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KATHERINE MANSFIELD
and other
LITERARY PORTRAITS
JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
and other
LITERARY PORTRAITS,
PETER NEVILL LIMITED
London
PETER NEVILL LIMITED
50 Old Brompton Road
London SWy
Made and printed in Great Britain by Richmond Hill Printing Works Ltd.
Yelverton Rqad Bournemouth
MCMXLIX
CONTENTS
PAGE
Katherine Mansfield
(i) The Isolation of Katherine Mansfield 7
(ii) The Letters of Katherine Mansfield 16
(iii) Portrait of a Pa-Man 2 1
Keats and Coleridge: An Imaginary Conversation 32
The Ode to a Nightingale 45
Coleridge and Wordsworth 50
De Quincey 91
Matthew Arnold TOT
Andrew Bradley no
Richard Hillary 123
Max Plowman 131
Karl Mannheim 152
TJeorge Chapman 163
Shakespeare and the Cuckoo 183
F. V. Branford 201
Thomas Hardy 215
Keats and Shelley 230
THE ISOLATION OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD
It is curious how little good criticism of Katherine Mansfield's
stories has been written. In England she established herself
in her lifetime as far as she did establish herself in spite of
the reviewers. Her work was appreciated by many of the
most eminent of her fellow craftsmen, and for the most part
damned by the reviewers. But of serious criticism of her work
there was little or none. It was quite otherwise in France.
There almost from the beginning the serious critics seriously
criticised her work. Perhaps it was because she appeared
before the French public as the author of a total wvre in
which her Letters and her Journal were given simultaneously
with her stories, whereas in England they appeared piecemeal.
Whatever the cause, there has always been in England a
discrepancy between the public and the critical appreciation
of her work which contrasts strangely with the reception of
it in France, Whereas in France there must have been few of
the outstanding critics who did not include in their (more a
substantial essay on Katherine Mansfield, if only because in
the French scale of values she was a writer about whom it was
necessary to have a critical opinion, nothing comparable took
place in England.
But in June 1946 Mr. V. S. Pritchett did something to fill
the gap. He broadcast a criticism of her work which was at
once serious and interesting. There was not very much in it
with which I agreed; but both the parts I did agree with and
those with which I did not were much more penetrating than
the average criticism of her work (if criticism is the word for it)
which has appeared in England.
On the whole (says Mr. Pritchett) the stories about New
Zealand, and especially about her childhood there, are the
best, though there are also one or two good ones about
vagrant life in London. Her bad stories are chiefly the
semi-sophisticated ones she wrote about London love-affairs.
I will quote the titles of some of her best stories. They are:
"Prelude," "At the Bay," "The Garden Party," "The Little
Governess," "The Woman at the Store," "The Daughters
of the Late Colonel." From this list, you will see that it is
women on their own, on the defensive before the excessive
male, and their children, that are her characteristic subjects.
7*
LITERARY PORTRAITS
That is good. It has the right kind of superficiality: by
which I mean that good criticism always returns to the surface
of things. The description of Katherine Mansfield's women
and girls as "on the defensive against the excessive male"
is obviously the result of a good deal of careful and sensitive
study of her work: it is superficial in the good sense a cool
judgment, in the terms of the surfaces of things, made after
patient and receptive reading. And the stories which Mr,
Pritchett calls bad, "the semi-sophisticated ones about London
love-affairs," are the bad ones. They have not worn well.
But there are two things in the rest of Mr. Pritchett's
criticism which I am impelled to challenge. One is relatively
unimportant : but very misleading.
Katherine Mansfield (he writes) belonged to the arty
generation which isolated private sensibility, and detached
private life from the life of its times. This was partly due to
the appalling mass-pressure of the first world-war : it was a
protest against the clumsy use and slaughter of the masses, the
denial of human personality which that war instituted. One
finds her shuddering, retreating protest, repeated in louder,
more violent and evangelical terms by D. H. Lawrence.
That is in the main true. Since the generation impugned
is the one to which I belong, it is a rather queer sensation to
find it thus isolated and defined : almost as though one were
looking at an X-ray of oneself. But one has to recognise the
accuracy of the description. Mr. Pritchett, however, goes on :
It is natural to compare her with Virginia Woolf, but
Virginia Woolf was a more deliberate writer, a woman with
an intellectual background and with roots. She was conscious
of literature, where Katherine Mansfield was more conscious
of the cult of the self-purified artist. Where Virginia Woolf is
precious, Katherine Mansfield is priggish. Mrs. Dalloway is
wayward, but is contained by her class. She will never be '
entirely lost; she can assimilate the iron that enters into her
soul. But Miss Moss has nothing; she is hopelessly lost, be-
tween too many worlds. When Katherine Mansfield imitated
Mrs. Woolf, she was a sophisticated failure.
Now Katherine Mansfield never imitated Virginia Woolf.
That is a historic fact. Katherine Mansfield did not like
Virginia Woolf's writing. "I fiate shrubberies" she once said
of it: thereby comparing it to the artificial, carefully designed
and highly cultivated garden of the eighteenth century. I
18
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
think the comparison is apt : and it was, no doubt, a limitation
in Katherine Mansfield that these arts of a high and slightly
over-ripe civilization did not appeal to her. It was particularly
unfortunate, since she genuinely liked Virginia Woolf as a
person: and the fact that Virginia's writing left Katherine
Mansfield cold created a feeling of embarrassment which is
very evident in Katherine Mansfield's letters to her.
What Mr. Pritchett should have said was that when
Katherine Mansfield chose subjects which apparently belonged
to the highly civilized milieu of which Virginia Woolf wrote,
she was "a sophisticated failure." These are the "semi-
sophisticated stories of London love-affairs" which Mr.
Pritchett has previously pronounced failures, as they are,
When judged by the criterion of her finest work. And "semi-
sophisticated" is an apter epithet than "sophisticated." Bliss
is the most famous of these stories ; Marriage a la Mode is
another, and there are one or two besides. The most striking
feature about them is that they are set on the bare fringe of
cultivated society. Bertha in Bliss., Isabel in Marriage a
la Mode are really quite simple women who have taken up
with the stupider intelligentsia, which Katherine Mansfield too
broadly caricatures. It is the discordant combination of
caricature with emotional pathos that spoils Bliss and
makes Marriage a la Mode ineffective. But the failure has
nothing to do with imitation of Virginia Woolf. Such imita-
tion is a figment of Mr. Pritchett's fancy.
Nevertheless, the contrast between the two writers is worth
making; and Mr. Pritchett in making it elaborates an inter-
esting thesis concerning Katherine Mansfield's spiritual
pattern.
Katherine Mansfield was a New Zealander. She spent her
firlhood in New Zealand and her adult life mainly in England,
he left New Zealand because she found no satisfaction in the
life there. Once established in England she found she had lost
her roots. What was she to do ? She could either go back and,
as it were, submit to New Zealand again, return like the mature
prodigal. Or she could try to work out a new spiritual basis for
her life. She could invent, as it were, a private religion, a
private myth to live by; the myth of pure receptivity. This
was the course she chose. One can see it clearly stated in her
Journals, which are literary documents of great interest to the
9 '
LITERARY PORTRAITS
students of this period. After reading between the lines one
forms a much clearer picture of Katherine Mansfield's
position. She is the prim exile who belongs neither to her own
society nor to London ; but who like some nervous spider lives
on an ingeniously contrived web that she has spun between
the two places. The traditions of the optimistic and ruthless
pioneer are strong in countries like New Zealand, and they are
oppressive to the sensitive. But the sensitive get their revenge in
satire, in cynicism, in exposing the hollowness of spiritual life.
Katherine Mansfield enjoyed her own hard, acute wit, her
malice, her bitterness, but she felt guilty about them. Hence
the cult of self-perfection, of pure art, the religious devotion
to the idea that an artist must create within himself a clean
heart.
Any hypothesis of this kind is better than none. But what
does this one amount to? What does "having lost one's roots"
really mean? The metaphor is a familiar one in spiritual
analysis. French criticism equally makes use of the category :
deracine. It implies that one has parted from the social ambience
in which one was unconsciously nurtured as a child, and has
moved into a milieu where the values which one instinctively
absorbed are not acknowledged. But Katherine Mansfield
consciously rebelled against the values of New Zealand society.
Her adolescent rebellion made her, as she came to realise,
unjust to her own country; but, though she was intermittently
visited by the desire to return to New Zealand, she never did.
It is true that she could not establish new roots in English
society. She felt herself to be a sojourner in a strange land. The
quality of her feeling of strangeness is beautifully rendered in a
passage in her Journal, when she was living at Hampstead,
in 1919.
The red geraniums have bought the garden over my head.
They are there, established, back in the old home, every leaf
and flower unpacked and in its place and quite determined
that no> power on earth will ever move them again. Well,
that I don't mind. But why should they make me feel a
stranger? Why should they ask me every time I go near:
"And what are you doing in a London garden?" And I am the
little Colonial walking in the London garden patch allowed
to look, perhaps, but not toHnger. If I lie on the grass they
positively shout at me: "Look at her, lying on our grass,
pretending this is her garden, and that tall back of the house,
with the windows open and the coloured curtains lifting, is
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
her house. She is a stranger an alien. She is nothing but a
little girl sitting on the Tinakori hills and dreaming: *I went
to London and married an Englishman, and we lived in a
tall grave house with red geraniums and white daisies in the
garden at the back. 5 /w-pudence!"
Mr. Pritchett's contention is that, in consequence of this
lack of a spiritual home, Katherine Mansfield had to try to
work out a new spiritual basis for her life. She therefore
"invented, as it were, a private religion, a private myth to
live by : the myth of pure receptivity. Hence the cult of self-
perfection, of pure art, the religious devotion to the idea that
an artist must create within himself a clean heart."
Though there are elements of truth in this theory, it is much
too summary. It cannot be assumed, as Mr. Pritchett assumes,
that the cult of self-perfection is the natural compensation for
the lack of a country in which one feels at home. Many have
practised the cult of self-perfection, many indeed practise it
to-day, who have not been exiled from their native land. The
natural consequence of living in exile from a familiar society
is to seek compensation in a closer human relation. The
friendliness, the ease of living, which is, as it were, diffused
in one's manifold contacts with a familiar society, has to be
recaptured in a more intense form in the ease and trust of more
intimate and private relations. In a word, the natural con-
sequence of social insecurity is the search for the security of
love.
Love is a word which modern critics are chary of using.
Nevertheless, it is sometimes irreplaceable. Any attempt to
explain Katherine Mansfield's development without recourse
to it is (I think) doomed to fail. Certainly, the account Mr.
Pritchett gives of her will -appear arbitrary to anyone who has
studied her stories, her Journal and her Letters in close con-
nection with one another. For what are the facts? At a
certain definite point in her life, there is a marked change in
the quality of her stories. A quite new quality of tenderness
and richness enters her work with Prelude. Before that
time, her work showed signs of originality and power
notably in The Woman at the Store, Millie, and The Little
Governess, all of which would be included in a collection of
her best stories; but, with Prelude, she entered, under full sail,
LITERARY PORTRAITS
a new realm of gold. And, afterwards, her work, though
marred by a few failures, on the whole maintained this high
level of achievement. The failures themselves are of a different
kind. Je ne parle pas fran$ais, for instance, is almost as interest-
ing as a success: there is something equivocal and mysterious
in its suggestion of a haunting and undefined evil lurking
near the heart of life. The nearest she came to absolute
success in this peculiar genre is in the unfinished but unfalter-
ing A Married Man's Story, which has not yet received the
recognition due to it.
It has always seemed to me that Prelude occupies much
the same crucial place in the evolution of Katherine Mansfield's
writing that the Ode to Psyche does in that of Keats. It is
the prelude to a new range of utterance, a new comprehension
of experience, new complex harmonies. We know something
about the emotional background of the writing of Prelude
The first version of it was written in the South of France, at
the Villa Pauline, in Bandol, in January, 1916. Two distinct
and definite strands of experience were woven together at
that time. Her overwhelming grief at the death of her young
and only brother, killed in France; and the almost simul-
taneous unfolding of a new love for her husband. The story of
these two things is perfectly told in her letters of December,
1915: it is summed up briefly in a. letter to S. S. Koteliansky
from Bandol.
When I first came here I was really very ill and unhappy,
but that is over now and London, you know, seems remote
remote as though it did not exist. Those last hateful and
wasted months are blotted out.
The emergence from darkness and despair into a new
radiance had its material symbol in the taking of the little
Villa Pauline.
I am like that disciple who said: "Lord. I believe. Help
thou mine unbelief." As I was dressing and your letter was
already sealed the heavy steps really came along the corridor.
The knock at the door the old man with the blue folded paper
that I scarcely dared to tak and having taken could not
open. Oh, I sat by the side of my bed and opened it little by
little. I read all those directions for the sending of urgent
telegrams in the night At last I said: "He is not coming"
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
and opened it and read your message. . . . Since then I have
never ceased for one moment to tremble. ... I felt: "Now he
is coming, that villa is taken" and I ran, ran along the quai.
One day I shall tell you all this at length, but it was not taken
until I saw the woman and took it.
This morning, I went to the little Church and prayed. It
is very nice there. I prayed for us three for you and me and
Chummie.
Chummie was Katherine Mansfield's brother. About three
weeks later, when she was embarked on the first version of
Prelude (which was called "The Aloe"), she wrote in her
Journal :
Now, really, what is it that I do want to write? I ask myself:
am I less of a writer than I used to be? Is the need to write
less urgent? Does it still seem as natural to me to seek that
form of expression ? Has speech fulfilled it? Do I ask anything
more than to relate, to remember, to assure myself?
There are times when these thoughts half-frighten me and
very nearly convince. I say: You are now so fulfilled in your
own being, in being alive, in living, in aspiring towards a
greater sense of life and a deeper loving, that the other thing
has gone out of you.
But no, at bottom I am not convinced, for at bottom never
has my desire been so ardent. Only the form that I would
choose has changed utterly. I feel no longer concerned with
the same appearance of things. The people who lived in
or whom I wished to bring into my stones don't interest me
any more. The plots of my stories leave me perfectly cold.
Granted that these people exist, and all the differences,
complexities and resolutions are true to them why should /
write about them? They are not near me. All the false threads
that bound them to me are cut away quite.
Now now I want to write recollections of my own country.
Yes, I want to write about my own country till I simply
exhaust my store. Not only because it is "a sacred debt" that
I pay to my country because my brother and I were born
there, but also because in my thoughts I range with him over
all the remembered places. I am never far away from them.
I long to renew them in writing.
And, the people the people we loved there of them too I
want to write. Another "debt of love." Oh, I want for one
moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes
of the Old World. It must 6e mysterious, as though floating.
It must take the breath. It must be "one of those islands" . . .
I shall tell everything, even of how the laundry basket squeaked
at C 75*. But all must be told with a sense of mystery, an
13*
LITERARY PORTRAITS
after-glow, because you, my little sun of it, are set. You
have dropped over the dazzling brim of the world. Now I
must play my part.
That is probably the best description of the rare quality of
Prelude and At the Bay that has been written. Katherine
Mansfield perfectly achieved her conscious artistic purpose.
The writing of Prelude followed a peculiar kind of spiritual
purgation, and the entry into a condition of love. Katherine
Mansfield did not stay there; but thenceforward she re-entered
it again and again. It was inseparably associated in her mind
with what she considered her best writing and the world has
endorsed her judgment. It was a condition to which she
constantly aspired, and by which she judged her other
conditions.
Of these only one was equally associated with the act of
writing. She defined this in a letter, written two years after
Prelude, which is (I think) just as important for the under-
standing of her genius as the passage from the Journal just
quoted.
I've two "kick-offs" in the writing game. One is joy real
joy the thing that made me write when we lived at Pauline,
and that sort of writing I could do in just that state, of being
in some perfectly blissful way at peace. Then something delicate
and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without
thought of frost or a cold breath, knowing that all about it is
warm and tender and "ready." And that I try, ever so humbly
to express.
The other kick-off is my old original one and, had I not
known love, it would have been my all. Not hate or destruc-
tion (both are beneath contempt as real motives) but an
extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to
disaster, willfully, stupidly, like the almond tree and "pas de
nougat pour le noel." There! as I took out a cigarette-paper
I got it exactly a cry against corruption that is absolutely
the nail on the head. Not a protest a cry. And I mean
corruption in the widest sense of the word, of course.
I am at present fully launched, right out in the deep
sea, with this second state.
Into those two categories, v corresponding to those two
originating emotions, all Katherine Mansfield's best writing
falls with a remarkable precision. The basic human moods,
of which the "kick-offs" are the corollaries in the realm of
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
artistic creation, alternate with a striking and poignant
rhythm in her letters.
It is significant, too, that in this same letter, she speaks of
the war as having finally invaded her inmost being. "It is
here in me the whole time, eating me away, and I am simply
terrified by it. It's at the root of my homesickness and anxiety
and panic." It is the sign of the dread corruption against
which she cries.
That brings us to Mr. Pritchett's judgment that Katherine
Mansfield belonged to "the arty generation which isolated
private sensibility and detached private life from the life of
its times" and that "this was partly due to the appalling mass-
pressure of the first world-war". There is a measure of truth
ift this. But I cannot see that the passing of the years has
improved things. The succeeding generation of story-writers
took up the job of official propaganda. I think their artistic
integrity suffered in consequence, and perhaps their critical
integrity, too. For there is a nuance of contempt in Mr.
Pritchett's reference to "the arty generation" which springs
less from a pursuit of truth for it is singularly unapt to
Katherine Mansfield or D. H. Lawrence than from an
uneasy conscience.
But that is a minor matter. What is more important is that
in the process of assimilating private life to the life of the times,
to which presumably Mr. Pritchett has submitted himself,
something has been coarsened. The fine edge of discrimination
has been blunted. Love has become too sentimental or too
illusory a category for a truly modern critic to employ in
examination or analysis. "We have changed all that." But
what if the subject demands it? What if the creature examined
expands its wings only in an atmosphere of love?
Katherine Mansfield lived in exile from her own country.
That is the material fact. She re-created her own country.
That is the spiritual fact. The country she re-created is not
New Zealand, but a universal country, the land of innocence, to
which the soul aspires. She longed for a home: but what she
could not find in New Zealand, she could not have found in
any country on this earth or she could have found it in every
one. Home, for her, was the security of love of "being in
some perfectly blissful way at peace."
'5'
THE LETTERS OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD
"It really is a heavenly gift to be able to put yourself,
jasmine, summer grass, a kingfisher, a poet, the pony, an
excursion and the new sponge-bag and bedroom-slippers all
into an envelope. How does one return thanks for a piece of
somebody's life? When I am depressed by the superiority
of men, I comfort myself with the thought that they can't
write letters like that".
So Katherine Mansfield wrote to a friend. I think there is
something in it. Of all the great men letter-writers I know
Keats came nearest to putting a piece of his life into them ;
but then he did it deliberately, in his letters to his brother and
sister-in-law who were on the other side of the Atlantic. But
Katherine Mansfield did it because she could not help it.
First, then, hers are the letters of a woman ; second, of a
woman in love; and third, of a woman in love, not with her
husband only, but with everything. Not with everything
always. Her letters are continually passing from gaiety to
despair, and despair to gaiety. But she never gives rein to her
despair for long; and she didn't believe that it was possible
to express her despair directly. "I simply go dark", she says.
"It is terrible, terrible. How terrible I could only put into
writing and never say in a letter." Partly, no doubt, this was
sheer fastidiousness. She had a horror of what she called
"confession". But much more deeply it was a profound
aesthetic conviction that despair should not and could not be
expressed directly the same conviction that inspired Keats's
Ode on Melancholy. "No, no, go not to Lethe," to find
the goddess of despair.
"She dwells with Beauty beauty that must die,
And joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."
I think this doctrine that despair should be, and only can
be expressed by beauty, is extraordinarily profound. Katherine
Mansfield hints at it continually in her letters, and applies it
instinctively in her stories. Ir\ one letter she wrote :
"We see death in life as we see death in a flower that is
fresh unfolded. Our hymn is to the flower's beauty: we would
make that beauty immortal, because we know.
16
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
I mean by this knowledge . . .'deserts of vast eternity'.
But the difference is ... I couldn't tell anybody bang out
about those deserts : they are my secret. I might write about a
boty eating strawberries or a woman combing her hair on a
windy morning, and that is the only way I can ever mention
them. But they must be there."
I suppose it is no accident that Keats and Katherine
Mansfield both died early of tuberculosis. Its toxic fevers seem
immensely to heighten the beauty of the created world and
give it an almost intolerable distinctness, at the same time as
they sound an inward warning of the precariousness of one's
hold of life. But the effects are dazzlingly rich. They give
one a sense of what Katherine Mansfield called "the triumph
of beauty".
Let Katherine Mansfield herself explain the meaning of
her phrase.
4 'Do you really feel that all beauty is marred by ugliness
and the lovely woman has bad teeth ? I don't feel quite that.
For it seems to me that if Beauty were absolute, it would no
longer be the kind of Beauty it is. Beauty triumphs over
ugliness in life. That's what I feel. And that marvellous
triumph is what I long to express. The poor man lives and
tears glitter in his beard and that is so beautiful one could bow
down. Why? Nobody can say. I sit in a waiting-room where
all is ugly, where it's dirty, dull, dreadful, where sick people
waiting with me to see the doctor are all marked by suffering
and sorrow. And a very poor workman comes in, takes off
his cap humbly, beautifully, walks on tip-toe, has a look as
though he were in Church, has a look as though he believed
that behind that doctor's door there shone the miracle of
healing. And all is changed, all is marvellous . . . Life is, all
at one and the same time, far more mysterious and far
simpler than we know."
'* And again, she writes :
"You see, I can't help it. My secret belief the inner-
most credo by which I live is that although Life is loathsomely-
ugly and people are often terribly vile and cruel ajid base,
nevertheless there is something at the back of it all, which if
only I were great enough to understand would make every-
thing, everything indescribably beautiful. One just has glimpses
divine warnings, signs." *
Now I have let Katherine Mansfield herself explain far
better than I could why she can be truly described as a
LITERARY PORTRAITS
woman in love with everything. The constant alternations of
joy and despair in her letters, in themselves so painful, are
expressed in terms of beauty. In that language she contrives,
by her own natural magic, to convey the subtlest modulations
of personal feeling. You need to read the letters over and
over again to understand all that is contained in some of her
pellucid, unpremeditated phrases. It is a kind of chamber-
music, exquisitely controlled, in which vast depths of feeling
are half-hidden in a slight change of tone. She writes to a
friend :
"Was there really a new baby in your letter? Oh dear,
some people have all the babies in this world. And as some-
times happens to us women, just before your letter came, I
found myself tossing a little creature into the air and saykig
'Whose boy are you?' But he was far too shadowy, too far
away to reply."
There's a personal tragedy uttered there.
Or again, when she writes in a mood of despair from her
isolation in Italy, after being cheated by a gardener:
"Oh, why are people swindlers? My heart bleeds when
they swindle me, doesn't yours?
Why am I not a calm indifferent grown-up woman? . . .
And this great, cold, indifferent world like a silent, malignant
river, and these creatures rolling over one like great logs
crashing into one. I try to keep to one side, to slip down un-
noticed among the trembling rainbow-coloured bubbles of
foam and the faint reeds. I try to turn and turn in a tiny
quiet pool but it's no good. Sooner or later one is pushed
out into the middle of it all. Oh, I am really sadder than you,
I believe.
Shall I send this letter? Or write another one a gay one?
No, you'll understand. There is a little boat far out, moving
along, inevitable it looks and dead silent a little black spot,
like the spot on a lung."
The power of that final phrase is terrifying. One under-
stood only too well.
Or, again, during one of the times when the high fever was
upon her: "L.M. has broken my thermometer. Good! I
got another for 18 francs, which seems to play the same tune,
though the notes are not so plain." "The same tune" it
would be hard to pack more pain into a smiling phrase.
18
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
But the gaiety of her letters is never forced. Her natural
mode of speech was gay; and her letters are full of jokes
rather rueful jokes many of them, but quite irrepressible:
and all with an inimitable quality of their own. One might
call it a blend of wit and humour : what is more peculiar is
that they are illuminating. They flash in a quick glancing
light, on a person or a situation so that they seem to be inherent
in her peculiar magic of style. Of her, Buffon's famous maxim
concerning style, is the obvious and literal truth: "Style is the
woman herself". So, for that matter, is Flaubert's "Style is
a way of seeing." And Katherine Mansfield's way of seeing
was essentially a smiling way. As, for example, when she
describes her fainting at an exhibition of Naval Photographs.
"When I reached the final room I really did give way and
was floated down the stairs and into the kind air by two
Waacs and a Wren who seemed to despise me very much
(but couldn't have as much as I did myself). They asked me,
when I had drunk a glass of the most dispassionate water,
whether I had lost anybody in the Navy as though it were
nothing but a kind of gigantic salt water laundry."
Because of her year's of wandering as an invalid, whole
periods of her life are chronicled day by day in her letters.
They become in one sense an intimate autobiography: but it
is curiously and delightfully objective. Not so much that she
saw herself objectively though she did as that she is seldom
and then against the grain directly concerned with herself
at all. She is for ever describing the life about her; the things
she sees from her windows, the maids who look after her in
the hotels, her doll and her cats. The doll and the cats she
endowed with a language and a character of their own:
they speak their own minute and enchanting commentary on
the things that happen. And the women who wait upon her
what personalities they are ! Juliet and Marie in the South
of France, Mrs. Honey in Cornwall. Under Katherine
Mansfield's touch they reveal the genius of the race. Marie
and Mrs. Honey they appear as the exquisite and simple
flowering of a whole civilization. .
And so it is that Katherine Mansfield's letters are like a
long and lovely story, in which the joy and pain of life are
inextricably entwined. They are life, but life seen in the
LITERARY PORTRAITS
vision of one who, knowing that she had not very long to look
at the pattern, turned all the energies of her eager soul to
examining and marvelling at it, setting down its beauties
with the tender fidelity of love a love that laughs, yet with
tears in its eyes.
And behind all this is the story of a struggle to live, first to
live in order to be able to receive the wonder of life into her
soul and to express it, and then, as the brief years draw to an
end, a struggle to live in a different sense : to achieve an entire
simplicity of soul, a central and crystal clarity which should
not change, to which joy and sadness should be as one.
So it is that, since her letters were first published in 1929,
they have made the conquest of the world. They have been
translated into almost every European language. And thoilgh,
when I first made up my mind to publish them, I hardly
expected this to happen; it seems natural enough today. In
one letter she speaks of "the only treasure, the only heirloom
we have to leave our little grain of truth" the truth that
can be discovered only by love. Her grain of truth she
would never have claimed that it was larger is of such
quality that it is self-evidently universal.
20
PORTRAIT OF A PA-MAN
The most tragic contrast in the life of Katherine Mansfield
was that between her happiness at Bandol in the South of
France in the winter and spring of 1915-16 and her suffering
there exactly two years later, when the hardships and misery
she endured gave her incipient phthisis its fatal hold upon her.
The full extent of that later suffering has yet to be revealed.
It was almost grotesque in its intensity. And not the least
powerful of its elements was the bitterness of her knowledge
that in that same place, two years before, she had been
happier than she had ever been before or was ever to be again.
There was sealed in the flesh and spirit of a delicate genius
the terrible truth of Dante's saying:
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria
Since her happiness in Bandol in the winter and spring of
1915-16 Katherine Mansfield had cherished a golden memory
of the little town. She fell ill in November 1917 with a severe
pleurisy and was making a slow but satisfactory recovery, when
her doctor, in all good faith, made the rash suggestion that
she should go to the South of France to convalesce. She jumped
at the possibility. She was quite certain that she had only to
return to Bandol to get well as if by magic ; and perhaps she
would have done had conditions been what they had been two
years before. But they were not. It was the last year of the
1914-18 war: and France was all but exhausted. The railways
were in an appalling condition. Her journey South was one of
fearful hardship. All the recovery she had made was instantly
lost, and she arrived at Bandol much more ill than she ever
had been before. She was terrified. For now she was cut off.
She was not allowed to return to England; and if she had been,
she was now quite incapable of making the journey alone.
From the moment she arrived she had but one desire to get
back again. But for three months she was a prisoner. When
eventually she did return she was, in body, a pathetic shadow
of her former self. And her spiritual suffering had been extreme.
A week after she arrived at Bandol she revisited the Villa
21
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Pauline where she had been so happy. The contrast was almost
more than she could bear. In a letter she tells how on the slow
walk to the villa : "I realised I was suffering terribly, terribly."
She was already so changed that the kindly old proprietress
did not recognise her, except by her voice, which was indeed
one to remember. The old woman and the young one sat
together in the familiar little salon and talked.
"But oh, as we sat there talking and I felt myself answer and
smile and stroke my muff and discuss the meat shortage and
the horrid bread and the high prices and cette guerre, I felt
that somewhere, upstairs, you and I lay like the little Babies
in the Tower, smothered under pillows and she and I were
keeping watch, like any two old crones ! I could hardly look
at the room. When I saw my photograph, the one that you
had left, on the wall, I nearly broke down, and finally I CcLme
away and leaned a long time on the wall at the bottom of our
little road, looking at the violet sea that beat up high and loud
against these strange dark clots of sea- weed. As I came down
your beautiful narrow steps, it began to rain. The light was
flashing through the dusk from the lighthouse, and a swarm
of black soldiers were kicking something about on the sand
among the palm-trees a dead dog perhaps or a little tied-up
kitten."
There is a terrible beauty and power in that simple prose.
Katherine Mansfield was sick at heart and sick in body. And
she was trying to begin writing again as the one solace for her
suffering. Exactly a fortnight later she says in a letter. "As
I write, I feel so much nearer my writing self my 'Pauline'
writing self than I have since I came." Two days after she
had begun to write. On February ist she says: "I am rather
diffident about telling you, because so many sham wolves
have gone over the bridge, that I am working and have been
for two days. It looks to me the real thing. But one ne\cr
knows."
But she was writing that strange and painful story Je ne
parle pas frarifais, and she was not writing from her "Pauline"
writing self. In a letter which is of crucial importance for a
true understanding of her work, written two days later, she
says:
"I've two 'kick-offs' in the writing game. One is joy real
joy the thing that made me write when we lived at Pauline
and that sort of writing I could only do in just that state of
22
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
being in some perfectly blissful way at peace. Then something
delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower
without thought of frost or a cold breath, knowing that all
about it is warm and tender and 'ready'. And that I try ever
so humbly to express.
The other 'kick off' is my old original one, and had I not
known love it would have been my all. Not hate or destruc-
tion (both are beneath contempt as real motives) but an
extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to
disaster, almost wilfully, stupidly. . . . There ! as I took out a
cigarette paper I got it exactly a cry against corruption that
is absolutely the nail on the head. Not a protest a cry. And
I mean corruption in the widest sense of the word of course.
I am at present fully launched, right out in the deep sea,
with this second state ..."
'Katherine Mansfield's genius for the precise word is here
applied to the source of her own inspiration in a moment of
entire clarity. She has, she says, the absolutely right word for
the condition out of which she was writing Je ne park pas
frangais: it was "a cry against corruption". And Prelude,
which she had written two years before at the Villa Pauline,
in her time of happiness, was the outcome of a condition of
love of being in some perfectly blissful way at peace
unaware of, unheeding, ignoring, rising joyfully above
corruption and the threat of disaster.
The connection between this lucid self-awareness in the
act of writing and the immediate experience she had under-
gone on her return to the Villa Pauline is intimate. There the
same contrast was experienced and expressed as it were
instinctively. There was the memory of her life at Pauline
its joy and confidence and achievement together with the
knowledge that it had been swept away, doomed wilfully,
stupidly to disaster: from the conflict came the agonised and
agonising "cry against corruption". "A swarm of black
soldiers was kicking something about in the sand among the
palm-trees a dead dog, perhaps, or a little tied-up kitten".
It is strange indeed almost frightening to those who have
some monition of the prophetic character of true literary
genius, and of the symbolical significance of so much that
23 *
LITERARY PORTRAITS
happens to the "experiencing nature" that the agonizing
contrast between Katherine Mansfield's joy at Bandol in
1915-16 and her suffering there in 1917-18 should have
embraced even the two English doctors who attended her
there at these different times. One belonged to the world of
trust and candour and integrity, the other to the world of
corruption. Happily, it is with the first of these that this story
is chiefly concerned.
In November 1915, shortly after the death of her brother
in the war, Katherine Mansfield left England for the South of
France. Her conscious motive was to overcome her grief at
her brother's death. But other motives were working in her.
Her brother was killed almost immediately after going to
France in October 1915. He had spent his last home leate
with her and they had talked and talked together of their
childish memories of New Zealand. For the first time for
many years really for the first time since she finally left
New Zealand in July 1908, her slumbering love of her
country, and a nostalgia for her childhood was awakened in
her. Her dislike of New Zealand quite suddenly changed into
love. That rebirth of love for her own country was intimately
and mysteriously mixed with her affection for her brother.
She wanted to go to a country that was like New Zealand
to seek a new state of soul. "Un paysage, c'est un etat d'ame"
said Amiel. And it is assuredly true that for Katherine
Mansfield in November 1915 the New Zealand, which her
imagination had rediscovered by love, was a state of soul.
At the time I did not clearly understand her motives.
Neither (I think) did she. I went with her rather reluctantly,
for I felt that her grief for her brother was something into
which I could not fully enter, any more than I could entec
into the memories of New Zealand which I did not share.
But we went together. After a miserable time exploring the
coast for a modest place to settle in and being constantly
disappointed, I decided to return home, as soon as we had
found a place where Katherine would like to stay. We found
it at Bandol, at the Hotel Bqau Rivage. I stayed there two
days with her helping her to settle in, and then left for England.
On the night before I left, we noticed at dinner an attractive,
thoroughly well-washed man of about sixty with a white
24
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
moustache, who had Englishman written all over him. The
next evening (as Katherine Mansfield's letters record) he
proved his nationality and his courtesy by * 'making her a leg
and offering her two copies of the Times."
Shortly afterwards, she fell ill, not seriously, but with the
fibrositis which sometimes painfully incapacitated her, and
also with what she called her "Marseilles fever". She had to
take to her bed. Two days later, on December 14, 1917,
she wrote to me :
" After mid-day that Englishman, terribly shy, knocked at
my door. It appears he has a most marvellous cure for just
my kind of rheumatism. Would I try it? All this was ex-
plained in the most preposterous rigmarole, in an attempt to
appear offhand and at his poor unfortunate ease. I never saw a
man so shy. Finally he says that if the pharmacien can't make
it up here he will take the first train to Toulon and get it for
me. It is a rubbing mixture which he got off a German doctor
one year when he was in Switzerland for the winter sports.
It sounds to me very hopeful but I'd catch at any straw.
So I thanked him, and humming and hawing he went off.
I can't think what frightened him so. I shall have to put on
a hat and a pair of gloves when he brings me the unguent."
Later on the same day she wrote :
"My Englishman has arrived with his pot of ointment
and refuses to take even a pin or a bead in payment. How
kind he is ! It's easy to see he hasn't lived with me three years."
Two days later, the ointment was working. She was still
in bed, but
"I think my Englishman's stuff is going to do me a great
deal of good, and he has made me so perfectly hopeful and
has been in many ways such a comfort to me. Should this stuff
not quite cure me, he has given me the address of a place in
Normandy where one goes for a cure once a year ... he says
it's simply miraculous . . . 'You'll be skipping like a two-year
old after a week there,' says my nice funny man. This man
isn't really a doctor. He's the Head of Guy's Dental Hospital
but he is a queer, delightful, good-natured person, and he
has certainly been a comfort to me ... I have the bed covered
with copies of The Times, marked at certain places with large
blue crosses and a copy of Le Temps with arrows in the margin
and 'this will interest you' written underneath. All from the
same kind and only donor."
2 5
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Another two days and "my rheumatism this morning
n'existe pas. I've not been so free for a year."
"I can positively jump. I'm to go on using the unguent and
my Englishman is going to give me the prescription today, for
he leaves here on Monday (the next day) . He is also going to
conduct me to the post and see I'm not cheated over my
mandat from Kay, so that is all to the good."
But "my Englishman" did not leave on Monday. He stayed
on another week for her sake. On the Wednesday, December
23, she wrote:
"I am going to drive in a kerridge to that little Durer town
I told you of". (That was the little town in Katherine Mans-
field's poem, 'The Town between the Hills') . "The Englishman
did not go away on Monday. He stayed till the end of the
week to show me the different walks he has discovered here,
and it is he who is taking me there this afternoon. How we
get there, Heaven only knows, but he says there is a road. This
man has certainly been awfully kind to me. You he can't
understand at all, and for all I say I am afraid you will
remain a villain. I can't persuade him that I am more than
six years old and quite able to take my own ticket and manage
my own affairs.
'But why should you?' says he. 'What did he marry you
for if it wasn't to look after you?' He is 62, and old-fashioned
at that. But I feel in a very false position sometimes, and I
can't escape from it. However, it's no matter."
On Christmas Day she wrote :
"Now I am going for a walk with the Englishman who
leaves definitely the day after tomorrow."
Later. It was a long walk through the woods and then we
left the paths and he taught me how to climb as taught by the
guides in Norway. It was boring beyond words but absolutely
successful we scaled dreadful precipices and got wonderful
views. Then I had to learn how to descend, and how to
balance if the stones roll when you put your foot on them
What a pa-man! All this he takes really seriously and I
find myself doing so too and I don't get one bit tired. I wish
you could see my room. Even the blue glass vases we put
away have had to come out for the big bouquets of yellow and
pink roses. Tonight I have promised to dine with this pa-man.
I don't doubt I shall get a lecture on touring in Spain. I
already know more about how to travel in Italy than any
living being, I should think."
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Then "my Englishman" disappears for ever from Katherine's
letters. He was indeed a true "Pa-man", to use the Beauchamp
family word of which Katherine Mansfield was particularly
fond. It meant an oldish man who was "a character", set
in ways which were a trifle eccentric, but charming; old
fashioned, courteous, and above all reliable. And behind all
this it meant a man who belonged to the childhood world
a man whom a child could trust.
Among Katherine Mansfield's papers lately I found the
precious prescription. It was signed, in a firm handwriting,
"F. Newland-Pedley F.R.C.S." So he was a doctor after all
obviously, from his qualification, a distinguished surgeon,
who had specialised in dentistry. I thought that I would
like, if it were possible, to learn more about this Englishman
who had befriended Katherine and been so great a comfort
to her. Accordingly, I wrote to the Secretary of Guy's
Hospital to ask for information. I was richly rewarded. I
received a copy of Guy's Hospital Gazette for May 24, 1947,
containing an article by Mr. Lees Read, the Clerk to the
Governors, on the man himself. The substance of that article
follows here. It gives a fascinating picture of the closing
years of a lovable, distinguished and eccentric Englishman
who richly deserves a niche in the temple of Fame, in his own
right as a "character", as well as for his kindness to Katherine
Mansfield.
Mr. Newland-Pedley was one of the co-founders in 1 889 of
the famous dental school at Guy's Hospital. He was evidently
deeply attached to his foundation, for when he died at
,Aquaseria, near Como in Italy, on May 4, 1944, at the age of
90, it was found that he had bequeathed to Guy's Hospital
the residue of his estate, of about 60,000, to be held by them
in trust to commemorate his connection with the Dental
School, by endowing existing prizes and scholarships and
establishing others. But the first charge on his estate was the
payment of annuities amounting to 900 a year to five Italians.
The Clerk to the Governors was accordingly deputed to
go to Italy, where Mr. Newland-Pedley had become domiciled,
to discover whether the Italian legatees still existed. In the
27*
LITERARY PORTRAITS
course of his investigations he learned much of the closing
years of the surgeon's life.
Newland-Pedley arrived in the village of Aquaseria, a
sick man, aged 76, in the year 1 930, and asked for accommo-
dation at the inn. He was taken in by the proprietors and
nursed by them through a serious illness. But he made a
good recovery, and declared that he had not felt so well for
years and that he had decided to make the village his home
for the rest of his life. He persuaded the owners to sell their
inn and buy a villa where he would be the sole guest. He in
return promised to provide for their future by his will.
The arrangement worked well. Newland-Pedley became the
godfather of the little Italian village. Perhaps his most remark-
able act was to build a church from no religious motive at ally
The inhabitants of Aquaseria were hard hit in consequence
of the sanctions imposed on Italy during the Abyssinian war.
The only industry in the village closed down, and the people
were near starvation. To remedy this, Newland-Pedley
proposed to the parish priest that he should pay a weekly
wage to every able-bodied man who did a full week's
work in quarrying and hauling stone and in building the
village church, of which only the foundations existed besides
the crypt in which the services were held. Shrewdly, he left it to
the padre to supervise the work and the payment. The padre
saw to it that they earned their money. So the village was the
richer by an excellent stone church, which cost Newland-Pedley
1500, and the villagers were saved from misery.
On one occasion he bought up the entire contents of the
village sweet shop and distributed them in packets to the
school children. The religious sisters, who taught in the school,
remonstrated gently with him and suggested that there were
many things more urgently needed by the children than
free sweets new blackboards, for instance. Would he not
consult them before making any other gifts to the school?
Perhaps their remonstrances had some effect, for his next gift
to the school-children, during a severe winter, was skirts and
pink woollen jerseys for the little girls and shirts and navy blue
jerseys for the little boys, and a pair of stout boots for both
alike. But he was unrepentant in the matter of the sweets,
and he was heard to declare, after the sisters had gone, that
'28
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
he knew far better than they what was good for children.
At another time, on being asked to help with the provision
of facilities for the education of the elder children, he retorted
in the same spirit by buying a hoop and stick for every child in
the school.
Plainly, there was method in his madness. It is easy to see
that Newland-Pedley was mainly concerned that the children
should play vigorously and grow up healthy. It is all in keeping
with his own past passion for climbing, under which Katherine
Mansfield had suffered a little, and his old addiction to winter-
sports, which was the occasion of his getting the precious
prescription. He remained true to type to the end: for the
villagers told the story how at the age of 86 he had gone with
ome village-friends to visit a sick neighbour. On the return
journey he was confronted with a jump of three to four feet
down into a sunken road. He brusquely refused the help that
was offered him, saying he would make the jump by himself,
even if it killed him.
His concern for the children of the village was unorthodox
and continuous. Of his five annuities, three were to the older
people who had cared for him for fourteen years, but the
other two were for the care of children. One was to the sister
of his housekeeper of whom Newland-Pedley had been fond
ever since she was a little girl.
Characteristically, he would never admit the possibility
that Italy might be at war with England. So he stubbornly
refused to make any financial arrangements which would have
secured him some income in the event of war. In consequence
when hostilities began he was almost destitute and had to be
maintained by the people he had befriended. They had
eventually to pay for his funeral. But for quite a while after
England and Italy were at war he could not be persuaded
that it was really impossible for him to obtain his income from
England and carry on as usual. "I am very tired of being poor",
he was heard to say more than once towards the end of his life.
But he had become almost a legendary figure. At a time
when there were not a few dangerous characters in the country-
side he could go anywhere unmolested. Neither was he in any
way interfered with by either the Italian or the German
authorities. They left him free to go his own road.
LITERARY PORTRAITS
He died at the age of ninety and was buried in the village.
A marble plaque in the village church commemorates his
generosity in building it.
Such is the picture of the closing years of Katherine Mans-
field's "my Englishman". One feels how he would have been
drawn to her, and she to him. He was a man after her own
childish heart. How she would have appreciated his gesture
in giving all the sweets of the village at one swoop to the
children she who urged me, in the last months of her own
life, never to go to a family of small children whom I knew
without an ample supply of barley-sugar, that I might live in
their memory as "the barley-sugar Man".
Now for the contrast. It is not a pleasant subject; so one
may well be brief. Two years after "my Englishman" had
tended her at Bandol in her brief illness, she was again ill in
Bandol, but this time desperately. "As good luck (she said)
would have it," an English doctor was in the place. Her good-
luck was an illusion. He turned out to be "a shady medicine
man" : an addict of drink and drugs. There exists a painful and
vivid letter in which she describes her final interview with him.
She, utterly mistrusting him, had paid his bill and severed
all connection with him. But when at last she was preparing
to return to England she discovered to her horror that the only
chance of permission being given her to travel was to obtain
a medical certificate. She sent to him to ask him to visit her
again for this purpose. Again and again she sent. He did not
come. Finally, after a long delay, he came, half-drunk and
half-drugged.
He gave her the certificate and she left Bandol straightway.
At a cafe in Marseilles, while waiting for the train, she wrote
me a letter. Here is part of it.
"He came far more than three parts on, and I sat down and
played the old game with him listened looked smoked
his cigarettes and asked finally for a chit that would satisfy
the Consul. He gave me the chit, but whether it will I'll
not know till tomorrow. It could not be more urgent in its
way. I dictated it and had to spell it and had to lean over him
as he wrote and hear him say what dirty hogs do say . . . Ah,
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
the filthy little brute! There I sat and smiled and let him
talk. . . .
Oh dear! Oh dear! I feel so strange. An old dead sad
wretched self blows about, whirls about in my feverish brain
and I sit here in this cafe drinking and looking at the
mirrors and smoking and thinking how utterly corrupt life is
how hideous human beings are how loathsome it was to
catch this toad as I did with such a weapon. I keep hearing
him say, 'Any trouble is a pleasure for a lovely woman' and
seeing my soft smile ... I am very sick, Bogey."
Sick indeed she was, by this time very dangerously ill.
Only an utterly inhuman doctor or one whose professional
conscience had been rotted by drink and drugs would not have
given her at sight the certificate she needed : that she was
unfit to travel alone. Where, if anywhere, she had a right to
expect integrity, she found corruption.
She does not say that she thought back to the far different
doctor who had cared for her in the same hotel two years
before. But she cannot have failed to think of him.
KEATS AND COLERIDGE
AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION
The conversation is imagined to take place in Dr. Oilman's house
at Highgate in May, 1820. Keats has recovered sufficiently from the
severe haemorrhage which laid him low in early February to make the
journey from Hampstead to Highgate. But he is quite incapable of
walking the distance and has had to hire a hackney carriage to drive
him along the Spaniards Road. He cannot really afford this extravagance,
but the matter is urgent. It is early Spring the mid- May he loved so
much and his eager eyes have been drinking in the luxury of an English
spring, for the last time, as his foreboding heart declares. For the
scheme is afoot, which he has neither strength nor hope enough to resist,
to send him away to Italy. He has the sense, as he is driven along the
familiar road, of looking his last on all things lovely.
He is very small, only just over five feet; and the disease has made
fearful ravages on him. The growing knowledge of the hopelessness of
his passionate love for Fanny Brawne has weakened his resistance.
Even his faith that man can overcome his destiny by accepting it seems
to be slipping away from him. Nevertheless, he puts a brave face on
his misery, cracks jokes about his determination not "to go of like a
frog in a frost' 9 , and none of his friends is allowed to have a glimpse
of his extremity. Tet he must speak to someone; and he has chosen
Coleridge, taking advantage of a casual invitation given him a year
before. He has written to Coleridge to ask if he might call, and
Coleridge has appointed today.
Coleridge receives him in the ground floor room which the Gilmans
set apart for him to receive his visitors. Coleridge looks older than he
actually is. His hair is white. He is not entirely at his ease at the
impending visit. He has the feeling that something more is required 9f
him than one of his habitual monologues to his bevy of rather second-
rate disciples. And for that cause he is more than usually conscious
that he ought not to be where he is, in his safe but somewhat inglorious
retreat, as a patient, honoured indeed, but still a patient, in the house
of a doctor who cares for him as drug-addict.
But, in spite of his misgivings*, he is gratified by Keats' s visit, and
he has taken care to hunt out and read the copy of Endymion which
Keats' s publishers had sent him. All the best in Coleridge's nature is
32
KEATS AND COLERIDGE
roused by the thought that the young man has chosen him to speak to.
At moments during the conversation Keats finds it difficult to control
his cough.
KEATS: It is kind of you to let me come, Mr. Coleridge.
You may have been surprised at my asking so long after your
kind invitation, whether I might call on you. I owe you an
explanation.
COLERIDGE: You certainly do not owe me an explanation.
But naturally I should be interested to hear it.
KEATS: Well, let me confess that at the time you invited
me: in April last year, after I had walked with you and
Mr. Green through Ken Wood
COLERIDGE : I remember the occasion well.
KEATS: At the time I did not think that I should take
advantage of your invitation. Not of course that I did not
wish to, or that I was not grateful to you. But I thought you
had probably asked from politeness, and I have a horror of
presuming.
COLERIDGE: So you have overcome your horror. I am glad.
KEATS: Thank you, Mr. Coleridge.
COLERIDGE: But how came you to change your mind,
Mr. Keats?
KEATS: A year ago, it seemed probable that one day when
I had a little more work to my credit, I might meet you without
forcing myself upon you. But now it appears less probable.
I shall be leaving England very shortly, and I wanted to see
you before I went.
COLERIDGE: But where are you going; and why?
KEATS: To Italy, I believe. It is not entirely settled yet.
Kind friends are busy with the arrangements. They are truly
kind. But well, my heart is not in the business. But I shall
go. One end is as good as another.
COLERIDGE : Believe me, Mr. Keats, I am sincerely glad you
came to see me. Though I may have spoken out of politeness,
that does not mean there was nothing specific to yourself in
my invitation. It was at least jpoken as from one poet to
another or from one who was a poet to one who is.
KEATS: To one whose ambition it was to be a poet, Mr.
Coleridge.
S3
LITERARY PORTRAITS
COLERIDGE: To one who is a poet, from one who was. And
yet, I hope, I am still, in some fashion a member of the
brotherhood. I like to believe that, although the particular
power of poetic utterance no longer visits me, I am nevertheless
still occupied in the work of a poet. I even say to myself that
I am perhaps more wholly occupied in the work of a poet than
I was when I was young. (There is a pause before Coleridge
resumes) .
Poets are not poets only when they sing, Mr. Keats. The
moment comes when they must think as well as feel, and feel
the more deeply the more deeply they have thought; and it
has become my conviction that beyond that moment only the
poet of commanding genius can retain both "the vision and the
faculty divine", the power to utter the vision in words which
touch the heart and convince the mind. It is the greatest and
the noblest of all powers, for it is the power of revealing the
truth, which can only be revealed. It is not false modesty,
therefore, which contrains me to confess that I have not this
power. Neither can I say that I had it and it left me. When
the time came for me to advance into the possession of this
power (to possess which is to be possessed by it) I was as it were
paralyzed. With only part of myself could I enter into the
kingdom; the other part remained outside the gate. But with
the part which is within I labour all I can. It is the work of the
philsosopher, not of the poet ; but it is the work of the poet-
philosopher, or so I would believe.
KEATS: It is generous of you, Sir, to confide your thought
to me; and I hope you will not think me presumptuous if I say
I think I understand it. Indeed, Sir, you have broached the
very matter on which I hoped to consult you. You will for-
give me if, by comparing your experience with mine, I appqar
to set them on an equality. But, as I listened to your descrip-
tion of your own experience, it seemed to me that I had come
to' the turning-point of which you spoke, at which the once
spontaneous poet is overwhelmed by the necessity of deeper
thought. By the effort towards deeper thought, feelings quite
incommensurable with those he felt before are awakened
within him. It is as though one died. For the experiences
which compel us to deeper thought are experiences which
shatter the frame of our personal identity. Things happen to
34
KEATS AND COLERIDGE
us which, we childishly feel, ought not happen to us; they come
from beyond the frontiers of the world of our expectation.
They are monstrous things. And for a moment we want to cry
out against them, with a terrible cry that shall pierce the ears
of God not to arraign him, but to appeal to him, and to
remind him that we exist, and that he has forgotten us. But
we know that that is childish. God, what ever he may be, is
not like that.
COLERIDGE: You are right, Mr. Keats. God is not like
that. We have the best reason for knowing that, for God himself
has revealed it to us. Is it not plain that to his Son, our Lord,
happened the most monstrous thing of all indeed, a thing
so monstrous that the human mind and heart must reel before
it?* To physical pain as fearful as physical pain can be, was
added spiritual pain such as no human imagination can
conceive when He, who knew himself to be the Son of God,
and had gone in that knowledge obediently to his agonizing
death, suddenly had that knowledge taken from Him. Then
He cried, once and for all, on behalf of all humanity: "My
God, my God! Why has thou forsaken me?"
That was, and is, and ever shall be the most terrible and
most wonderful cry ever wrung from the lips of Man. Of all
human words it is the most human; of all divine words the
most divine the most human because it tells us, beyond all
possibility of denial, that Our Lord was utterly man; the
most divine because without that knowledge we could not
know him as God. We need the certainty that He was man
to give us the certainty that he was God.
It would perhaps be esteemed sacrilege if I were to say in the
market place what I can say to you here, as poet to poet,
namely, that this revelation is as it were the archetype and"
consummation of poetry itself, the complete suffusion of utter-
ance with meaning. There it is absolute; here it is never
more than partial. But I have never doubted that all true
poets reflect, nay participate in, the creative power of God.
KEATS: I am not sure that I understand you, Mr. Coleridge:
but what you say may be of verygreat importance to me. It
seems to ratify some of my own speculations, though I feel it
goes far beyond them. You say, do you not, that the nature of
God is revealed in the love and the suffering of Jesus, and that
45
LITERARY PORTRAITS
his life, being absolutely filled with meaning, is self-evidently
divine, so that the creative power of God is nakedly and
blindingly visible? You affirm that this revelation is, as it
were, the absolute idea of poetry : the incommensurable per-
fection to which poetry tends that as the life, the words, the
love, the suffering of Jesus reveal the very truth of God, so the
words of the poet may reveal the hem of God's garment.
Further, by bringing so tremendous an endorsement to the
poet's putting aside the temptation to cry to God, when the
monstrous things happen to him, you seemed to infer that the
poet's life itself might reflect the divine pattern.
COLERIDGE: I do truly believe that what distinguishes the
moral nature of the true poet is a power of obedience, whereby
barriers of the self are overborne, and he becomes all permeable
to a higher power. It is not possible to comprehend man's
moral nature at all, except by assuming the idea of a Fall of
some kind, whereby individual selves were separated from
their divine origin. Quite apart from the Christian revelation,
finite mind presupposes infinite mind. We cannot wholly
overcome that separation of ourselves nor escape the fmitude
of our minds, but we can become conscious of our condition,
not with the sickening cant of false humility, but as vehicles of
Reason.
Reason is the power which comprehends that things must
be, and is utterly distinct from the Intelligence which can
only understand that things are. Intelligence understands,
Reason overstands. So it is our duty, by the power of Reason,
to overstand our selves, and to comprehend the necessity of
our own separation and finitude, not in order that we may
snivel over our human condition, but in order that our selves
may cease to be an obstacle whereby the truth is obscured.
That is the moral duty of man, as man.
But the poet and the philosopher are those to whom this
duty is pre-eminently delegated. I distinguish between
them, but I do not separate them. In every genuine poet there
is an element of the philosopher, and in every true philosopher
an element of the poet. The form which this moral duty
assumes in the philosopher is that of overstanding the partial
views of the mere intelligence, not by denying to them their
measure of validity, but by seeing by an act of the Reason that
36
KEATS AND COLERIDGE
they can be, and must be, only partial. But in the poet this
contemplative or meditative process becomes creative* The
reality, which the philosopher apprehends by Reason, and
which I denominate as the Idea, becomes in the poet a power to
shape and body forth representations of human nature which
are as distinct and partial as are the views of the Intelligence,
but with which he is not identified. Thus we may speak of the
poet as reflecting the creative power of God, as the philosopher
reflects the contemplative mind of God. To those who do not
comprehend these processes from the centre from which they
radiate such a description will suggest detachment or im-
passivity. It is not so. There is no condition of more perfect
activity, for the finite human being, than that of being used
bya power which, so far as he apprehends, he loves.
KEATS : I remember, Mr. Coleridge, that when I first began
to take poetry seriously, to consider what a thing it is to aspire
to be a poet it is not so very long ago, but much has happened
to me since then I was depressed. But then a thought came
to me, which encouraged me greatly, namely, that the man of
poetic genius had not any individuality, any determined
character, any clearly-defined and proper self. When I
understood this, as I thought I did, my feverous impatience
to achieve began to abate ; and lately I came to this resolution
never to write for the sake of writing or making a poem, but
from running over with any little knowledge an experience
which many years of reflection might perhaps give me. It is,
I fear, unlikely that I shall be allowed to abide by this resolu-
tion, for I have to make my living. But I should like to make
it, if I could, by other means than writing verses for the market,
if I could make it that way: which I gravely doubt. But I
should like your judgment upon my surmise that there is
something essentially submissive in the man of genius which
prevents him from having a defined character.
COLERIDGE : I should be only too eager to confirm it ; but I
am restrained by the thought that there is more than one kind
of poetic genius. Evidently, Shakespeare towers at the head of
the species you describe. Indeed, only the other day, in
conversation, contrasting him with Milton, I said that his
poetry, was characterless, whereas John Milton himself is in
every line of the Paradise Lost. But to say that poetry is
LITERARY PORTRAITS
characterless, in the sense I apply that epithet to Shakespeare's
poetry, is not the same as to say that the poet is characterless.
We have a very definite conception of Shakespeare's character,
despite the impossibility of attributing to him the opinions of
his dramatic characters.
Consider, for example, the idea of love in Shakespeare.
Who, that reads Shakespeare with a discriminating mind,
could deny that there is a profound difference between Shakes-
peare's attitude to women and Milton's, or that Shakespeare's
is the nobler and more humane? For Shakespeare woman in
idea is at least the spiritual equal, and perhaps one should say,
the spiritual superior of man at least in potentiality. That he
represents woman who lacks tenderness as a monster of cruelty,
in Regan and Goneril, serves only to set in sharper relief bow
highly he esteemed woman. Even his harlots have tenderness,
and his women in love from Portia to Miranda are such that
every man, with a spark of fineness in his soul, would deem it
a high privilege to be loved by any one of them. But, for all
the beauty of Eve and partly because of it we feel and know
that for Milton woman was by nature a being inferior to man.
Yet Milton was a very great poet.
KEATS: I see, Mr. Coleridge, that I have used the word
character carelessly. Shakespeare has a character, and we are
conscious of it most distinctly conscious of it in his attitude
to this semi-ethereal matter of Love. As it came first to your
mind, so it comes first to mine, when we compare Shakespeare
and Milton as human beings. But is not perhaps this very
thing the exquisite refinement in his conception of love
COLERIDGE: Pray do not use the word conception, Mr.
Keats Shakespeare's "idea" of love.
KEATS: I will, Mr. Coleridge. Is not Shakespeare's posses-
sion of the true idea of love the very thing which makes his
character indefinite compared to Milton's? He could not
possess the idea, without being possessed by it. There must
have been an exquisite power of love in Shakespeare for it is
not only in portraying the love of man for woman, that he
manifests it, but in picturing the love of man for man
in Cassius and Brutus, in Enobarb and Antony, in Horatio
and Hamlet, in Antonio and Bassanio. He continually
astonishes and exalts us by his revelation of the power of love
38
KEATS AND COLERIDGE
and friendship. In the most unlikely places he makes it shine
forth like a pearl in rubbish in Doll Tearsheet even. Until
we feel that this power of love alone, in Shakespeare's eyes,
was what made men and woman human or divine. It is as
though he were, for ever, turning mortal clay into gold. '
COLERIDGE: That is well and justly said, Mr. Keats. He
is like the sun,
"Turning with splendour of his precious eye
The cloddy meagre earth to glittering gold".
KEATS : May not this power and alchemy of love in Shakes-
peare have been the very thing that makes his character
indistinct in other particulars, as though Love itself were his
character. And might it not be that Love, in this superlative
degree, excludes every other kind of character? Forgive me,
Mr. Coleridge, if I speak obscurely. I can scarcely express
what I dimly conceive. But does not Love mean that the self
is transcended, and where there is no self, there is no character
no character that is, as the world counts character?
COLERIDGE: I think it does nay, I am sure of it. You have,
almost without knowing it, set forth the very idea of Love.
KEATS : And when you say, Mr. Coleridge, that Shakespeare's
poetry compared to Milton's is characterless, you mean it,
do you not, in the sense that whereas Milton's identity seems
stamped on every line, Shakespeare's seems to have uttered
itself? We recognise it as Shakespeare's, because it has this
impersonal quality as though in the very utterance of his
verse, his self were continuously obliterated and surpassed.
The verse of Milton is John Milton's verse and perhaps no
man ever forged and stamped a verse more marvellous; but
Shakespeare's verse is
COLERIDGE: God's, Mr. Keats. Say it. For it is true. Milton
himself recognised the difference.
For whilst to th' shame of slow-endeavouring art
Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu'd book
Those Delphick lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of Jtself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving.
Every word of that tribute needs to be weighed. Delphic lines,
Mr. Keats, inspired and mysterious.
39 *
LITERARY FUKl RAITS
KEATS: Shakespeare's verse seems actually to grow into itself
before our mind's eye, to be animated and urged by an inward
life. It is not designed or controlled from without. I heard you
say in a lecture that the construction of his periods is the
necessary and homogeneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of
thinking. It is not the style of his age, you said : I would go
even further and say that his style it is not a style at all, in
the same way that his character is not a character. Marlowe
has a style, Jonson has a style, Milton has the greatest style
of all. Shakespeare has not one. Probably, Milton has the
greatest character of all our poets. Shakespeare has not one.
COLERIDGE: Milton's egotism is truly sublime. His Satan,
his Adam, his Raphael nay, almost his Eve are all John
Milton. It is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the
greatest delight in reading his works. The egotism of such a
man is a revelation of the possibilities of the human spirit.
KEATS: May not this palpable impress of Milton's identity
upon his verse and his characters be connected with his
conception of woman as an inferior being? Is there not some-
thing in common between the effort to dominate a woman, and
the effort to dominate words?
COLERIDGE: Why not? I cannot imagine Shakespeare
dominating a woman, in spite of The Taming of the Shrew ; but
neither can I imagine him happily married. I suspect that he
dreamed of a felicity which he was far from having attained.
Poets of the one kind may set the idea of woman too high, as
the others set it too low; but it is rare, I believe, that great
poets attain domestic happiness, and when they do the faculty
of poetry is apt to leave them. The very fact that Shakespeare
bodied forth the idea of woman as it had never been bodied
forth before, and made it prophetic, may itself be the reason
why the record he has left of his own relation with a woman is
one we could well be spared. He seems to have been dominated
by her, or by his animal desire for her.
But if there is an affinity between the effort to dominate
words and the effort to dominate a woman, would you suggest
to a kindred affinity between, being dominated by words and
being dominated by a woman? There may be something in
that too.
KEATS: I did not suggest, Mr. Coleridge, that the only
40
KEATS AND COLERIDGE
alternative to trying to dominate words is to be dominated by
them. Shakespeare does neither, unless in some of his early
conceits. There seems to be a condition in which words are
born as it were out of a darkness, as though Nature herself
were heaving into utterance immediately, without the inter-
position of the intelligence, but we feel that the darkness is in
the Light, that the Light does not deny the darkness but is the
meaning of it.
COLERIDGE: In the beginning was the Word. The Darkness
does not comprehend the Light, but it is comprehended by
the Light. I have often wondered what Shakespeare's religious
beliefs really were. Although I am certain that he was tender
to the old religion, I am not so sure that he held closely to the
Ghristian faith. Nevertheless, I feel that he was more deeply
Christian than the majority of those who have held it. There
is a mystery in Shakespeare, as there is a mystery in every
Idea, for every idea is a revelation, and every revelation is a
mystery. Truth is not something we understand, but some-
thing in which we participate.
KEATS: I too, Mr. Coleridge, have never been able to
understand how men could believe that truth was arrived at
by a process of consecutive reasoning.
COLERIDGE: You arc fortunate. Most young men pass
through a period when they cannot believe that Truth can
be reached in any other way, and many of them arc per-
manently corrupted. The only thing that can save them then
is to experience a deep feeling. But it is easy for feelings to be
corrupted by the false intelligence. No, the best remedy is for
such a young man to love someone, sincerely and deeply. That
will give him the assurance of something real which his
vaunted intelligence cannot comprehend. Then he may begin
to think, instead of dreaming that he is thinking. But you,
Mr. Keats, not having the disease, do not need the remedy.
Besides, sir, I have read your Endymion, and I do not think you
can be accused of over-indulgence in the vice of consecutive
reasoning.
KEATS: It is a slipshod poem, Mr. Coleridge; but it was the
best I could do. Its mawkishness is distasteful to me, and it
must be repulsive to you. Nevertheless, I cannot disown it.
It was myself, and though it may be hard for you to credit,
LITERARY PORTRAITS
it was a striving after truth, though with feelings alone to
guide me. But sometimes I regret that I exposed myself to
be flyblown on the review-shambles.
COLERIDGE: There are things one can say only to friends
only with the certainty of not being wilfully misunderstood.
Your poem may be one of them. But remember, though the
tongues of malice do their worst, it may find friends, Mr
Keats it may find friends.
KEATS: You are too kind, Mr. Coleridge. Believe me, I
am grateful; but I do not want you to be kind.
COLERIDGE : But to find friends, Mr. Keats. Is that not our
deepest desire, and to lose friends our greatest anguish?
But do you think, Mr. Keats, it is really possible to lose a
friend? Is not a friend, by nature, something that one cann<5t
lose, but only find? Is not the idea of a friend the incarnation
of that love which always understands, always discerns the
pure intention behind the shabby deed, the soul beneath the
subterfuge?
KEATS: It seems it must be so. But I have not thought
about it, sir. I do not . . . believe I have ever lost a friend.
COLERIDGE: Neither had I, when I was your age. I lived,
I think, in a world where friends could not be lost. Now, it
seems, I live in one where friends cannot be found. In that
world I live my waking hours and it is the world of my
dreams also. That is the more terrible. But, thanks be to
God, when Reason and Imagination achieve the idea of a
friend, they find Him there already before all worlds.
(There is a long pause before Keats speaks.)
KEATS : I may never see you again, Mr. Coleridge. Indeed,
I do not believe I shall. Therefore, I must be honest with you,
even in exposing my own ignorance and insufficiency. I am
not convinced of the truth of Christianity. No one, I think,
could desire more ardently than I at this moment to be con-
vinced of the reality of an after-life beyond the grave ; what
are called the intellectual objections to the Christian faith make
little impression on a mind like mine. My heart is hungry for
faith. But there is some step I cannot take ... It is as though it
would make life too difficult for me. I might be tempted to
arraign God, if I imagined Him too clearly. I don't want to
rebel. I don't believe in rebellion. The greatest happiness I
42
KEATS AND COLERIDGE
have known and I have known very great happiness, Mr.
Coleridge has come to me by the other way, by acceptance.
I want to accept, Mr. Coleridge. I want to participate in the
Truth, as you put it a little while ago. I think I understand
what you meant. I want to be part of the Truth. I am afraid,
if I were a Christian, I might become incapable of the small
thing that is left to me.
COLERIDGE: And what may that be, Mr. Keats?
KEATS: To be faithful to the principle of beauty in all things,
and to endure to the end . . I may be deluded, Mr. Coleridge
I hope I am but I do not believe that I have much longer
to live. There is a core of weakness which I now feel within
me of which I shall not be rid. Anyhow, it has been decided
that I must not risk another winter here. For my own part,
I think the risk is equal wherever I am. My mother died of
this disease, so did my brother. I shall hardly escape by going
to Rome.
COLERIDGE. I, too, have felt within myself an ineradicable
core of weakness. Yet here I am. How old are you, Mr. Keats?
KEATS: Twenty-four.
COLERIDGE: And I am let me see forty-eight. No,
forty-seven. I little dreamed while I felt myself at death's
door on a voyage home from Malta that I should live to
forty-seven.
KEATS: I shall not do that. I would be I would have been
well content with less, much less. But I must be going. I
had to hire a coach. Your hill would have been too much for
me. It is hard to believe I climbed Ben Nevis less than two
years ago.
You have done me a great kindness, Mr. Coleridge, in
allowing me to call upon you. I had a deep desire to talk with
you I do not know how to put the reason in words. Perhaps
there were many reasons. I think I wanted to be reassured,
and I knew of nobody who could reassure me except perhaps
yourself.
COLERIDGE: Have I reassured you?
KEATS: (slowly) I think . . ^ I have been reassured. But I
wish to ask you one final favour. It will not take many
minutes of your time. I have copied out a poem which I wrote
a year ago, very soon after you allowed me to share your walk
43*
LITERARY PORTRAITS
with Mr. Green the demonstrator at Guy's in the lane
beside Lord Mansfield's park. You will not remember, I
imagine, that you spoke of the Nightingale in poetry. You
said that you thought no one not Chaucer, not Milton, not
the Countess of Winchilsea, not even Mr. Wordsworth had
conveyed the mystery of the nightingale's song. This is an
Ode to a Nightingale, which (as it happened) I wrote soon
afterwards. I thought of sending it to you. But I might have
appeared to press you for a judgment. And since then I have
hoped to re-write the last stanza, which is not what it ought to
be. But I have not the strength for this kind of composition,
any more.
I am making a great to-do about a poem. But such as it is,
Mr. Coleridge, it owes something to you. I would like to know
you had read it but not now. Good-bye, Mr. Coleridge.
COLERIDGE: Good-bye, Mr. Keats . . . And God bless you.
44
ON THE ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
For sheer loveliness this poem is unsurpassed in the English
language. It is a poem of midnight, and sorrow, and beauty.
Its pattern is intricate; it is an instantaneous exploration of the
experience declared in the opening line: "My heart aches and
a drowsy numbness pains my sense." That is the poet's
condition as he listens in the dead of night to the song of the
nightingale. The heart ache comes from his excess of happiness
in participating in the bird's happiness. But a drowsiness steals
over him as though he had drunk a death-potion.
H At the thought he asserts himself. "O for a draught of
vintage": and in some astonishing lines he conveys what he
would have called the "sensation" of drinking a bumper of
claret: what Blake would have called "the spiritual sensation"
of wine that maketh glad the heart of man. The draught he
longs for would carry him out of the world, into the nightingale's
dim hiding-place, into forgetfulness (as deep as the bird's
ignorance) of human sorrows. Those he tells of reflect his
particular and personal griefs. The youth that grows pale
and spectre-thin and dies is his dearly loved brother Tom who
had died but five months before; and Beauty's lustrous eyes
are Fanny Brawne's, and the new love that cannot pine at
them beyond tomorrow is Keats' own new love which had
already become an agony by his premonition that he too was
doomed to go the way of his brother. The stanza is tense
with the emotion of personal suffering controlled by poetic
genius.
And poetic genius transports him. Not charioted by Bacchus
and his pards, but on the viewless wings of poesy he flies to
the realm of forgetfulness and immortality which the night-
ingale inhabits and of which she sings. Her perch amid the
leaves is a haven of eternity a warm rich darkness into which
the poet follows, and where he listens, darkling. Now more
than ever it seems to him rich, to die. It had seemed so many
times before. In one of his early poems perhaps his first
completely successful one he had told of the quiet joy that
came to him with the first breath of spring.
45
LITERARY PORTRAITS
The calmest thoughts come round us as of leaves
Budding fruit ripening in stillness autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves
Sweet Sappho's cheek a sleeping infant's breath
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs
A woodland rivulet a poet's death.
Strange how prophetic that lovely sonnet was of Keats'
loveliest poetry to be ! That bud blossomed into fullness in the
Odes. But the bud was born a long while ago. The thought
had come to him again, only a week or two before he composed
the Ode to a Nightingale. He had cried :
I know this being's lease;
My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads.
Yet could I on this very midnight cease
And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds.
Verse, Fame and Beauty are intense indeed,
But death intenser: Death is life's high meed.
The very phrase "cease on the midnight" returns now with
an added depth and richness of experience.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
For indeed in the Ode he has imaginatively passed through a
death flown on the wings of imagination to the nightingale's
immortality, and his soul is poured forth with her soul in her
ecstasy.
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a tranced senseless thing
But melodious truth divine
But the recoil comes. Were he indeed to die, he would not
hear the song. Mortality is reasserted against the immortality
of which the bird's song is at once the symbol and the elixir.
Then with a magnificent sideways sweep of the imagination,
from the poor vantage of the mortality he has re-claimed, he
sees the song and the bird as one. The bird becomes pure song,
and inherits the eternity of beauty.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,
No hungry generations tread thee down.
The effect is incomparable, or comparable only with a similar
sudden swerve from the world of time to the world of eternity
in the Grecian Urn. The song of the bird is the voice of
46
THE ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
eternity, sounding in the ear of high and low of Ruth in
tears amid the alien corn,
The same that oft-time hath
Charm'd magic casements, . . .
The Ode itself is a most marvellous example of this very
miracle. The imaginative vistas on to which it opens are
indeed of perilous seas of thought and experience.
For there is a connection between the Ode to a Nightingale
and some lines which Keats had written a year before.
O never will the prize
High reason and the love of good and ill
Be my award. Things cannot to the will
Be settled, but they tease us out of thought.
Or is it that Imagination brought
Beyond its proper bound, yet still confined,
Lost in a sort of purgatory blind,
Cannot refer to any standard law
Of either earth or heaven? It is a flaw
In happiness to see beyond our bourn
It forces us in summer skies to mourn,
It spoils the singing of the nightingale.
To use that language, the Ode to a Nightingale is such a
spoiling of its singing. The pure bird voice is interwoven with
the anguish of human destinies. Keats' great coeval Shelley
expressed what is essentially the same realization:
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
Of that eternity the nightingale's song is the symbol;
and its purity is stained by the poet's despair. It is as it were
caught and enmeshed in the still sad music of humanity.
Yet it would be a sacrilege to describe the Ode as a poem of
despair. Its marvel is that it holds suspended in a moment of
absolute beauty the tension between Time and Eternity,
between Joy and Sorrow, between Mortality and Immortality,
between Life and Death. It denies nothing of human ex-
perience, and it makes a great affirmation : an incontrovertible
affirmation that the truth, completely apprehended as it can
be, only by an act of the Imagination, is completely beautiful
that the bitterest human experience if it can be contemplated
by the Imagination turns or can be transmuted into the beauty
which is truth.
47
LITERARY PORTRAITS
The Ode to a Nightingale is a song of Victory. Keats, in the
weeks before he wrote it, had been battling with great waves
of disaster: his younger brother's death, his elder brother's
departure to America and no news. And, as he confessed,
his love of his brothers was passing the love of women. Then
he had fallen headlong in love with Fanny Brawne. Then he
had realized that he too was threatened with an early death
and had little hope of ever marrying her. Then that the little
that remained of his small inheritance on which he had
depended for his independent life as a poet was now tied up in
a Chancery suit and he must live on the charity of his friends.
And behind all this was the cruel and blasting attack made
upon his poetry by the Quarterly Review, which had appeared
six months before. Thank heaven, he had loyal publishersto
help to sustain him against this, but it hit him hard harder
than he let appear.
Truly a cornucopia of misery had been emptied on this
young man's head, in the winter which preceded the spring
of 1819 when the Ode to a Nightingale was written. With
this misery he struggled, as a man and as a poet. As a man he
reached the conclusion, beyond which no mortal man has
gone, that the world is a Vale not of tears and sorrow, but of
Soul-making. "Do you not see how necessary a world of
pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a
Soul?" a unique spiritual being. And as a poet, too, how he
had laboured! Those who read carefully his letters of this
period some of the greatest letters in the English language
can watch him gradually fashioning his magical instrument :
the flexible and subtle stanza of the Odes. His technical
labours during this time of spiritual struggle are often forgotten.
It is easy to forget them, so enthralling is the spectacle of the
struggle of his mind with his heart, of the effort of his intelligence
to become a soul.
But of this spiritual struggle his technical labours were an
intrinsic part: they were consubstantial with it. For he was
sustained in his effort to accept his destiny by his conception
of the function and the glory 9f poetry the proud privilege of
being "a miserable and mighty poet of the human heart."
And so, over and above our wonder at the heroism of his
struggle to master his suffering by accepting it into the inmost
THE ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
recesses of the heart, it is our duty to think of him as the hero
too of pure poetry, experimenting, searching, rejecting, till
he had fashioned an instrument capable of greater range and
more delicate inflection than English poetry had known before :
only a few days before this Ode he had written a poem which
is a perfect record of his striving for technical mastery
the lovely Andromeda sonnet with a new rhyme scheme,
beginning "If by dull rhymes our English must be chained."
"Dull rhymes" .... Now think of the Odes. Perhaps their
greatest technical triumph is the spiritual subtlety of their
rhymes. Rhyme in the English language had never been
used before, or since to carry such implications "to pipe
to the spirit ditties of no tone". There is no more marvellous
ryhvne in the English language than this:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm' d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
By such a rhyme the voice of Eternity makes a secret way into
the human heart. Keats discovered that way.
49
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
As it is hard to separate the names of Coleridge and
Wordsworth, so it is hard to separate their work; and if the
disentanglement were to involve a final separation, it would
(I am sure) be better not to attempt it. The intimate con-
nection of those two men of genius is a unique and precious
thing in the history of our literature. It is also a pathetic thing;
for when that wonderful friendship decayed, the men and the
work of the men both suffered. They dwindled to shadows of
the splendid creatures they had been.
But their decline was not equal. Wordsworth was strong
before he met Coleridge, and he remained strong after hey
had parted. He was the tree as it were the elm, round which
the vine of Coleridge twined itself to flourish in the happy and
fruitful years of their friendship. The elm stands firm to the
eye long after it has ceased to grow within. But take the
support away from the vine, and instantly it trails impotent
upon the ground; it can no longer "dedicate its beauty to the
sun". After the severance, Coleridge collapsed with a com-
pleteness both foreign and repulsive to Wordsworth. Morally,
Wordsworth was unassailable; Coleridge, emphatically, was
not. But to the eye of imagination, which sees differently from
the eye of current morality, the contrast between the men is
not so absolute. They had both begun to decline, though the
beginning of the decline was much earlier and the rate of the
decline much quicker and more spectacular with Coleridge
than with Wordsworth. But by 1818, twenty years after* the
zenith of their friendship, they were both dead to young
Keats. He revered them both for what they had been; what
they were was little to him. It was not very much, I suspect,
in their heart of hearts to themselves.
I do not intend to try to probe the strange relation between
these two men to the depth; still less to estimate the enigmatic
part played in it by Dorothy Wordsworth. I must content
myself, for my present purposes, with examining an aspect of
it which seems, in the bare statement, almost painfully obvious.
The relation, during the glorious and creative years, was not
one of identity. Between men of such different "character",
50
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
in the ordinary moral sense, that was impossible. Wordsworth
and Coleridge were not "two minds with but a single thought".
They complemented, not repeated one another. Nor was this
complementary relation one of equality. That is plain from
the nature of their collaboration in the famous volume of
Lyrical Ballads.
In the Biographia Literaria (Ch. IV) Coleridge describes
how at the age of twenty-four, after having admired Words-
worth's Poetical Sketches, he first met Wordsworth person-
ally; and he describes u the sudden effect" upon him of
Wordsworth's reading to him a manuscript poem.
It was not . . . the freedom from false taste . . . which made
so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and
subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep
feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in
observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the
objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading
the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of
the ideal world around forms, incidents and situations, of
which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the
lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops.
And in Ch. XIV, in a very famous passage, he describes
the birth of the plan of writing and publishing the volume of
Lyrical Ballads.
During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were
neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two
cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy
of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature,
and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying
colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents
of light and shade, which moonlight or sun-set diffused over a
known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the
practicability of combining both.
It will be observed that, if Coleridge's memory of his hearing
Wordsworth recite his poem is accurate and there is no cause
to doubt it Wordsworth had already achieved precisely this
combination, and the novelty of his achievement had been
recognised by Coleridge. It is equally noticeable that
Coleridge's simile for the kind of effect which they were
discussing is much more apt to Coleridge's own contribution
than to Wordsworth's. However, he goes on :
LITERARY PORTRAITS
The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect)
that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In
the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least,
supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the
interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such
emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations,
supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to
every human being who, from whatever source of delusion,
has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.
For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary
life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be
found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a medita-
tive and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them,
when they present themselves.
In this idea originated the plan of the "Lyrical Ballads";
in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be djrected
to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic;
yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest
and semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows
of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the
moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on
the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give
the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's
attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the
loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inex-
haustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of
familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not,
ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
Now not only are those two sorts of poetry very different, so
different indeed that it is only by a kind of verbal sleight that
they can be assimilated to the same fundamental type ; but it is
notable and we have already noticed that Wordsworth's
kind of poetry was already in existence, and that it was
Coleridge's response to his actual achievement which had
brought them together. We are therefore scarcely surprised
when Coleridge's account continues:
With this view I wrote "The Ancient Mariner", and was
preparing among other poems, "The Dark Ladie" and the
" Chris tabel", in which I should more nearly have realized
my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr.
Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful,
and the number of his poems so much greater, that my
compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather
an interpolation of heterogeneous matter.
52
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
That, in a sense, it was. The difference between Wordsworth
and Coleridge was real. And it is of importance to understand
more closely the nature of this difference.
It went back to their childhood. In what is, I think, much
the most beautiful of Coleridge's meditative poems, Frost at
Midnight, he tells the pathetic story of his schoolboy faith that
the fluttering film of soot on the bars of the fire-grate, called
a "stranger" (because it was supposed to portend the arrival
of some absent friend), would really bring to him, in his
loneliness at school, some visitor from home. I, too, have
looked into the fire in my ward at old Christ's Hospital, in
the city of London, and sought comfort for my loneliness, so
that it may be that this poem makes a particular and personal
appeal to me. When Coleridge has remembered all this, he
turns to the baby sleeping beside him as he writes:
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought !
My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore
And in far other scenes ! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher ! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
To put it simply, what Coleridge desires for, and promises to,
his little child Hartley Coleridge that was to be is a child-
hood like Wordsworth's, and unlike his own. He shall not be
condemned to see "nought lovely but the sky and stars".
53 *
LITERARY PORTRAITS
This profound difference between the "conditioning" of the
two men was recognised by themselves ; and it must have been
a frequent theme of discussion between them. It was frankly
admitted by Coleridge that Wordsworth's nurture was both
natural and ideal. That is clear from the end of Frost at
Midnight ; and in another poem The Nightingale Coleridge
tells, with a naivety that is touching, how when his baby cried
he took it into the garden and held it up to the moon : obviously,
to expose it to "the skyey influences." But the crucial passage
is Wordsworth's comparison between their childhoods in
Book VI of The Prelude. This was addressed to Coleridge, and
admired by Coleridge.
I too have been a Wanderer; but, alas!
How different is the fate of different men
Though twins almost in genius and in mind!
Unknown unto each other, yea, and breathing
As if in different elements, we were framed
To bend at last to the same discipline,
Predestined, if two beings ever were,
To seek the same delights and have one health,
One happiness. Throughout this narrative,
Else sooner ended, I have known full well
For whom I thus record the birth and growth
Of gentleness, simplicity and truth,
And joyous loves that hallow innocent days
Of peace and self-command. Of rivers, fields,
And groves, I speak to thee, my friend; to thee
Who, yet a liveried schoolboy, in the depths
Of the huge City, on the leaded roof
Of that wide edifice, thy home and school,
Was used to lie and gaze upon the clouds
Moving in heaven; or haply, tired of this,
To shut thine eyes, and by internal light
See trees and meadows, and thy native stream
Far distant, thus beheld from year to year
Of thy long exile . . .
Oh ! it is a pang that
Calls for utterance, to think how small a change
Of circumstances might to thee have spared
A world of pain, ripen'd ten thousand hopes
For ever withered . . .
I have thought
Of thee, thy learning, gorgeous eloquence,
And all the strength and plumage of thy youth,
Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse
54
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
Among the Schoolmen, and Platonic forms
Of wild ideal pageantry, shap'd out
From things well matched or ill, and words for things,
The self-created sustenance of a mind
Debarr'd from Nature's living images,
Compell'd to be a life unto itself,
And unrelentingly possess'd by thirst
Of greatness, love and beauty . . .
... If we had met
Even at that early time; I needs must hope
Must feel, must trust, that my maturer age
And temperature less willing to be moved,
My calmer habits and more steady voice
Would with an influence benign have soothed
Or chas'd away the airy wretchedness
That battened on thy youth.
That seems to me very beautiful: a heartfelt utterance of
true friendship, and a profound statement of the startling
difference between the men.
To Wordsworth, Coleridge was a man who had been
nurtured as a man should not be : a natural thing cruelly cut
off from the sustenance of Nature, and withered. And
Coleridge realised the truth of this in Wordsworth's presence,
and gratefully agreed. To Coleridge, Wordsworth was a man
who had been nurtured as a man should be. So Wordsworth
was to himself also ; and because this was in the main true, we
can never afford to give much scope to our impatience with
him. There was, indeed, in him that element of "intellectual
egotism'' at which Keats later took offence, but, at the time
when he met Coleridge at least, it was justified. He had the
right to compose an autobiographical poem in many books
describing the "growth of a poet's mind", because that process
of growth was "natural", almost in the ideal sense of the word,
wherein what is and what ought to be are found to coincide.
He was, from the beginning, at one with the reality about him; -
he had no need nor impulse to withdraw from the world he
knew. For him the objective thing really was: the visible and
sensible world really existed, and (it seemed to him) by the
power of its own real existence called forth in him a kindred
and analogous power, a sense of his own unshakeable being, so
strong that there were moments when it seemed to gather the
external world into itself. Wordsworth describes, in language .
55 *
LITERARY PORTRAITS
precious for an understanding of him, this strange natural
process; and he describes it, significantly enough, in a passage
which later he omitted from The Prelude. Quite rightly, the
timid orthodoxy of his later years was afraid of it.
No outcast he, bewilder'd and depress'd;
Along his infant veins are interfus'd
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of nature that connect him with the world.
Emphatically such a Being lives.
An inmate of this active universe ;
From nature largely he receives; nor so
Is satisfied, but largely gives again,
For feeling has to him imparted strength,
And powerful in all sentiments of grief,
Of exultation, fear, and joy, his mind,
Even as an agent of the one great mind,
Creates, creator and receiver both,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds.
Thus, for his infancy; and in his boyhood the same natural
reciprocity goes on.
I was left alone,
Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why.
The props of my affection were remov'd,
And yet the building stood as if sustained
By its own spirit.
The creative response within himself was so strong that there
were moments when
Such a holy calm
Did overspread my soyl, that I forgot
That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw
Appear'd like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in my mind. (ist Prelude II, 368 sq.)
It was the intense reality of the outward world to him that
made it like a dream, with all the strange and overwhelming
vividness of a dream: but a dream that was reality. The
experience is magically recorded in the sonnet composed on
Westminster Bridge.
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep
Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep,
And all that mighty heart is lying still !
That is often misunderstood. A reciprocal reality and activity
of the natural human creature and Nature is what Wordsworth
56
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
insists upon. He sees the calm, outside himself; he feels the
calm, inside himself: object and subject act upon one another.
A plastic power
Abode with me, a forming hand, at times
Rebellious, acting in a devious mood,
A local spirit of its own, at war
With general tendency, but for the most
Subservient strictly to the external things
With which it communed. An auxiliar light
Game from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestow'd new splendour . . .
(ist Prelude, II, 381 sq.)
Wordsworth once said of Coleridge that "he was not under the
influence of external objects". The implied distinction between
thm was radical.
It appears in the very texture of the poetry of the two men.
Coleridge's observation of nature is rare, and precise with an
almost scientific precision. The famous, indeed almost
hackneyed instance, is in the Ode to Dejection :
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky
With its peculiar tint of yellow green :
And still I gaze, and with how blank an eye!
We feel how perfectly appropriate in that place is the prosaic
flatness of the line, and we regard it as a sort of triumph of
poetry. But we must not deceive ourselves. Coleridge always
saw the visible world in this fashion, when he sought to see it
exactly. He had not lost, as he believed he had, a power of
exact yet imaginative vision which he once possessed. In
April 1 798 his vision of nature is of precisely the same kind.
"But the dell", he wrote then in Fears in Solitude,
Bathed by the mist, is fresh and delicate
As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax,
When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve,
The level sunshine glimmers with green light.
This is, indeed, precise observatipn, but it is not exact imagina-
tive vision. It is not of the same order at all as Wordsworth's
vision. The distinction between them almost exactly corre-
sponds to Wordsworth's distinction between the Fancy and the
57
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Imagination except that Coleridge's observation (even in
this realm of Fancy) is not so spontaneous and free as Words-
worth's. Characteristic of Wordsworth, in this lesser mood,
is his picture of the Linnet :
Amid yon tuft of hazel trees,
That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
Behold him perched in ecstasies,
Yet seeming still to hover;
There ! where the flutter of his wings
Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings
That cover him all over
Compared with this Coleridge's observation is deliberate;
above all, it is static, and lacks the immediate sense of life.
It is not a quick and sudden capture of a living essence. Yet
this is so frequent in Wordsworth that it is part of the normal
texture of his poetry, become so familiar that we scarcely
notice it. Take The Kitten and the Falling Leaves', one of
Wordsworth's quite minor poems.
But the kitten, how she starts,
Crouches, stretches, paws, and darts!
First at one, and then its fellow,
Just as light and just as yellow;
There are many now, now one
Now they stop, and there are none:
What intenseness of desire
In her upward eye of fire!
With a tiger-leap half-way
Now she meets the coming prey,
Lets it go as fast, and then
Has it in her power again.
That, too, is "observation" (or Fancy) as distinct from
imaginative vision; but the distinction, though Wordsworth
made it himself, and on real grounds, is hard to maintain in
his poetry. He lives with and in the thing he is describing;
it becomes, as it were, a mode of his own being, in a supremely
non-egotistical sense. The linnet and the kitten and William
Wordsworth are modes of onp Being. That is what we feel,
and what he says he felt : no wonder we believe it. And indeed
the distinction between Fancy and Imagination as Wordsworth
applied it to his own work is best understood as a distinction
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
between the levels on which Wordsworth's own being was
operant. The first is when his sympathy is mainly instinctive,
immediate and physical; when he is, as it were, simply
watching and participating in the life of Nature : while the
second, which he justly valued more highly, is when he felt
"the plastic power" rising within himself and going out to
dominate Nature with a sort of sudden compulsive illumination.
Thus it is by no caprice that he placed under "Poems of the
Imagination" the seemingly simple, and apparently naive:
The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter
The lake doth glitter,
The green field sleeps in the sun:
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one.
It is an almost staggeringly simple example of what Wordsworth
meant by the Imagination : of how it works and what it does.
The clinching vision comes almost with a snap. At a slightly
different level the quality is just as striking in a single line at
the end of Airey Force Valley.
. . . Not a breath of air
Ruffles the bosom of this leafy glen.
From the brook's margin, wide around, the trees
Are steadfast as the rocks; the brook itself,
Old as the hills that feed it from afar,
Doth rather deepen than disturb the calm
Where all things else are still and motionless.
And yet, even now, a little breeze, perchance
Escaped from boisterous winds that rage without,
Has entered, by the sturdy oaks unfelt,
But to its gentle touch how sensitive
Is the light ash ! that, pendent from the brow
Of yon dim cave, in seeming silence makes
A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs,
Powerful almost as vocal harmony
To stay the wanderer's stef)s and soothe his thoughts.
In that line the whole scene is gathered into a unity, which is,
as it were, its meaning and its life.
59*
LITERARY PORTRAITS
I have no doubt at all that Coleridge was the first to under-
stand and appreciate and unfeignedly admire this imaginative
power of Wordsworth's; and I have not much doubt that
Coleridge built his whole theory of Imagination upon Words-
worth's peculiar achievement. It was for precisely this
singular power of Wordsworth's that Coleridge coined his
phrase "the esemplastic power" or the power of "moulding
into unity" as a definition of Imagination. And it is quite
possible that \Vordsworth accepted from Coleridge this
specific theoretical distinction of the Imagination. There is a
careful and notable discrimination in Wordsworth's 1814
preface to The Prelude, where he speaks of that poem in it
original form as having been addressed to "a dear friend,
most distinguished for his knowledge and genius, and to whom
the author's intellect is deeply indebted". That is to say,
Coleridge helped to make Wordsworth intellectually conscious
of his own nature and his own achievement; and very probably
he provided Wordsworth with a terminology.
But the important point is that the * 'esemplastic' ' Imagination
which Coleridge distinguished and admired in Wordsworth,
he did not himself possess: that "fine balance of truth in
observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the
objects observed". Even that memorable image from nature
in Christabel
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light and hanging so high
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky . . .
is, as we know, not Coleridge's own. It is the classic example
of his borrowing of Dorothy Wordsworth's vision. She wrote
in her Journal :
"One only leaf upon the top of a tree the sole remaining
leaf danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind."
Coleridge's seeing of Nature^ as we have said, is not of that
kind at all: it is static and deliberate, scientific and almost
superinduced. Indeed, my own feeling about it is that he is
trying, with an effort and in vain, to do what Wordsworth did,
'60
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
naturally. Contact with external nature was, essentially,
artificial for Coleridge.
His province, or his kingdom, was thought and dream a
dream quite different from Wordsworth's. It is commonly
enough admitted, if stated in those simple terms. It is indeed
obvious when we merely consider his three most famous
poems The Ancient Mariner, Christabel unfinished, Kubla
Khan a fragment. Outside these, what have we? A few
beautiful and indeed characteristic poems, all of one type and
tone: Frost at Midnight, This Lime-Tree Rower, The Ode to
Dejection, the verses To William Wordsworth after hearing The
Prelude. Of these four the next best of all Coleridge's poems
one tells the story of a childhood divorced from Nature,
%nd promises his baby son a childhood like Wordsworth's, not
like his father's; the two last lament the decay of "his shaping
spirit of Imagination" while the second This Lime-Tree
Bower appears to me deeply interesting as an effort to find in
his kind of nature-observation a substitute for the true
imaginative response in which (I suspect) he participated only
in the company of Wordsworth and his sister.
This little group of Coleridge's poems as a whole is very
illuminating; but most illuminating of all in the context of the
whole is This Lime-Tree Bower. The occasion of the poem,
which was written in 1797, was a visit of Charles Lamb to
Stowey. Coleridge had scalded his foot and was confined to
the house. The poem is an account of his feelings while
William and Dorothy and Charles Lamb walked the hills
together. He sees them, in fancy, wandering to
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun ;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; that branchless ash,
Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fanned by the water-fall ! And there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.
The memory picture is exact; but it is, essentially, prose not
61'
LITERARY PORTRAITS
poetry, good prose, better prose than Coleridge was
accustomed to write but still prose.
He sees his friends, in fancy, emerge from the dell to the
hill-top, all happy, but happiest of all Charles Lamb who, "in
the great City pent, has pined and hungered after Nature".
And Coleridge calls on the familiar scene to shine more bright
for his friend :
So my Friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wid.e landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
At the recollection of that ecstasy, and the thought that
Charles may be sharing it, Coleridge's disappointment
vanishes; and he remembers that in his lime-tree bower he
has "marked much that has soothed him".
Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watched
Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight: and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower. Henceforth, I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure.
I do not, for one moment, deny the beauty of that description;
but even at the risk of appearing over-subtle in discrimination,
I would insist on its essential prose-quality. It is, I think, the
most poetical with one exception of all Coleridge's nature-
descriptions ; but it is not, in the sense that Coleridge himself
distinguished that quality, imaginative. Coleridge is, as it
were, watching himself watching. That is, indeed, the real
argument of the poem. He has discovered a consolation, or a
substitute, for the ecstasy forgone, in this careful and deliberate
observation of Nature. The little note from Bartram which he
'62
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
added to the poem tells its own tale. He is pleased with his
own power of observation. *
The real content of that charming poem appears to me
significant of Coleridge; and its significance is the more
apparent as we discover that it can only be clearly understood
in terms of Coleridge's own distinction of the Imagination as
"esemplastic" that "shaping spirit of Imagination", whose
loss he was to lament in "The Ode to Dejection". For the
question which starts up immediately is whether he ever
possessed it. That he did not possess it before he met
Wordsworth we know by his own confession, as well as by the
quality of his previous poetry. In the IVth Chapter of the
Biographia Literaria he acknowledges that it was the peculiar
ar*l characteristic power of Wordsworth's imagination which
set him pondering on its nature. "This excellence, which in all
Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant and
which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt
than I sought to understand." But to understand the "esem-
plastic" imagination is not to possess it.
It will seem, to some, almost absurd to be challenging
Coleridge's possession of imagination. The author of The
Ancient Mariner, of Christabel, of Kubla Khan, without imagina-
tion! We must be clear what it is that we are denying that
Coleridge possessed. The peculiar faculty that is manifest in
Coleridge's three most famous poems he surely did possess;
and what is more, possessed it at this time of his intimate
association with the Wordsworths, and at no other the power
to tell a strange and fascinating story, to bathe imaginary
events in a glamorous supernatural light, to be supremely
"romantic" in what was, in Coleridge's day, the accepted
sense of the word. This peculiar power Coleridge for a little
while pre-eminently possessed. But he never did possess the
power of transfiguring Nature the common substance of the
* When the last rook . . .flew creeking. Some months after I had
written this line, it gave me pleasure to find that Bartram had
observed the same circumstance of the Savanna Crane. "When
these Birds move their wings in flight, their strokes are slow, moder-
ate and regular; and even when at* a considerable distance or high
above us, we plainly hear the quill-feathers: their shafts and webs
upon one another creek as the joints or working of a vessel in a
tempestuous sea."
LITERARY PORTRAITS
lives of men ; or of making simple ordinary experience suddenly
significant and symbolic, by the power of the imaginative
unity at once drawn from it and imposed upon it.
What Coleridge did possess, for a fleeting moment, was the
power to organise his dream. If this is what he meant by " the
shaping spirit of Imagination" in the Ode to Dejection, it is
true that he had had it, and lost it. But if he meant the kind
of power that Wordsworth possessed, then he was deluding
and tormenting himself into the belief that it was ever his to
lose. And this is what he certainly seems to imply in the
Ode to Dejection.
Lady! in this wan and heartless mood
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky
And its peculiar tint of yellow-green :
And still I gaze and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue,
1 see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.
There is this is the point no evidence in all Coleridge's
poetry that he had ever seen Nature with a different vision
from this. The descriptions in This Lime-Tree Bower are of
precisely the same quality. The only difference is not a
difference intrinsic to the poetry at all. That there was a
difference, that this difference was real, that it was important
to Coleridge as a man, is indubitable: it was a simple and
human difference. He was happy at the moment of This
Lime-Tree Bower, he was miserable at the moment of the Ode to
Dejection. But as far as his imaginative power over Nature
was concerned, it was the same in both poems exactly what
it had been, totally unchanged.
Yet the whole argument of the Ode to Dejection is a denial of
this patent fact. And, far morp important, on this self-deception
is based an explicit denial of all Wordsworth's experience.
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
It is ambiguous, so far. The passion and the life may be within
the outward forms of Nature, or within Coleridge himself.
But the famous passage following makes his meaning clear.
O Lady ! we receive but what we give
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud !
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth.
Here, addressed to Dorothy Wordsworth, is a flat negation of
all that creative reciprocity between Man and Nature which
Wordsworth had experienced and expounded and in which he
believed. That there was in the poet "a plastic power" he had
never denied. What he asserted was a mutual and progressive
interaction between Nature and Man. Man properly sub-
missive to and worked on by the influences of Nature, becomes
himself creative. To declare that from Nature "we receive but
what we give" to Nature was to Wordsworth a heresy, of
which the whole of the original Prelude is a splendid and sus-
tained refutation. The heresy was untrue to Wordsworth's
experience, and it is denied by nearly all of his best work.
But it was true of Coleridge's very different mode of "imagina-
tion". In his three famous poems the "atmosphere" is
manifestly an emanation from the poet's mind or soul.
This is the absorbing interest of the Ode to Dejection. It is
one long unconscious equivocation. My "imagination" has
failed (says Coleridge in effect) because I am unhappy.
Therefore the source of all "imagination" is in the happiness
of the poet.
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power
Which wedding Nature gives to us in dower
William's belief is all wrong. He can "imagine", simply
because he is happy ; and the luminous cloud goes forth from
his happy soul. I am unhappy Aeries Coleridge) therefore I
feel nothing, create nothing.
It is, of course, far more personal and intimate than this.
The Wordsworths were meant to understand, and beyond all
5 6 5
LITERARY PORTRAITS
doubt understood what Coleridge meant when he wrote.
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness :
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth ;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can,
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
Why should Coleridge have enforced upon himself "not to
think of what he needs must feel"? Why was he deliberately
seeking, "by abstruse research, to steal from his own nature all
the natural man?" It was the very opposite of the remedy
for the condition he has been describing in his poem. And
what are the afflictions which bow him to the earth ? Coleridge
quotes those lines in a letter to Tom Wedgwood (October
20, 1802) "for the Truth and not for the Poetry" as
describing his condition of mind during the months when
"scarce a day passed without such a scene of discord between
me and Mrs. Coleridge, as quite incapacitated me from any
worthy exertion of my faculties by degrading me in my own
estimation". There is no doubt whatever that the "afflic-
tions" are one affliction the affliction of being married to
Sara Fricker, and not to whom? In answering that, we
touch the very quick of Coleridge for the strange fact is that
poem was addressed in turn to Sara Hutchinson, to William,
and to Dorothy Wordsworth. It seems particular and personal,
but Coleridge was incapable of a particular and personal love;
just as in his artistic life, so in his personal life and these can
never be separated in a living man of genius he was not
"under the influence of external objects". The answer to the
question: "Whom did Coleridge want to be married to,
66
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
instead of to Sara Flicker?" is the strange one: To Sara
Hutchinson, to William and to Dorothy. What he wanted
and what he felt was a diffused condition of " being in love",
not concentred on any particular being. And precisely that
is what he wanted and what he felt, in his poetry. To attend
to, to care for, a particular thing, a particular person was for
him a strained and unnatural condition.
In 1810 Dorothy Wordsworth, the long suffering, was to
speak the bitter truth about his 'love' for Sara Hutchinson,
who spent herself in vain in trying to keep him to The Friend.
His love for her is no more than a fanciful dream other-
wise he would prove it by a desire to make her happy. No, he
likes to have her about him as his own, as one devoted to him,
tuit when she stood in the way of other gratifications it was
all over.
It took the Wordsworths years of bitter, and self-denying
experience, to discover that. But how significant it is that in
the first letter we have mentioning Coleridge's domestic
unhappiness ("Sara alas! we are not suited to each other":
to Southey, October 21, 1801) he describes this peculiarity
of his own nature. In that letter, Coleridge, after warning
Southey that "if our mutual unsuitableness continues" he and
his wife will separate, passes to a discussion of Humphry
Davy's character. Chemistry "prevents or tends to prevent a
young man from falling in love".
We all have obscure feelings, that must be connected with
something or other the miser with a guinea Lord Nelson
with a blue ribbon, Wordsworth's old Molly with her washing
tub Wordsworth with the hills, lakes and trees . . . Now
chemistry makes a young man associate these feelings with
inanimate objects . . . That to be in love is simply to confine
the feelings prospective of animal enjoyment to one woman
is a gross mistake (Who, of Coleridge's friends at any rate,
believed this?) it is to associate a large proportion of our
obscure feelings with a real form. A miser is in love with a
guinea, and a virtuous young man with a woman, in the same
sense without figure or metaphor.
Here the parallel I have drawn beJLween the imaginative love
of the poet, and the personal love of the man, is drawn by
Coleridge himself. Working backwards along the line of his
argument, we have, first, the assertion that a man is in love
LITERARY PORTRAITS
with a woman in precisely the same sense as a miser is in love
with a guinea. In other words, no man loves a woman for
herself \ he is merely under the necessity of associating his
'obscure feelings' with, and concentering them upon a real
form : which is, no doubt, what Coleridge did when he fell 'in
love' with Sara Fricker. This, Coleridge says, is what Words-
worth does when he is in love with his hills, lakes, and trees.
He does not love them for themselves.
So that for Coleridge to fall out of love with Sara Fricker is
perfectly in order. Coleridge not only implies it, but says it.
"A young poet may do without being in love with a woman
it is enough if he loves." So it is enough if Coleridge goes
on "loving" any thing or person. So Wordsworth, when he
comes to sec things as truly as Coleridge does, will ce<?se to
imagine that he really loves his trees, lakes and hills.
What I suggest is that the movement of thought and feeling
in this letter is precisely the same as that of the Ode to Dejection;
and that both are, to put it brutally, justifications of his
behaviour to his wife. His affliction is that he is married to
her; he is now required to love her, for herself. Because he is
incapable of this, he asserts that no man is capable of it.
Wordsworth, in thinking that he loves things and persons for
themselves, is merely self-deluded. At the time of the letter to
Sou they, the thought is just taking shape in his soul. In a
few months, he has written the Ode to Dejection; in exactly a
year he is writing his marital woes to Tom Wedgwood and
quoting the Ode as giving the truth of them.
Now we can see clearly what the naked argument of the Ode
really is. 'Wordsworth can create, not for the reason he per-
suades himself, because he is responsive to the beauty and the
life of nature in things and persons ; but simply because he is
happy. And he is happy because he has Dorothy and Mary
and Sara; whereas I cannot create because I have them not.
It is not objects to love that one needs, but to be in a condition
of lovingness'. No wonder that the next strophe begins:
''Hence, viper thoughts that coil around my mind." But
Coleridge has really bee^i indulging them throughout the
Ode. It is an example of precisely that fearful moral inertia
of the mind, concerning which, when it declared itself more
plainly in 1808, Wordsworth wrote to him:
68
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
"There is more than one sentence in your letter which I
blushed to read, and which you yourself would have been
unable to write, could never have thought of writing, nay,
the matter of which could never have passed through your
mind, had you not acquired a habit which I think a very
pernicious one, of giving pen and voice to your most lawless
thought . . .
However valuable as a document, or even as poetry, the
Ode to Dejection may be, the waste-paper basket was the
place for it, if Coleridge was to retain his own self-respect. One
may be, one is deeply sorry that Coleridge was unhappy;
but what are we to think of the basic and not really unconscious
equivocation behind it all the not really unconscious desire
to make, if he could, his beloved friend Wordsworth more
wrefched than himself? Wordsworth's religion of Nature (for
all his fortunate boyhood) had not been easily won. He had to
suffer and struggle out of the age when "the sounding cataract
haunted him like a passion" into the higher and rarer realm
of experience of
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
To tell the man who had fought his way to this experience and
this conviction, that it was illusion, a mere projection of his
own happiness upon the world, was an insidious treachery.
And a very subtle one. Coleridge was intellectually subtle
by nature in a way Wordsworth was not; and now he appears
to me to be using his intellect with a peculiar cunning. For
this word "joy" which Coleridge now declares to be the
source of the poet's glorious vision of the unity of the world is
a word drawn from the heart of Wordsworth's experience.
In Tintern Abbey he feels "a presence that disturbs me
with the joy of elevated thoughts"; and in the still more
famous lines of that crucial poem, he describes, aye and almost
communicates
69
LITERARY PORTRAITS
that serene and blessed mood . . .
When with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
"It is true", Coleridge is saying. "But the joy is in you,
nowhere else. It is not, as you believe, a response within your-
self to the truth and beauty of Nature ; not the recognition, in
a truly responsive soul, of the one Being of which itself and the
world beyond are modes. It is simply the overflow of your own
good spirits, which derive from your own good fortune. Be
wretched like me, and you will see into the life of things no
more ; and seeing into it no more, you will come to believe as
I do that you never did see into it at all."
Coleridge himself has passed sentence on this action ohis,
in the preface to his Poems. "There is one species of egotism
which is truly disgusting; not that which leads us to com-
municate our feelings to others, but that which would reduce
the feelings of others to an identity with our own."
Woman, said Lawrence, is the nemesis of doubting man;
Mephistopheles said Goethe, is "the spirit that ever denies."
A feminine Mephistopheles inspired the author of the Ode
to Dejection.
The Ode to Dejection may be forgiven. It is the utterance of
a real despair; and it may well have been that Coleridge, when
he uttered it, did not really understand the profound difference
between Wordsworth's experience of Nature and his own.
Some ecstatic experience, of which Nature was the occasion,
if not the cause, he had had ; and he had had it at a moment
of great joy. I think it was of two kinds, corresponding to the
kinds of joy which he experienced in his intimacy with the
Wordsworths. There was the joy which Dorothy's tender and
delicate sympathy brought to him: she surrounded him with
the aura of love which he craved, and as it were momentarily
enriched him with her delicate perceptions. What she saw,
he seemed to see ; and what those perceptions of hers contributed
to the creation of Christabel is known to all. He was momen-
tarily completed by the rich "experiencing nature" of a rare
woman.
70
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
On the other side, he was the feminine complement to
Wordsworth's sterner and more purposeful nature. He
adopted Wordsworth's experience of Nature. When we first
meet, in Coleridge's poetry, with a description of Nature
ecstasy, it is 1795, when Coleridge was staying at Clevedon in
Somerset. On August 20 of that year he wrote The Aeolian
Harp.
O ! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought and joyance everywhere
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled . . .
And thus, my love!
(It is Sara his wife whom he is addressing.)
as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst through my half-closed eyelids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main
And tranquil muse upon tranquillity;
Full many a thought, uncalled and undetained,
And many idle flitting phantasies
Traverse my indolent and passive brain
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject lute.
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of All?
This experience (it is obvious) is purely passive, a vague self-
surrender to sunshine and tranquillity a common experience
and an enjoyable one, which generally ends in sleep. There is
nothing particular about it, in any sense; indeed, so far as
visual perception is concerned, it definitely avoids particularity :
Coleridge looks at the sea "with half-closed eyelids", and gives
himself up to warmth and dreaminess, to a relapse into animal
quiescence. There are those who maintain that this is all the
rapture of Nature ever is it w ft as a favourite dogma of the
late Irving Babbitt, for example. But it is not so. The authen-
tic nature-rapture is very different from this stream of
undifFerentiated sensation, which is familiar to us all.
71 *
LITERARY PORTRAITS
What distinguishes it in Coleridge is that he has a theory,
or conjecture about it. This passivity, he surmises, is the real
condition of "all animated nature"; the "idle and flitting
phantasies" which "traverse his indolent and passive brain"
may be the sound made, in one particular human Aeolian
harp, by the "one intellectual breeze, at once the soul of each
and God of All". And that is what he has just before greeted as
O ! the one life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul . . .
Thus described, it seems to take on an added dignity, though
I must confess that the lines are really incomprehensible to me
a splendid verbal incantation, but no more. From this
angle they are, I think, the best lines that Coleridge had
written so far; and by the very vagueness and ambiguity of
their content they provide a stepping stone from the indolent
and animal tranquillity celebrated in the subsequent lines, to
the intellectual conception he had expressed, in very poor
poetry, nine months before in Religious Musings.
There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind
Omnific. His most holy name is Love.
Truth of subliming import ! with the which
Who feeds and saturates his constant soul,
He from his small particular orbit flies
With blest outstarting! From himself he flics,
Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze
Views all creation; and he loves it all,
And blesses it, and calls it very good !
This is indeed to dwell with the Most High!
Cherubs and rapture-trembling Seraphim
Can press no nearer to the Almighty's throne.
Although these lines are, as I say, poor poetry, the thought is
clear, and it is a genuinely religious thought. It is possible,
perhaps even probable, that there was genuine spiritual
experience behind it. In the lines, at any rate, Coleridge
accurately describes the self-detachment of spiritual contem-
plation, whether or not he derived the description from the
neo-Platonic mystics, or from his own intellectual experience.
The Sun, in which the sejf-detached spirit stands, is the
metaphorical Sun of the mystics: the creative One the
Father who, in the unforgettable phrase of Jesus, "makes his
sun to shine on good men and bad and his rain to fall on the
72
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
just and on the unjust". It is the spiritual sun, which Blake
(like other mystics) saw in and through the physical one.
"What? (it will be questioned) when the sun rises, do you not
see a round disk of fire, somewhat like a Guinea?" "O no,
no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host,
crying 'Holy, holy, holy! is the Lord God Almighty!'"
A different sun altogether from the one beneath whose
radiance Coleridge had basked at Clevedon when he gazed
with half-shut eyes upon the sea. But he contrives, by his
lines of verbal incantation, to blur the difference between
them almost completely. The idle phantasies which stream
through his indolent brain under the caress of the sun may be
the workings of the intellectual breeze which is at once "the
Scul of each and God of all". He felt rather guilty about it,
as well he might, for it was a piece of legerdemain too bare-
faced even for the straightforward and pious Sara. She "darts
a mild reproof from her more serious eye", and rejects such
"dim and unhallowed thoughts".
Well hast thou said, and holily dispraised
These shapings of the unregenerate mind ;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring,
For never guiltless may I speak of him,
The Incomprehensible! save when with awe
I praise him, and with Faith that m\y feels \
Who with his saving mercies healed me,
A sinful and most miserable man,
Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess
Peace, and this cot, and thee, heart-honoured maid !
To which rather blush-making snuffle, one can only reply that,
if Coleridge really meant it, he would have put his poem in
the waste-paper basket. In fact, he treasured it as his best so
far. Obviously, he would like to be able to persuade himself,
and somebody else if possible, that his dolce far niente in the
sun is the beatific rapture or to use his own later phrase,
"making himself all permeable to a higher power."
This first effort at nature-rapture we may dismiss as a mere
try-on. Rapture, indubitably, Coleridge did know; but it
was an intellectual rapture a curious, but certainly authentic
perturbation of the whole being by the abstract idea of the
73 '
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Whole, the One. He gives a very truthful account of its origin
in a letter to Poole.
From my early reading of fairy tales and genii etc. my mind
had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my
senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all
my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that
age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and
relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that
had been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the
affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love
of the great and the Whole.
In the most literal sense of the word, Coleridge was
metaphysically-minded from childhood. And that devouring
bias of his is nowhere more charmingly evident than in 4iis
great scheme of Pantisocracy "the perfect system of Pantiso-
cracy", as he naively and seriously put it. No-one can ever
really understand Coleridge who finds that perfect system
merely comic; somehow, when I read his letter to Southey
reproaching him for having deviated from self-evident and
axiomatic perfection of the scheme, I don't know whether to
laugh or to cry. "The leading idea of pantisocracy", said
Coleridge superbly, "is to make men necessarily virtuous by
removing all motives to evil". It is sublime; and it is a
contradiction in terms. "I have told you, Southey, that I will
accompany you on an imperfect system. But must our system
be thus necessarily imperfect?" This could only come from
a young man with no sense of reality at all absolutely none.
And that is rare and wonderful. Whenever I want really to
love Coleridge and sometimes I do very badly I have only
to think of him as the Pantisocrat, who even married a wife
in accordance with the dictates of perfect Pantisocracy.
Suddenly, in Wordsworth, Coleridge met a man for whom
the vastness and the unity of the world were a real experience
of the world. The distinction was tremendous. Coleridge could
think the One, dream the One, but the only sensation of
unity (so far as I can see) that he ever had was precisely the
dreamy oblivion of the world, which came to him (as to more
ordinary people) when he lay in the sun. Before he met
Wordsworth, he tried, as we have seen, to delude himself into
believing that this was an experience of the Unity of which he
74
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
had learned from mystical theology; but he could not succeed.
His wife would not let him get away with that.
But now came Wordsworth into his life: Wordsworth who
really had experienced the unity of which Coleridge thought
and dreamed, Wordsworth to whom the experience had been
so real that his whole life-pattern derived from it. It was, for
Coleridge, amazing: suddenly, his thoughts and his dreams
were real, more than real, they were incarnate in Words-
worth as man and poet. Wordsworth was the link with life,
of which he knew in himself the need and for which he
instinctively sought: his own completion. Nor is it to be
wondered at that he should have tried to make Wordsworth's
experience his own.
ferhaps the most remarkable of Coleridge's poems in this
regard is Fears in Solitude. It was written in April 1798, the
second of the years of creative association with Wordsworth ;
and it was written two months after Frost at Midnight, wherein
(as we have seen) Coleridge recognises the sensational meagre-
ness of his childhood, and promises his baby a different life.
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness thus to look at thee.
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes. For I was rear'd
In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
Is it not passing strange that, only two months after this,
Coleridge should have written in Fears in Solitude, lines which
contradict this true and beautiful statement entirely?
O native Britain ! O my Mother Isle !
How should'st thou prove aught else but dear and holy
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills,
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
Have drunk in all my intellectual life,
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of the God in nature,
All lovely and all honourable things,
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
The joy and greatness of its future being.
This is an extraordinary self-deception; but so obvious and so
palpable that it can be explained, I believe, only by supposing
that for the moment Coleridge did verily believe that he was
75
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Wordsworth, or that Wordsworth and he were one being.
Such a condition of mind would be incredible, were it not
that the man was Coleridge. Because it was Coleridge, I
really do incline to believe that he desired this identity of
being with Wordsworth so ardently, that he almost came to
experience it as fact. The truth is that Coleridge was a very
queer person indeed. Few people and no other man of
genius that I know of have had so little sense of their own
personal identity as he. He seems to have experienced himself
chiefly as a negation; and he was continually groping after
some means of communicating to others the strangeness of
his own experience of himself. Thus, he tried in 1802, to
explain himself to his wife. "I seem to exist, as it were, almost
wholly within myself, in thoughts rather than things, in* a
particular warmth felt all over me, but chiefly is felt about my
head and breast." The explanation is strange, almost
incomprehensible. Or he gives a memorable description to
Southey, in 1803, of
A sense of weakness, a haunting sense that I was an herb-
aceous plant, as large as a large tree, with a trunk of the same
girth, and branches as large and shadowing, but with pith
within the trunk not heart of wood that I had power, not
strength, an involuntary impostor, that I had no real Genius,
no real depth.
Sometimes, he was terribly severe upon himself, as when he
described himself to De Quincey as "a moral marasmus of
negatives." But beneath it all, we cannot fail to sense some-
thing quite extraordinary, some altogether amazing hiatus
at the core of his being.
I do not profess to understand it; but I do dimly glimpse the
possibility of such a man adopting the central identity of
another. We have seen how, in Christabel, Coleridge adopted
the sense-perceptions of Dorothy Wordsworth really in-
corporated them into the motion of his own mind. It seems
to me that, in the case of Wordsworth, Coleridge tried to
adopt his very nature, and momentarily succeeded in believing
that he had done so. Wordsworth's childhood became his
childhood. And, significantly enough, in the same poem,
Fears in Solitude, we find Coleridge making an effort (doubt-
less unconscious) to identify his dolce far niente sensation with
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
Wordsworth's mystical experience of Nature. This is a
repetition, at a different level, of the attempt we found him
making before. Then, at Clevedon, the mystical experience
with which he tried, in vain, to identify his noon-day lethargy
was neo-Platonic. Now that Wordsworth has so potently
entered his life, Wordsworth's mystical nature-experience is
become the absolute.
Oh! 'tis a quiet spirit-healing nook!
Which all, methinks, would love; but chiefly he,
The humble man, who, in his youthful years,
Knew just so much of folly, as had made
His early manhood more securely wise !
That, I make no doubt, is Coleridge speaking of himself.
He goes on :
Here he might lie on fern or withered heath,
While from the singing lark (that sings unseen
The minstrelsy that solitude loves best),
And from the sun and from the breezy air,
Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame;
And he, with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found
Religious meanings in the forms of nature !
And so, his senses gradually wrapt
In a half-sleep, he dreams of better worlds,
And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark,
That singest like an angel in the clouds!
Intrinsically, that is precisely the same condition as was
described in The Aeolian Harp. The talk of discovering
"religious meanings in the forms of Nature" is self-deception.
He is lying down, and soon to fall into a half-sleep. The
"religious meanings" and the "meditative joy" he has simply
adopted from Wordsworth. But this more subtle legerdemain
is beyond Sara's power to detect. For the moment not
religious orthodoxy, but Wordsworth's experience, is the
absolute for Coleridge ; and Sara would have been out of her
depth, if she was consulted at all: which is very improbable.
With the Wordsworths to lean on, Coleridge had no need of
her.
Now let us move forward a year, to May 1 799. And let us
remember precisely what had happened between. The
Wordsworths' year's lease of Alfoxden had expired in July
77 '
LITERARY PORTRAITS
1798, and they had gone to Germany, taking Coleridge with
them. Speaking humanly, this was a selfish and irresponsible
thing for the Wordsworths to have done: they should have
made Coleridge stay at Nether Stowey with his wife and
children. The Wordsworths returned from Germany at the
end of April 1799. And, I think, Coleridge's feeling of guilt
towards his wife played no small part in keeping him from
returning. At any rate he stayed on, after the Wordsworths
had returned. Within a month of their parting, he is writing
these Lines in the album at Elbingerode (May 17, 1799). After
describing his view from the Brocken, and his descent
I moved on
In low and languid mood : for I had found
That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the life within;
Fair cyphers else ; fair, but of import vague
Or unconcerning, where the heart not finds
History or prophecy of friend, or child . . .
It is a manifest anticipation of the Ode to Dejection. But
apart from that, what strikes one about that last line is that
it is a precise description of what Coleridge had really found
in the outward forms of Nature. He had found the history
of his friend, Wordsworth (which he tried to take to himself)
and the prophecy of his child, David Hartley. That was the
only reality they had had for him; and now, at the moment
when he is separated from both, he realises the truth. The
lines continue:
Or gentle maid, our first and earliest love,
Or father, or the venerable name
Of our adored country! O thou Queen,
Thou delegated Deity of Earth,
O dear, dear England! how my longing eye
Turned westward, shaping in the steady clouds
Thy sands and high white cliffs!
We are reminded of the apostrophe to England in Fears in
Solitude. But this time, instead of imputing to himself a
fictitious Wordsworthian derivation from the lakes and
mountain-hills of England, it takes a quite different turn.
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
My native Land!
Filled with the thought of thee this heart was proud,
Yea, mine eye swam with tears : that all the view
From sovran Brocken, woods and woody hills,
Floated away like a departing dream,
Feeble and dim! Stranger, these impulses
Blame thou not lightly; nor will I profane
With hasty judgment and injurious doubt,
That man's sublimer spirit, who can feel
That God is everywhere I the God who framed
Mankind to be one mighty family,
Himself our Father, and the world our Home.
I do not suggest that Coleridge was consciously thinking of
Wordsworth here, or that Wordsworth is "the sublimer
spirit" ; but I am quite certain that the whole poem is shot with
a dtmbt of Wordsworth's experience and his faith. While he
was with the Wordsworths, Coleridge could believe in
Wordsworth's experience and persuade himself that he
participated in it; as soon as they were gone, he feels the
exaltation no longer and begins to suspect that Wordsworth's
experience is illusory. At any rate, he knows that his own
pretended participation in it is illusion ; and he universalizes
his own disillusion. He says he will not "profane with hasty
judgment and injurious doubt" the larger faith; but he cannot
help it. He has already done so.
Apparently, from the beginning of Coleridge's association
with Wordsworth, Wordsworth had been unresponsive to his
Christian theologizing. "On one subject", Coleridge wrote to
his Unitarian friend Estlin, as early as May 1798, "we are
habitually silent; we found our data dissimilar and never
renewed the subject. It is his practice and almost his nature
to convey all the truth he knows without any attack on what
he supposes to be falsehood, if that falsehood be interwoven
with virtues or happiness. He loves and venerates Christ and
Christianity. I wish he did more ..." What more, one cannot
help asking, did Coleridge himself do? That he wanted to
do more, there is no doubt. He had done more, as we have
seen, in the sense that he had saturated himself in the mystical
theology of Neo-Platonism, which was to become (through
79
LITERARY PORTRAITS
"Dionysius the Areopagite") the theology of Christian
mysticism. And in December 1 796 before the intimacy with
Wordsworth he wrote :
I have been myself sorely afflicted, and have rolled my
dreary eye from earth to heaven and found no comfort, till
it pleased the Unimaginable High and Lofty One to make my
heart more tender in regard of religious feelings. My philo-
sophical refinements, and metaphysical theories, lay by me in
the hour of anguish, as toys by the bedside of a sick child.
May God continue his visitations to my soul, till the pride and
Laodicean self-confidence of human Reason be utterly done
away; and I cry with deeper and yet deeper feelings, O my
Soul ! thou art wretched and miserable, and poor and blind
and naked!
Here, I think, is the desire not untinged with a certain
complacency for religious experience, but not the experience.
And, just as his philosophical mysticism was merely intellectual,
so did his Christianity become. He called Christianity "his
passion"; but "it is too much my intellectual passion, and
therefore will do me but little good in the hour of temptation
and calamity".
Precisely here his intimacy with Wordsworth did him no
good at all. Wordsworth had real mystical experience: in him
it was something quite apart from Christianity or Christian
theology. His experience was independent of them; and he
did not need them. He could stand alone. And Coleridge
knew it. "Of all the men I ever knew", he wrote afterwards,
"Wordsworth has the least femineity in his character. He is
all man. He is a man of whom It is good for him to be alone".
It certainly was not good for Coleridge to be alone. He
needed something or someone to cling to. He did not like to
be alone with the universe, which (I believe) is the condition
which leads to the authentic mystical passing from isolation
to communion. What Coleridge liked, as we have seen, was
to lose the sense of the implacable otherness of the universe by
dreaming with half-closed eyes; or he loved to surrender
himself to the motions of his own brain, and lose himself in a
realm of thought, "existing" (as he said) "almost wholly
within himself, in thoughts rather than things". The con-
frontation of his own limited self with that which was
intrinsically not himself, whether in the world or in persons,
80
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
was what he instinctively and desperately sought to avoid.
He felt that he could not exist except in an atmosphere of
affection, wherein the bounds between his own personality
and that of his friends was dissolved.
To be beloved is all I need
And those I love, I love indeed.
That was his cry, and there is no doubt it came from the depths.
Coleridge did love, where he loved, very intensely. But it
was, for all its intensity, a diffused love which spread a kind
of circumambience, or veil, over the thing or person loved.
It was a love which shrank from seeing the object as it was and
loving that.
These may be subtle psychological distinctions; but they
are *of cardinal importance for understanding Coleridge.
This love of his was an immensely powerful sensation. "My
whole being", he wrote to Thomas Poole from Germany, on
May 6, 1799 "yearns after you. Methinks my hand would
swell if the whole force of my feeling were crowded there".
He was writing at the moment that his second child had died,
Berkeley Coleridge, just one year old. He went on:
I thought of my own verses on the Nightingale, only because
I thought of Hartley, my only child. Dear lamb ! I hope he
won't be dead before I get home. There are moments in
which I have such a power of life within me, such a conceit
of it, I mean, that I lay the blame of my child's death to my
absence. Not intellectually, but I have a strange sort of sensa-
tion, as if, while I was present, none could die whom I entirely
loved . . .
I do not doubt, for one moment, the reality of this sensation;
and it is not in the least with the idea of jeering at Coleridge
that I recall that this entire love for his children had not
prevented him from leaving his wife alone with two little
babies in order to accompany the Wordsworths to Germany.
Some people would conclude from that that Coleridge was a
sentimental humbug. They would be wrong. The fact is that
love, for Coleridge, was not an activity at all ; it was a passivity.
It was a sense of warm and affectionate security in which he
could expand, and as it were flow out into a sort of homogeneity
with his surroundings. He felt, when he could yield himself up
to this sensation, that the irksome barrier of his own personal
81
LITERARY PORTRAITS
identity was gone. But that love was a relation, as distinct
from a sensation; that it imposed obligations, and involved a
resolution to take care for certain definite identities distinct
from his own this was an idea that was profoundly unnatural
to Coleridge. In order for him to acquire it, in the only way
he could have acquired it, he would have needed, I think, to
pass through that experience of utter isolation in face of an
alien universe from which he shrank.
However that may be, his desire to retain the circum-
ambience of Wordsworth and Dorothy triumphed over what
little sense of responsibility to his wife and children he possessed.
He professed to consult Poole before he went off to Germany.
With regard to Germany (he wrote on August 3, 1 790) these
are my intentions, if not contravened by superior arguments.
I still think the realization of the scheme of high importance
to my intellectual utility; and of course to my moral happiness.
But if I go with Mrs. G and the little ones, I must borrow
an imprudent, perhaps an immoral thing.
It is characteristic Coleridgean equivocation with himself.
The whole magnificent moral argument would have collapsed
at the question "Why not stay at home?" As was inevitable,
Coleridge felt guilty. He was not acting out of his own being;
he had none. He was in instinctive pursuit of the sensation he
called love. And this sensation, whether it was love of Nature
or of persons, was always intrinsically the same: warm
security and oblivion of the outward world. When he was
with the Wordsworths, he convinced himself intellectually
that it was the same as Wordsworth's experience : the moment
he parted from them he sank back into his own subjectivity,
with a consciousness of intellectual equivocation, and moral
insufficiency.
Then he must cling to Christianity. But his Christianity was
not authentic experience. It was a metaphysical system to
which he clung, a metaphysical system which had some-
where, and incongruously (as Coleridge well knew), the
assurance of security and salvation attached to it. Hence the
years after his return from Germany were crucial. Not
unnaturally, his wife felt rather bitter towards him for his
dereliction; he took refuge from his domestic unhappiness in
illness, which was, I believe, half real in that he really did
82
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
suffer physically from this unhappiness and half invented.
His hyper-sensitive and guilty conscience produced night-
terrors of the kind so vividly recorded in The Pains of Sleep.
Deeds to be hid that were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others' still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
Why, Coleridge asks at the end of that poem, do such terrors
visit him? They are the due punishment of "natures deepliest
stained with sin."
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need
And where I love, I love indeed.
It sounds pathetic; nor do I doubt that the note of injured
innocence was perfectly sincere. But, in fact, by this time,
1803, Coleridge was incapable of real sincerity. He had lost
his own integrity. He knew, quite well, that his night-
hauntings were only a grimmer repetition of his hauntings by
day. He was gnawed at by a sense of sin ; he was wasting his
life, he had, in shrinking from reality, fled into a morass of
intellectual and moral duplicity, from which his means of
release were but two the indulgence of metaphysical
speculation, and laudanum.
The crucial years after Coleridge's return from Germany
were at once the years of abandonment to metaphysical
speculation, of increasing domestic unhappiness, of larger
doses of laudanum, and of a deepening sense of sin: and these
are merely distinct manifestations of a single process of inward
disintegration. Its theological manifestation is a return to
orthodox Christianity. He writes to his clergyman brother on
June 3, 1802, to tell him that the French Concordat has caused
him "to think accurately and with consecutive logic on the
force and meaning of the word Established Church, and the
result of my reflections was very .greatly in favour of the
Church of England maintained as it at present is". His
brother, not unnaturally, expressed surprise at this revolution-
ary change in the staunch Unitarian of four years ago. And
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Coleridge very characteristically denied that he meant "in
any way to refer to its peculiar doctrines, or to the Church
of England in particular". He was, as he was to explain more
copiously in after years, merely referring to the "idea" of an
Established Church, as a necessary component part of a
healthy society. Since this "idea", shorn of its ecclesiastical
trappings, simply reduces to the desirability of having an
endowed and independent "clerisy", or "intellectual elite"
(as we should probably call it to-day), it has no necessary
connection whatever with the defence of the Church of
England. But, when it was combined with Coleridge's new
"faith", it served the turn. That his faith was new, Coleridge
denied; but we have only to read his Religious Musings of
1794 to see that the change was striking. He declares <o his
brother (July i, 1802)
My Faith is simply this that there is an original corruption
in our nature, from which and from the consequences of which,
we may be redeemed by Christ not, as the Socinians say,
by his pure morals, or excellent example merely but in a
mysterious manner as an effect of his Crucifixion. And this I
believe, not because I understand it; but because I feel that it is
not only suitable to, but needful for my nature. . . .
That is entirely different from the Neo-Platonic mysticism of
Religious Musings ; entirely different from the attempted
Nature Pantheism of The Aeolian Harp ; entirely different
from the natural religion which he tried in vain to absorb
from Wordsworth : it is the Christian faith of Coleridge the
beaten man the man haunted by a sense of sin. How far it
ever became in Coleridge a genuine faith, I do not presume to
decide. But I am quite certain it was not a genuine faith when
he professed it to his brother. It was something which he
desired to believe, but could not. It was, indeed, a faith
"not only suitable to, but needful for, his nature"; but that
very fact made it almost impossible for Coleridge to believe it.
It was, he knew, too easy. It was a feather-bed religion, whose
function it was to receive him at the end of an unending series
of moral cowardices. An/i, for very good reasons, Coleridge
had great difficulty in believing in the truth of such a religion.
Christianity, of this particular type, which finally absolved
him from all moral effort, was a last refuge. And, of course,
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COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
he felt terribly guilty about that. He had got himself into the
truly appalling condition of feeling a sense of sin about his
religion itself. The inevitable outcome of this condition, in
which disintegration touched the core of his being, was such
"viper thoughts" as raised their ugly heads in the Ode to Dejec-
tion. That was written on April 4, 1802; and he managed to
beat them down. A year and a half later, on October 26,
1803, he could not conquer them. On that date he records a
"very unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth and Hazlitt."
I spoke, I fear, too contemptuously; but they spoke so
irreverently, so malignantly of the Divine Wisdom that it
overset me. Hazlitt how easily raised to rage and hatred self-
projected ! But thou, dearest Wordsworth, and what if Ray,
Durham, Paley have carried the observation of the aptitude of
trtings too far, too habitually into pedantry? O how many
worse pedantries! how few so harmless, with so much efficient
good ! Dear William, pardon pedantry in others and avoid it
in yourself, instead of scoffing and reviling at pedantry in good
men and a good cause and becoming a pedant yourself in a
bad cause even by that very act becoming one. But, surely,
always to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of
taking delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their real
or imagined life, is as deleterious to the health and manhood
of intellect as always to be peering and unravelling contrivance
may be to the simplicity of the affection and the grandeur and
unity of the imagination. O dearest William! would Ray
or Durham have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature ?
Here we have Coleridge at his most contemptible; there,
indeed, he is in a moral marasmus. The equivocation is
palpable; the assumption of moral and imaginative superiority
offensive. Coleridge, now fairly in the grip of laudanum, and
craving a refuge from his refuge, and seeking it in Christianity,
is compelled to defend the complacent and barren mechanical
theology of the argument from design. And he is so conscious
of his moral weakness and his intellectual cowardice, that he
turns, with the vicious malevolence of weakness, on the
delighted observation of Nature which it had once been his
supreme happiness to share with Dorothy and William
Wordsworth. In Coleridge's now diseased mind it is become
"to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of taking
delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or
imagined life"; and it is as "deleterious to the health and
LITERARY PORTRAITS
manhood and intellect" as the sophistries of Ray and Paley are
to "the grandeur and unity of the Imagination".
Coleridge himself, of course, is superior to either. His
unctuous assumption is that he possesses both "health and
manhood of intellect" and "grandeur and unity of imagina-
tion." It is a familiar piece of psychological compensation:
when Coleridge is at his lowest, he claims to be at the highest.
Implicitly he sets up his own metaphysical dreaming, which
could no longer bear any real contact with the objective
world at all, as the perfect unity of "manhood of intellect"
and "grandeur of imagination". It is a nadir of self-deception ;
and unpleasant to contemplate.
It is generally supposed that Coleridge did not get into
this condition until five years later, on his return from ty[alta,
in 1808. Then, it is admitted, that "over-indulgence in
alcohol or narcotics not only had weakened a will already weak
by nature, but had begun to undermine his affections and play
havoc with his moral sense. At times, indeed, he still felt his
old self-effacing admiration for his friend, but he was subject
to moods in which love and gratitude were crossed with
resentment, even with jealousy." (De Selincourt: "Dorothy
Wordsworth", p. 211). But that is to recognise Coleridge's
condition only when it had become palpable: when he had
become the poor creature who "dared not go home", and
whom the Wordsworths met at last at Kendal.
"Never, never did I feel such a shock as at first sight of him.
We all felt exactly in the same way as if he were a different
person from what we have expected to see ; almost as much as
a person of whom we have thought much, and of whom we had
formed an image in our minds, without having any personal
knowledge of him."
Thus Dorothy Wordsworth in her letter of November 6,
1806; but the inward change that was the cause of that
outward metamorphosis had happened long before. The
Wordsworths had not seen it, because Coleridge was still the
old Coleridge with them : but in himself he was no longer that
man, because he never had been that man.
The collapse of Coleridge is one of the most fascinating and
pathetic stories in the history of literature ; and I do not think
that justice has ever been done to Sara Coleridge in this matter.
86
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
She was not a woman of genius; she could not put her case in
a form in which posterity would read it. But I find in her
words on the final rupture between Coleridge and the
Wordsworths, a substantial human justice which is not easy
to find in the judgments of the three more famous protagonists :
"He has" (wrote Mrs. Coleridge) "been taught one very
useful lesson that even his dearest and most indulgent
friends, even those very persons who have been the great means
of his self-indulgence, when he comes to live wholly with them,
are as clear-sighted to his failings, and much less delicate in
speaking of them than his wife".
That the Wordsworths were "the great means of Coleridge's
self-indulgence" is not a familiar way of looking at the situation ;
bu* I think it is very nearly the true one. The trouble was
that they were unconscious of it.
We look at the product and say that to Coleridge's intimacy
with the Wordsworths we owe one uniquely beautiful poem
and the fragments of two others. It may be so; but I find it
hard to believe that Coleridge would have done nothing
without the Wordsworths, impossible to believe that Words-
worth would have done nothing without Coleridge. And I
am convinced that it was fatal to Coleridge to deceive himself
into believing that there was an identity between Wordsworth's
experience and his own; for that, I think, finally confirmed
Coleridge in an unconscious habit of intellectual and moral
duplicity in a matter of all things most vital to his own true
life. He plunged into a condition of religious self-intoxication;
and he emerged from it like a revivalist after a debauch of
religiosity, having lost contact with his own integrity of being.
After that first period of intimacy with the Wordsworths at
Racedown and Alfoxden, I think it is true to say of Coleridge
that he never afterwards knew what the Truth was; he had
entered on a fatal path which can be described as the opposite
of that instinctively chosen by K(jats "An axiom is no axiom
to me until I have proved it on my pulses." Coleridge no longer
knew how to prove things on his pulses; he lost the thread of
his own being. He had, involuntarily no doubt, committed
8?
LITERARY PORTRAITS
the mortal sin of creative genius: he had connived at his own
conviction.
There is to me no more grievous history than this of
Coleridge. It leaves me sad and miserable, for truly I love the
man. The story of Keats, far more harrowing, nay, almost
intolerable in its final anguish, leaves me at peace with
Destiny, or with God. It is an authentic revelation of the
unutterable mystery of life. But the story of Coleridge is
depressing. It fascinates me; and I wish it did not. I lean
over him to read his heart, and I find myself for ever dis-
covering things that I do not want to discover.
And so it is that for me the young Coleridge is the true
Coleridge the Coleridge whom I can love unreservedly is the
Coleridge before he met the Wordsworths, and the Coleridge
just at the first moment of blissful happiness when he had met
them: the fleeting moment when he knew himself and was
glad at his own self-knowledge. Of this moment, thank Heaven,
one imperishable record survives, in Frost at Midnight, written
in February 1798. It is, as I think any lover of Coleridge's
poetry would admit, certainly the most beautiful of all his
poems outside the enchanted three: to me it is as beautiful as
any of them. It has the beauty which is truth, the truth which
is beauty.
We have already analysed the poem ; but we may analyse it
briefly once more, in the light of what further knowledge of
Coleridge this inquiry has brought to us. It is midnight, and
Coleridge sits alone by the fire in the cottage at Stowey. The
silence of the frosty night is intense "strange and extreme".
Coleridge listens to the breathing of his baby sleeping by his
side, and watches the fluttering film of soot on the bar of the
grate.
Then he thinks of his schooldays, when he watched the same
fluttering soot-film, and really believed that it promised the
visit of a stranger, a visitor from home. He tells how, with
unclosed eyes, he would dream of home, in far away Ottery;
and when he slept, the dream of home would prolong itself:
and next morning in school^his eyes would be "fixed in mock
study on his swimming book" while he waited, in vain, for the
promised visit of his friend from home.
Then he turns to the sleeping baby, and his heart is thrilled
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COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH
with tender gladness to think that his childhood shall not be
starved and lonely like his own. He shall not be imprisoned in
a great city; he shall be nature's playmate, and his spirit shall
be shaped by the God who utters himself in Nature. He shall
be, for ever, at home in the universe of Nature.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun- thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
That is, I have no doubt, the most beautiful and unstrained
description of Nature in all Coleridge. It has Nature's own
calm. But how perfect is the harmony of the poem which it
crowns. The frosty midnight calm, "that vexes meditation
with its strange and extreme silentness" in this hush of
nature, one visible motion; the soot-film; one audible sound;
his baby's breathing. One after the other, they flower,
become the theme of a tender and beautiful meditation; and
the meditation is one meditation, bound together by an
indissoluble and natural imaginative unity. His own child-
hood; his child's childhood. Life shall not be for him as it was
for me ; he shall not be cheated of his birthright as I was ; he
shall not be cut off from the world as I am.
At this moment Coleridge understands and accepts the
past which has made the present, and utters his acceptance in
a beautiful movement of the Imagination. In this moment,
he touches the peace which passcth all understanding. I
do not believe he was often to know it again. But for this
moment, he was veritably the voice of Nature not Words-
worth's Nature, but the Nature of his own experience: a
starved and lonely childhood, a passionate longing for
affection, but all bitterness resolved in an utterly unselfish
desire that his babe so beautiful shall be rich where he is poor.
And all this is also Nature. And there is something in
Coleridge's experience at this moment that Wordsworth
himself can never know. Wordsworth, who has made him
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
realize what he has lost, can never know the happiness of
promising it to a loved one. Wordsworth, who is so rich, will
never have the riches of knowing what it is to be poor. All
this, it seems to me, is in that beautiful poem; and because all
this is there, it seems to me no wonder that, for this one
moment, when all thought of challenging, or identifying
himself with Wordsworth is remote from Coleridge's mind,
he should describe Nature with a simple imaginative power at
least as great as Wordsworth's own. "He is he; and I am I."
Why Coleridge could not be loyal to that moment of
illumination and self-knowledge, I do not know. But by the
summer of this year 1798 Coleridge had taken the fatal
decision if so strong a phrase has meaning in his history
to leave his baby, and his baby's mother, and the baby's new
born brother, by themselves in Stowey, while he voyaged with
the Wordsworths to Germany. The second baby died while
he was away. I wonder whether his young wife ever forgave
him or them: I do not think she did; and, had I been she, I
could never have forgiven ,him or them. Or, if I could have
forgiven him, I would never have trusted him again. Still
more, I wonder whether he ever forgave himself. I do not
think he did. Anyway, I am sure that Life never forgave him.
His inward decay began; he began to be eaten away by his
sense of sin : and within five years he was a broken man, and
the fire of his genius glowed seldom through the ashes.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
"The deep, deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child's
hands were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck, or his
lips for ever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below
all, and these lurk to the last." So De Quincey wrote in
Suspiria, and it sticks in one's memory. There is a touch of
floridity in the expression, which awakens the misgiving that
the writer is luxuriating a little in his sentiment; but there is
also an impressiveness about it, which convinces. Moreover,
it is almost, though not quite, faithful to the facts of De
Quincey's actual experience. His beloved sister did die during
his childhood; but his mother did not. Nevertheless, it is more
than possible that he did endure a moment when his " hands
were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck"; and that he
was carefully using a phrase which may have been literally
true of his own experience, while suggesting to the reader that
the severance happened through his mother's death. The
truth was worse. The severance was due to his mother's
principle. Mrs. Quincey the elder was a remarkable woman;
but, unfortunately, she was persuaded by her particular
brand of evangelical Christianity that demonstrative affection
between parent and child was dangerous to the child.
Of this lack of human warmth between the fatherless De
Quincey and his mother his life betrayed the consequences.
So did his brother Pink's. The entire difference between the
careers of Thomas and Pink shows that we must not attempt
to explain everything by their childish conditioning. But
Pink's reckless embrace of reality, and De Quincey's feckless
evasion of it, seem to spring from the same source. And
Pink's behaviour, when at last he returned from his Odyssey,
in refusing to see any of his family ; his mysterious illness, in
which "every feeling is dulled except a sense of pain and
sorrow, which retain their first strength;" and finally Mrs. De
Quincey's notion that Pink was not really Pink at all, but an
impostor seeking to obtain his patrimony, seem all to belong
to the same order of experience as Thomas De Quincey's own.
Apparently Mrs. De Quincey found, in Pink's shrinking from
meeting her, evidence that he must be unreal. Her sensitive
LITERARY PORTRAITS
children must have felt something the same about her. "You
have urged your misery," she wrote to Thomas, when he
besought her to take him away from Manchester Grammar
School, "and you still urge it again; but cannot you tell me
what it is?" It was simple enough: she had taken him away
from Bath Grammar School where he was happy, and sent
him to Manchester where he was not. But Mrs. Quincey was
one to whom happiness was not an argument for prolonging
a condition, but for ending it. Happiness was wrong; it was
unregenerate.
This was not the whole story. Thomas had been mixing,
since he had left Bath, in an aristocratic society which he
found congenial. With a sort of snobbery which may be
reprehensible, but is very intelligible, he had ennobled lys
own name. From plain Quincey he became De Quincey. His
mother's severity on this aberration was salutary enough.
"If you ever arrive at higher distinction, your birth and your
future can have no share in your elevation; but were you to
stir up doubtful and remote pretensions to a line of ancestry,
you would become truly ridiculous." This one of the pomps
and vanities of this wicked world we can all agree with her in
condemning; but it is inconceivable that she understood or
cared to understand its motive, which was to create a kind of
sanctuary for himself, and to interpose a barrier between his
sensitiveness and the rude reality of life. It is rather com-
forting than otherwise to think that in this matter Thomas
eventually triumphed. He is become De Quincey, for good
and all; and no-one would grudge him now his self-inflicted
accolade.
Opium, in this perspective, was only another of his refuges.
It was more deplorable than a home-made nobility. But it
is easy for us to be virtuous. A juster attitude might reflect
that if we had had to endure his chilly childhood, we should
expect to be forgiven our consolations. And there was, in
spite of all, a kind of tenacity in the man which enabled him
to turn his indulgence to account. It is true that we do not
find so much in Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow as did the critics
of sixty years ago, when David Masson called it "the most
perfect specimen he has left us of his peculiar art of prose-
poetry, and certainly also one of the most magnificent pieces
92
DE QUINCEY
of prose in the English or in any other language." To us it is
too voulu ; too implicated in the elaborate assumption of the
singing-robe. But there is a quality in some of his more
enduring work which is unique and precious, and for which
opium is probably in part responsible. Perhaps the best
example is the three parts of The English Mail Coach, where the
narration of the substantive event has all the clarity and
palsied immobility of a nightmare. Whether it was true, as he
asserted, that he actually dreamed the past happening over
and over again, may be doubted ; but he certainly succeeded
in infusing the peculiar emotional tension of a dream into
his story. In his valuable book on De Quincey Horace Eaton
very pertinently notes that it was during the period when he
was struggling to escape from his slavery to the drug that
he conspicuously succeeded in communicating the dream-
quality to his work: as in 1819, when he wrote the original
Confessions, and in 1844 and 1845, when he wrote the "dream-
fugues." At those periods of struggle against the drug his
dreaming itself seems to have become more terrifying (as
did Coleridge's) ; but this was compensated by an added power
of making his experience the material of his art. That art
could easily become too deliberate ; but at its best, it is horribly
impressive.
Another, and far less reprehensible, refuge of De Quincey
was the society of children. If it is, at all times and in all
forms, a weakness to take refuge from reality, then De Quincey's
predilection for the company of little children was a sign of
weakness. But it seems unduly severe to speak, as a recent
critic of De Quincey has done, of his unrestrained grief at the
death of Catherine Wordsworth as a "wallowing in artificially
heightened luxury of woe." It is difficult to dispute about
matters of sheer and immediate taste; we can only record our
complete agreement with Mr. Eaton's finding that De
Quincey's letters to the Wordsworth's are eloquent of a deep
and genuine grief.
"What tender, what happy hours we passed together!
Many a time when we were* alone, she would put her sweet
arms about me and kiss me with a transport that was even
then quite affecting to me. Nobody can judge from her
manner to me before others what love she shewed to me when
93
LITERARY PORTRAITS
we were playing or talking alone. On the night when she
slept with me in the winter, we lay awake all the middle of
the night and talked oh, how tenderly together: when we
fell asleep, she was lying in my arms; once or twice I awoke
from the presence of her dear body : but I could not find in
my heart to disturb her. Many times on that night when
she was murmuring out tender sounds of endearment, she
would lock her little arms with such passionateness round
my neck as if she had known that it was to be the last night
we were ever to pass together. Ah pretty, pretty love, would
God I might have seen thy face and kissed thy dear lips again !"
Perhaps we should not write in exactly that way to-day;
but the emotion is surely authentic, and it is the particular
emotion of a grown man who has known what it is to lose his
heart in disinterested love of a child. And this interpretation,
which seems natural and unstrained, fits exactly with m's
later confession in a letter to Lushington :
"All children become objects of deeper tenderness when it is
remembered that a certain portion of them are always marked
down in the unseen register as consecrated from their birth
to an early death ... It is therefore of vast importance to one's
own peace of mind, that an existence so brief from a station
of after-review should have been altogether happy."
That is the attitude of the true lover of children ; and no
fact concerning the inwardness of De Quincey's life is better
established than his delight in the society of children, or their
delight in his. With them, as Mr. Eaton says, he felt "no
need of defences" such as he instinctively interposed between
himself and the adult world : such for example, as his studied
and stylized politeness in correspondence and in address, which
so confused the servants who waited on him, when there were
any to wait. It is perfectly true that this love of children did
not make him an exemplary father to his own. The necessities
of his years of hiding from his creditors in Edinburgh forced
him to use them as his messengers; and there is a tinge of
justified bitterness in his daughter's memory of her fears and
the dangers to which she was exposed. It would have been
more satisfying if De Quincey had been able altogether to
conform his conduct to his love; but that the love was real, it
is impossible to doubt.
We must not confuse his intense feeling of anguish at
Catherine Wordsworth's death, as expressed in letters to the
94
DB QUINCEY
Wordsworth family which we cannot read without a pang,
with his retrospective account of his feelings in his Reminiscences
of 1840. In retrospection, De Quincey like most people was
seldom quite reliable; and he was there engaged in stressing
the strangeness of his recovery from his prolonged paroxysm
of grief. He himself speaks of the months during which he
flung himself nightly on the little girl's grave as "a senseless
self-surrender to passion; far, in fact, so far from making an
effort to resist it, I clung to it as a luxury." It passed into a
curious physical malady from which he was suddenly released;
and after the physical revolution, he candidly avows that he
entered a condition of emotional indifference towards
Catherine's memory.
But that the total experience had been really shattering is
revealed not only by his letters at the time, but with almost
equal clarity, by the utterly unexpected sequel of his falling in
love with Peggy Simpson of the Nab. Nothing in De Quincey's
past had prepared us for this. His chief escape from the harsh-
ness of reality appeared to be fixed : it was to be opium, not
the tenderness of a woman. But his grief over little Kate had
hit him too hard and too deep. He needed something more
real than opium; and, considering his intimacy with the
Wordsworths, and his deference to their opinion, he acted with
surprising courage and independence towards Peggy Simpson.
One cannot help admiring him for it. De Quincey's complete
indifference to respectability in this crucial matter makes, to
our thinking, a better human showing than either Coleridge's
marriage, or Wordsworth's behaviour to Annette Vallon;
and it is very possible that De Quincey's resentment at what
he felt to be an element of moral humbug in their attitude was
at the bottom of the feeling of prejudice against them which
he afterwards displayed in his Reminiscences. Anyhow, his
marriage was, in substance, a good one. It justified itself,
pretty completely, in life. Not that Mrs. De Quincey had an
easy or a happy time. Her cry of sorrow at her loneliness dur-
ing De Quincey's long absences pierces the heart; and there
is nothing more touching in the record of his life than the
gentle and humble plea which De Quincey quotes from one
of her letters, when urging Dorothy Wordsworth to visit her.
She had asked him "not to take her grief amiss." At least, in
95
LITERARY PORTRAITS
spite of all the hardship, she had, and enjoyed, the consolation
that he loved her, and that, when he spoke of "the over-
whelming suffering of separation from my wife's society," he
was speaking from his heart.
The great merit of Mr. Eaton's biography of De Quincey is
that, without malice or extenuation, it puts before us a strange,
yet simple and lovable human being. Mr. Eaton conceals
nothing that many years of patient research have revealed to
him; he makes no excuses for the little man; he uses no art,
save that of a loving fidelity to his subject; and he leaves us
fully satisfied. With critical estimate Mr. Eaton is only
incidentally concerned. Evidently, he began his work with the
primary conviction that DC Quincey was worth all the pains
that a faithful biographer could bestow on him. Whether or
not it is true, as Mr. Sackville West has maintained, that "the
spectacle of De Quincey's living his life is an unedifying one,
look at it how we will," seems to depend upon what we mean
by edification. That it was a model of living to be copied, no
one would dream of saying; but it is certainly not a depressing
life to contemplate. We do not leave it with the feeling that
De Quincey's great gifts were vilely cast away; but rather that
he managed, sometimes clumsily and sometimes wastefully, to
do all that he had it in him to do. If he lived long and 74
is a remarkable age for a man who consumed so much opium
as he it was because he deserved to live long. Somewhere
within him was a spring of indomitable energy which
triumphed over drugs and bailiffs and the rest of his miseries.
That he entertained grandiose dreams of what he might have
done, if the sordid necessity of making a living had not been
imposed upon him, was but natural. He wrote in a draft of
a letter to his mother in 1818:
I hoped and have every year hoped with better grounds
that (if I should be blessed with life sufficient) I should accom-
plish a great revolution in the intellectual condition of the
world ; that I should both as one cause and as one effect of that
revolution place education upon a new footing throughout all
civilized nations, was but one part of this evolution : it was
also but a part (though umay seem singly more than enough
for a whole) to be the first founder of True Philosophy: and it
was no more than a part that I hoped to be the re-establisher
in England (with great accessions) of Mathematics.
96
DE QUINCEY
This is truly Coleridgean in its vastness ; and some might say
that De Quincey did not get even so far as Coleridge on the
road towards achieving his panphilosophy. Instead, he did
a great many other things ; and he left a very substantial body
of work behind him. It was under the compulsion of earning
a living that he took to actual writing. Without that, he would
probably have been quite content to go on dreaming of a
maximum opus\ but once he had begun, he worked hard, even
if he worked erratically, and, what is more, he did not keep up
a continual moan about the sordid necessities of his craft.
He became a journalist, and he was not far from being proud
of it. The opening of his masterly essay on Toryism, Whiggism
& Radicalism which appeared in Tail's Magazine in 1836,
contains this knowledgeable praise of the journalism of the
time :
The newspapers, and other political journals of this country
are conducted with extraordinary talent with more, in fact,
than was ever before applied in any nation to the same func-
tion of public teaching. Indeed, without talent of a high
order, and without a variety of talent, it would be a mere
impossibility, that an English journal should sustain its
existence. Perhaps it would be impossible to show any excep-
tion to the rule; unless in the rare cases where a provincial
newspaper has inherited from a past generation a sort of
monopoly, or privilege of precedency, as a depository of
advertisements. Advertisers go where they have been used to go,
on a certain knowledge that readers, interested in advertise-
ments, will by a reciprocal necessity, go where advertisements
are sure to be found; and, therefore, a monopoly of this
nature is most secure where it is most intense. But allowing
for this single exception, the political press of England has so
much more than its fair proportion of natural talent that, for
thirty years and upwards, it has even acted injuriously upon
the literature of the country, by impressing too exclusive
direction upon the marketable talent of the young and the
aspiring.
De Quincey, in fact, deserves the honour and, as the
passage shows, he would have regarded it as a high honour
of being called one of the greatest English journalists, in a
period when journalism was at its zenith: as indeed it was.
Looked at soberly, it was an extraordinary achievement for
one who had been brought up to enjoy and expect a life of
ease and contemplative detachment. If we say he was making
7 97
LITERARY PORTRAITS
a virtue of necessity, that only proves him the better man. In
what else does a life of achievement consist, save in making
virtues of our necessities?
There are many dull, verbose patches in his journalistic
production. It could not have been otherwise, considering
the conditions under which he wrote. But the general level of
attainment is astonishingly high, though not quite so high as
Hazlitt's. Nor was De Quincey's quasi-omniscience superficial :
he had read in, and thought about, innumerable subjects.
His obvious blind spots were only two. Of one, he himself was
conscious. "My hatred of all science, excepting mathematics,
is exquisite." For the other his complete unawareness of
the splendid development of English prose-fiction perhaps
his almost total immersion in the practice of journalism was
partly responsible. Obviously, he did not see that at the very
moment he was remarking that journalism swallowed up all
the marketable literary talent, the novel was expanding to
meet the needs of an expanding society. For him, Mother
Radcliffe remained the genius of the novel, partly because he
had himself a taste for naive horrors, partly because the novel
was for him chiefly a feminine relaxation. One would like to
know how he would have reacted to such a book as Mrs.
Gaskell's North and South, particularly seeing he too was a
Manchester man. It would surely have been, both by content
and authorship, a puzzling portent to him. He was the very
antipodes of a feminist.
This room is her pretty boudoir, in which, till to-night
poor thing! she has been glad and happy. There stands her
miniature conservatory, and there expands her miniature
library; as we circumnavigators of literature are apt (you
know) to regard ail female libraries in the light of miniatures.
His exquisite hatred of science was, in fact, confined to the
sciences of observation. "I am not an Ornithologist, nor an
Icthyologist : I am no Botanist, no Mineralogist : as a Naturalist,
in short, I am shamefully ignorant." He had one of the best
excuses for ignorance; as he woke up to discover at the age of
twenty-four, he was very short-sighted : and nothing shuts one
out so effectively from the study of the book of Nature as not
being able to see the letters. But, in other provinces, his
interests were eminently scientific. He was an enthusiast for
DE QUINCEY
economics, and Ricardo's doctrines came to him with the
force of a revelation, in very much the same way as the doc-
trines of Marx struck men a century later. Yet with this he
combined a rare faculty of insight into the concrete process of
history. His essay on Toryism, Whiggism & Radicalism contains
the firm outline of as impressive an English political history
as has ever been written. He had some excuse for the dream
of " the History of England, in twelve volumes" of which he
used, at the age of 70, to speak to his last and most successful
publisher, James Hogg. Hogg regarded it as the amiable
fantasy of a rather childish old man. The reader of that essay
will at least understand why De Quincey believed that he
could have done better than Macaulay or Froude.
Underlying this natural aptitude of De Quincey for history
was a sense of the process of life as a conflict of opposites. The
English Party system was a manifestation of the tension of Tin
and Tang (De Quincey would have rejoiced alike in the funda-
mental conception and the learned superstructure of Mr.
Toynbee's book) . This vision of life arose in De Quincey as a
child, if we are to believe his own report in a famous fragment
of Suspiria.
"Upon me, as upon others scattered thinly by tens &
twenties over every thousand years, fell too powerfully and
too early the vision of life. The horror of life mixed itself
already in earliest youth with the heavenly sweetness of life
... I saw from afar and from before what I was to see from
behind. Is this the description of an early youth passed in the
shades of gloom? No; but of a youth passed in the divinest
happiness. And, if the reader has (which so few have) the
passion without which there is no reading of the legend and
superscription upon man's brow ... he will know that the
rapture of life . . . does not arise, unless as perfect music arises,
music of Mozart or Beethoven, by the confluence of the mighty
and terrific discords with the subtil concords. Not by con-
trast, or as reciprocal foils, do these elements act, which is
the feeble conception of many but by union. They are the
sexual forces in music: "male and female created he them;"
and these mighty antagonists do not put forth their hostilities
by repulsion but by deepest attraction.
De Quincey was an unusual child, and it is quite possible
that the substance of that vision came to him early, though the
interpretation of his sensation was thf; work of the man. The
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
attitude was imaginative and profound, and it was a mag-
nificent equipment for the critic or the historian. From
it derived his little essay, On the Knocking at the Gate in
Macbeth^ which begins with an exhortation to the reader
"never to pay any attention to his understanding when it
stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind" ; from
it, equally, his view of the "bursting into life" of the English
constitution in the Parliamentary War : and it also supplies the
pattern of his "dream-fugues". The simplicity of sensation
passes beyond the understanding into the simplicity of
imagination.
The De Quincey whom Mr. Eaton portrays is a man in
whom this achievement seems natural. "Eccovi," said Carlyle,
"that child has been in Hell!" And that too is the word of a
truly imaginative criticism. A child who had been in Hell
that was De Quincey; and that is the De Quincey who appears
to us in Professor Eaton's biography. Since it may well be that
the Hells of vision and experience through which the sensitive
man must pass are for the purpose of making him as a child
once more, possibly Carlyle's phrase is true in some degree of
all imaginative men. But it is pre-eminently true of De
Quincey: for he went into his Hell as a child.
100
MATTHEW ARNOLD AND HIS IDEALS
After a period of comparative oblivion. Matthew Arnold
has become contemporary again. The elegant and melancholy
Oxonian who abandoned the pursuit of poetry for what we
might call had not the phrase been rather cheapened a
life of service to the society of the future, the outlines of
which no one so clearly discerned as he, is a kindred spirit
to-day.
Rightly, I think, the authors of a recent commentary have
read Obermann Once More as the final chapter of Arnold's life
as a poet : the record of his passing from poetry to prose, from
aiml^ssness to purpose, from passion to peace. Not that these
transitions are always identical. It was Arnold's peculiarity
and distinction that they were not merely concomitant, but
involved in one another. In Obermann Once More Arnold
reviewed his life in relation to the life of the great world. Between
the first Obermann and the second, twenty crucial years had
elapsed. The revolutionary uncertainty of 1848 had given
place to the democratic confidence of 1867 the year of the
Household Franchise Act. And the spiritual difference
between those two historical moments, as Arnold now saw
them, was that whereas, twenty years before, the old
"Christian" social and political order was still in possession
of Europe, though the faith on which it was based was dead,
now the order itself had disintegrated. The moment had come
when it was possible and necessary to try to build.
To the effort to build on the ruins Arnold's life was thence-
forward devoted. From the beginning he realised, with a
clarity shared by few of his contemporaries, that the universal
democratic society of the future could have no solid foundation
except in a religious faith. Mechanical progress gave no
assurance of moral advance ; the mere apparatus of political
democracy was no safeguard against moral anarchy. Unless
the masses who were now entering on political power were
educated into an entirely new conception of civic responsibility,
and at the same time into a development of themselves as
moral persons so secure that they could use the new State as
an instrument of true civilisation, they would become its
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
slaves. The only means to such a development of the moral
personality was religious education. But nobody, in the society
of Arnold's day, meant by religious education what he meant
by it an education into a new religious catholicity. For
everybody else it was a sectarian affair. Indeed, the phrase
"religious education" was then what it has remained ever
since in this country : the terror of all responsible politicians,
who knew by grim experience what anarchical fanaticisms
were aroused by that fiery Cross for narrow minds.
Arnold's precarious hopes have been disappointed, his
substantial fears all realised, in the anarchy of mass-society
to-day. Yet there are those who, half admitting his prophetic
insight, smile in superior scorn at his effort to restate the
fundamentals of Christianity in a form which might serve as
the basis of the new universal society. Arnold, they say', was
superficial; he did not understand the depths of man's tragic
situation, or the reality of human sinfulness. For him sin was
no more than "the something which infects the world."
The criticism might be well, if those who make it showed signs
of acting in accord with their own pessimism. But to denounce
Arnold for "liberalism" in politics and religion comes awk-
wardly from those who respect no oecumenical religious
authority. The rigours of a private orthodoxy are no remedy
for the social disease which Arnold strove to prevent. The
truth is that Arnold was more radical in his criticism of human
nature and human society than those who denounce him for
not being radical enough.
I at least firmly believe that Arnold diagnosed, while it
was yet in germ, the condition of moral anarchy in which
Europe is involved to-day. The problem which he prophetic-
ally confronted in the eighteen-sixties how to moralise
the coming mass-State is the actual problem of the nine-
teen-forties. It is the more unmanageable, because his
warnings and his remedies were disregarded. And, although
his poems belong to the period before he accepted the mission
of being at once the servant and the prophet of the society in
which we live, they are essential to an understanding of the
spirit and the conviction irt which he dedicated himself to the
cause of civilisation. The loveliness of the best of them is a
measure of his sacrifice at the call of duty.
102
MATTHEW ARNOLD
In a letter of 1867, he was at pains to repudiate the sug-
gestion that he had used Empedocles and Obermann merely
as "mouthpieces through which to vent my own opinions."
He had still, he admitted, a sympathy with "the figure
Empedocles presents to the imagination 5 '; and no doubt, he
added, the sympathy had been greater at the time the poem
was written, some twenty years before.
"But neither then nor now would my creed, if I wished or
were able to draw it out in black and white, be by any means
identical with that contained in the preachment of Empedocles.
No critic appears to remark that if Empedocles throws himself
into Etna his creed can hardly be one to live by. If the creed
of Empedocles were, as exhibited in my poem, a satisfying
one, he ought to have lived after delivering himself of it, not
died."
The fineil argument is only half-convincing; it is invalid at
one level, and valid at another. Moreover, the fact is that not
merely "the religious newspapers" of 1867 some of which
were very justly reckoned among Arnold's abominations
but some of his intimate friends of eighteen years before had
believed that he was using Empedocles as the vehicle for his
own thoughts. Shairp wrote as much to Clough in 1849.
The discrepancy was real. As far as Arnold's conscious
thinking went, Empedocles's thoughts were pretty faithful to
Arnold's thoughts in 1849. But Empedocles threw himself
into Etna (though perhaps it was not so necessary that he
should as Arnold's argument assumed) while Arnold lived on.
And Arnold was right to insist on the difference. It was not
a mere debating point ; for he had always had a Wordsworthian
awareness of man's oneness with the persistent, instinctive,
animal life of the world. He had always acknowledged the
presence and potency in himself of what Spinoza called the
vis existendi. He had described it well in Resignation, which was
written at much the same time as Empedocles.
That general life which does not cease,
Whose secret is not joy, but peace;
That life whose dumb wish is not miss'd
If birth proceeds, if things subsist ;
The life of plants, and stones, and rain
The life he craves if not in vain
Fate gave, which chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
It was indeed to bring his conscious thinking into harmony
with the unconscious persistence of life that Arnold strove.
Coleridge, though Arnold seems not to have known it, had
formulated the goal and the endeavour in almost exactly the
same terms. More pertinently, Arnold-Empedocles utters the
same thought at the end of the poem, when the philosopher-
poet imagines a succession of rebirths of the soul, in which the
thinking part of man seeking rest will be called to
Go through the sad probation all again,
To see if we will poise out life at last,
To see if we will now at last be true
To our own only true deep-buried selves,
Being one with which we are one with the whole world.
But the deep-buried self, the search after which is the cjiief
motif of Arnold's reflective poetry, and the discovery of it the
summum bonum in his scale of values, is not simply identical
with the enduring impulse to mere existence which man
shares with "plants and stones and rain." It is rather the
product of harmony achieved between the conscious self and
the unconscious life : between what Freud (in this matter less
original than his disciples suppose) has called the Ego and
the Id. At this crucial point of his spiritual development man
ceases to be a divided being. He is unified in obedience to
the law of his own being, which is part of the universal law
which governs the working of the famous "power in ourselves,
not ourselves, making for righteousness." Only by this
achievement does a man come to the knowledge of his own
true purpose in life, the mission which it is appointed him to
accomplish. Lacking it, he falls away to quote Empedocles
again
Into some bondage of the flesh or mind,
Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze,
Forged by the imperious lonely thinking power.
The bondage of the flesh ensues upon following the urge to
rejoin the general life at the level of mere animal existence, in
disregard of the special differentia of man le roseau pensant;
the bondage of the mind is the outcome of the refusal to
acknowledge man's fundamental community with Nature.
Freedom consists in, or follows from, a recognition of both
allegiances, which leads to the gradual emergence part
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MATTHEW ARNOLD
discovery, part creation of the hidden self. During this pro-
cess, which is hardly to be distinguished from Keats's "soul-
making," the intermittent and fleeting intimations of our own
"line" to use Arnold's favourite word become more solid
and abiding. Till then, as he put it in The Buried Life
We try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well but 'tis riot true.
Freedom, the discovery of one's own "line", truth in act
and utterance these were for Arnold, aspects, or alternative
descriptions of the same condition, whose initiates he called
"children of the second birth". By what paths he came to
associate, and finally, to identify this spiritual renascence with
the t rebirth which is at the heart of Christian doctrine is
hardly a matter for consideration in connection with his
poetry, for his poetry came to an end before he had made the
identification. But in the same unpublished letter which we
quoted above are these significant words.
That Christ is alive is language far truer to my own feeling
and observation of what is passing in the world, than that
Christ is dead.
That may not satisfy indeed it was not intended to satisfy
the demands of orthodoxy; but it may satisfy other demands.
The importance of Arnold's contribution to the reinterpreta-
tion of the Christian religion has been largely neglected, not,
we believe, because it is superficial, but because it is profound.
It is based on a deep experience of life; but the weight of its
findings is concealed by the truly deceptive simplicity of
statement which Arnold cultivated no less as a spiritual than
as a literary virtue.
But the relevance of this, for our present purpose, is that
when Arnold found his "line" he abandoned poetry. That is,
of course, no judgment on poetry in general; but it does imply
a judgment of Arnold upon his own. Pushed to a false ex-
tremity, that judgment might read: " Tis eloquent, 'tis well,
but 'tis not true." But truth in the sense in which Arnold
might, and probably would, have denied it to his own poetry,
is the outcome of an inward harmony and a sense of obedience
to the mysterious purpose appointed to the individual by Life
or the divine Providence. Greater poets than he, he would
105
LITERARY PORTRAITS
have been the first to insist, were privileged to express the
truth (which was also their truth) in poetry. They were, in
the full sense of the word, "called" to be poets. Of these, he
believed, there had been few: Homer, the Greek tragedians,
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Goethe
he reckoned the chief. But the collocation of Wordsworth
and Goethe, which was frequent with him, was always qualified
by a significant comparison.
But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate ;
whereas the truly great poet "sees life steadily and sees it
whole." The phrase, like others of Arnold's, is so familiar
that its place in the context of his thought is seldom re-
membered. But such a vision is the privilege of those whose
"line" is poetry. Their conquest of their buried selves is not
accompanied by the realisation that their poetic gift is inade-
quate to the new truth. On the contrary, their second birth
lifts them to the condition of being authentic voices of Nature
the Nature that includes man. They are instruments through
which are uttered the self-evident oracles of a hidden wisdom.
Their activity is passivity.
The happiness divine
They feel runs o'er in every line.
It is the same as Wordsworth's "deep power of joy"; but
Arnold had thought more about its genesis.
Precisely this deep power of joy he felt to be lacking in his
own poetry even at its best. It was deficient in the joy which
comes partly from complete self-fulfilment in the creation of
poetry, partly from fulfilment of the completed, and therefore
largely impersonal self, whereby the most terrible tragedy
becomes a paean of praise. This truth he expressed, a little
baldly, in an epigram which some are surprised to find included
in his poetical works. But it is, as he said to Clough, "an
oracular quatrain"; and certainly it touched the heart of his
theory, or rather his religious conception, of poetry.
What poets feelnot when they make
A pleasure in creating,
The world, in its turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating.
1 06
MATTHEW ARNOLD
That the joy in the act of poetic creation should persist during
the period when the poet's mind, from facing "the burden of
the mystery," passes onward to the power of "mirroring life's
majestic whole" was the crucial test of the few who are called
and chosen to be poets. The word he used for the effect was
"animating," probably with a reminiscence of Wordsworth's
tribute to Milton's "soul-animating strains." By this test he
himself had failed.
"I am glad you like the Gipsy Scholar (he wrote to Clough)
but what does it do for you? Homer animates Shakespeare
animates in its own poor way I think Sohrab and Rustum
animates the Gipsy Scholar at best awakens a pleasing
melancholy. But this is not what we want.
The complaining millions of men
Darken in labour and pain.
What they want is something to animate and ennoble them
not merely to add zest to their melancholy or grace to their
dreams.
It is to misinterpret Arnold completely as the appeal to
Homer and Shakespeare shows to imagine that he is de-
manding of the poet that he should be a moralist with a
message. True, Arnold himself was to become a moralist with
a message; but that metamorphosis was due precisely to the
fact that, judging himself by his own severe standards, he
found himself wanting as a poet. He had the spiritual develop-
ment of a great poet, but not the faculty divine to carry it as a
poet. He had to proclaim his message by precept, since he
could not impart it by revelation. Possibly he himself did not
always keep entirely clear in his own practice of criticism the
distinction between animation and uplift : between the height-
ened sense of life that is communicated even by the verbal
texture of the great poet and the indoctrination that is im-
parted by the expression of some profound truth about life.
But there is no room for doubt in the minds of those who study
Arnold's poetics in their full context that the distinction is
basic to his belief in the significance of poetry in general and
his judgment of his own in particular. The riches of English
poetry, though incomparable, are not so great that we can
afford to be so severe to the beauty of The Scholar Gipsy as he
was ; but we can appreciate the austerity of his perspective.
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
Perhaps the poem which most fully reflects the controlled
turmoil of Arnold's nature while he was working his way to his
mature philosophy of life and poetry is Resignation. In it are
combined, in a blend which has made it the favourite of many,
his lyrical-pastoral gift and his reflective power. Arnold
packed a great deal in that seemingly simple poem, which he
probably worked over and over again. In it he tentatively
suggests a hierarchy of human natures. The Gipsies represent
the aimless instinctive, who live in the moment; the Pilgrims
and the Warriors are the purposeful but narrow- visioned ;
then there are those emancipated from the life of passion
in Spinoza's sense of the word in whom the Gipsies'
instinctive submission to life is raised to level of consciousness.
The prince of these is the poet.
Action and suffering though he know,
He hath not lived, if he lives so.
The poet contemplates, is identified with yet detached from,
"the eternal mundane spectacle"; he is moved by it and the
working of Nature within himself to creation. "To his mighty
heart, Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart." But to neither
Arnold nor Fausta has this great gift been given : they belong
to the tribe indeed, but not to the blood royal.
And though fate grudge to thee and me
The poet's rapt security,
Yet they, believe me, who wait
No gifts from chance, have conquered fate.
The hierarchy is not absolutely clear in the poem itself;
and the cause of the obscurity is illuminating. It is that
Arnold hesitates at one moment whether to reckon himself
among the poets. At one point the poet is indubitably merged
with himself, and is represented as craving the general life
and as burdened with "a sad lucidity of soul." That may have
been true enough of Arnold at that time; but it is in flat
contradiction to the "rapt security" which is attributed to the
ideal poet in the next movement of the poem, where Arnold
definitely disclaims for himself the true poetic endowment.
The indecision is more than curious if the poem was indeed
much revised; it is as though we watched him in the very
process of forming the judgment upon himself as poet to
which he was finally to adhere. An aptitude for pleasing
1 08
MATTHEW ARNOLD
melancholy, he wrote to Clough, "is the basis of my nature
and of my poetics."
It was not enough for him. To be a life-long minor poet was
no destiny for such a man; indeed, it was a spiritual
impossibility. A poet of Arnold's gift, having achieved the
kind of awareness he had achieved, must (it seems) either
become a poet of the first rank, or abandon his semi- vocation.
Since he could not be the kind of poet he revered, he became a
prophet instead surely the most far-seeing of his time. How
far this was a matter of deliberate election must remain
obscure; but the inherent probability is that he had to feel his
way towards his "line," towards the utterance in act and word
of his own truth. One can find little substance in the ultra-
roanantic theory that Arnold was ruined as a poet and unful-
filled as a man because he did not plunge headlong into his
affair with Marguerite. Arnold developed as a poet for years
after that episode was over; and the regrets he felt, keen as they
were, were certainly not such as to cripple his powers. There
seems to be no solid evidence, other than the fact that he
ceased to write poetry, that Arnold's poetic powers failed. He
had the lucidity and resolution of soul to abandon what was,
by his own standard of self-judgment, something less than a
vocation. Some speak of Arnold's "inevitable transition from
poetry to prose". Inevitable is, I believe, in Arnold's case, the
strictly correct word ; and part of the lasting fascination of his
small corpus of poetic work is that it derives much of its subtler
meaning from the inevitability by which he relinquished it.
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ANDREW BRADLEY
It is, probably, a not uncommon experience with those who
have long practised the art of literary criticism to find them-
selves, when they return to the work of A. C. Bradley, satisfied
with their own past performance precisely to the degree in
which their judgments and conclusions have accorded with
his. Those of their appraisals which he anticipated, and
perhaps even suggested (though the suggestion had been
forgotten for many years), are those which have commended
themselves, after long probation, to their developed experience.
And the critic recognises, with a mixture of rueful and happy
surprise, that in so far as he agrees with Bradley he is mature;
and where he disagrees he has still a long road to travel. But
he makes no doubt that the road will lead him to Bradley
again, and bring him under that sign to the thrill of critical
certitude and the bliss of critical peace.
This surmise may be mistaken, and the experience more
uncommon than we imagine. If so, it remains for the present
writer to bear his witness unequivocally, and to declare that
there is no other critic f English literature not Coleridge,
nor Hazlitt nor Lamb nor Arnold, nor Bagehot, nor Pater, nor
Bridges in agreeing with whom he feels the same sense of
relief. It may be that this is not the highest praise that can
be given to a critic. Possibly that critic serves the cause no
less effectively who stimulates the eager mind to explorations
from which it must draw back, and to judgments which it must
finally relinquish. Nor does the praise necessarily imply that
the critic to whom it is given is the greatest of his kind : for
comprehensiveness in range may well be reckoned more impor-
tant than intensity of appreciation, and a fair (though not a
strong) case would be made for judging that Bradley's scope
was too narrow, and his output too small. His works are
contained in four volumes, of which two alone are really
substantial. The commentary on In Memoriam is too
specialised to strengthen his title to critical pre-eminence: it
is commentary, rather than criticism. And some of the papers
collected into A Miscellany are slight. Yet again, it may be
held that it is an essential part of the function of the greatest
no
ANDREW BRADLEY
critic to have applied himself at some time to the judgment of
contemporary production. Bradley never did.
All these things may be admitted; and yet it remains true
that for one quality at least and that quality the rarest and
most essential in literary criticism Bradley was indeed pre-
eminent. That quality is the capacity for a total experience
of the work criticised, and for retaining that experience
throughout the subsequent work of analysis and comparison.
In this respect, all other English critics without exception
appear in comparison with Bradley fragmentary, or partial,
or casual, or capricious. Probably it was because Bradley had
no creative temptations; he was content to be a critic and
nothing more. And more than content. He conceived it
almost as his mission to enter fully into the experience of
English poetry, and then to communicate that experience as
richly and completely as he had received it. One feels behind
the astonishing concentration of Bradley's critical work a mind
of unusual gifts which had, at the moment of its own maturity,
reached the deliberate conclusion that the interpretation of
English poetry was a work worthy of the unremitting applica-
tion of all its powers. About the conclusion there may seem
to be nothing remarkable. After all, it is obvious that such a
task is worthy of the powers of any man. But to resolve
to perform that task, and to refuse to be deflected with any
other this is singular.
In a lecture on "English Poetry and German Philosophy"
(included in A Miscellany) Bradley sets forth the position on
which his critical work was based.
It is in poetry that the English mind expresses most fully its
deepest insight and feelings. This cannot be done by natural
science, simply because that confines itself to a single aspect
of the world. It may be done by religion, by philosophy,
by poetry and the other arts, because they are not thus con-
fined. The English mind does its best in poetry, and not in
the shape of religious or philosophical ideas. We have been,
and are, much in earnest about religion ; but we have produced
very few, if any, men of the final order of genius in that sphere
men like St. Francis, Thomas a Kempis, Luther or Pascal,
mystics like Jacob Bohme, theologians like Schleiermacher.
In philosophy we have some great names, but none of the
greatest, none to rank with Plato or Aristotle, Spinoza or
Kant. And then there is this further fact. When the English
in
LITERARY PORTRAITS
mind is in flood and approaching or reaching its high-tide
... it breaks into poetry; and its greatest poetry appears at
such times. And its most famous philosophy does not . . .
Philosophy never speaks the same language as poetry, or
presents exactly the same view of things. If it did, why should it
exist? But still, if we read first Pindar and the Greek Drama-
tists, and then Plato and Aristotle, we feel no incongruity
or want of kinship in the poetry and the philosophy, and no
inadequacy of either to the other. Neither do we feel this
after reading German poetry from Goethe to Heine, and
German philosophy from Kant to Hegel. But this is just what
we do feel when we pass from the poetry of Shakespeare's or
Wordsworth's age to Locke or Hume or any of our most
purely native philosophers. We find ourselves in the presence,
not merely of an inferior degree of genius, but of a view of the
world incongruous with the substance of poetry.
In devoting himself, therefore, to the experience and
interpretation of the poetry of Shakespeare and the English
Romantics and his published criticism was almost rigorously
confined to them Bradley conceived that he was devoting
himself to the understanding and illumination of the com-
pletest utterance of the English spirit. In one constituent
realm of the triple kingdom of religion and philosophy and art
England was supreme. To reveal her supremacy and its
significance, to enable Englishmen to enter completely into
a heritage which they knew vaguely and instinctively to be
unique, to make them intellectually and imaginatively con-
scious that they possessed a tradition of spiritual expression
to correspond with their more obvious, though perhaps not
less mysterious, tradition of politics and government this
was Bradley's purpose.
To its accomplishment he brought a unique capacity for
the experience of poetry. Other critics may have experienced
poetry as intensely as he, but none (we think) was so richly
endowed with the faculty of retaining the experience in its
pristine integrity throughout the arduous process of intellectual
analysis, so that he seems never to have even felt the tempta-
tation, to which so many even of our greatest critics have
succumbed, to substitute the concept for the experience.
That impression of complete and constant immunity is no
doubt illusory, and is derived from the fact that he published
relatively so little. He was not compelled, as most other
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ANDREW BRADLEY
critics have been, to give hostages to fortune while he was still
immature. If he also learned his art by practising it (as surely
he did) he made his practice essays and his journeyman pieces
alms for oblivion. Even the commentary on In Memoriam is
the work of a master of criticism, although it is not a work of
the first importance, because it handled Tennyson whom
Bradley never ceased to esteem as the greatest of the English
poets since the Romantics from an aspect in which he was
not pre-eminent. Tennyson's indisputable excellence may
be described in Bradley's own later words :
I believe he is unsurpassed, and I suspect he is unequalled,
among English poets in two things one, the accuracy and
delicacy of his perceptions; and the other, the felicity of his
translation into language of that which he perceives. The
first of these things is not specially distinctive of a poet; the
second, though not by itself enough to make a poet great, is the
distinction of a poet from other artists. Poetry is an art of
language; and the born poet, of whatever size, is a person who
has a peculiar gift for translating his experiences whatever
he sees, hears, feels, imagines, thinks into metrical language,
a special necessity in his nature to do this, and a unique joy
in doing it well.
That is not to imply that Bradley thought meanly of
Tennyson as a poetic thinker, or what Coleridge meant by a
philosophic poet. After all, his commentary was concerned
with the thought of In Memoriam, and Bradley was incapable of
displaying his powers of analysis for their own sake. He
believed to the end that In Memoriam was a great poem, and
one worthy of being totally experienced; but there is no
sign that he felt that sense of passionate self-identification
with the poetic mind of Tennyson which he experienced with
Wordsworth and Keats and Coleridge and Shelley, and
supremely with Shakespeare.
In this special sense the commentary on In Memoriam was
an exercise in method. When poetry really achieved the
condition of poetry, Bradley believed, then it demanded a
complete, though temporary surrender. The critic must
begin like the poet as described by Keats in words of which
Bradley himself was the first to seize the significance. "A
poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence. He is
"3
LITERARY PORTRAITS
continually in, for, and filling some other body." So, Bradley
might have said, the critic is the most uncritical of anything
in existence, except that the poetic achievement is the con-
dition of this surrender or transmigration. It is the poetic
fact which makes possible the experience of poetry. So that
the recognition of this fact is at once the preliminary and the
fundamental critical act. From this aspect, it might almost
be said that other critics left off where Bradley began. That
would be extravagant; it would commit the critical solecism
against which Bradley was always on his guard that of
exaggerating distinctions into antitheses. But it is certainly
true that Bradley was more fully conscious of the nature of
his own activity than any critic before or since.
What he sought was the opportunity of what we may call a
permanent surrender. All surrender to poetry must be as
complete as the poetry itself could compel from a mental and
emotional nature prepared to offer no resistance, or at least
to oppose no prejudice. The world of poetry was a world of
life, smaller in extent, greater in intensity; and the critic must
approach it in the spirit of Shakespeare, which, Bradley
believed, was expressed in the words of Keats we have quoted.
But the critic, no more than Shakespeare, could prevent the
natural identification of himself with one "character" rather
than another. So, the experience of one poetic achievement
is acknowledged to be more completely satisfying to the total
nature of a fully conscious man than any other. That pinnacle
was occupied, as everyone knows, in Bradley's critical universe
by Shakespeare. His great book on Shakespearean Tragedy
surely, the greatest single work of criticism in the English
language needs no particular commendation here: it is
become an indispensable instrument in the education of an
Englishman, and those who have once been touched by its
influence are subtly influenced by it for ever.
But, although it would be impertinent to praise the book,
it is well to remember precisely what it is. It is an account of
an experience of Shakespeare which was found finally satis-
fying by a man of unusual capacity for profound thought and
deep feeling. Bradley's passionate enthusiasm is tempered
throughout, sometimes tempered almost to the point of
apparent suppression, but it is there, thrilling and unmis-
114
ANDREW BRADLEY
takable, from beginning to end. And the beginning and the
end are worth remembering. Bradley begins gently.
"Our one object will be what . . . may be called dramatic
appreciation; to increase our understanding and enjoyment
of these works as dramas, to learn to apprehend the action
of some of the personages with a somewhat greater truth and
intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a
shape a little less unlike the shape they were in the imagination
of their creater."
After a rapid and masterly description of the world por-
trayed in Shakespeare's tragedies, in the first lecture Bradley
advances to his tremendous question: "In this tragic world,
where individuals, however great they may be and however
decisive their actions may appear, are so evidently not the
ultimate power, what is this power?" One is inclined, even
now, to stare amazedly at the last four words. Then Bradley
goes on:
Any answer we give to the question proposed ought to
correspond with or to represent in terms of the understanding,
our imaginative and emotional experience in reading the
tragedies. We have, of course, to do our best by study and
effort to make this experience true to Shakespeare; but,
that done to the best of our ability, the experience is the
matter to be interpreted, and the act by which the interpreta-
tion must be tried. But it is extremely hard to make out
exactly what this experience is, because, in the very effort
to make it out, our reflecting mind, full of everyday ideas,
is always tending to transform it by the application of these
ideas, and so to elicit a result which, instead of representing
the fact, conventionalises it. And the consequence is not
only mistaken theories; it is that many a man will declare
that he feels in reading a tragedy what he never really felt,
while he fails to recognise what he actually did feel.
Here is made clear the uniqueness of Bradley's critical
effort. Nothing in criticism had previously been attempted,
and certainly nothing achieved, of a comparable integrity.
This is not the place to follow Bradley in the detailed pursuit
of his purpose. Our object is merely to recall, as vividly as
may be, the nature of that purpose, and the quality of the
method by which it was pursued. From the beginning we
must hasten to the end. It comes before the actual conclusion
of the book towards the end of the eighth lecture, on King Lear.
LITERARY PORTRAITS
"Why does Cordelia die? I suppose no reader ever failed
to ask that question, and to ask it with something more than
pain, to ask it, if only for a moment, in bewilderment or
dismay, and even perhaps in tones of protest. These feelings
are probably evoked more strongly here than at the death of
any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may sound
a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of re-
conciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them. Yet it
seems to me indubitable that such an element is present,
though difficult to make out what it is with certainty or
whence it proceeds."
He puts aside first the suggestion that it is due to the fact
that Cordelia contributes something to the catastrophe; next,
that it is due to our perception that Cordelia's death is true to
life. Then he disengages it. It is distinguished as a feeling not
confined to King Lear, but common to our experience of all
the later tragedies of Shakespeare; but one which takes
exceptional force in King Lear because of the strength with
which our bewilderment or dismay is aroused.
"The feeling I mean is the impression that the heroic
being, though in one sense and outwardly he has failed, is
yet in another sense superior to the world in which he
appears; is, in some way which we do not seek to define,
untouched by the doom which overtakes him, and is rather
set free from life than deprived of it ... Now, this feeling
is evoked with a quite exceptional strength by the death of
Cordelia ... It simply is the feeling that what happened to
such a being does not matter; all that matters is that she
is. How this can be when, for anything the tragedy tells
me, she has ceased to exist, we do not ask; but the tragedy
itself makes us feel that it is so."
Perhaps it is excessive to draw the conclusion which Bradley
himself did not expressly formulate: but it is impossible to
avoid, and it indicates the real scope of Bradley's inquiry.
Shakespearean tragedy and the foundation-story of the
Christian religion belong to the same order.
Shakespeare was, for Bradley, the culmination or con-
summation of the experience of poetry. Below him were
ranged the great poets of the Romantic period. In one of his
rare outbreaks of personal avowal, which by their rarity are so
impressive who can forget the moment when he suddenly
said: "It is for things like this, that I worship Shakespeare?"
Bradley declared of the Age of Wordsworth: "And yet,
116
ANDREW BRADLEY
if I may descend to personal opinions, I believe in that Age."
What did he mean? First, he meant that he believed that in
that period the imagination was at work in the English poets
with sovereign strength and felicity. And Bradley, above all,
believed in the imagination. But what was the imagination,
for him? In describing Wordsworth's doctrine, he defined
his own. "Wordsworth's doctrine, if we may use the word, is
that imagination is the way to truth. By imagination he does
not mean fancy, but a transference of the mind into the centre
of the thing contemplated, and a construing of all its motions
or actions from that centre outwards." Some would deny the
possibility, or the reality of such an activity; and to-day the
denial is frequent most vehement, strangely enough, among
those t whose political doctrines are directly derived from such
an act of the imagination. Hegel was the common ancestor of
both Bradley and the Marxist materialists; and Spinoza was
Hegel's ancestor. The imaginative penetration of the process
of history, and belief in the possibility of conscious identification
with it, on which Marxism is based, is an act of that imagin-
ation in which Bradley believed. But he did not believe that
all its deliverances were literally valid. His doctrine was rather
that the utterance of the creative imagination in the "artist"
aroused in the responsive person an imaginative response,
which could be described as the satisfaction of the demands
hitherto unconscious of his imagination ; and "wherever
the imagination is satisfied" (as Bradley said at the end of his
Oxford lectures) "there, if we had a knowledge we have not, we
should discover no idle fancy, but the image of a truth."
The qualification is important. Bradley did not believe that
even imagination could pluck out the heart of the mystery;
he did not believe that mankind would ever come to possess
the knowledge that would enable it to make the fateful
transmutation of beauty into truth. In a sense, it was inherent
in mortality that even those most highly gifted with the true
imaginative power should feel themselves to be the incessant
prey of
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in woiHds unrealized.
And it is this quality of awefulness in Wordsworth's vision
that Bradley drives home and home again to our flinching
117
LITERARY PORTRAITS
attention, in his magnificent lecture on Wordsworth's poetry.
Not even by imagination can we make the Universe our home
indeed, it is imagination that tells us that it cannot be;
nevertheless, it is through imagination that we learn to take
into our souls and accept the ultimate mystery. By imagination
its nature, though not its secret, can be revealed to us.
The relation between Bradley's final statement concerning
the validity of the imagination and the utterances of the
Romantic poets is intimate and obvious. We are reminded
immediately of Keats's "What the imagination seizes as
beauty must be Truth," and of Blake's "Everything possible
to be believed" by which he meant everything that satisfies
the imagination "is an image of Truth." And probably
Bradley would have accepted Keats' converse proposition:
"I can never feel certain of any Truth but from a clear
conception of its Beauty" that superhuman and awful
beauty which Keats and Bradley both found supremely
exemplified in King Lear. Beauty, in this sublime sense, is
best defined as that which satisfies the imagination. But what
imagination itself may be, who can say? We cannot remember
that Bradley anywhere addressed himself more directly to this
question than in his sentence on the doctrine of Wordsworth.
Its reality for him was both primary and ultimate. It is that
in ourselves (he might say) which is satisfied by King Lear.
And what is that but the reality of ourselves? something
which emerges and takes possession of the discrepant creatures
that we are, something which unifies the conflicting elements
within us and establishes a living peace between our hearts
and minds, and establishes a like peace between our moment-
arily integrated being and the reality beyond us, something
which, if it could find utterance in the action of our daily
lives, would have the power to transform the world. "Doubt-
less it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains interior
is not the whole soul."
Some such belief, though Bradley never sought to formulate
it, underlies all his work as a critic. And because he believed
in the imagination after this fashion, he was the most genuinely
118
ANDREW BRADLEY
imaginative critic our country has produced. Not even
Coleridge, for all his flashes, can compare with Bradley in this
regard. What he said of the Romantic age can be aptly applied
to himself. "Each of the poets and philosophers seems to have
caught sight of something that startles and engrosses him . . .
whether his mental life is tumultuous, as with Byron or Shelley
or Schelling, or an inward and steady fire, as with Wordsworth
and Hegel." In Bradley it was the inward and steady fire;
but, as he believed in that age, so essentially he belonged to
it. He, rather than Coleridge or Hazlitt, was the critical
consciousness of that age. In his criticism of Shakespeare,
Coleridge's is fulfilled: what Coleridge attempted in glimpses,
Bradley patiently achieved. And he wrought into his critical
attitude a knowledge of German philosophy such as Coleridge
never came near to possessing. For Bradley indeed, English
poetry and Gcrnian philosophy were parallel manifestations of
the same spirit the universal imagination at work through the
instrument of national genius. So that when he said that
Oxford's best intellectual gift to him was "the conviction
that what imagination loved as poetry, reason might love as
philosophy; and that in the end these are two ways of saying
the same thing," he was thinking less of philosophy in general
than of the philosophy which was the counterpart and the
contemporary of the poetry in which he believed. He slipped
a tell-tale phrase into his lecture on "English Poetry and
German Philosophy", when he spoke of "Wordsworth and
Hegel, who happened, as we say, to be born in the same year."
Probably in the attempt to convey the broad significance
of Bradley's work, we give the impression of one who troubled
little over the minutiae of criticism. Certainly, if by the
minutiae of criticism we understand the accumulations of
faintly relevant and doubtfully profitable "research", Bradley
had no dealing in them. "Research," he said, "though toil-
spme, is easy; imagination, though delightful, is difficult." For
the critical exercise of imagination includes all that is relevant
in research ; it is the irrelevant part of research that is easy,
and it is easy because it is irrelevant. It is automatic.
Criticism, for Bradley, could n<*ver be automatic. On the
contrary, it was, as he practised it, one of the severest con-
ceivable exercises of the soul. First, to separate the pure
"9
LITERARY PORTRAITS
imaginative experience from the subtle usurpations of the
intellect and the emotions that is a work demanding a rare
combination of intellectual subtlety and spiritual serenity; then
to maintain that unique experience, undiminished, un-
coarsened, unchanged, throughout the delicate work of
analysing it and comparing it with other unique experiences,
which must also remain undiminished, uncoarsened, un-
changed this required the steadiness of a master indeed.
And no critic with whose work we are acquainted, whether
in England or abroad, has displayed an equal power of control
of his own processes. At his best, and his best is fully three-
quarters of the w r ork he published, Bradley is in the middle of
the note all the time. He leaves nothing out, and he allows
nothing in that is not essential. Consider his footnotes alone:
they contain the themes of at least a dozen volumes of true
criticism, work really worth doing, and suggestions for a dozen
pieces of research which would have some real bearing on the
essence of literature.
Bradley made no parade of the sheer work of scholarship he
had done; and it may be said that it was done in order to be
forgotten, in the sense that it was to him only a necessary means
to the perfecting of his own capacity for the imaginative ex-
perience. But those who have carefully followed his criticism
are aware how many separate paths of knowledge he has
travelled in order to reach the point where the imaginative
synthesis was possible, and how unerring was his discrimination
between the intellectual and the imaginative. Such a dis-
crimination is difficult to imitate. That is the reason why
Bradley's influence on the actual practice of criticism has been
so small. He offered no short-cuts to the acquisition of a
method; he demanded of those who would follow him not
only the primary endowment of the creative artist -the
"experiencing nature" of which Bagehot spoke but also the
intellectual capacity to discriminate an experience to its
elements, and the moral will be satisfied with nothing less
than a complete interpretation of it. The return must always
be to the imaginative experience, and the task of the critic is
to complete his analysis so faithfully and to order it so har-
moniously that the imaginative experience naturally super-
venes in a new fullness.
120
ANDREW BRADLEY
This process Bradley was apt to describe as "feeling one's
way into the poet's mind." His purpose is clearly stated in his
commentary on In Memoriam. He warns the reader who
desires to understand Tennyson's thought that he "must not
expect system or definition ; he must not press hardly on single
phrases or sentences, but must use them in order to feel his
way into the poet's mind." The connection between this and
the Wordsworthian doctrine of imagination is manifest.
Whereas the poet is he who exercises the power of imagination
on objects and on life, the critic is he who exercises it on the
work of the poet. And, in so far as he is a critic indeed, he will
not be guilty of the major offence "taking the road round
Wordsworth's mind, not into it." One feels, on reaching the
end^ of that lecture, that no critic of Wordsworth before
Bradley had ever done anything other than "take the road
round" Wordsworth's mind not even Coleridge.
But to make amends for it would grieve Bradley's shade
that praise of him should involve speaking slightingly of
Coleridge we will choose for the final statement of Bradley's
doctrine a passage based on one of Coleridge's own revealing
phrases. It is taken from the lecture on Shelley's View of Poetry.
"The chief moral effect claimed for poetry by Shelley is
exerted, primarily, by imagination on the emotions; but
there is another influence, exerted primarily through imagina-
tion on the understanding. Poetry is largely an interpre-
tation of life; and, considering what life is, that must mean
a moral interpretation. This, to have poetic value, must
satisfy imagination; but we value it also because it gives us
knowledge, a wider comprehension, a new insight into our-
selves and the world. (Bradley"* s note at this point is important:
And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does
it imaginatively, the more does it satisfy imagination, and
the greater is its poetic value). Now, it may be held . . .
that the most deep and original moral interpretation is not
likely to be that which most shows a moral purpose, or is most
governed by reflective beliefs and opinions . . . And the reason
I wish to suggest is this, that always we get most from the
genius in a man of genius and not from the rest of him. Now,
although poets often have unusual powers of reflective
thought, the specific genius of a poet does not lie there,
but in imagination. And the specific way of imagination is
not to clothe in imagery consciously held ideas; it is to
produce half-consciously a matter from which, when produced,
121
LITERARY PORTRAITS
the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry (I must
exaggerate to be clear), psychologically considered, is not
the expression of ideas, or of a view of life ; it is their discovery
or creation, or rather both discovery and creation in one.
The interpretation in Hamlet or King Lear was not brought
ready-made to the old stories. What was brought to them
was the huge substance of Shakespeare's imagination, in
which all his experience and thought was latent; and this,
dwelling and working on the stones with nothing but a
dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion, gradu-
ally discovered or created in them a meaning and a mass of
truth about life, which was brought to birth by the process of
composition, but never preceded it in the shape of ideas, and
probably never, even after it, took that shape in the poet's
mind. And this is the interpretation which we find inexhaust-
ibly instructive, because Shakespeare's genius is in it."
"It may be held. . . that the most deep and original moral
.nterpretation is not likely to be that which most shows a
moral purpose." Bradley held it, and he knew why he held it.
He believed in the Imagination. We need the capacity and
the courage for the same belief to-day.
122
RICHARD HILLARY
The late Richard Hillary's book, The Last Enemy > is the work
of a writer born: it depicts with remarkable vividness and
objectivity the experience of an Oxford undergraduate turned
airman, who crashed, was terribly burned, was patched up
into the semblance of a human being by plastic surgery, and
could not rest till he was flying again to a death which he knew
to be certain, and which he desired. Of this latter part of the
story The Last Enemy tells nothing. To that extent the book is
an artefact. Were we to trust it alone we might be persuaded
into believing in the triumphant emergence of Hillary from a
spiritual crisis, in which his radical scepticism was changed
into a faith.
The book represents Hillary as converted to the creed of
his friend Peter Pease also killed as a fighting pilot whose
faith he had tried in vain to undermine by his own scepticism.
Hillary's relation with Peter was so intimate that, in hospital
under an anaesthetic, he had a vision of his friend's death,
apparently more or less at the moment when it happened.
The book ends with the spiritual triumph of Peter in Hillary's
soul.
So Peter has been right. It was impossible to look only to
oneself, to take from life and not to give except by accident,
deliberately to look at humanity and then pass by on the
other side.
But what could he do? It comes to him suddenly. He would
write of his dead friends. He was "the last of the long-haired
boys" a group of undergraduates who had gone, one by one,
to their deaths in the Battle of Britain.
If I could do this thing, could tell a little of the lives of these
men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my
right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those
with steadfastness and courage who were still living and who
would go 011 fighting until the ideals for which their comrades
had died were stamped for ever on the future of civilisation.
It is an ungrateful task to be sceptical about such a declara-
tion. Nevertheless it must be said plainly that it does not
convince. The speech betrays him. In these latter portions
123
LITERARY PORTRAITS
of the book Hillary's style suddenly fails him. It becomes
rhetorical, and almost commonplace. The spiritual thread is
broken. No doubt he did desire to commemorate his friends,
and he did so, most memorably. But when he was doing that,
he did not present them crowned with this halo of idealism :
and it will not work retrospectively. Hillary it is no moral
criticism is faking something. Artistically, he is forcing the
note in order to give his record a significance different from
that which is really its own.
He was a born writer, and now he had something to write
about, and time in which to do it. It would be a long while
before that patched-up body would again be fit to seek its
Nirvana in an aeroplane. He had crashed on September 3,
1940. It was more than two years later that he wrote 4 (in
a letter of December i, 1942) :
It's curious psychologically that I have only to step into an
aeroplane that monstrous thing of iron and steel just waiting
to down me and all fear goes. I am at peace again.
Meanwhile, a subaltern peace of self-forgetfulness was to be
had in the act of writing. That would do for an explanation ;
and it would be a truer one than Hillary gave.
Why did Hillary fake the record? Here is ground that
angels fear to tread. That the record is faked admits of no
doubt whatever. The internal evidence of the writing and the
evidence of his own subsequent letters is at one and incon-
trovertible. Hillary did not go up into the air again, to a
death which he knew to be certain, in order to help to stamp
certain ideals for ever on the future of civilisation. Neither did
he write his book to commemorate men who believed that
that was why they fought and died.
Finally, I got so sick of the sop about our "Island Fortress"
and "The Knights of the Air" that I determined to write it
anyway in the hope that the next generation might realise
that while stupid, we were not that stupid, that we could
remember only too well that all this hau been seen in the last
war, and that in spite of that and not because of it, we still
thought this one worth fighting.
The Last Enemy took the shape it has because Hillary, for
some reason, wanted to present himself as a man who had
changed been indeed converted into one who "still thought
124
RICHARD HILLARY
this war worth fighting." It was not true. Why did he do it?
It is not entirely impossible that there was a tinge almost of
cynicism in his resolve : a momentary assumption of the r6le
of the hard-boiled writer who knows what is expected of him.
That would not conflict with what I feel to have been his
deeper motive a fear of coming truly to grips with the unknown
power that impelled him to find his peace in death. He was,
after all, only filling in the time of waiting while writing his
book. He had done his best to make it popular; he had suc-
ceeded. But as the price of such a success he had given himself
a part to sustain. After writing The Last Enemy it would
hardly have been possible, hardly spiritually decent, to have
relapsed into the arm-chair of a professional author.
Had he not given that twist to his story the sequel might have
been different. It would have been possible for Hillary to
have survived (one feels) if he had not published The Last
Enemy, or if he had written it differently. Had the story been
carried through to the bitter end on the same plane of sheer
veracity on which the greater part was written, it would have
imposed upon him no obligation to so bleak a destiny. He
had forced the note as artist; now he was doomed to force it
as man. There was no earthly, and not much heavenly, good
to be gained by his going back to the R. A.F. He knew, perfectly
well, that the chances of his being an effective fighter again
were negligible. Mais quoi faire? As Arthur Koestlcr, who
was his friend, put it in a penetrating essay, "The myth was
devouring the man."
But what would it have been the book which Hillary
did not write: the book which he half-wrote, then screwed
to a heroic pitch, which belied his own experience; the book
which would have dealt with his own inward change for
change there surely was as honestly as it had dealt with what
had come to him before the change? To conjecture that
were to conjecture what song the sirens sang. For the
change itself was now to be conditioned irrevocably by his
adoption of a role "the last of the long-haired boys" who
stays awhile only to commemorate his dead friends, and to
be converted to the creed which the public is made happy
to believe they professed; then hastes to join them.
That role, indeed, Hillary could not play. His integrity
125
LITERARY PORTRAITS
was much too real for that. But the end was appointed.
There was no escape from death. One cannot, at twenty-three,
look forward to a life that is one long anti-climax. The
penalty for dramatizing your own life, when you have a
Hillary's sense of decorum, was the inexorable necessity of
the fifth act. The horror, the pathos, the new and terrible
beauty, is that the fifth act had not to be written, but lived.
Hillary's letters, which I have read only in the excerpts
which Arthur Koestler has given, are the record of the man
facing the inevitability of death to which he has condemned
himself as tragic hero. They are terrifying letters, in which
we watch him groping after his own motive. Why is he being
impelled to die? Is it vanity, he once asks himself: hesitates,
and answers "No." That was true : it was not vanity. But the
reason he gives why it was not vanity is untrue. "Because
implicit in my decision was the acceptance of the fact that
I shall not come through." One can seek death through
vanity. But the sense of decorum is not vanity. Cleopatra's
And then what's brave, what's noble,
Let's do it after the high Roman fashion
And make death proud to take us.
is not vanity. But Hillary was not a character in a tragedy.
And yet he was. He had made a tragic hero of himself: but
it was Richard Hillary who had to fill the bill and pay it.
The sense of decorum, in Hillary, was now complicated.
Nothing so simple as Hillary living, or dying, up to his part.
The man of exquisite integrity, entangled in a necessity
imposed upon him by his art. That would be complex
enough. But it was not so simple even as that. The necessity
was imposed upon him by a failure of integrity in his art.
Too simple still. That failure of integrity, that forcing of the
note, was in the last analysis only the desperate grasp at a
faith which did not involve, for him, intellectual or moral
suicide.
But he had to snatch at it, all the same. It had seemed
to be there. There had been a moment of vision of some
kind. But he had magnified it, interpreted it, connected it,
used it to pattern his book," and thence himself. And then
the pattern did not fit, after all. He had connived at his own
conviction ; adopted a meaning for himself, when deep down
126
RICHARD HILLARY
he knew his only meaning was himself. And now, by snatching
at a meaning, he had lost himself.
Was it indeed any essential part of his own pattern that
he now had to die? How could he say? How can we say?
That he had to die was certain. He had lured himself into
a position in which it was no longer possible for him to live.
By snatching at a meaning, he had projected himself into a
world which was governed by the laws of tragedy : but tragedy
as conceived by the disillusioned and reticent youth of the
ruling class of the Munich age a tragedy of understatement,
of the minor role ; of the man who has his faith as it were at
second-hand, in the form of love and admiration and envy
for those who have a faith he cannot share; of the man who
puts meaning into his own life by insisting on a meaning in
the deaths of his friends.
But the real tragedy, that which awakens in us thoughts
beyond the reach of our soul, is that of the Hillary who
shrinks not so much from death as from his submission to the
necessity imposed upon him by his own self-deception, who
has no name and no love for the power which drives him on.
It is, he says sometimes, instinct. But it is not instinct. It
may be instinct which drives the singed moth back into the
bright incandescence. But Hillary was not a moth. He was
a finely conscious contemporary human being.
What compelled him to death? We have said a sense of
decorum. That comes nearer to the mark. But the phrase
is ancient now. The decorum of 1942 is a very different thing
from the decorum of a century ago. Hillary's is the decorum
of an age of total war. The English obverse of the medal
whose German reverse carries the picture of the young Nazis
in April, 1940, flinging themselves deliberately to death in the
advance upon Rethel. That was a portent; so was its counter-
part, Hillary's death.
What is this new sense of the decorum of total war, as
manifest in Richard Hillary? We may find the roots of it
in his picture of his generation.
We were disillusioned and spoiled . . . Superficially we were
selfish and egocentric without any Holy Grail in which we
could lose ourselves. The war provided it, and in a delight-
fully palatable form. It demanded no heroics but gave us the
127
LITERARY PORTRAITS
opportunity to demonstrate in action our dislike of organised
emotion and patriotism, the opportunity to prove to ourselves
and to the world that our effete veneer was not so deep as our
dislike of interference, the opportunity to prove that, undis-
ciplined though we might be, we were a match for Hitler's
dogma-fed youth.
Good, one feels. There is decorum here. And had the
battle of Britain ended there: fighter pilot against fighter
pilot, and the free man triumphant by virtue of his freedom,
the decorum might have been manifest at the level of nations.
But the battle of Britain was not the end. This last,
consummate achievement of the British genius for improvisa-
tion and desinvolture, perfect had it stood alone, was but a
link in a chain, a cog in a mechanism. The glory of fighter-
pilot grinds slowly and inexorably down to the shame of
Bomber Command. The respite won by the fighter pilots
was used to inflict with calculated purpose upon the simple
families through the length and breadth of Germany the same
obscenity the blasting of simple families to death in their
London homes which gave Hillary his moment of vision and
faith.
The wheel had turned full circle. Truly, there was nothing
for a Hillary to do, but die, if he was to remain significant.
The necessity was cosmic. In the total story of Hillary the
veil is lifted for moments and we glimpse the purposes of God.
Hence its power upon us. Hillary did not consciously flee
into death from the futile horror to come, for which he and
his friends had unwittingly prepared. But he had to be saved
from it.
Turn back to the sequence which brought him as an
individual under the law of tragedy. The vision which
brought him the momentary faith at which he snatched was
simply that of a woman killed with her baby in the London
blitz. That gave him meaning, and he built the pattern of
his book upon it. His dead friends were justified, and so
was he. The unworthy element in him and them was burned
away, for redemptive action cannot be "delightfully palatable."
And his integrity was such ttfat not even his terrible experiences
in hospital could absolve him from levity at the bar of his
own conscience.
128
RICHARD HILLARY
The vision of the dead woman did absolve him. To make
that thing for ever impossible that was the Holy Grail.
He and his friends were crusaders after all, and he their
chronicler.
And yet, and yet. Somehow he could not quite believe it;
he could not go on believing it. And it was not true. It
might have been true, had the Battle of Britain been the end.
Then he might truly have believed what he desired to believe.
But the Battle of Britain was not the end, and The Last Enemy
was written in the growing awareness that it would not be.
The terrible event would dissolve the very foundation of his
half- won faith.
He had presented himself to the world as a man who had
won through to a knowledge of obligation which set his
doubting heart at peace. He was henceforward dedicated to
the cause. He knew what he fought for and loved what he
knew.
That was the Hillary he gave to the world. But the living,
growing, experiencing Hillary came to know different. He
had half-known it already. When he returned to the R.A.F.
he neither knew what he fought for nor loved what he knew.
The real Hillary was doing to the outward eye what the
legendary Hillary was pledged to do. But it was no enemy
he was seeking, no crusade on which he was flying. He was
seeking Death. That which found his friends, he sought.
Death was for him the barrier of finality between him and
a life of growing and irreparable division, an end to his
"posthumous existence," a surcease from consciousness which
would fix him, as it were a fly in amber, outside the stream
of time and experience, incorruptible by the future event.
Eric Linklater, in his preface to The Last Enemy bears
witness to Hillary's austere clarity of purpose, with which
(Linklater knew) all dissuasion was incommensurable. The
creature had a purpose and his eye was bright with it. The
purpose was to be a symbol. Had that become conscious, it
could not have been accomplished. Hillary sought to discover
why he was impelled towards death always in vain. We may
be wiser than he, but if we are, that is because we are not
perfect, as he was. His was the knowledge that all was torment,
and the power to act on the knowledge.
129
LITERARY PORTRAITS
He could not live; he could not have lived. In Hillary's
experienced impossibility of living, his profound sense that it
was unfitting and wrong to live, because by living he must
inevitably become less than he was, is the epitaph of our
society. Here was a man who participated in Britain's "finest
hour"; perhaps the most fully conscious of all those who were
the occasion of Churchill's phrase-making, the objects of his
eloquence: "Never was so much owed by so many to so few."
He was plucked, like a brand from the burning: saved to
survive and to be the vates sacer. Yet he could not live. He,
in whom this society was justified, by whom it was defended,
willed not victory, but death: and willed it, impersonally, as
one who submits to a meaning, and becomes its vehicle.
In Hillary, the deep urge of contemporary society towards
death is made visible. He is the dazzling white of the ibam
on the great wave of death which D. H. Lawrence prophesied,
if it were not forestalled by a wave of generosity. In him
generosity itself seeks Death. The irony of his title becomes
intolerable. Death was not the last enemy, but the last and
only friend.
In Hillary is visible the nature of defeat of life in the world
to-day. Embody the virtues of the Englishman in one man,
endow him with awareness, give him a perfect part to sustain
in the massive drama of total war, put him at the very hinge
on which history turns, let him escape death by a miracle,
and be restored to life by magic of modern surgery: and he
goes bad on you. "We are fighting for survival," said
Churchill in 1940. Is Hillary the essence of what survives
the impossibility of living?
130
MAX PLOWMAN
Max Plowman or, to give him his right English baptismal
name, Mark Plowman was a singularly distinctive figure in
the British scene: distinctive but not conspicuous. For he
sedulously avoided the spotlight. I have known no one of
comparable gifts who was comparable with him in self-
effacement. He took a positive delight in playing second fiddle.
He wrote but few books, and the most successful of these
the unvarnished account of his experiences in the last war:
A Subaltern on the Somme was published anonymously. The
same self-effacement was characteristic of his attitude to his
friends. They were the marvels, the nonpareils. His function
was to lavish himself upon them in entire self-forgetfulness.
Few men have loved their friends so well ; and few have been
so quick to discover and to make friends. Naturally, for few
experiences are more delightful than to be discovered as a
nonpareil.
So his literary works are largely posthumous: in the essays
he did not trouble to collect, and now in his letters to those
friends of his whom he patiently coaxed into achievement or
caressed into self-acceptance, perhaps into self-satisfaction.
He was not (I think) one of the great letter-writers in the
accepted sense: one who pours forth magic felicities of style,
and dips a flowing pen into an inkwell which is a pool of
vision. He had not that incessant instantaneous sensitiveness
to what Coleridge called "the goings-on" of the letter-writer's
world, or the accompanying gift of sheer natural style, which
lifts letter-writing into a high and peculiar art of literature.
There is, of course, a high degree of self-forgetfulness necessary
to that art ; but it is the self-forgetfulness of the pure artist,
No one has ever excelled in this kind of letter- writing who had
not the true literary genius "the vision and the faculty
divine" whether it be Mme. de Sevigne, Charles Lamb,
Keats, R. L. Stevenson or Katherine Mansfield. Max
Plowman's self-forgetfulness was not of the literary artist, but
of the self-forgetful friend, intent upon his unending task of
appreciating, encouraging, inspiring those he loved, or sharing
his discoveries with them.
LITERARY PORTRAITS
But a gift of friendship is the greatest of all spiritual achieve-
ments. Its implications are profound. And in Max Plowman's
letters we can watch it growing to its perfection, through the
three phases which he knew so well : the rapture of Innocence,
the suffering of Experience and the joy of the Imagination.
Max Plowman became a master of imaginative friendship.
I can conceive of no nobler title. Neither could he. The most
faithful service a friend can do his memory is to try to explain
from the substance of his own letters something of what
imaginative friendship meant for him.
For him friendship was all-important, all-embracing. That
is manifest. At the very end of his life he said, in final
explanation of the faith to which he had completely devoted
his last laborious years, "Pacifism is friendship." The volume
of his letters is a unique record of a life lived as a manifestation
of friendship, in the spontaneous service of friendship an
immortal witness to what friendship can be : a demonstration
of its power and beauty (and perhaps also of its limitations)
in act.
"In act" is the operative phrase. It links Max Plowman's
friendship immediately with his conception of the Imagina-
tion, from which it is inseparable. "Imagination," he wrote,
"is dynamic disinterestedness." Dynamic disinterestedness is
friendship, he would equally have said. And that activity is
the purpose of life. In so far as we have learned that this is
the purpose of life, and are obedient to it, have we learned to
live. "Life is life," he wrote, "just in so far as human beings
are the means to the enfranchisement of one another in love
and friendship." In what sense are human beings enfranchised
by one another in love and friendship? "Service to those who
have real meaning for us is delight. Friendship exists only
when we know a friend beyond the realm where approval
and disapproval have meaning." Friendship is thus a relation
in which the participants are beyond each other's judgment.
Each delights in the other's being, and so they are mutually
liberated c rom the muddy vesture of decay which the censure,
whether for good or ill, of an abstract morality puts upon
them. Just in so far as* this mutual liberation takes place,
human life becomes truly human, and is the vehicle of a power
which regenerates the world.
132
MAX PLOWMAN
For this is the means by which the divine love becomes
operative.
It is impossible truly to love anybody without loving God.
Then this love should be the opportunity for the recognition
of God and the worship of Him in them. Only as we do so
can friendship be really sustained in all its essential holiness.
Only so is marriage sanctified. And there must not be to
my mind any otherness about love for Ghrist and love for
our fellows. Christ and God in every man are one- -the
Divine Humanity the essential person. And it is that recog-
nition, and that alone, it seems to me, which has power to
save the world.
Saving the world is regenerating the world, as this mutual
recognition of the essential person God manifest in His
creatyres passes like a subtle, consuming, refining and
revealing flame through the mass of humanity. Again he
writes: "How can people expect to be good friends if they
don't love God? They simply must eat one another. And
broken friendships are records of people who didn't like being
eaten, or get tired of eating." In those vivid words he
expresses his abhorrence of the false friendship which is merely
an indulgence or a gratification of the Ego. Friendship can
endure only if it is completely purged of possessiveness : its
activity is to allow and assist the essential person to unfold
itself in the beloved to be a medium for the radiance of the
spiritual sunlight of affection, trust and faith, whereby the
other grows into the grace of his own identity.
Obviously, in all this the word love could be substituted
for the word friendship. There is no difference between them.
William Blake, whose doctrine was second nature to Max
Plowman, spoke again and again of "love and friendship."
The difference, in ordinary language, is that love is more often
used of the relation between a man and a woman who are
bodily united, or between parents and children; friendship,
of the relation in which there is no physical bond. But Max
Plowman was perfectly clear that the essence of the relation
is the same. Marriage, he said, is sanctified only if man and
wife worship the God manifest in one another. He puts the
same truth more forcibly: "The fact of mating, unillumined
by the Imagination, is, rightly, positively repulsive. Seen in
the Imagination it is the consummation of joy the birthplace
LITERARY PORTRAITS
of the Lamb of God." Clearly, the physical union of a man
and a woman, who worship the visible God in one another,
iS a spiritual communion of the highest. But it is not clear
whether he meant more than this whether he meant that
the physical mating of a man and a women who have not
reached this loving awareness of each other's identity, and
may never reach it can nevertheless be regenerated by the
Imagination of others. This seems to be implied in his
frequent insistence on the significance of the fact that "all
life begins in love." He dwells on this. He speaks of the
necessity of "a dying into life and rising again to walk in
newness of life a faith based on the knowledge that as love
only could have set the wheels in motion, so at the end all
will be resolved in that which gave it birth." For "you cannot
have a unique and individual soul born into the world without
a couple of loving parents concerned only with one another.
Animals may be bred of pure sex-hunger, but individual
consciousness is requisite for the production of human beings
and works of art." Again,
Love alone gives cloud and flower beauty, worthwhileness
or truth. How then shall the life of man be regarded apart
from love? It's just silly. . . . Though the whole human (and
more than human) race is propagated and lives by desire,
when you come to the consideration of truth, this, if you please,
this desire, is the one thing to be discarded as negligible. It's
just fantastically stupid.
Now, is there or is there not an element of confusion here?
Desire and love arc not the same. Between them is a difference
of kind, not of degree. For desire is essentially possessive;
and it is transmuted into love only when the possessive essence
is purged away. Then only the act of mating becomes an
act of worship of the visible God in the man and woman.
"Only so is marriage sanctified." That corresponds exactly
with his later words: "Animals may be bred of pure sex-
hunger, but a sexual act makes me physically sick; and it's
because the sex-hygienists use the word in the same sense that
they revolt me." But the fact remains that the word is thus
used and the act thus performed. In this sense sexual love
was conceived by many Fathers of the Christian Church
and even by St. Augustine; and in this sense the marriage
'34
MAX PLOWMAN
service of the English Prayer Book speaks of marriage as
"ordained to avoid fornication." Are we to conclude that
from such unsanctified matings "unique and individual souls"
are not born? There is a real ambiguity here, such that we
cannot tell whether in the words: "Animals may be bred of
pure sex-hunger, but individual consciousness is requisite for
the production of human beings and works of art," some
human beings are being relegated from birth to the class of
animals.
One may be sure that was not Max Plowman's intention.
It is alien to the true quality of his thought. Probably he
used the word Desire in the comprehensive sense of the all-
prcvading urge towards life Spinoza's vis existendi, or
Lucretius' benign Venus: hominum divumque voluptas. But,
even so, the ambiguity remains. Max Plowman certainly
could not have accepted the materialism of Lucretius or the
pantheism of Spinoza. The love that is at the beginning of
all life is not the same as the love which is the consummation
of human living. Sometimes it is ; but far more often it is not.
What is the connection between the universal desire and the
love into which it has to be transmuted?
Historically, a connection was made by the romantic
conception of "falling in love," whereby human mating is
conceived as a mutual act of spiritual recognition which is
consummated in physical union. The distinction between the
love-marriage and other kinds is established in language. But,
if the love-marriage is recognised as the ideal, it is certainly
not the norm. The marriage of convenience, or interest, for
sexual possession or for the procreation of children is much
more prevalent. Max Plowman would no doubt have said
that the love-marriage, in which there is an interpenetration
of spiritual and physical in the act of falling in love, ought
to be universal, and that it should gradually flower into a
complete physical-spiritual union. But the fact was other-
wise. The obstacle to this permeation and transmutation of
desire by love was "the rigidity of insensibility."
Blake is always talking atout "fibres of love." Life is
tenderness with those fibres. They stretch from the lightest
smile to the depths of procreation. . . . The rigidity of insensi-
bility that's what we're up against.
135
LITERARY PORTRAITS
I think our sex-relations are under a curse of rigidity. We
don't know practically all the gradations of love. Most
people know nothing. The rest know the rules of the game.
There aren't any rules ultimately: and we ought to know
everything by experience. Sex is a long slow process of initia-
tion a voyage of discovery between two people, and absolutely
the only chart for the journey is mutual feeling.
Truly and beautifully said. But what of the millions of
marriages under the curse of rigidity where generation has
not been regenerated by Imagination? By some sleight of
mind they are left out. And this omission is not merely, as
it might be, an appearance created by the casual expression
of letter-writing. It hovers like an unlaid ghost over such a
considered expression of his faith as The Right to Live :
Henceforward test life in light of your own birth
You were born of love. Love is your birthright. Know then,
that except by love you cannot truly live at all, and that life
with one insistent cry from the cradle to the grave, ay and
beyond, does but call for that active co-operation of your
spirit which is the conscious manifestation of love. There is no
other life.
That was written in 1917, part of an essay which, twenty-
two years later, in 1939, he considered as "at least worth
more than all I have written before or since." And at the
same time he reaffirmed the central thesis.
Does birth confer the right to live?
No, there is no such right inherent in birth : birth is merely
the means that provides the opportunity for life. Life is a
gift which we receive at the hands of. ... Of whom ? Whole
philosophies hang upon the answer to it.
At the hands of our parents is the most obvious answer.
True enough; but in their separate individualities they have
no power to transmit life. So back we come to the basic truth
that life is the offspring of love, and to the corollary, no love,
no life. And thus it becomes simple and rational to say that
God is love.
But is it either simple or rational to say on those grounds
that God is love? On those grounds it is equally simple and
rational to say that God is desire, or the urge to existence, or
the life-force. It is the kind oi*love that makes all the difference.
The love that is the mutual worship of the God manifest in
the essential person is one thing; the love that is manifest in
136
MAX PLOWMAN
the animal desire of mating is another. Which of these loves
is God?
To say, "Both", is to say nothing. To say that the former
is human, the latter animal is to say hardly more. To come
nearer to the truth we must call in aid Blake's words: "God
only acts and is in existing beings or men/' and his profound
distinction between the Sexual Threefold and the Human
Fourfold. Man is, for this thought, as it were the means by
which animal desire i^ that is, can be and ought to be
transmuted into Human Love, by the power of Imagination.
For that purpose, or with that potentiality, Man came into
the world : to be the vehicle of the Imagination whereby the
fact of mating is seen to use Max Plowman's words as
"th^ consummation of joy, the birthplace of the Lamb of
God."
It is this Imagination which redeems the birth of a child
who is born of sheer animal desire. It is not the Imagination
of its parents, who have none. It is the Imagination of those
who see that it makes essentially no difference to the child's
potentiality of becoming itself a vehicle of Imagination. At
birth he is, as Keats says, "an atom of perception, which
knows and sees and is pure." Twice blessed, no doubt, are
those children who arc born of the commingling of imaginative
love: of conscious Imagination in act in the consummation of
joy. But the Imagination redeems all birth.
These two forms of Imagination the Imagination which is
active in fully conscious human beings, shaping their acts and
lives, and the Imagination which is active only in man's
thought, comprehending and redeeming all creation as it
were from without, are not separate; they are one. The unity
of the active and the contemplative Imagination is the unity of
the fulfilled human being in whom they abide. He both
enacts the life of Imagination in his own human relations,
and is the living point whence the Imagination, as conscious-
ness understanding, forgiveness, and joy is radiated through
creation. In the Christian idiom, the Imagination is Christ
"reconciling the world to Himself", by act and thought. The
contemplative Imagination could hot comprehend and redeem
all creation if creation itself were not the work of Imagination :
the beauty and truth are veritably there. But in the works of
137
LITERARY PORTRAITS
the active Imagination, the work of creation is carried on :
Imagination re-enters, as it were in a second act of creation,
the world of Generation and the growth of Time. The implicit
harmony which the contemplative Imagination discerns in
the universe becomes explicit, by the active Imagination, in
the lives of its servants. They co-operate with God, they are
His fellow co-workers, not His subjects: "no longer servants,
but friends."
Such a friend of God, such a vehicle of the Imagination in
act, Max Plowman pre-eminently was. The implicit harmony
became explicit in his life. Yet for a time in one crucial point
he mis-esteemed the powers of the active Imagination; or,
as he would have said, put his power of active Imagination to
a test at which it failed through his own insufficiency. J do
not believe that the active Imagination was ever deficient in
him. If it failed at the test, it was because success was im-
possible; profoundly impossible, because success would have
destroyed the Imagination itself.
Just as there is ambiguity in his conception of Birth, so there
is ambiguity in his conception of Death. The actual birth of
children is not always the fruit of disinterested love. It ought
to be, but it is not. If the birth of every child is a manifestation
of the Divine Love, as it is, it is often of the Divine Love opera-
tive through mortal instruments which ignore or deny it.
Moreover, if birth is a manifestation of the Divine Love, so
equally is Death. The life that comes between is simply the
opportunity for the Divine Love to be recognised and obeyed:
the opportunity for man to know it and co-operate with it.
Can he co-operate with it by seeking to overcome physical
death?
Why should he attempt it? When the Divine Love becomes
conscious of itself in a human Imagination, it is self-evident
that what comes between Birth and Death is only an episode:
a descent from and a return to Eternity " which is ever-present
to the wise." What is important is not that mortals should
cease to die, but that they should cease to fear Death: and that
the fear of Death will be cast out if they achieve Imagination.
The spiritual conquest of Death is probably the highest
good attainable by man; the physical conquest of Death is
unimaginable, and (I believe) contrary to Imagination. But
138
MAX PLOWMAN
between these two is a debatable realm, wherein the power of
Love may be invoked to help in overcoming bodily disease.
I know little about it, but I believe it is accepted that where
disease is mainly psychological in origin and has not proceeded
far in the organic derangement of the body, the removal of
psychological conflict does conduce to physical recovery.
In such a case it is evident that the attainment of Imagination
by the patient himself will have a curative effect. But whether
the Imagination of another, in the form of Love, can directly
mediate health to a sick person, it is impossible to say. To
deny it categorically would be to go beyond the evidence:
to assert it categorically is equally to go beyond the evidence.
And a very important part of the evidence is contained in
Max Plowman's letters. He came to believe, with an extra-
ordinary intensity of conviction, that through the power of the
active Imagination, he could directly mediate health to sick
persons whom he loved. He made the attempt three times,
and failed in all.
At first, and bitterly, he believed that the cause of failure
lay in the fault of others; gradually he came to believe that the
fault lay in himself. "The essential redeeming love in me
wasn't enough as ever, it seems. 5 ' But no sympathetic
reader of his letters will accept that verdict. There was no
deficiency of love in Max Plowman. Where he failed, none
could hope to succeed ; and, I am convinced, none have really
succeeded. Love is spiritually, not physically, regenerative.
Its triumph is to conquer not Death which would be to
annihilate Life but the fear of Death.
For a period of his life Max Plowman desired that Love
should, and believed that Love could, do more than this. He
was disappointed. It was necessary that he should be disap-
pointed. Yet it was at this period of his life that he wrote one
of the noblest and truest justifications of death that have ever
been written. Anyhow, it belongs to the world where there
are no comparatives: the world of Eternity.
The one who contained the whole meaning and expression
of life, died. And we died toe died in an agony of despair
died fighting all the way, from support to support, pleading
with fate for pity and with life for a single concession. Till
there was nothing to defend: not a recess that pain had not
LITERARY PORTRAITS
ravaged, not a cranny of possession that death had not
ransacked.
And still there is nothing.
And yet there is everything. For out of the whirlwind came
a still small voice, arid it said: "For the possession of one thing
you would gladly have lost the world. You have lost the
treasure of your heart. You held it in fear, and your love
was bound. See, I have taken away the fear and freed the
love." And then we saw w r hat death had power over and
what he could not touch.
All that is of self death takes away. All that would bind
another to its delight, even by the finest cords of love, death
snaps. Death rolls up the whole world of our existence and
bowls it into vacancy. And we are left stark.
But gradually, and right out of the heart of pain, another
world opens, a very still, very silent world, without time and
space, but a world of such intense reality that it makes t*he
old world look like a bubble floating in the sunshine, mirroring
everything in beauty, but having the impermanence of a
bubble and being as fragile to the touch. On that day we know
that the new world contains the old, and is to the old as the
earth to the bubble. We discover that it is a world of being
where all things exist eternally without shadow of doubt, or
need of substance. It is a world where merely to think is to be
full of action ; where merely to desire is to fulfil the heart ; where
to remember is to return, and to anticipate is to realise.
"The War Blake Tim," Max Plowman wrote in 1934,
"these are the peaks of experience for me. And they are all
parts of one experience, which Destiny seems determined I
shall understand."
The name Max Plowman would have given to the one
experience is Imagination, which, according to Blake, "is not
a State, but the Human Existence itself." In Blake the word
Human (always with a capital H) has a much deeper meaning
than the word "human" in ordinary language. The Human
is Fourfold, as distinct from the Sexual which is Threefold.
The "fall" of the Human Fourfold into the Sexual Threefold,
the struggle of man in that condition, and the return from the
Sexual Threefold to the Human Fourfold is the theme of all
Blake's prophetic books from The Book of Urizen onwards.
The Sexual Threefold is the condition of man when Intellect,,
140
MAX PLOWMAN
Emotion and Desire have broken away from their harmonious
subordination to the Imagination: or the Spirit, which is Love.
This is the Fall of Man : his downward plunge into the Sexual
Threefold, wherein the three elements are at incessant war
with each other a war which docs not cease, nor cease to
cause wars, until Imagination is restored to his peaceful
throne.
That is a very crude outline of Blake's central doctrine;
but it will suffice to give the clue to the sense in which the
War and Blake were parts of one experience. Achieve Imagin-
ation (as Max Plowman did in 1917) and war becomes
impossible for the individual who has achieved it. That is
the simple reason why pacifism for Max Plowman was essen-
tially an individual affair; and a pacifist movement was
doomed to sterility and negation unless is was a gathering of
individuals who had achieved Imagination.
Let me try to deal with the third element in Max Plowman's
one experience, which Fate seemed determined he should
understand. This was Tim. Tim was his elder boy. He died
in hospital at the age of 12, on April 16, 1928. The manner
of his death was the crucial experience of Max Plowman's
later life. Three-and-a-half years later, he wrote :
Piers has just brought me a pencil-box that has been left
at school forgotten, for 3^ years Tim's. An object of con-
templation: all the pencils still there inscribed, bitten, cut,
worn. And I am sure that if I can sec that pencil-box with
spiritual clarity I shall see the very face of God.
Max Plowman's love of the living Tim was exquisite: an
example of the loving awareness of Imagination in act: a
continuous but unoppressive concern that the loved one should
be, should express with complete spontaneity in his own childish
life the love which had given him birth. Suddenly he was
stricken with cerebro-spinal meningitis, and taken to one of
London's great hospitals. What happened then? There are
many descriptions of the happening in the letters, and all
are memorable. No one of them, I think, tallies exactly with
any other. That is inevitable, because a happening of this
kind is such that a description df it must be an interpretation ;
and it admits of different interpretations as experience
increases.
LITERARY PORTRAITS
I copy two accounts of it. The first was written three
months after the experience itself.
Soon after Tim fell ill, he became as a great light to me.
Overwhelming every kind of weakness and bodily distress,
there shone out from him to me a light of love that seemed
to bear us both into a world of pure happiness. It was a
world of triumph over death and hell ; and then I knew that
whatever there was of life that was not love was delusion. . . .
Then came all the wonder of my discovery that the physical
body is actually and literally dependent on the spirit for its
sustenance that, in short, loving old Tim, I could actually
mediate physical life to him by feeding and sustaining his
spirit. And when I found this out, not theoretically but
actually, in repeated instance, then I began to walk on air:
for it was as if a new heaven and a new earth were in process
of creation. Then the powers of this world broke my he?rt,
and I had to learn what Jesus meant when He said "Fear not
them which kill the body." I learnt that, knowing that if
Christ Himself could be stuck up on a wooden cross, ignorance
and human heartlcssness could kill a small boy. But the
wonder of the vision did not fade.
The fact behind what Max Plowman, in the fierce injustice
of bereavement, called "ignorance and human heartlessness"
was that Tim, having apparently recovered from cerebro-
spinal meningitis, actually died a few days later of broncho-
pneumonia. Max Plowman believed that in the case of the
former disease, which is so often fatal, he had been able so to
mediate physical life to the boy that the disease itself was cured ;
but that another, generically different, disease had taken his
life. This strong persuasion was of such decisive importance
for Max Plowman's later life that it must be examined; if
possible with equal tenderness and fidelity to truth.
I do not doubt for one moment that Max Plowman's love,
attaining a final purity through his passing beyond all "selfish"
concern for his little son, breaking clear of all the agony of
anxiety, by its own fine excess did truly mediate an immortal
strength to the little boy's spirit. But I am not convinced that
this mediation of spiritual strength enabled the boy's body to
conquer the disease. If that were indeed so, why did he die?
Was not the same strength still being mediated to him to the
end? It is truly conceivable, or imaginable, that selfless
love at its pinnacle can prevail against meningitis, but not
142
MAX PLOWMAN
against bronchitis whether or not it was complicated by
the ignorance and heartlessness of a hospital?
Scrutinising the happening with all the imagination I
possess, and with the firm determination to set aside all
personal considerations (for I was intimately involved in the
outcome of Max Plowman's interpretation of it) I find that at
this point he was conniving at his own conviction. On the
facts as he himself repeatedly describes them, his conclusion
that "the passion of love in its sublime" could mediate physical
life to another was unwarranted, or at least not proven. Yet
on this conviction some of his most important subsequent
judgments and acts were based.
Let us turn now to another account of the same happening
written seven years later, in 1935:
The crucial point seems to me to lie in what I can only call
the experience of God objectively I think I can only make
that all clear by going back to my experience with Tim. I
loved him, Heaven knows, when I was distracted out of
thought by my concern for him. And yet, so long as I was so
distracted, I didn't love him enough. For there was self-love
in that distracted concern. The "I" of self was involved and
was creating a fearful confusion between myself and the true
object of my love. When suddenly, this wild concern realised
its own helplessness, then the knowledge and love of the object
of my love suddenly became clear and detached. Tim was.
All my thoughts and feelings about him went whistling down
the wind. All my concern was my own affair, and nothing to
do with that essential personality, which just to see in rny
mind's eye, and love with a pure heart fervently, was bliss.
Suddenly I had come unstuck, and he existed in his own sovereign
individuality, and that was enough. What happened to him was
something else. Whether he lived or died was something else.
To know and to have known him was the eternal truth, and
at the thought of it one's heart just overflowed with joy.
And there lay the secret. He was the embodiment of love.
Completely detached from me, there was Love God manifest
the secret of creation revealed. To be this manifestation was
our purpose in coming into the world. To discover it objectively
in another, the way by which the recognition of God was
achieved.
Notably, in this account (which contains a profundity of
spiritual truth) there is no mention of the mediation of physical
life. But later in the letter which contains it to his dear
H3
LITERARY PORTRAITS
friend Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence Max Plowman speaks of the
matter again.
The thought of you, ill, is a contradiction in terms. The
you I know is never ill never has been and never will be.
Oh, of course I know that that "you" lives conditioned by the
world it lives in, so that, from that angle, the wonder may be
that it is not always ill. But when I remember the woman who
greeted me with open arms upon a day in 1917 when I first
saw her in her drawing room, then I remember an incarnate
spirit of such love and heavenly radiance that I know true
value from false. It is by the release of that heavenly spirit that
the mortal human being can triumph over mortality; and
whatever it may be which releases it, is ordained of God and to
be accepted as his ordination.
"To release the prisoner. " That's what we all need, isn't
it? Three times I have tried to release the prisoner, and three
times I have failed. It is a terribly subduing thought. And if
I ask myself why, the answer is always the same : because I
was not simple enough; not whole-hearted enough: not wise
enough with that wisdom in which love and intelligence are
wholly one, and action is pure obedience.
The three attempts "to release the prisoner" and so minister
health to a body diseased which failed, belong to the inmost
pattern of Max Plowman's life. But, whereas, seven years
before, he had attributed the failure to the heartlessness and
ignorance of others, and in the case of the second attempt, five
years before, to another's lack of faith, he now ascribed it to
his own. After the second attempt had failed, he had again
declared his conviction uncompromisingly. "Even if every-
body I ever came near died as the result, I should not disbelieve
what now I know that the life of the body is in the Spirit, and
if the body can be brought into harmony with the Spirit,
health results." And at that time, categorically, he ascribed
his failure to his having given "respect to error" in the sick
woman's husband "the error of believing that because our
faith has failed to remove our mountains, therefore the truth
that faith can remove mountains is a lie. With God all things
are possible. Without God fatalism is absolute. Faith is
always inoperative because of some weakness or error in us.
Find the error and release the faith. But justify ourselves and
we destroy the possibility of faith."
This is subtle indeed. Whose really was the error here?
144
MAX PLOWMAN
Max Plowman says, his own, in that he gave respect to error
in his friend. But what else could he have done? His friend,
whose experience had been as searching and as valid as his
own, did not believe that "with God all things are possible";
by virtue of past experience could not believe that by the
intensity of spiritual love a diseased body could be made whole;
felt indeed that such expectation was inordinate and wrong.
Max Plowman either had to convert him to his own belief or,
since he was his friend, give respect to his "error". That
"error" was a conviction which his friend had paid for. The
only way to convert him was by working a miracle. Max
Plowman did not work a miracle. Was the blame justly to be
attributed to his friend's lack of faith? Whose was the fault?
"tyly own fault," said Max Plowman five years later. "My
own faith was imperfect. I was not simple enough, whole-
hearted enough, wise enough." Was that really true? The
whole tenor of the letters is against it. Max Plowman's faith
that love in its sublime could be the means of healing a person
in the extremity of disease was whole-hearted and simple
enough. It was a faith, moreover, that could hardly be confuted
by experience. "If everybody I came near died as the result,
I should not disbelieve . . ." "Faith is inoperative because
of some error or weakness in us." That is an almost invul-
nerable position. But to be convinced, we must demand to be
shown the weakness. In Max Plowman's case, it is not visible.
We look then for the error. That we can find only in the faith
itself. Max Plowman did not really know what he claimed to
know.
He had, in consequence of a moment of veritable illumina-
tion, confused the spiritual with the physical: the laws of
Eternity with the laws of Time. Later he himself was to confess
the distinction in his original experience. Writing in 1935 he
explained how his selfish concern for the life of his little boy
suddenly dissolved away. "He existed in his own sovereign
individuality, and that was enough. What happened was
something else. Whether he lived or died was something
else." Yet, at the very moment of this statement, and in the
same letter, he was again asserting* that by the release of the
spirit the mortal being can triumph over mortality which
in the spiritual sense is surely true and wresting it to a physical
10 145
LITERARY PORTRAITS
sense: whereby it meant that the release of the spirit is
curative of bodily disease.
In consequence, he was at once inordinate in his faith, and
unjust to his achievement. Three times, he said, he had tried
to release the prisoner, and three times failed. That was
untrue. He had indeed released the prisoner, but not in the
sense he claimed. He had enabled the spirit in his sick friends
to triumph over their bodily limitations. He had made
simple, easeful and lovely their passing from Time to Eternity.
It was a wonderful achievement; not in the least diminished
because he failed to accomplish what he believed he could and
would accomplish: the restoration of his dying friends to
health. Suppose he had succeeded in his miracle-working.
Would the world be wiser or better, because three persons had
been raised whole from the bed of death? Why only these
three? In order that the capricious works of God should be
manifest? Max Plowman, the worker of physical miracles,
would have had to make the entire human race immune from
death in order that his miracles should be an epiphany of
the love rather than the caprice of God. There seems to have
been a strange moment when he felt that this was in his power.
"I began to walk on air, for it was as if a new heaven and a
new earth were in process of creation."
Considering the matter with the lucid sympathy of a loving
and admiring friend, it seems plain to me that Max Plowman
was on a false trail, when he came to hold the conviction that
the perfection of self-transcending love could renew physical
life. I cannot but feel that this particular corollary of his
spiritual faith was not only an accidental excrescence on it,
but perilously near a surrender to his own arch-enemy,
materialism. It is one thing to have the power to help a friend
sick unto death to a condition of joy and serenity, of spiritual
confidence, of indifference to the fate of the body, of assurance
that the sundering of earthly loves is not the end but the
beginning of true felicity. To build up, by the power of love,
this security of spirit within another, or rather (as Max
Plowman himself understood so well) to enable it to break, like
a February flower, through its tenement of clay, is the highest
service one mortal can do for another. But it is quite another
thing to build up the expectation of a physical recovery, and
146
MAX PLOWMAN
to believe in and present it as the necessary consequence of the
spiritual emancipation. The latter belief would war against
the former faith ; for an acceptance of death, I believe, is the
necessary condition of true spiritual emancipation.
To accept Death, in this sense, is not the same as to resign
oneself to death. The spiritual emancipation of a sick person
certainly does not require that he should give up hope of
recovery, even in the most desperate condition, but it does
require a complete surrender of the sick person to the divine
power, in the spirit of the words: * 'Nevertheless, not my will,
but Thine be done." And that, it would seem, is possible only
when the faith in the divine power let us call it simply the
certainty that All is well is so strong that mortal life and
mortal death arc known to be only two conditions of the true
Life, which is everlasting.
Angels might fear to tread in a matter so delicate. Inevitably,
in criticising what seems to me an abberation in Max
Plowman's faith, I have indicated my own. It is a strange
discovery that I should find him tempted by the very material-
ism to which he believed that I had yielded. But the fact is
that never, while he lived, had I the desire to think the issue
between us out to the end. It would have stirred up memories
too painful ; and anyhow it was enough that he was alive : and
it was certain that, whatever passing estrangement might
come between us, we should be united again as we were. The
joy of reunion was not to be disturbed by memories of disa-
greement, or by investigation into its grounds. And it may be
that this is an issue which cannot be thought out to the end,
because it is one which falls under Goethe's sentence: "Then
only do we truly think when the matter of our thinking is one
which cannot be thought out." The Imagination must
supervene : and thought, unless it is imaginative, is false.
Max Plowman, no doubt, in the felicity where his eternal
identity abides, is chiding me for my own abberations. I
think in retrospect that in our prolonged debate about
Marxism, he had the best of the argument. On this matter
of spirit and body, I think I held a straighter course than he.
I think, moreover, that were we to* accept his account of the
matter, we must also accept the conclusion to which it drove
him: that he failed. "Three times I have tried to release the
'47
LITERARY PORTRAITS
prisoner* and three times I have failed." I think, as I have said,
that he did "release the prisoner,'* but not in the way that
he desired and dreamed. And that is why his letters do not
make the impression of failure ; far from it, they are an inspir-
ing record of a continuous triumph of the spirit over bodily
weakness the authentic triumph of the spirit. Though his
heroic will and his unwearying embodiment of the joy of love
did not enable him to secure health to his own body, it did
enable him largely to ignore his sickness. There is no temp-
tation for an imaginative mind to say "Physician, heal thyself!"
to the man who declared: "I want my faith in the human
spirit's power to assist the body in recovery from disease to
become effective."
In those terms it is a reasonable faith: but to hold that it
is possible for the human spirit to assist the body in recovery
from disease in all circumstances, at any stage of disease, and
even in articulo mortis, is a belief which, if put to the test, is
bound to fail. If it did not fail, the whole of human life would
be transformed in the twinkling of an eye ; for there would be
no Death any more. But I entirely refuse to believe that it
failed through some deficiency in Max Plowman: it failed
because he was attempting the impossible. And it is no ade-
quate reply to invoke, as he did, the words of Jesus: "With
God all things are possible." That is poetic hyperbole, not
argument. It is not possible for God to annihilate physical
death. For to annihilate death is to annihilate life: and life is
the condition of the manifestation of God. An abstractly
conceived God, a God of theory, might annihilate the con-
ditions of his own manifestation. But not the God whom man
experiences; above all, not the God whom Max Plowman
experienced, distinct and wonderful to the Imagination in
the essential persons of those he loved.
In this matter, Max Plowman, who understood Blake so
intimately, departed from the doctrine of his master. Blake
and Tim were, together with his illumined repudiation of the
last war, one whole of experience which he felt called to
understand. The ascension and death of Tim are perfectly
described in the Little Black Boy, in the lines which begin ;
And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love. . . .
148
MAX PLOWMAN
Max Plowman's failure in his three attempts to prove that love
is curative of what would ordinarily be reckoned mortal
disease was part of the process of understanding his experience.
After the letter of 1935, which I have quoted, the emphasis
on the curative power of love seems gradually to fade away; or,
when it flashes out again, it is only to sink into a kind of
acceptance. In 1937 there was yet another encounter with a
dying man, of which he says simply, "Of the essential redeeming
love, there wasn't enough in me as ever, it seems."
I have no right to suggest that Max Plowman consciously
abandoned his faith in the physically regenerative power of
love. As we have seen, he abandoned his belief that the
insufficiencies of others were the cause of his own "failure";
it wa& the insufficiency of love within himself. Whether he
verily and indeed believed to the end that if his faith had been
flawless, he would have been able to conquer physical death,
I do not know. I should be sorry to believe that he did. For
surely the true spiritual doctrine is not that perfect love can
cast out death from the body, but that it casts out fear from,
the soul. By casting out fear from the soul, it reveals with the
simplicity of sunlight, that Death is but the gateway to Life,
Max Plowman would never even in the period of his
completest confidence in the physically regenerative power of
love have challenged this spiritual doctrine. The question is
whether to the end he believed it to be incomplete, so long as
it held back from the faith in bodily regeneration. I cannot
answer that. In its most moderate form that the spirit "can
assist the body in recovery from disease" the belief is perhaps
true. In its less moderate form that "the life of the body is in
the spirit, and if the body can be brought into harmony with
the spirit, health results" it is questionable. For what does
bringing the body into harmony with the spirit really mean?
Spirit cannot spiritualise the body in the sense of a physical
regeneration. The spirit-body harmony comes from the side
of spirit, and is a spiritual attitude towards the body: the
"dear Brother Ass" of St. Francis. That attitude does not
necessarily produce bodily health ; but it does prevent the
disorder of the body from infecting the soul. In its extreme
form, that the joy of the spirit, educed by Love, can overcome
deep-seated organic disease, it is, I believe, definitely false.
H9
LITERARY PORTRAITS
But this is theory. In the living life of loving persons, where
and how shall the line be drawn? At what point shall the lover
say to the beloved, in the grip of disease: "Now your mortal
death, as far as human science can foretell, is a matter only
of days. Dear heart, accept it and rebel no more.
Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all.
Let us live the little rest of your life in the radiance of eternity,
in the joy of the knowledge that we are forever in the hands of
God." How shall the lover take upon himself the awful
responsibility of saying this, even though he believes it to be
true? Yet how shall the lover shirk this responsibility, and
not be faithless to love? Faced by this choice the human t heart
may well become a sensitive stone: for between those rival
paths is a desert land where the soul wanders and is lost.
Shall the verdict on such a one be (as Max Plowman, at
one time, would have pronounced it) that no true lover can
believe that the death of the beloved is imminent, because to
love indeed is to have faith? But faith in what? In the possi-
bility of a miracle? Of God working a miracle, or of our work-
ing one? Or of our co-operating with God, by faith, in working
one?
All these things, it seems to me, are something other than
love: the love which is truly and purely spiritual. That love
Max Plowman himself expressed when he said, of his ex-
perience with Tim, "He existed in his own sovereign individu-
ality; and that was enough. What happened was something
else. Whether he lived or died was something else" But Max
Plowman was not required to say that to a boy of twelve. But
he would have been required to say it to a grown man or a
grown woman. Would he have said it or something different ?
I do not know. What is certain from the letters is that Max
Plowman moved steadily from imputing his failure to mediate
the physically regenerative power of love to the fault of others
towards ascribing it solely to the deficiency of love in himself.
Yet I do not feel, either e from the letters themselves or my
memory of him in his last years that this sense of failure and
deficiency oppressed him, as it surely would, if it had been
deeply felt. What happened (I think) was that in course of
150
MAX PLOWMAN
time and experience the issue lost its urgency : it ceased to be
real. And when he said in 1937 that the essential redeeming
love in him was insufficient "as ever, it seems" he was
saying perfunctorily something that was hardly more than a
matter of form. Perhaps the truth of the matter is contained in
his own profound words :
"Nothing is nobler than the power to close the mind when
it is like to bleed to death. And nothing is more redemptive
of the individual, and of the world, than the power to open
it and lay it bare and show that the blind Fury itself can be
accepted and surmounted by consciousness."
There was the time when Max Plowman had to close his
mind; and to believe the impossible. With the years the need
gradually departed. He felt himself urged in another direction ;
ancf did not stay for a final answer to his former question, or
a final settlement of the account with himself. Whether or not
Love should or could repel death from the individual person
seemed of little moment beside the manifest truth that Love
could and should overcome man's self-inflicted death by
mechanised war. To accept death as it comes to the individual
person might or might not be necessary it might indeed be
the will of God : but to accept the mechanism of deliberate
mass-murder this no man who had known the reality of
Love could do for one moment without defacing the image and
likeness of God in himself.
To this cause in its fullness the last years of Max Plowman's
life were entirely dedicated. "A pattern of life," he said,
"that is essentially exclusive of war is what we have got to
create." In the service of that cause he and I were united, or
reunited : and are united still.
KARL MANNHEIM
One thing was certain to those who had the privilege of
direct contact with Karl Mannheim: that his was an eminent
mind. It stood above others; it comprehended more; saw the
great issues of our time in a wider perspective. More than
this, he was pervaded with the sense of their urgency. The
degree of his detachment was balanced by the degree of his
identification. If he had stood aloof in order to understand,
it was only in order that he might participate in the struggle
with a full consciousness of what was, and was not possible :
he was a master-strategist the wisest I have known of the
forces of light. And he was heroic. One felt that he was
profoundly tired, his heart as it were soaked through with
the weariness of bitter disappointment; yet he was indefatig-
able, determined to spend himself to the uttermost, in his
mission of spreading awareness of the human predicament and
creating the capacity of response to its demands.
It is beyond my competence to attempt an objective
appraisal of his obviously great contribution to sociological
thought. I can do no more than elucidate some of the constant
stimulus he applied to my own mind. And here I must
premise that I found myself, from the beginning of my contact
with him, in instinctive sympathy with his mode of thinking.
Though the range and resources of his knowledge were far
superior to my own, from the outset he confirmed in me a
conviction that the prevalent social and political thinking of
today was too abstract or too rigid or too emotional. It was
not engaging with the events themselves. The crying need
was for minds which could think on many levels at once.
In Mannheim I responded to one who had made himself a
master of this flexibility of thought, and who encouraged me
in my stumbling efforts to attain it. He had a rare genius for
the Socratic midwifery appropriate to an age of sickeningly
swift and radical change : for helping to bring to birth a new
mode of thought that should be at once instrumental and
directive in the process of ouv time.
The names he gave to this were not entirely happy. Neither
"planned thinking", nor "thinking at the level of planning",
152
KARL MANNHEIM
were calculated to ring a bell in the unprepared mind. He
more nearly hit the mark with his slogan, "Planning for
Freedom". That, at least, defined the main purpose of the
new mode of thinking, in a phrase which contained the element
of paradox necessary to distinguish it; and since it is of the
essence of the new thinking that it should be purposeful in a
new sense, the slogan comes near to fulfilling the function of
a definition. Moreover, it indicates a relation which Mann-
heim's thinking certainly had to that of Marx. Marx's
dictum: "The philosophers have interpreted history, it is our
task to change it", was the first parent of the school of thought
of which Mannheim was the brilliant exponent. But
Mannheim had profited, as no orthodox Marxist could
possibly do, by the subsequent experience of mankind. He
was totally immune from the dogmatism of positing a single
motivation of social change, though he allowed full weight
to the economic. But he saw, very clearly, that Marx's thinking
was conditioned by a particular social situation, which had
passed away.
In substance his thesis, as compared to Marx's, was that
the social revolution had occurred, in Russia and Germany,
to the disastrous accompaniment of revolutionary violence,
but it had taken place no less in other highly industrialized
societies. The political and social problem was to avert
dictatorship, which was a crude surgical operation on society
in itself a confession of failure rather a rational and remedial
adjustment. For such a rational adjustment the democracies
were equipped. The problem was to induce them to make
proper use of their equipment. To conceive of the situation,
as the Communists do de fide, as one in which dictatorship
must succeed, while the democracies must fail, in solving the
problem, is to misconceive it entirely. The fact is that "the
democracies have not yet found a formula to determine which
aspects of the social process should be controlled by regulation,
and the dictatorships cannot see that interfering with every-
thing is not planning".
Thus, the concept of "revolution" is itself misleading and
irrelevant. Revolution is a consequence and not a cause.
It is the consequence of the sudden disintegration of socially
established attitudes which results from collective insecurity:
153
LITERARY PORTRAITS
it is the concomitant and index of the failure of a society to
make a rational adjustment to the profound changes in its
technical and structural foundations. Where such adjustment
is not made, collective insecurity follows, and the irrationality
of revolution and war erupts from the depths of a national
or international society which has not discovered how to
organize and integrate the impulses to violence. To Mannheim
we may go for the deeper and disquieting obverse of
Mr Churchill's world-famous epigram: "Never was so much
owed by so many to so few"'
"There has seldom been a generation which was less willing
for petty sacrifice and more likely to pay the supreme one
without even knowing why."
That was, I believe, written in 1935; and it was, alas, to be
prophetic even of many of those who earned Mr. Churchill's
famous eulogy.
Out of this context emerges the meaning of Mannheim's
concept of "planning". It is the outcome and purpose of the
thinking of rational beings who have achieved a higher level
of consciousness. Higher than what? Than the unco-ordinated,
unsynthesized thinking of the specialized sciences, or the
dogmatic religious psychologies of the nature of Man, con-
ceived in abstraction from society. No doubt, Mannheim
himself could be charged with dogmatism when he asserts,
pretty peremptorily, that man is transformable, and implies
all human ideologies have a social origin. But the reply is
that, self-evidently, Man is Man-in-Society; and conscious
control of society is the form necessarily taken by any realistic
effort towards human self-control. There is no danger,
provided we understand clearly that control of society is
essentially a means the only means to secure and enlarge
the freedom of man, by preventing him from remaining the
slave of blind social forces, which seem to him impersonal
precisely because they are generated by his own "free"
activities. "Planning" is the activity of consciousness whereby
man escapes from the bondage of false freedom, which is
the freedom to destroy hirtiself by defect of consciousness,
into authentic freedom : the condition established for him by
a society which is consciously and conscientiously self-regulated.
154
KARL MANNHEIM
"Planning" is thus to use one of Mannheim's own definitions
"foresight deliberately applied to human affairs so that the
social process is no longer merely the product of conflict and
competition". Not, of course, a Utopia in which conflict and
competition are totally eliminated from the social process, but
where they are regulated and confined to spheres in which
they are socially beneficent.
At this point it becomes evident that Mannheim's primary
objective was to educate his contemporaries into a new con-
ception of freedom. Not to reconcile them to the misleading
notion that planning, in the current sense of the word, was
compatible with freedom (that is to say, some planning with
some freedom, both of the old and familiar style) but to
persuade them to a radical change of both concepts, so that
planning and freedom were understood to be complementary
and interdependent. In a kind of primitive and elemental
way men do understand this. They appreciate the necessity
of government, in order to secure any real freedom at all;
they appreciate the necessity of self-government, or democracy,
in order that their freedom may be enlarged, and made more
rational, by their willing consent to their own government.
But at this point there is, or there threatens to be, a hiatus.
Men continue to demand and to exercise freedoms of a type
that are obsolete and anachronistic, because they set in motion
impersonal social forces which undermine the collective
security and open the gates to the irruption of mass-irrationality.
Contemporary examples of such insistence on anachronistic
freedoms are the self-contradictory demand of Russia for
entire national sovereignty, or the demand of the English
coal-miners for a yet further increase in wages unrelated to
any increase in output. The one directly diminishes the
collective security of the world-society; the other, by intensify-
ing the pressure towards domestic inflation, diminishes the
collective security of the country.
Against dangers of this kind, Mannheim saw but one
prophylactic: an increase in human rationality expressed in a
new understanding of freedom. Of the way to achieve these
he was certain: it was by a nftore comprehensive science of
society based on a more objective analysis and a new synthesis.
By that effort, the new and necessary type of thinking would
LITERARY PORTRAITS
be evolved, which would be essentially dynamic, comporting
a change in the thinker himself and setting him the task of
changing others. Primarily, he envisaged the task as the
education of an elite the aristocracy within democracy with-
out which it is an unworkable system into a new understand-
ing of modern society, and of the nature of the contemporary
social process.
" If anything creative emerges from the general disillusion-
ment of an age which has witnessed the practical deterioration
of the ideals of Liberalism, Communism and Fascism, it can
only be a new experimental attitude in social affairs, a
readiness to learn from all the lessons of history. But one can
only learn if one has belief in the power of reason. For a time
it was healthy to see the limitations of the ratio, especially
in social affairs. It was healthy to realize that thinking is not
powerful if it is severed from the social context and ideas are
only strong if they have their social backing, that it is useless
to spread ideas which have no real function and are not woven
into the social fabric. But this sociological interpretation of
ideas may also lead to complete despair, discouraging the
individual from thinking about issues which will definitely
become the concern of the day. This discouragement of the
intelligentsia, which may lead them to too quick a resignation
of their proper function as the thinkers and forerunners of a
new society, may become even more disastrous in a social
setting where more depends on what the leading elites have
in mind than in other periods of history. The theory that
thought is socially conditioned and changes at different
periods in history is only instructive if its implications are
fully realized and applied to our own age."
This suggests the one radical criticism which can be made of
Mannheim's thought: that it ends in a universal relativism.
I am sure the criticism cannot be sustained, though I could
wish that Mannheim himself had more explicitly formulated
the assumptions which he accepted as self-evident. He rebuts
the criticism in this passage by saying that the theory that
thought is socially conditioned is only instructive if its implica-
tions are realized and applied to our own age: which must
mean that we are called upon consciously to submit our own
thought to a social conditioning, to apply it to the actual
social reality in statu nascendi and thereby to compel it to
transcend itself, or pass beyond the limitations imposed by a
KARL MANNHEIM
habit of abstraction and specialization. That, no doubt, in
itself involves a moral choice ; it is, as von Hugel would have
said, a costing emancipation of thought. But that alone does
not appear to guarantee that it will help the cat to jump the
right way. What is the right way? Is there, on Mannheim's
principles, any means of determining that? I am sure there is,
although (as I say) I would prefer that he himself should have
been more explicit about it. It is indicated in his declaration
that one can only learn from all the lessons of history "if one
has belief in the power of reason". The emphasis is on power.
Another more direct indication is contained in a passage
which is more fully quoted below. "Freedom of thought will
not be established" in a society planned for freedom
"because it is a virtue in itself, but because the unham-
pered exchange of opinion is the only guarantee of social
progress".
Thus, the condition of rationality is the unhampered
exchange of opinion. That alone is a rational society in which
this condition is deliberately secured, by means appropriate to
the real condition of the society, and only a rational society
is capable of progress. From those propositions it seems to
follow that progress is an advance in rationality. And rationality
the reason in the power of which one must believe requires
for its manifestation freedom of thought and expression. To
maintain this, a rational society must proscribe those who
would abolish or diminish this freedom.
Still, it may be said, we are not given a clear definition
either of rationality or its power. Probably, no further
definition is really possible. The power of reason will consist,
mainly, in the power of such a society to appeal to the human
reason as a manifest good, and to elicit the moral action of
men in support and defence of it, as the sole guarantee of a
continuous advance in truth and justice. In regard to this
normative ideal of the society "planned for freedom"
Mannheim's relativism amounts to no more than the recog-
nition that "the chances of achieving this new society are,
to be sure, limited. It is not absolutely predetermined. But
this is where our new freedom begins." Man is free to reject
or achieve it; to reject it through ignorance, or to achieve it
through fuller consciousness. But he has only to understand
LITERARY PORTRAITS
the human predicament, and the social situation, to devote
himself to the task of achieving it. That is the effect of the
"power of reason" in himself, and he must believe that it
has the like power in others.
The purpose of sociology as Mannheim understood and
practised it is to defend and strengthen the rational society.
To that end the historical consciousness must be contemporary
and dynamic. Marx expressed that truth in terms which are
now crude and treacherous because they derived from a social
situation which is past. The need is now for a dynamism that
is truly contemporary, which takes account both of the
fundamentally changed situation since the Communist
Manifesto and of the processes which have caused that change.
It is one of the tragedies of our time perhaps the greatest
that the Communists of the West have been unwilling' to
make the adjustment to reality. They have clung to an out-
moded orthodoxy which has led them to an absurdly partial
interpretation of events, and a complete failure in rational
anticipation : for which they have striven to compensate by an
opportunism so outrageously cynical that it has corroded the
very foundations of rationality. The degeneration of the
profound insight of Marx into the fanatical religious doctrine
that Stalinist Russia can do no wrong is one of the most
astonishing phenomena of an astonishing age.
Of course, that phenomenon also needs to be understood,
not merely condemned. The moral vacuum which this
preposterous orthodoxy has come to occupy arises from the"
lack of a faith adequate to the real social situation ; and that
lack is largely due to the persistence of the ideology of a
purely negative Liberalism which left fundamental doctrines
to be decided by individual caprice, and deplored even a
conscious affirmation of the principles of the social consensus
on which it was founded. The distinctive economic doctrines
of Liberalism have been entirely discarded, but the negative
ideology persists at a time when the changed social structure
imperatively demands a doctrine that is, if not more positive
than itself, at least in sufficient harmony with it to give it
relevant and effective guidance. This failure of the British
intelligentsia, deeply infected by the anarchy of Liberalism,
to produce a positive ethic (and metaphysic) of co-operation,
KARL MANNHEIM
has helped to create the situation in which the sinister com-
bination of fanaticism and cynicism, which goes by the name
of Communism, not merely corrupts the young but, by its
influence on men who hold key-positions among the workers,
does much to hamper the incoherent effort of the nation to
assert its own will to live.
It was, I think, no accident that Karl Mannheim, the central
European, by birth a Hungarian, a German by choice in the
pregnant days of the Weimar Republic, was driven to take
refuge in this country, and became one of its most devoted
citizens, and gave himself unsparingly to the work of making
it conscious of its opportunity and its danger. I should describe
his life-work, unhesitatingly, as an effort to give his adopted
country a doctrine at once worthy of its best traditions, and
moulded exactly on its real condition. Obviously, such a
description is teleological. When his own decisive thinking
was done, Mannheim was still a German, whose self-imposed
duty it was to give the nascent democracy of the Weimar
Republic a conscious philosophy. But the necessity which
drove him to England was implicit in his own activity.
England had become the only possible home for the peculiar
synthesis of rationality and freedom for which he stood : the
only country where it might be achieved. And it says some-
thing for England that shortly before his death he had been
appointed to one of the "key-positions" by which he rightly
set such store.
To educate the educators was his mission: to carry men's
minds beyond the barren and unprofitable antithesis between
planning and freedom, to make them aware at once that the
rational control of society was necessary in order that man,
the really existent man, and not the atomistic figment of
nostalgic fantasy, might control himself and his destiny and
that this control was the indispensable condition of freedom
real freedom and not the specious substitute for it that still
fascinates so many backward-looking imaginations.
* 'There are certain basic virtues which are essential to the
maintenance of a planned society, and it is necessary that we
should use all the resources of our education to create them.
These basic virtues are not very different from those which
the ethics of all world-religions, among others Christianity,
159
LITERARY PORTRAITS
have held to be vital : co-operation, brotherly help and decency.
This education is primarily needed to destroy the psychological
anarchy of liberal capitalism, which is based on the artificial
cultivation of certain exaggerated attitudes. One of these is the
mania for competition, which springs not from the desire for
objective achievement and community service, but from sheer
self-centredness or very often from neurotic anxiety. A
democratically planned society must thoroughly develop the
new forms of freedom, but once developed it must defend
them with the same zeal that any society shows in defence of
its fundamental principles. Democracy ought to instruct its
citizens in its own values instead of feebly waiting until its
system is wrecked by private armies from within. Tolerance
does not mean tolerating the intolerant. Once integration and
equilibrium have been achieved in the sphere of elementary
human relationships, there must be very far-reaching liberty
on the higher planes of our spiritual life, especially freedom
for intellectual discussion. But freedom of thought will not
be established merely because it is a virtue in itself but because
the unhampered exchange of opinion is the only guarantee
of social progress."
Democracy, too, has its orthodoxy: but it is an orthodoxy
which at the simple level of the essential social consensus is
but workaday epitome of the ethical teaching of all high-
religions, and at a higher level of consciousness is understood
to be the indispensable condition of the continuance of man's
search for truth and freedom. If social progress is to be pro-
gress indeed, and not mere biological process, freedom must
be understood as the willing consent to establish the social
conditions of freedom. The obstinate endeavour to perpetuate
forms of freedom which were appropriate only to a past
condition of society such for example as the freedom to do
altogether as one likes with one's own, or the much vaunted
consumer's choice coming, as they do, into direct conflict
with the organization necessary to keep society alive, only
makes for confusion and inefficiency and a lowering of the
standard of life which vastly diminishes the total freedom of
society. What is true of the capitalist is equally true of the
working-class, which adheres to the equally obsolete principle
of selling its labour for the highest price it can extract from a
seller's market. That price -control without wages-control is
irrational, as we are now learning, is only one of the many
exemplifications of one of Mannheim's basic axioms: that
1 60
KARL MANNHEIM
partial planning is worse than no planning aj all. The * 'free-
doms" which the partial planner treats as sacrosanct, through
ignorance or timidity, then become self-destructive.
The vital freedoms of democracy can be preserved and
extended in modern society. Of that Mannheim was con-
vinced. But he was equally convinced that there is only one
way to do it : that is, consciously to organize society in such a
fashion that these freedoms are guaranteed. The question
for him, was whether existing democracy was capable of the
effort the small conscious sacrifice that would avert the
great unconscious one. That depended primarily on the
capacity of the democratic elites for a radical change in their
modes of thought. It is at this point that Mannheim, though
a Jew, came into intimate harmony with the most responsible
Christian thinking of our day, which regards as the note of
Christianity the willingness to suffer such a radical change in
those habitual postulates of social thought which Mannheim
distinguished as principia media : the principles which are of an
age and not for all time, as they almost invariably are imagined
to be.
The future is open. The impassioned objectivity of Mann-
heim's study of the social mechanism served merely to reinforce
his convictions of this basic freedom of social man to choose and
create his own destiny. But this freedom could not be exer-
cised by abstract idealism : it was realized only in relevant and
responsible action, that is to say, action which proceeded from
a clear knowledge of those points and structures in society
where positive influence was possible, and applied itself to
some one of them. Herein lay at once the likeness and the
extreme difference between Mannheim's thought and Marx's.
All that Marx had in unconscious deference to the principia
media of his age taken for granted as permanent in the struc-
ture of capitalist society, Mannheim had submitted to a
searching analysis based upon bitter experience. He turned
the tables on Marx by demonstrating the Utopianism of his
* 'scientific socialism". Yet he was the first to acknowledge the
profound genius of his predecessor, of whom in the positive
and creative sense he was one df the greatest disciples. A
comparison and a contrast between the fate and fortune of
these two German-Jewish refugees, with almost a century
11 161
LITERARY PORTRAITS
between them, jmposes itself: one fled from the collapse of
German liberalism in the iS/jo's, the other from the collapse
of German Social Democracy (of which Marx was the deity)
in the 1930*8. I would like to think that, in making Mannheim
Professor of Education at London, England instinctively
showed its recognition of what is necessary at this time of
revolutionary change. It gave Marx freedom; it gave Mann-
heim the freedom and the task of teaching it how to preserve
the freedom that it gave. None was better fitted to fulfil it.
Multis ille bonisflebilis occidit.
162
GEORGE CHAPMAN
"I have sometimes wondered, in the reading", wrote
Dryden in the dedication to The Spanish Friar, "what was
become of those glaring colours which amazed me in Bussy
d'Ambois on the theatre; but when I had taken up what I
supposed a fallen star, I found I had been cozened with a
jelly; nothing but a cold, dull mass, which glittered no longer
than it was shooting; a dwarfish thought, dressed up in
gigantic words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expres-
sion, and gross hyperboles; the sense of one line expanded
prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all, uncorrect English,
and j hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense ; or,
at best, a scantling of wit, which lay gasping for life, and
groaning beneath a heap of rubbish. A famous modern poet
used to sacrifice every year a Statius to Virgil's manes; and
I have indignation enough to burn a D'Ambois annually to
the memory of Jonson."
The judgment of George Chapman's most famous play
could hardly be more severe; yet, sentence by sentence, it
could be amply justified. Nevertheless, it is unjust. Whatever
Bussy'd'Ambois may be, it is not what Dryden's total verdict
suggests it is, namely, a mass of empty rant once made
endurable or enchanting by some great and popular actor,
who tore a passion to tatters. We who read it now, and never
had the opportunity of being amazed by it on the boards, feel
none of the asperity of disillusion which Dryden felt. On the
contrary, our difficulty is to imagine it a popular success:
for assuredly those "grotesque and grandiose" tirades, when
hurled at them by the actors, could never have been under-
stood by any audience. They might almost as well have been
uttered in another language than our own. All we can conceive
is that the language seemed like a continuous roar of sullen
thunder, sometimes gathering into a lightning flash.
But, with all deference to Dryden's great authority, the
lightning is authentic; and, what is more, wholly Chapman's
own. His crashes of magnificence, rare and shortlived though
they are, are like nothing else in the Elizabethan drama. They
are strange, with a strangeness of their own; and we are
163
LITERARY PORTRAITS
utterly unprepared for them when they come. Consider
Bussy's dying speech :
O my heart is broken!
Fate nor these murtherers, Monsieur nor the Guise,
Have any glory in my death, hut this,
This killing spectacle, this prodigy:
My sun is turn'd to blood, in whose red beams
Pindus and Ossa (hid in drifts of snow
Laid on my heart and liver) from their veins
Melt like two hungry torrents, eating rocks,
Into the ocean of all human life
And make it bitter, only with my blood.
O frail condition of strength, valour, virtue,
In me (like warning fire upon the top
Of some steep beacon, on a steeper hill)
Made to express it : like a falling star
Silently glanc'd that like a thunderbolt
Look'd to have stuck and shook the firmament.
The four lines which lead to those two great ones are dark-
ness palpable; what follows is commonplace and so anti-
climax; but the stream of Bussy's blood has such potency of
bitterness that it compels the whole into some strange, writhing
and tortuous life. As again and again with Chapman, one
feels he does not know what he is doing; but that even in the
kind of his unconsciousness, there is a strangeness. Once
more, it is his own ; quite unlike anybody else's unconsciousness.
Consider, too, Monsieur's description of Bussy when he is
bent on provoking the Guise to combat.
His great heart will not down, 'tis like the sea,
That partly by his own internal heat,
Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion,
Their heat and light, and partly of the place
The divers frames, but chiefly by the moon,
Bristled with surges, never will be won,
(No, not when th' hearts of all those powers are burst)
To make retreat into his settled home
Till he be crown* d with his own quiet foam.
It is almost impossible to believe that Chapman was de-
liberately working for an effect which largely depends on the
contrast with the pedantic detail of the natural philosophy
which has gone before. His method of employing his common-
place book into the drama is too habitual to allow us to
suppose that it was calculated here. But equally it is almost
164
GEORGE CHAPMAN
impossible to suppose that he was unaware of the lovely calm
he had captured in his final lines. And it becomes quite
impossible when we compare them with Tamyra's invocation :
Now all ye peaceful regents of the night,
Silently-gliding exhalations.
Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of waters,
Sadness of heart and ominous secureness,
Enchantments, dead sleeps, all the friends of rest,
That ever wrought upon the life of man,
Extend your utmost strengths, and this charmed hour
Fix like the Centre! Make the violent wheels
Of Time and Fortune stand, and great Existence
(The Maker's treasury) now not seem to be
To all but my approaching friends and me !
There, without a doubt, is the work of a conscious poet, and,
still more interesting in the case of Chapman, in whose work
such evidences are very rare, there we have (or may guess that
we have) the expression of a recognisable and profound
emotional experience. We would hazard the assertion that
the man who wrote those lines had felt Night, and felt it
deeply, and in no common way.
Now Chapman had commenced author some ten years
before the writing of Bussy, and his first poem (to the publica-
tion of which he was urged by Marlowe) was The Shadow of
Night. The theme, or the thesis, of that curious poem is that
Night, which brings man freedom from his day-time slavery
to the sense of sight, is the opportunity of Philosophy and the
realm of Truth. At first, when we read the poem, it is difficult
to persuade ourselves that Chapman is wholly serious. The
mixture of the grotesque and grandiose is as disturbing in
his earliest as in his latest work. But, apart from the simple
consideration that Chapman must have been driven by some
compelling motive to make his debut with a poem on a theme
that was bound to be unpopular, one is finally forced by the
quality of the poem itself to the conclusion that Chapman was
in deadly earnest. He did, so to speak, t really believe in"
Night ; and though nowhere in the "hymns" which compose the
poem did he approach the convincing beauty of Tamyra's
invocation to Night, he was completely serious in his strange
enthusiasm. At one moment he seems almost to succeed in
uttering his complex emotion.
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Rich-taper'd sanctuary of the blest,
Palace of ruth, made all of tears and rest,
To thy black shades and desolation
I consecrate my life.
Night was evidently for him in some sort the presence of God,
in which his soul, freed from the urgent solicitations of sense,
was like the pool of Bethesda troubled only by angelic visita-
tions. Then "the sadness of heart and ominous secureness"
of which Tamyra speaks welled up like a dark fountain within
him. He felt himself to be in communion.
If we translate his evident experience in such terms as
these, we moderns feel an instinctive motion of sympathy
with Chapman. But Chapman had inherited an old and
severe philosophic tradition, with a vocabulary that is
unfamiliar to us; and what is more, he had inherited the
impulse to render to himself a philosophic account of his
experience. Thus he would have said that in the presence of
Night "the chaos of the world was worked into digestion";
and likewise the inward chaos which continually threatened
man through the siege of the senses. Or he would have said
that by the aid of Night he achieved that victory over himself
which the wounded Strozza achieves and expounds in The
Gentleman Usher:
Yet the judicial patience I embrace
(In which my mind spreads her impassive powers
Through all my surTring parts) expels their frailty;
And rendering up their whole life to my soul
Leaves me naught else but soul . . .
Humility hath raised me to the stars
In which (as in a sort of crystal globe)
I sit and see things hid from human sight.
The philosophy is a kind of semi-Christian Stoicism : by the
operation of the ethical will the natural is free to be trans-
formed into the supernatural. The effect of Night, to use the
same analogy, is like the effect of divine Grace. It is a boon
granted to suffering and disordered man, clean apart from his
own efforts.
His reverence for Night and it would be unfair to Chap-
man to use a lesser word was thus philosophical and religious.
To be more precise, it is by virtue of his reverence for Night
that his philosophy, which is a kind of Stoicism, becomes
1 66
GEORGE CHAPMAN
religious : for we may say that the conception or experience of
divine Grace (in some one of its manifestations) is necessary
to distinguish a religion from a philosophy. Chapman appears
to have had both the conception and the experience of Grace
in his religion of Night. Then, and then alone, he seems to
have been touched with the peace which passeth all under-
standing. It was, for him, the moment of vision: " Day of
deep students, most contentful Night!"
We suggest that this religion of Chapman's deserves to be
taken seriously, not in the sense that it is an adequate religion,
but that it was the serious effort of a serious mind, at a moment
when the traditional religious framework of human experience
had been shattered for the bolder spirits, to create for himself
at least a religious substitute for religion, which should do
jusfice to the certain values of his own experience and be
worthy of acceptance by his intellect. It was, in intention at
least, an effort to make Stoicism a religion. It may seem a
strange effort, but the close reader of Chapman will be eager
to contend that it was a genuine one. Nor should it be for-
gotten that he was the intimate friend of Marlowe, whose
atheism was of the tough and serious sort, and that it was at
Marlowe's instigation that The Shadow of Night was published.
Marlowe seems to have recognised at least the seriousness and
the strangeness of Chapman's endeavour.
However that may be, the endeavour itself can only have
been based on an unusual idiosyncrasy of temperament and
experience. Chapman appears to have been aware of this.
Ye living spirits then, if any live
Whom like extremes do like affections give,
Shun, shun this cruel light, and end your thrall . . .
That is a strong statement, which betrays Chapman's con-
sciousness that he was a queer fellow. And, indubitably,
The Shadow of Night is a queer poem. There is something
strange about it; it strikes us as at once extravagant and
earnest. It puts forward a claim to private revelation in terms
so unfamiliar that we are at first bewildered. We are loth to
admit that Chapman can be serious, and we are forced to that
hypothesis rather by the ultimate absurdity that awaits any
other assumption than by the immediate power of the poem
itself. But once we have accepted, as a real hypothesis, that
167
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Chapman may be entirely serious, not only do the evidences
crowd upon us that it is the true one, but we seem to have a
clue to the solution of another problem besides that of Chapman
himself.
Ever since Professor Minto, sixty years ago, put forward the
theory that Chapman was "the rival poet" of Shakespeare's
sonnets, it has commended itself to a steadily increasing
number of students of Shakespeare and Chapman; and they
have felt that Minto was not exaggerating when he claimed
to be innocent of presumption in saying "that he is so obvious
that his escape from notice is little short of miraculous."
Indeed the theory that Chapman was the rival poet seems to
belong to an altogether different order from any other theory
whatsoever concerning Shakespeare's sonnets. It is a necessary
instrument of Elizabethan literary criticism. The more r one
reads, both of Shakespeare and Chapman, the more self-
evident it is: and it would be true to say that the critic who,
after submitting himself to the considerable volume of
Chapman's works, seeks to give an exact impression of his
enigmatic poetic personality, has the unique experience of
knowing that it has been done already, with a perfection of
good humour and generosity, by no less a hand than
Shakespeare's own. The answer to the question: what was
Chapman? is Shakespeare's 86th Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse
Bound for the prize of all too precious you
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence :
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter: that enfeebled mine.
That astonishing sonnet for its harmony of dignity and
persiflage in verse of incomparable diction and melody is
astonishing is an achievement of a kind for ever beyond
1 68
GEORGE CHAPMAN
Chapman's scope. In a way, it is more than generous to
Chapman. Chapman's verse never wholly merited the
splendid tribute of the first line; neither was Chapman's
bitterness towards Shakespeare adequately punished by so
smiling and so royal a gesture. But there is something of
importance to be said on Chapman's side. Uncouth and
grotesque though he was in The Shadow of Night, he was
philosophical in a way Shakespeare was not philosophical.
Shakespeare had no need to be philosophical in this way.
He was one of those prodigies of Nature to whom the expression
of life came as easily as life itself. He was not tormented by the
desire to find an intellectual answer to the riddle of existence ;
to experience existence as he could experience it sufficed him.
Like his successor Keats, he could and must wait "to feel it on
his ^mlses." But Chapman was different. The world of sense,
of immediate experience, was a world from which he was
debarred. One might search through all his works for the
incontrovertible evidence of the thing seen, almost in vain.
In the outward and visible world he was a peering exile.
No possibility of communion was there for him; and, on the
grim economic level, no patron either. But he had, as we
believe and have tried to show, his authentic consolation;
his moment
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.
It was the moment of Night, when "the cruel light" was
withdrawn and the kingdom of sense in which he was a
stranger was blotted out. If his nature was such that he must
needs make of this deliverance a mystery revealed to him alone,
he was not the first mystic to have sinned through pride. It
was his misfortune, too, to be compelled to manifest his
knowledge in the medium of poetry, where the supremacy of
the simple and the sensuous and the passionate is such that
the non-sensual is as close as the word itself to the nonsensical.
None the less, if principles may be considered in themselves,
apart from the mastery of their expression, Chapman repre-
sented a principle which was in itself not unworthy to be
169
LITERARY PORTRAITS
counterposed to Shakespeare's: the metaphysical against the
physical, the supra-sensuous against the sensuous.
Since day or light, in any quality,
For earthly uses do but serve the eye;
And since the eye's most quick and dangerous use
Enflames the heart, and learns the soul abuse . . .
Since night brings terror to our frailty still
And shameless day doth marble us in ill, , . .
Gome consecrate with me to sacred Night
Your whole endeavours, and detest the light.
No pen can anything eternal write
That is not steep'd of humour of the Night.
It seems beyond all reasonable doubt that Shakespeare
riposted genially to this (as Mr. Acheson was the first to show)
with Biron's tender and fanciful encomium of Love, that
"adds a precious seeing to the eye", in Love's Labour's Lost:
of Love that is
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair;
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Unless his ink were ternper'd with Love's sighs.
To Shakespeare, no doubt, it was a mere contest of wit in
which he knew himself to be carelessly certain of victory. The
evidence is that Chapman was the aggressor, for as I have
pointed out elsewhere,* it is hardly possible to understand four
lines from the second part of The Shadow of Night
Presume not then ye flesh-confounded souls
That cannot bear the full castalian bowls
Which sever mounting spirits from the senses
To look in this deep fount for thy pretences
save as a direct onslaught on Venus and Adonis and its motto :
Vilia miretur vulgus : mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.
But this is not the occasion to enter into the details of an
unequal literary quarrel between supreme natural genius and
a turgid, self-conscious but sincere metaphysical mystic, save
to remark that the manner of Chapman's discomfiture must
have been bitter indeed to him. Shakespeare seems simply to
have smiled at him, never to have taken him seriously either
* Shakespeare. By John Middleton Murry, pp. 50-51.
170
GEORGE CHAPMAN
as a rival in poetry or to the favour of his patron, and in the
very act of daffing aside his claim to special inspiration,
vouchsafed "with invocation, fasting, watching yea, not with-
out having drops of their souls like an heavenly familiar,"
written verse more obviously inspired than any Chapman was
to compass in the whole of his long and laborious life.
There is indeed no comparison between the men, either as
persons or poets; nor any point in comparing them, save as
representing opposed principles. The opposition between them
was that long afterwards defined by Keats as the opposition
between the man of Character and the man of Genius ; and,
in fact, Chapman appears to have cut a sorrier figure than
Mr. Benjamin Bailey when his character was put to the test.
After pouring abuse on Venus and Adonis as the work of "a
fl Ah- confounded soul", he stooped immediately afterwards
to write Ovid's Banquet of Sense which, as Swinburne said, is
foul "with the dry-rot of pedantic obscenity." From a certain
height of judgment Venus and Adonis can be condemned as the
work of "a flesh-confounded soul"; it is brimmed with the
lust of the eye and the pride of life. But that the man who
presumed to this height of judgement should immediately
descend to a cold-blooded attempt to outdo it in sensuality
in order to win the favour of a patron, puts him beyond the
pale. Inevitably he achieved not the sensuous, but the obscene,
and apparently, all for nothing.
In this respect Chapman is, indeed, an unedifying figure.
One feels behind his work envy, and hatred and all manner of
uncharitableness. But we cannot tell under what compulsions
of poverty he may have suffered. He may have had more cause
even than Shakespeare to wince at the recollection of having
gored his own thoughts. At any rate, if we hold in check our
own instinctive reactions to his deficient humanity, we can
piece together the pattern of a peculiar and considerable
nature. He was one for whom the opposition between sense
and soul was never resolved. The experience of love appears
to be totally absent from his work. Bussy's passion for Tamyra,
for instance, is quite without humanity or reality; as such, no
doubt, it is true to Bussy's "character", but it is completely
unconvincing. And Bussy's 'comic' counterpart is to be
found in Tharsalio, of A Widow's Tears. Like Bussy, he is
171
LITERARY PORTRAITS
impressive. Whereas Bussy's overweening confidence is
tragic, Tharsalio's, which being 'comic' has to be successful,
is completed by an absolute cynicism. His vicarious wooing
of Eudora, through Arsace, for cold pruriency anticipates the
very worst of Wycherley. Yet, when we have said this, we
must make an absolute distinction. There is no smell of
corruption in A Widow's Tears. This is the cynicism not of a
roue, but of a philosopher, or at least of a mediaeval monastic,
towards the world and the flesh. And we may suppose that
the convictions to which Clermont gives utterance in The
Revenge are indistinguishable from Chapman's own:
But I deny that any man doth love,
Affecting wives, maid, widows, and women . . .
So when humanity rules men and women
'Tis for society confind in reason.
But what excites the bed's desire in blood
By no means justly can be constru'd love;
For when love kindles any knowing spirit
It ends in virtue and effects Divine
And is in friendship chaste and masculine.
Certainly, there is nothing in Chapman's writings which
forbids us to take that profession at its face value. Neither in
his tragedy or his comedy is there any trace of the familiar
sentiment or passion of love. And even where, as in An
Humourous Day's Mirth, his subject compels him to contemplate
the possibility of a man falling in love with a woman, he treats
it with a precise formality, and notably in accordance with
Clermont's formula. Thus Dowsecer, having looked upon
the picture, speaks in Chapman's familiar philosophic idiom:
What have I seen? How am I burnt to dust
With a new sun and made a novel phoenix!
Is she a woman that objects the sight,
Able to work the chaos of the word
Into digestion? O divine aspect!
The excellent disposer of the mind
Shines in thy beauty, and thou hast not changed
My soul to sense, but sense unto my soul;
And I desire thy pure society
But even as angels unto angels fly.
That is merely to show tha^t Chapman's attitude is entirely
consistent in the matter of human love. It is only in Eastward
Ho, where in all probability neither the drafting nor the
172
GEORGE CHAPMAN
plotting of the characters was his, that he comes remotely
near depicting a credible human relation between a man and
a woman.
If therefore we are to say that Chapman's mind was
metaphysical, we must use the word in a more precise meaning
than that in which it is applied to Donne. For Chapman, the
world of sense seems always to have been a chaos. He was a
stranger in it, and he could make nothing of it. The only
conduct in it that he could approve was that of "the Senecal
man", who, secure of his own contact with the divine reason,
was completely unperturbed by sense or circumstance. But
one feels, with Chapman, that his positive stoicism is more of
a velleity than a conviction. He does not make at all the
impression of having been a successfully Senecal man himself.
But it is an ideal which he understands and approves. His
other "ideas" of human nature are strangely limited. Besides
the Senecal man, he portrays two other types : the natural man,
and the "politician", the Machiavellian. All three are in
reality very simple, and by their simplicity almost superhuman.
The natural man is a prodigy of strength; the "politician" is a
miracle-worker, a "medicine-man".
A politician must like lightning rnrlt
The very marrow and not taint the skin
It is an effective description, though Chapman spoils it by a
characteristic and extravagant elaboration; but it is naive.
These three simple types are Chapman's main clues to the
human chaos. They are not on the same level. The natural
man and the "politician" the Lion and the Fox of Mr.
Wyndham Lewis's interesting essay are the thesis and the
anti-thesis: the Senecal man, in some sort, the synthesis. But
to describe them thus is to exaggerate the clarity of Chapman's
thought. They rather represent a pattern to which he
instinctively reverted, tendencies within the tumult of his own
experience, than a clear scheme. But the pattern is sufficiently
marked to be significant; and the curious inconsistencies of
character between Bussy and The Revenge seem to show that
this intellectual bias of Chapman's mind was powerful. The
Guise, who is "politician" in the? earlier, becomes "Senecal" in
the later play; while the King makes precisely the opposite
change both in defiance of history. And the conclusion
LITERARY PORTRAITS
seems fairly plain, when we remember that the same three-
fold pattern reappears in The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey
"politician" and "natural" man respectively, with Cato for
the "Senecal" hero, that this was the way in which Chapman
was impelled to think history.
In spite of this fairly persistent pattern, one feels that there
was a curious discontinuity in Chapman's thinking. Its
clarities are momentary and episodic, just as are (on the smaller
scale) the intermittent clarities of his verse. But against this
we must set the fact that he, unlike any other Elizabethan,
had the determination to grapple with history which was
really contemporary. Was there anything more to be made of
it than he made in The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Biron ?
Is not the vision of that drama the vision with which we see
the period even to-day the great noble pitted against the
King, no longer a feudal superior but a national sovereign?
Turbulence against the new order, individualism against
universality, the part against the whole. One cannot
challenge the main values of Chapman's picture, nor easily
think of any contemporary who could have marshalled them
so well. It is the details which confound us. Thus Biron's
arguments, in his various great speeches, are in naked conflict
with one another, and Chapman gives not the faintest indica-
tion that they are not on each occasion to be taken at their
face-value. To interpret them psychologically as successive
efforts in self-deception would be an anachronism. Of
psychology, in this sense, Chapman is completely innocent.
At one moment, Biron, the man of war, maintains quite
seriously that peace is unnatural.
The world is quite inverted, virtue thrown
At Vice's feet, and sensual Peace confounds
Valour and cowardice, fame and infamy.
War is thus an end in itself, the only condition in which the
true human values are manifest. He goes on :
We must reform and have a new creation
Of state and government, and on our Chaos
Will I sit brooding up another world.
I, who through all the dangers that can siege
The life of man have forc'd my glorious way
To the repairing of my country's ruins,
Will ruin it again to re-advance it.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
There is no lack of clarity here. Since in war someone must
win, war is necessarily interrupted by intervals of peace and
order. But these, though necessary, are unnatural. The only
purpose of peace is to beget the means and opportunity of
further war. The attitude may appear strange to the point of
fantasy; but to the contemplative mind, viewing the Europe of
the sixteenth century, and the behaviour of its famous soldiers,
what other interpretation of their conduct was possible? In
the next act, however, Biron opens a quite different argument :
"We must not be more true to Kings than Kings are to their
subjects." The doctrines of Machiavelli have been embraced
by rulers, in treason against the true source of their authority,
which is Religion. Because of this treason, "two abhorred
twins . . . stern War and Liberty enter'd the world." With the
decline of Religion,
The lamp of all authority goes out
And all the blaze of princes is extinct.
Thus, as a poet sends a messenger
Out to the stage to show the sum of all
That follows after, so are kings' revolts
And playing both ways with religion
Fore-runners of afflictions imminent.
This is, indeed, no mean argument. But what is it doing in
Biron's mouth? Some might attempt to find the answer to
that question in Biron's next argument. He has at last obeyed
the summons to court, and is playing cards in the King's
presence. The king leaves the room, and Biron breaks into a
bold eulogy of Philip II of Spain, who "with his divine phil-
osophy" extirpated idolatry throughout the world, employed
the gold of America only to propagate his empire
and his empire
Desired t' extend so that he might
Extend religion through it, and all nations
Reduce to one firm constitution
Of piety, justice, and one public weal
To which end he made all his matchless subjects
Make tents their castles and their garrisons;
True Catholics, countrymen nd their allies;
Heretics, strangers and their enemies.
There was in him a magnaminity
Mont. To temper your extreme applause, my lord,
'75
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Shorten and answer all things in a word,
The greatest commendation we can give
To the remembrance of that king deceased
Is that he spar'd not his own eldest son
But put him justly to a violent death
Because he sought to trouble his estate.
Sir. Is't so?
Biron is taken utterly aback, and at that moment "the King
suddenly enters, having determined what to do". It is a splendid
coup de theatre, though it is not of Chapman's own invention ;
and it would be possible to hold that the previous argument
on the decay of religion was merely to lead up to it. But so
sustained an effort of psychological construction, which would
pass unremarked on the stage, would be unparalleled in
Chapman. Nor, for the same reason, is it possible to consider
it as irony. What seems to be the simple fact is that Chapman
had to make Biron say something. He was neither wholly
conscious, nor wholly unconscious of its incongruity (for
D'Auvergne's half-bantering remark on "deep discourses"
suggests that the unconsciousness was not entire), but in a
kind of half-lucid confusion.
Some such condition it is necessary to suppose behind most
of Chapman's writing. He did not live in and through his
characters at all; yet some compulsion drew him towards the
high drama of the contemporary world. Where the problem
of the world of existence was most baffling, there he must needs
grapple with it. It is a queer paradox that the poet who, of
all the Elizabethans, appears to have been the most withdrawn,
the most solitary, the deepest wrapped in the toils of his own
speculations, should have been the one pre-eminently allured
to picture the tangled drama of contemporary policy and
intrigue. Yet, in the judgment of a modern psychology of
"compensation", the phenomenon may be natural enough.
What is palpable is that Chapman did not understand the
figures that fascinated him. We cannot blame him for that,
for we are ourselves in no better case. These Renaissance
super-men are beyond us, much more than they were beyond
Chapman. The famous conclusion of Biron's outburst to
La Brosse, the astrologer, gives us at any rate an authentic
sensation.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Loves t' have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel plows air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is; there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.
They may have actually felt like that ; but it is rather a picture
of how they appeared to Chapman. But of what really passed
within their minds he gives us no credible account. The
thought which he lends them is essentially the thought of the
outside and amazed observer. We have only to compare them
with figures like Shakespeare's Faulconbridge and Hotspur to
see the difference. Shakespeare's figures are human characters,
spontaneous physical men whom we instinctively understand ;
Chapman's are confused and portentous, and the more por-
tentous because of their confusion. But the confusion is not
theirs, it is Chapman's. He cannot identify himself with them,
neither can he anatomise them. They are creatures of another
kind, at whose nature he can only grope, and fill out their
design with his own gropings, as when Biron compares himself
with the animals:
Amongst them the lion
Serves not the lion, nor the horse the horse,
As man serves man : when men most show their spirits
In valour, and their utmost dare to do,
They are compared to lions, wolves and boars;
But, by conversion, none will say a lion
Fights as he had the spirit of a man.
Let me then in my danger now give cause
For all men to begin that simile.
The superman, or super-animal, which Chapman's thought
there reaches after; the man, whose manly part, or divine
reason, is merely the means to a fuller indulgence of the lion
part, not to control it, is the creature who fascinates Chapman's
gaze. Against him, on a lower level, is ranged "the politician",
whose reason is the tool of his advantage. In the conflict
between the lion-man and the politician, the lion-man has
Chapman's sympathy and ours. But beyond them both is the
Senecal man, whose lion-part is active only at the call of
12 177
LITERARY PORTRAITS
reason and in defence of right and justice like the "absolute
Clermont", and like Biron's King. By such men alone, the
chaos of the world is "brought into digestion". The justice
they uphold derives from reason, which is the divine element
within them. By obeying it, they are "one with the All";
by extending its dominion they cause the whole to triumph
over the unruly part.
That was the substance of Chapman's philosophy: a
Stoicism, coloured by personal experience, and prepared at
any moment to ally itself with Christianity. The main outlines
are clear; but the applications are confused, as though the
material which he sought to pattern by its means were fluid
and elusive. And indeed it was. How far were the new national
monarchs disciples of Reason, or the order they enforced the
order of Justice? A little later the chaos of the world vCould
drag from even an Oliver Cromwell the admission that any
order was better than none. And the politician was as often
the chosen instrument of the new national monarchy as he
was the servant of mere princely tyranny. It was not easy for
the philosopher to find the clue to it all. But Chapman, with all
his confusions and his pedantry, makes upon us the impression
of a man more conscious than others of the strangeness of
the age in which he lived. He may not have been wholly
deliberate, but his choice of themes is that of a man who is
aware of the Renaissance as a European happening. It is
something obscure and portentous and elemental. An old
order is gone, a new chaos is come ; and the signs of a new
order yet are hard to discern.
The thought and the phrase recur continually in Chapman,
both of the macrocosm and the microcosm. Instinctively,
one compares Chapman's use with Othello's sudden words:
When I love thee not
Chaos is come again.
The packed suggestion of this is diffused, after Chapman's
fashion, in the words of Montsurry to Tamyra.
I know not how I fare; a sudden night
Flows through my entrails, and a headlong chaos
Murmurs within me which I must digest
And not drown her in my confusions
Which was my life's joy, being best inform'd.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
Montsurry himself is not one of Chapman's tragic figures ; he
hovers between a lay-figure, like so many of Chapman's
subsidiary characters, and a poltroon. But take away from the
description of Montsurry, which as it stands might serve for
a description of Othello, the suggestion that there had been a
moment when the chaos was informed, and it would serve
admirably to describe the condition of Chapman's lion-men.
And just as the order within the Senecal man is one with the
order of the divine reason that seeks to inform the world, so
the chaos within a lion-man is one with the chaos of the age.
The imprcssiveness of Chapman is that his tragedies at their
best do convey this sense of "murmuring chaos," both positively
and negatively : positively, because the lion-men are the heroes,
and negatively, because Chapman's failure to impose his
philosophical pattern on his material reinforces the impression
which is concentrated in his heroes. They are felt to be the
creatures of their total environment; the obscurity and tension
that is diffused through the whole drama comes to a head in
them. This singular effect has been ascribed to "a moral
confusion" in Chapman; and the phrase, if it were used
precisely, might serve. But what we generally understand by
a moral confusion is the kind of moral insensitiveness which
is evident in such a poet as Fletcher, and which made him
congenial to the Restoration mind. Chapman's confusion is
entirely different; it is that of a man defeated in a genuine
effort to comprehend. It is his intellectual seriousness which,
being baffled creates the strange atmosphere of his tragedy,
and makes him the half-conscious vates of an era when an old
great order had crumbled, and the emergence of a new seemed
doubtful.
Probably, we succumb too easily to the magic of Shakespeare.
He tells us, in enchanted accents, what we would like to
believe concerning his age, and it seems almost perverse to
break the spell by reflecting that what Shakespeare has to
tell us was never true of any age. It is the kind of thing by
which any age would be enchanted, but in which no age would
ever find the reflection of itself. Jonson may have been using
a great commonplace when he declared that Shakespeare was
not of an age but for all time ; but in its most exact sense it is
true. There is singularly little of the Elizabethan in Shakes-
LITERARY PORTRAITS
peare ; yet he is become, for most of us, the epitome of that
great period, whereas he is, in fact, the means by which we
humanize or idealize it to our liking. Through him, we digest
the chaos. From Chapman we receive a grim reminder of
what it was ; and with it awakens a sense of sympathy for the
embittered philosopher who had a grudge against Shakespeare
for his trick of alchemy. Probably Chapman felt angry with
the enchanter, who seemed to him to evade reality, instead of
wrestling with it, who took "the plain way to barbarism"
and "poesy as pervial as oratory", and dared to declare that
Love was as potent a principle of harmony as Reason. The
trouble was that Chapman's principle would not work,
whereas Shakespeare's did even though what it worked
was a miracle.
We have said above that it is impossible to tell whaf com-
pulsions of poverty Chapman may have suffered. That is to
exaggerate our ignorance, for it happens that one of Chapman's
best poems To M. Harriots is rich with autobiographical
material. Harriots was a philosopher-friend of Chapman's,
evidently in a position to prosecute his metaphysical studies
without material anxieties : whom Chapman addresses thus :
Thus as the soul upon the flesh depends,
Virtue must wait on wealth; we must make friends
Of the unrighteous mammon, and our sleights
Must bear the forms of fools or parasites.
Rich mine of knowledge, O that my strange muse
Without this body's nourishment could use
Her zealous faculties, only t'aspire,
Instructive light from your whole sphere of fire;
But woe is me, what zeal or power so ever,
My free soul hath, my body will be never
Able t'attend; never shall I enjoy
The end of my hapless birth; never employ
That smother'd fervour that in loathed embers
Lies swept from light, and no clear hour remembers.
O, had your perfect eye organs to pierce
Into that chaos whence this stifled verse
By violence breaks; where, glow-worm-like, doth shine
In nights of sorrow, this hid soul of mine ; . . .
And how her genuine forms struggle for birth
Under the claws of this foul panther, earth,
Then under all those forms you should discern
My love to you in my desire to warn.
1 80
GEORGE CHAPMAN
There are the genuine accents of a smothered and suffering
soul, and incidentally a very good description of the qualities
of Chapman's "strange muse." The ring of sincerity endures
throughout the poem : so that when he pleads that his thoughts
may be excused "as bent to other's aims", and speaks, with
a humility as affecting as it is unexpected, of Homer's "seven
books which my hand hath dressed in rough integuments",
we realize suddenly that Chapman was indeed a man at grips
with adversity, a philosopher born, struggling as a literary
hack in the Elizabethan Grub Street.
Were there no other evidence than this, it might perhaps be
thought that Chapman was only one of the many professional
men of letters who have dreamed that, had they been free
from the "strong necessity" of keeping their bodies rather
than their souls alive, they would have done more nobly than
they did; and that he, in believing that his true bent was
philosophy, was the victim of a dear illusion. But apart from
the manifest philosophical bias of his tragedies, there is a
most substantial and impressive piece of evidence in another
of Chapman's poems. The Tears of Peace is a philosophic poem
of a very high order indeed; which has never received the
attention it deserves. It is both beautiful and profound; it
gives a truer idea of Chapman's intellectual stature and
religious sincerity than any other single work of his ; and it is
sustained throughout by a gravity of impassioned thought
which burns his alembicated language into a noble simplicity.
The Peace who speaks in this remarkable poem to which we
know of no similar in Elizabethan literature: even Fulke
Greville is commonplace beside it is at once the peace of
understanding, and the peace which passes understanding;
and the essence of Chapman's argument is that they are the
same peace.
But the effect
Proper to perfect learning to direct
Reason in such an act as that it can
Turn blood to soul and make both one calm man,
So making peace with God.
Read "wisdom" for "learning" and that is what Chapman
meant and it would be hard to find in all our literature a
nobler expression of the creed of Christian Stoicism. And this
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
is not a high spot in a characteristic Chapman chaos. On the
contrary, the poem is sustained throughout on the same level
of noble thought and lucid expression. Only The Address to
M. Harriots can be compared with it ; and that is a much smaller
thing. If Chapman is to be judged by a single poem, then
assuredly it is by The Tears of Peace that he must be judged.
And that is not only a deeply impressive poem in itself; but
it is the signal justification of the claim which he makes, with
such unexpected modesty, in his apologetic address to Harriots.
In both these poems the thought of his beloved Night
recurs. Beautifully and sadly to Harriots he speaks of "his
stifled verse/*
Where glow-worm-like doth shine
In nights of sorrow this hid soul of mine,
and the verse itself is warrant of its truth. But even more
notable, after the culmination of The Tears of Peace in a
statement of Christian experience impossible save to a truly
religious nature, he breaks into this:
And thus because the gaudy vulgar light
Burns up my good thoughts, form'd in temperate night,
Rising to see the good moon oftentimes
Like the poor virtues of these vicious times
Labour as much to lose her light as when
She fills her waning horns; and how, like men
Rais'd to high places, exhalations fall
That would be thought stars; I'll retire from all
The hot glades of ambition, company
That with their vainness makes this vanity,
And cool to death in shadows of this vale.
There we have a glimpse of the veritable Chapman in his
habit as he lived : the quiet and meditative scholar, the lover
of peace and night, a true philosopher and a true poet, with
the capacity to be both together, but starved of opportunity.
Yet the smothered fervour shines always through the embers
of his stifled verse; and sometimes makes them incandescent
with the fire divine.
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SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
Last year I first heard the cuckoo in the early morning of
April 24th. Twice, at least, in the four previous years I have
heard it first on April 23rd. By tradition, April 23rd is the
date of Shakespeare's birthday in 1564, It is challenged
nowadays. Sir Edmund Chambers has pointed out that all
we have legal evidence for is that Guglielmus films Johannes
Shakspere was baptized on April 26th, 1564. But a tradition
is something, after all.
Anyhow, its uncertainty does not worry me. On the con-
trary, it pleases my fancy to think of Shakespeare's arrival as
a little uncertain, like the cuckoo's. Somewhere roundabout
April 23rd, Shakespeare was born on that day, also, he
died somewhere roundabout April 23rd, the cuckoo is pretty
sure to make itself audible again in my part of the country.
The coincidence is satisfying. Its mere simplicity is magical.
It is positively childish. Not too good to be true, but too good
to be false. I think of Keats's nightingale:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,
No hungry generations tread thee down
and, God knows, that is wonderful enough. But more wonder-
ful still is the fact that Shakespeare's nightingale if I may
put it so is the cuckoo. For the voice of the cuckoo is at once
unearthly and elemental. Could anything be simpler than
that call?
As if on purpose to reassure me that my imagination is not
fantastical, Shakespeare himself (and Shakespeare alone to my
mind), has captured in words the simple magic of the cuckoo:
The finch, the sparrow and the lark
The plainsong cuckoo gray.
"The plainsong cuckoo gray". That is the cuckoo; that is
perhaps the answer to the question of a lesser, but a true and
noble poet:
Shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice?
It is typical too of Shakespeare's answer to most questions.
To "Either, or?" he replies: "Neither, both". And just as
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
Shakespeare alone has caught the essential cuckoo between the
opposites of earthiness and ethereality, so he alone has
recorded, with a simplicity in tune with the nakedness of the
fact, what in the human world would be called the tragedy of
the cuckoo :
He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard, not regarded.
When, in June, the cuckoo's voice is become familiar,
monotonous and importunate, I find myself automatically
repeating those words. They are just a bare statement of fact.
"The poetry", as Wilfred Owen said of a greater theme, "is
in the pity"; and that is where, in this matter anyhow, it
ought to be.
But if the cuckoo is the victim of a tragedy, he is no less f the
villain of one. That also is duly recorded, without emphasis
or exaggeration, by Shakespeare :
And being fed by us you used us so
As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo-bird
Useth the sparrow; did oppress our nest;
Grew by our feeding to so great a bulk
That even our love durst not come near your sight
For fear of swallowing; but with nimble wing
We were enforced, for safety sake, to fly.
The phrase: "that ungentle gull, the cuckoo-bird," satisfies me
wholly. Not only does it fit and harmonise with "the plain-
song cuckoo gray" ; but there is in it a happy suggestion of the
hobbledehoy clumsiness of the young cuckoo. No cunning
plotter he, but just a loutish force of Nature an "ungentle
gull".
For you know, nuncle,
The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it had it head bit off by its young.
That is the cuckoo in its own world the rather grim world of
pre-human Nature to which the human world in King Lear is
on the point of reverting. But there is a realm between, where
the human becomes animal indeed : non-moral, immoral if
you like, but by no means red in tooth and claw. It is the
human lapse into this reprehensible but not cruel animality,
of which the cuckoo is the time-honoured harbinger. And of
this also, Shakespeare is the infallible poet.
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SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws
And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks;
When turtles tread and rooks and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo !
Cuckoo! Cuckoo! O word of fear
Unpleasing to a married ear!
It is all very wicked, and natural, and delightful. A charming
but a dangerous time this, when the sap begins to rise freely
in the veins of Nature. Cuckoo-time, indeed. The cuckoo,
whose note is the veritable voice of spring, teaches a subversive
lesson in morality to the humans whose pulses are stirred by it.
Shakespeare, it must be admitted, shows no sign of being
pefturbed by the menace of the cuckoo. He seems to have
been distinctly indulgent towards the heyday in the blood of
primy youth.
There is no word, in literary criticism, or in the whole of
language more tantalizing than the word "Imagination". I
have not the authorities by me; but I suppose it did not come
to vex us until the great outburst of Romantic poetry at the
end of the i8th century. First, there came a man, William
Blake, uttering quite incomprehensible oracles concerning this
faculty of Imagination, which, up to that time, had been
kept decorously in its place by the Age of Reason : Imagination
was, for that age, the faculty of combining images. And the
Age did a lot of image-combining, mostly with capital letters
to mark the solemnity of the process on which it was engaged.
But Blake talked another kind of language altogether about the
Imagination, for example: "The Imagination is not a State,
it is the Human Existence itself". It was inevitable that such
a deliverance should be neglected. It was just incomprehensible.
We have to leave out Blake. The moment when we can
really distinguish the emergence into a more current conscious-
ness only relatively more current, of course of a new con-
ception of the Imagination is th moment when, at the age of
24, Coleridge first met Wordsworth personally. Wordsworth
read him a poem in manuscript; and it made a startling one
LITERARY PORTRAITS
might say, a revolutionary impression on Coleridge. He
described the effect upon him years afterwards in the
Biographia Liter aria.
It was not . . . the freedom from false taste . . . which made
so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and,
subsequently, on my judgement: it was the union of deep
feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in
observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the
objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading
the tone, the atmosphere, and, with it, the depth and height
of the ideal world around forms, incidents and situations, of
which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the
lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops.
In that retrospective account, the function of the "imagina-
tive faculty" is limited to "modifying the objects observed":
there was in Wordsworth's poetry some mysterious and to
Coleridge's mind, novel harmony between truth in observing,
and modifying the objects observed. That docs not take us
very far. And Coleridge was not content with that.
I believe that this effort to penetrate the secret of
Wordsworth's "imagination" was the main effort of all
Coleridge's critical thinking; and that from the contemplation
of the Imagination at work in Wordsworth, and on the basis
of results reached by that incessant investigation, Coleridge
turned to Shakespeare. I mean that Coleridge's Shakespeare
criticism is, originally and essentially, an application to
Shakespeare of a conception of the Imagination which he
derived from Wordsworth. He did not derive it from Words-
worth as a conception; he witnessed its actual working in
Wordsworth, and came very near (though never quite so near
as he would have liked to believe) to participating in those
workings.
Now, Wordsworth was a great poet and great by virtue of
the presence in him of that power which Coleridge discerned,
and responded to, in him the power of Imagination. I
think Coleridge was absolutely right to use Wordsworth's
imagination as the clue to Shakespeare's : I think Wordsworth
is, indubitably, our next greatest imaginative poet after
Shakespeare (just as I think that Keats would have been if
he had lived). But there is a great and palpable difference
1 86
SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
between Wordsworth and Shakespeare: a difference easy to
recognise, but almost impossible to define or describe. The
clumsy terms, subjective and objective, lead us nowhere.
Wordsworth is very different from Shakespeare. But the
difference between them is not the difference between the
subjective and the objective. Wordsworth is an almost
intolerably objective poet. In Wordsworth's poetry, and in those
parts of his poetry where his peculiar genius is most manifest,
the object looms upon, dominates us, terrifies us almost.
William Blake is reported to have said to someone: "I can
stare at a knot in a piece of wood until it terrifies me ?> . That
conveys the sensation of Wordsworth's poetry at its most
powerful and its most characteristic moments. He was rapt
out of himself by the overpowering reality of the objective
world. He describes his emergence into boyhood:
I was left alone
Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why.
The props of my affection were remov'd,
And yet the building stood as if sustained
By its own spirit.
And the creative response in himself was so strong that there
were moments when :
Such a holy calm
Did overspread my soul, that I forgot
That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in my mind.
It was the overpowering reality the objective imminence or
superimpendence of the outward world which gave the dream-
like quality to Wordsworth's experience of it. It had the
startling and awful vividness of a dream. Coleridge, I am sure,
knew nothing of this experience. Wordsworth once said of
him, that "he was not under the influence of external objects".
The simple phrase is worth remembering. It indicates
a radical difference between the two friends.
This was the psychological basis of Wordsworth's Imagina-
tion. It was by no caprice that he included under Poems of the
Imagination the simple and seemingly naive lines:
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter,
The green field sleeps in the sun:
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one.
It is an almost staggeringly simple example of what
Wordsworth meant by the Imagination : of how it works, and
what it does. The clinching, dream-like vision comes almost
with a snap, and the picture before the mind's eye is made
one. You could take one after another of Wordsworth's
Poems of the Imagination and find the unifying power at work'.
It is not exactly a power of the poet; he is recapturing an
experience an experience of unity. And sometimes in his
poems Wordsworth is describing this experience, sometimes
re-creating it, sometimes both together. His cuckoo is as it
were an agent of this Imagination :
O blessed Bird : the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial faery place
That is fit home for Thee.
There it is the " wandering voice" which gives the unity of
dream to the visible world. In "Airey Force Valley", it is
"A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs" which creates,
and is the symbol of, the dream-unity.
I have no doubt at all that Coleridge was the first to under-
stand and appreciate and unfeignedly admire this imaginative
power of Wordsworth's; and I have not very much doubt that
Coleridge built his whole theory of Imagination upon Words-
worth's achievement. It was to fit precisely this singular
power of Wordsworth's that Coleridge coined his exact and
peculiar phrase: "the esemplastic power", as a definition of
Imagination. He carefully gives the etymology of his new
adjective 13 sv TrAocTTeiv the power "of moulding
1 88
SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
into unity" : what he called in himself, when he lamented its
passing, in the Ode to Dejection, "my shaping spirit of Imagina-
tion". But it is pretty certain that Coleridge never possessed
it: he had, for a brief period namely, the period of his most
intimate association with Wordsworth Imagination of an
authentic kind, but emphatically not this Imagination of
Wordsworth's: not the Imagination of a man "under the
influence of external objects."
Wordsworth's imaginative power was intimately and
inseparably connected with his unique capacity for experienc-
ing a unity in Nature an experience which he describes
many times, but always without monotony and with novelty,
because the experience was ever new. And he re-creates it*"
over and again in the responsive reader. The sense, the
significance, the reality of the external world, experienced
in all its diversity, would be gathered up as it were into a
Oneness, of which the poet was a part. He would be pervaded
by a solemn peace, a calm and religious joy, a humility of
complete surrender. Of this Oneness, in which he participated,
some external object would be the creative symbol. "Dans
certains etats de 1'ame prcsque surnaturels", wrote Baudelaire,
"la profondeur de la vie se revcle tout enticre dans le spectacle,
si ordinaire qu'il soit, qu'on a sous les yeux. II en devient
le symbole". The French poet is speaking (I think) of exactly
the same experience as that which visited Wordsworth so
frequently and so powerfully. Reality took on an immediate
Unity so startling that it stood out in such moments from the
ordinary texture of experience with the vividness of dream.
Now, though this experience in Wordsworth had an
altogether peculiar intensity, I believe that Coleridge was not
in the least mistaken when he sought in it the clue to Imagina-
tion in general; and in particular, the clue to Shakespeare's
Imagination. I believe that Wordsworth's Imagination is,
in a sense, indeed the type of the poetic Imagination; and that
Wordsworth was right in believing that it was to a faculty of
this quality and order that Shakespeare himself was referring
when he wrote :
189
LITERARY PORTRAITS
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact . . .
The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Shakespeare was fairly young when he wrote that; and he
was, from the beginning and by profession, a dramatic poet.
Again, he was at this time light-hearted, as Wordsworth
never was. But, essentially, this * 'giving to airy nothing a
local habitation and a name" was the same process by which
the "esemplastic power" operative in Wordsworth discovered
in the figure of the lonely old leech-gatherer the symbol and
present assurance of the Unity, of which for a melancholy
moment he had despaired. I do not mean that Shakespeare's
"airy nothing" is exactly the same as Wordsworth's "some-
thing" the mysterious and memorable "something",
far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in th e mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The nothing and the something are not the same; but they are
of the same order. The difference in phrasing and in tone is
due less to an essential difference in the thing of which the
two great poets arc speaking, than to a difference in the whole
structure of society, a change in the quality of the spirit of
the age that had supervened in the two hundred years which
separate Wordsworth from Shakespeare.
I would say simply that the young Shakespeare did not have
to take poetry seriously, as young Wordsworth had to do.
Shakespeare was to become very serious indeed, and to attain
or at least persist in a seriousness that outsoared even Words-
worth's; but not yet. The world of the young Shakespeare was
secure. It was in many ways a tough, grim world a world in
which it was hard for poetic genius to achieve security but
1 90
SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
a world of which the frame-work was solid. "The King was in
his counting-house, counting out his money; the Queen was
in the parlour, eating bread and honey". We all remember
that world, in which royalties were as singular, as certain, and
as definite as they are in a pack of cards the world we know
as children: a very solid and satisfying world. Well, I think
that childish memory gives one some idea of the kind of world
in which young Shakespeare lived and in which he fought his
way a world full of glories and full of horrors, indeed, but
where you did know what was what, with a certainty un-
available to young Wordsworth, and still less available to the
young genius of today. Not in the least a world where you had
to begin by worrying about how you ought to be governed,
or one where you had to vex your mind with thinking about
relfgion. That was all settled. There was still only one religion
to be had, arid you had to have it. That is a rather satisfying
state of things. It puts religion so to speak in its place; and
leaves plenty of margin. And margin is a useful thing to have
if you are a young genius.
Young Shakespeare did not, like Wordsworth (or Coleridge,
or Blake, or Shelley, or Keats for that matter) have to go
about looking for Unity: it was there already, or enough of it
was there to enable him to take it for granted. Within the
framework of a stable social order, clamped firmly to an
unquestioned religious-political basis, the unity was manifest
in the social hierarchy; and the poet did not have to assume
the function of prophet, priest and king or, as Shelley put it,
"the unacknowledged legislator of the world". Or, at any
rate, he did not have to assume these functions consciously.
Indeed, he would have been bottled up very promptly if he
had dared to. But in any case, he did not naturally seek any
licence in that direction: there was no need for it. A quite
respectable remnant of the full Catholic tradition was still
in being. And it left the poet free to enjoy himself. He wasn't
expected, and he didn't expect himself, to be anything much.
So, for instance, you have young Shakespeare letting himself
go, spontaneously and delightfully and immorally about the
cuckoo the cuckoo of the natural countryman. I have no
doubt that Shakespeare also on occasion felt like Wordsworth
about it, and wondered :
'9 1
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering voice?
But he did not have, as Wordsworth did, to lean on such a
moment; to treasure and turn back to it, as a clue to the
mystery of existence; it wasn't important for him, as it was for
Wordsworth: he wasn't looking for the same thing as
Wordsworth in the cuckoo-call. What Wordsworth was looking
for was signs of Unity or evidences of God.
That, I think, is the reason (or an approximation to it) why
Shakespeare could speak lightly of "airy nothing" and yet be
referring to what was not essentially different from Words-
worth's sublime "something". Shakespeare did not have to
find God in it. The Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury
with quite a lot of the Catholic tradition behind them, to
make them august saw to it that his needs in that direction
were amply supplied. And another relevant consequence of
this general keeping of things in their places keeping religion
in its place, and the young Shakespeare in his was that,
whereas Wordsworth was terribly troubled (and quite likely,
as Mr. Herbert Read conjectures, troubled for life) by his
love-affair with Annette, Shakespeare took his love-affair
with Anne Hathaway pretty casually. I find no convincing
evidence that he did otherwise. Young Shakespeare was on
terms of casual intimacy with Nature : Wordsworth took it
or her much more seriously. Yet I suppose Wordsworth's
actual childhood in the country was not very different from
Shakespeare's. The difference was that Wordsworth was
compelled consciously to seek in the experience of his child-
hood sustenance of a kind that Shakespeare was not compelled
to seek from his.
In the early Shakespeare the Shakespeare prior to Hamlet
we have the simple miracle of a man who experienced this
Unity in and with Nature without interruption, and as it were
unconsciously. With him it was normal; not "religious" by
reason of its exceptionality,- its intensity, or its significance.
It was diffused into the texture of his day-to-day existence.
And the consequence of this was that the Imagination in him
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SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
could find free and unchecked expression in the form of
Imagery.
Imagery, when it is creative or revealing, is a spontaneous
exercise of the faculty which, on the fully conscious level, is
the Imagination. In his preface of 1815, where Wordsworth
discusses the Imagination, very pregnantly but with tantalizing
brevity, he puts together three instances from Virgil and
Shakespeare and Milton of the simple metaphor "hangs"
used in each case with splendid effect; and he says that, in
the former two, there is "a slight exertion of the faculty which
I denominate Imagination". I follow him in this matter
entirely. It seems to me that the original act of vivid sense-
perception (which is the origin of any creative and revealing
imagery) is a sort of miniature and unconscious paradigm of
that* abnormally vivid apprehension of the external world,
concentrating itself in a single object, which is the main
substance of Wordsworth's greatest poetry. The connection
between Imagery and Imagination is very intimate indeed.
We may go to Baudelaire for a corroboration of Wordsworth's
view. In this book L'Art Romantique, after anouncing his
conviction that "the fundamental condition necessary for
creating a healthy art is a belief in the integral unity of the
universe", he goes on to say that:
"In excellent poets, there is not a metaphor, or comparison,
or epithet, which is not adapted with a mathematical exacti-
tude to the actual circumstance; because these comparisons,
these metaphors, and these epithets are drawn from the
inexhaustible well of the universal analogy."
That is to say, every creative image is evidence of Unity; the
master of creative imagery is declaring his belief in Unity
a belief which is of course generally instinctive and un-
conscious, in the sense that it is not formulated intellectually.
And from this angle, some of Wordsworth's most splendid
poems (for instance The Leech-Gatherer) may be regarded as
single images used with a full intellectual and religious aware-
ness of their significance. But the poet who, like Shakespeare,
was absolved from the necessity of seeking a religious sig-
nificance in the workings of the imagination, could use Imagery
with the spontaneous facility and felicity of Nature itself. The
ultimate belief in Unity, concealed at the heart of every sense
18 193
LITERARY PORTRAITS
impression which registers itself because of its felt significance
on "the more than ordinary organic sensibility" of the
natural genius, does not require to be unfolded and made
explicit. When society itself still embodies some sort of religious
unity, then for a halcyon moment, the poet is free to be a poet,
with the instinctive grace of an animal. His Imagery is the
texture of his natural speech ; and in his poetry he has no need
to be more than the unconscious witness and voice of Unity
which does not at such a moment require conscious formula-
tion: there is no need at such a moment to separate out the
religious element implicit in all poetic-creative experience;
and it is part of the same spontaneity, part of the same lived
unity, that the poet, at such a moment, is at one with the
ordinary world of men and women. The poet feels himself to
be a native of the workaday world : he is exercising a profession
just like other men. I do not really believe that Shakespeare
felt that in doing his best to touch up old plays and write new
ones to attract people like himself to Blackfriars, he was doing
anything essentially different from the man who tilled a field
or made a table. And that I think is the reason why the only
epithet by which the living Shakespeare survives to us in
contemporary discussion is the epithet "gentle". It is obvious
that a man who knew him as well as Ben Jonson knew him,
found in Shakespeare nothing out of the ordinary. True,
he produced astonishing things with astonishing ease; and
that was a baffling phenomenon; but the man himself made
no impression of peculiar genius. He was unobtrusive: he
behaved like an ordinary man; and, whereas Ben Jonson
himself made the impression on his contemporaries of an
immense superiority and evident genius, Shakespeare was
nobody in particular.
This is, more or less, how I think it actually was. Shakespeare
during his early years was a natural man ; the only difference
being that he was more natural. He did not have to question
things: he took them as they came: he adjusted himself to life
with the stubborn delicacy of a sapling tree : his sensitiveness
was exquisite, but so was his sanity. And his language was the
natural utterance of his being : he expressed himself through
imagery of a richness and variety that has never been
approached before nor since, simply because his sensational
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SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
experience was so rich and various, and because Imagery is the
natural language of the man who feels himself at home in life.
That is what the language of imagery means that the person
who uses it is at home in life : the visible universe is familiar to
him, as the house in which he is born and lives is familiar to a
child. And when the time comes that such a nature begins to
feel a sense of alienation from the universe, it can never produce
upon us the impression of an ultimate severance : the uncon-
scious man, and the language of the unconscious man, are
for ever bearing witness against the desperate conclusions of
his consciousness. Take, for example, Macbeth (a dark play
if ever there was one) ; at its darkest moment, the hero, who,
in spite of all the horror of his doing, is still partly by virtue of
the working of this unconsciousness in Shakespeare, a hero
indeed, greets the severing of the last tie that held him to
the human world the death of Lady Macbeth with the
inexhaustible words:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle !
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
There is Shakespeare's imagery at its most natural and its
most magnificent; there is, so far as the intellectual statement
goes, the utterance of a complete despair; and yet the utter-
ance is almost unbearably rich. It is surpassingly difficult to
express one's reaction to it. If this be despair, one feels, then
what could be more natural and more glorious than to despair?
The only other English poet who had command of a power
precisely like this, was John Keats. I do not refer to the
obvious resemblance between the quality of this utterance of
Macbeth and the quality of the Ode to a Nightingale :
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
'95
LITERARY PORTRAITS
But beyond this there is a constant quality of Keats's poetry
by which he gives I know not what richness and opulence to
the expression of his bitterest pangs :
She dwells with beauty, beauty that must die,
And joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding Adieu.
In such magical phrases there is the tragedy of life. And yet,
at the moment, it is a more abundant life than ever. A
miracle of this kind we sometimes say (rather foolishly) is an
effect of language. That is all very well: it is an effect of
language; but unless we have explored the secret of poetic
language to its source in the poetic nature feeling itself at
home in the universe, and, by virtue of that relation of child-
like familiarity, unconsciously absorbing into itself the
magical particularity, the haeccitas, of the created world we
are saying little or nothing at all by saying that this marvellous
and contradictory and re-assuring effect of great poetry at
its greatest, is an effect of language. It is the spontaneous
achievement of those rarest of rare natures, which are born
to be at home in the universe, and who, for that reason, when
she sentence of separation, or exile, or death falls upon them,
ttill cannot but bear witness, by the operation of their uncon-
scious being, that even in their sufferings they are at home in
the universe still. "Though he slay me, yet will I believe in
him". That is the utterance of this mysterious and simple
truth on the pure religious level. A Shakespeare, a Keats, a
Wordsworth do not have to say this thing in this fashion:
their consciousness may cry out at the slaying, but in the
very words they utter, their unconsciousness proclaims their
belief.
Shakespeare differs from Wordsworth, not because he was
more objective as I have tried to show, Wordsworth is an
intensely objective poet but because he was a dramatist.
We speak of his characters as "the creatures of his imagination".
And that dramatic "imagination" seems at first sight to be
very different from the Intagination of Wordsworth. Shakes-
peare's characters were certainly not, in the main, observed :
if Mistress Quickly may have been, Falstaff certainly was not.
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SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
Nevertheless, I do not think that the problem of dramatic
creation introduces any generically new factor into the con-
sideration of poetic imagination. Precisely how these figures
which (to use Keats's phrase) the dramatic poet "is intense
upon" in exactly the same way as a Wordsworth was ' 'in-
tense upon" a field of daffodils are originated in the creative
mind need not concern us now. We may be content to call
them, with Coleridge, c 'modifications" of the universal life,
of which the poet is the vehicle a phrase which may help to
spare us the illusion that Shakespeare's characters speak their
own language and not Shakespeare's.
Anyway, I do not believe that the language of Shakespeare's
characters is, in any ordinary sense of the phrase, dramatically
appropriate. Othello's recital before the Signiory of his
wooing of Desdemona is not, though it is often said to be,
succinct and soldierly: but it is splendid. So with his great
farewell speech: there is nothing soldier-like about it, except
perhaps its heroism. Macbeth's meditation on tomorrow is
not that of a murdering usurper. They are, most emphatically,
the speeches of a supreme poet, whose imaginative being is
for the moment thrust into situations so acute and so real that
he loses self-consciousness. It is not that Shakespeare is or
becomes Macbeth or Othello ; but that he is himself within
the limitations of Othello's or Macbeth's predetermined
actions.
Indeed, I find nothing particularly or specifically dramatic in
Shakespeare's use of imagery. On occasion, in a particular
play, the act of realisation is so complete, Shakespeare is
living his drama so entirely, that his imagery tends to be
influenced by the sensation of the drama : as, for example, in
the early scenes of Othello, where the imagery has a tang of
the sea long before the drama itself reaches the quayside.
This, I think, was quite unconscious. Scarcely more deliberate
is the strange prolongation, in the final scenes of Antony and
Cleopatra, of the elusive and beautiful imagery of a baby at the
breast: first, the Queen a baby at the breast of Death; then,
death the baby at the breast of the Queen : strange, that that
play should end on such a note, yet surpassingly beautiful.
It gives one an indefinable sense over and beyond anything
that the drama itself can convey of what Cleopatra was in
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Shakespeare's sensation how simple, for all her infinite variety,
and, for all her cruelty and caprice, how tender.
But I must not be led aside into any consideration of the
nuances of Shakespeare's imagery. My purpose is severely
limited to suggest that creative imagery is the unconscious
witness that the poet is at home in the universe. By creative
imagery I mean imagery of the kind described by Keats:
. . . the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like
the Sun come natural to him (the reader) shine over him
and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the
Luxury of twilight . . .
That is the imagery of which Shakespeare was the supreme
master. It is in an eminent sense, ' 'natural". Like the quality
of mercy (with which after all it is not too distantly allied) it
"blesseth him that gives and him that takes". It is the silent
witness that the poet is at home in the universe, whatever his
consciousness or his drama may be saying; and through our
instinctive response to it we are made momentary partakers in
the comfort of its security. Tragedy can never be unmitigated
disaster when it is expressed in language which holds this
healing virtue in its very fibres. And it often seems to me that
discussions of Shakespeare's tragedy are incommensurate with
the total impression of his great plays, precisely because they
tend to abstract the drama from the poetry which is its sub-
stance, and the characters from the language which is verily
their own flesh and blood.
I have hazarded the opinion that the process of accumulat-
ing the significant and vivid sense-impressions in the storehouse
of imagery, which is the poet's unconsciousness, was though
of minor intensity essentially the same as Wordsworth's
rapt contemplation of the visible world, as it were gathered to
a quintessence in an object of sense. At such a moment, for
Wordsworth, reality became so overpoweringly real that it was
like a dream.
Lately, I have caught myself wondering whether Shake-
speare's last play may not contain a sublime instance of this
experience (which in its lees intense forms is one of the main
roots of Shakespeare's poetry). We are familiar, almost to
weariness, with Prospero's haunting words:
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SHAKESPEARE AND THE CUCKOO
These our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled:
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
It has often been remarked that there is nothing in the action
of the play to call forth words so strange as these. They seem
to jiave their motive from somewhere outside the play, in
some extraneous thought which had disturbed the poet's mind
and insisted on utterance. If I were to try to describe the
quality of those lines I think I should be naturally drawn to
use much the same phrases as I have used about Wordsworth's
experience : I think I might even find myself quoting Words-
worth's actual words:
I forgot
That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in my mind.
There is a difference. The glorious visible world, and all
mankind, at this strange moment of Shakespeare's imagination,
is not merely dream-like in its vividness in his mind: there is
also the conscious thought that it may be only a dream. And
Shakespeare-Prospero himself but part of it.
I have always been haunted and troubled by those lines of
Prospero: they seem to torment me with a thought beyond the
reach of my soul. I may be mistaken; but lately I have
fancied that in Wordsworth's simpler, but no less profound
poetic experience, I had the clue to them which I had sought
so long in vain. It was I have surmised the very vividness,
the overpowering reality and distinctness of the world of
Nature passing by insensible degrees into the world of
Imagination (the world of Shakespeare's characters who are to
us a second Nature) that gave to this double universe, at
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
the last, the quality of a dream. That very thing which made
Shakespeare the supreme poet, caused the supreme doubt to
assail him a doubt, the nature and quality of which we
ordinary mortals can by no means make real to our experience.
We have to stretch our moments of significant experience to
the uttermost in order to have a secure glimpse of what
Wordsworth is talking about. When we have to strain beyond
that to Shakespeare's experience ourselves to become
the lodge
For solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of Heaven,
Then leave the naked brain,
we fall back baffled.
And my brain, I confess, is left naked in the effort to m-ake
real to myself the strange experience, of which (I feel) Prospero's
lines are the utterance. But I do have a sort of monition that
Shakespeare the impersonal vehicle of Imagination was at
this moment beholding in his inward eye both the world of
Nature, and the world of second Nature which had been
created by means of him. There is a moment of terrible
reality and vividness, and a sickening sense of dream. This
inward eye of Shakespeare was not, at that moment, the bliss
of solitude: it saw too much.
And if, as I surmise, that ineffable Doubt is such as could
arise in, such as could be really experienced by only a supreme
poet ; because it is a doubt that springs from the very roots of
his poetic genius from the very intensity of his sensation, and
the prodigality of his creativeness it seems to me that there is
something mysteriously and simply appropriate in Shakespeare's
arriving on this earth with the cuckoo. The cuckoo was his
bird.
200
F. V. BRANFORD
F. V. Branford is an English poet who has been forgotten;
yet he is a remarkable poet. He is now in the middle fifties,
he published two small volumes of poetry, Titans and Gods
and The White Stallion, in the years immediately after the
first world war, and he has been silent ever since. In this
essay I propose to investigate the reasons why he has been
forgotten.
Towards the end of his elegy on Francis Thompson
(which is, in my judgment, by no means to be reckoned among
his best work) Branford declares that that genuine but limited*
poet is an
Uranian eagle towering on a pinion
Serener than the Swan of Avon bore.
The judgment is significant, because it conflicts with a more
genial judgment of Shakespeare in Branford's earlier volume,
Titans and Gods. There, in the market-place of dreams, he
Sudden came upon a star-high rnan
Whose mighty composition hid the sun.
That man was Shakespeare. And we may say, I think,
without distorting Branford's values, that he passes, in the
progress from his earlier to his later volume from a judgment of
Shakespeare that is in consonance with the instinctive estimate
of humanity to one that is altogether peculiar to himself. To
declare that Francis Thompson towers on a serener pinion
than Shakespeare is not necessarily a foolish judgment when
pronounced by one who has previously praised Shakespeare
well; but it is obviously an esoteric one.
The judgment, I say, is significant; and the significance
is twofold. First, it warns us what to expect, and what not to
expect, from Branford's poetry. It will be the poetry of one
who sets Francis Thompson on a pinnacle. It will be passion-
ate; it may on rare occasions be simple; but it will never be
sensuous. Branford is a rhetorical poet. If you do not like
rhetoric, you will not like his. poetry. Magniloquence is
natural and necessary to him ; and magniloquence is terribly
out of fashion nowadays. Branford has fallen foul of the
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LITERARY PORTRAITS
Zeitgeist. So, for causes some the same, and some different,
have I. I, like him, find this a very shallow age, almost
deliberately oblivious of the deserts of vast eternity, of which
he seeks to remind it. But, unlike him, I do not like mag-
niloquence in poetry. Indeed, I should be quite sympathetic
towards the irony and cynicism of contemporary poets, if
only they would leave off writing poetry.
Branford has left off writing poetry; and he has left off
writing it about the time I should expect a man of his ex-
perience to leave off; for he belongs blood, bone and sinew,
mind, soul and spirit, to the war-generation of 1914-18. And
he stopped writing poetry somewhere about 1923 or so. About
that time, according to my private chronicle of modern times,
the experience of the War got by the throat the men of
imagination who had endured and survived it. They tken
realized finally that the peace the mere and negative peace,
the cessation of the unendurable, by the hope of which they
had endured it was never to be peace at all. Do not mistake
me. I am not speaking of the disillusion of the idealists who
had believed that the world was to be "made safe for
democracy": most of those had perished, either in the body
or in the spirit, by the end of 1916; and the youthful half-
hopes that lingered on were finally done to death by the con-
clave of old men at Versailles. I am speaking merely of the
dim belief in the imaginative man who endured and survived
the War, that the horror, the grey death, within his own soul
might have an end. Somewhere about the time that Branford
ceased to write poetry, these men knew that the horror in
their souls would never end. I could name others; but I
must not. Therefore, I will name only D. H. Lawrence, who,
in the winter of 1923-1924, discovered that the new life for
which he yearned would never spring up within him. He
learned that he was indeed a broken man ; and his inevitable
path to the final dissociation (which I have elsewhere much too
harshly called disintegration) was made clear to him. It was
not otherwise with his famous namesake, T. E. Lawrence.
With these Branford belongs, in the vital matter of ex-
perience. That he was silent,, where D. H. Lawrence continued
to utter himself, is not of the first importance; or rather it
indicates a difference radical and important enough in its
202
F. V. BRANFORD
own order in creative gift. D. H. Lawrence was a poet in a
sense in which Branford is not: he was organically in touch
with life after the manner of Shakespeare and Keats: like
Ivan Karamazov he could never deny "the sticky buds."
He could never have written, like Branford, of
legless things with lateral gait
Immortal slimes that never mate
Themselves into their sons dilate
With lack-of-love that laughs at fate.
That is powerful ; but it is an intellectual vision not the vision
of one who feels the ebb and flow oflifc primarily on his pulses.
It is (for example) the vision of Coleridge "and slimy things
with legs did crawl" against the experience of WordswortrP
That conflict between imaginative despair and primary
incontrovertible experience which carried D. H. Lawrence
finally to the Nirvana of pure Sex was either never waged at
all in Branford; or if it was waged since no man is ever
totally devoid of instinctive life-confidence the struggle was
sharp and sudden and soon ended. The intellectual despair
was triumphant, in the form of intellectual ecstasy.
But the point I wish to make is that the modern fashion
in poetry to which Branford is a stranger was set by
Americans: Ezra Pound, the erratic and floundering pioneer,
and T. S. Eliot, the man of genius. That is to say, the
modern fashion in English poetry was set by men who had
no real experience of the War. The irony of American disil-
lusion and the inward shattering of the English spirit are
vastly different things. One is the ironic disillusion of a
machine-made mass-civilization; the other the spiritual
annihilation produced by modern war. It is all the difference
between world-weariness and Death. The post-war generation
in England could not get on with the generation that had
lived with modern Death : it had nothing to offer. The sweet
war men were rotten ; those who remained were either silent,
or speaking incomprehensibly. Who, of the English poets of
the next generation had learned anything from D. H.
Lawrence, or from Wilfred Owen, or from Siegfried Sassoon?
Poets can learn only things that are learnable in the last
resort, tricks I use the word in no bad sense tricks of
technique, tricks of mood, tricks even of religion. The poets of
203
LITERARY PORTRAITS
the war-generation had lost what tricks they had. Great or
small, they had passed to a place where tricks had no meaning,
entered a world of experience which Branford seeks to convey,
and to my sense really does convey, in The White Stallion:
Hoot-tu-hoot ! the beast has caught
In the dark den of his thought
The speech of one who sayeth Naught
But rides down every talking god
On a tremendous stallion shod
By the dumb smith Eternity,
With steel as strong
As time is long
And nails that were used on Calvary.
There is no learning anything from that. It is either experience,
or a noise ; and emphatically, it is not the kind of thing you
can take tea with. It does not encourage conversation. The
post-war generation had to live; and the war-generation had
nothing to give them to live by. For living, after all, though
not a trivial business, is a social affair a matter of inter-
change and conventions: practically speaking, you must
have tricks to live, whether as poet or plumber or politician.
Into the heart of the English tradition I mean the kind of
thing typified by Rupert Brooke, D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried
Sassoon, H. M. Tomlinson and Henry Williamson had come
a hiatus. It was either dead, or posthumous; assuredly it did
not know how to be social. It had lost the trick of it.
At this point America stepped in, in the persons of Pound
and Eliot, to offer the young intelligentsia of the post-war
years a thread of continuity. It offered them as it were a
manual of conversation from which the ghastly and involun-
tary importunities of the war-survivors were eliminated.
He holds him with his skinny hand.
'There was a war,' quoth he.
'Hold off, unhand me, greybeard Loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye
The wedding-guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child :
The Mariner hath his will.
But the post-war intelligentsia, very naturally, was not going
to let the Mariner have his will : he was not even talkative like
204
F. V. BRANFORD
Coleridge's old man. His faraway eye and his stony silence
cast a gloom which was not to be tolerated ; and his somnam-
bulist motion towards lifting the backcloth was hardly a
contribution to discussion. It tended to make the small-talk
sound small.
The company on the stage did not entirely forget that there
was a something or a nothing behind the backcloth; but
since, whatever it was, it was a thing you could not live with,
and living cannot be avoided, it had to be shut off. So the
new American idiom was eagerly adopted. It was a language
built to register the minor monstrosities of modern life, the
innumerable offences of a contemporary mass-civilization to
a refined sensibility. Those offences were better articulated,
and more clearly manifest in America. The uglinesses that
w^re smudgy and dim and a little shamefaced in England
were declared and blatant and self-confident in America.
So that the American poets, who had fled their own country,
appeared to the post-war generation of Englishmen as men
who brought a revelation of reality and a technique to express
it. Indeed, they did. They revealed post-war England to
itself: for the world the American poets had learned to speak
of with such fastidious and detailed loathing, and such a
foil of traditional knowledge to set off the contemporary
vulgarity, was indeed the post-war England, rationalized and
booming, battening on its own betrayal of the ideal, which
young Englishmen now knew. They had never known any
other.
But there was one small and perhaps insignificant difference
between the world the Americans spoke of and the English
world the American world was not post-war. Or maybe the
difference was significant; but it did not signify, because it
was unmentionable, and perhaps unutterable as well. The
continuity of English utterance passed inevitably to Americans,
because in America alone there was a continuity. In the
English tradition of England there had come an uncomfortable
hiatus composed of men who had died in the flesh, and men
who had died in the spirit. The thread of life had been cut off
by the lightning of an incommensurable experience. And the
survivors were ghosts at the banquet.
Nevertheless, the young Englishmen who followed Eliot
205
LITERARY PORTRAITS
so eagerly, could not follow him into the Church of England.
They drew the line at that. Dimly they knew that something
irreparable had happened that was not to be mended by a
pilgrimage to Canterbury. Eliot's idiom was elegant and
fascinating ; his gesture of profound respect for tradition while
he cut it up in little stars had an Oriental suavity. Follow-
my-leader behind him had been rich in contemporary thrills;
but the finale in St. Paul's Cathedral was too bewildering. It
did not speak to their condition.
Yet there was much in his submission to the Ecclesia
Anglicana, which escaped attention at the time. In the person
of his remote (and for all I know, direct) descendant, Eliot
ot the Parliament-men knelt before Laud and declared that
he truly and earnestly repented of his contumacy towards the
Lord's anointed, and his bad behaviour towards his Bishop's;
in the person of T. S. Eliot the Mayflower came home again,
repentant and demiss, plus rqyaliste que le Roi.
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind !
How like a prodigal doth she return,
With over-weathered ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent and beggared by the strumpet wind !
That return of the American prodigal after three centuries
was symbolic indeed, but irrelevant to the malaise of his
English followers. Eliot annihilating America, deleting it
from the book of history, was a striking gesture, but hardly
more to them. He was able to busy himself with blotting out
three centuries, precisely because he never knew the necessity
of blotting out four years; but that necessity was at work,
albeit unconsciously, in the being of those who were in all
things else his disciples.
The parable is, or seems to me, illuminating or else I
would not dwell upon it. Eliot's revolutionary and Puritan
ancestry the Eliots, the Pyms and the Hampdens on
whose behalf he now pleads : "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,"
at the shrine of St. Thomas and the tomb of the Lord were
indeed the progenitors of the American civilization he abhors
and flees from ; but they were equally the progenitors of the
English civilisation to which he flees and of the Ecclesia
206
F. V. BRANFORD
Angelicana in which he hides himself. But the veritable con-
summation of the civilization inaugurated by those great
individualists is less visible in the gregarious nonentity of an
American sales convention than in the obscenity of modern
mechanical War. This is the point at which the mass-civiliza-
tion, which repels Eliot, authentically reveals its own nature.
Of that revelation he was not a recipient. Hence he has been
able to take refuge in the private security of Anglican
orthodoxy. He does not see, or if he does see he does not say,
that the Church of England in which he takes refuge is con-
substantial with the mass-civilization from which he would
escape.
Much of the utterance, the peculiar charm and the
extraordinary influence of T. S. Eliot derive from the fact
thsft he was untouched and unscathed by the revelation of
War. His extreme Englishness his high Anglicanism, his
Toryism, his Royalism was possible only to one outside the
English destiny, which though it was avoided by their
consciousness, was yet registered indelibly on the plasm of the
post-war generation of Englishmen. They admired and
imitated him; indeed he "taught them language": but they
could not follow him. If they did anything, they went to
Spain, to participate in just such another war, and for the same
cause as his ancestry fought the cause that he has so elabor-
ately repudiated. But whether they fought in Spain, or whether
they remained at home toying with theological possibilities, or
whether, like Huxley and Auden, they took the opposite
journey back to America, they had no faith. What they
heard, though they dared not acknowledge it, was "the speech
of one who sayeth Naught."
Hark! the beat
Of invisible feet
The terrible tread
of that great white dread
Stallion galloping overhead.
Ruin rides upon his back
Beating down, with roar and wrack
Beauty in blood, and black
Dust, upon his smoking track.
The fervours of secular optimism the plunge into dreams of
207
LITERARY PORTRAITS
a Communist millennium these were no more than an
unconscious escape from the ultimate question that was put to
Englishmen in 1914-1918. But so are the dreams of solace and
communion in the Anglican Church militant. Both alike are
self-engendered ecstasies to drown the sound of the terrible
tread of the White Stallion.
The poem of that name is Branford's finest work. It has
its moments when the rhetoric is overstrained; but it has a
truly dreadful power on those who have once been gripped
by the meaning of its symbolism. It is the utterance of a real
and rare imaginative experience. That the imagination is
essentially intellectual is true; but it is an intellectual imagina-
tion which has gripped the heart and soul of the man whom it
visited.
Branford belongs to those who have not avoided Dealh:
therefore since every man would avoid Death if he could
to those who have been unable to avoid it. Since the whole
fashion of modern utterance is shaped by the instinctive
avoidance of Death, or the turning of it into a circumscribed
and manageable mystery, he is perforce unfashionable.
Death changes; death is changing; death has changed.
What was once a mystery for the individual to wrestle with,
or to forget, is become the monster who menaces Man; who
has perhaps killed Man already. Death that was once a
part of Life, is now become the whole.
There were of old-time, plagues and pestilences: great
waves of doom, sent forth by the inscrutable God, swept over
the earth. Men, women and children fell before them. A
voice was heard in Rama, sound of lamentation and great
mourning Rachel weeping for her children, and would not
be comforted, because they were not. Such lamentations
have been heard through the ages, and will be heard again.
But the spirit of Man survives the sorrow of such disasters;
it bows, and has bowed itself, to the dispensation of the unknown
God, and risen renewed, by simple courage or by surpassing
faith. "Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth
every son of whom He receiveth."
Likewise in the past, man has been fearful and terrible
to man. Cities have been sacked; women and children put
to the sword; cruelty and desolation have been wrought by
208
F. V. BRANFORD
man upon his kind. But there was an end. The sword-arm of
the slayer grew weary. His anger or his blood-lust ebbed.
Even his savagery was in some sort human, limited by human
powers of endurance. And, over and over again, before the
slayer's sword-arm slackened, his belly sickened, or even his
heart misgave him at the sight of his own doing. And under-
neath the brutality and bestiality of war, there was a rough
humanity. Warrior fought with warrior; equal to equal.
What he did to the unarmed man, the woman and the child,
was loathsome and terrible; but he himself would be ashamed
of his fury. He knew that it was sin. He did not boast of it.
The pride of the warrior lay in his triumph over his equal, in
courage and in arms.
Thus here also the spirit of man lived on lived on not
merely in the courage and chivalry of war, but even in its
brutality and bestiality. For, if the courage and chivalry were
noble, the brutality and bestiality were a sin, felt and repented
of as a sin. That is the point which must never be forgotten.
Whether in the battle-struggle men gave death and received
it, man to man, and man by man : or whether they behaved like
beasts and ravished the innocent, Life was the master of
Death. For Life is still the master when men are ashamed of
their brutalities, and expect to be punished for their sin.
All this is changed. To-day Death is the master of Life.
War is no longer the struggle of armed men against armed
men* The sin of sins the bestial murder of the innocent
is no longer sin at all. Modern warfare is a deliberate and
indiscriminate massacre of the innocents. It has been said so
often that it is a weariness to say it again to ears that hear
but understand not. This death comes not from God, but
from the spirit of Death itself: who never before this age
walked upon the earth visible and incarnate in Mankind.
For there is Death in the soul of the man who needs must have
recourse to this abomination. Let him be a patriot, let him be
a revolutionary, let him be a Christian God is mocked to-day
he is but one thing : part of the living Death. In him the
spirit of Man has died, what lives in him is Death. This is
the age of the living Death. And Life lives alone in them that
know it.
Branford belongs to those who learned this twenty years
H 209
LITERARY PORTRAITS
ago. He was one of the first of those on whom and in whom
this grim knowledge dawned. He was an airman in the
war.
I too have drunk delight in weakling's tears
The rapture of quick cruelty, and the prize
Of sudden prey. I too have handled fears
And filled the air with iron merchandise,
Like a pitiless falcon nailed upon the skies.
He became the typical instrument of modern Carnage the
new Death that is death to the man who deals it. And he
was one of the first to know what Man, in him, had become.
The Airman in a bombing plane that is Man to-day.
Branford was that twenty years ago ; and he became conscious
of what he was: at twenty-three years of age he became That.
And this is how he remembered it: "
Pit-a-pat, Pit-a-pat,
All the dark years I never heard that.
Pit-a-pat, Pit-a-pat.
Pit-a-pat, Pit-a-pat
At dead midnight
Like the spirit of fright
When I stood on the brink
Of Hell I think
I should have gone mad
If not for the glad
Soft silence of that
Pit-a-pat, Pit-a-pat.
It is beautiful to those who understand, and terrible to all*
There thrills the comfort of the annihilation of modern Man-
Branford is a prophet, because he is prophetic. But the
war ended when he was twenty-six. He was then a poet for
whom some of us, in those far-off days, had learned to listen.
After all, we could listen to strange things in those days; and
we had strange things to listen to. In those days you could
sometimes hear the heart of humanity breaking. There were
silences in those days. There have been none since. Who wants
silence to-day, when he knows what he will hear? In what
church, in what street, in what countryside, does silence dare
to be to-day? Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat.
Branford is silent. He has been ever since. In his heart
and mind at least, silence dares to be. Yet he was trumpet-
210
F. V. BRANFORD
tongued too trumpet- tongued, indeed, for such as I. But
in the midst of the storms and the thunders was the still
small voice: not comfortable as of old. Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat.
Now, as I understand, Branford craves for an audience
again. He has found one, in me; and I, in turn, seek to win
the ears of others for him. But with little hope. Men do not
want to hear what he has to say. They want to forget War;
for if they did not forget it, how could they prepare for it?
And I fear that not even those who protest against War will
care to listen to Branford. He is the thing itself, the Man who
has died.
Who returneth whence he carne
Through Night of Nothing to Thy Heart
By the Bridge of Sin and Shame,
He shall know thee who Thou art.
Who hath died so deep in life
That Death disdain him for his dart,
Shall turn in fierce and loving strife
On Thee, and know Thee who Thou art.
Who shall prevail, in awful grace
Of love, o'er Thee, shall surely run
With fire and wind before Thy face;
He is Thy Beloved Son.
Who this secret shall acclaim
He the many, Thou the One,
Through doubt, and fear, and sin, and shame,
He is Thy Beloved Son.
Branford has seen God face to face: the God that is, and
not the God who was. It is a mistake; but it is also a destiny.
It is a mistake, above all to-day, when the far-off, omnipresent
tremors of the God that is, are driving men on every hand to
hide their faces from Him in the skirts of the God who was.
Communist and Christian to-day alike worship Him.
What is God, if He be not comforting? And what is
comforting to-day but the Lie? And what is the Lie?
The Lie is that men need not die to live. They need not
change, to change the world. Because they cannot change, they
must have the Lie. Because men will not die, Humanity must.
It is better, I think, far better, to have seen God and been
slain by Him, than to live not having seen Him at all. But
it does not make for success. Branford does not even take the
trouble to call on man to repent. I think he should. And
211
LITERARY PORTRAITS
doubtless he would, if he could; but he was as one blinded by
his vision; and the scales are still over his eyes. He does not
see men any more. All is one, and all's one.
Who hath had commerce in grave peaceful hours
Witli scared, awful, elemental powers;
Who undismayed while yet the kind dawn shone,
Looked to the scroll of flesh and read thereon
How in each man there walks his skeleton.
He, in the crashing circumstance of doom,
Under the splitten skies,
When the iron devil flies
Through white vestures flaming from the loom
Of Nature weaving, even in the tomb,
Beauty for the hour she dies.
He, in his steadfast thought, shall rise
Above the treason of his eyes,
To follow sights beyond his seeing
To borrow breath above his being;
Till shattered flesh and twisted bone
Are mingled into air and gone;
Till he stand up in the starkness
Of his spirit, and the darkness
Of Death and Light are One.
That is a moment : an eternal one, maybe. But Man cannot
live there. There, if he seeks to live, even his own integrity
becomes a snare. Not even the starkness of his spirit can
sustain him. He must become humble again, inhabit the
tabernacle of frail, sweet flesh as though it were his only home.
That is what I miss in Branford's poetry the note of
compassion. The compassion is in him, and the note is there;
but only once, to my sense, is it sounded as it should be
sounded: in December, 1918:
Through this pontiff hill I hear
Christ comforting, with ghostly cheer
The last hour of the dying year.
Poor broken-hearted year! who fain
From her tomb would turn again
For pardon that she brought us pain.
Night has shown my heart until
I see the silence of this hill
Is God's sad spirit standing still.
Standing still, because He fain
Would let the poor year turn again
For pardon that she brought us pain.
212
F. V. BRANFORD
One who merely endured the War has neither right nor
desire to criticise one who waged it. But it is time that Bran-
ford broke his silence. I am speaking not of the poet, but the
man. I have tried to explain why there is no communication
between his work and the present generation. It is for Branford
himself to make it, not by changing his mode of utterance,
but by descending again to the world of men.
He cannot do that if he listens for ever to "the speech of
one who sayeth Naught." That is a speech which, once heard,
can never be forgotten. Nevertheless, it must not become the
dominant; if it docs, the poet who has experienced deeply
must become the prophet of love, or men will not listen to
him. They will not follow Branford to the heights of his
austere experience unless they know that there is something
humAn and precious and simple to be gained at the end.
And the name for that human and precious and simple
thing is Love.
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels
and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a
tinkling cymbal."
The significance of Branford's poetry is that it reveals, in
the idiom of an intense individual experience, the spiritual
impasse of contemporary England, and contemporary Europe.
We have come to the end of our tether to the end of our
philosophy, or our religion. To-day, such is the general
atmosphere, that assertion would be received with general
indifference. Yet our great English visionary and prophet,
William Blake, spoke the simple truth when he said: "Man
must, and will, have some religion." But when we see the
realization of this saying in the new religion of the totalitarian
state, the Germany that was, in the Russia that is, we are
genuinely horrified. But we have nothing of the same order
to oppose to it.
What we are faced with, in England and in Europe, is the
collapse of an individualist morality before the necessities of
a mechanical and industrial "civilization." There is a pro-
found and fatal contradiction in our philosophy. By the
advance of the machine we have become an integrated
community on the material level ; but the philosophy by which
that advance has been achieved is radically anti-communal.
213
LITERARY PORTRAITS
The concrete and visible result is that the productive energies
of our pseudo-community are more and more devoted to
preparing the means of destruction.
European civilization can endure only if the constituent
nations can rise to the conception of a European community.
This realization is terribly remote. The history of Europe
during the grievous post-war years has been of the history
of a steady and cumulative desertion of the idea of international
community and international law. Yet that appears to be
inevitable, so long as the morality of the individual within the
nations is so intensely individualistic and competitive. To
expect an international morality to be superior to the inter-
individual morality is idealistic illusion. Yet without the
re-establishment of the reign of international law, and its
immediate development into international community, it
seems inevitable that Europe must destroy itself; and that the
astonishing advances of its technical civilization will have
served only to enable it to destroy itself more utterly.
Hence the sense of doom that invades the more imaginative
European minds, like Branford's. They are a prey to the
conviction that our ''civilization" is impotent to save itself.
That means only that it has ceased to be a civilization at all.
It is a material technique, which has developed in indepen-
dence of all natural morality, and on the ruins of such natural
morality as Europe once possessed. In the impasse of Europe
to-day is revealed the fallacy of Marxism, which holds that
morality and religion arise from the material technique of
production. If this were more than a half-truth, Europe would
be a community to-day. In fact, it is a chaos.
214
THOMAS HARDY
I first met Thomas Hardy at Dorchester in May, 1921. I had
long desired to meet him; but when the volume of his collected
Poems appeared in the winter of 1919 the desire became al-
most a monomania. Certainly I had never longed to meet a
living writer so much.
Hardy had sent me some very kindly letters, and in particu-
lar one concerning a review of the "Collected Poems" which
I had written for The Athen<eum . In that letter he was generous
enough to say that the history of English poetry ought to be
re-written in accordance with the principles I had tried ti/
establish in regard to his own. So that it would not, I suppose,
ha^e been outrageous if I had asked hirn if I might visit him.
My friends, too, who regarded the extremity of my desire to
see him as an amiable fie of mine, urged me to take the
initiative. I was tempted, but I made no effort, partly out of
shyness, but much more because I regarded Hardy as the one
indisputably great English writer living.
At that time Hardy was, in truth, for me a being set apart.
It was not merely that I was convinced that he was the only
great English writer living in the world. There was also a
peculiar quality in his greatness which made an intimate and
almost painful appeal. In Hardy it seemed honesty was made
absolute. He had purged out of himself the last trace of the
lie in the soul. He was the only man in whom I believed. And
to give this belief something of the passion of despair there was
the precise point of time. It was at the end of the year of
complete disillusion which followed the Armistice of 1918.
We had hoped against hope that the peace would be so
glorious and generous that it would somehow justify the
sacrifice made to gain it. It was quite a different peace, and
as the news of its shameful terms gradually became known, the
sense of the hideous waste and the utter futility of the whole
monstrous war became steadily deeper and deeper. One felt
that England, the true England, had ceased to exist.
Rather, it appeared to exist in Hardy alone. He had held
himself remote from the fervours of literary militarism ; he
never let himself be blinded to the essential horror of war;
215
LITERARY PORTRAITS
and, more than this, he had faced a disillusion, more pro-
longed if less catastrophic than the four years of war and
peace. If we were to continue to believe in England and,
after all, we must, being Englishmen then the England of
Hardy alone was left to us; not the country or the characters
of his novels, but the great and achieved simplicity, the all but
terrifying candour, of the mind which had conceived them.
In the midst of corruption, this was sound ; in the midst of
squalor, this was beautiful; in the midst of weakness, this was
strong; in the midst of fear, this was brave.
Not that I imagined Hardy as more than mortal: but he
represented an immortality. He was the vehicle of a spirit
of humanity in which we must believe if we are to believe in
humanity at all; the spirit which loathes the lie even though
it be most comfortable. Far from imagining him superhuman,
I knew by the report of those who had seen him that he was
simple. I had been told that he was even naive, credulous
about things of which my own generation rightly enough had
no conceit at all. I had been told that he believed that editors
were important people, and that newspapers existed primarily
in order to communicate what they believed to be the truth;
I had also been told that it would be the easiest thing in the
world for me, who was then an editor, to see him, if I would
only ask.
I felt that I would rather not sec him at all, than see him by
such means; and I resented the importunity of those men of
letters, young and old, who "just dropped in" upon him. It
seemed worse than indecent, a confession that they were
ignorant what manner of man he was who made England
still tolerable, and the profession of literature more than a
means to a livelihood. They were abxisers of his kindness.
It was part of his greatness that he should be open to such
abuse. But that only made me the angrier and hardened my
resolve never to go near him unless I were invited of his own
unsuggested motion. Still, I knew that I should see him:
it was impossible that it should be otherwise.
It was appropriately ironical that I should have been
compelled to leave England at the moment the invitation
came; ironical that, owing to the coal strike, the visit was very
hard to arrange during a brief return; ironical that I who
216
THOMAS HARDY
had a terror of adding one single item to his correspondence
should have been compelled to send a telegram cancelling one
day and fixing another, then another telegram to cancel that.
It was an unusually hot day in May, 1921, so hot that the
railway carriage, with both windows open, was stifling. The
name of Hardy's house, Max Gate, had suggested to my mind
that it must be in the middle of the town, like the Bar Gate at
Southampton. The suggestion had become a certainty.
Accordingly in my telegram I had allowed five minutes for
getting from the station to the house. The train was late.
Instead of arriving at half-past four, it was well past five when
I began to walk through the blazing heat from the station
into the town. I asked a labourer the way to Max Gate: lit
told me to turn to the right, and that would take me straight
there. Then I remembered that I had not found out the time
of to-morrow's trains at the station. We were in the middle of
the coal strike. I could not expect Hardy or his wife to know,
and it would be painful if I were to outstay my welcome, or
cause any trouble in departing. So I hurried back to the
wrong station -there are two in Dorchester and made my
w r ay across a cattleyard to the right one. It was nearly half-
past five. They would have given me up.
The heat was killing. Dorchester pavements are made of
boiling pitch. My bag grew heavier and heavier. Still, it
was only a few hundred yards away. I hurried along the road
I had been shown. It was interminable, but it ended in a
railway bridge, a twisted fringe of new red-brick houses on the
other side and then the open country. Once more I asked the
way. "D 5 you see that house there in the trees far as you can
see? That's Max Gate." The man pointed with his pipe.
I saw a house roof among the trees. "Which is the nearest
way ?" "You can go round by the road" he followed it
round with his pipe. "But the nearest way is across the fields
here."
I dashed across the fields. A wall and a barbed wire fence
of many strands prevented me from bearing towards the
house I had marked. I tried to make a short cut, but the
barbed wire was impassable. I was in the road, having lost
another five minutes. I asked again. "Oh, Mr. Hardy's
house. That's it. You'll see a plate on the wall," and he
217
LITERARY PORTRAITS
pointed a good six hundred yards down the road. I had, in
my haste, mistaken the roof. If I had kept along the field
path I should have been there long ago. Five minutes to six.
I was dead-beat.
It was certain they had given me up now. I resigned
myself, and walked slowly along. Then I realised that I was
terribly thirsty. Of course, there couldn't possibly be any tea.
And the utter impossibility of tea made me long for it. I
forgot about everything else. Only visions of cups of tea.
Max Gate. I rang at the door, completely discouraged,
with hardly enough energy to sponge my face with my
handkerchief. Well, there I was.
*' Mrs. Hardy came forward. "I hope you won't mind.
We've begun our tea."
A fire kindled in me. There was tea. *
It is true. I scarcely noticed Hardy not more than that he
was wearing an old suit of check tweed, of the kind that I
dimly remember long ulsters and travelling caps with ear
flaps tied over the top were made of in the early 'nineties.
Not until I had drunk two cups of tea. 1 drank five in all:
I became self-conscious just before the sixth, and politely
declined.
Hardy seemed very small. As he sat there sideways
turned away from the light of the window, he seemed not so
much old as shrunken. That old brown suit, so well worn,
must have fitted him well once ; it hung loosely on him now.
A big grey bobtailed dog danced in the room.
"When he came to the house," said Hardy, "he was so sorry
for himself that one was sorry for him an insignificant,
pitiful, shivering thing. He has become the absolute master."
It was a room without personality, full of gilt framed
pictures, cretonne, mahogany and silver. Afterwards, when
I looked more closely, I found that everyone of the pictures
had some personal or local justification; but few of them
combined with this the beauty of a work of art. The one
obvious exception was the portrait of Hardy between fifty
and sixty painted by William Strang, I think, in 1893.
Hardy told me that Strang had been sent down by John Lane
to make a drawing of him for some edition of his work. The
drawing finished, Strang took out a panel and painted it
218
THOMAS HARDY
swiftly, within an hour. Some twenty years afterwards,
Strang had returned to make another drawing (perhaps for
the Mellstock edition) and Hardy had produced the old
panel. Strang had quite forgotten it. "I painted well in
those days," he said. He signed and dated it and had it
framed for Hardy. It is a portrait of Hardy in full maturity,
and it deserves the praise the artist gave it. Yet all I
remember of it is the old-fashioried low collar, the big tie,
and the generous moustache.
The rest of the pictures were watercolours, many by
amateur hands, of places in Wessex; there was a sketch from
imagination of Egdon Heath, sent Hardy by a lady. "The
curious thing," he said, "is that it is very like what I mearft."
Another represented "Eustachia's Barrow," according to the
Avritten legend beneath. I pointed out that Eustachia was
wrongly spelt. "I never noticed that before," said Hardy,
"it was done by my wife." I was annoyed with myself for my
clumsiness, although I could not have known. But when he
told me, the misspelling of the name reminded me of his poem
It was your way, my dear . . .
Personality in this intricate and detailed sense there was in
the room; but none in the larger. No touch of fastidious
arrangement, nothing to one's immediate sense inviolable,
nothing from which one might have guessed at Hardy. It
might have been the drawing-room of a country vicar who
combined a passionate admiration for Hardy's work with
antiquarian tastes: for there was a glass case filled with
Roman bowls. They had been discovered when the founda-
tions of Max Gate were being built. Three skeletons were
also found in shallow oval holes scooped out of the chalk.
Hardy said that he had kept it from his wife, that she might not
be frightened; but he too had felt that the omen was evil.
Still, nothing had happened.
"I never have cared for possessions," he said. "What is in
this house has come together by chance. The things I have
bought, I bought as I needed them, and for the use I needed
them for. Those chairs, for instance, I paid thirteen shillings
for at a sale. Now I'm told they're Chippendale. I remember
*my mother selling a dozen, much better than those, to the
219
LITERARY PORTRAITS
cheap-jack at two shillings apiece, so that she could get some
new-fashioned ones for her drawing-room. The cottagers
bought them of him for half-a-crown. But IVe never
troubled about these things. A good table to write at and a
solid chair to sit in."
After tea we walked to William Barnes's grave. Up the
hill in front of Max Gate. On the left a double hedge and a
field bright yellow with charlock "the farmer says there's
no way of getting rid of it; but I think I should have found a
way." To the right a huge monstrous field stretching to the
very edge of Dorchester, a field of 4,000 acres, running to the
top of the bare ridge; beyond, bare ridge followed bare ridge
to she horizon, with ancient earth-works always outlined at
the crown. "Over that one lies Weymouth." He mounted
the hill most gallantly. A man of fifty could not have goner
better, with a strong dog tugging at the leash; but perhaps a
man of fifty, even though he breathed harder, would not have
taken those short angular steps with a bent knee. "All this
is Duchy land. When I bought my few acres, I had no
trouble about deeds. I held it direct from the Prince."
We paused at the top of the hill. Far away to the front and
to the right showed a gap in the ridge. There twenty miles
of heath country began. "Egdon Heath ?" I said. But
Hardy would do no more than admit a half-identity. Egdon
Heath was partly based on it.
We entered a copse that thinned out within a hundred
yards into a formal avenue of trees running through a park.
The young leaves joined together overhead and the almost
horizontal rays of the sun poured through them, making them
one shining network from pure gold to a green that was
nearly black. We stopped to look. The effect was very hard
to get, he said, in watercolour. It was one, I replied, that
the early English watercolourists, Cozens in particular,
frequently captured. He agreed. The dog had been let
loose and had to be leashed again. The farmer had said to
Hardy one day : "Money can't pay for the damage that dog'll
do my cows."
At the bottom of the aver.ue was the bed of a stream : it
was called the Winterbourne, because it ran dry in the
summer. The story was that no one had ever seen it run dry
220
THOMAS HARDY
or seen it flow again. x One day the gentleman at the great
house made up his mind to test the legend. He set up a
sentry-box when the bed was dry and posted two watchers to
relieve each other. Nothing happened: the bed remained
dry. The man walked off for five minutes to get a drink of
cider. He returned to find the Winterbourne flowing fast.
When we reached the bed, it was dry. Hardy was surprised.
It had been full three days ago. He had never known it dry
so early in the year as May.
We passed some cottages huddled up against the high wall
of the great house to which the avenue had once been planned
as a drive. They had been put there, said Hardy, in the
eighteenth century in order that the village might not be s'e'en
from the house nor visited by the sun; they were dark,
dank and unwholesome. Perhaps the new housing laws
would do something for the poor deni/ens. But the supremacy
of the great house could still be felt. The very path by which
we walked to the little church had the air of belonging not to
the people but to the park.
William Barnes's grave, with a Saxon pillar and cross in
dark stone, was growing weedy again. The piety of his
descendants, not even now believing that he was a poet, was
spasmodic. Hardy thrust his stick into the turf, tied his dog
to it, and led the way into the little church. It had suffered
little: there was an old Jacobean altar-screen, and a severe
and beautiful pulpit from which Barnes used to preach. One
day towards the end of Barnes's life he died in the early
'eighties Edmund Gosse had made a journey down for the
express purpose of seeing him. Hardy and Gosse had sat
together to hear him preach. But instead of producing a
special sermon for the London critic, Barnes had ignored
their presence, and spoken just as he used to the villagers,
homely, broad, simple stuff. Hardy had been greatly im-
pressed. Perhaps a London critic was always more to him
than he could be to Barnes.
An Elizabethan monument to the great family, with two
reclining figures, stands to the left of the altar. They were. . .
He had forgotten. He had known so well once. I looked
round the base and could see no inscription. There in the
foiling half-light of the dim church he stood on the altar
221
LITERARY PORTRAITS
steps peering into the obscurity above the tomb, trying, it
seemed, to rescue something from oblivion in vain. "My
eyes are going. I have forgotten."
"You would not think," he said, "that Napoleon's name is
signed in the register here."
"No." I hurriedly tried to fit a visit to Calne Winterbourne
into what I knew of Bonaparte's career. There was no room
for it, anywhere. But still, Hardy ought to know. I held my
peace.
"Yes, he very nearly married the daughter of the house
here. But the family would not have him. In those days they
thought him a rather seedy adventurer. If they had known !
Bif^ he lived with them for a long while, and signed as a
witness to the daughter's marriage."
It was Napoleon the Third, of course ! The story developed
as we slowly made our way back to the village. Before he was
presented to the rectory at Calne, William Barnes had been
the master of the Dorchester School. He had an usher named
Han. Han was Hardy's mother's name. He was persuaded
that Han the usher and his mother were related ; for the trait
in Han's temper was just like her own.
One Sunday afternoon Barnes and Han were walking
along the promenade which runs round the old wall of
Dorchester, when they met Napoleon and the young ladies of
the family, walking the other way. Just as they were passing,
Napoleon thrust the cane he was carrying between Han's
legs. Han saved himself from falling, swung round, and in a
flash tossed his coat to Barnes. The two stood facing one
another, while Barnes tried to hold Han back, and Napoleon's
companions dissuaded him. After a long pause Napoleon
apologised, laughing, and Han, still smouldering, walked
away with Barnes.
"We have plenty of Napoleonic connections, you see. Still,
it's doubtful whether there was any of Bonaparte's blood in
Napoleon III."
"His silly behaviour with the stick suggests that there might
have been," I said.
"Or was he merely trying to make them think there was ?
I have wished many times that I had taken more trouble to
collect these memories when I was young. They're very
222
THOMAS HARDY
precious and valuable when one grows older. When I first
went to London, in 1863, I heard Palmerston speak in the
House of Commons an extraordinary mixture of eloquence
and puns. Somehow it made all the difference when I came
to write The Dynasts that I had actually heard the man who
was Secretary for War against Napoleon. I seemed to be able
to touch hands with Pitt in a way I could never have done
otherwise."
Afterwards Hardy showed me a stiff little watercolour of
Westminster from the Green Park which he had made when he
first came to London. It was done in the faintest of yellows
and greens. In the middle distance was a man with a
chimney-pot hat and a lady with a crinoline. It brought ba ;k
the time to him, he said.
i* "Of course," he went on, "I always used to frequent the
men who had fought against Napoleon who lived hereabouts.
For some reason it interested me when I was young. And
when I went to Paris, I went to see them at the Invalides. But
even if they could make out what I said, I could not under-
stand them. Their voices seemed very rough, even though
they were so old, and the French they spoke seemed quite
different from the French I knew as perhaps it was."
I told him a story Sir Walter Raleigh had told me a few
days before. In the 'sixties as a small boy of six or so he had
been in Paris; and there he had been taken to see an old lady,
who said that her first memory as a little girl of five was
hurrying along the street holding her father's hand. Suddenly
they were stopped by a man in a red cap holding a pike, and
on the point of the pike, a head. "Pretez le sermcnt, citoyen !"
she remembered the man's words, and her own fear,
because she somehow knew that her father was on the other
side. However, he repeated the Republican oath and passed on.
"Yes, those things make the past very real. My grand-
mother saw a man hanging in a gibbet just over there. The
post remained there for years. But lately at the end of the
war they made a bonfire round it and only the charred
stump remains."
"What a terrible waste the war was," he said. "They're
beginning to see it now. It achieved absolutely nothing
only pure loss."
223
LITERARY PORTRAITS
I said that his poem in The Times on the anniversary of the
armistice had given expression to the deepest feelings of most
of us; he had said for us what we could not say.
He was glad of that. He had been very nervous about the
poem; but when the request came from The Times, he felt
that he ought not to refuse. But he had not been satisfied
with what he had done.
We entered the house. "We won't change for dinner we
call it supper, here if you don't mind," he said. When I
came back to the drawing-room, I found Mrs. Hardy there.
"An awful thing has happened. I'm afraid it's one of the
things that can't be believed. But I've lost the key of the wine-
cellar. But there's whisky and cider."
I said it did not matter in the least: I wasn't a regular
wine drinker. '
Hardy came in again. He had changed his brown tweed
for a dark suit.
"You have heard of the disaster ? You're sure you don't
mind ?"
In the dining-room, Mrs. Hardy asked me: did I mind
sitting to face the light ? Hardy's eyes were weak. I sat
opposite him. Mrs. Hardy was at the head of the table. We
ate soup and mutton chops and trifle.
I poured myself some whisky. Hardy watched me.
"I think I'll have a little of that."
"Do you think you ought to ?" said Mrs. Hardy.
"I'll have a little." He poured himself out a finger and a
half.
We talked about mead, and firmity; about modern
writers as a whole they seemed to Hardy "to have lost grip"
he felt very often that they did not know what they wanted
to say; he said how he had enjoyed Katherine Mansfield's
story, "The Daughters of the late Colonel," how he had
laughed when his wife had read it to him. "She has got right
into her characters. But she mustn't stop there. She must
follow their lives right through to the end. You must tell
her that from me." What a lot of verse was being written
now! He felt he must be getting out of touch; there was very
little of it that he could appreciate.
He had lately pieced together the fragments of the
224
THOMAS HARDY
mumming play he had put into "The Return of the Native,"
and he had managed to fill it out with his own memories and
the recollections of some other men. It was worth rescuing.
Mrs. Hardy had had it printed.
Though the talk went on, the quiet was always waiting to
descend ; it descended on the conversation itself, which seemed
to come from very far away. I heard continually the faint
plack-plack of Hardy's teeth as he chewed. It drowned every
other sound to my ear; it reasserted itself at every moment.
He chewed with a quick persistent movement, and each
mouthful of his lasted four times as long as my own. Flack,
plack, plack, plack. Yes, he was very old.
Plack, plack, plack. It was impossible to find the courage to
speak against it: as well try to stop the passing of time itself
with words.
I was glad when dinner was over. For a moment I was
alone with Mrs. Hardy in the drawing-room.
"I hope I'm not tiring him." And I felt a sudden sense of
at. ute shame that I should oe talking of Hardy behind his
back, as though he were a child.
"No, Fm very glad you were able to come. You've taken
him out of himself. He has been worrying over some business
arrangement for the last two days. He has quite forgotten it
now. He will do his business himself."
"But why doesn't he use an agent ? The biggest agent in
London would think it an honour to do his business for
nothing; I should imagine so, anyhow." I rushed into the
opening I had made to escape from my sense of guilt. "And
why aren't his poems sold simultaneously in America ? I
understand that he may not care. But it's almost a question
of principle. Why should the Americans have the best
poetry that England produces for nothing, while any common
or garden English author takes care (quite rightly) that the
American copyright remains his own ?"
"You must tell him that when he comes in. We're com-
fortably off; but still a little extra money would be useful
nowadays."
When he returned, Mrs. Hardy began: "Mr. Middleton
Murry was saying that you ought to have an agent to sell your
poems in America."
is 225
LITERARY PORTRAITS
He thought for a moment. "I don't think it's worth while,
now. And besides poems are such very personal things. I
can't get quite used to being paid for them at all. I
don't think I can make a change now. I'll see. . ."
I urged the question of principle. "Yes, there's that way
of looking at it. I had forgotten. But the difficulty is that
they're written almost as people ask for them. Not written to
order, of course. But there's always someone who has been
asking me. There's The Fortnightly for instance. About once
a year I get a letter from Courtney saying: 'It's time we had
another poem from you.' And if I've got one half-finished, I
try to finish it and send it off. Then there's the poem in
flu London Mercury. I had a letter from Mr. Squire saying:
'If you don't send me that poem, I shall come down and fetch
it.' There wouldn't be time to make arrangements (n
America."
"But you have only to say when you send the poem, that
it must not be printed before such and such a date six weeks
ahead. That would give plenty of time."
Hardy seemed to think that the editors would not be
pleased with that. 'Til see," he said. He turned more hope-
fully away from the subject. "These business arrangements
arc very trying, don't you think ? I've spent two days trying
to worry out a question of Canadian copyright. Does it
belong to the English or the American publisher ? It's too
difficult."
Two days of Hardy's time !
"But that's precisely what literary agents are for," I
persisted. "All that kind of thing is easy to them. They like
it"
"I have always been on such good terms with my publishers.
They do a great deal for me. And I've known them so long . . "
Again he turned away with relief. "There's one thing I
would like to have your advice upon. A man who works for
the Clarendon Press was here the other day ; and he urged me
to have a thin India-paper edition of my poems printed. He
said that when the Oxford Book of English Verse was printed
on India-paper, the sale suddenly trebled. What do you
think ?"
"It's an excellent idea," I said. "Your Collected Poems make
226
THOMAS HARDY
rather a heavy volume heavier than the thick Oxford Book
of English Verse. People like books of poetry they can carry
about easily. They read them on their holidays. As it is,
they can only take the little Golden Treasury book of
selections."
"I'm glad you agree. Do you hear that, Florence ?" He
turned to Mrs. Hardy. "Mr. Middleton Murry thinks that it
would be an excellent thing to print the poems on India-
paper. Now that's" he turned back to me "the kind of
suggestion that M 's like. They're very good about
practical things like that."
I had a fairly clear conception of the kind of suggestion that
M 's didn't like.
Mrs. Hardy unlocked a bookcase and produced the
piivately printed pamphlet of the mumming play.
"Are you interested in valuable books ?" said Hardy.
"I like to look at them; but I don't collect them. And I
don't suppose I should, even if I could afford to."
"They don't interest me."
Mrs. Hardy put on the table under the lamp a number of
privately printed books of Hardy's poems one, of the first he
had ever written.
"I don't think it's even a curiosity," he said. "But one day
I turned it out. X happened to be here. He said : would
I mind if he had some dozen copies printed to give to his
friends ? I didn't mind. And after that he printed a good
many other scraps in the same way."
Mrs. Hardy took up the tale. "One day a friend of ours
saw one of these in a bookseller's catalogue at twelve guineas.
He wondered how it had got there, and he made up his mind
to find out. Meanwhile he told us not to let Mr. X have
any more scraps to print Tor his friends.' His friends turned
out to be Y 's the booksellers. So now I do them myself."
"It's one of her perquisites," said Hardy.
"Still, I don't suppose you make quite as much out of it as
Mr. X ," I said, and I wondered whether Mr. X ,
who was known as the possessor of one of the best Hardy manu-
scripts, came by it in the same way.
"Speaking of turning out things," said Hardy. "This
morning I was hunting in a drawer and I came across a letter
15* 227
LITERARY PORTRAITS
from Meredith. I'll fetch it. It's rather interesting in a
way."
He went upstairs and reappeared with the letter. "My
dear Sir," it began; it was dated late in the 'eighties. He
would be pleased to see Mr. Hardy (Meredith wrote) in his
little home at Box Hill, and he gave a long list of trains
three-quarters of the letter was trains. "Very faithfully yours,"
it concluded. "It's very stiff and formal," said Hardy. "And
yet we had known each other fifteen or sixteen years then.
He read my first book for Chapman and Hall."
It was ten o'clock; time to let him go to bed. I said good-
night. There was the same impersonality in my bedroom.
Everything was exquisitely clean and polished, but without
centre or focus. The furniture refused all attempts at alliance.
An overmantel with terra-cotta busts, one of Hardy himself a
capacious modern wardrobe in polished mahogany sneered^
like parvenus at the solid old oak table. A proof of Strang's
drawing of Hardy for the Mellstock Edition ; a little picture
of the Matterhorn with crosses and dotted lines in red ink,
and underneath an inscription: "Whymper traced out the
course of his climb on the Matterhorn on this picture for me
in 187 . The cross marks where his companions fell."
I woke early in the morning and sat on the turf in the sun
outside the door. The dog sprawled on the gravel at my side.
The surrounding trees isolated the house completely from the
surrounding country. Hardy came out, and we began to
walk on the path that runs through the trees, making a square
alley-way round the house. "It's never one moment the
same," he said, pointing to the trees. "They change continu-
ally. When you know them, they are different every morning.
I planted them; and now the waste wood from them is more
than enough to keep us in firing for the year. One doesn't
realise how fast they grow."
At breakfast he sat with a pile of letters. One was opened.
It was from some remote cousin, enclosing an essay by his son,
aged sixteen, and a photograph of the boy. His masters at
school said he showed great ability. Would Hardy give his
opinion of the essay, and advise whether the boy should adopt
literature as a profession ? "I've never seen either of them: I
suppose I shall have to reply." His correspondents were so
228
THOMAS HARDY
persistent. For a time he had tried to answer them all; but
now he had given up. They were always asking for specimens
of his handwriting. He was sorry, but it was impossible ; if
he replied, his whole day would be occupied. But one thing
had grieved him. A young man, who had been a friend of
Rupert Brooke's, had asked for a fragment of his hand-
writing. He had not given it. And now he had learned that
the man was suddenly dead.
Hardy walked with me on my way to the station, across the
fields as far as the bridge. He had been safely articled to a
famous Church architect when he was a young man ; but the
desire to write poems had taken hold of him. He sent them to
the editors, but not one was ever accepted. So he thought he
would try his hand at a story. His dream had been that he
woifld make his living as a poet. Yet he had liked the
architecture. He didn't know why he had turned away from
it. These things were so.
He said I must come back with a bicycle and ride over the
Dorset country; it was worth the knowing. A bicycle made
travelling delightful. Now for him it was only a weariness of
the flesh the packing, the getting to the station, the hotels.
But in the old days he had, by taking thought, reduced his
luggage on a bicycle to ten pounds. Then he was free to
learn the countryside. Did I know that excellent hairbrush
with a mirror fitted to the back and a little slot to take the
comb? An admirable thing. I must fit myself up like that,
and come to him again. He would give me my cruising orders.
We paused at a little gully where the fields become the
town.
"I must put the dog on the leash here," he said. "The
town boundary begins halfway across the bridge. There he
must be muzzled; here he is free." The dog tugged him to
the middle of the bridge. We shook hands.
I turned back to watch him. In his old brown suit, and his
dark grey felt hat, he went resolutely back. I saw the
deliberate bend of his knee as he walked. He seemed, ever so
slightly, to be stamping on the ground before him.
229
KEATS AND SHELLEY
When men speak, as many do to-day, and as Shelley also
might speak if he were alive, of "the eternal Values," meaning
thereby the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, they beg a
mighty question unawares. What they really mean is the
Ideal values. For there is no reason why we should assume
that the Beautiful is any more eternal than the Ugly, the True
than the False, the Good than the Evil. The Good, the
True and the Beautiful are not less involved in the flux
of Becoming, because we love them. This surreptitious
lifting of these particular Essences to a transcendental status
of their own, from which their contraries are excluded, is a
triumph of the Heart over the Mind : which is human* but
illegitimate.
To call the idea of the Good, as Plato and Shelley did,
eternal in some different sense from that in which the Idea of
the Bad is eternal, is merely to give a metaphysical sanction
to a deep and undying desire of the human heart. We seek
the Good and ensue it: if we do not, according to our powers,
we are less than human : but the Good we seek is not eternal,
or we should not seek it. We seek the best we can imagine in
reality more good, more truth, more beauty: the highest
perfection we can conceive of earthly existence. But what we
seek is not something beyond existence as the Eternal is.
Or if we do seek something beyond existence : a condition
of perfection immune from change and decay, then we can
have it at the price of acknowledging that the longing is a
simple human desire. There is a condition beyond existence
Eternity indeed but it is not entered after the death of the
body, and is not a condition which we can conceive as a
perfection of existence. Change and decay are the conditions
of Life itself. To be immune from them is to be immunefrom
Life.
That is my doctrine, or my belief. Shelley's was different.
That brings me to the likeness and the difference between the
thought of Shelley and Keats. It is subtle, and of surpassing
interest. Take, for a beginning, the famous and lovely lines
from Adonais :
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KEATS AND SHELLEY
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
Until Death tramples it to fragments. Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled . . .
The meaning seems to be plain. Through death, which is a
liberation from life, we are gathered to the One, which is
"eternal." But that plain meaning is deceptive. Shelley is
not talking to such as you and me. He is talking to himself:
bidding himself hasten to leave mortal life and fly to that
transcendent felicity, where
The soul of Adonais like a star
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
By the Eternal," in Adonais, Shelley undoubtedly means
those whom we call "the immortals." Adonais has bought
"a grave among the eternal" (VII); and more emphatically
still (XLVIII)
He is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time's decay
And of the past are all that cannot pass away
It is "the kings of thought" alone who are "eternal." They
alone are gathered to the One. What happens to the others
is hard to discover; and the cynic might have some excuse for
suggesting that in fact "the Many," instead of being the
metaphysical description of all that is involved in existence
including Shelley himself is hardly different from "the
mob." That would be unfair, for Shelley includes among
"the inheritors of unfulfilled renown"
Many more, whose names on earth are dark
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark. . . .
These also are "robed in dazzling immortality." But all
alike, known or unknown, are "kings of thought." And
Eternity is reserved for them alone.
Now, this I hold is to degrade the conception of Eternity.
Eternity is not at all the same as what we call the "immor-
tality" of fame. They are generically different conceptions.
And, if "immortality" alone be considered, though we may
231
LITERARY PORTRAITS
set surpassing value on the immortality of fame "the last
infirmity of noble mind" to restrict "immortality" to "the
kings of thought" is, to my thinking, a far less noble con-
ception than that of Jesus who declared that one solitary
forgotten impulse of simple human love should gain a man a
place in His Kingdom.
And what has the immortality of fame to do with the One ?
Shelley speaks nobly of the One. But if we press home his'
thought it eludes us. Adonais by his death "is made one with
Nature." But was he not one with Nature during his life ?
In some mysterious way, by being freed from the clog of
mortal clay, he becomes united with the Power
Which wields the world with never-wearied love
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above.
It may be said that that is no more difficult than the Chri&ian
conception; and it may not be. But the Christian con-
ception is at least humanised by the university of Forgiveness.
In Shelley's it is only "the kings of thought" who are thus
gathered into the stream of never-wearied love that sustains
and kindles the universe.
I cannot imagine this Power as a reality unless it is im-
manent in the actual universe. It is as near to us in birth as in
death, by land as by sea. But not so for Shelley. For him it is
something from which mortal life is a separation only just
not entire :
That benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not.
The doctrine is like Wordsworth's in the Immortal Ode,
though Shelley would hardly allow that Heaven was about us
in our infancy. The shades of the prison-house close on us
long before that. Birth itself is a curse, eclipsing the light of
the One. Nevertheless, it is
that sustaining love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.
Let not the lover of these beautiful lines condemn me for
sacrilege, because I seek to understand them. I can under-
stand the sustaining love ; and how it is blindly wove thr6ugh
232
KEATS AND SHELLEY
the web of being by all the creatures and all the elements;
but I cannot understand how it burns bright or dim in * 'beast
and earth and air and sea," according as these are bright or
dim "mirrors of the fire for which all thirst." That this
should be said of men, I understand. I take it that Shelley,
in the case of men, is saying that as their consciousness more
completely reflects the beauty of the One, so they are more
perfect vehicles of the sustaining Love as which the One is
manifested in the world of existence. But in what sense that
can be true of animals and elements, I do not see, unless it is
that Shelley conceives these as manifesting now more, now
less, of Beauty. His thought would then be that there are
moments when animals and elements the non-human uijj-
verse appear irradiated by an extreme of Beauty, and these
3fe the moments when the sustaining Love burns brightest
in them.
Of such moments he appears to be thinking in Stanza XIX
when he looks upon the early summer around him Adonais
was written in early June, 1821 and cries:
Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean
A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed,
The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.
At any rate one cannot fail to connect this verse with the lines
quoted previously. At this moment the stars of Heaven shine
more softly beautiful, and the great surge of Love wells up in
the brute creation. But to relate these two manifestations is
arbitrary. In early summer the stars may shine more softly
than in mid-winter; but they are assuredly not more beautiful
than on a keen, cloudless, frosty night. And, though it is
true that men's pulses quicken in sympathy with the onset of
summer, that is because we also are part of Nature, as
Lucretius understood who gave this primordial feeling its
most splendid expression.
Moreover, if it be true that those humans who reflect in
their consciousness the beauty of the One are indeed the
233
LITERARY PORTRAITS
purest vehicles of its power, why need they hunger
and thirst after death ? They have conquered mortality in
Life. They have become perfect instruments of the One. Why
should they seek to be dissolved in it again ? Their business is
in life, and with life. It seems to me that there is a fatal weak-
ness in Shelley's creed here. He does not know, in the last
resort, whether the One is beyond and hostile to the Many, or
within and informing it. He speaks both languages. And he
is indeed, as he pictures himself in the poem, one ' 'fleeing
astray"
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.
He is the victim of the divided mind, or the divided heart and
mind. At one moment he accepts and glorifies Existence, at
another he rejects and denigrates it. At one moment Life is
the utterance of Love, at another it is the dull, dense Matter
that clogs the feet of Spirit.
I come to this: that Shelley does not satisfy me in this
matter. And whether or not I am unreasonable in my
demand to be thus satisfied, I can only say that there are poets
who do satisfy me, and that I believe this sense of final
satisfaction is the supreme test of the greatest poetry. It is the
power to awaken it which is, to quote the words of Robert
Bridges, "the highest gift of all in poetry, that which sets
poetry above the other arts: I mean the power of con-
centrating all the far-reaching resources of language on one
point, so that a single and apparently effortless expression
rejoices the aesthetic imagination at the moment when it is
most expectant and exacting, and at the same time astonishes
the intellect with a new aspect of truth." Precisely this I find
rarely in Shelley.
I do not find it in Adonais. At the crucial moment, when I
seek to press the thought home to finality, it seems to dissipate.
"The One remains, the many change and pass." But what is
the One if it is not the Many also: they are the One. It may
be said that I am quarrelling with Plato, not with Shelley;
but Shelley believed in Platonism, or wanted to believe in it.
So did I once. But I found that Plato did not satisfy nfc.
234
KEATS AND SHELLEY
Neither does Shelley's Platonism now. I do not believe,
neither do I desire to believe, that
the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same . . .
Nor, I fear, could Shelley really believe it, for the last line of
that stanza (XXXVIII which is addressed to Keats's re-
viewers) is this :
While thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
Keats's reviewers had behaved stupidly, malignantly,
cruelly; but are they therefore to be denied their portion^of
the Eternal (in Shelley's sense) ? Or is Eternity reserved for
Jjiose in whom "the One spirit's plastic stress" is supremely
manifest, in whom the fire of Life and Love glows to incandes-
cence ? This is not Eternity, as I have said, but what men
call "immortality," the fame which attends on the achieve-
ment of men whom Humanity must remember with love and
will not willingly let die. These men are indeed wrought into
the very substance of the human race. They are the leaven
that leaveneth, the seed which dies and springs again; but
they are not eternal, either in my sense or Shelley's. They are
not a portion of something which "glows through Time and
Change, unquenchably the same."
To me, who am no Platonist, that vision of an absolute and
unchanging perfection is profoundly alien, and all that it
implies. I do not, and cannot believe that Birth is a curse and
an eclipse; that Existence is a degradation from Eternity. I
do not believe that life is the sufferance of- "the contagion of
the world's slow stain," by the pure spirit which at death
returns to that immutable perfection whence it once declined.
Still less do I believe that Keats, though nobly and eloquently,
was truly praised in the memorable verse (XL) :
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain.
235
LITERARY PORTRAITS
That is not Keats, nor Keats's desire. I am not blaming
Shelley for not having known Keats. He would not easily
have understood him if he had. Keats was wise in holding
himself aloof. Shelley's Keats is Shelley, as no doubt he had
to be; and Shelley knew it.
All stood aloof and at his partial moan
Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own . . .
But what does deeply interest and impress me is the profound
and subtle difference between Keats's belief and Shelley's.
How strangely does phrase after phrase of the stanza des-
cribing Keats above recall the very words of Keats ! Yet how
different they are! "And that unrest which men miscall
delight." Instantly, my mind returns to The Ode on Melancholy.
She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
VeiPd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
"Nevertheless, O for a life of Sensations rather than
Thoughts." The ignorant who have jeered at that phrase, not
knowing what it meant to be one total sentient living thing,
might learn from that verse what a Sensation, for Keats,
was. For that is a Sensation a moment when all life and all
living is gathered into an utterance : and we know, and are at
peace. How many times in my life have those first two
wonderful lines come unbidden to me and brought me calm !
I compare them with: "And that unrest which men miscall
delight." The former is Sensation, while the latter is Thought.
So, likewise, at the lines:
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain.
my mind instantly recurs to the Ode to a Nightingale : or rather
not instantly, for first I find myself trying to imagine Keats
"mourning a heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain.*'
236
KEATS AND SHELLEY
In vain I try to imagine that. A heart grown cold ! Cold that
heart, of which the last record we have is this :
"I can bear to die I cannot bear to leave her. O God!
God ! God ! Everything that I have in my trunks that reminds
me of her goes through me like a spear. . . I am afraid to write
to her I should like her to know that I do not forget her.
Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my heart. It surprises me
that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so
much misery."
That heart would never have grown cold that heart which
has power to burst and break my own time after time, for
ever and ever, until I also am surprised. . . .But to return.
Keats also saw heads grown gray; but he had seen more^han
that:
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin , and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
He had more to mourn than heads grown gray; he had to
mourn a brother who pined away, he had to mourn the
knowledge of a like destiny for himself. Not something that
might be, if he lived, had Keats to mourn ; but something
that was, while he lived something that he was living.
Not "the contagion of the world's slow stain" had he to fear,
but the quick and spreading stain of a spot on the lung. Yet
did he speak, or think, of the world's slow stain corrupting
the spotless purity of his immortal spirit ? Far otherwise.
At this moment, he thought of "a system of Spirit-creation."
He imagined that what was born into the world, in the life of a
new-born child, was "an atom of perception" or conscious-
ness, as we should say pure with a primal innocence, un-
differentiated, one with God. "How then are these sparks
which are God to have Identity given them so as ever to
possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence?"
A bliss, mark you. "How, but by the medium of a world
like this ?"
237
LITERARY PORTRAITS
"This is effected by three grand materials acting the one
upon the other for a series of years. These three Materials are
the Intelligence the Human Heart (as distinguished from
Intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental Space suited
for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the
purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the
sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly
perceive and yet I think I perceive it that you may judge
the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible.
I will call the World a School instituted for the purpose of
teaching little children to read, I will call the Human Heart the
Hornbook read in that School and I will call the Child able to
read $> the Soul made from that School and its Hornbook. Do you
not see how necessary a world of Pains and troubles is to
school an Intelligence and make it a Soul ? A Place where the
He^rt must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. Not
merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the teat from which the
Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the
Lives of Men are so various become their Souls, and thus
does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls [i.e.
Souls having an Identity] of the sparks of His own essence."
To me it is as wonderful still as in the days when it first
brought me illumination. It satisfies me. Not the world's
slow stain of the brightness of the pure spirit, but the world's
slow shaping of its blankness into beauty, by the heart's
suffering in a thousand diverse ways. And this suffering ends
not in moaning or in mourning : but in bliss, but not in bliss
that puts an end to sorrow, but in the bliss which knows, the
bliss of knowing, that this it is to be alive, to be an individual,
to be.
This, it seems to me, is the reality on the human plane
of "the one Spirit's plastic stress." What Shelley means by it,
I am uncertain; and I do not believe that he was certain,
either; but what Keats means in those sentences I know.
What makes a Soul of an Intelligence is the plastic stress of
Life. And Life is not Spirit, it is just Life neither spiritual
nor material, but itself; and Spirit is the pinnacle of Life's
consciousness of itself, when Man stands apart from himself
and with the eye of Imagination comprehends what he truly
is. At such a moment, of which Keats there gives us ar
238
KEATS AND SHELLEY
example, the eye of Imagination sees that Life is growth. In
spite of all, a man is what he is by virtue of all that he has
experienced. Life has shaped him, as the elements shape the
plant; and his Heart his sensitive experiencing nature is
the means by which he draws sustenance and shape from the
world : the Heart which is the teat from which the Mind sucks
its Identity. True, there is an inward law governing the
process. Just as no plant is merely passive to its conditions,
but submits the elements on which it feeds to a change which
makes them congruous with its own nature ; so no human is
merely passive to his experience. The Life in him co-operates
with the Life without. Unless he also were Life, he could not
submit to Life. There would be neither confluence* nor
congruity. But because he also is Life, all Life has meaning
for him, all life is capable of being absorbed by him. He
enters by experience into his own, and his own enters into him.
To have the power thus to blend with all experience; to
be so completely filled with Life as to be able to absorb every-
thing that Life may bring, seems to me the human ideal.
Such a man would be himself the meaning of Life. And
certain men have some near to being this. No one, not even
Jesus of Nazareth, could be it utterly : for Life would stop.
No imaginable man could ever say: I have experienced
everything. No man has returned from the grave. And in
smaller things, less easily remembered, there is an essential
and inexhaustible newness in experience. All we can say is
that there have been natures of whom we know that they
would have grown under the stress of all that Life could bring.
Therefore their wisdom cannot fail us. They do not tell us:
This is the Truth; they simply show us that this is the way.
It is as though their lives, in closing, let fall a seed of perfect
richness, and we, in so far as our hearts are good ground for
that seed, do not fail them. We do not become like them
that is beyond our destiny; but we in turn become all that we
might be, as they were all that they could be. And that seed is
the secret of human Life: through it there grows in us the gift
of experiencing, each after his kind. We atoms of Intelligence
begin at last to read our Hornbook, and when we begin, we
become aware of those former scholars who meant nothing to
us before. They smile on us and whisper from the shades:
239
LITERARY PORTRAITS
"That is the way. We can teach you nothing. We can only
give you the assurance that that is the way, and there is no
other."
And how they give this assurance is a mystery. For, though
sometimes it is explicit, more often it is simply an inflection of
voice, a modulation of tone, a quiet and subtle vibration
which, coming as we surmise from a heart full of peace,
disposes the listening heart to peace. Heaven knows how
often it has come to me from two of Shakespeare's simplest
lines lines so simple that I am almost afraid to set them down.
The ousel with his tawny bill . . .
The plainsong cuckoo gray . . .
The*/ work the magic. I know not what candour of simple
love inspired them that they can thus breathe it forth again
love and peace.
Maybe it is a defect in my own heart; but that simple
vibration never comes to me from Shelley. There is love in
him, deep, burning and impassioned love ; but it is love of a
different kind from that which I need. I say "need" ad-
visedly, for I fear that if I had written poetry it would have
been poetry of the Shelley kind : abstract, intellectual, meta-
physical. But my heart demands something different.
Shelley's metaphysical anguish, his devouring desire for the
Absolute for that which is absolved from time and Existence
in my own way, I have suffered. But there is the old lesson
to be learned: "One cannot live in rebellion," and love of the
Absolute means rebellion against the Relative. I admire
Shelley for never ceasing to rebel against the chains that
fettered him to Time, for desiring more beauty than ever was
in any beautiful thing; but though I admire, my heart does
not grow warm. Or rather it grows warm for him, it is never
made warm by him.
Yet what is the difference between Keats and Shelley other
than the subjective one that the former brings me peace, and
the latter not ? I might say that Keats really believed in the
One, where Shelley only tried to; or that Keats submitted
himself to Life, where Shelley could not; or that Keats
turned away from abstract Thought, where Shelley was
intoxicated with it. All these things seem to me to be true,
but somehow harsh in their truth, as though I sought to bring
240
KEATS AND SHELLEY
Shelley to judgment for judgment's sake. I do not. But that
he does not, nor ever could, satisfy me, is certain ; and I have
to know why. For many years, I have been content to leave
it in abeyance, as though it were a question better left un-
moved by me. But one is never suffered to avoid these
questions for ever. And since circumstances have brought
me full up against it, this is my finding.
Shelley is a magnificent example and therein lies his
greatness of the divided being. To use the words in the sense
in which Keats used them, his Mind triumphed over his Heart.
His Mind conceived an absolute perfection, and when the
experience which came to his Heart denied it, he did not
submit his Mind to the deliverances of his Heart, but souht
to annihilate them. For the absolute and immutable per-
fection which Shelley conceived, though it is of the kind often
spoken of as "the Heart's desire," is not of the Heart at all.
It is a purely mental ideality. What is strange and wonderful
in Shelley is the depth of passion which he felt for the purity of
the Idea. In this sense, he was indeed "a philosophic poet,"
since philosophy in the ordinary meaning of the word draws
its life from this passion. But of the deeper philosophy which
is humble before experience, and seeks instinctively to make
the Mind the servant of Life instead of its master, Shelley knew
little or nothing. Life must bend to the Idea. And since Life
will not bend to the Idea, save in so far as the Idea bends to
Life, Shelley was indeed pursued by the raging hounds of his
own thoughts.
Yet there is this also to be said: that the Idea to which
Shelley sought to bend Life was indeed pure, and so was the
devotion he felt towards it. And he did attempt to translate
his Perfection into human terms. It w r as for him an imperative
in the realm of conduct. Though, when he failed to fulfil his
own imperative, he tended to put the blame, not on himself,
but on the sheer conditions of Existence as he conceived them
the inveterate hostility of Matter to Spirit. It was the alien
environment which prevented him from true obedience to
the law of Perfection. Such a thought Keats was incapable of
entertaining. Keats believed neither in perfection, nor
perfectibility. So that he was not haunted at the end, as
Shelley was, by the grim idea of the everlasting recurrence. If
241
LITERARY PORTRAITS
Shelley tried to reconcile his Perfection with Existence, he
found either that it was immobile or unchanging and there-
fore not in Existence at all, or if it was in Existence it was
subject to change and therefore imperfect.
Another Athens shall arise
And to remoter time
Bequeath like sunset to the skies
The splendour of its prime ;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
That is lovely; but a dream. Let us listen to the prose of
Keats beside it.
"The most interesting question that can come before us is:
far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom appearing
Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such
happiness carried to an extreme but what must it end in % .
Death. And who could in such a case bear with death. The
whole troubles of life which are now frittered away in a series
of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a
being who instead of hailing its approach would leave this
world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all believe
in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will not
admit of it. The inhabitants of the world will correspond to
itself."
And from that he passes to his conception of Soul-creation.
But Shelley at the end of the final chorus of Hellas is forced
back at the last to the position whence Keats had begun.
Oh, cease ! must hate and death return ?
Cease ! must men kill and die ?
Cease ! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die, or rest at last!
In Keats the world is not weary of the past; it learns slowly
and painfully from the past from which it grows. And so,
he believed, should the individual man. And so do I believe.
242
