London Mercury is not the first modern journal to venture upon this quest. After all, I, in my way, during the last seven years or so, have made occasional references to current English style, and my comments cannot be said to be distinguished by any particular tenderness to bad English, by whomsoever it has been written. It amused me, therefore, to read sundry and divers exhortations to Mr. Squire to be severe, and, if need be, “savage” in criticism, and especially when I observed that some of the names appended to the advice were of writers who have anything but appreciated the severity, let alone the “savagery,” of reviews addressed to themselves. Let it pass. The thing in question is English style, and nobody can be too enthusiastic in its maintenance and improvement. The peril of English style, I take it, lies in its very virtue, that of directness, and its fighting edges are to be found where the colloquial and the vernacular (or, let us say, the idiomatic) meet and mix. The English vernacular is the most powerful and simple language that was ever written, but the danger always lies in wait for it of slipping into the English colloquial, which, by the same token, is one of the worst of languages. The difference between them is precisely the difference between Ariel and Caliban; and I am not sure that “Shakespeare” had not this, among other things, in mind when he dreamed his myth. Caliban is a direct enough creature to be English, and there are writers who imagine his style to be the mirror of perfection. But Ariel is no less direct; he is only Caliban transformed and purified and become a thing of light. There is, of course, no rule for distinguishing between them; between the permissible and the forbidden use of the colloquial; for it is obvious that the vernacular is finally derived from the colloquial. The decision rests with taste, which alone can decide what of the colloquial shall be allowed to enter into the vernacular. In general, I should say, the criterion is grace; the hardest, the rarest, but the most exquisite of all the qualities of style. I hope one day to see English written in the vernacular, with all its strength and directness, but with grace added unto it. Newman, perhaps, was furthest of all writers on the way to it. But Newman did not always charm. Now I have written the word, I would substitute charm for grace, and say that the perfect English style, which nobody has yet written, will charm by its power.

Mr. G. K. Chesterton on Rome and Germany.—Hovelaque’s Les Causes profondes de la Guerre is either the original or a plagiarism of Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s theory that the war was only an episode in the eternal “revolt” of “Germany” against “Rome.” I put these words into quarantine to signify that they are to be handled with care; for it is not only Germany or Rome that is in question, but the psychological characteristics and the relation between them which they embody. Thus raised to psychological dimensions, Germany and Rome become principles, types of mentality: in radical opposition. Germany is of one camp, Rome is of the other, and given the fact of their inherent antagonism, war between them is endless. Mr. Mann, a German writer, has carried the subject further; he has entered into particulars. In the following pairs of qualities, tabulated by Mr. Mann, the first of each is to be attributed to “Germany” and the other to “Rome.” Heroic, rational; people, masses; personality, individuality; culture, civilisation; spiritual life, social life; aristocracy, democracy; romance, classicism; nationalism, internationalism. I do not know how Mr. Chesterton will fare among these pairs of opposites, for it appears to me that his preferences are to be found at least as often among the “German” group as among the “Roman” group. There, however, they are, as drawn up by a supporter of his general theory, and we must leave him to make the best of them.

There is another pair which Mr. Mann has not mentioned, though it has been brought close home to many of us. The German “Persius” has confessed that “the lie has always been one of Germany’s chief weapons, both by land and sea.” The lie, however, is not the “Roman” way; the “Roman” way is silence, and anybody engaged in the dissemination of ideas knows which of the two forms of opposition is the more difficult to meet. After all, the liar takes risks; moreover, he does the idea he opposes the honour of noticing it if only to lie about it. But silence risks nothing; it kills without leaving a trace.

Leaving the subject where, for the moment, it is, we can inquire whether the suggested antagonism is not altogether false. Is Rome so eternal as all that, or Germany either? We have been familiarised with a view that represents the map of Europe as a map primarily of mind; but I can discover in such a map no confirmation of the statement that it is Rome and Germany that are in permanent conflict. On the contrary, what we call “formal mind”—in other words, the rationalistic consciousness—appears to me to distinguish “Rome” quite as much as “Germany.” It may be true that on the whole the “Roman” qualities are better integrated and that the “Roman” type is more completely a “man of the world.” But, in comparison with a type of the universal man, the man of the whole world, I doubt whether it can be said that the “Roman” is much more inclusive than the German. Both exclude a good deal, and thus the opposition between them is not of principle, but of accident, the accident being that the anthology of qualities which we call “Rome” differs from the anthology called German. It would follow from this that so far from being in necessarily eternal conflict “Rome” and “Germany” are susceptible of a synthesis in which the qualities of each will complement the qualities of the other. “Germany,” in other words, needs to Romanise, while “Rome” needs to “Germanise.” Their approach to each other would mark the end of the conflict.